June 30, 2019

Unexpected voice from the past. Email from Mike, the son of Geneva Emily, who discovered twenty years after her death that I was designated to be the possessor, and I suppose executor, of her literary works. He’s sending them now, digitalized, in what appear to be gigantic attachments. Geneva was my greatest fan, and idolized me beyond reason and certainly beyond what I could sustain. I thought we had parted in shadow. Maybe we had, and this is my punishment. Her Verse Letter: to David Hopes is the one thing ever dedicated to me. I wonder if the cache includes copies of that. Mine disappeared in some move or other. Return of a strangeness that I’d thought had cycled through.

Went back to the Magnetic to see IAG. Much better than the last time, the actors engaged, the audience big and enthusiastic. Glad that was the last impression rather than the Friday before. Except for Jack and DJ, no one from AGMC attended. I may have misunderstood what we were all about. No one from the University, either, that I saw, but one got used to that of old. Whatever its virtues, UNCA has never particularly supported its own. The bright side is that people who don’t know me at all come to see my work for its own sake, I suppose, or because they’re friends with the actors. God bless the actors.

June 29, 2019

Calm morning after having drunk altogether too much at Capella and staggered through the downtown streets. In keeping with our amazing good fortune, the concert came off superbly, and, after all, was probably exactly the right thing to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. The capacity audience loved it. Lionized in the street afterwards. Not at my own personal best, but it didn’t matter. A group effort that exceeded all reasonable expectation. Just short of a hangover this AM.

June 28, 2019

Last night’s tech rehearsal at the Wortham in the top 5 most catastrophic in my experience. Doesn’t mean the show won’t be good, rehearsal being, after all, only rehearsal. I observe that the “concert” is 100% ready and pretty damn good without any of the extras that were causing problems. It’s “the show” and not “the concert” that was a horror. I’d be perfectly happy without the show at all, though, unless it IS as awful as it might be, it will be a crowd-pleaser. Every damn seat in the Wortham sold. 

June 27, 2019

Another woodchuck moved in. I thought it was the same one, but the exterminator assured me that the first one “will not come back from where I put him.” Five years with no such visitor, then two in a week

Jack took me to see Presiding Bishop Curry at Trinity last night. Packed house, the people you’d expect, the message you’d expect, though sometimes it’s good to hear it again.  How to fight evil in the world? The lesson of fighting evil with love is hard to hear, going as it does against the grain. Should evil not be stamped out? Parried wherever it shows its head? I hear Jesus saying, “Can you do that?” The evidence of recent years is, “clearly not.” Capella in the sky afterward. Ran into Richmond with his buck-in-the-forest eyes.

After coffee at High 5 I drove to the Parkway, as I have not done for years, pulled over at Sleep Gap, and hiked. The woods embraced me. I felt like a dry plain whose runnels and ditches ran with moisture again, absorbing, swelling. The wood spirits recognized me, or perhaps do not differentiate among humans, and flow into all who open the gates.  I stopped and looked into the depths of the forest. I stopped and listened. I stopped and peered down at the pathside emerald and ochre jungles. Tried naming the names of the thousand. Encountered a jogger whose beautiful white body was spoiled with tattoos, an old man and his well-behaved husky. A pileated drummed high in the trees. Where we walk is essentially a desert, at the top of a ridge, no water, no food, the rich valley and creekbed lying below. But it is right for contemplation. The time I spent hiking was given over to painting long ago. Maybe time to readjust.

June 26, 2019

Watching on TV what was meant to be a sarcastic documentary on some Passion Play in Arkansas, I was nevertheless moved. Something inside me sang, “and your warfare, you warfare is accomplished.” I have been at war almost every minute of my life, turning from one battlefield to another, sometimes in struggles that have long been over, long ago lost or fought to a draw. Took a deep breath. went out and sat in the garden, managed to be, for a moment, at peace.

