1.

Condi Rice as Secretary of State. Bush gets the lapdog he always wanted.

2.

Don’t expect this to ring a bell with everyone, but Abimael Guzman, head of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path ), the extremely violent Maoist/Native revolutionary movement in Peru, saw his trial collapse today when two out of three judges recused themselves.

I followed Sendero pretty closely at their peak in the 80s. Really, the first group of terrorists to make regular use of suicide bombers, most of whom were women. They also used to send dogs wired with explosives into crowded marketplaces.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this.

3.

I’ll be in a loooong-ass class through Thursday, so if you don’t hear from me, it doesn’t mean anything except I’m away from the computer.

Be well.

when will I come to you again for featury goodness?

I need an excuse to come down, dammit!!!!

I’ll even read poems for food.

Love me, NY. If I can make it there, I’ll have passed through Connecticut.

If I still smoked,
I’d be lighting up right now
right after rolling out of bed
to taste the only cigarette
I would truly taste all day,
out of all the ones I’d smoke in a day
that was the one cigarette I wanted most,
the one every smoker lives for, the one I smoked
before anything else could get into
my body and come between the smoke
and the smoker, the one that smelled
like my father and his habits, him at the table
with a cup of coffee and the Tribune,
grunting merely, not seeing me
steal a Winston from the pack before school
so I could light up walking along the tracks
and suffer the giddy nausea as I walked,
wondering if the feeling went away
once you smoke more, wondering
if it got easier as you went along,
learning only later that it did not
and smoking even more after my father died of it
because it was what I did back then,
what I thought I was supposed to do,
keeping at it until you taste so little
you have to keep trying to find it again,
living beyond giddiness and nausea and my wondering
at where it all would go
until I saw myself in my father’s habits,
and saw my father in the dark bedroom, in the morning
when I awoke, and though I am like him
I am not him
so I quit.

it was good to see you again. You rocked the house and did it with style and substance that I hope worked for you as well as it did for us.

Not to mention the bull session after…

Thanks.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Again, with the no sleepiness without drugs. Crap.

I’m sure it’s got something to do with the vat of coffee I drank tonight.

Seroquel’s kicking in, though, so no worries.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And before I pass out: upcoming features!

NEXT WEEK at the old homestead, the Java Hut, 11/21. BOOK RELEASE PART-AY!!!!!

Dec. 12: Washington DC at Teaism.

January 17: Westfield MA at Jester’s Cafe (aka the little reading that could).

More on the way.

Night night…