the full skinny

Closing in on the end of vacation. Here's the gist of the past bit:

• F&F is in full production mode. There have been wrinkles and hopefully they've been ironed. I'm nervous, I've stretched my skills. I want these publications to approximate how I feel about the work and what it deserves. My lack of cake, and the lack of a reasonable print shop in this area, ridiculous!, has compelled me to do much of the work myself with less than state of the art technology. So remember these are productions of humble devotion. The moon is made of cheese.
• Langston, my beloved dog, for those of you who haven't been playing along from home, tore his ACL leaping a high fence. This will require an expensive surgery. He isn't in any pain and should be up to speed six months after surgery. He's a star, think kindly towards him.
• My car transmission needs work. $$$$
• I move into my new place the Monday after next. Woo hoo! Hopefully I'll have enough money to seal the deal.
• Spent a couple of days in North Adams at the Wigwam cabins. It is a wonderful little getaway spot that is very reasonable. I re-read a chunk of Solution Passage whilst looking out at cloud shadowed mountains. Mass MoCA is here.
• Spent a day working with my friend on his organic farm. I used to manage an organic farm, so whenever I get the opportunity to put my hands in the ground, I do. We hoed the collards, the joi choi, the broccoli, the dinosaur kale, the beets, harvested his onions, and pruned his spring raspberries. He paid me in produce: new potatoes, sweet corn, beets, joi choi, tomatoes, onions, and garlic.
• My neighbor continues his earnest homesteading by extending his skills to smoking foods as he prepares to harvest the pigs he is raising. He has a large grill which he is welding a fire box to in order to have the fire separate from the cooking. On the evening when we corked 270 bottles of our Syrah-Merlot blend, he prepared grilled sweet corn, keilbasa, chicken, and ribs. If you've never had grilled sweet corn, this is the ideal way to prepare it: soak it in water unshucked, place on the high heat part of the grill until the husk begins to blacken, remove from heat and serve. The high heat crystallizes the sugars.
• Not enough hammock time.
• Reading with Tony Robinson in NYC early next year! Very excited about this, as if the exclamation point didn't say this enough.
• Finished what might be the final draft of "the Rothko poems" which now has a title. I think... 105 meaty pages. I've tried prunning without much success. I need to figure out what this means.
• The Red Sox nickle and diming might cost them this year. This is not necessarily a criticism.
• Aaron Tieger continues to crank out the work. It is funny because Aaron lets on like he isn't doing anything, then you receive CARVE 7 in the mail, his After Rilke from the inimitable Anchorite Press, and he has another forthcoming from Skysill. & he is buying a house. I need to be relaxing like that.
• Lame House has a new one.
• & more good news, two poets who deserve more work in print: Scott Glassman and Guillermo Parra have forthcoming books from Cy Gist Press.
• Lastly, glad to see Jordan giving props to this.