Arthur Peabody Goodpasture and my coffin

Odds and ends and so on...

I completed the musical piece built around my poem "The Wild and Defiled, along the way..." which was originally written to be used as a song lyric. And when I sat down to listen to the result...

My God, I've written a pop song! Actually, it sounds pretty mainstream and every day, I hear my voice edging closer...and closer...closer and closer...to singing. Ack! Not bad, a little strange, probably too pop for my poetry fans and too poetic for the pop crowd. It will probably get me burned at the stake as a witch.

Got a note from my daughter yesterday...asking, among other things, what the novel was I used to read to her when she was little about a guy (named Arthur Peabody Goodpasture) getting caught up in a South American revolution. She wanted to re-read it now that she was older. I told her that it was the Readers Digest Condensed Book version of Richard Powell's "Don Quixote, U.S.A." which for years was my favourite book. It's out of print in original form, but I should be able to wrangle her a copy of the RD Condensed volume...my original, I suspect, is at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, along with all the other sentimental victims of my second marriage.

Including my coffin. No, I won't forget that. My dear friend Thom worked hard to build that sucker and I toted it cross-country half a dozen times. I had actually planned to be buried in it. I would've perhaps preferred to lose a limb. Or at least a piece of my left ear.

Designed a cover for Tag's and my collaboration, a book of poems about the Morgantown, West Virginia, area and subculture that is the logical follow up to both my "The Morgantown Suite Poems" and his "Midnight Muse in a Convenience Store"...entitled "Psalms of the Monster River Cult". The cover is a photo of the Monongahela River, taken by the esteemed Mr. McTaggart himself (he's getting back at me for designing the cover of "Midnight Muse...")