Not yet two hundred titles listed in my seller account
yet the books are selling swiftly, one or two per day
at good prices this time, not like
when I had 7000 and most were worthless.
That's because these are not some vestigial inventory
but because these volumes belonged to me, were cherished by me,
were sought and bought at some expense
of time and money, one by one. I loved them. Love them.
Now must shed them because we're sinking fast
again. My books like bobbing little life preservers. Still
the ones that have no moneyworth--the titles of no interest
to online buyers--the titles I get to keep, hurrah!--I smile
with downturned mouthcorners, happy to have them,
my jewels no one understands the value of, my various hard editions
Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, John Milton
amd Zbigniew Herbert--my Dickensons Audens and Carruths
and their cohort--you can't give these away.
Thank the heavens.
The rest will feed us through the summer
and our future moves will be lightened
by a box or two. Full bellies for now and no harm done.
All the same, each little package I mail away
bears the invisible print of my
sometimes bitter kiss good-bye.

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.

We had chosen CarmelValleyVillage as destination of our planned Great Escape from the ModocPlateau, a concrete location to visualize living in and so create an energy to follow out. Lightning can't strike unless the stricken object first sends up a little tendril of request, and we imagined that's what our picturings were, in the energetic scheme of things.

It made sense, because Husband's siblings and mother all live in nearby Monterey, and his children from former marriage live or visit nearby. It would make it easier to keep in contact. And I had grown up in Southern California (when I wasn't exiled to the Iowa farm of my grandparents) and could easily imagine the environment there, familiar enough.

But the picture wouldn't hold, much as I loved the hot smell of baked earth and manzanita I conjured, and the sensation of dappled shade.

Next we chose Chicago, where Husband grew up and lived and worked for many years. He misses it often, I think, and still has friends there. I had no sense imagery to put with it - my only contact with Chicago was a 30-minute airport layover en route to New York in 1982 - but we collected photographs and websites and I was getting to know its layout pretty well.

Although it never felt quite right.

New York might never have occurred to us if we hadn't played around one day with location astrology to see where our planets and asteroids were best aspected. And there it was, New York City, shining like a great beacon across the basins and ranges and plains between here and there. As though made for us.

So here's a street map of Manhattan on the corkboard at the foot of my bed, and this week a promising series of dreams located there, in which I always get an apartment easily and easily afford it.

I think it could be the place for us to stay, for a while. That's what the stars say, anyway. Now to do something to make that lightning strike ...

"Knowledgeable." That's the key. It was only after beginning the input of new book inventory into the old online bookseller account that I remembered. It came up fuzzily, with a fringe of little question marks, but soon enough I had full recall of the fact that no money can be made whatever UNLESS you have listed at least several thousand titles. For one thing, there's the monthly fee for using the web site. For another, all that competition means that even a five-star rating can't help you much.

Sobering. What am I doing??? I thought. Do I REALLY want to get into all this again? If it isn't a full-time activity then it's just a giant energetic drain with no hope of profit. You're either in with both feet or not.

So ... not.

Whew. That was close.

***

Labored a third afternoon yesterday in the heat and dust with friendKathleen emptying the Bookworm shelves and making a space in my storage unit for the boxes therefrom. Today I lounge and study and recover, grateful for the unexpected gift of cool gray the morning brought.

I just read a study that says persons, like my brother, who have celiac disease, more often than not react to corn gluten, too. This explains why he hasn't bounded back as strongly as I'd hoped when I changed his diet two years ago. He has regrown about 60 percent of his hair, and I noticed yesterday a bunch of pale whiskers just visible on his pale cheeks. So we have made some progress. My main concern is bone loss, though. He gets smaller by the day and has developed scoliosis. I trot him 'round in the sun every day and give him supplements, but corn has been a big part of our diet.

Out with it, too, then. Damn.

Spent yesterday afternoon in bowels of local Friends of Library "Bookworm" used book trailer clearing shelves of decades-old compost to make way for (finally, at long last) fresh stock. Much of what we removed will be "recycled" at local junk store or landfill, but I was privileged as volunteer to skim the cream, though not as completely as I would have liked. Found a couple of volumes that will go for 50 or 100 dollars, but I may spend tomorrow rooting around in the stacked garbage-book boxes (awaiting Monday pickup) for more.

