I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


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Thursday, September 29, 2022

Near the end of LIFE

 

from this week of September 29, 1972  (I was 27)

 

         Near the end of LIFE

I’m flipping through the pages of LIFE

listening to a recording of Woody Guthrie

and wondering at the circumstantial evidence

that he fathered Bob Dylan.

 

Bobby was born at the age of twenty-one

(a conception right out of the Old Testament)

That leaves Woody in one place only

(amazing the way the metaphor leads one away…)

 

Anyway, I’m flipping the pages pf LIFE

must have been back in September of ’72,

maybe October, there is a P.O.W.

and his liberated wife.

 

It’s the kind of article I can’t read

I already believe everything I’ve ever heard

about the War.  The War.

The concept is incredible, the War,

 

There are other things in it too,

a European starlet and great ads.

It all sells to the great camping American

and it’s the best satirical review around.

 

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