THE SILENT BOOMER AND BILL MURRAY ON THE SAME PAGE

Wonderful Friday night, my wife's home from work, and we just watched Bill Murray being awarded the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Award, and isn't it funny to watch an old dude like Bill and wonder how he grew so old while you remain so young? Speaking of which, I turned 79 this month on the 20th, and I'm still pursuing my goal fiercely, when I'm not weeping for myself, to get someone other than myself to publish a novel I've written. 


I'm slowly rewriting a short story from a first person narrative into a combined third person/omniscient pov, and I've even sent off a couple of haikus to haiku magazines. I've got a hundred of them at least. These last two days I've been working on another prostate cancer poem for Up Your Ass, and I'm beginning to understand what I'm trying to do. I'm layering in historical personages, friends, details from my own and others lives and historical moments and surrounding them with my mortality and letting them sit side by side to percolate together, hoping that something enticing will show up to stimulate a reader's mind. I no longer experience those powerful moments when words are summoned from out of nowhere by emotion and bonded in metaphor to mean something else. I guess imagination still works, but much more gently. Why else would Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Gabby Hayes, Nancy and her "Ronnie" Reagan appear together in the poem I'm working on? The inspiration is still there, but it doesn't torture me so much. 

ADDENDUM TO JULY 1: BEAT BOOMER BUMBLING ALONG

Eventually, in the cool of Black Rock Coffee, after a slow 75 minute walk along the Columbia, my spirits did revive today, and I began the rewrite of Chapter Thirteen of Angie's Choice. What I mistook for ennui was diminished energy due to the cold. It's difficult to distinguish a physical from a psychological condition since both are the same sensation. A feeling is no more than a comfortable to uncomfortable physiological excitation as we have learned to label it by our brains' language functions.

More importantly, I came upon this pair of osprey by the Columbia. (I carry my camera on my belt now at all times.) Osprey mate for life and go South in the winter and often return to the same nest year after year. Years ago I wrote a haiku based on that information:

the osprey couple—
busily tidying up
their summer timeshare

PS: This pair's timeshare is not visible in the photo. Years ago when I wrote the haiku, the female was on her nest, and the male was nearby, picking out suitable fish for supper.