...And past this construction site on Cortez Hill, trucks full of pipes and long strands of rebar, this union man all sardonic waiting for us way-to-cube-farms to drive by - lunchpail in a sooty hand that never gets clean and where's he stick that & who let's him stick it there & does he hug his daughter with it too? Head cocked forty-five degrees, eyes rolled, like 'I don't know what you think you fucking mean by all these white collar deli-ca-cies but I got your seventeen inch guns right here, so you just scoot on by man-childs', and in my rearview he crossed the street crooked-legged just like a cowboy...

Something big is coming. What exactly, I can't quite say yet. More will be revealed...

it was a marine air day
and I had the top down
the cool air, my bare chest,
driving with my pelvis -
kicking the car's clutch
working her stick through the gearbox
moving bodily, my arms extensions of belly
jamming home now with my other foot
on the gas, really getting on that thing,
jerking my little car through the alley
darting into the avenue traffic
winding around the little S bend
flinging down the hill
into the bright white day and the 5
- it's all on the way to LA.

There's an underlying tension that becomes necessary when the poet reaches a certain age and realizes that things happen, utterly, and without violence or turbulence but rather mom's sublime decisiveness...

the thing is sad, maybe, but also hopeful, confident, full of plans which are made not oblivious to the rules but wholly conscious of them - nine innings, sixty minutes, a single beating heart.

It was the story (at Leland and Park)

I sat under that oak in Peers Park
around eight on a late-April Tuesday
her ten-speed leaning against the trunk
a sack of pastries between my feet
the lawn glistening in the post-dawn
red-breasts chirping & yanking at worms,
the SF train blowing two miles north.

My mind was on her & her fleshes
in hardcore flashes from last night
and earlier grins signing the docs
and all of our plans for the place -
the den, the office, the hobby room
the downstairs which we'll rent and
the wall we'll knock down and which part
of the yard our garden will go -

when I happened to notice
an accident, a happenstance -
one green leaf from that old oak
falling
without chorus or circumstance
pattering on the gleaming lawn
for no good reason, and no good rhyme,
and in what month, and at what time?

The bay area this weekend - oysters at the Ferry Plaza for breakfast, then the CalTrain to Palo Alto to see Jesse's new house. It's a wonderful time to be moving around in California. Late spring. March's green hills are giving way to summer's honey. Everything's awake, pulsing, buzzing - like a big bee garden, as John Muir said.

The novel this summer - it's going to happen. I work nearly every morning these days, even if it's only for an hour. Heck, some days I'd be happy with an hour. Yesterday it was a quick 15 minutes, chopping up a few stray paragraphs in Gelato Vero. Editing a novel like this is like attacking a big hunk of marble with an ice pick. You've gotta just focus on what's in front of you. If you start thinking about all that marble, you're done for. It'll daunt you in a hurry.

Because it's my last spring in San Diego I'm noticing things. For example, on Penn between first and third, the sidewalk is blooming. Right there in the crack, these nice pink cups are shooting up, wagging in our morning spring breezes. It's a vine, doing what vines do, creeping along the edge of the sidewalk and the road. It's also life, in her syrupy dominion, trickling into everything.

Happy Earth Day. Like George Carlin says (with that mad stage-performing glee of his, which is essential context for any of his quotes), 'The planet is fine. It's the people who are fucked!'

Finally, keys and whitespace again. Finally, the rules and regulation of english grammar, funneling their way through my brainpain and into these ten fingers. Finally, the tradition of my race, its culture, its collected best practices which are in fact collected by no-one but are our vocal melange - the all inclusive English collection. It includes American History Part 4 The Legacy of the Monroe Doctrine and it includes Pynchon and it includes the wildest shithouse porn. Its rules can be prescriptive or proscriptive, but they're always laid out firmly, with grave predictions for the wayward, though with a courtroom wink and a banker's nod we understand them to be quite malleable.

