1,000th Post & Weekend Bits

I've been keeping this blog for five years, which seems like a long damn time. This is post number 1,000. I wanted to thank everyone who has read, posted and lurked since 2003. What a strange, wonderful ride it's been...and continues to be.

Before I backtrack into the weekend, I got a lovely note from Blue Fifth Review Editor Sam Rasnake telling me that he had nominated "Patty Hearst On The Occasion of Her Presidential Pardon" for a 2008 Best of the Net Award. I am pleased and honored. That's become one of my favorite poems in After the Poison, and it appeared at Blue Fifth first. Thank you, Sam.

After navigating Atlanta traffic for more than 20 years and having done my share of driving in Los Angeles, I decided on Saturday that the traffic here is worse. Maybe that's because I sat on the Downtown connector (where I-75/85 intersect in the middle of the city) for an hour trying to get down to Fayetteville to have dinner with my BFF Joy and see my parents. The DOT is doing a massive repaving of the connector every weekend, closing exit ramps and diverting traffic, so all of that on top of the thousand of cars makes for a big, shitty cocktail of traffic mayhem.

Once I finally made it to Fayetteville, I dashed into J&R Clothing for some retail therapy and bought new jeans and khakis. Like Michael Kors on Project Runway, I'll be wearing black t-shirts, jeans and a black jacket until the day I die. The khakis are for work functions where jeans are a no-no. Luckily, black t-shirts and a great blazer-style jacket looks great with everything. I usually like my stuff a bit loose, but I tried on this pair of jeans from River Road (a New Orleans-based jeans company...yay NOLA!) that were fairly tight and straight-legged. They made me look skinny(er), so I got 'em. After shopping, Joy and I went to Piccadilly. Don't judge. I'm practicing now for soft foods and how to negotiate the serving line with an oxygen tank for my senior years.

I took my parents a copy of After the Poison and, of course, my mother opened the book and started reading. Her first reaction was, as I expected, "What kind of poems are these?" She clucked her tongue over "Siege," my condemnation of Reagan during the AIDS crisis of the 80s, laughed over "Fairy Tale Eating Disorders" and "Confidentiality" (the poem about Condi Rice) and didn't know what "Fatwa" meant. She suggested I write a poem about John Edwards cheating on his cancer-stricken wife and having a baby with that "dye-haired floozy" from his campaign staff. I'm actually with my mom on this -- Edwards is the baby daddy. The mistress must be rolling in cash like Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal right now. Edwards had one of his lawyer friends arrange pay-offs and even moved the mistress and the guy claiming to be the father (I wonder how much he made?) out of North Carolina to California. Men and their dicks...can't live without 'em, can't stop putting 'em where they don't belong without a rubber. Dye-haired floozy is poetic perfection, so I'll definitely be working on that poem.

On Sunday, I didn't leave the house and watched the entire second series of the British show, Skins, on DVD. If you get BBC America on cable, they are going to air the first series starting Aug. 17, although with all the profanity, nudity and sex it should be nothing but one long bleeeeeep and lots of blurred out images. It's a brilliant show, so I highly recommend it.

Anne Haines mentioned on her blog today that rooms at the Hilton in Chicago for AWP 2009 are about to sell out. I was planning to go and sign After the Poison at the Finishing Line Press table, but I started adding up the cost and my enthusiasm started to wane. The hotel would cost nearly $800, and that's on top of airfare and conference registration, so we're talking well over $1,000. I don't have a university to foot the bill, and for that amount of money, I can go to the UK and see my friends and do some feature gigs in London, so I think I will. Sure, there are a ton of poets/bloggers I still want to meet, but chances are they will be winging their way through Atlanta eventually or I'll be in their town, but since I'm totally over the whole po'biz thing right now, the idea of Chicago in February makes my balls shiver and shrivel.

R.I.P. – Bernie Mac, Isaac Hayes and Mahmoud Darwish