…waiting for my flight home.

I’m in the Varsity Grill. Dr. Phil’s on four TVs and ESPN is on about eight others.

And none of them have the sound up far enough to hear…because Fergie is on the sound system. Which is making for some interesting and disconcerting sensory dysfunction as it seems like Dr. Phil is going on about his London Bridge even as Rome is burning.

There’s probably a trenchant political poem in there somewhere, but I just don’t feel like looking for it.

I can never sleep in hotel rooms — not on these in and out nights. It usually takes me a couple of days to adjust to a new room when I’m there by myself, and that’s in addition to my usual insomnia…

so you get to listen to me ramble. Or read my ramblings, more to the point.

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Every time I fly into Dallas, I find myself singing Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas” in my head, humming it at odd moments while I’m in town, etc. “Did you ever see Dallas/From a DC-9 at night…Dallas from a DC-9 is a beautiful sight.”

Strangely enough, Dallas is one of the few cities I’ve been to that I don’t think is all that beautiful from the air at night.

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Listening to iTunes on shuffle on the plane, I heard two different versions of Thelonious Monk’s “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues Are” back to back. Both are recordings from a night at the Jazz Workshop, one each from the two sets they played that night. The takes are different enough that it didn’t become monotonous (not that Monk ever becomes monotonous to me — I jump back and forth between Monk and Ornette Coleman as my favorite jazz artists). That’s one of the reasons I love jazz so much — the freedom that artists feel to reinterpret their work. It’s encouraging and frustrating to me as a performing poet — I wish more of us felt that it is important to not “freeze” performances.

I heard a poet at the Lizard Lounge last night use the word “love” in a poem and he pronounced it exactly the way Buddy Wakefield always says the word “love” when he hits it at the climax of “Convenience Stores.” I really, really want to hear people be original in performance. When I start to see myself “freezing” a rendition of one of my poems, it drives me batshit crazy, and I try to retire the poem for a while or actively look for a new way to perform it.

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And while we’re on the subject of the Lizard Lounge…I had a great time there last night. I just wish it wasn’t such a long drive home and that it was an earlier night in general; I could get into being there far more often.

Iyeoka Okwaowo was AMAZING. Performing with the Jeff Robinson Trio, she sang as much as she did poetry and seamlessly blended the two. Best feature I’ve seen in ages, and I’m a fan of hers anyway.

I did “DIY” with the Trio during the open, and I had a fun time trying to take a poem whose performance is pretty “frozen” after all these years and work it differently to make the piece work with music. I have to thank Faro for that — our collaboration is really opening me up to new ways of looking at my work.

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This afternoon before going to the airport, I got into a hot and heavy argument with one of my neighbors who took me to task for parking in front of his house and hindering the plowing of our street. Granted, he parks across the street, they didn’t plow last night, and I wasn’t even directly in front of his house, but it didn’t stop him from taking me to task for not having respect for people who’ve lived on the street for 35 years.

On another day, I would have ignored him or mumbled something apologetic, but the stress I’ve been feeling lately just popped and I ended up trading high decibel F-bombs with a 70 year old man over a parking spot. Not my finest moment.

He’s one of the guys who puts crates out to save his spot. It’s not illegal in Worcester like it is in Boston. It ought to be.

Again, I wasn’t in his spot. He had his car in his usual spot. I’m not sure what set him off.

Ah, winter in New England…

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If anyone local or otherwise is looking to go to the show in Cambridge on April 12 with Adam Stone, Iyeoka, Duende (that of course is Faro and me), and Marc Smith, I’ve got tickets to sell — come see me.

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And now, I think I shall try to sleep. In Dallas, which from a DC-9 is a beautiful sight.

sitting at the terminal at TF Green waiting to go to Dallas for work (just overnight, getting in late/leaving early tomorrow — sorry, Dallas friends)…

business travel is really just really long commutes, and we all love really long commutes, don’t we?

more later.

to the Lizard Lounge tonight to see Iyeoka feature.

See you there, anyone?

Just filling folks in on the latest weirdness.

Got a call from my ex two days ago — her father had been found dead after what appears to have been a heart attack from shoveling out of the storm last week. He died in his house and wasn’t found for a week.

As you can imagine, everyone’s pretty upset. As you can imagine, it arouses all kinds of conflicting feelings in me.

I won’t go into the details, but Mel had a fairly complex and dysfunctional relationship with his family. This is just the final act.

So if I continue to be a little withdrawn for a bit, you now know why.

After reading through the comments, I think I’m going to go with columns only for the manuscript.

It does mean excluding those columns that refer directly to specific poems — but since there are over 100,000 words to choose from, I suspect I can pull something reasonable together without them or after editing them.

I may expand the topic area from just “A Life In Slam” to “A Life In Poetry” to increase potential readership, but we’ll see. Since the column focused on slam and performance poetry issues, it shouldn’t be an issue for slam readers, and it may attract non-slam folks.

In other news, my poem “Man At The Pharmacy” was just accepted for future publication by Breath and Shadow, an online zine dedicated to writing by people with disabilities. Although I’m always reluctant to claim that status, reading the guidelines for the zine made me think about the number of poems I’ve written related to my struggles with bipolar illness — so I went for it.

Disability with this condition is so hard for me to assess, y’know? Clearly it does hamper my abilities in many ways, and God knows the severe episodes, both manic and depressive, shred my life. The cognitive therapies I use to maintain daily are a chore as often as a blessing. But I go through periods where I barely notice it except for that shelf of pills in the kitchen.

Sleep apnea is, in some ways, a more chronic disabling condition. The years when I was untreated were terrible. I can’t sleep anywhere without the CPAP device. And despite the treatment and the pills, I still have many nights where I can’t sleep, and that’s a major problem.

So…anyway. There it is.

I’m in the preliminary stages of pulling together a manuscript.

The book will be titled “Zero Point Zero: Reflections on a life in the Slam Family.” It’s exactly what it sounds like — ruminations on the world of slam as seen by an insider.

This will be based on the years of columns I’ve written for Gotpoetry.com. For those of you familiar with the column, I’ve got a couple of questions:

— Would you rather see a manuscript that included some mix of my poems, other people’s poems, and a selection of the columns, or:

— a simple selection of the columns edited into a coherent whole?

Either way, it’s going to be a lot of work to do this, but one requires getting permissions from other folks as well as my own editing work. But I’m game to do it if people think it might be more useful.

If you don’t know the column, it’s on http://www.gotpoetry.com. The specific link for the column is http://www.gotpoetry.com/News/topic=8.html. Keep in mind that the columns appear in reverse chronological order.

Y’know, life just keeps getting crappier and crappier. I’d like to start this month over.

Whenever I feel this way, I know that people like to call, see how I’m doing, try to cheer me up, etc.

I don’t work that way, folks. I become quiet and introspective, and shake myself out of things my way.

This is a hard time. I’m fine. Thanks for understanding.

Come see 200 Proof Poetry, the Boston Intercollegiate Slam Team, tonight at the reading.

Or else.

A brief meditation on ambition and such.

http://www.gotpoetry.com/News/article/sid=3944.html

If you’re gonna comment on it, please comment over there, k? Thanks.

Just did a big trim of the friends’ list.

I’m kinda laconic lately, I know. Feeling tentative. Don’t trust myself right now. Skittish.

It’s awful to feel so afraid of words.

been among the missing this week because frequegrl‘s grandmother passed away after a long illness. we had the various events, etc., so we haven’t been around.

she’s doing ok, but it was a tough week.

Busy week. More later.