June 25, 2019

Rabbits scamper toward me on the lawn. Am I sitting that still, or do they think of me as a friend? The garden is orange and purple. Rich black muck comes out of the pond filter, as if the pond were a natural pond. Wrote a scare play for the Magnetic’s Halloween show.

June 24, 2019

Church yesterday, mostly to say goodbye to Susan, whom Alzheimer’s is removing step by step from the world. Surprising new summer people in the choir. Rehearsal for AGMC was discouraging, because I have applied myself diligently to memorizing my music and still was faulty. I’ve never been good at memorizing music. I listen too hard for cues and get lost in other voices’ lines. I should do what I do for scripts: read it off the back of my eyes.

Finished the (final?) Revision of The One with the Beautiful Necklaces.

Rabbit and groundhog grazing the back lawn at one moment. Thought the fat boy was gone: another call to the exterminator. . . . .

June 23, 2019

Watched in my mirror a cyclist pull up behind me as I parked in front of the theater. He said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I need 85 cents to get me a beer to drink as I watch an Audie Murphy movie.” Realized I could support that absolutely. Gave him the $5. A woman sits on a blanket under the Wells Fargo ATM in Biltmore Village.  Stayed at the theater long enough to greet the audience, including lovely Dustin and his lovely wife who, it turns out, works at Eden Brothers. I complained about the iris that didn’t come up. I praised the zinnias that did.

June 22, 2019

Father died eleven years ago today. Same date as Judy Garland, it turns out, inconsequentially.

Maybe a mistake to go to the theater last night. The crowd was small, not resistant but not very enthusiastic. One cannot blame them. After the electricity of opening week, the energy had not quite returned to the stage. Plus, I couldn’t find the venue for the cast party, drove around in the pitch dark for a while and came home. The one thing I had done right was to make sure there was gin.

June 21, 2019

Flawless, brilliant day. Summer. It feels cool, but while I was weeding I felt the sun warm me like a crocodile on a riverbank.

Watched for my woodchuck. I think the exterminator did his work. I wish I could think of a word other than “exterminator.”

Did terribly at rehearsal last night, unable to sing correctly even pieces I thought I knew. I’m not actually having a good time with this.

Two days in a row at the Y. Smiled at Nat. It is time to observe–hopefully without tempting the gods–that I seem to have in large part recovered from whatever was ailing me for several years. My response to exertion feels “normal” to me, given my age, and my often surprising bodily strength seems to have returned. A session on the cross-trainer or in the garden does not make me lightheaded. At the moment I’m thanking the radicalization of my diet. Near-constant inflammation and ache have shrunk back to the point where I may take no more than two aspirin in a week. I can get up off the sofa in one try. I can sit through (or sit and stand through) a church service without wishing to die. The muscle spasms that I thought a permanent part of my life have gone. I put them down to dehydration (and drinking eased them) but I, if anything, drink less, and do not have to rise three times at the end of night for monumental bladder draining. I still don’t know what it was. Part was anemia, of course, but that was probably more symptom than the central issue. Postmortems are not necessary to me. If it’s gone it’s well gone and I will not poke around in the ashes. Except to keep it from appearing again.  Ten years of acid reflux just disappeared one morning. This seems like that. One cycles through. One moves on. Only edema and the resulting infections have proven immortal.

Notice from Black Mountain Press about the imminent appearance of Night, Sleep. Will believe it when I see it.

Woke in turmoil over Jill and Wiebke and their little tyrannies. I wonder how the prophets of old decided what was a personal irk and what God wished them to blast from the mountaintop. Their opposition to freedom of thought and expression is important enough to fight, but am I the one to fight it, or merely one example of why the battle is necessary? Can wait a little longer to find out.

Orange in my garden.

June 20, 2019

A more substantive review from online:

Jun 18
Theater review: In the Assassins' Garden at The Magnetic
Michael Poandl
Every generation has a grandiose tendency to think of its own politics as the most extreme that ever existed. In 2019, we believe our voters are the most polarized, our politicians the most mendacious, our media the most biased in the history of the American republic. 

