wake up!

Historical administrivia:

The Still Breathing weblog was continued at Shallow Breathing, and then at bodega, and currently X-POLLEN.

Related musings can be found at Stealing Sheep and Radio Free Blogistan.

This note won't make much sense once this entry is imported into X-POLLEN....

of all the things i could have been posting about the last few weeks if my life hadn't been such a timesink (such as the rest of the new orleans chronicles, day by day; my trip to new york and getting comped into the phish show at radio city music hall by one of those friend-of-friend chains; my brother's job in Central Park; and other things i can't think of - by the way, anyone really interested in any of these things, particularly stuff i've already written like the new orleans journal entries, just send me email and i'll send it to you personally, when i get a moment free), the last thing i'd like to be posting about is losing my fucking wallet!

it's bad enough that i lost my cell phone a few weeks ago. the nice consultants i'm consulting with replaced it for me reasonably quickly. but is this how i react to stress? throwing off important material talismans? Is that why I kept smashing my watches till I took the hint and stopped wearing one (to the eternal consternation of B of whom I'm eternally asking the time, though she often isn't wearing a watch and in fact lost her swatch in new orleans). point is, i just don't have time for this crap. canceling credit cards, getting new parking pass, replacing driver's license? fuck the money. that's not the point. i care more about my BART card than the fungible cash. oh for the days when upstanding crooks took the green and dropped your wallet in the nearest mailbox. It's a huge pain in the ass, especially when you consider that I'm going to Chicago on thursday for BEA and then a day or so after I get back I'm going to Boston to be trained on a monster content management system, getting back just in time (barely) for B's b'day. Since i know she never reads this, I can tell you here if you keep a secret that I'm looking for one of those breakfast-in-bed trays. she deserves it.

Finally starting to unwind... it only took three or four days of extra sleep and fried seafood to do it. Here's my take on the second day of the Fest:

4/29

Large frozen cafe au lait

Beignets

Frozen water

Patina earrings for B with Germaine Bazzle's scatting carrying over from the Jazz tent

E) Indian fry bead

Mrs. Wheat's crawfish pie

B) Softshell crab po'boy

S) Crawfish tail po'boy

S) Shrimp remoulade

Banda Blanca of Honduras (with two booty dancers to keep all the men in the audience paying strict attention to the stage)

Louisiana Heritage tent (Viator family showing their violins)

Virgin Megatent (B buys the Viators' last album, I buy a David Lindley record I've been looking for for ages - it has "Brother John" and "Rock it with I" on it)

Grandstand to cool off in the AC and look for one of Steve and Elizabeth's friends working in the Brazilian pavilion

B) Spring rolls

S&E) Vermicelli

Carlos Maba & Pife Muderno of Brazil @ Fais Do Do stage

I passed Wardel Quezergue Orchestra (an Afro-Cuban style big band - very hot) @ the Congo Square stage on my way to get

Fried sweet potatoes (disappointing, soggy and greasy, so two strikes no against Jeanminette's food stand) &

Crawfish Monica, large (great as always, but small would have been more than adequate - except B helped me finish it off)

Pife Muderno quotes Ravel's Bolero on flutes in their encore number

Roy Rogers and the Delta Rhythm Kings plays at least three Robert Johnson songs (Rocks in the Roadway? that's not the title but something like that, Terraplane Blues which absolutely tears the place up, and 32/20 Blues) - he's a big hit with the crowd, which has a tad too many drunken dust dancers and off-beat tambourinists for my liking, but a cupped hand at each ear does wonders. Bonnie Raitt comes out and does the "I'm not worthy" bow. Let's see, what else, he plays "Down in Mississippi with Legends of the Blues" about touring with John Lee Hooker in 1982 (he has since produced JLH's album(s?)) on 12-string National steel guitar. Encores with Willie Dixon's "Built for Comfort, Not for Speed" a little more mellow.

