I know, I know. I've been absent this space again. Mea culpa, and thanks for sticking with me.

Three things I'm excited about:

1. ¡OBAMANOS! Seriously. I don't care about the politics, either. Barack's a guy I'd follow into battle. He's an eloquent speaker and he's a smart motherfucker and he's everything the last guy wasn't. I don't blame the current credit crisis on Bush, any more than I blamed the dot-bomb on Clinton, but frankly, he looks and sounds like a blithering idiot, and I'm tired of his face. And his choices of advisers have gotten worse and worse - from the heights of Colin Powell, we sunk through that Brownie asshole and into Henry 'Good Trillions After Bad' Paulson. It was time for change, time for someone who looks, sounds and acts like The President to be President. I'm enthused.

2. We (The Creative Cusp) have our first songwriting workshop this weekend. Bobby Shaddox is leading it, and I can't wait to take it, let alone teach part of it. Check out the details here.

3. Trying not to look forward to this Spring, but... anybody know a good French teacher?

October in San Diego

Wednesday, sweating standing still
a sultry spell. Vietnamese. ninety-five degrees.
bought some veal at the market
- a bone-in shoulder, which I salted
the site said 'rain this weekend'
a system. a cold front. from Alaska.

Saturday, up with those crows
needed my beanie getting coffee
silver cloud bands streaked the sky
I braised that veal in a Paso red
& stock I made from two hens
six hours. three-hundred degrees.

After dinner, out on the porch
Surfliner blowing down at Sassafras
the wind's swishes in the eucalyptus
that skinny palm swaying away
first drops on the palm of my hand.
a downpour. a new season. from Alaska.

It's that one moment. 1:17 or 3:14 in the afternoon, and you realize the light's different, not quite as intense as it was, and you get this sense of loss that begins in your belly and moves through your chest towards your head. Something's wrong. Everything has an ending. And then you need to stop what you're doing and go outside to think for a moment.

It was a sunny Sunday and I was lazying around Balboa Park, reading Kerouac's Desolation Angels. I've read it many times so I was sipping - skipping some parts, spending time on parts I didn't know or some that I knew well but wanted to revisit.

There's this scene when he's wandering around New York after traveling on the West Coast and through Mexico. He's noticing everything and the words are pouring out, so authoritatively, like God told him he could so he did. And it got me thinking about how I sometimes need to remind myself that I have the authority to sing the beauty of the world. And how a biblical education might grant you an assurity that I missed out on with the secular smartypants atheism of my youth.

At the time he wrote Desolation Angels, Kerouac was wrestling with the Buddhist notions of emptiness and meaninglessness of everything. Even in the face of these seemingly contradictory notions, throughout the text he continually throws out the name of God. His Catholic God. It's as if, even if the true nature of the universe was The Void, it were unthinkable not to have God there, too.

I not only respect and admire those cemented beliefs, I also have the creeping feeling I may be missing something by lacking them. And thus this poem -

JK
a pint of port in
declares he's the
'Greatest Writer in America.'

'n walks like he means it
shaking scenes from streets
shoving his snout deep
into suffering & joy & dramedy
revealing with that authority
internalized early -
a catechismal upbringing
affirming the duty and right:
    'Sing his PRAISES.'

- sing!
stop arguing
the existence of HIM, boy.
outsmart your smarts
the painting is not the paint -
shove deep
walk like you mean it
call it like you see it
    - sing boy!

Sorry all, I've been away for too long without explanation. I was absent from this space for two months - longer than I've been away for at least four years. Please, forgive me a brief catch-up before I return to posting regularly -

• I took the last two months to finish my next-to-last draft of A Story About San Diego. This draft is approximately 130,000 words long, or about 20,000 more than it should be. Next week I'll begin the final cutting process. I'm expecting to take at least the rest of September on it - if you've signed up for updates on the site, you'll be hearing from me soon.
• I'm teaching again this weekend, at our September Write on the Cusp workshop. There's still time (as of the morning of Sept 12) to signup at a discounted price - ping me.
• La Chingadera, our San Diego quarterly, is on track for its first publication this winter. If you or anyone you know is producing printable art (with a preference for but not exclusively to fiction, poetry or photography), let them know that there's an opportunity to get their work published.

Cheers,

J O

Finally, another poem about Cambodia. I knew more would come. I didn't know it would take this long. Maybe it was the intensity of the place, the way it burns oddly in my mind - It's like a candle you might have left burning, but you're on bottle number two at the restaurant, and did you blow it out or didn't you?

