Call me old-fashioned, call me naive, but I just don’t get back tattoos.  I mean, what’s the point of spending the cash on the ink if you don’t ever get to see it.  Also, getting a tattoo with text on your chest.  It just seems like for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading it backwards.  Yeah, it looks cool in photos, but you probably see photos of your chest a lot less frequently than you see your chest in the mirror after a shower.  Unless you’re Tupac.  I bet he saw a lot of photos of his chest.

The list of things I accomplished today is mundane: read some more of a novel, mowed the lawn, steam-cleaned the carpets, watched a movie and some of a television show.  The details are pretty inconsequential.  I won’t look back on today and think that I accomplished anything of note, and by next weekend I probably won’t even remember what I did.  In a couple of years, I may make it back to this blog post and wonder why this is, but today was a pretty good day.

Melissa showed me this site today: http://wherethehellismatt.com.  We talked for a while about Matt’s job– traveling the world and dancing a stupid dance on Stride’s dime– and while she came to the conclusion that she wants a gig like that, I would have to pass.  What can I say?  I like home, I like being in familiar spaces with all my books around me and a cat on my lap.  Though, I have to tell you, a cat on your lap makes it hard to type up a blog entry.  For srsly.  I mean, I’m experiencing it right now.

OK, after yesterday’s sloth-fest, I kicked it into gear, beginning work today at 8:30 and plowing through all of the remaining poetry submissions in the Inch submissions manager.  A small handful that we liked and were considering had been pending for entirely too long, a disservice to the authors that I hope not to repeat now that the graduate work is finished.  (Our new intern Jordan has been diligently learning the ropes, and shows such a keen eye for fiction that I hope he’ll stick around as a reader even after the summer is up: Bill and I have five fiction submissions left to discuss and we’ll be ready to send fiction contracts, as well.)  I also filled this week’s orders, sent a care package to a friend who is home with her family, and got five submissions of my own out into the wild.  So, it was a massively productive morning.  Clearing those tasks off my plate has me feeling much more mentally prepared for the day job tomorrow… a feeling I did not have at any point last week, when I stumbled through the workweek with a groggy sense that I didn’t belong anywhere near that office.

But the real triumph of the day was mowing the lawn.  Longtime– and I do mean longtime– readers may remember that my most transcendent moments all seem to occur when I’m mowing the lawn, be they revelations about where my life is headed or 70’s porn moments.  (Man, I wish I had not lost all the blog comments when I moved from Moveable Type to WordPress… some of the comments accompanying that latter entry were pure gold.)

I hadn’t mowed my own lawn in over a year, since I discovered early last summer that the mower had died.  I honestly don’t recall how I managed to make it through last summer, but this summer I was paying the same guy that mowed for my next door neighbor.  Until, that is, one of the kids from the neighborhood offered to mow for me.  He’s a good guy– I had met him through Lisa– but a total stoner.  I never had any way to contact him, so when the lawn was hilariously overgrown, he’d appear a couple days later.  He would borrow lawnmowers from whoever he could borrow from, and a couple of times he asked me for a raise from $25 to $30, which is what I had been paying him all along (so I always agreed and let him think he was getting a raise).  He would sometimes bring a stoner friend; occasionally I would bring him dinner.  When I found out he was 21, which completely shocked me since I assumed he was 16, I would sometimes hang out and drink a beer with him on the front stoop when he’d finished.

Just before residency, he came by late at night (did I mention he never began mowing before 8:30 PM?) and couldn’t finish the whole yard before it got too dark, so he left the side yard unmowed and said he’d get it in the morning.  I went ahead and paid him since I was leaving in the morning, but when I got back into town, the lawn looked decidedly overgrown in that area.  He came by Wednesday night, late once again, and finished only the front yard (though he did manage to mow an X into the back yard… why that happened, I cannot be entirely sure).  I paid him when he said he’d be back in the morning, but as of this morning, it was still looking pretty rough.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, I’ve been outwitted twice by the neighborhood stoner.  So, cognizant that spending another $30 would likely get no more than a small swath of my lawn cut– I would suspect that he was conditioning me to expect less and less, until he could one day ring the bell and have me just hand him thirty bucks, saying “See you in a couple weeks,” but seriously, the kid is a mad stoner and I just don’t think there’s enough guile there to undertake a summer-long program of conditioning– I finally got my mower up and running, a process which proved much easier than I had envisioned, and spent an hour puttering around that lawn, choking the mower almost to death in the thick patches that hadn’t been mowed in quite some time.