We move to the rickety House of Blues grandstand and wait for Derek Trucks Band to come on. Only problem is a cigar smoker in front of us (and I cut my knuckle on the end of a metal pipe strut). Somewhere in her we bought two more bottles of water and 1 sweetened rosemint tea. Later I get to see an altercation between a drunken college-guy type and a feisty young woman who hits back and then taunts the fellow all down the strip)

Derek's first tune is jazzy with a bass solo - can't just call them a blues-rock outfit, then

Ain't That Lovin' You

then two, three, four tunes I don't know? then

Afro Blue (cool, taken fast)

then a song, then band intros, then

Amazing Grace, with an extended guitar intro and then a reggae arrangement

then an encore I don't recognize that trends into Love Light as we're heading out of the place.

On the way out, we couldn't resists catching the last few tunes of

Zawinul Syndicate in the jazz tent

Strange, my Mac says it's 8:43, the clocks here in New Orleans say it's 10:40, and this diaryland entry form says it's 9:19:10? whassup widat?

Report from Jazz Fest:

4/28

Drove to Fest with convertible top up.

Large unsweetened rosemint tea

Beignets

Soft-shell crab po'boy

B) Mrs. Wheat's crawfish pie that turns out to be a meat pie by mistake

Bonerama trombone band

Wild Magnolias ("meet the boys on the battlefront/the Wild Magnolias gonna stomp some rump")

Native American exhibits in th grandstand, Brazilian band playing a cha-cha (everyone dancing), decided against oysters on the half shell, sat in the a.c. for a while cooling off while Ernie Andrews was interviewed about growing up in Philadelphia with Charlie Mingus and Dexter Gordon but he wasn't really talking into the mic, so we went to Economy Hall and heard the end of Dr. Jaz from New Zealand (playing "Saints" of course).

B) Lemonade (too sweet)

B) Crawfish pie (tart style, lots of crawfish but gummy dough)

No popcorn shrimp again!!

Fried turkey po'boy (so so)

Gatemouth Brown at the Ray Ban (Acura) stage, OK but not will mic'd and very hot - the usual fat/frat/cigar scene (though thankfully the cigar fad seems to have peaked last year), so we went back to Economy Hall and caught the end of

Lionel Ferbos and the Palm Court Jazz Band (hokay)

Small unsweetened mandarin orange tea

B) Small unsweetened rosemint tea

Dukes of Dixieland with hilarious loud self-gossipper and her confiterix, their shrill voices interlacing with the clarinet and trombone, all about how her boyfriend won't divorce his invalid wife

Henry Butler on the Fox stage, we lounging in the shade. Not Snook Eaglin on guitar but someone pretty good playing a blues/rock fusion: Something You Got (which I know from James Booker but not sure who wrote it), then a tune with the line from Goodnight Irene 'bout "six months ain't no sentence/one year ain't no time/they got boy down there in Angola/doin' one year to 99"

Why do old guys not lock the portolet doors so they say occupied? remoinds us of Steve two nights ago laughing about Grandpa Simpson saying "this elevator only goes to the basement and someone made an awful mess down there!" Henry Butler does Voodoo Man from his new record... then something I don't recognize, then Tipitina.

We go to the Jazz Tent and get seats for Chick Corea and Gary Burton. I go looking for Steve and Elizabeth and don't find them but do come back with a

Shrimp/oyster (half and half) po'boy instead (so so, nothing compared with the soft-shell crab). Corea plays

Love Castle (from the '70s, plucking the strings in the piano at first)

Native Sense (? can't read my handwriting, from their last duet record)

Monk's Dream

Sophisticated Lady (Ellington)

No Mystery (originally for piano and marimba, also '70s)

Budd Powell

audience gives them a standing O

encore: Armando's Rhumba

impossible to top that, we decide to duck out early (after one more rosemint tea each - I have mine honey-sweetened this time) to the strains of the Allman brothers.

sax drifting up through my loose wind-rattly window from down on the street. somehow brings me back to standing in harry kwan's today, with loosely stitched together suitings pinned and flattened and tucked and readjusted. felt like i was going back in time. not that i have that many occasions to wear a suit, but i've wanted one custom-made for a long time.

Key in lock, baby. Key in lock. Keystonery afoot. Cornerstonehengeosity. "A child could do it! A child could do it!" A little of this, a little of that. Snail trails have direction. Follow your nose. Body Language 201: Conversation. Stop trying to make sense when it falls off the log. "A delay makes its own gravy." I can't be the only one who digs getting lost. Familiar landmarks trigger autopilot. I know this one. It ain't never gonna end. Hup one, hut two. Strike!