Today we continue - I have offered a free corner of my storage unit for the group to store the boxes of high-graded material soon to be donated to another FOL group 50 miles to the north, which is starting its own shop and needs good stuff to get off the ground.

I am so incurably mercenary I can't stand the thought of any possibly valuable volumes being lost, even though the idea of returning to my old bookseller daze makes me queasy. It was something I did while my mind recovered from emotional breakdown mid-2000s, when I couldn't think well enough to do anything else. I enjoyed it. Eventually though my physical health broke down, too, and in 2010 I got rid of my entire 20,000-volume stock to make space in my hovel and to rest for a few years. I can't believe I'm into it again, but the profit potential when one is knowledgeable is seductive - especially if, like me, one is barely surviving on minimum-wage dole while attempting to create "art."

Flat dry heat and relentless hammer of UVs returns. The plants burn and curl no matter how moist the soil.

I dreamed last night of an old African woman who fed the famished inhabitants of the drought-stricken interior from the gardens around her hut beyond the mountains, in a green moist crescent up against the sea and sand.

Nights chock full o' dreams lately - New Moon.

Yesterday was midsummer gift of overcast and cool breezes. Soft and almost unreal. Gratitude was boundless. I had been reduced to sobs last week to see my outdoor canopy and umbrella thrashed and smashed by wind and my plants deer-nibbled. The oppressive heat and sere desiccating everything, my brain, my skin. I couldn't water hard enough to make it up.

I feel better now, indoors working and determined to keep detached from results of yard work. I water, I cultivate, but I no longer invest hope. We redouble our efforts to escape the grim desert plateau we've been confined to for far too long.

Set back to work on opus part 3, which will be done now in a minute and lobbed into those offices all unprepared to receive it. Resume was updated and cleaned up, but I find I can recall no reference names from back in the day, and the venerable Rolodex has gone missing. So - stalled. Again.

When you give birth there is a stage just before crowning called "transition" where many mothers weaken and give up, ask for drugs, anthing, in their fear. They are told, always, "Too late. It's almost over." And so it is, in a joyful rush.

And that seems an apt metaphor for this work: I grow discouraged, convinced of my words' unworthiness, and certain I labor under delusion. Then I pick up one of these biographies and learn that every hopeful artist gets to that point - repeatedly, with some - and gives up, goes underground, hits the rails, whatever, to escape his or her failure. That's when, inevitably, everything comes clear, and the work gels.

I must remember that.

Rare high desert midsummer gray, cool soft skies wrapping us in kindness.

I have deserted Sylvia after several months of trailer life. Made my bed in the Little-Big-House livingroom instead, and the past two nights I have slept (sort of) back in my creatures' midst. Awoke today with all five cats and one dog pressed against me, very welcoming.

I have taken this room over now during the day. If I need complete isolation for some work that actually begins to flow, Sylvia is available, but such a creative breakthrough seems unlikely. I polish old work here, and, yes, polish my resume as well. It's time to get real. The thyroid supplements have taken hold at last and it's time to earn money again somehow now that I have clarity of thought and vigor of body.

My tower computer died briefly last week, refusing to power up. I had written it off and resigned myself to iPhone computing until a laptop could be acquired - how, I couldn't imagine - but then a brainstorm sent me cracking open the computer case and hunting around for a tiny gray button somewhere in the innards. Sure enough, a quick press of the PRAM reset got the beast back to its feet, and it looks as though we're good to go for a while longer. I haven't had to reset a PRAM for 15 years ... I'd all but forgotten about it.

I have still a few minutes before I head in to the Big House. Heat finally hit. High 90s F and dry wind. I give thanks for flat-rate water, although the succulants wither and brown, sunblasted, despite wet roots.

