CHANGE

My birthday was fine and nice. I liked Rocky's gifts. I'm wearing the Star Wars tie to a dinner party tonight. Plus, she bought me dinner! Rocky scores so many points. The others score one point for showing up. I should have ordered the whole fish special as I initially intended, but the sound of shrimp stuffed with crab wrapped in bacon got me. It sounds better than it tastes.

OH HELL YA!!!!!!!!!!!! I JUST SAW MYSELF ON THE NEWS!!!!!!!!!!! I WAS AT THE 5 DE MAYO CELEBRATION IN SF WITH CLAUSEN HOUSE STUDENTS AND WE WERE IN ONE OF THE CAMERA SHOTS. I'M FAMOUS!!!! I'M ON CHANNEL 7 NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Matt Volla rolled the dice three times as a bday gift. He roled a 6 & 4 twice. The other time was two 3s. What does it mean? When he rolled the 6 & 4, the numbers were familiar from some part of my day. Then I remembered that it was from change I got back in some transaction and I said aloud "change". Okay. Change it is then. What should I change? I'm starting by reducing drastically the amount of pot I smoke and cutting cigarrettes out all together. I'm increasing excercise. I'm improving Spanish skills.

I'd like to change the way John's meaningless insults make me feel. It's always a bunch of bullshit and meant merely to amuse himself and not to actually hurt me. It adds up, though. When I come home feeling emotionally spent from giving all of myself away to people who endlessly need my attention and affection, even trivial, just-joking insults chip away at my already spent self and leave my sense of self worth a bit beaten up. Have I told John? yes. He says "okay, but don't listen to me. Think of it as another language that when translated means positive things." And, "You're too sensitive." I am what I am. And I've been in his shoes before. I used to tease my sister to amuse myself all the time. It always hurt her, but I always thought she was over reacting and being too sensitive. I was the one in the wrong. And now that person is John. There's no point in trying to get the guy to change, though. For one thing, he is constantly changing. One moment he is this and the next he is that. He is also everything at one time. Which is why he is so amazing. Besides, I don't believe in trying to make people change. We can only change ourselves. That is already an enormously difficult thing to do. How can we expect to make someone else change? We can only accept people as the individuals that they are and relate to them the best we can, make the best of the time we spend.

The other thing about CHANGE and the numbers 6 & 4 that I thought of last night is that 10 is a very stable solid and constant number. "Change is constant", I said to myself, "so no need to worry about the way things are or might be because things always change anyway".

okay. enough of that.

until next time

Stephen Dunn- Technology/Memory

Okay. So maybe not everyone has to read it or have it read to them, but I would recommend that everyone I know and anyone who might come across my blog should read it. So once again, the poet's name is Stephen Dunn. The book is called Riffs & Reciprocities: prose pairs. There are forty five pairs in the book. Here is the first:


TECHNOLOGY

Maybe we've always been transported by what we can't explain. But if the world were almost destroyed and only a few of us remained, who could reinvent the telephone, no less the radio or the car? I'd be a man with hopes for a farm. I turn the television on, and there's baghdad, and there's a missile and a rationale. I could be in a cave watching the Northern Lights- it's all so out of my control. I watch a laser repair a heart. I look in atmy daughter before she is born. There used to be a gulf between empiricism and faith. Now an e-mail message arrives on my turned-off machine. Somebody who lives in cyberspace- where my mother never roamed- could say how. Normal: the most malleable word our century has known. The light bulb changed the evening. the car invented the motel.


MEMORY

A kind of achievement, William Carlos Williams said. Or a curse, said the man who couldn't get the phone book out of his head. Speak, Nabokov asked of his. Which it tends to, if we invoke it often enough. Imagination is its most important friend, selecting, coloring, casting aside. Without imagination, an endlessness, like my colleague's story of his summer by the lake when he listed birds and his wife was tortured by a lingering cold; he told me so much I didn't know what I'd been told. More and more I forget what I need, and remember what I'd like to forget. And sometimes I keep talking, keep recalling, as a way of not saying what I feel. Memory's law: what we choose to say about our past becomes our past. That other past, the one we've lived, exists in pieces that flicker and grow dim. I can buy memory in a store called Circuit City. I can press search, and find a fact, a person, but not what I've most dearly lost. Every time I save I exclude.

Rocky is right

that I need to write. I majored in creative writing. Why? because it was fun. I got to do homework that was fun. I don't write much anymore. Why? I don't know. I haven't been inspired? The other night, I was talking to Manny's girlfriend, Julie, about majoring in creative writing: poetry. She asked about who inspired me. I couldn't remember one of the poets I used to really like. I felt embarassed about how I had majored in poetry and been very interested in it at one point and now pay almost zero attention to it. I just pulled one of the poet's books off the shelf for the first time in a long time. His name is Stephen Dunn. My favorite book of poetry by him isn't really poetry, but not really just prose either. I guess you would call it a book of prose poetry. It's called Riffs & Reciprocities and I believe that everyone alive should read it or have it read to them. I will type out a small sample for you Rocky when I get back from dinner. John and I are going to go eat cheeseburgers at Luka's.

until then....