Best get out and mow the back 40 before it gets any warmer. Baling might be the answer there. Not only has feral alfalfa taken over the yard, but it has been allowed to run riot and even go to seed and is so tall I will have to elevate the mower (poor thing!) several inches just to get through. The weather was so hot, I will say in excuse; I couldn't face the toil. But now of course the weather is just as hot and the toil is many times amplified. Familiar story.

I bit the bullet and posted many books for sale online yesterday, using the non-pro-bookseller rate. Less will be removed from my account there every month but my priveleges are fewer and a chunk of money is taken out of each individual sale. This means I will post only fairly valuable books, which I had planned to do anyway. I have about 50 titles up.

I didn't want to go there again - bookselling - but we pretty desperately need cash. The house trim is peeled and exposed and cracked, and if something isn't done to rescue it soon it will be permanently damaged. So a housepainter is coming here today with a variety of grays for me to choose from, and is letting me pay in installments, and over the weekend he will prep and fill and paint the trim. Only. The house itself is in good shape, still. But even this expense is fairly devastating, and so - back to bookselling. Not that it will bring much at this point. Even back when I had 7000 titles listed I only netted $500 a month. I can't see how my 50 little books (so far) will do much more than inconvenience me. I just have to keep culling my own collections and posting titles every day, I suppose.

Walked with husband yesterday evening as the moon rose. Used phonecamera close-up to photograph the scene, and this made for a nicely fuzzy, sort of impressionistic snapshot of moonrise. I was surprised not to remember my dreams this morning: it must be the first times ever that the full moon hasn't delivered me a stunner.

These places & persons as things & spots are all inside any one of us. ... the whole world & all experience is, no matter how real, only a system of metaphor for the allegory (Keats called it) a man's life is.
- Charles Olson

Some chemical smell, oldfashioned shoe-polish or melting electrical, overpowering here but not a stroke (yes!) because I lose the scent when I walk through other rooms. I've checked the outlets and the cords, put the computer to sleep ... is it coming through this window? Someone burning plastic? Ech, nauseating.

I'd wanted to have the Thing finished, what I'm writing. I finished final edits on paper yesterday late morning, meant to keyboard them early afternoon, but as I was winding toward the work (lightening anxiety by organizing rooms, thereby organizing mental energy, as I do) Husband descended to start his own day. I told him what I was doing and that I had a deadline. He congratulated me and proceeded to talk virtually without stopping for breath until nearly suppertime, and me practically in tears. I still do not know how to express needs firmly. I had expected him to coffee and withdraw, which he does every day without fail. But not yesterday. And oddly enough not back on the day when this material all came to me in a rush I had to get down or lose it, and so I lost much of it, back in December.

Anyway I blurted finally that I had to get going, and he asked to remain in the room then reading quietly, and so I went outside to water plants and unconfuse myself. When I returned he had gone upstairs. I sat down then before the text column on the screen and soon realized I was so weary and overheated I would lose the music that sang to me so clearly just that morning. So I closed the file, showered, curled up for sad nap.

No one's fault, I decided. Something wants me to slow down. And it was true, after the morning's edit I was burned out. So why can't I begin work today? Husband has promised not to talk to me until evening. But I am groggy today - where's the jar of guarana? - and having doubts again, and since the deadline for online submissions where I wanted it to go is midnight tonight, I'm afraid I will rush now and damage it.

I'll get to it, in a bit. I'll take it easy. Other, later deadlines are out there.

Anyway, eventually I'll have a MacBook and can do computer work in trailerSylvia.

I received a bushel of cheap used books in yesterday's mail. Husband accepted the packages at the door, to my embarrassment. Why books ordered on this day and that over the course of a month must always arrive at once on a Monday I will never understand.

I finished reading Brother Souls all teary-eyed on Sunday afternoon, and so today I've started several other books hoping one or two will grab hold of me. Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg's Composed On the Tongue account of his acquaintance with Ezra Pound at Rapallo. Poor EP! All Ginsberg seems to do is sing him Hare Krishna. But I love the words he finally squeezes from the otherwise stubbornly silent 82-year-old Pound:

[Ginsberg]"Ah well, what I'm trying to tell you - what I came for all this time - was to give you my blessing then, because despite your disillusion - unless you want to be a messiah ... anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?"

He hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.

"I do," he said " - but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along, that spoiled everything - " This is almost exact.

... and I responded, "Ah, that's lovely to hear you say that ... " and later "as it says in I Ching, 'No harm.'" (pp.8-9)

Olson will be more difficult to crack. He seems so lacking humor or joy. But he shares my birth date of December 27 (though his is 1910), so I am curious.

Those are the two volumes near to hand as I type. There are others.

I was thinking yesterday how adult life is like a kind of exile in a foreign land and when you approach old age you want to go home again, live as you did as a child, where things are familiar. And so people who grow up in the countryside go off to cities and then return to the country late in life, and I, who formed my Self in central Los Angeles and have sought remoteness most of my adult years since then, now long to immerse myself again in urban energies.

I think maybe it's immoral, environmentally, for humans not to live in cities. Perhaps the only ones who should be allowed to live in the wilderness are holy persons - farmers, monks, and such. Then we would have to learn how to make cities healthy and livable because we could not flee them.

But who would want to live in such a restricted world?

[Midafternoon addendum: I sought Husband's brief company for coffee at lunchtime. When it seemed clear his (otherwise welcome) stories would continue again for a while I stood abruptly in his midsentence and said "I've got to go." And he said, laughing, "I'm so proud of you," and stood himself and kissed me. God sent him to me for many reasons, but surely one of them was this lesson.]

Image of Charles Olson from pavellasmusic.wordpress.com via Google

As you get older, you husband your attentions, they seem to concentrate themselves more, you are more fluent about less. You use your energies and, with any luck, they burn with an intenser light. ... One can't get on if paralyzed by the grinding knowledge of the brevity of life, and the ephemerality of works. And getting on is our most important duty, a vow we make in the worthiness of the baffling endeavor of remaining human. One part of being human is sometimes failing to keep the faith. For a writer, who spends his time so many fathoms down in the murk and complexity of the human personality, periods of "savourlessness" are inevitable. As I say, they usually presage an on-coming change, and the only way to initiate that change is to pass through (not around) the temporary melancholia. You can't reach dawn without enduring the night. Wishing won't make it so.

            --John Clellon Holmes

Mild summer. Dry, because this is desert after all, but, once you've acclimated, the 90-degree days are kind of pleasant. It takes most of the day to reach that temperature, after all. And nights are cold, so we're lucky there. It's the searing light that gets to the plants, but they seem to be getting used to it.

Coming off my third monthly three-day greenapplepurge. I didn't do so well fasting this time, and so yesterday was very difficult. But I was well by day's end and it's another month before I do that again. Meantime, discomfort is gone, again, and I continue to dodge the surgery bullet.

Oh but I was so hungry I stuffed myself with bowls of stew last night, frenzied almost. And was finally calmed.

Husband continues to instruct me in astrology. Finally I understand progressions, and that adds a new dimension to self-understanding - and other-understanding. How the natal sun advances around the chart at a degree per year (and other planets by something likewise) so you can see how you have changed and grown over time, encountered and overcome challenges (or not), and so on. My own sun has moved from the thudding Capricorn of my birth, through the disconnected Aquarius of my middle age, and now shines in Pisces, of all places! Which makes such sense, as I have remarked often on my sensations of feelings thawing and love understood.

I was ill three days with my chronic mono after doing all that heavy lifting last weekend (damn! I didn't take my tinctures to prevent that, it was so long since I'd been sick), and then with the fasting thing I was out of commission all week. I worried yesterday that it might be that I've forgotten how to be well. I am so accustomed to my bed and pillows.

So I must remember my tinctures and vitamins and brotherB's, too, and to drag us outdoors for walks every day in the sun. B's becoming sturdy again, too. Almost a full head of hair now.

Have I anything of interest to say? Evidently not. I hear husband running water in his bedroom sink for brushing teeth, and now his TV goes on and the urgent sounds of a broadcast horse race trickle down the stairs. From brother's room the clunks and thuds of dresser drawers opening and closing as he put his clean laundry away. Lovebirds screech from the kitchen. Doves coo from the powerlines out the window. dogApple sighs in sleep at my feet.