It’s a little thing, chopping up the grass on a patch of land that you own (or that your wife owns and allows you to manicure).  And it’s a little thing, finishing a job left undone by your neighborhood stoner.  But for about an hour this afternoon, I felt like the returning conqueror, like the hero in a late-night western, like the king of the fucking world.

We go tonight to see The Dark Knight on the big screen.  The BIG screen– we got in with a group of people who are going out to the IMAX theater in Raleigh.  Oh my goodness, this is promising to be good, and I say that as someone who is completely underwhelmed by Heath Ledger as the Joker.  It’s an all-escapism weekend, as I’ve spent the day so far reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao while Ladybug watched a movie, napping, and lying in bed thinking about reading or napping. You might think all of this is pure laziness, but trust me, this low-energy day is just what the doctor ordered.

After 10 days in Swannanoa, I’m now a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Dealing with Humidity.  The most difficult part was probably the dealing with the humidity, rather than the creative writing.

My last residency at Warren Wilson College was the typical wormhole: in retrospect, it seems to have flown by in the blink of an eye, but while it was happening, it seemed like it went on forever.  The class I taught during the residency, Gravity Along the Space-Time Continuum: Position and Superposition in Poetry, dealt with how one might slow time in a poem (among other issues), but certainly the faculty and staff of the program did not need any instruction, as they already have significant experience with bending time.

I’m back at home, clearing out the inbox, catching up on correspondence, and trying to sort out some of my thoughts.  I awoke yesterday with an acuteness of thought: the graduate degree was the easy part, and the work required to be a functional poet in the world really begins now.  I think my plan for later today is to assemble eight to ten submissions and get them out into the world.

A number of my peers got weepy during their last residency, but I could never quite get there.  I’m enormously grateful for everything that the program has done for me, and I’m certainly sad to leave, but I’m actually delighted to finish.  I don’t really consider this an ending, and it doesn’t really occur to me that I won’t see these people again.  I suppose there are a few that will disappear from my life, but more than anything, I was reminded in my last residency that I have a number of friends and fellow writers with whom I’ll be conversing for years to come. Notes of congratulation came from all around the country, from people who graduated one, two, even three years ago. It was truly touching.

So, get ready to start seeing my work in print more frequently.  It’s on.

I am now at home, hanging out on the couch while I run one last load of laundry.  I was planning to read some this weekend, but I find when I get buried in a book that I don’t really want to put it down for housework, so instead, I have started John Adams.  I must say that I am enjoying it, but I doubt seriously that this is how things went down.  I’ve seen 1776, so I know that the founding fathers broke into song pretty frequently, and I don’t think I have heard John Adams sing a thing in this.  (I am, however, impressed with the casting, because Paul Giamatti does bear a reasonable likeness.)

So what was the deal with all those wigs?  And seriously, what on Earth is the deal with monarchies?  All that bowing and curtsying and just general ceremony.  Ick.

For the second Sunday in a row, it’s raining like mad, hard enough that there’s been some flash flooding.  Why it should be that we have these hot, muggy weeks and then these unmercifully wet Sunday nights, dumping down water just in time to make the start of the week even more oppressively muggy…

I can barely believe that school starts Thursday, or that I am so prepared for it that I do not need to do anything else but pack.  My class has only, what, 4 Star Trek references?  I thought that was pretty restrained.

I am a crazy-deliberate Scrabulous player, which does not show in the words I play, since I so often lay down “WO” or “ET.”  But I have been playing uber-slow games with people for the past couple months, and in the last two weeks, I have started playing a little more… I’m about back at the level I was when I first got interested in it.  Today around 5, I decided that I’d kill the pre-dinner hour with some live games, so I used the “host a table” feature for the first time and started playing some strangers.  I’m holding my own in one and doing pretty well in the other, which is a suprise because I have given myself no more than two minutes per turn.  Both opponents have now gone offline, within five minutes of each other, so I’ll probably have to drag these games out along with some of the other games I have going.

