This Week In The Dream Antilles

(midnight. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Spring, or maybe it is Summer, has finally arrived in the green corner of Eastern New York occupied by your Bloguero.  It is Friday evening of the three-day Memorial Day weekend.  The garden isn’t in yet because it’s been too wet.  The cat is screeching because she has caught a small field mouse and is summoning her imaginary children and the dog to the feast snack.  Your Bloguero can hear mowers in the distance.  The baseball game is on the tube.  The air is wet, and there is a chance of yet another thunderstorm.  The world is green, and as ee cummings put it, “mudlucious.”  It’s getting dark.

Your Bloguero has found nostalgia in the twilight.  He is thinking about when he was a child in that odd corner of Newark, New Jersey, he called home.  He is unsure whether he is remembering things as they were, or whether he is repeating an exaggeration told by others, or whether he is making it up from whole cloth.  Does it matter?   To your Bloguero, no.  To readers who would like to distinguish their fiction from their facts, perhaps.  Regardless, your Bloguero, now about 5 years old, is sitting in the family kitchen at a small table.  Dinner has been over for a while.  The light overhead is three fluorescent tubes.  The white refrigerator is small and rounded and humming softly.  It is still hot.  The baseball game is playing somewhere; he can hear it.  It is not playing on the television in this house, because playing the television without sitting in front of it is a “luxury” of later decades.  The man of the house, your Bloguero’s dad, is sitting in a chair with a bottle of beer.  He is wearing what is now called a “beater” but what was then called an undershirt.  The woman of the house, your Bloguero’s mom, is leaning back against the old porcelain sink.  They are talking quietly about the events of the day.  It’s Friday night and summer.  It’s getting dark.  And there is something heartbreakingly wonderful to your Bloguero about this tiny, fragmentary moment: he sitting on this wooden chair at this cool Formica table and doing nothing.  It is wonderful. Your Bloguero enjoys this moment again now, as if it were new.  But it’s not.  Your Bloguero has revisited it for decades, and every time he enjoys it anew.

Friday was Miles Davis’s Birthday.  Your Bloguero marked the event for other lovers of great music with a Youtube recording of “All Blues” the fourth track on Miles’ seminal album “Kind of Blue” that was released more than fifty years ago.  It is remarkable how fresh this music is even after all of this time and all of the imitation.  Miles was a genius.

Ghost Bloggers In The Sky mourns the darkness at Writing in the Raw, a group blog your Bloguero had high hopes for.  Maybe your Bloguero’s concerns about its demise were premature.  I hope so  Maybe it will now just gutter before it goes out.  Either way, your Bloguero registered his sadness.  Your Bloguero doesn’t like it when the lights go out, or stars die.

Your Bloguero celebrated Bob Dylan’s Seventieth Birthday.  He finally found a Youtube of “dogs run free/why not we.”  Your Bloguero notes in passing his favorite role model, a fellow punk poet with defiant attitude and a sneer, who is now 70.  What a complete surprise to have traveled this far.

Your Bloguero’s second novel, Tulum, is just about done (it needs proofreading for stupid typos and mistakes), so your Bloguero decided to experiment with Photobooth and fiddle around with making a new photo for the jacket in This From The Persona Warehouse.  It was fun.  It was more fun to make fun of people who actually do this for a living.

Graffiti brings to your attention a wonderful short story by Julio Cortazar about two street artists during  Argentina’s military government.  A stunning, wonderful short story, one to be ferreted out and devoured.

Finally, Demonstrations Called For June 10 in Ciudad Juarez asks for support for Javier Sicilia and the People’s Movement to end the violence in the Mexican Drug War.  This is a People’s movement as vital as those in the Arab World.  Why, one might ask, is it being ignored in the US?    

Your Bloguero notes that this Digest was once a weekly feature. Maybe it’s a weekly feature again. Who knows? Your Bloguero, though, needs encouragement. He hates playing to an empty Internet.  If you read this Digest, please click the “encouragement jar” in the comments.  That way your Bloguero will know that you visited.  Hasta pronto.