So it’s a useful grounding exercise (and a fascinating experience) to look back on an era, not so long ago, when American politics was far more volatile — and deadly.  

This is accomplished to tremendous effect by In The Assassins’ Garden, a world premiere by playwright David Brendan Hopes playing at The Magnetic Theatre Company. Set within the turbulent world of early 20th century anarchism, Assassins’ Garden uses a magical realism approach to paint a vivid picture of Gilded Age revolutionaries, as well as the brutal industrialist context in which they were radicalized.

Hopes takes a liberal approach to time and space in Assassins’ Garden. For instance, the moment of a world leader’s death stretches on for minutes, as he and his assassin engage in a poetic dialogue about the implications of the shooting that has just occurred. Likewise, a deceased Italian anarchist hops the boundaries of life and death to give a pep talk to an American revolutionary who is contemplating a similarly violent act. 

Then, of course, there is the titular Assassins’ Garden itself, a sort of Elysian Fields of political murderers where John Wilkes Booth and his ilk drink divine nectar and ponder their place in history.

It may take a while for some audience members to get used to this freewheeling narrative style, but once you get the hang of the rules of the game, it’s quite fun to jump from place to place and time to time. It’s also a clever way to convey the global, sweeping nature of the modern anarchist movement at the dawn of the 20th century.

Even those of us who paid attention in U.S. History in high school may have forgotten how much upheaval there was during this period: mass labor strikes, the Spanish American War, the scramble for Africa and other colonial possessions, and the cynical, war-mongering yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst. 

It is within this charged political context that anarchists including Emma Goldman (Katie Jones), Gaetano Bresci (Eugene Jones), and Leon Czolgosz (Jason Williams) decide to fight back. All three are real historical figures — Bresci killed the king of Italy (played here by Will Storrs) in 1900, inspiring Czolgosz to kill American president William McKinley later that year. 

Director and scenic designer Andrew Gall holds all the pieces tightly together, no small feat for a script that is so discursive. Further context and atmosphere is provided by video and photography work by Jennifer Bennett and Rodney Smith, as well as sound design by Mary Zogzas. 

All of the actors in Assassins’ Garden play two or more characters, so the clear and specific costume design by Victoria Smith is vital. Even more important, all the actors differentiate their characters to a degree that it’s never confusing who is speaking at a given time.

Katie Jones is electric as Goldman. Far from getting bogged down in the philosophical language of more than a century ago, she uses Goldman’s words as a springboard to deliver a passionate and emotional message of freedom and revolution. I found myself nodding along as she spoke about the necessity of political murder — not a position I normally hold in the absence of such compelling arguments. Jones brings to life the powerhouse that Goldman was in persuading hundreds of activists to sacrifice their own freedom and, sometimes, lives, in the service of an impossible-seeming ideal. 

The main storyline concerns one such convinced revolutionary, a disillusioned steel worker named Leon Czolgosz, played with dark earnestness by Williams. The actor embodies Czolgosz’ iron dedication to the anarchist cause, as well as the complicated emotions surrounding his homosexuality and relationship with fellow steel worker Charles (Adam Olson). 

The subject of Czolgosz’ ire is McKinley, played with high-minded bravado by Mike Yow. In a sort of Game of Thrones meets Veep scene, McKinley absentmindedly wonders what color the new American empire will be on the world map, as he laughs with newspaper propagandist Hearst about which of them truly “runs the country.”

Goldman, while not directly implicated in political assassinations of the period, was a hugely influential writer and speaker and appears as a sort of anarchist emcee throughout the play to provide context and a thematic through line.

A lighter version of their elitism is embodied by Barbara (also Yow) and Edith (Storrs again), “ladies of society” who serve as a hilarious symbol of the conservative, aristocratic Victorian culture against which anarchists such as Goldman were rebelling. 