Finally, caffeine again. Finally, the hiss and fuss of a machine being tuned. Finally, the blast of caff which brings with it the electric rush of ideas. I love anything that brings us up, and maybe it's caff that I love best. It's such a loving up, such a brute but also familial jolt - like rough sex with a long-term lover. There's is no other upper that will stick around when the deed is done, will lick your wounds, will straighten your shirt, tie your tie and then send you out into the world not only fit for battle, but better off than when you found her.

it's always the one you love

French pastry guy at the Hillcrest Farmer's Market - the one at the stand with the yummy olives and the feta - thought I'd try his ham & cheese croissants. Took them home and heated them up - Not enough heat to kill whatever meanie was in there. Jen got it a little - nausea all day sunday - I got nuked. Puking and fever and puking and puking on Sunday. Liquid diet Monday and Tuesday. Finally, today, a foray back to solid foods - crackers, rice, cookies. Flavorless calories. Still really weak. Haven't written since Saturday. Been going to work because I'm a glutton for punishment? Yup, must be it.

The weekend in Arizona :

Thursday night flight to Phoenix, rental car, drive to Tucson.

Up early friday morning for espresso. First-morning best-morning. Saguaro East, a photo mission. Lunch at El Guero Canelo. Benson AZ. Sunset shooting in Saguaro East. Dinner from El Minuto, carne seca and menudo washed down by a Santa Cruz Mountains pinot.

Saturday morning's drive to Saguaro West. Then lunch at El Mezon del Cobre. The drive to Mesa via Casa Grande National Monument. Tom, the wife, the kid.

Sunday morning a buzz around downtown Phoenix shuttered for Easter, then out.

He'd been to San Francisco. He wanted to talk about it. He talked about the hills, and the architecture, and the cold fog that comes in around four in the afternoon. Yes, I told him, it's quite cold. He was being cautious and only talking about things how they were. I nodded for him to go on. There was something about it, did I know? I did. He looked at his wife, and she was a little embarrassed, like Oh no, here he goes. There was something, he meant, almost, romantic about it? Kind of? Yes, there is. Mostly it was unnamable, wasn't it? Yes, I agreed. San Francisco is very romantic. His wife laughed. He was relieved. We talked about the other cities we'd been to in America. St. Louis. Phoenix. And Denver. They were just ordinary places with their plusses and minuses, and they were easy to talk about in those terms. Later when we talked about Europe, I told him to pay attention when he's in those German cities, because that thing he'd felt in San Francisco? It would be there. He beamed and said he would, and his face was red, and his eyes were a little damp, and when breakfast was over we shook hands. I never saw him or his wife again. But I hope they make it to Europe someday.

Tucson, finally, after a low-sleep night. This is Southwest City. Long red-light boulevards that lead nowhere. Hardarmed men who've dump their paychecks into their automobiles stalk the city like hyenas on the veldt. If I was a woman with tender flesh, I'd be terrified of the rapist eyes of predator men, and maybe nowhere more so than Tucson Aridzona.

Or, for another take - I'm having a cappucino on a cozy couch in the middle of Arizona. As far from the office, the novel or anything else that says 'Jon-Life' as I could be. The couch is in the corner and there's power and nobody else around. It's an enclave. A cat-spot. I could stay all day.

Last night I was thinking about the Sophia Story. I was so high when I wrote that last summer, and then I just let it go. How many pieces do I have like that? Fantails that have feathered away to the ethers because of the The Job, because of The Novel, because of Just Too Busy. To be honest - also because of too much wine.

What flavor will this trip have? Do I have room on this voyage for baseball? Can I get the definitive saguaro cactus shot? What about a decent Tucson shot? The downtown is so diminutive. I'm reminded of Sacramento, of Stockton, of Saskatoon...

I found a poem I wrote five years ago but never posted -

The world slips by
In semi-concious exhaustion
Think of the days of drunkenness
In Londons of middle centuries
When it was Thames water or beer
Wine whiskey whatever –
Dehydtration alone must have led to countless
Depravities
Let alone the warm drunken wash over
Scrupled London the Capital of the World.

Here's the same poem, this time a la mode of 2008. Wouldn't that be a neat exercise? To rewrite the same poem every five years, as a benchmark to measure the evolution of your style against?