Shake it off like the remnants of a dream down the drain faster than hair let go from the scalp. Let the troll under the bridge have a go at it. He's good at these word games. You'd know that if you ever had him to tea. (Without closing the blinds first.) Agamemnon knew what I'm talking about. Aga Khan. Elian: I lean, alien!

learning at a furious pace how to build and manage large-scale web sites and researching content-management systems so i can streamline the whole publishing aspect of the web and make it easier to wail. at first, the mere existence of the net and the *relative* ease of posting to the web (even via telnet and ftp) compared with other forms of publishing was enough to elicit reams and reams of words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs from me on a regular basis. but it didn't stay easy enough or get easier fast enough, somehow, and now the slightest nuisance deters me from putting it out there.

meanwhile the backlog grows.

watch over the next few months as i systematically remove obstructions - methodological, systematic, and mental - and then no amount of complaining about how much work i have to do and how many demands i and everybody else are putting on me will stem the flow.

x

i just figured out i can afford a digital camera.

Kill the narrator. He talks too much.

You talk too much. (You never shut up.)

Shut up "shuttin' up."

(Good for dialog)

I TOLD YOU TO SHUT UP

maybe that;s why dead narrators

tell the best stories?

"...then they kilt me."

x

Just relaxing and being yourself

puts you at the head of the pack.

x

couple on BART overaccessorized,

semi shaved one-dangly-earring depending

boots and a good color scheme - brick red

but faded, glasses like mine, great

profile, leone-cowboy hairdresser

he, she the good yoko, asian master

of western taste, subtleties, nuance,

stars of their own movies but ultimately

not a story i care to tell (so what?)

something rare for me happened a few nights ago: i dreamed about jerry garcia. now, some deadheads have these kinds of dreams all the time (and especially dreams of being at shows), but not me. i've only had the "intimate show" dream once or twice and never a "talking to the celebrity just like a friend" visitation. he didn't look great, plus even though we were sort of walking along talking, i had the famous front-on view, and i noticed his hairline receding even though the hair was more black than gray: kind of a hybrid of tommy-chong era jerry with touch of grey era jerry. don't remember what we talked about but near the end i welled up with tears because, as i told him, "you're going to die soon." so what was my mind trying to tell me?

yesterday i had lunch with my friend jeff green, writer of the GreenSpeak column in the back of Computer Gaming World magazine. walking down market on the way back from the burrito place where we et, we both spotted r. crumb's ascetic brother sitting in the lotus position, looking distressed (but maybe he always looks that way) and talking to someone standing, leaning over him. when we got past earshot i said to jeff, "do you know who that was?" and of course he did. i guess anyone who saw the documentary about crumb would. we joked about having seen a movie star. as my brother likes to quote a homeless man he met in new york once, "You in the city now."

sitting here still with a stiff neck that just won't go away. got home and went to the backyard to chill. cat came by and we communed for a while. i finally let her sit on my lap some. kept thinking b was home but it was other car doors closing up and down the block. the garden is in an amazing state of fecundity at the moment. the banksia rose bush/canes are overflowing in orgasmic bliss. one amazing shot only a handful of micrometers wide: a tiny yellow rose blossom already died on the vine and dried in the recent heatwave, next to a candelabra of five to eight buds just about to push themselves out and bloom, probably tomorrow. life and death on the same branch of the same plant, where elsewise there are thick bushels of roses all budding in an communal extended family, and only children equally happy with their own patches of sun.

it's cooled off today, finally, but i still quaffed a beer in short order. not to cool off but to dumb down. fares to new orleans just dropped, at least on delta, so it looks like we saved about four hundred bucks by waiting. now we got to make our reservations at the plantation/b&b in mississippi we've had our eye on for the few days between jazzfest weekends.