I, Back From Vacation

Back from Cambodia, in at the office.
The return of the shafts to the mind.
The gears. The rudder. The wheel.
     1 and 1 equals 1 again.

overseas, where machinery molders
naked kids scatter the muds
play in the remains, a France brought too far.

durian, fermented fish, flies on the plates.
eat with the hands. sweat. grandma's bloody teeth -
'betel-quid'. chawed to fade. an old free.

scooter kids, zip and sling, chthonic traffic
the yellow rues of Batambang
    one and one and one
mud busses, green sense, buffalo in mists,
    Cambodia.

The Holiday Cafe

He just dove in. And got it all over his nose, his cheeks, even his glasses. Whipped cream. His friend clapped and cracked up. Said You ordered it! He did, too. His friend started to wipe him off. No! Get away! He dove in again. And now the white, on his glasses? Brown from the coffee. They cracked up. Clapped each other on the shoulders. His friend said You ordered it! They shook their heads. Then he dove in again. They couldn't help themselves. His friend leaned over and dove in too and sputtered it all over. He was laughing so hard. They both were. It was the sidewalk cafe, full already, where people chatted or read the LA Times and teenage curves carried trays of big puffball pastries, steaming quiches, tarts, little glasses of orange juice, and lots of the fat mugs topped with four inches of whip. It was still early. But warm already. Sun spangled the tables through the jacarandas. Top down zoomsters, beatbox SUVs, and a 908 chugged up the Avenue. Strangers said 'Good morning'. I took my coffee to go, and hurried home to get to work.

I walked home from the Coaster. Little Italy was full. Couples in ones and twos, threesomes, gangs of men all chests and swinging arms. I walked on the sun side of the street. Girlfriends were on the patios, bottles of white wine between them, the bottles beaded with water. There were families where dad and grandpa both had tall glasses of Heweweizen, slices of lemon floating in the beer. There were couples having shy conversations. First dates. Old lovers. Husbands and wives. All in the June late afternoon sun. And everyone gesticulating, nodding, smiling, talking, their voices like bottles of champagne popping and sloshing into the street, into the sun in the street, India Street, 5:15PM.

I meant to stop for a beer. I thought how a Duvel would look in a glass on a table in the sun, my laptop on the table. I thought how it would taste. That first big sip. How it would feel in my mouth, throat, belly. How a little bit would hit my head, and I'd crack the laptop, and the words would come.

I couldn't find a place though. Sogno DiVino was packed. Princess had too much energy. The place next door was dead. The cafes were fine, but I wanted a beer. You can't get a beer just anywhere. You have to order a meal most places. They look at you funny, they rush you. I walked on.

I ended up stopping at Tango, the wine shop. I meant to have a drink at the bar, but it was packed. It's one of those places that's packed when there's four people there. A shame. I bought a bottle of Paso red, and another because the lady was nice. The lady was almost a girl, and could have been a girl, but she was a lady instead. It was ok. I took my wine and walked up Laurel to Banker's Hill.

Everyone was out in Banker's Hill. A girl jogged past who I thought I knew, but I didn't say anything because she was into her jogging, and didn't see me, and I didn't want to scare her.

I thought about cutting over to Avenue 5, or Bassam, or Modus, but none of them were quite right. Then I thought about my porch. And a martini. The bite and the burn of a first sip of martini, out on my balcony, watching the sun set in the shadows against the wall.

I made the martini extra strong. 10 to 1. Montgomery. I thought about everything while I shook it up. It wasn't that bad, anyway. In fact it was pretty good. Sure, I'd thought of some pretty rotten things on the way home, but everything was ok now.

I took my martini to my porch. The first sip was pleasure. The second was joy. The third was extacy. I surrendered. I sat on the porch, drank my martini, waited for her to come home, and wrote this.

A little prose poetry for the summer solstice. Dance your pagan butt off.

On The Son

He's the muscled one, fecund and indomitable. Kept his promise to take dominion. We adore him without adoration, this one who's brought back the parts of us that cower. Turned our spirits, our work into gifts. He hauls us out in the mornings, we lay splayed under his body in the afternoons, we run wild with his shadow on full moon nights.

We whisper to be polite. For his own good. Yes, our man has grown! Such pride and aplomb! But always, the worm. We've noticed for a while how his growth has slowed. The hulk, hulking, but no longer expanding. And today is the day - this mid-June day of all days, so soon, just as his reign is ascending. It's the begin of his ending.

