Reach for Peace

Kathleen, the budding Photoshop artist, designed this Peace Globe for me so I could participate in the estimable Mimi Lenox's global peace campaign. Isn't it great?

Go here to make your own Peace Globe. And to see others, go here.

Houston Street, 1 Line

Lithe limbs, curling free, as a creeper
That creeps in a desolate place,
To enroll and envelop the sleeper
In a silent and stealthy embrace...
--Octopus, Arthur Clement Hilton

The Fountain Pen Hospital (Since 1946)

Open doors of time! Open hospital doors!
(--The Wound Dresser, Walt Whitman)

It's Snowing in New York

...the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.
("The Dead", James Joyce)

Weird Things

My lovely and talented wife tagged me with a meme that said I must reveal seven weird things about myself. She has already received three such memes, and was struggling by the time she reached weird thing twenty-one. So this is all you're going to get out of me:

1. When I was a kid, our family dentist didn’t wash his hands after eating and didn’t believe in novocaine.

2. I went to a doctor who smoked a cigar while examining my nether regions.

3. Until the age of 25, I had a large brown and hairy birthmark on one arm. My newborn son’s pediatrician urged me to have it removed, and after getting a second opinion (not from the cigar-smoking doctor), I did. The doctor who cut it out assured me he would leave no scar. He lied.

4. My mother used to keep the family’s pills mixed up in a candy dish in the kitchen. As I became adolescent, these became irresistible.

5. For a couple of years, I hitchhiked alone around the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

6. I got a ride from a narcoleptic driving a pick-up truck on a winding mountain road. Stress made him fall asleep, he explained as the road grew narrow and he asked me to take the wheel.

7. One summer while hitchhiking, I took peyote every day. I stopped when a spirit came to me and told me it was time to make a final choice between his world or the human world.

I'm supposed to pass this on to seven more people. If you're reading this, tag, you're it!

Rock on, Dan!

Dan Leo rocks out here. We're in teenage heaven.

The Bird Who Came to Breakfast

Stray birds of summer come to my window
to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn,
which have no songs,
flutter and fall there with a sigh.

From: Stray Birds
By Rabindranath Tagore