incredible heat and not enough time to do all the things that need to be done. got my fixer ticket signed by one of two oakland motorcycle cops busy rousting a somnolent bearded derilect folded up at the base of a lamppost near the big grand "theft" auto on park boulevard and 18th. now, i still need to bring (or mail) the damn thing into alameda county court in berkeley by the 4th, along with some unspecified fee. all because a bulb burned out before it's time in the right rear bumper of mr. bean. actually, it just passed 24,000 miles and i'm due for my next "cronos care" visit.

working in the office all weekend getting some eMatter (think small eBook) packaged for mightywords. when deadlines approach, i become very inventive with the hardware and software failures i coax along as they blossom. the heat doesn't help. i guess i'm frazzled, been working too hard, and i never do well when it's unseasonably roasting. locked b in the backyard this morning and had to make an extra trip home to let her back in. still, being trapped in the garden she's cultivated (an iris bloomed today) with fraidy the sleepy visitor cat and a small amount of shade wasn't the worst exile possible. still, she can't seem to resist tasks that require great exertion (in this case transplanting some oaks the squirrels have nursed for us - looks like a pine is coming up in one of the pots), even as she complains constantly about never getting enough exercise.

speaking of which, i need a regimen of some kind and i mean that in the sense that i need it, not that i someone told me it's a good idea. my body is telling me this (i only learned to speak "body" in the last few years).

overdid it somehow lugging stuff to san diego and back last week (or, really, the week before). tried to pack light but still ended up with a sore neck, rigid trapezius and achey lower back. starting to pull it together physically, though, and enjoying the adventures of the moment.

got a few messages from readers in the last few days. that always feels good. skimming the surface here i guess. i'll try to delve deeper next time.

everything seems to be up in the air at this time
everything seems to be up in the air at this time
one of these days
it'll all settle down, but
everything seems to be up in the air at this time

     --camper van beethoven

when this it hits the fans, boy does it ever. it seems to be catching. deep breath and the big "what's next?" feeling. bustin' out all over starting to sound purty good.

standing on the corner, i didn't mean no harm. just for the fun of pronouncing it po lease.

a propos of nothing but the chaos and the recent epiphany about "wow, i can afford a file clerk... and more," looking for an Assistant Literary Agent (trainee) in the S.F. bay area to work in my Oakland office, hack the flow, and learn the business on the job. see debussy fields or hank gurdjieff in our human resources dept.

driving up 14th street to work this morning, i saw men at work in the road, using one of those tools that digs up asphalt (a back hoe?), painted a dull yellow with those corrugated teeth on the digging part and swooping neck making it look like some sort of dinobirdanimal, and at once i felt that boyish delight in things both powerful and colorful. it also explained the sound i'd heard at time from my office window, almost like a helicopter, with a basic shuddering drone and then the pterodactyl screams of the teeth biting tarmac.

a temp is doing my filing even as we speak. it's a luxury i can finally afford (or rather, can't afford to do myself anymore) and she seems like a really nice person, but it does feel sort of funny not to be able to scratch my ass if i want to.

had a great time at my agency's annual conference in san diego. i just got back but am still digesting all the industry news and gossip i heard and all the personal contacts and leads i made.

greg morocco bulldog breath severance dropped me note sometime between yesterday and today to let me know he's diarylanding too (morocco.diaryland.com). Nice to have the company. I tried using the blogger tool that syrup's been having a ball with lately but I think the tight security at ezone's host defeated its attempt to ftp the stuff over.

soon, i hope to start collocating (sp?) my own little linux box (in new york, of all places) and even in the meantime i plan to move my old homesteadpage to its own domain, xianlandia.com.

blah blah blah. this all sounds much more boring than it is to me, having gestated these approaches and solutions and nomenclatures for eons of internet years.

need to take some photos so i can renew my passport by mail. off to a conference in san diego tomorrow so i can't send my old passport in yet if i want to stroll over to tijuana with a writer friend old buddy from editing days at sybex.

life is grand.

