Outside of Ithaka

Exam Time

2006-12-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious power. The intercourse of society, -- its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels,--- is one wide, judicial investigation of character. In full court, or in small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is read. But who judges? and what? Not our understanding. We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets them judge themselves, and merely reads and records their own verdict. ~Emerson

Not yet complete

2006-11-11T21:44:00.000-05:00

Something I'd like to say dissolved
just now into the atmosphere;
Into the sphere of atoms.
It poured out of my soul and into the
green automobile waiting at my
door step, and just drove away
Across America.
Before I could grasp it
and hurl it at you, lovingly of course.

But here's what remains tonight to be said
To the faces unrepresented by Time
but bound by Eternity;

To the Homesick Transcendentalists,
emerging from the subway at
Farragot Square, dreaming of
blades of grass, consecutive or pooled together;
arriving only to find megaphone wielding anarchists
preaching scripture and apocalypse...

My Latest Embarrassment

2006-08-09T17:23:00.000-04:00

Read about it here: http://suburbanskies.blogspot.com/2006/08/sometimes-you-wanna-go.html

Could it get any better?

2006-08-04T16:35:00.000-04:00

The Beatles perform "Pyramus and Thisbe"

If He Could Only Speak English

2006-08-02T09:52:00.000-04:00

I'm sure he'd be saying something like, "Seriously, another picture, it's a hundred freak'n degrees out here! Why don't you go in the barn and fix my dinner?!"

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, by Aunt Lizzy

2006-07-26T09:56:00.000-04:00

For my summer vacation I drove up to visit my nephew Jack in Michigan. We played hard for a whole week and had so much fun! Here are the highlights.

First we played with cement mixers and diggers... Then we walked around the lake to the local ice cream shop... Jack really, really liked his chocolate cone...Luckily he decided to share some with Aunt Lizzy... Then we were so tired we read a few stories before going off to bed.

This will be me on Saturday

2006-07-13T15:14:00.000-04:00

My new motto, "If you're going to hell anyway, you might as well dress nice"

Shameless Nostalgia

2006-07-11T15:39:00.000-04:00

When I moved from the house where I grew up in Grafton, WI, I secretly took with me the knob from our front door. We had to replace the old locks anyway so I rescued the the handle from the garbage where my dad had tossed it. I still have it in a box under my bed at home. I’m not sure what it is exactly that makes it so sacred to me. There’s something about all of the people who have touched that handle over the years as they entered our home and my life. Most of them I probably won’t see again, though they played a large part in my life as I grew up. I remember standing at that door waiting for my dad to come home from work, watching out the window for my brother to bring the car back so mom could drive me to dance class, peeking to see how deep the snow was, or accidentally slamming a basket ball into it. Every major event of my life to the age of 14 was preceded by a photo taken in front of that door.

So today, over my lunch hour, I stopped in to look around the architectural antique shop at 13th & Mst. And it’s a heavenly spot. It’s filled with old doors and windows and light fixtures, molding, and columns, sinks, and bathtubs with feet. And it’s as if someone opened their front door and invited you in to snoop around for a while. Rooms filled with doors, and every one of them has inhabited hundreds of lives. And I kind of feel better about loosing my door, because so many are preserved here, lost by someone, but found again in some manner in this place.

Pearls Before Swine

2006-06-21T10:18:00.000-04:00

Ah, Summer!

2006-06-09T10:14:00.000-04:00

Current and Most Favorite Song

2006-06-08T11:42:00.000-04:00

Aside - by the Weakerthans

Measure me in metered lines, in one decisive stare, the time it takes to get from here to there. My ribs that show through t-shirts and these shoes I got for free; I'm unconsoled, I'm lonely. I am so much better than I used to be. Terrified of telephones and shopping mall, and knives, and drowning in the pools of over lives. Rely a bit to heavily on alcohol and irony. Get clobbered on by courtesy, in love with love, and lousy poetry. And I'm leaning on a broken fence between Past and Present tense. And I'm losing all these stupid games that I swore I'd never play. And it almost feels okay. Circumnavigate this body of wonder and uncertainty. Armed with every previous failure, and amateur cartography, I breathe in deep before I spread these maps out on my bedroom floor. Leaving. Wave goodbye Losing, but I'll try, with the last ways left, to remember. Sing my imperfect offering.

Happy Birthday Mom

2006-06-05T20:47:00.000-04:00

I'm so thankful that you're my mother. To bad no one can tell that we are related!

Happy Birthday to Me, Walt, and Jeremy

2006-05-30T14:38:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow I will be 24 years old. Never being one who is comfortable as the focus of attention, I thought it would be a good time to point out two very special people who will also celebrate a birthday tomorrow.

The first is Walt Whitman. Walt is the father of the American voice (as I hear it). His writing celebrates life, death and everything in between. He’s the kind of writer who writes things that make you feel a little less alone in this world once you’ve read them. I choose to view our shared birth date as a cosmic sign that our souls are interconnected.

