Jack Johnson - You And Your Heart

This is my first day not working. I took my mother to the airport this morning and am now getting some final bills I need to take care of. So, soon I'll be dead broke and unemployed. It feels okay. I will try to write a bit this week and hope to god that something happens. The blank page has stared at me hard for some time. I will try to get busy once I move into an apartment; the moving part will be a pain in the butt, and that too is only yet another temporary move. Not sure where I'll end up but am starting to accept that I have a disability now. It's a long story, but I have to get back on track to getting well so I can work and do something of substance to help other people live.

Years ago I wrote on this blog about people having too narrow a sense of aesthetics and how the marginalization and favoritism of particular sensibilities is unfair. Now it's the new thing despite folks having lambasted Billy Collins etc.

In a recent essay, I lambaste mediocrity in the name of diversity and/or mere politics masquerading as art. There's a difference in my mind and there is a sense of flat mediocre language, dull images and so forth that deaden art and turn it into mere political platform. This is not to say art can't be political, but yes, it should be "good". There's a lot of things that make a poem good to my mind. But contemporary American poetry is a farce in a lot of ways. There's not much to be done about it but grow and read and write. I think there's more involved in that solitary act than I had previously thought. Yes, we want community, but artists are artists, not politicians nor activists. They can be both but they are not mutually exclusive and the expectation that one be a politician following a particular narrow brand of belief expectations is simply lame. Be free. Believe what you believe.