Oh What a Beautiful Morning

A mere 26 months after landing at Southside Road, we're preparing to pour the pad for my new home!

It comes with charming next door neighbors. . .and a nice view.
Stay tuned for thrilling updates, e.g. concrete footings, sewer lines, and stucco removal.

Depression, part two

Reclusive. It comes and recedes, loosely associated with lack of control over life's details.

Depression

. My father's family survived the depression as itinerant farm workers, picking fruit in Colorado and cotton in west Texas. Anxious about relying on their old age pensions, Mamaw and Pawpaw pulled cotton every fall well into their 70s. If the bailout doesn't work, maybe I can carry on the family tradition.

Farewell

To an extraordinary human being.

Bone Tired

I feel tired most of the time. Not that good kind that comes from working in the yard or cleaning the kitchen. But the bad kind that comes from watching the world as I know it decompensate. I fell asleep in front of the tv last night, woke up at 2:00 am to hear that my bank had died, their bones picked over by JP Morgan. Goodbye WAMU.

I Brake for Hubcaps

I love old pieces of rusted metal, the rustier, the older the better. Recently I've become obsessed with hubcaps. I see them by the hundreds along the freeway. Like most objects of desire, they flit through my peripheral vision and then disappear. Last week someone took the Jeep insignia caps from my passenger side mag wheels. Just another fellow traveler who's drawn to shiny round things?

Advice to New Writers

Read, read more,
read again
read aloud

Chew words
spit them out on the page without caution
dribble them down the front of your shirt

Caress them
let them slip out
soft
moonlight
a bud opening

If they don’t please, toss them
if they come tumbling back
give them a second chance

Gather words in baskets
set them on a shelf to ripen

Put a few good ones under
your pillow each night and
let them seep into your dreams

Will you still need me

And that would be this Sunday! Time flies, whether you're having fun or not.

The meaning of life after work

My first paid job was in the early 50s, picking cotton with my granddaddy in Texas. When his cotton sack was full, we'd stop at the scale and they'd write down our weights in a notebook. At the end of the day we'd get paid about five cents a pound. It's a hard connection to break: self-worth and a paycheck.