equinox

First day of fall.  The trees are gathering their energy in order to wither more magnificently. I suppose that’s how I feel about my lifestage as well.  I’m drinking a “grain beverage” – new addiction -  I like to change my addictions occasionally.  My obsession always at this juncture of the year is boots.  It isn’t that I don’t have boots or that I need them.  Suddenly though they become totally engrossing, the place where my attention goes as if to nudity.  I will spend hours looking for the grail of boots.  There have been many boot fails. I have sent back many boots.  Honestly it is more fun to look for boots online than boyfriends, although it is easier to find the latter. A perfect pair of boots changes everything – all the items that will magnetically attract into outfits around the central sculptural fact of the boots.

I got these which make me look like I have cankles a bit but I like their exaggerated pirate feeling, since I think I am, when I am at my best, sort of an exaggerated pirate:

These are on their way to me.  They are orthopedic.  I'm not sure if you can tell but they have a design of embossed roses:

There are on their way to me as well.  If they are comfortable they will be whatever the boot equivalent of "crowning glory" is.  Just look at them! That color!

My semester is very busy and started especially busily so I am not into the swing of journalism by which I mean recording what happens in my life and consciousness. I miss this terribly. Doing it right now is a little difficult, a bit like walking in a marsh.  But I am trying to do it. I got Studying Hunger Journals yesterday and you know there has always been something about Bernadette’s onrush that I have identified with and she makes me want also to enter a stream, the “life of the writing” if that doesn’t sound too clichély insufferable. If we follow that metaphor, what then would be a big shiny silver fish? Autumn food in Japan is desirable; I would like to eat some sort of broiled fish for breakfast this morning but it isn’t feasible. Also what’s it called, go-moku gohan or something with all the ingredients, dried tofu, gingko nuts, carrots, etc.; I would like to eat that.  I’m in a phase of eating brown rice with just some flavoring for two of my three meals a day.  Olive oil, salt, pepper, and maybe some spaghetti sauce. I don’t know why exactly I have started doing this. It’s not like I’m following a “diet” although I do want to slim myself.  It just seemed appealing. 

Thyroid all over the place as usual: it was too high for quite a while, and I was amped up and fried, and then I improvised the dosage for about a week and it was too low I’m sure since all I wanted to do was sleep and I could barely get through the days. Now I’m on the right dose again and we will see.  Will I feel as if I have energy to accomplish the long list of projects that is always somewhere underneath my forehead? The energy vacillates so much that I begin things and then don’t continue them.  I wrote on facebook that I felt a rant coming on against the fetishization of appropriation-as-strategy.  I didn’t make the rant materialize, but I did begin a verse of “advice to young poets” that I also at least for now have abandoned, but here’s what I wrote:

You don’t need to have

anything to say: you only need

the desire to say it. That desire

will inhere in your selections

and your combinations. It’s only

those two things, finally: word

following word following word.

There is no innate value

to any approach or technique.

Beware those who preach

a gospel: they are marketing.

Beware appeals to authority:

they also are a part of marketing.

Respect only those whose value is

unequivocally clear to you: do not

adopt the values of others. You need

not like what you respect or value.

Your “tradition” should be at least

slightly different from the traditions

of others. Obsession is good. Follow

your obsessions. Don’t worry about

being “healthy.” Poetry is not about

being “healthy” although on some

miraculous occasions it might actually

heal. It won’t heal The State. Don’t think

it will heal The State.

And that’s where I stopped.  I suppose I should continue. If I were to continue, I would probably say that poetry can make people think about The State and there might be some change as a result, but it is indirect at the very best.  I also think a line soon after this might be, “The desire to eat Moroccan olives naked.”  I should put a “while” in there but I enjoy the ambiguity.

I think I would like to refer young poets to Stan Apps’ Handbook of Poetic Language.

Do you ever have a day when you are not at least on some level disappointed and confused? If so, I think I envy you. The Big Disappointments do tend to loom over everything and I think so ruefully about how I bought her a cat or about how I meant to care for him in his dotage and also the world is a big disaster, nothing like the 60s at all, just a big chaotic & agonistic open sore. That is why I suppose I am given to obsess over boots. How to be stylishly grounded? Protected? Tough as well as comfortable? That, my darlings, is the question.