Feeling better, even with the cold, the hacking cough, the week taking away your energy.

Day off, I stay close to the house.  Nothing but rest.  I suppose I am  beginning to see some need to change this habit of writing.  If I am feeling better, perhaps it's no longer so necessary here.  There's not much energy for it anyway.  A lack of purpose.  Or is it this new found state of being has its own ups and downs.  Being sick does not help.  I've felt sleepy all day.


And then, the better feeling, slowly coming over me, the desire to clean, to focus, to watch or read something suitable, not felt in a long time, somehow.


Do I even want to go back, to Amherst, such as I am?  I put so much into it.

This weird feeling here, of not doing it, but... that overriding purpose, to get better.  And that is good enough, the story of all people.


dreams, a vision of brian, my brother's pal, his hearty laughing company, along with a dog, my brother's friendship and approval.  That wonderful time when we were all together, participating...

waking sweaty, after the long rest.  only 1 bottle, a beaujolais, 12.5%, in total last night, good nutrition.

Three o'clock, PM, fuck, it is really time to rouse this body to go to work?  Give it another snooze nine minutes.  There are cooked sausages in the fridge, and I made the pot of green tea, somewhere late in the night as I cleaned, a new approach to the dusty old bedroom and all the piles of books, the old dust of winter, set in with all the habits of my old lovely literary mom...  Books back into the rough simple pine coffin board book cases made of wine cases, Bordeaux and other.  The Irish stack, next to the bed.  A strange mountain climbing book by the literary critic A. Alvarez, friend of Bonnington, of Hughes and Plath, tales of rock climbing the Old Man of Hoy, and in the Dolomites, and Himalaya, the addiction, "Feed The Rat."...  in order to turn in, and then, shit, is it time, yes, no one to work for me, graduation weekend, I must go, and isn't that old milepost, graduation weekend, a thing in the mind, and at the restaurant, those pretty young people bound for success as you might expect, in Washington, D.C.

The strange good moods pop up, from time to time, new to me, but, again, like those of being young. These moods are strange, surprising, creative as I've always loved to be creative, to be spiritual, to let that side of intelligence hang out like that of a free jumper or some other bold adventurer caught or catching the high, in my case, some of my high, words, the words themselves, apparent in that old bastard, Shakeyspeare.  I would have loved to have gone bike riding with him on the high road above the valley, spring still gritty from all the road crews had put on the roads to tame the winter grip of frozen wet, down that road, lined with trees, having to brake and diplomatize with the group of dogs, left to overlook Deansboro and drop a lovely sinking road to the Deansboro Hotel, or right, as you looked toward Tassle Hill the mystic pagan mound as if chipped round by druids the quick down spiraling road past the quarry down to 12B, less far away from Oriskany Falls.  Those roads will never be like they were in my childhood, though the green will be the same, and the farms still there. Years ago, on a return, I outran a pit bull type dog who came up along with predatory silence, in a large enough gear, and the even that long bend down, westward to the valley and 24, coming from OK Falls to Vernon Center, the real center of everything if you stopped to think, and loved by Wallace Markfield, for its bandstand, and tractor yard and market store, down that, the one real hairpin turn, woozy to take, down to that valley where Knoxboro was, and higher above the land, the ridges just like min, where the documentary, Brother's Keeper, was, is, eternal, set, one of the poetic things, the story of the Ward brothers, who I never might, but might have cycled by, who knows, on those old lovely green green sunny days of old towns that confirmed in the boy, me, that I wanted to be some sort of documentarian, not in a fancy defined way, but in those old tools we all have,  that of the powering flashes in our minds, those words which cross our lips, silently, invisibly, in dreams, in forms that seem to haunt us in good ways.  The imaginative imagining, wrought and banged out by books and things and poems we've read, some sort of iron shop, of crucible and melted metal, rods banged upon on an anvil, the hammer blow and bang.   The trees, the old cemetery, the strong mansion like house of Colonel Knox, figure of the Revolutionary War, now quiet, and as you climbed the hill, on this old Iroquoia route--they knew--another old mansion with high fences, and strong warning signs not to trespass at all.  I suppose further up the ridge was that old simple derelict farmhouse to the left or the right was that of the Ward Brothers, and I never was able to find it, having to journey back on my bicycle, to deal with the barking dog storming out as you climbed back up up past that lovely hairpin turn with that valley view and the streams below you now, the houses laid out around them, naturally, to get back, back to Skyline Drive, then back to those own hills of home and school bus route.  I made the time for those bike rides, as carefully as I did, as the inception, the birth of my writing career, and as painful as it was, that's where I wanted to go when I graduated college, back there, to write, even though there was nothing there to write about really, except those things we will, as a mindful species, always write about, those psychological and shapeshifting things that, when we look back, will be found on, within, the things we keep, like the pictures I took back when there was film in cameras of old snowy farms, silos, barns, the roads that kept them, the trees that lined them to protect and whisper poetry.  That was a rich life, and my parents were wise. and selfless and guided by things we do not know directly of, to give me that life, not that of  Amherst, the town, but a real part of the world, less run by old Congregationalist names, populated by barns, and pastures, cats, dogs, people whose children you rode the school bus with, birds singing, hawks, pastures, sugar maples, and views worthy of, you thought, some sort of bicycle race tour, not necessarily going very fast, one of appreciation, mileposts, local attractions, architecture of barns, lots of idling livestock and farm implements and vehicles, and granary devices low in the valley and up above.

Home from the bar, hunger prompting bringing hone a burger to ease the hunger and the stress, in the kitchen a cockroach has daintily upended herself over the little plastic dosage cup that comes with cough syrup, apparently enjoying the sugar of it, there on the counter top I try my best, as a cook, to keep clean.   Makes you think, the times, being sick,  you don't clean that little cup out, refill it, go back to bed.  The standard American big red cockroach will pull surprises on you, like being there in your pint sized water glass by the bed when you wearily lift it to pull a sip to soothe the dryness, the general feeling you need to put some water through that system, but we won't go there now.   Could one day we make pets out of them, these walky characters, the large bug who likes our showers and our sinks, our silverware, our cutting boards...

The Ward brothers, read about in  NY Times, then that documentary film, they were real.  One, at least, reacted to the presence of a camera so strongly that he shook, and at one point, moves a board of a barn to go hide, because of who he was, not of some guilt that the creepy modern prosecutorial officious legalist policing-heavy world wanted to impose upon him.  Let him free, let him be, no spotlight needs he.  And isn't that a lesson, how the legal pushes the news which in turn pushes upon us our taste for  the nachos and the cop, for world history made now sudden, something like that.  When the news could rather be on that level of simple reportage about the strangeness of backward characters born in those old locals we used to know before we moved to cities, remembering the simplicity and the meaning inherent in roads in country towns, that's how you got to farmer joe's or that old Mirror Bar in the long lost Oriskany Falls hotel where there was incredible pizza and sawdust slide metal disk game for the children while they waited.

Shyness is the reaction, finding these old memory worth tale, the good feelings that crop up now and again.  What am I doing, feeling well, all of a sudden, what do I do with it, where should I be?

I feel the light here, in the morning, the breeze, the birds call back and forth.   This nice place reminds me of where I grew up, my childhood, the light of Amherst, and always wondering when I would sleep, what I would dream.