new shoes! new shoes! my feets are so happy and snug. i guess i swear by ecco. my feet are size 44 in their system, though i could wear a 43 on the right foot, which is a tad shorter. both feet seem to keep getting bigger (flattening out under my weight? loading up on fluids?), now between 9¹/₂ and 10. My poor old Ecco Walkers are about ready for some dog. I've been wearing them nearly every day, day in day out, for at least the last three years! In fact, one of the pairs of new shoes I bought was the exact same shoes, I love them so much. The woman at the store told me Ecco is discontinuing them. It's their original model! I almost bought a spare pair for three years from now. I got another pair of Ecco shoes for dressier occasions (black, pointy, shiny), although I think they look great with blue jeans.

looking for refills for my mach 3 razor, i parked at the walgreen's near 51st street and telegraph. before i figured out that the refills were kept behind checkout number one, i witnessed an odd charade: a woman returning a dented pringles can for one dollar, grinning at me in bluff abandon as i interrupted the routine, the two counterpeople head's down and extremely polite. after i got in the confusing line that lead to either checkout one or two, an older man pushed his way through the disorganized line, rushed out the doors, and set off the alarm system as he went. the woman at checkout number one made a face but no one ran after him and i wondered if this is what the good times mean in the poor neighborhoods.

don't keep dosing the baby. that's one of the things i learned the other day. that kid in self who doesn't know the name of anything but has a cat-like feel for what's really going on. ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny they say. i know that's greek to most. ontogeny is the development of the fetus in the womb, roughly. phylogeny is the evolutionary tree key to classifying animals and other relatives of ours. in the womb, the fetus recapitulates evolution, some say, explaining why human embryos, for example, develop gills early on and then undevelop them.

just so, each day you live out the entire story of your life. you are born in the morning and before you slam down that coffee you are still as innocent and vulnerable as a newborn. forcing yourself into adolescence before your time, you head out into the world, probably driving too fast, to meet your destiny, your job. at the end of the day you are more tired and weary than you expect. your faculties fade with that second glass of wine. you've eaten too much. before long you are missing part of the conversation and finally you give in to blessed sleep.

i need a new nipple! my amazingly compact NEC Ready 20LT laptop, Oyster, has one of those nipple-pointing-device controllers between (among) the G, H, and B keys. I kind of like it, but the rubber thingie started wearing through months ago and now does nothing to protect my fingertips from the plastic stick itself. another drawback is that i sometimes add b or were g to my e-mail in random places, which people might think means <g> something i almost *never* write.

i changed my homepage recently as a way of debuting a piece of a piece i improvised listening to a band called SKB jamming live, called "Stop Me if You've Heard This One," about the neverending sentence.

been refribbing a collaborative writing project. ran into the limits of what i could do all by myself some years back and been on a quest to discovers modes of collaboration with other people whose talents i admire and with whom i can imagine a good fit. there've been false starts and some very satisfying projects (such as Coffeehouse), but i'm still learning a lot about getting the best out of myself and from others.

cleaned out the upper drawer of my subconscious over the weekend, spread it out all over the floor between the piano and the stereo (sorted the tapes and cds and semifinished recording projects while i was at it). that space on the floor is some kind of power spot. if it wasn't before, it is now, what with all the green and pink powdery dust and tiny slivered sherds of watch crystal.

an enema for the head i called it later.

later, i paid all the bills. solvent again, what a relief. made it to the other shore. again. i know most of you don't know exactly what i'm talking about but some of you know what i'm talking about enough, i think, to appreciate it, and a few know exactly what i mean.

Got a call from my mom yesterday. I'd just sent her some printed out e-mail messages from her brother. I'd asked him to tell me some stories from their time growing up in Erie, Pa. and about his family and his mom's family. I'm beginning to worry about losing the lore from the past, and my dad has always drilled his family story into my skull so it took a while to remember that that could only be half of my own history. My uncle Tom's tales are fascinating and remarkably well written (that was part of what my mom was calling to comment on - she noted how "easily read" his letters were and noticed, perhaps for the first time, what a good writer he is).

