All right all you NYC, Cambridge, Providence, Bard-on-the-Hudson, Ithaca,
San Francisco, London, and D.C. poets... I know you are now at some festive
affair with seven foot pointed hats on your heads, laughing away and having
so much fun, drinking fine, imported stuff. I'm happy for you, and I mean
that.
But I want you to know, because self-pity has that double edge to it, like
the hangnail that "hurts so good", that I'm here all alone, wife recovering
in hospital (it's across street and she wanted to be alone, since this is
one of the few breaks she ever gets-- so poignant when solitude demands a
huge incision across the belly), kids at friends' homes. No, no one has
invited me to any parties, not a one, even though they are happening like
fireflies in July around my neighborhood, and I know exactly what you are
thinking, Gabe Gudding and Maria Damon and Lawrence Upton: "Of course no one
has invited him to any parties, the ornery ass! Who would want to be in
*his* company, e-mail or up close??" And, I have to admit, though with a
sense of pathos so strong it casts a Fat Bastard shadow against the wall,
that you would be right.
Ah, but in the company of moon, flowers, and New Glarus Extra Pale Ale (two
six packs of it), I raise my glass: Who else do I need for friends? (Li Po)
But I also wanted to clarify, since I received three admonishments b-c about
my salute to Comandante Che Guevara at Subsub, that I meant the post
*exclusively tongue-in-cheek*. I am something like an old-line (now on-line)
socialist, but opposed in principle to one-party states (even in conditions
of civil war)-- de jure as in Cuba's, or de facto, as the U.S.A's. Still,
wouldn't it have been grand to die like Che, rather than rot the slow rot we
are rotting in our despicable and meaningless and swill-snorting lives?
Remember, on this 2001 eve, the one-armed children in the Congo, whose
suffering is the 0 to the 1 of the World Wide Web.
cheers comrades,
Kent
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