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Marblehead, MA 5:41 a.m.

I woke up at 4:00 am today, which is a good thing, because I have to drive to Middlebury VT, about 4 hours away from where I played last night and am now (Marblehead, MA). I’m playing a couple of songs at the Memorial Baptist Church this morning.

I don’t like the adjective “perfect,” cause it’s lazy. “It was a perfect evening.” “The weather was perfect.” Those 2 statements don’t *tell* you anything. Rather you’re expected to read the mind of whoever says such things and assume you know what they think “perfect” means.

That said, the weather yesterday was perfect. The sun seemed like a late afternoon sun all day long, and I got to sit in it and watch the ocean with a friend. My hungry skin drank in all that sun and, staring at that ocean I used to write songs about but don’t anymore, I wondered why I ever left the North Shore. Why the hell would someone choose to live in NYC? (or Jersey City to put a finer point on it). Actually I can answer that, but it’s a good question nonetheless.

Last night I played my first solo show in a while. I missed all the folks I’ve been playing with lately. Toby, out in Ohio, Gerko, back in the Netherlands, and Paul, down in NYC, anticipating shoulder surgery. Paul played bass with me show before last, in NY, and it was fun and comfortable. Paul is a great musician and a super sweet guy. He’s one of those people who sees everything but doesn’t say a lot, so sometimes it’s hard to know what he’s thinking.  I wonder if there’s a great roiling sea of emotions underneath that amiable face.

Anyway, Paul messed up his shoulder falling off a motorcycle so, no Jason-Harrod-bass-playing, or any bass playing, for him for awhile (get better soon, Paul!) so i played last night solo.

And I wanna say more about that, but time is pressing and I must get in the car or drive, or else be late. “Time is a child-biting dog,” says the poet Charles Wright. ow. I can just feel my skin being nipped. nice job Charles, you earned your keep as a poet right there.

Interestingly, Wright describes time as a dog elsewhere. Here for instance:

“And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.”

Hmm.  So which is it Charles? Is Time going to bite me or curl up beside me and keep me warm?  Make up your mind, man!

here’s another piece of loveliness from Charles Wright, from a 2009 collection called Sestets:

Sundown Blues

There are some things that can’t be conveyed—
description, for instance,
The sundown light on that dog hair lodge pole pine
and the dead branches of spruce trees.

They hold its brilliance close against them
For a tick or two
before it chameleons away. No one is able to describe this gold to bronze to charcoal, no one.
So move along, boy, just move along.

Unca Unca burnin’ love

When I was a kid I owned a small mountain of comic books. I was not a discriminating collector. My grandmother took me to yard sales where we’d buy tall stacks of yellowed, coverless magazines which I’d bring home and pore over while she sewed. Though my tastes were ecumenical, I found I preferred uncomplicated characters like Uncle Scrooge McDuck (who liked two things: money and adventure) to say, Spider-man (who didn’t really like anything, and was always in the middle of some existential crisis. Come on, Spidey, snap out of it!).

The best Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics were written and drawn by Carl Barks, widely regarded as one of the greatest cartoonists of all-time, who labored for Disney in relative obscurity until the mid-1960’s, when he was slowly discovered, and fêted by, legions of Uncle Scrooge fans. At this point Barks started producing kitschy duck oil paintings that were not nearly as satisfying as the simple pen and ink originals on which they were based. Animation/comic historian Michael Barrier wrote this lovely essay on Carl Barks and Uncle Scrooge for the Wall Street Journal, who declined to publish it.

70spidey

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