I typed up a yellowing sheaf of old scrawled poems on my Skyriter manual, and then reworked them in ink, as of olde. It's satisfying. My only computer burned up somehow over the weekend so I can't do fancy Office editing. I like seeing the sheets pile up on the desk and the close lines of fuzzy black Courier type all scratched and scribbled on.

The afternoon's wind pounds and rocks poor Sylvia. The little AC hums along coolly. DogApple and catGreta are happy to nap here.

And just like that the cloud lifts.

I wake as usual in a bitter lonely funk and go through the morning motions as always, half-there, ruminating on the death of a notion of family that exists nowhere anymore, so why mourn?

And having portioned out the kibble and seed and porridge among the House creatures that pass for my family now, poor things, I retire to trailer with my bowl and my mug to break my own fast while scrolling through my iPhone apps for news of the day, then take up my pen and my book.

In my little SylviaSanctuary, redone now and so sweetly blue.

I glance up from the text beyond my reading glasses to notice the peace of the scene, the rumpled comfort of it, and the breathing animals. And from outside declared and redeclared the innocence of sparrows and the dreamlike everpresent approach and retreat like oceanwaves of big rigs on the highway.

And I remember again, as I did when I was 40 and 20 and 12 and 4 and anguished from isolation, how beautiful and perfect things can be in the instant, the pedestrian Now, and all misery and loss and abandonment - that's what actually constitutes illusion.

Outage. Bodyhealth stuff. And then wholebody edema that brought my mood low with the pointlessness of everything. Odd attitude for a former Pollyanna. But I recognized it as soggy brain syndrome and knew the bad attitude would pass as the water did.

I worked too hard in the yard for too many days in a row under the fierce light and a summer heat that was not fierce yet, particularly, and yet it knocked me out. Ah well. Here we are now.

We have acquired a 10-by-10 four-footed gazebo sunshade and erected it over the top of the wobbly umbrella for double protection, enjoyed sitting outdoors scribbling and bibbling. But although every day starts calm and cool with birdsong and sweet air, each day ends with a vicious wind, one day from the north, the next from the south, and before I knew it my staked-down gazebo had tipped up and over. BrotherB will help me carry it back and set it up again. Stakes don't count for much in this stony soil, I guess, so I'll bind each of the four legs to a strawberry planter pot and hope for the best.

I have tomatoes planted finally - mature plants left over at the nursery - along with their unbought squashes and sweet potatoes, with some parsleys and cilantros and nasturtiums for the planters. Leggy remnants of their spring garden stock.

Reading, taking notes, Olson's "Projective Verse" essay. Pausing to write little notes to loved ones who respond only to the nonpersonal matters, as though for an older person to confide in a relative were an embarrassment best left unaddressed. Young people have become so strange and mean. So good-bye to them, I suppose.

Yes, depressed. It will come back, the lifespirit, I'm pretty sure.

Echh what a miserable and sick 24 hours that purge was. Foolishly I tried Hulda Clarke's Epsom-salts method, not understanding what Epsom salts, intended here to be used by non-fasting people, actually can do to a body. I should have realized that, after my three days' fasting, Epsom salts would be a violence to my body - and was it ever. I swallowed my two doses Friday evening at 8 and at 10. It began scouring my innards immediately, and by midnight I was a weak and dehydrated and heart-pounding mess, heart pounding all the sleepless night as I tried to lie flat and still (fat chance! running to the toilet every 15 minutes) and let the olive oil do its work on my gall bladder - which it did, I suppose - as before, all my right-side discomfort is gone like a miracle - but I was feeble and sick afterward and empty for sure. Gradually yesterday I returned to normal as I ate wonderful food and drank blessed water. No more Epsom salts for me! My gentle, effective apples & olive oil will suffice for my monthly cleanses after this.

Still windy but cool here now, and cold nights. Early Saturday - maybe 5 a.m. - as I writhed in wakeful tachycardic misery in my little trailer, a powerful rainstorm swept through and pounded the roof tin, winds rocking Sylvia and us inside her (catGreta, dogApple), & delightful healing din of whitenoise water and fitful air. Everything is clean again now. Summer heat is due back next weekend (it will be July, after all) but I'll be ready for it this time, and won't complain. Maybe.

