Winging in the New Year

Everyone should have a disco ball in their front window all the time

Mine faces west so every afternoon things get twinkly and it’s like a dream and I sort of dip into the room and it makes me happy which perfectly illustrates what I’ve been thinking lately.

I am beginning to think I am too simple and my writing is, too

I have been reading a lot of poetry lately, also studying Arthur Miller and I use the word studying instead of reading about because I’m really thinking everything in this book through. I mean the shit he says is so thick and dripping that I have to put the book down frequently to give myself the chance to absorb it. The book is Arthur Miller: His Life And Work by Martin Gottfried and I waltzed up to the library between an ice storm and the salt trucks, right after they sent me the message it was there, so eager to get it like it was a new release or something although it’s been around for almost 20 years (surprising that 2003 is almost 20 years isn’t it?)

Arthur Miller makes me realize not exactly how little I know but how much I have to learn

And the other poetry I’ve been reading on OpenArtsForum mostly, poems I read in the day that come to me again in the darkness like gifts, so full of knots and lumps and fucking galaxies sometimes.

Gets me in the gut which I think is where poetry resides

I tried poetry but the result was too dense, more of a word-trap than a poem, a fucking bomb, and I don’t know how true poets survive.

What I like best is telling complex stories in a simple way. I like to leave most of the story out if you know what I mean

Stories about brothers I don’t have, friends I don’t know, houses on cliffs I’ve never seen, the midnight listing of boats upon which I’ve never slept.

Maybe I am just a pathological liar with a pen

The Washington Post published the results to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words, and here are my faves:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

6. Lymph (v.) to walk with a lisp.

7. Gargoyle (n.), gross olive-flavoured mouthwash.

8. Flatulance (n.), emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

9. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

10. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

11. Believing (adj.), when you’re optimistic your guests will soon go home.

    Last one’s mine… can you tell?

12. now I can’t get rid of the fucking numbering

13. fuck

14. what

15. fuck

16. So I was just wandering and saw this quote by Guillermo Del Toro who directed Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.

    We tell stories because we have a hollow place in our heart. You don’t fill that with success. You fill it by finding yourself in the stories you tell.

17. I think that is very true except for I’d like to have a whirl with the success part before I make a final judgement

18. Hope your new year is less glitchy (like I hope mine will be)

19. Here are some five minute stories straight from my hollow heart if you feel like wandering