He doesn't have a clue. In his mind he's still waxing. After all, he is who-is. Raised on the glory of his boundless increase. Why should he have even an inkling of some old rule lingering just outside his light?

It's begun. The wane. He won't notice it, let alone acknowledge it, for a while now. His cock & surety will carry the coming days. He has no mirror, he has no model, She's told him no stories to warn him of cracks or wrinkles or cold September winds.

Above all, what he doesn't know - that we and especially She have seen this show before. It's her burden - To give birth to these sons, to nurse and nurture them, to notice on a May day how she's now the shorter one, to beam up at their June dominions, to catch them caught off guard by late August, to see them fade horrifically in October, to bury them in the finality of November.

How many iterations? And our Lady's still game. Her pregnancies keep coming. It's the repetition, this illiterate patience of the Goddess. An old stubbornness. A cycle that makes a man shake his head and wonder why she doesn't just give up. A man would've lasted three, maybe four go-rounds, shrugged his shoulders, cracked a beer and tossed the whole shebang into the sea.

And maybe that's why we prescribed this metaphor. As a method of making love to the perseverance of our women.

Why did we make words to make myths?

Maybe because caresses alone felt insufficient, in light of what we learned from these sons' inevitable wanes.

What's going on...

• I've given up trying to blog A Story About San Diego and have put up a static info page. I'll still be talking about it here, of course, but maintaining two blogs proved untenable. A Story About San Diego, available October 2008.
• Our first Creative Cusp workshop is in less than two weeks! There's still space left, if you're a San Diego writer I want to see you there.
• Attended SDTweetup last night, lots of neat people, reminded me that I need to be more active in the geek community. Kinda lost my passion for it in the last few years - for the networking, not the geekery of course.

Nice thing about flying Virgin from Seattle to San Diego is, you get to stop in San Francisco. Yeah, it adds about two hours to the flight. But unlike Southwest, you get to get off the plane and stretch your legs. There's usually just enough time to take a shit and drink a beer. In fact, that's what I'm coming to know SFO as - the place where I get off the plane, take a shit and drink a beer. And Virgin's in the International terminal, so it's nice - bright, spacious, and there's several good bars that serve decent snacks, and if it's night there's lots of asian cuties boarding flights for Shanghai and Bangkok and Manilla. Get off the plane, walk a little, do some squats for the calves and quads,use the boy's room, munch a greek salad, guzzle an Anchor Steam, tap a few words, get back on the plane and less than two hours later I'm in SD. Sometimes it's the same plane. Sometimes it's even the same seat. It's like rail travel in the old days, a hint of civilization for the jet age.

Stuff that has me enthused...

The Creative Cusp!

The Creative Cusp is Abbie Berry's baby. Abbie's a phenomenal woman, and a damn good writer too. I'm helping her with web design, marketing, and some of that make-it-happen magic that I sometimes conjure.

What's The Creative Cusp? I think - and this is the reason I chose to get involved with it - it's the best opportunity that's come along since I've been here for us as San Diego writers to find our niche, to grow in our own environment, and to have some realistic goals for what we can accomplish and what our role is in the community. There's two parts to it -

1) Weekend Writing Workshops. We've gotten together with local writers to put on fun but serious learning experiences. The workshops will take place once a month this summer - go here to see which weekends are available. Abbie's got a ton of people interested in these things, so if you're considering going, sign up now so we can save your place.

2) Publishing. San Diego is starving for words! Every quarter we'll be staving off the hunger for a bit with La Chingadera, a selection of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction writing about San Diego. If you love San Diego, we need your words. We'll also consider publishing longer pieces - collections, non-fiction pieces and novels.

Publishing includes promotion too, of course - we'd like you to publish with us, but ultimately we don't care if you're with Creative Cusp or Random House. If you're writing beautiful things about San Diego, we'll help you get your words out.

Jen's blogging (finally)

Right here! At last!

Actually, the truth is, she's been blogging for a while on her flickr. A few weeks back she even got a little taste of blogebrity. It reminds me of how much talent she has - she has the eye and the artistic skills of the household... as I say often, I'm only good at what I do because I make up for my lack of talents with my canine enthusiasm.

Mike Por

Mike's one of my best friends, so it's hard to write about him objectively, but I'm so proud of him that I'm going to try anyway. His current project involves housing and infrastructure projects in Cambodia, including plans to bring foundational services to the Cambodian people (trash pickup, reliably clean water, green power).