I'm looking at the day's third Granny Smith apple, untouched (the apple) on the sill. Tonight is the Second Big Gallstone Purge and so I'm supposed to stop all intake, solid and liquid, at some point - 3 o'clock? 6? It's OK because by Day 3 of the apple fast you're not hungry anymore anyway.

Glorious gray gusty cool today. I'll have to lower the south awning again before it's ripped from its hinges. Hark! is that rainspatter din on tin roof? Splendid. I didn't want to mow the lawn today, anyway.

Reread Hemingway's "The Gambler, The Nun, The Radio" this morning, tangenting from discussion of white noise in the choral interstices of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues. Strange story; I'd forgotten how strange. Odd repetitions and refrains. I'll read Hemingway for Part 4 of the Thing I'm Writing, and Gertrude Stein behind Part 5. Joyce will do for 1, and for 2 maybe tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur - that's it! I'll just burrow into My Book House. Part 3, my finished "Road Choruses," is Kerouac. Six needs something sensual, overwritten - something Jamesian, maybe, or out of Virginia Woolf.

The Lombardy poplars across the way bend and sway in their neat row; trees always seem to dance in slow motion, in any wind. When I was young and paid attention to the World Out There I used to hypnotize myself watching them communicate among themselves, especially if the leaves were shiny and the sun was high, all the sparkles. I remember lying in bed during my second miscarriage, having taken too much Darvon for the pain, following, waltzing with those leafglints in the grove out the window.

Billowing curtains - same thing.

(blasted heat)

(blasted wind)

Janet Frame's mystical conception of her creative source was a place called Mirror City, where a demanding Envoy waited for her to bring her memories and perceptions to use as foundations for the palaces she built there - her novels and stories. At the end of the third volume of her autobiography The Envoy from Mirror City, she has the Envoy say,

What does it matter that often as you have departed from Mirror City bearing your new, imagined treasures, they have faded in the light of this world, in their medium of language they have acquired imperfections you never intended for them, they have lost meaning that seemed, once, to shine from them and make your heart beat faster with the joy of discovery of the matched phrase or cadence, the clear insight. Take care. Your recent past surrounds you, has not yet been transformed. Do not remove yet what may be the foundation of a palace in Mirror City.

Writers who are mostly Rememberers as opposed to inventors are very often Aspies like me, I think. If male, like Jack Kerouac, they may follow the common male Asperger pattern of using alcohol to relieve the chronic anxieties of coping in the bizarre and confusing society of NeuroTypicals. If Female, they may follow that pattern and study and mimic NTs to the best of their abilities, withdrawing to seclusion at every opportunity and for as long as practicable.

In many of us the compulsion to record and transform every memory and perception begins as soon as one can write, because the mind processes so slowly, and too often memories evaporate before that processing takes place. To incorporate them, then, we preserve them and study what we've written or drawn until it becomes a part of us.

We keep Childmind into old age. It's our neurology - the emotions never mature. And although this gives us a rough life - we never figure out how to be grown-up; we falter without tenders and managers - at this point in my own life I finally find Childmind a blessed relief. I am able to see the world fresh every day.

Grief and confusion because of my alienated family consumes me still, when I let it, but gradually I am learning how to let that pain go and stay present and mindful of life where I am.

Consuming Aspie biographies like bonbons these past months has paid off with understanding and some peace. Those shy turbulant socially ill-equipped artists so focused on their work that great palaces rose up around them - what matter they were built of mirrors?

Several days of cool, then another, now, of wind and heat and dust.

I've begun my monthly greenapple fast, just Granny Smiths and bottled water, with black coffee in the morning to fend off withdrawal headaches. This first day is challenging mostly because I have only four apples, but two of them are large, and as of now (3:07 p.m.) I still have two waiting. I will allow myself today, as last time on Day 1, a beverage (right about now) of molasses stirred into hot water, to ease the sugar jones.

