Daily Diary. 03/18/2019

Monday

Up at 330 this morning, my rash torturing my paunch and my thighs. I scratched until I started to bleed. Applied the ointments the doc prescribed and then powdered down with baby powder, which helped somewhat. Feeling out of sorts and disinclined to say my prayers, I wrote a little ditty from a story about disappearing newspapers, thus:

there is no effective ruse/to report the local news/it should be a piece of cake/now that most of it is fake/but if truth you want to read/it will make your bankbook bleed.

The reporter’s email response, thus:

Keach Hagey	7:42 AM (3 hours ago)
to me

I love it! Thanks for reading

Keach Hagey

Reporter

Wall Street Journal

347-461-6534

Feeling certain that was an automated reply that journalists keep handy on their email accounts, I continued to feel crabby and affronted, so I wrote some verses based on a B of M scripture. That actually made me feel better, and when I finished it I knelt beside my bed to commune with the Man Upstairs. But afterwards I noticed the last line of my poem did not scan -- it needed one more syllable. That made me crabby again.

Bruce Young picked me up as usual for the Rec Center at 734. Afterwards I walked over to the clinic so the doc could look at my hemorrhoids -- he just said I need a colonoscopy, so he sent in the request to have the colonoscopy people call me for an appointment. But he was alarmed by my “hyperpigmentation of the genitalia,” as he called it. He said it has turned completely black, which he’s never seen before and doesn’t know what could cause it. So I’m also scheduled to go in to see the dermatologist as well. Who knows, maybe they’ll name a new disease after me.

After reading the obituary of W.S. Merwin in the NYT I feel, not for the first time, that I need to abandon rhyming verse and start seriously exploring verse libre. In fact, I’m going to read up on his poetry and start composing some topical work in that fashion. Ambiguous perhaps, but also very accessible. I want to become more than a word clown, without losing the lightness and humor.

I can smell burnt marshmallows from somewhere, and it is upsetting me. I don’t know why.

Because W.S. Merwin lived on an 18 acre abandoned pineapple plantation in Hawaii and replanted it with 500 species of palm trees, I now have a bumper sticker on the back of my brain that reads:  W.S. MERWIN STOLE MY LIFE. MAKE HIM GIVE IT BACK.

**********************************

So this is my first attempt, sent to Shannon Stirone of the NYT:

Last year, two satellites the size of cereal boxes sped toward Mars as though they were on an invisible track in space . . .  The satellites, known as cubesats, were sent to watch over NASA’s larger InSight spacecraft . . .

NYT

the cereal boxes of mars

came from earth centuries

ago

landing amidst impossible volcanoes

and soil so red it trembled

and they grew into bodegas

and supermarkets

until finally they were

all swallowed up by

convenience stores that grew

in the cracks until they conquered

the entire planet and began

planning on how to wage war

on the earth in revenge

for the travesty of box tops

that could never be turned in

for prizes

I’ve had one positive response to the above so far, from BYU teacher Bruce Young, my morning ride, thus:

Wow! This is wild conceptually (both the NYT story and even more your prophecy) and written with a frenetic Beat-generation flow unlike anything else I’ve seen from you. Kudos! (for versatility and for imaginative and verbal energy and explosive facility)

Now I’m afraid to try and write like that again; I’ll  burn out from doing too much of it or will endlessly repeat myself or will never be able to replicate the tone, whimsy, and off-kilter humor. But on the other hand, maybe all these years of writing rhymed verse was just a prelude, my apprenticeship, to finally reach better and more complicated creations . . .

(I feel ridiculous writing such things about myself -- it would be laughable if it weren’t so self centered.)

Now I have to chop four heads of cabbage for the upcoming corned beef & cabbage dinner tonight for FHE.

*************************************

The dinner went well, although there was one lady there who had fallen down earlier and lost her cell phone and had to tell everyone about it in excruciating detail, even during our FHE presentation. At one point I gave her a very stern look and help my finger up to my lips, which caused her to break into sobs and run out of the room. Do I feel like finding her and apologizing? No, I do not.

I’m not going to pretend to have any interest in godly and educational things tonight, now that the dinner and FHE are over -- I’m just going to sit in my recliner and watch Deep Space Nine on Netflix -- the Grand Nagus is up to something with Quark, and I gotta find out what it is . . .