I am creeping my way oh so sloooooowwwwllly through Moby Dick. It is one of those books that, because it is so thoroughly intertwined with our culture, I feel as if I have already read it. I expect it to seem familiar–and it some ways, of course, it is. After all, it involves a big white whale, and a captain named Ahab who has a wooden leg, and a tattoo’d cannibal who is terribly misunderstood. I expect too as I read it to recall it from memory, but how could I? So, every page is a surprise, a discovery, as I unravel the preconceptions from my head–even the long-winded passages on whale species, blubber preparation and ship navigation.

This site is wonderfully mean:
Criticizing Child Art

It is late, I am drinking bourbon and updating web sites. I want to sleep for 15-hours, but it looks like I will barely get in a good 7 tonight. The stack of dishes in my sink teeters precariously toward the ceiling. My stinky clothes from this weekend’s camping trip curdle at the foot of my bed. There is a mound of unpaid bills and the answering machine light blinks urgently.

I feel like I am going a 1,000 miles an hour; my knuckles are white on the steering wheel and smoke pours from under the hood. The engine light is on, but I’ll just ignore it–grind down on the accelerator and hope that I make it through the next few lights, all the way to the city limits, maybe, if I’m lucky, to the state line.

I had a dream last night that I was watching Bill Monroe play the mandolin. It WAS Bill Monroe, only his head was actually a kind of oblong flattened skull, like a horse’s, with a white cowboy hat perched on top. He began playing the mandolin with his teeth, and they popped out one by one and shot off over my head. Still, the music he played was beautiful.