The second is Jeremy Kloehn. Jeremy and I were born on the same day, in the same year, and quite possibly in the same hospital. Jeremy and I both attended Woodview Elementry School in Grafton, Wisconsin. He is perhaps best known for being sent to the emergency room not once but on two separate occasions for stapling his own finger. I choose to view our shared birth date as a cosmic sign that the cosmos has a sense of humor.

Complaint of the Skeleton to Time

2006-05-09T15:17:00.000-04:00

Take my love, it is not true,
So let it tempt no body new;
Take my lady, she will sigh
For my bed where’er I lie;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take my raiment, now grown cold,
To give to some poor poet old;
Take the skin that hoods this truth
If his age would wear my youth;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take the thoughts that like the wind
Blow my body out of mind;
Take this heart to go with that
And pass it on from rat to rat;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take the art which I bemoan
In a poem’s crazy tone;
Grind me down, though I may groan,
To the starkest stick and stone;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

.................... Allen Ginsberg

No History, only Biography

2006-04-03T10:53:00.000-04:00

I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain and the Islands, -genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, - must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.................................................Emerson

Rainy Day Sunday

2006-04-02T16:20:00.000-04:00

Oliver agrees with me that the best thing to do on a rainy day is to stay in bed.

Happy 30th Birthday Eric !

2006-03-15T00:23:00.000-05:00

A moment with Walt and Ralph

2006-03-10T16:06:00.000-05:00

From Walt Whitman's Journal
Concord, Mass.
Oct. 10–13.—I spend a good deal of time on the Common, these delicious days and nights—every mid-day from 11.30 to about 1—and almost every sunset another hour. I know all the big trees, especially the old elms along Tremont and Beacon streets, and have come to a sociable-silent understanding with most of them, in the sunlit air, (yet crispy-cool enough,) as I saunter along the wide unpaved walks. Up and down this breadth by Beacon street, between these same old elms, I walk’d for two hours, of a bright sharp February mid-day twenty-one years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm’d at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argument-statement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, “Children of Adam.” More precious than gold to me that dissertation—it afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of E.’s statement was unanswerable, no judge’s charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put—and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. “What have you to say then to such things?” said E., pausing in conclusion. “Only that while I can’t answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify it,” was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver’d or was touch’d with qualms, (as I confess I had been two or three times before).

Happy Thought for the Day

2006-03-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

Jack and his mom are coming to visit in 17 days and counting!

II

2006-02-24T15:59:00.000-05:00

I chased Neal Cassady all across the prairie
From one endless sea to the next
And back again
And somehow I got left here.

He was never the one for me, though.
There was never any real connection,
When the road ended he was gone.
I don’t know what Jack saw in him.

No, that’s a lie
Cassady had a fantastic madness that
Made one wish for things that one rarely finds

And I’ve stopped looking for those things
For fear of disappointment.

I

2006-02-19T11:33:00.000-05:00

Not Wide, but Deep and Underneath
and always, always looking up,

Ishmael has taken to the sea
and Whitman's Barbaric Yawp
has become Allen's Howl.

And where do I hide but
beneath my covers,
newspapers and magazines,
and books, but all the right ones you know.

I seek that silence where my own thoughts can seep back in.

I hear people talking all the time.
I nod and gesture
and take down notes.
When the phone rings I listen to myself
say things that others have told me.

I make sounds that are less
and less recognizable.

People, all of these people
sweep in and out of my periphery.
I have a blog, a cell phone
a tv, and three email accounts.
I am very easy to contact, but impossible to reach.

I hear ringing in my sleep and the
steady tapping of keys in the waking
stages of my dreams.

And if Williams is right, and "there
are no ideas but in things" than I
have ideas enough to drown in.

Far beneath the surface of where I lie
Things have become Ideas.
Doc Williams, what am I to do
but laugh until I break through?

Valentine

2006-02-13T23:40:00.000-05:00

Here is my nephew
Here is his love and here is his drawing
Here is his beauty

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

2006-01-29T15:14:00.000-05:00

Not like Dante
discovering a commedia
upon the slopes of heaven
I would paint a different kind
of Paradiso
in which the people would be naked
as if they always are
in scenes like that
because it is supposed to be
a painting of their souls
but there would be no anxious angles telling them
how heaven is
the perfect picture of
a monarchy
and there would be no fires burning
in the hellish holes below
in which I might have stepped
nor any alters in the sky except
fountains of imagination
.................Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

Let’s go berry picking, don’t forget your hat

2006-01-27T19:43:00.000-05:00

That’s my grandmother Helen K. sitting in the front with the big sun hat. My great grandfather Jacob Leonard is standing on the far left and my great grandmother Katherine Leonard is second from the right.

To H.C.Osterman, with love and thanks

2006-01-09T13:36:00.000-05:00

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

.................Walt Whitman