Birthday Greetings

Summing up my first three days / nights at home:

Night 1: 4:00 am – outside drinking coffee while neighbors continue their partying.

Night 2: ~6:00 am – dumpster fires just South of my building in the apt complex.

Night 3: 3:30 am – sitting on my steps drinking coffee when I begin getting dive-bombed from
                              a suicidal bat.

So last night I went to bed early.

Now off to celebrate my being born and entering this fine world. I wonder where I’ll go today?

peace.

Body of Motion at Rest

Back home. Ahhhh! relaxation. naptime. my own bed. fresh coffee. fresh sheets. fresh outlook.

Glad to be home. Hoping to see all the glam fam (that’s family to you non-word splitters) soon. I’m taking a day or two to prepare for the semester, watch the tigers play ugly, revise some of the poems I wrote on the road, and begin my new business.

I’ve met some amazing people on the road this summer, and I just wanted to thank all of you for making my summer what is was. Many of you have helped restore my faith in the underlying goodness of people – the underlying oneness of people. I feel someone awkward putting this to paper, especially at age 36, but I feel that through my experiences, writings, and deep reflections this summer, I’ve entered a new phase of my development as a human being; as myself.

I’ve faced some truths about my life, my fears, my desires, and my ego. And I’m happy to say that I’ve embraced most of the truth about myself. There’s still a few breadcrumbs along the road, but for the most part I’m excited about my life.

Anyway – those breadcrumbs will be important for the next great adventure: Make a living from my writing / creativity. I’ve had to shed the delusion that I am able to do this right away (which was tough because I like to jump right in and full steam ahead – some call it obsessive), and allow myself to set this up in stages. I’ll talk about the first stage of this is my next post.

Until then I bid you love, peace, and hapiness.

The Long Drive Home

I’d planned not to write again until I was home, but then again I’ve planned a lot of things on this trip which have left God laughing.

Actually today’s the 15th and now that I think of it, I planned on being home today. Hmm, well maybe tomorrow.

So I snuck back into northern Michigan for a quick two day affair before retuning home. I was, of course, rewarded by many natural scenes of wildlife and northern beauty, but that’s not why I’m writing.

I was eating at the only all night diner I’d seen anywhere near Belaire, Michigan. The night air was as still and quiet as the interior of the diner. Myself and the cook/waitress/everything were accompanied by one of her regular’s around four o’clock.

He and I began talking (he’s a mid-forties semi-retired truck driver/farm hand/handy man – but mostly now he makes a living scrapping metal), and eventually I mentioned the trip and that I was writing poetry and such, and he kinda looked at me funny. “For real?” he asked me like three times. Then he proceeded to tell me a story about the only other poet he’d known. I won’t bore you with all the details, but here’s the gist:

When he was a kid there was an old guy who once owned a farm and corner store who would read stories to the children (and oftentimes adults too). The adults all said he wrote poetry too, but my new friend didn’t remember ever hearing any. We talked til near six o’clock (I mostly listened). He was so elaborate with details of this old guy, and the whole time he spoke of it you could see this boyish smile beneath his scraggly beard. It was the coolest thing – I wish I could describe it better, but perhaps being there adds to my excitement a bit too.

Anyway this old guy (as you can tell I don’t want to say his name yet, for reasons I’ll soon share) used to sit around outside the corner shop he used to own, and read to the children. He never brought a book, though. His story ideas all came from the children. You see the children would bring him an envelope. Inside the envelope was one quarter and one word. He would keep the quarter to eat and such, then would tell the children a stort relating to whatever word was in their envelope. Some days he would speak for hours to those children.

Well I’ve met with people who knew him better, and there’s something that this old man dreamed about, that I’m going to try and make come true. So hold on to your hats, more details will be coming soon, after I look into a few things. But it looks rather wonderful. A funny (well maybe tragic depending on how you look at it) thing about these other people – they all remember him creating stories for the kids, and remember hearing that he wrote poetry, but none of them ever remember seeing or hearing any of his poetry.

Oh – just in case you’re thinking another search is on, it isn’t. His wife preceeded him in death, he had no children, and there’s no known living family. But that doesn’t mean what comes next isn’t exciting as a dickens.

Update on searching for Artie: My spirits have almost completetly deflated & forgotten the search since it’s been so long for anything new to surface. I’m still waiting to hear from Tom on when I should visit to look through the rest of his mother’s boxes of stuff.

Upon checking my email – I’ve received a nice little rejection letter from some poems I submitted a month ago. Just in case anyone is wondering. My poetic plans are to begin submitting more pieces as soon as I’m home.

P.S. – Home FYI – I’ve decided I’ll see you tomorrrrrrrow for sure.

peace.

