Friday, January 13, 2006

Ignint No More

It is good to be home. The days are mild and sweet, Spring-like. I have been catching up on the internet, including finally boning up and using RSS feeds. I had been feeling like a bad librarian because I'd been ignoring them.

I was ignint and wrong. RSS feeds are the bomb. They make surfing for new stuff as easily as checking email. I am using Bloglines to gather, and have been sad to find that many sites I love lack them. If you haven't, and are (like I once was) in denial about them, please spend ten minutes checking out Bloglines or the like, and enabling feeds from your site. Pretty please?

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Tonight I went to the opening at Burchfield-Penney of my old neighbor Peter Arvidson's work. His work has changed signficantly over the years, but is consistently sweet with color and calm. (This painting, he told me, he named Cusp because he noted the title on my first chapbook [traded to him years ago in exchange for a painting] one day while casting around for a word).

Peter used to live below me on Breckenridge Street. I had the poet's garrett above his dark little apt studio. Our neighbors were some of the craziest, most ill people I've ever been in proximity to (the sink would back up from the vomit of the guy downstairs; another guy tried to kill his common-law wife in the stairwell and cut my phone lines when I called the police; another guy detailed his Lithium regimen to you whenever you met).

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I just put Tiger Balm all over my sore (from bagging leaves) lower back and must go enjoy the tingle now.