A good week, professionally and otherwise.

Last night: the Broken Speech Slam, hosted by jbradley, was pretty cool. Neat venue in a coffeehouse/bar/alternative video store. Packed house. Some good poets in the slam, many of whom are now on my LJ friends’ list. Mr. Bradley was an excellent host.

I did pretty much a greatest hits set, since the room is unamplified:

Meta
No
Mission Statement
Punk
Getting Ahead
Conspiracy
fever
DIY

Good fun. Sold and gave away a bunch of books.

Flight home uneventful, except that upon landing we skidded aross the runway and the pilot had to do something kinky with the engine to get us back on track. Nothing was said about it, but I’ve flown hundreds of thousands of miles over the years, and this was definitely something out of the ordinary.

Home, naps, laundry, errands…and so to bed.

see y’all soon…

Full update later, including Scary Landing at Logan and Great Evening at Broken Speech.

Hello to all the new LJ friends I made last night…

Later, gators.

ARGH. No more information.

Time to stop.

I go home tomorrow…but not before making an appearance tonight as a feature at the Broken Speech Slam. Come down, come down…I need to talk to POETS!!!

Me at the end of today’s sessions: “Information overload…must have beer…”

I’m featuring at the Broken Speech Slam tomorrow night. C’mon down, O Floridians.

I return now to sweet slumber.

More of the same — heat, humidity, and demos of software for authoring courses.

I’m not a software guy, but I’m a damn good instructional designer. Some of these packages look good, some don’t. Pretty much like life.

I don’t talk much about the particulars of my job. I should.

Anyway — I’m on a Thinkpad at the moment and I hate the keyboard — feels cheesy as hell. So this will be short.

Options for the night: The ASTD party at Universal Studios on the NYC backlot, or poetry at Will’s Pub with valis429. Such a dilemma…

See you at the reading.

ETA: Fuckery. I’m too far with no car. Staying in to eat and, perhaps, drink a bit.

Love, Meester Corporate

It’s hot.

There’s humidity.

Corporate trainers are weird. Case in point: yours truly. I get geeked over seminars on e-learning.

I had a drink tonight with Ken Blanchard — for those of you who know the slightest bit of info about management books, he’s the fucking billionaire who wrote the “One-Minute Manager” books. He’s just completed a new one co-authored with a friend of mine from way back.

Yes, he paid. And for the record, a single malt Scotch takes more than a minute to drink.

More later — gotta go get food and be back in time for the Six Feet Under premiere.

this is how things are

there are places
where snakes wait
tails in their mouths
against the chance people
will stop pretending that
there is no proof
of the way they chase themselves
of the way each end
is in its beginning

this has been proved

but
it has not happened
in so long
it is as if
it hasn’t ever happened

people say
if it happened
where’s the proof
that it happened

when another snake
happens to eat
its own tail
it seems that would be
enough proof

instead what will happen
(what always happens)
is that people
not trusting that what happens
happens
will demand
plural and immediate proof
and it takes so long
for these things
to happen
and it only happens
in solitary moments
that
they will forget and deny
that it ever happened

yes
it takes
so long to prove
that what happens
to a snake and its tail
is what always happens

but now we are here
and here’s another snake
reaching around himself

this is how things end and begin
this is how it happens

Class today:

— instructor did not do a single thing that was listed on the class outline.

— instructor lectured nonstop on the history of historical representation of minorities in American culture from (wait for it) 9AM to 1:30 PM. then, we broke for lunch for twenty minutes.

(I should have told her that I know a lot of people who could do this in about three minutes flat.)

— when we came back, we introduced ourselves (mind you, this is the 4th class we’ve all taken together) according to a questionnaire she put together that placed us in the context of the discussion we’d been having. It ended with a confrontation over same-sex marriage that had a woman leave the class in tears. (Guess who chased her down and played peacemaker? Yes, me…and my amazing ability to calm down Pentecostal Christians who are feeling persecuted.)

— All three of the presentations due for this weekend will be done tomorrow. WHEEEEEEEEE.

…and tonight was a ball too…

Lord have mercy.

I walked into class this evening to learn that our instructor is EVIL in a really good way.

Why, you ask?

Because she assigned us THREE presentations — one for this morning, two for Sunday — based on our reading before class.

Just finished prepping for the first.

Heh. Bring it on. This is WHY I’m back in school.

God, i’m tired. too many late nights, too many books, too many poems in my head.

i’m off to bed. wish each other well. i wish you well.

Some nights are sadder than others, I think, for all kinds of people. Like a wave travels through the air and knocks a bunch of people down, all at once.

Here’s to standing upright again, friends, beloved…to all and sundry.

If I were to be told
that there are equations that measure
the curve of joy I would soon be
endlessly calculating:

scratching one term out, then
another, adding forever,
tumbling the quotients around,
eventually rethinking the whole process.

Then I would recall that every moment of math
demands its physics. I would
step outside and face the stars,
like a bad student who’s wasted his time.

In the movies the brilliant professor
spins the blackboard to reveal the proof.
I’d let the sky spin before me
and fall flat back, looking up, solving for joy.

Q.
How many slam poets does it take to change a lightbulb?

A.
Actually, none. Somebody else will probably get to that, eventually.

But 100 of them will stand around screaming about the NEED for change.

to know in your bones that you are no longer obligated to apologize for something you do that doesn’t conform to someone else’s idea of what is right.

Especially if it is something you know is right for you, but you’ve denied yourself or apologized for it just to keep the peace.

You learned early on that failure is your lot, and you’ll never live up to expectations anyway, so why bother to live up to your own? Someone’s bound to be disappointed either way; it might as well be you. You can take it, right, stud?

And if you do walk the line, try to please everyone…why then, you’re a hero. For as long as it lasts, no matter the cost to you.

Of course, someday you’ll fall off that tightrope…because failure is what you do, isn’t it? And if you fall, you fail, right?

Maybe not. Maybe you just fall. Maybe you die upon landing, maybe not. Maybe your entire life cracks open and spills a huge mess all over the ground; or maybe, it bounces.

That’s the point of walking the tightrope, isn’t it? To see how long it takes for you to fall?

It couldn’t possibly be that you have to walk it just to get to the other side.

If that were true, it would suggest that failure is optional. And it’s a given that that’s not true. A given.

Well, it always has been. But maybe it’s time to just give that back.