It's amazing what we take for granted. When I was in Cambodia this January, I learned firsthand what not having trash pickup means. It means severe air pollution. Why air pollution? Because without trash pickup, everyone burns their trash. A pickup service would mean cleaner air, meaning less respiratory problems, meaning a happier, healthier Cambodia. Who knows what art, what words might come out of the place if half the people weren't spending their lives hacking up a lung?

I chat with Mike a few times a month, and every time I hear from him there's a part of me that cringes, because when you dream as big as he's dreaming you're bound to get spanked a few times. Not this guy though! His dreams just keep getting bigger - in addition to his American investors he has Korean, Chinese and Cambodian investors lines up as well. Mike's a great guy with a big heart, and I know whatever he ends up with over there, it'll be good.

A Story About San Diego

I started this novel on December 26, 2005. Two and a half years later, the end is finally in sight. Thank you everyone who's read the early drafts and given me all that valuable feedback - I couldn't have done this without you.

More soon on the book, I promise...

I stopped at my sushi bar in Tacoma for some fish and a respite before a week at my mother's. It's Charlie's place. Charlie this slender happy-eyed Tokyo fishman with his knives, and his daughters up front taking care of the tables and giggling at his silly jokes. I go to Charlie's because of the fish, and also because there's usually some fellow lunatics at the bar. This time it's a fine pair, a seasoned hardarm with a busty blonde half his age perched on his elbow. The two of them halfway down a big bottle of sake. Right away they decide they want to put some of it in me too. Fine with me! Her fleshes just about pour out of her tank top as she hands me the little sake cup. Kampai! Yahs! Where you froms? Here try this... it's so good! Char-lie! As the fish goes down and the shots pile up, the 'Hais!' and 'Kampais!' get more guttural, more sincere. Charlie matches us shot for shot, same as every night. 'Fliday niiiight, ayte-fohty-fiiiive, tiiime to dlink!' His assistant just frowns and mixes his spicy salmons. He doesn't drink. He gave it up. Used to drink like a fish, until he wised up. He's that kind of guy, a wise guy, a guy who gives you the final score of the Mariners game-on-tape, just to make sure it's ruined for you, too. It'll be a shame when Charlie retires, I'll miss the place...

...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...

Alright, so you've poured 140,000 carefully chosen words into a first draft of something you're calling 'The Novel'. You've told all your friends and they're expecting to read something, soon. The only thing is, at this point The Novel is an unreadable mess. How will you toss the trash and sew together your moments of brilliance into something succinctly beautiful?

I had a math teacher whose solution to every difficult problem was 'break it down'. I can hear him now : I'd show him my flailings at some complex problem that I barely understood and he's get all excited. 'Jon, stop trying to eat the elephant in one bite! Break it down and eat him bite by bite. One inductive leap at a time.'. Funny, I don't recall much of Linear Algebra, but I've never forgotten that advise. It's applicable in so many situations. Like editing a novel -

The novel is an elusive work of art, isn't it? Consider this : A painter, no matter how large her piece, has the ability to view it in its entirety whenever she chooses. The architect can in an hour or two at the jobsite take in the entirety of her building in progress. The director, even if he's making a five hour documentary, can still bolt the doors, turn off the cell phone and watch his movie in a single elongated moment.

Not so the novelist. Working with 100,000+ words, there's just no way she can experience the entirety of her work in a single sitting. Even if she were to dedicate an entire day to reading her piece, she'd doubtlessly find herself at 4 o'clock in the afternoon in the middle of chapter 4, editing like a madwoman, splicing in some new twist. Reading 100,000 words takes days. There's just no way to view your entire work in any span of time that could reasonably be called 'a moment'.

If you can't see the whole thing at once, how do you edit a novel?

One of the finest skills a writer can have is the ability to deal with the needs of an individual tree while keeping an eye on the tree's role in the forest itself. Some trees are worth the effort of saving, while others must be culled to benefit the whole. It's a useful metaphor. Fortunately it's also a wonderful (and profitable) life skill, one that will always be in demand.

It works like this : break The Novel down into parts. Then break those parts into parts. Go further if you need to. Take notes on the parts. Not just about the parts but how those parts fit into the hierarchy of parts and into the novel as a whole.