It's been 25 years since I lost my three living grandparents all in the same year, before I'd even turned 10. That loss has taken all this time to sink in completely and is now expressing itself as a fear of losing the past. My father just buried another one of his brothers, his favorite, and I worry that the songs and stories, jokes and riddles, puns and quibbles of my past are fading, irretrievably. That's why I'm glad I asked Tom to set down some of his thoughts and memories. My mom was glad too. There's stuff in there she'd never heard before.

funny how everyone i talk to found topsy-turvy too slow or boring or with too much of the mikado in it. perhaps it was just the meticulously recreated world of the props and costumes, but i was enchanted by the film. then again, i grew up with the pinafore and penzance and the mikado on my dad's stereo nearly as much as beethoven, mozart, and sinatra.

just caught up with an old friend and had a great time comparing notes on the world, technology today, adulthood, and talking in silly voices.

locked out of enterzone for security reasons, i was mildly frustrated this morning, but i'm getting it sorted out now (my generous host updating his list of permissible IP numbers) and still looking forward to sprucing up the old place. got a big backlog of yummy stuff and had a great conversation with a friend in s.f. who'd be embarassed if i called her my design guru to her face, but it's true. thinking now i'd like to brush up on server-side includes to make the navigation a little smarter, easier, and more elegant. a form's based posting system like they use here at diaryland (which i persist in thinking of as dairyland) and at pitas would sure be copacetic.

file under sounds just as good on cd as it did live: phil lesh, steve kimock, al schnier, mike kang, kyle hollingsworth, and john molo at the greek last summer playing footprints. it rocks. as kimock said later, "it got up and did the boogaloo."

spent the whole morning in bed, lounging, lazing, and reading to b. it started raining outside and the wind is still whipping tree branches against the windows of our house, as it's been doing for the last few days. ever since monday i've been experiencing the bearable lightness of being, and i've been almost manic with spontaneous joy and enthusiasm.

b and i played hooky yesterday, saw a matinee of the cider house rules, and took it easy until our weekly yoga class at 5:45. yoga took some of that new energy of mine and gave it an appropriate outlet. after the final resting posture, shavasna, for nearly 15 minutes, i felt peaceful and relaxed, in a natural endorphic afterglow.

today i'm going to tackle some of the Enterzone backlog, and then we're seeing another movie, topsy-turvy, at 5 before eating a late dinner out. life without nagging guilt and glimmers of responsibilities unfulfilled will take some getting used to, but i'm game for it!

woke up this morning to a glimpse of pink reflections in a crystal blue sky out the windows of my room. though i'm neither menopausal nor, for that matter, female, i have been waking up in the middle of the night many nights with hot sweats for nearly the last year. when this happens, i often leave the big bed and move to the cot-sized one in my "office." sometimes fraidy hears me moving around and starts her scratching on the door, regardless of the time. cats are nocturnal, after all.

i've been experiencing an "up" mood this week without any of the hallmarks of mania. as i explained to syrup yesterday, it's not that i'm happy all the time. instead, i am content, and my moods and feelings radiate from me with a kind of clarity and transparency that i can't remember from any time in my sentient, language-using life. thus, the pink glow of sunrise this a.m. felt to me like a blessing, an opportunity to revel in the glory of the world, another day of this humane, down-to-earth state of grace. i'm not saying i thought all that. it was a feeling, you know? they don't translate to words exactly, but i'm a writer and i can't help trying.

peak flow meter at 460 today, finally starting tracking it in earnest after paying lip service to my general practitioner all this time. people die from asthma. two close friends of briggs' have died from it within the last decade. i have to treat this like any other chronic condition. it's so hard to think of oneself as "sick" or in need of constant treatment or therapy, but i'm slowly getting used to it. the first step was remembering to take an antihistamine every night. now i do it without even thinking, even when i drunk, stoned, or just logey after a long work day. i'm still holding out hope for a "cat-allergy vaccine." if the day ever comes, i can invite the neighbor cat, Fraidy, in to play without fear. as it is, she comes by and meows plaintively and scratches on the door panes like a speed freak most evenings. can you say "familiar"?

osmosis tutmoses
THOTH moses
titmouses

nobody noses

idea for 1-800-poetry
audio, intimate
whispered in your ear

why does it gall me so much to be interrupted? why do i talk faster and faster, louder and louder, competing to complete the most syllables with the most decibels? why am i wounded when cut off? why do i lash out? is it worse when a woman does it to me? am i able to have a conversation with a woman that doesn't make her feel bullied? that is, when i'm not a-courting?

stay tuned.