I wasted yesterday from 10 in the morning until quite late in the evening dealing with a techno-crisis that turned out to be no crisis at all. My iPhone suddenly was "unable to join" the house's wi-fi signal, and also refused to recognize my email. After hours spent on Skip's cellphone talking to three clueless tech-support persons in succession, I ended up wiping and reformatting and restoring the unit's contents - 108 apps, 259 songs, hundreds of books, etc - which is a criminally slow procedure.

And ultimately unnecessary. All I had needed to do was reset the wi-fi router and change my email password. Which I figured out once the reformatting was already underway.

The upshot is that I lost a day of work, so have had to cancel my Wednesday visit with friendKathleen to make up for it.

I spent most of this very hungry day burrowed into Nicosia's Kerouac biography and Janet Frame's autobiography: Jack descends into suicidal alcoholism while Janet, at last diagnosed as sane-all-along, embraces her calling and finally earns literary fame.

And then of course I've scribbled some - written a letter to artguyJim down in Yolo (who gave me this trailer) and then faced the terror of My Own Work, which gradually becomes less and less terrifying. I have a title for the overall opus, and names for nine of its parts (with a tenth and eleventh TK). Part 3 is completed already, and Part 1 virtually so, requiring only the gathering and consolidation of a series of sort of hallucinatory early-childhood bits from an old blog.

Husband and brother are doing very well and so are the pet people.

I'm pretty sure it's time for that molasses now.

Yesterday - murderheat boiled my brains before I knew it. Evening, staggered with brotherB to storage unit and dug out from the back of all the junk a tiny Samsung airconditioner brand-new still-in-box someone gave us back in 2006. It fits exactly into one trailer window and ahhhhhh is so good in here now. How did my then-angelfriend know I'd need it one day?

Study today includes deconstruction of the Kerouackian sentence and further reading in a bewildering Paris Review interview with an incoherent and months-from-death Charles Olson. I want to understand the whole Projective Verse deal (tried before, back in college daze), although this interview is not likely to help me there.

Still time to scritchscratch at some poems before I go indoors to invent a lunch for my people.

This hot arid wind means I will have to water everything deeply again today. Cruel climate. Nothing grows, at least not without llama poop around it for good magic. A one-foot-tall lilac cutting I planted three-and-a-half years ago is still one foot tall. Likewise the wan honeysuckle still struggling at the foot of a fencepost. Few of my perennials came back this year - but here are the comfrey, faithful friend, and feverfew, yarrow, and a lonely hollyhock. The three-foot pine tree I planted in '09 is now ... three feet tall.

I gotta track me down some llamas.

Another warm fore- and afternoon. I missed my cool-of-the-day walking window; perhaps early evening instead, then. These breezes (as opposed to gales) sweeten the day.

Hard to believe school is out. Neighborkids are with their fathers abroad for a week or two, so quiet prevails, and no interruptions other than those imposed by my role as care provider to my brother, husband, and pets.

Inevitably, then, I remain stalled creatively. I struggle not to toss it all in the fire: keep the eye on the process, not the result.

Movement of body moves the mind. This is true. So I break from Sylvia's innards and go out to tend the wilting yardplants and feed the trough-fishes, run the errands, make the stew to get us through to payday.

Tormented Elm lends her winddriven stems to the afternoon chorus, and I can detect no suffering behind her generosity.

A magnificent afternoon, wind just starting to come up, temp around 85F in Sylvia here. The leaves rustle seductive in the Tormented Elm framed in the narrow doorway.

My mind feels turned-around, a little, not quite grounded, as though one foot of me still stood on the ground of vivid dreamworld I woke from so reluctantly. My dreams of night are sweeter and fuller with every sleep since I move toward full health. It's a blessing.

But this mindframe prevents my concentrating on the page, any page, whether bookstudy or journal.

I keep drifting away ...

A noise of chainsaw - another tormented tree, perhaps. Among the dry weeds here a fawn-colored butterfly flits - blossoming salsify and alfalfa - and a housefly swerves ess-ing around.

But sparrow twitter from neighbors' shrubbery, constant, and whoosh of movement from the highway yonder.