Border Patrol

This Post A. K. A. – ‘When a Sign Becomes a Border.’

I’ve been aware recently that often the only way I know I’m crossing the border from one state to another is a sign welcoming me and all the other motorists. So that got me to thinking about signs.

Not only do we use signs to create borders, we also use signs to create laws. It’s a bit strange that all I have to do is plop down 74 cents at W**-Mart and I’ve got a new law.

Example: “No Trespassing” – this sign allows me to play God and tell other people that they aren’t welcome in this part of paradise.

I think the collective intelligence of any culture / country / group of people – can be extracted from how many signs they use in their daily lives. The more signs necessary – the lower the collective intelligence.

For example: While stop signs are necessary, do we really need speed limit signs everywhere? No, we don’t. In fact when we evolve a bit more, we’ll be able to choose 3 or 4 speed limits and implement rules which dictate which speed limit goes with each street. It’s really not that difficult. Think about the difference between 25, 35, 55, 70 – I’ll bet most adult drivers can choose simple rules to follow for each of these limits.

If this were a visual piece, you’d see me signing off while displaying a sign of

peace.

Poetry in Quicksand

Not sure what the title of this post represents, ‘quicksand’ just sort of popped out, so I kept it.

Anyway now’s a good time to talk about my poetry. Seeing that myt blog name is road poet, I should at least mention it a bit more often.

Currently I’m working on several poems, but more specifically I’ve begun working on a few collection sof poems.

One collection is political poetry, which strikes me odd as I’ve never before desired to write anything about politics / USA / voting. I’m not sure hown many of these poems will actually be ‘keepers’ – but hopefully enough to put together a little chapbook this fall.

I’m also working on a chapbook of very small poems. There doesn’t seem to be any specific theme here, I’m just putting together a few older short poems with some of the new ones I’ve written. By short I mean less than eight lines. Most are four lines or less. But again I’ll have to see how many of these are keepers.

Button Machine Update: I’ve ordered a top quality button maker. My hope is this is the first phase in creating a self-supporting arts conglomerate. The next phase wil most likely be publishing, but we’ll see. I can’t believe how excited I am to start creating on the very limiting canvas of a 2 1/4″ button.

Here’s a sign of how excited I am: I’ve actually been trying to teach myself HTML so that I can produce a good looking web site to show and sell the buttons. Ok, truth be told – I’ve always wanted to learn HTML & the buttons just provided the momentum to begin learning.

Less than a week until I’m home.

peace & love to all.

Folk Art Project

The last two days I’ve been lolly-gagging around looking for relaxation spots. This may be the first time of the trip when I’ve allowed myself to totally relax and enjoy my surroundings. Maybe the second time – since I did a lot of view enjoying around Mackinac.

While driving around I’ve come up with a great folk art project for anybody who so desires. All you have to do is drive around with a camera, snapping pictures of yard art made out of tree trunks. You know the ones where they’ve taken a chain saw and made a cross or a mushroom or bear or etc.

You could take a tape recorder and talk to the individual artists and put together an awesome coffee table book. Just a thought. There really is some wonderful originality / creativity out there. And I’d rather look at a book of trunk art then pass by another lawn gnome or flamingo.

By the way what in the world are flamingos doing in the yards of the midwest? The world’s gone crazy I suppose.

peace.

Woo-hoo! Illinois!

I’ve spent the past two days driving around four states, looking for out of the way parks and other sites of possible poetic inspiration. I made it into Illinois today. Woo-hoo! That means I’m not in Ohio or Indiana. Although this state looks incredibly like western Indiana. Perhaps we can change the state’s name to W. Indiana. Just like Virginia & W. Virginia. We now have Indiana & W. Indiana.

Future conversation: “So where do you live?” “Chicago, West Indiana, how about you?” “Wow is that even in America?” Ok. pointless to continue.

What about this: we redistribute state lines based on the terrain. So we’d have one very long flat state nestled between two mountains states. We really don’t need more than 3 states total and we have like what 50 of them. Jeez, the [insert foreign countrymen here] are right – American’s are greedy.

Ok – back to the parks – There’s this great park in…in…well I can’t remember which state (see if there were only 3 I’d know which one for sure). Anyway the park has three beautiful pond with slightly comfortable wooden rafts available for free to the public. The rafts have inch-thich ropes running through their centers. The ropes are connected to wooden tees (no not the golfing tees, big T’s – like clothesline T’s) on either side of the ponds. It really serene out in the middle of the pond, except for the geese. There were like four hundred and sixteen geese in my pond.

So like anyone else, I switched ponds. And no kidding, the geese slowly made their way over. I have a sinking suspicion that they geese don’t spend much time hunting for food if you know what I mean. wink – wink – nudge – nudge.

