1. I completed my software business with the worldwide corporation I started dealing with last Wednesday. I'm glad to be done with that, but in the process I lost some data that I've started to replace. If I needed to slow down my life a bit, this tedious process will do just that!
2. So, as I expected, once I entered into the world of software upgrade, a long telephone call and an online chat session with a very friendly agent who tried but couldn't help me devoured much of my afternoon, as did starting the project of replacing the data I'd lost (luckily I can recreate it -- many of my online accounts will now have new passwords!).
I took a break from my new project and drove to the post office to mail an envelope containing Debbie's absentee ballot off to New York.
Early in the evening, I put computer stuff aside and mixed myself a gin and tonic and put today's Billy Collins Poetry Broadcast on the Vizio.
On Tuesday, Sept. 29th, Billy Collins' new collection of poetry, Whale Day, comes out.
Billy Collins had fun wryly joking about today being Whale Day Eve and this silliness, along with the Horace Silver he played to open the broadcast and the funny Irish song about dancing cows he played at the end and the poems he read transported my attention away from online password management and into a much more pleasant world.
I can't sum up the poem I enjoyed most very well. It's entitled "Tipping Point". In it, Billy Collins realizes that jazz saxophonist and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy died when he was thirty-six and, on the day of the poem, thirty-six years had passed since his death. The poem playfully regards time in terms of another Eric Dolphy lifetime getting underway and the poem's speaker muses about what he felt at this tipping point moment as time passed from a second Eric Dolphy lifespan into a third. I didn't know it, but it turned out this was just the sort of playful treatment of time and the human relationship to time that I wanted to experience this evening. The poem filled an empty spot in my inward self (it scratched an itch) that I didn't even know was there.
3. After watching an hour of news programming, I mixed myself on more gin and tonic and decided to go back to the beginning of Ken Burns' series, Jazz, and watch the first episode. Having watched the last four episodes already (7-10) made going back to the beginning work especially well for me. Knowing where Ken Burns' story was headed and knowing its end made what I learned tonight about the origins of jazz all the more pointed.
A limerick by Stu:
With their males called a Drake not a Buck!
But, when the guy’s called a Gander,
Don’t let thoughts meander.
It’s a day to wish honkers some luck!
Goose Day.
With best thoughts of Kirk
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