I have a great affinity for words but Scrabulous no longer seems much like a word game to me, though occasionally my vocabulary expands as a result of an ambitious arrangement of tiles that just happens to work.  But the electronic game does not, unless you play challenge mode (which bores me), force you to know the words, only to be willing to experiment with tiles until something works.  So it’s a math game that sometimes yields neat words.  Why I should find myself more excited about the game now that I have come to this realization is beyond me.  Logically, I should find it more boring than ever.

I just started my tenth concurrent game, which is my absolute max, so I probably won’t take any more on.  I’m hoping that I can finish some of these before I head to school, because once there, I will not play a lick.

A friend sent me The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which will be my nighttime entertainment this weekend.  I do not expect to read more than 40-60 pages before I head to school, but I’m told that the book is so good I’ll be envious, so perhaps…

Wow.  Little Fury lay fallow for over a month, the longest such dry spell since I started blogging in 2002.  Thanks to each of you who sent puzzled notes asking when it would be regularly updated again… you can now resume wasting valuable work time here, instead of surfing for Internet pr0n.

I just finished up my first radio appearance in a long, long time as a guest on WUNC’s The State of Things.   Producer Susan Davis, host Frank Stasio, and the rest of the production team do a really terrific job; from start to finish I was amazed at how effortless they make it seem.  I was on with Michael McFee to talk about The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, and literary life in Durham.  Sitting in their new studios in the American Tobacco Complex, it’s hard not to be struck by how thoroughly Durham is in the throes of being revitalized, of growing into a truly exceptional place to live and work.

Assuming that I’m able to complete this last stretch, I graduate on July 12, which has been part of the reason for my silence.  I am now assembling a class and preparing for two thesis interviews.  I’m not sure why I have chosen to focus more of my energy and grey matter on these two tasks than I did on most of the rest of the semester, but friends, I tell you, they have eaten up just about all of my spare bandwidth.  I often feel like I’m not myself for days on end.  But I suppose that these two tasks are the first where I’ve been really beholden to my classmates, and I feel the weight of that responsibility quite keenly.  If I am to leave Warren Wilson with a sense of peace, I’ll have to feel like I knocked these two tasks out of the park.  (As an aside, I am also working with Lili Flanders on the fundraising for the graduating class gift to Friends of Writers.   Though wehave publicly stated that we really want 100% of the grads to participate, we’ve been a little more subdued about our other goal.  But I’ll put it out there, commit it to print: We don’t just want to contribute more than any class before us, we want to shatter the record, setting the bar so high for future classes that they will hire professional fundraisers.  We want the Holden Minority Scholarship endowed now.  If you are a loved one and you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider a donation– the donation form is on the FOW website– in honor of the Summer ‘08 grads.)

So I expect the blogging will be slow a while longer, though since Ladybug is currently in Turkey, I have a little more bachelor time.  I don’t think any man wants to receive e-mail updates from his wife, half a world away, about coed naked massage, but that’s the state of my inbox right now…

Before work, my iTunes, on random, played three Queens of the Stone Age songs, including “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

On my way to work, my car mp3 player, only a 9% chance of playing Queens of the Stone Age at any time, played three of their songs in a row, including “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

When I arrived at work, iTunes, again on random, was playing MF Doom.  Then it played “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

I am trying to get a long list of things done today, but every time I make an attempt, I find that either I do not have enough information to complete the task, or I have enough information but I make so many mistakes along the way that I think, “Maybe I should do something else.”  The one positive thing I’ve accomplished at work today was completely an accident.

When I went to get some lunch, my car served up another two Queens of the Stone Age songs.  That was five in a row, despite only a 9% chance that any given song on that disc will be Queens of the Stone Age.

California has overturned a ban on gay marriage.  Charleston is hosting National Microfiction Weekend.  Schools, get your web filters ready to go to work, because Joe Biden just called Bush’s “Democrats appease terrorists” speech “bullshit.”  And if you check my Last.fm page, guess what just came up again?

OK, I will go ahead and tell you:

Queens of the Stone Age - Better Living Through Chemistry [mp3]