For all the fantastical flourishes that Assassins’ provides, there are chilling reminders that history often repeats itself. In responses to McKinley’s assassination, Hearst, played with cold fanaticism by Tippin, delivers a monologue decrying immigrants who bring “dangerous ideas” to our shores and urging America to “build a wall” of iron ships to stop the flow of these bad hombres. The dark laughter of the audience proved that the message, while a little blunt, was well received.

In The Assassin’s Garden is a clever, poetic, and entertaining work of art that brings to light an often-forgotten period of our history that now, more than ever, we should remember. I only hope the message isn’t too late. 

In The Assassin’s Garden plays through June 30 at The Magnetic Theatre Company, 375 Depot St., in Asheville’s River Arts District. Tickets can be purchased at the door or online.

Yesterday was a time for receiving good reviews. One of the earliest of my former students emails:

William Hall
Tue, Jun 18, 11:01 PM (2 days ago)

Hey,

Thank you for sending me your books. They are both beautiful. The book of poems I consumed quickly. I am still working on the novel.

I hope you are well and happy. I just want to say this: besides my own father and my own son, you are probably the one man in the world who has had the most direct impact on my life. You made me into a poet, at a time when I was trying to find my voice. You helped me find it, but then I strayed away and became something else. I do not do the poet thing any more. I want to, but The Voices have left me.  

 My times with you, in your poetry class, with Nancy and Bill and whoever else was in there, were some of the best moments of my life. Just being at UNCA as a student, then as a teacher (for a year), will always be remembered as some of the best moments of my life.

I love you, as a brother, as I always have, since I first met you. I celebrate you and your successes. Thank you for all that you taught me. Thank you for being who you are.
God bless you and keep you.

Kurt Katzmar, whom I sought for many years and finally found, writes a beautiful letter back to me.

Bob Ferrell is dead. Used to walk to his house for patrol meetings, at which we hung out with his super tough friend Louie, who would pound the head of a hammer with his fist to toughen up.

June 19, 2019

Called the pest-catcher on my groundhog, and was immediately conflicted. He is a sweet soul, but also a glutton. I saw the goldenrod shaking in their stand as he attacked their stems. The exterminator company sent a giant. I wondered how he got into the tiny spaces they have to get into, but when it was time for him to crawl behind the tool shed, he fit miraculously.

June 18, 2019

Sweet rain on the roof. I calculated that today would become critical for my garden if there was no rain, and in the night the rain began.
Mountain Xpress Review:

The early 1900s were a time of anti-immigrant sentiment, labor unrest, police violence and imperial expansion. Enter an assassin, Leon Czolgosz (played by Jason Williams), with a plan to rid the world of one more tyrant: President William McKinley. The Magnetic Theatre tackles the disturbing overlap of free speech and political violence in its world premiere of In the Assassins’ Garden, a new work by local playwright David Brendan Hopes, onstage through Sunday, June 30.

On the surface, the play dramatizes the 1901 assassination of the president in Buffalo, N.Y., at the Pan-American Exposition in the Temple of Music. The garden, however, is the location of the play’s exploration of violence as a political act. The garden is where a rupture in time and space happens, and, outside of historical possibility, assassins can meet each other and even talk directly with their victims

In the garden, Czolgosz encounters the Italian anarchist-assassin Gaetano Bresci (Eugene Jones), someone he admires. But, more troubling, is the presence of King Umberto I, who slowly bleeds to death in front of them. He didn’t know he was a tyrant, the king admits, as he slumps to the ground. Bresci and Czolgosz confront the human behind the caricature they and other radicals created in order to justify violence.

At the center of this play is the anarchist and orator Emma Goldman (Katie Jones), an immigrant from Imperial Russia who electrified audience around the U.S. with her calls for revolution, emancipation and sexual freedom. Jones’ is the standout performance of the play, and she gives a dynamic rendering of Goldman’s bravado and intellectual capacity to persuade and indoctrinate. Goldman knew a “good learner” when she saw one, and Czolgosz was open to her influence, as the play reveals.

