This and that on a Wednesday morning

A great comment to my poem at Work Literary Magazine

:Charles, I remember exactly where I was that night. In a tent in the backyard with an extension cord to my radio and a little lamp. Annie also “Had A Baby” and I had dreams of doing “THAT” on the radio. 

How we remember where we were! The first time I heard Little Richard's "Jenny, Jenny" I was camping with some high school nerd friends, the father of one a physicist, we'd water ski etc. The first time I heard Canned Heat I was in a cabin in Utah. I didn't realize until later that it was the same guys who as UCLA grad students did Eastern European music at the Ash Grove! Shit, I can even remember the first time I heard Perry Como's "Pack of Wild Horses"! I'd better stop. (Why can't I remember something that happened yesterday?)

A wandering mind this morning.

• Great article on the Hollywood Hotel in the LA Times. They charge now, can't copy it here.
• Brooding about the narrative poem. I think I found a way to give it a shot, after dismissing my first take on it because I don't have the chops to embrace it that way. It's good to know something like that. Saves wasted time. What bullshit that Little Johnny can do anything. Don't limit your goals but don't be a fool either.
• A day of coding, getting student posters ready for Show and Tell tomorrow.
• A free weekend, calm before the storm, no student work to collect.
• Back to cold, windy, wet. Jesus, Portland weather!
• Friday a new batch of scrapple, I think, with my first sausage close behind. The pate is great but I've been thinking of an embellishment to make it my signature pate. The "easy scrapple" of the past took about an hour ... the new scrapple will take 3 or 4 hours and if I get my meat from a butcher, it will take 7 or 8 hours. Love it! I think I'll probably focus on the middle kind, with stuff I can get in the supermarket, for convenience, but now and again venture across town to the butcher shop. I don't expect to find a hog's head on my porch any time soon, which is what the late and dear friend John Basham left me on a spring day in Eugene in the early 1970s.
• Feeling good, despite the weather. My first rate coffee helps. Knowing I have scrapple to make gives me something to look forward to. Hey, getting a response to my poem is very cool as well. 
• Nature will win and there will be hell to pay soon enough but in the meantime, I plan to enjoy myself as much as I can.