the road trip was wild... we picked up a hitchhiker with crazy gray eyes who told us about this tiny central illinois town where they'll shave your head for free... so we had to check it out... but just after we got off the interstate this hitcher pulled out a pencil and wrote us into his bottomless book of the road... so we found ourselves trapped in the white gashes between the blue lines of his spiral notebook pages and...

no... it was an ordinary trip... straight down i-55, as noted last time... without incident... except that i only brought four disks... two by low... beck's sea change... and moby's play, which was the only sorta uptempo one... and jay had the soundtrack from the cardinal, barbara cook singing sondheim, and a very obscure broadway recording of alfred drake in 1964's kean... of which i'd never heard... understandable enough once i heard it... but you know what? jay's music sounded better than mine... beck was ok, but the low and moby were washed out... buried... lost... on his car speakers... clearly, showtunes are mixed for the big sound you get out there on the road... has anyone ever tried to mix rock the way they mix showtunes? just wondering...

down at mom's we had a good time not watching the war and talking and eating... sunday night i stepped out to take a shot of the sunset trees over on the point

duke, this little prince of a dog, is always a good topic. i got to take him out for a pee a couple times. meg just opens the door and lets him out, but i put the collar and leash on him. just as mom says, i don't want to be blamed when the critter runs off after a squirrel and never comes back. we had a nice prance around the yard. back inside, duke assumed the conventional poses... such as this...

but he wasn't always so reclusive. he did his best to help mom adjust to life after her cataract procedure.

while mom and meg were at the doctor's on monday, jay and i hit-and-run springfield's famous prairie archives. a classic mess of a used bookshop, the place was more up for grabs than i've ever seen it... boxes and books and old dog and confused lady shoppers everywhere. jay picked up an armload of morris west novels on the cheap, and i scored a cool first edition of a. r. ammons' tape for the turn of the year and m. bruccoli's correspondence of f. scott fitzgerald... good stuff.

meg fed us wonderfully well.

the drive back was fine... and so here i am... almost ready to jump into several piles of paper... but not ready yet... was going to wash the car today... but instead i clipped the roses plants a bit (already budding) and cut out the old garden growth.. just some brown old airy nothingness.

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated - thrown aside - a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

William Carlos Williams

 

 

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