thinking about ed

I used to call my wife and her sisters the Four Sisters of the Apocalypse. A joke, of course. Sure they were four very definite women of Scottish-Irish descent—that tells you a lot. That gave their four husbands a kind of collegiality in my mind.
Now, just as there are only three sisters of the Apocalypse, so also are there only three husbands: Ed has left. He didn't exactly want to go, and certainly none of us wanted him to go; but a certain cancer took to partying in his innards, and sent him packing. It doesn't seem right that some of us can entertain the cancer party and still hang around, but that's the way it is.

"thinking about ed" is a little bit of my story with ed.

rainy river road

Yesterday, because Flora was curling, I was alone as I drove down to Lancaster for my haircut. The day was pretty wet, with dark but distinct heavy clouds hanging low over the river. The road hugs the river quite picturesquely for most of the half-hour trip, making the drive a pretty Zen experience.

I like to drive with the radio off, mainly for the sake of absorbing the experience. I don't know why people are so afraid to be alone with themselves that they have to keep a radio blaring. I like the solitude. I guess that is a writer thing, part of the habit of being a contemplative.

Oh, yes: this is about "rainy river road", yesterday's poem of the day in wordcurrents

Poet In Residence Gig

I have just finished a gig as "Poet in Residence" for October at youngpoets.ca.






The site is run by The League of Canadian Poets for students and their teachers. My job for October was to comment on poems posted in two parts of the forum: the General Forum, for young poets who are sensitive about criticism, and the Advanced Forum, for young poets who can take and give serious constructive criticism.

I enjoyed the month, and commented on about fifty poems.

wordcurrents is really fixed!!

The final problem, keeping anyone including search engines form finding wordcurrents, was that Google Analytics was preventing pages from loading. I removed it, and everything is A-okay. What a relief!

A little too early for Halloween

True horror story: The past week, I have been working desperately to overcome a disastrous database problem in wordcurrents. Two fields in the database totally disappeared, making linking from page to page impossible. All six hundred-plus posts were there, but there was no way to read anything but parts of the front page. Search engines could not find me, and my readership dropped dramatically. I tried several approaches to resolve the problem, but the ultimate solution was to delete the whole database and install a backup copy of the database I made a couple of weeks ago.

Am I glad I believe in backups! I have altered my back up procedure to have the system back itself up automatically on a regular schedule.

I am almost back to normal: I have just a dozen and a half posts to restore, in order to fill in the gap left between September 27 and October 18. The saving grace here is a program called Clipbook that came with WordPerfect. Clipbook saves a permanent copy of anything you save to the clipboard. So, when I knew that I was going to have to replace those items, I went into the database and saved them all in Clipbook, so I could restore them, even the drafts I have not yet posted, like my unfinished review of the production of The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood.

My thanks to Fei-Jan, who called my attention to the problem.

the ends of days

This is not about anything Biblical: it's about sunsets. I posted a few from this summer on facebook. These look so much more amazing on a monitor than on paper. This one is from July; it is the view from our cottage.

"Centaur"

Yikes! I posted my next poem after taking the summer off.

As September approached, I was beginning to wonder if I might face an insurmountable writer's block, but "Centaur" just flowed out easy as sighs.

I originally started blogging in wordcurrents as an antidote to blockage; it seems to have worked so far. I watched Stranger Than Fiction again last night on TV. It is one of my real favourites, partly because three of my favourite movie actors are in it: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Unlike Emma Thompson's character, a writer who is horribly blocked, I seem able to function (for the present, knock would)

I was moved to write "Centaur" after seeing people--mostly macho guys--roar past the cottage on seadoos, going nowhere as quickly, loudly, and annoyingly as pointlessly possible. Of course I feel the same way about snowmobiles, which are just as unathletic, dangerous and macho and pointless and annoying. Heaven help anyone hapless enough to be swimming away from the dock when one of those "personal watercraft" screams recklessly around the corner of the island at lethally high speed.