Will finish final touches on manuscript and write acknowledgments soon. Yay!  Looking forward to calling this thing a book rather than a manuscript. I've been writing a lot. A whole lot of new stuff is flowing, billowing like gray storm clouds lit with sunlight. It feels awesome!

I like this video because it shows Dylan's contradictions or contraries. Plus it mentions Juarez. Yes, El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, the most appropriated places in America. It seems many claim the area while simultaneously abandoning it or worse, never having been there, much less lived there-- claim the area as theirs. I call this "the border in vogue." Maybe I'm just a little cranky tonight? I don't think so. I love Dylan and I don't see him doing that here. Maybe I'm deluded tonight! I believe William Carlos Williams made a stop in El Paso. Overall, I don't seem to like it when we appropriate the area in a way that diminishes its people. It's a real place with real people, all kinds of varied and individual people that live and breathe. They are not some border "concept" or "construct."

Much of the world lives in abject poverty--the kind I remember when I was a kid growing up near Juarez. It made an indelible mark on my psyche. We are blessed to have the luxury to write, to read, to question the things that need to be questioned.