I took the weekend off from . . . what do I do again? This time around I wrote no poems, returned no phone calls, and generally just let the time slide over me. I'm not sure, but it might have been a good thing to do. Things are finally starting up this week, beginning with 9:00 am tutoring tomorrow. I feel out of joint, unprepared, but if there's anything this summer has taught me it's that readiness is not all. I don't think I can ever feel ready for something until I'm actually doing it.
In teaching, I've decided to scrap my syllabus from last year, just to keep things interesting for me, but trying to plan a new first week I realized that I'm really attached to teaching a Dream Song on the second day of class. I think I like to get in some early damage to everyone's preconceived notions of what poetry should sound like. Sometimes I decide that under all the complexity the Dream Songs are sentimental, and that I'm a cheap reader for loving them, but right now I don't care. That's why it's great to be the teacher.
Anyhow, shit is only crazy in the usual ways now--ot at least I hope that's the case. I think I'm in an overdramatic frame of mind. I've noticed that I have a sort of a time-lapse reaction to the famous Irvine lack of weather. My mental state could really use some fall right now: bite in the air, smell of leaves, cold wind in the early dark, people trying to get me to go apple picking. Melancholy makes sense in a fall that feels like fall. It's one of the real New England pleasures.
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Driving around in the Rita rains that pushed the leaves about last night, I was thankful for the first hints of fall we've had here (it's been awfully warm). I love that sense of melancholy, that sense of dark portent. It reminds me I'm alive.
I was thinking of apple picking for my birthday. Why don't you come? ;)
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