Czolgosz attended one of Goldman’s lectures and was among the group who accompanied her to a train station in Chicago before she left for another event. He even asked her for a reading list of good anarchist books. Goldman claimed she’d never met him. Jones’ capacity to channel Goldman’s unique skills as a propagandist and public speaker rightly places her role as the fulcrum of the play.

Two bourgeois women with a penchant for sipping tea and ordering people around appear as the comic relief in the show. Barbara, a lady of society (Mike Yow), and Edith, her companion (Will Storrs) find themselves running into Emma Goldman without really understanding why she loathes them so much. Their wigs slightly askew, Barbara and Edith clutch their pearls.

A glaring anachronism in costume design is the Che Guevara T-shirt that Emma Goldman wears. When she sheds her staid skirt and button-up top for an all-black ensemble of leather and tights, it seems truer to the spirit of sexual badassery that Goldman exuded, but Goldman in Guevara? No way.

All things are possible when a public figure can articulate the dissatisfaction of a group and rally them to a cause. Political violence, in this case against kings and presidents, landed Goldman in fear for her life. The McKinley assassination haunted her. The radicals of the left, like the anarchists, embraced change by any means, even if that meant glamorizing violence. When they meet in the garden, however, the audience has the opportunity to imagine these historical figures with more doubts and humility.

WHAT: In the Assassins’ Garden
WHERE: The Magnetic Theatre Company, 375 Depot St., themagnetictheatre.com
WHEN: Through Sunday, June 30. Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m. $23

I was prepared to be disappointed– no word about the brilliance of the script– but I do realize the reviewer has told her audience exactly what they’re going to see, and around here that seems to be the expected function of a review. Also, her lack of comment implies she was watching the show and not distracted by its bits and pieces, and all that is well.
Wyona gets a positive review from DJ.

June 17, 2019

Interview at 103.3 for AGMC. I’m becoming a regular there. Simone and I and a couple from Hola Carolina, a Latino Culture group– not a natural pairing, but I think it was smooth sailing. Sang at the Masonic Temple to honor the Quilt. Ones duties are not always congruent with one’s desires.

June 16, 2019

Bloomsday, Trinity, Father’s Day.

Startled a fat woodchuck in the garden. Is he a resident? Passing through? I have no vegetables, so I wonder, if a resident, what he eats.

Watch the catbirds flying low, scarcely above the grass, at sunset.

Second night of the run also excellent. Jack is there; Leland goes home with a stomach ailment at intermission. One saw that coming. That nearly everyone in the crowd is a stranger to me is both wonderful and disappointing. Heard a murmur of “that is so relevant to what’s happening today” as people left the seats. One never knows if one is being prized for what one prizes in oneself.

June 15, 2019

Indecisive day, half dark, half fire. Short time in the studio. Finished one thing and had no will to start another. 

Opening of In the Assassins’ Garden last night spectacular, joy-making, unexpected, quite the most successful first night I have had in Asheville. It’s rare for me to leave opening night completely satisfied, but so I did, not merely satisfied, but in wonderment at some of the touches which I had not expected, which I would have warned against had they been explained to me beforehand, by which I was finally enchanted. The play is much more political than I thought it was when I wrote it. I’ll once again acquire a reputation which I do not fully deserve. Talked briefly to AW in the lobby (he did not attend the play), which, in terms of the sweetening of old bitterness, was as pleasing as the performance. I’m told I left before they toasted me with champagne. Going back to the theater tonight for some sort of interview.

Drawing up old play files. I’m easily discouraged, apparently. A snotty rejection or an unexpected rejection and I let the play languish. Some of those I looked at today, and they are all better than I remember them, but also studded with curious typos..

June 14, 2019

AGMC rehearsal last night almost not survivable.

I consider that I have a new novel sitting on the table and tonight is opening night for a new play. I feel as well as I have in ten years. A thrasher family nests in my little wilderness. Objectively, life is pretty good.

