Thirteen Days is Soon.,

So, I've been walking around town enduring the cold wind humming 'Where is my mind?' (an old favorite) and singing whole verses from 'Science of Silence' by Richard Ashcroft (possibly my new favorite song). I was such a Spiritualized fan that I didn't let myself connect to the Verve for a few years Then I did so strongly in passing. I mean Jason Pierce shares my first name and my mom's maiden name, maybe he takes too many drugs. But when I loved that band even more than I do now he made some epic music and when Richard Ashcroft 'stole' Jason Pierce's girlfriend I was prepared to not spend time with Ashcroft's music no matter how cool I thought Bittersweet Symphony was or how shitty what the Rolling Stones did was. Things are never that simple. Are they? I''l tell you about Ashcroft, the man has a SOUL unlike many eyes I meet. If anything I respect people like Ashcroft who are willing to be human in the higher sense of the word. The automaton Xmas crowd has me thinking about Patchen's New Being a lot:

Your problem is that you have betrayed your animal
Into hands as cruel and bloody as your own.
Man is dead.
I don't know what kind of thing you are.

Santacon (www.santacon.com) was a relief.

As I put it in a recent poem:

Wander the backroads.
The common way
has brought the world
to ruin.

Anyway, I should write something about Amy (blogsite). Theo put it well, he said we're the two craziest people he knows. She's a supersmart, emotional, pretty TESC grad who works for the Red Cross. She has a healthy obsession with sensual experience, esp playing with her cat Hunter, eating desert foods, and kissing me. She's crazy. I don't even smell good but I am smart enough to love her.

I have yet to see my niece because I am a vehicleless man. That's right, every day I go to work without the unnecessary, burdensome guilt of driving an ozone killing giant hunk of metal that hurdles itself violently along at unnatural speeds. I take the bus. Cute girls fight in the aisles to sit next to me. Homeless people that lost a few marbles (they chose not to keep so much stuff) supply me with life advice, rambling one-sided stories, and, recently, a discomforting bite of a cookie. The busdrivers like me because I occasionally make a little conversation and always thank them. What a strange life. Spy-approving presidents, busdrivers, artists, poets, troglodytes, Buddhist physicists, 80's legwarmer-wearing baristas, Bob Dylan, mycorrizah fungi, heartache, goldleaf for Jesus, redemption, and my little niece.

That's it, I'm done. Aaron's sick and I should check on him. The absolute luney Dutchman we were hosting this week (now at Aaron's father's house) has called the computer twice via Skype while I've been typing. We should make arrangements to hang with him before he leaves on the morrow if Aaron isn't too brutalized by the weather. Love you all. Thanks for putting up with so much of my shit. Happy Holidays. Give real hugs. Look people in the faces. We're all gonna die someday and that's alright. We live on through our actions, through the permeations of our thoughts in glorious complexities with fruit tones of resonant simplicities straining through the binding harmony. What the hell was that shit? Blah blah blah. Stick a pitchfork in me. Peace.