Worlds were exhausted
half-humanly by boors;
Think of those stuporous days
in Londons of capital's youth
when it was Thames water or beer
or wine or whisky or gin –
Dehydration can begin countless
depravities
let alone the drunken flow through
scrupled London,
financiers stumbling over
the roots of our World.

Eloy, AZ

I'm at the Burger King, idling in the drive-thru, tapping away on my Mac Book. Could there be a scene more indicative of our times? Here I am with more computing power in my lap than they had in the world a hundred years ago. About to nonchalantly eat a meal that would would $70, $100 in today's money, if it was possible at all - some of the ingredients may not have been procurable back then out here in Aridzona, in the Spring. Idling away in this masterpiece of automotive design, wasting the legacy of the dinosaurs, doing my part to use up another $110 barrell of oil.

Everything we touch is made somewhere else. You know what? It's ok with me. All of it, in fact. Everyone's so consumed with the overarching pictures. I'm referring specifically to an article I was reading in Harpers about the future of economies. You know what? On a wide enough zoom, everything is wonderful. Only when you zoom in do you find chaos. And in that chaos is the most terrible of terrors, but also is the most beautiful of beauties. Me, I'm only in it for the fiction. Show me the beauty, baby.

Thunder last night, a good spring storm to wake the dead or at least snoring me. Three times - 2AM, a 4AM and again at 6AM. The waking terror from the booming, mom's biggish reminder that she has dominion, dude.

When I woke up at 2 I must have been dreaming poetry, because I was determined I wanted to write my own Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction in order to answer Stevens' question : What should we believe in?, and knowing that I have a better, more modern answer.

At 4AM I woke with 'all things ought to aspire to excellence' in my head, the rejoinder to which was 'it's good to be wine, because for a wine to be excellent it has to be drunk, hah!'. Nothing like cracking yourself up in the middle of the night, is there?

The final act came at 6AM. The waking terror, the reminder of impermanence : I felt acutely the potentiality of never waking up. Felt the moment after everything vanishes. It was like a numbness, a TV gone off and all the characters are still there for a split-second, just long enough to realize that they're gone. And then poof! Gonzo.

When I woke for good at eight, the sun was shining like a meyer lemon, and Jen said 'Wow it's like there's no proof it was even storming!'.

Every March I reread The Sun Also Rises. It's a perpetual birthday present to myself - That book contains enough treasures for a lifetime of reads. One of my favorite scenes is the description of the Place de la Contrescarpe. Jake and Bill have just had dinner, and Hem wants to show that they both Get It, so he describes the scene and then has Bill refuse a drink, just about the only time in the book that anyone does, because the scene taken straight is enough to intoxicate him.

This is my homage, courtesy of Bangkok :

Eventually we told the cabby to just let us off. We'd find it ourselves. The alley curved in each direction and we asked a cop which way. At the end of the alley was Yaowarat Road. The fluorescent lights from the shops lit up the sidewalks. Pop music came from an old stereo. Through the rows of scooters and all the people I saw the flames. They were blue and orange and we felt the heat. At the tables working people and students were slurping noodles. A lady was frying banana flowers in oil. There were iron pots of curry. The lady ladled some into a bowl for an old man who tottered on his rickety cane.

'Want to grab a bite?'

'No,' said Mike. 'I don't need it.'

4 reasons for this poem -

1. I've been infatuated with The Waste Land since hearing it recited from memory by an Englishman at Shakespeare & Co on a summer evening in 1998.

However I disagree with most of the poem, including the opening where April is derided as the cruelest month for bringing to life these dreams which will eventually be shattered... I've done all that damn it! Lived out the melancholy of my life, as Henry puts it 10 years later in Tropic of Cancer. I'm through believing that life is futile because we owe a death at the end. We're like flowers, more beautiful because we bloom and wilt, like the Greeks knew way back when. Yeah, our future is as daisy-pushers. In the meantime, let's dance.

2. I woke up this morning thinking about how March and 'to march' were the same word, and why, and how generations of men have marched off to their slaughter in March, singing naive songs of bravery and companionship.