I think I may finally, after how many tries, have finished The Frankenstein Rubrics. 

June 13, 2019

Blessing on Yeats in Paradise.

Beginning cold and cloudy, the day moves toward afternoon glory.

I sat on the front stoop of the theater last night with a cup of wine in my hand. A black van stopped on the street opposite me. The driver moved over to the passenger side, stuck something meant to look like a gun out the window and said, “Money! Now!” Before I thought about it I barked back “Go fuck yourself!” He simply slid back into the driver’s seat and departed. I don’t know whether he fucked himself, but he did go. Myself, I just got into my car and drove home, assuming that the high point of the evening had passed.

This may be a new iteration of an old theme, but I tried to get Jill and Wiebke and the whole Title IX drama into Jason of the Apes. It simply doesn’t work. It would be like putting Donald Trump into a novel before there had been one, the actual statements, the genuine behavior too absurd, too far afield from reason and sanity to be believable in fiction. It would look like inventing a character merely to be ridiculous. God can do that, but we can’t.

Painting a Madonna in the wilderness.

June 12, 2019

Yesterday was brilliance between bookends of rain.

Emergency at the theater– wrote a new scene (in 10 minutes) to cover a difficult costume change.  Went to rehearsal but realized that scenes of chaos are not where I belong. Healthy and productive chaos in this case, but I would be an onlooker, and onlookers, in such cases, are not profitable.

June 11, 2019

The Dean of All Souls is retiring at the end of summer. It’s a shock, though there’s no reason it should be. One does one thing, then one does another.

Good work at the studio– excellent days, all in all, I managing to get in at least a little of everything I want to do. Diligently studying my music. Pulling weeds. Writing like a fiend.

Andrew giving correct notes at rehearsal. The level of paraphrase and line mangling shocks a playwright, who shouldn’t have been looking at the script. But, overall, one’s central emotion is gratitude that people should be going to all that trouble for one’s play.

June 10, 2019

Noticed in the university news that our dazzlingly out-of-her-depth former acting Provost has accepted another prestigious job. Marked before that once you’re in the administrative caste, achievement becomes irrelevant. The most incompetent, the most widely damaging administrators go on to other, sometimes better, positions. Actual performance counts for nothing. They’re like the police, protecting and fostering their own according to criteria mysterious to the rest of the world. Also realized that the perfect academic world for the current generation of administrators would be if the student paid his money upon entering and got his diploma four years later upon exiting, without having had contact with the messy and issue-introducing faculty. The faculty is an irritation to the administration, who want to be proprietors of a store, in which the customer is always right and nothing really matters but the sale. Or so it stands here. Now.

TONY watching party at Jack’s. Didn’t really care about any of it, except glad that Elaine May got a prize. Drive home in the rain. Wake this morning in the rain, go to the Racquet Club for a pretty good weights session.

June 9, 2019



Whitsunday. The kids spoke from the pulpit. After the Offertory spiritual Naomi Tutu cried out in African.

June 8, 2019

Excellent morning at the studio, working on one of those intricate allegorical paintings which actually do sometimes sell. This is called In the Marsh of the Ibises and with it I had a wonderful time. Visitors from out of town, Philadelphia, Indianapolis. Ivy blooms outside the studio window. One almost never notices ivy flowers. One strand of ivy creeps under a southern window into the room. Maybe a lover of art. Hard work on Jason of the Apes.

June 7, 2019

Was in frenzy for several weeks because I couldn’t type right. I’d type extra letters into almost every word, type rows of letters when I didn’t mean to, skip spaces when there was no space to skip. I thought through the passage of time I’d become an incompetent typist. I looked forward to years of laborious writing. In desperation I decided to see if maybe it was the keyboard. Bought a new one. It was the keyboard. Even those of us who, when we miss the mark, look for the error in ourselves have something to learn. Sometimes it is not ourselves.

