been living in books and cruising electrical dreams typing here on this screen wishing i had a pencil in my hand and solid paper under it. simple enough just pick it up. just let it happen. thinking about desperate characters in all of these books Nora Helmer, Willy Loman, The Compsons, Emma Bovary, Lear, Oedipus. and i am a desperate character. be warned. stand back or the snake may strike. so i read Wendell Berry. he doesn't deny it but he keeps it off to the side. in his world the desperate are frequently fools like Roger Merchant, blinded by modern ambition like Troy Chatham, sometimes just too hopelessly tangled like Ernest Finley. at the center he places the imperfect durable ones with the inner and outer resources to persist, to hang on. we know that such exist in the world and we call them blessed and good...strong men and women.

last night in the cool evening with the windows down and wild african song on the radio i sat in line on 176 to let two trains pass - both long and slow. i was on my way to hear some blues at a bar up in grayslake...and got there just a little late to find sean, jason and russ - the tuff enuff blues band - already rolling along. the room was back of the bar. moms and dads aunts and uncles friends and english teachers. polite sincere aplause after songs. nobody dancing. a good set. sound a bit muddy. playing loose and confident. nice quick transitions from song to song. like they knew where they were going most of time. somebody should have been dancing.

i remembered something david bowie said about growing up in the suburbs and joining a blues band - that it didn't take him long to realize that he wasn't american, fifty years old or black ... so he became another kind of alien. of course, he hadn't run into stevie ray and jimmy vaughn. the rest of us so desperate to become ... something.

working toward upcoming classes this morning, i ground out some thoughts for APLit. wondering how i'll ever get it all in, get it all read. i'm scrapping the formal research paper - such a beast last term - in favor of abstracts of critical essays and a couple large analytical papers.

hoping to get together with a few people, but it may not happen. too much to do. i need these blocks of time to figure all this business.

summer's over. never was a summer. have you heard that the bats of lake county are rabid? look out.

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

Georgia O'Keeffe