3. I'm an Aries and know something of the Zodiac's connotations, as well as those surrounding my later-neighbor the bull.

4. I love March. The return of the light, the awakening of the lamb. And in San Diego, asparagoose and strawberries, if you can believe it.

March First

c'est March
same word as
'walk steadily forward
in step with others
into bellies of Russias' -

and I know why
April is the cruelest month,
drowning in keratin sheaths
the suckling peace
of March's rams -

I just don't believe
- the cruelty not the reality -
for me, giggling
on my way to the stage
or in line with Jean
trampling the steppes,
some General's ideas of Spring.

Other winters were wet and when the rains came we'd sleep until eight or later. Those mornings usually began with nibbles at flanks or pinches at flesh. It would be cold in the apartment but we'd cuddle under the comforter for as long as we could stand it. Or until one of us got the Jones.... coffee. Good coffee. Usually it was me. I'd leap out of bed and in one momentous moment of momentum throw on my heavy overcoat and my rain pants and my wool hat and my waterproof socks. Like a bullet. You do it in one moment and there's no thinking involved. You still freeze but at least you don't have time to think about it.

Dressed for winter, I'd run down the stairs and into the wet. The cafe was three blocks from our place. Fortunately inclement weather in San Diego was usually pretty flighty. Oh it'd start off coming down in buckets and sheets. But then it would remember this was San Diego and politely stop.

San Diego wasn't built for deluges though, even short ones. On a rainy day our neighborhood would be a tidal zone. I'd splash from puddle to puddle, happy in that way you can only be when you're wearing dry clothes on a rainy day. What I love about rainy days - how the palette of the planet shifts to green and grey.

Back home I'd melt good chocolate into some milk, and then pour the coffee into the little cups and top them with the melted chocolate. We'd sit at our computers, cups of cafe au lait mochas steaming away, listening to the rain, expounding on the world as the coffee stretched our minds across the latticework of Web 2.0.

Sick as a goat for the last 5 days. 1 day of sore throat, 1 day of intense fever, 3 days of severe nasal drip. No kinda fun, and I know I have a couple more days of snot and coughs before this thing passes me by

Hoping for decent health by the weekend...

Progress, Cambodia, early 2008

My first time in Siem Reap
they were digging the sewer line.

Women worked at it
with shovels and picks
poking and prodding
sublimating the dirt
choking their street in dusts.

We laughed at this progress
or what passed as,
making jokes about CalTrans –
“Siem Reap Trans!”

and wondered why they don’t get it
and when they will get it
and worried they won't get it
and worried they will
as we watched from the car -

windows up & the AC on
our driver honking
plowing scooters and bikes
like a water buffalo
driven through October rice.

Some friends have asked me about my presidential preferences. With the California primary 2 days away, this is as good a space as any to weigh in.

Everyone wants to talk issues. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that the issues don't mean squat. Every politician is indebted to whatever groups got him/her there. Their primary motivation when they take office therefore is to take care of said groups.

Clear the issues out of the way and you're left with the man, and what goes into the man, and what the man exudes when he takes a hard stand on a podium. It's been a long time since we had someone who spoke eloquently about America. Too long.

For me, only three of the candidates look like a president. Actually four do, but I refuse to consider Hillary on the grounds that there's been a Bush or a Clinton in the White House for 28 of the 31 years I've been on this earth, and as they say in Arkansas and Texas, enough is enough.

Mitt Romney looks like a president. But more of a guy you'd cast in a sarcastic movie about a blundering president than an actual leader. He's not my guy.

Johnny Mac looks like a president. I don't care for his allies, but the man exudes charisma and integrity. I'd be happy with him in office. I think he'd go a long ways towards restoring the dignity of the office - and he'd be a fine foil for the big government Democrats in congress.

Barack Obama looks like a president. And he's my choice. I can't stand his big government politics. But like I said, the issues don't matter to me anymore. Every politician is a crook of sorts, a schill for their own tribe of hucksters. This man looks and sounds like the President of The United States. I'm sold.

So