After a weekend of intense scrabulizing, I have won a couple more games and lost a couple more games. Curiously, I’m now beating the people who are pretty good and losing to people who aren’t; I think I truly play to the level of my opponent. (Granted, against the better players, if I can’t find a 30-point word right away, I’ll let the game sit for a while and come back when I have more brain space and patience. Against the opponents who don’t play me so tight, I’ll play a word each time I open the game.)

I spent much of today working on poems, revising a small handful (minor edits here and there, things like snipping an article or strengthening a line’s rhythmic qualities) and working for a while on one. In November, I wrote a poem called “Man on Ski Lift Passes Reindeer,” triggered by, of all things, a Starbuck’s commercial. When reviewing the November output, this poem, which was really dashed off and felt, at the time, woefully incomplete, was the one that interested me the most. I’m now using it as the basis for a poem that I agreed to write one night in July after several glasses of wine with Dean Young. I was surprised at just how thoroughly “Man on Ski Lift…” adhered to the rules I knew I would want to set for this other poem… without realizing it, I’d begun a poem I’d been intending to write for some time.

I bought the new Foo Fighters album, knowing before I listened to it almost exactly how it would sound. Turns out, I was right. Do they have software for crapping out their new albums? Have they inserted a microchip in my brain to ensure that I will like each one?