What would you like to see then?

I spent the past chunk of days running around in the middle of CT loving life. I was staying with friends and playing with friends and it was weird to have to leave. I had some good quality chunks of writing time too. Sometimes when there wasn't a lot going on or my host was busy I would scribble for a while and one night EWal took me to his drummers house and I got to listen to the band jam for hours on end and I walked out of the house with like 6 pages of scribblings. Mostly one or two lines that still need dressed up before I can take them out of the magic book of colors but some good stuff came out too. That will sort of all follow along here in the next expance of break time. I get the opportunity to bounce around a lot over break so it will be a sporadic bit of posting at best anyways.


The magic book then. . . yes it is real. So some tidbits about where the words all go after they come from my head.

I got the magic book as a Christmas present sometime before Christmas last year which makes it about a year old as far as I am concerned. It's made of all renewable resources by women up in the mountains of Nepal and yes it is fair trade. I was obsessed with the notebooks when I found them in a little shop and a little birdy passed the information along to the gift giver. The pages are good and thick and hearty and I have been told that the outside is covered in rice paper.

The first few lines appeared in it on 1/21/05 in green ink. I have used black, blue, green, red, pink, and maroon pens for my scribblings. I refuse to write with a pencil and I dont use ball points either. Most of the words are in green but I think my favorite pen I have used just might be the water/acid/alcohol/bomb proof pen that I used to use on my field notebook though I am very much a fan of the one Dad gave me at Thanksgiving.

My plan from the begining was to only write on the fronts of the pages and then turn around and work backwards. At this point I am about three quarters of the way through the frontward direction so depending on my propensity towards verbosity I think it should last me at least another year. The cover is starting to show some wear though, especially in the corners and where some of the rice paper was thin and the binding keeps yelling at me for marking my place with a pen and then shutting the book too hard.

The magic book of colors is somewhat of a staple item on any type of trip. It has been to multiple states along the east coast from FL to NH and it will make a midwesternly type voyage in a few days. It has also checked off Haiti, Honduras, and Peru not to mention me scribbling in it in the airport in the Bahamas while we refueled. It has almost been dropped several times into unfortunate death-to-paper places like the Rio Las Piedras. There are flowers pressed in it from the first 3 countries and a few extra snippets that got tucked into the book for safe keeping (Like a copy of the Nicene Creed, my every growing list of words I favor, a Salvavida wrapper and some poem about a chick that usta was from PA)

It gets stuffed full of poetry, prose, single or double lines (which are not developed enought to count as either) and rants (which can take the form of all three but are not refinable and therefor count as none), and when I feel so inclined I pull something out to share. I have only ripped 3 pages out ever. I was morally opposed to it then and I am even more so opposed to in now as a lonely leftover page keeps trying to escape to find its missing half. One page became a letter to a friend in Haiti and two contained scribbles to a pirate of the freshwater sort, the second page created to replace the first which died in a horrible boating mishap that included jumping in the river to unstick the boat and almost loosing the magic book to the electric eels and catfishes.

Two was my maximum number of scribbled on pages in one sitting before this weekend. Six will be hard to beat.

When It Is Tomorrow Again
(A makeshift basement concert hall 12/17/05)

Sometime in these steps
There will be a tomorrow again
If I walk beyond these tired white walls
To a place without imaginary friends
Can the flowers be ever-growing
If I move through this space in time
Tell me which road will carry me there
To Oz, or to Heaven, or to the sublime

-Jn