That's certainly not groundbreaking advice. Nonetheless it's a mistake I've seen many beginners - including myself when I wrote my first novel-length work! - make. I used to fantasize about one day getting my arms around the whole enchilada and 'making it sing!'. (Confession : When I was working on my first novel I used a single word doc named Enchilada.doc). And that day of mastery was coming! Soon!

Only of course it never came... And I learned the hard way. You can't work on 'the novel'. You have to work on pieces of the novel. Not even on one chapter - most chapters are too big to handle in a single sitting. They simply encompass to much - too many sways, too many nuances, too many inductive leaps. I mean work on a section, on a paragraph, on a single key sentence. The smaller the unit that you're working on today, the better chance you have of either making it shine brilliantly or finding out that it just doesn't belong. It sounds silly and obvious, but it's true.

I've slowly developed a rule - each component part should have as much if not more written about it than it contains. For example, if I have a 3500 word section but I've only taken 1000 words of notes on it, something's wrong. I need to reexamine that piece, find out what I haven't looked at, what parts I haven't broken down. Inevitably that's where I find weaknesses - in my under-notated parts.

In part two of this piece, I'll talk about how I've divided A Story About San Diego for manageable editing.

I've been reading Tropic of Cancer with Google close at hand, looking up references and street addresses. I had just finished listening to Ravel's drumbeat Bolero courtesy of iTunes when I came across a stuffed swan and some gal named Leda.

How did I miss this? It's a question I often ask myself when I come across a juicy topic that's previously escaped my examinations.

It doesn't matter though. Henry leads me back to ancient Greece and I explore this little lusty, bestial tale via Ovid, Michealangelo, that bastard Leonardo, Cezanne, Cy Twombley and the New York scene, and via Yeats whose poem finally, after so much beating around the bush by the painters, captures the essence of the thing!

And now I'm wandering around the city thinking about Leda and her encounter with Zeus. Encounter! Hah. What a mask for copulation ie : fucking. The whole thing smells like humanity looking for beauty in the animals and maybe a warning not to get too close, or what a woman will go through to have the perfect child, or a woman's sacrifice to bear the Godlike children. I don't know. How can you write about a poem? It's like sketching a hundred pictures about a painting. Fidriculous.

Leda fucking the swan who is Zeus and then having his child is a poem in itself. Yeats' piece, the painters takes, those are just methodologies of reviving one of our old old poems. A relic of dropping from the trees, separating from the animals, all of that. Genesis. All art seems be in love or at least in lust with that theme. Out with the new, in with the old!

It's insane to navigate a city with Leda and the swan on your brain. Hello, fine thanks. Cappuccino please. Yes, dry is fine. Oh I'm sorry, what do I owe you? And then other problems - catching the bus, avoiding traffic, things that have to get done. All of them pushed aside by Leda and the swan, but how far an you go into the cerebral before you're endangering yourself?

It's funny too, how no one can tell what I'm thinking about. How I'm imagining each woman I see enraptured with a big white bird. The absurdity of it - though look around. People are becoming aroused by less every day courtesy of the Net. Not only by watching but by doing. To become aroused merely by watching! It's a stupid thing, really. Real arousal involves every sense. Not just sight and feel but smell, taste, sound.

The UT has a story about a hurricane slamming into Jamaica. The USA Today has the same story, but the headline is different. Hurricane headed towards Mexico. I look both ways then walk across University mid-block. At the corner several women are waiting for the light. Lately the world seems to throb with poems. I don't even bother writing them down there's so many. I just roll around and get filthy with them. Like a dog.

I have this affection for baristas. It roots back to this theory of mine that there's something analogous to how a woman cranks out espresso drinks under stress and how she makes love to a boy. ('this one here, she must have been a barrista in a former life' I say, warding off ill looks with a quick squeeze.').

I was a great barista. For a long time I was a terrible barista who thought he was a good barista. Then Rudy got sick of watching me fuck it all up and took me under his wing. Rudy taught me all about milk, and steam, and how to treat every customer and especially every lady like your lover. How to open them up so they were comfy in telling you what they liked & didn't. How to accept criticism humbly. And most importantly how to put heart and soul into each cup.

Well hell. I was 19. I'd never put heart or soul into anything, let alone a friggin cup of coffee that I had to make one hundred and fifteen times a morning. Rudy showed me. Rudy who had a smile a mile wide. Rudy who barely spoke English. Rudy who sent half his barista's paycheck home to his wife and kids in Guatemala each week. Ojala que Rudy regreso de la Guatemala, y esta allí con su familia esta noche.

Rudy, I love you man. You're in the book.