Bring on 2007.

Christ, I hate wishing for time to pass any faster than it does, but I'm really looking forward to the new year and the potential tabula rasa it'll bring. I'm in the final stages of proofing shit for my dad's book, which seems to be an interminable and increasingly daunting process because so much is riding on it. I'm proofreading a second book for Len Bracken this year, both of which have come within the past month or so. Unheimlich is angrily gathering dust on the writing desk in the back of my skull. There are impending birthdays and holidays to attend to. My attempts at teaching myself Chinese are half-assed at best. I've got almost a dozen records and CDs that I've only barely listened to; same goes for books, though I'm making more headway with those (only 1800 or so pages left of Three Kingdoms!). I sleep too much, but not enough. On top of all this, I'm trying to cut back my drinking and smoking.

It's not even that I lack the time to get all this shit out of the way by the deadlines I or others have set. I don't know what it is, really. I'm definitely unmotivated, but not as much as I think I am. Frankly, I think I've simply got too much going on, which is as difficult to deal with as having absolutely nothing to focus on.

I hate having plans.

82

Involuntary removal from the driving population puts this corpse back on the bus for a few days. Exhausted midnight riders of all stripes, white and blue and no collar, stinking of late shifts and clothes worn for weeks on end. Cell phones clamped to heads in doo-rags, low sweetnesses or impending plans muttered to distant someones, though not all the souls with voices direct them across the ether: some folks talk to the invisibles, others bombard the driver with tales of conquered chicken fried steaks or exegeses on the bus schedule. Most don't talk, too beat by their jobs or themselves to waste the energy, and so remain silent testaments to the horrors of labor or introspection or monthly payments to the demiurge that tells all of us, in tones seductive or bland as television, that yes, it's worth it, keep it up and the world will be yours.


I get off the bus, my soul getting paid overtime tonight, and walk into the noisy neon where we all try desperately to earn ourselves another day.

First it's the cold, come down overnight,
long overdue,
that bites my ears to and from the bar.

Then, home from the corner table,
blood thinned,
comes the music.

Clamped to my ears,
warming them with Norwegian beats
and noir never filmed.

Then the body's tiniest bones
tremble at the voice of God
or a mortal echo thereof.

Raining antlers.

My laptop has been going on wildcat strikes the last couple days- or maybe it's either Firefox or Windows acting up like a bratty adopted child- so I'm writing from the crusty yet beloved warhorse that is my desktop for the first time in what is probably ages. I've gotta say, it's a welcome change of pace. Sure, the keyboard sticks, the wheel of my mouse has been gnawed to the point of near-uselessness by the ferrets, and I can't stretch out in my (uncomfortable) bed while I catch up on the news, but at least I can move freely without my cat5 cable dislodging and dropping my connection.

It's all very much like it was a year ago, but it's not. In some ways, I was happier then, but at the same time I'm almost where I want to be now. Better job, vegetarian diet, wheels, minimal hassle from non-Dave sources, etc. It's also nice returning to a position where I don't have to get up to flip an LP- my turntable is literally within arm's length.

I hope y'all are doing well, and that if I have to keep using my desktop, I have the wherewithal to get a new keyboard soon.

now playing: Greenland, Teeth of the Hydra

"Amusing Myself"

Face wine not aware get dark Fall flower fill my clothes Drunk stand step stream moon Bird far person also few

Facing my wine, I did not see the dusk, Falling blossoms have filled the folds of my clothes. Drunk, I rise and approach the moon in the stream, Birds are far off, people too are few.

Hanzi, pinyin, and literal/literary English translations courtesy of chinese-poems.com.

I know criminally little about poetry, especially Chinese poetry, but I know what I like, and I get the impression that this poem might have led to the legend that Li Bai drowned while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in a stream when he was drunk. Worse fates than that, I reckon.

Speaking of poets, I seem to meet and/or associate with a lot of them lately. This is a highly excellent thing, be they the regular circle of hookah-smoking folks I've spent most of my Saturdays with, or the Shakespeare-tattooed bartender at the icehouse, or the long-standing poet and professor Robert Phillips, whom I also encountered at the icehouse today. I've gotta say that it's a rare pleasure having folks appreciate, or at least be interested in hearing, my bursts of language that aren't directed into pure conversation or my novels. Thank y'all, and keep up the good work and good spirits.

Zaijian, Meiguo.

Ni hao.

It's not a recent thing, mind you, but I've pinpointed much of what's wrong with my life... and I can't, or won't- or both- do anything about it.

A downer note to cough up after over a week of silence, I know, but there have been some good things. Got to see Destroyer 666 on their first American tour. Been plugging away, slowly but surely, at the ol' Potunghua lessons. Work's all right. Dave gave me a copy of Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Traveled, which is providing me the structural basis in poetry I've been needing for a long while. Speaking of poetry, the Saturday night writing group I've been involved in for a while now has yet to let me down.

Still, I really need to take care of some obligations, not least to myself, and hammer out a couple other outstanding moral issues, and maybe then I'll make it through the fall and winter without being ragingly disappointed with myself.

Not likely. Self-sabotage has become my modus operandi.

Good night, y'all. Sorry to be a killjoy, but blathering here doesn't do me or my attendant shreds of optimism any favors. Instead of reading this, go read a book or listen to a record that doesn't drag you down.


Love always. Always.
Dave Smith