Friday and I live and love and hope and dream and speak

Did you realize this is my 1,700th post to this blog? Wow.

Yes, I know I still have to post the remaining seven meme tag victims...I'll get to it this weekend. It has just been a crazy week, trust me.

Heard from Chan the other day, always good to hear her voice, especially since so many of the "can't live without" me friends who I left behind in Morgantown seem to have cut me off. Tag is still in touch, fortunately...he better be, as we are launching our own publishing imprint later this year. Yeah, that is still on track.

The coming Poetry Year (February 14, 2007-February 13, 2008) has a lot to be done during it. I will still be touring this summer. I will still be at FiW in Amaraillo in June. I have a half dozen books in the final gestational stages...which ones will pop out this year (including the tidied-up "101 GREAT EROTIC POEMS") is still anyone's guess. Man plans, God gets a wry, mischievous smile and laughs.

This summer, after I get settled into my new digs, I also plan to engage, in honor of my old friend Pete Rosa, in a social experiment in online dating. I will select an online dating service, most likely Yahoo personals, and go out with the ten highest-rated matches I can convince to go out with me. And document the results. Who knows? Maybe Abstra is just a mouse-click away! No, I am not being unfaithful to Jaz. I adore the woman, and she has a great fondness for me, but she will never see me as anything other than a good friend...and I am not that consumed by the need to enagage in futile gestures. Eventually I will allow my heart to travel to a place of comfort and shelter and warmth. I can only penance my past mistakes so many times, so many miles, so many years. To feel again the invincibility I felt in Brigit's embrace.

I was, as much of America, shocked by some of the results from last night's "American Idol"...but every year we get a few like that. I can tell you this, if some smart record company signs Sabrina, I'll buy her CD. She'll outsell Taylor Hicks, and I like the guy. I was not shocked to see Antonella Barba go. She seems competent, and I am sure in time, if she's smart about it, she'll land on her feet. I do agree that the producers are backed a bit into a corner when this is contrasted with the Frenchie fiasco. I see their point, but it is one Occam would have gone mad trying to bisect.

The job search is interesting. You would think someone out there would have already tagged someone with my track record as a successful proposal writer and proposal manager for at least a contract gig. Remind me to maintain my network better in the future.

Okay...looking over my project tickler file...so you know, in various stages of completion: Six volumes of poetry, two novels, three screenplays, two nonfiction books and two CDs. Think how much more I would be producing if I was inspired of a muse, not just in abstract, but in the flesh. I miss the intimacy. Perhaps this is my final exile? It would be nice.

I was approached last week by a writer working on the Benedum Foundation newsletter for word on my plans to speak in West Virginia schools during National Poetry Month. I really didn't have the heart to tell her that despite being named one of 50 Outstanding Creative Artists from West Virginia by the AEI, having spoken before the West Virginia Board of Education and having been invited to speak in schools in Mississippi, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, Iowa, Colorado and probably several places I can't even recall anymore and that, after EJ sent out, over the past three years, hundreds of emails to teachers and administrators at schools (including my alma mater) letting them know I was available, I have never, even once, been approached to read at a school in West Virginia.

I have considered it a curiosity. Sometimes a point of, even, grief. But I have been embraced too many places to dwell too long or profoundly on that rejection. I knew I was a bad fit, they just underscored it. I survived.