Rain returns, finally, and now as I hear on the trees, with a vengeance. Got a hibiscus and a butterfly bush into the ground just in time that God might do the watering.

Learned the full Village People choreography for “YMCA.” I just don’t want to. I don’t want to sing in a show choir. I want to do Music.  Checked online and our choreography is more intricate than theirs. Must sleep. . . .

Orange cosmos reseeded from last year enter the riot of their bloom. Nasturtiums not far behind.

Evening ends with a spectacular concert by the Charlotte Bach consortium– somebody like that-- a crisp and pellucid “Magnificat,” a cantata I didn’t remember from before. Bach is a foreign country to me, forever peculiar and great. Handel, on the other hand, speaks directly to me, forever accessible and great. Some judgment can probably be made about my character based on that.

Evening actually ends with cocktails at the Wayside.

June 4, 2019

Back at the Y, with increased weights, and I felt marvelous at the end. Stretched muscles for months unstretched.

Now that I’m more than a week into it, I feel it’s legitimate to analyze my sibylline health project. I have eaten exactly two meals since May 29. Nibbles here and there, such as bar food at DJ’s birthday, potato chips at rehearsal, a few fries snagged from Allyson’s plate, plenty of juice and water, as many radishes as I want, which turns out to be 2 or 3 a day. V-8 juice is wonderful for making you think you’ve eaten when you haven’t. The cause was my knees. My knees were failing– standing up and sitting down at church had become an ordeal almost beyond bearing-- and given the condition of my legs I felt knee replacement surgery would be unlikely. The plan was to get as much weight off them as possible; make them last as long as I could. Yes, my knees feel better, and only standing without something to pull on hurts them at the moment. I couldn’t have lost weight to achieve that yet, so it must be something else. The further amazing thing is, all my body inflammation has gone away, the ache that made me long for the time when I could take another aspirin or another hit of CBD oil, the low flame that sometimes read as sickness and through which I’d have to lie down and try to sleep. The pain that I thought would define the rest of my life, that I assumed would sharpen and become more resistant with time, is gone. I have not had an aspirin since the day the fast began.  Gardening, I realized I was lifting the 50 pound bags of sod straight up into the air as I had in the days of my youth. Could I have been poisoning myself with food? Was it the wrong food, or too much food? I assume the latter, since I’ve always taken in a fair variety. What does food beyond the necessary do to the body? If I read things right the amount of intake a body needs is radically less than we had thought, for seldom recently have a felt more vital and energized than I do now. Yes, I’m hungry, but not THAT hungry, and to be a little peckish and not in pain is a trade I’m willing to make. It occurs to me that the prospect of retirement provides a psychosomatic element to this, but I am content, when things go well, not to be too precise in my method.

Watering the parched garden.

Removed dead people from my Facebook friends list.

Rejoice in the flashes of rusty gold that is my thrasher flying from cover to cover in the sunlight.

June 3, 2019

Y in the dark of morning, extremely good weight episode. Retired to High 5 and began a play. Freed my callas from their collar of violets.

Sent Jonathan a painting for his housewarming in Memphis, a white granular abstract. Sent him a wooden cross from Jerusalem.  Vinnie, my former student, manned the shipping desk.

Looked at my investments briefly, and I  had lost $18,000 in one day, and it was not yet noon. Turned off the screen.

June 2, 2019

Pavlina writes from Tacoma that 16th and Curtis will have a three week run at The Changing Scene in September.

Calm Sunday.

June 1, 2019

Good session at the studio. All the visitors seemed to be from Pennsylvania. What am I as a painter? People seem to admire my work without liking it. For the most part, the same can be said of my writing.  Maybe the same could be said of me.

Taking pleasure in my garden.

Finished the rewrite of Tub. 

May 31, 2019

Tiniest shimmer of rain during the night.

Found my old friend Kurt Katzmar on Google, Turned out to be a UC of C minister. Not a surprise.

Revised half of Tub.

DJ’s 50th down in Biltmore. It was well that he was driving.