The park had the oddest statue I’ve ever seen. It was a statue of a man with a cowboy hat and flip-flop’s seated at a mini-table. On the table was a plate and what I’m pretty sure was a whole chicken (including the head). I’m still trying to figure out what in the world was going on there. My best guess is he was some local eccentric wealthy chicken farmer who had the statue and park built himslef and then donated it to the city.

If anyone knows where that park is, please let me know. I’d like to make note of it, so that I never happen by that way again.

A few more days of driving, then I’m heading back toward home. Boy I can’t wait to get to my mailbox and back to all those bills that represent one’s living in a box is ‘common sense’ in today’s society. The first thing I’m going to do is look for a nice co-op to move to. Although I have nine months left on a lease back home – if they haven’t moved my stuff out yet.

peace and love.

Indohigan

So I’ve been driving around Indiana and Ohio for the past week and one question keeps popping into my mind: Why am I driving around Indiana and Ohio?

It’s not that I haven’t had a lot of, shall we say – experiences in these states, it’s just that they look a lot like Michigan, without the seasonal beauty of course. What I’m saying is that it’s flat here. It’s like all three states are the same – I dub thee ‘Ind-ohi-gan’ which is roadpoetese for why so flat, land?

I’m wondering now why I didn’t head to someplace fun like Lynchburg, Tennessee -or- to someplace I’d really like to see like Slab City, California -or- someplace with access to the ocean (any ocean) -or- someplace exotic like Pittsburgh.

Did I just say that? Pittsburgh – exotic? well, who knows, maybe they have a zoo!

That’s it I’m heading somewhere cool. right now. as soon as I finish this post. right now. oh, I already said that. Ok, I’m on my way.

peace.

The Sadness

Just a quick list of what makes me sad when I haven’t slept for over 30 hours (if you’re lucky I’ll tell you the story behind staying awake as some time later).

First, music. No, music doesn’t make me sad, but when I’ve been awake this long and I should be tired, but I’ve drank so much coffee that I’ll be awake another 6 hours easy, I tend to think about the unrecognized music that is incredibly better than most of what’s been made.

So here’s a quick trio of musical sadness: 1) “Valerie Loves Me” by Material Issue – I know they got a little press when the song broke like 15 years ago, but it still outrocks most songs today. 2) “Anything, Anything” by Dramarama – that’s a lot of rama. How does such a great song land in the universe of obscurity? I don’t know. I do my part and rock out to this osng often. 3) The Band Dear Mr. President – I’m not sure why this glam/hair/social issue band broke up, but their self-titles cd is still in my top 30 albums of all time (list to come some time in the future).

Two things about Dear Mr. President. 1) Rumor has it the U.S. gov’t asked them to change their name – so they changed it to Flesh and Blood (one of the tracks on the cd). 2) In all my years I’ve only ever seen 3 copies of the cd. Copy 1-my friend Dan (or Mark – not sure which one introduced me to this band) had a copy. Copy 2-I had a copy, loaned it out, and never saw it again (yeah-it’s that good!) Copy 3-On a trip to Daytona back in the early 90’s I bought the copy I found at a huge used cd store.

Ok, I need to get back to driving, so no more sad things today.

p.s. – biscotti is just flavored stale bread!

peace.

Well Good Morning August

My face and hands are feeling much much better, but my neck is still swollen and sore. That may have to do with me sleeping with my neck in an awkward position last night. The lotion has been a dream. I’m a bit disappointed that the Karma Bugs didn’t wake me when they were using me for their personal buffet, because I’ve never seen a Karma Bug and I’d like to know just what they look like.

On to other news: IN A FEW WEEKS I WILL BE MAKING A SECOND TRIP TO TOM’S TO LOOK THROUGH HIS DECEASED MOTHER’S (MARY) BELONGINGS FOR ANY TRACE OF ARTIE.

On a third note: I’ve been writing a bunch of poetry, but haven’t spent any time revising the work, so I’ll have a bunch of that to do when I arrive back in Mt. Pleasant on or about the 15th of this month. I was hoping to make it back sooner, but it just doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

On a fourth note: I’ve spent a lot of time this summer in deep reflection (as one who has spent the majority of the summer alone with ones’ self), and there’s a few areas in my personal life I’ll be addressing upon my return. My lips are sealed on specifics, but I’ll give you a hint: the areas are 1) work and 2) relationships.

Also on a completely separate note – I’ve decided that some time this fall/winter I’m buying myself a quality button maker. I’ve some cool ideas for buttons/art, and I’ve always wanted one, so there!

peace and love, mostly love.