Most of this weekend has been spent sitting in my front room with the windows open, either smelling the late April breeze still speckled with cherry blossoms, or listening to the soft rain patter against the dark green leather leaves of the bush tree below the sill. Minutes passed and then hours passed and soon days will pass.

The silent quality of this gentle drizzle, the birdsong behind it, the lack of voices and machines lets me hear my own breathing, uncoils my thoughts that have been so tightly wound around the spoke-stem of my reality. Each day I've gone for a walk, half an hour to an hour throughout my neighborhood in a practice I began when I returned from the doctor some weeks ago. At first it was exercise and my heart rate complained and my legs screamed for the sanctity of sofas and cartoons. But then I hit my stride and the weariness of steps turned to circulation and the feeding of energy into my joints and muscles.

And now when I walk, it is how it used to be. My legs move and my breath rises and falls, and my thoughts and laid out behind me like breadcrumbs, and my thoughts go before me like swallows, and my thoughts spin around me like small planets on which infinitely small civilizations go about the business of ecosystems.

( Continue… )

You know, it occurs to me that the phrase "like a broken record" really doesn't have much meaning for kids raised in the era after vinyl. "Like a skipping CD" doesn't mean the same thing either as CDs tend to skip ahead or skip around and, anyway, don't reliably skip back and play the same piece of the song over and over. Perhaps the popularity of old school rappers and folks like Beck might at least keep the idea of record scratch around.

In fact, "like a broken record" makes me feel the same way as saying "beating a dead horse" or "like a bad penny" does. Kids today don't know from horses and one day soon the penny will be out of circulation. And that will leave me with my adages, which I'll spew forth our the window of my dank apartment at the kids on the lawn.

So what skips? A stone across the water? Do people do that anymore, or has that gone the way of feeding the ducks? Are there still ducks? "Like somebody keeps hitting the Tivo rewind" might work. Maybe "Like an acid loop". I dunno. I'm still working on it.

( Continue.. it's a bigun )

One night in 1993 or 1994, I left work and drove almost two hours south, through back roads and past tree-flanked streams to see the Indigo Girls at Ohio University. After the show, I fought the expulsion of traffic and the weary, sleep-inducing darkness to arrive home a few hours before I had to get up for work the next day.

A few years ago, I sat in the back row, in nearly the last seat to watch Tom Waits rust and hunker and wiggle and slide across the stage.

To date, these are the only two concerts I've ever been to alone.

( Tonight... )

"Hey, William. Aren't you supposed to be updating every day? I noticed you didn't yesterday."

"Who are you and how did you get in here?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought this was the post office"

"Ah, no that's a few blocks away"

"Right, wow, this is embarrassing. I'll just leave then, shall I?"

"Don't worry about it, happens all the time with you voices"

( Voices... )

My last post regarding the space-creation philosophy and practice has caused a fair amount of discussion and interested questions within my artistic community. Having only just launched the idea as a new approach to myself, I am also busily processing the possibilities of what it can bring to my life. So I thought I'd expound on it a bit more.

( a bit more is here, in fact... )

This is a long one, just to get you caught up with what's going on with the Willie. It's funny how I shift day-to-day in and out of esoteric versus factual, from imagic (my own word) to newsy.

( Let's go... )

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A man dressed as Chewbacca was arrested after police said the street performer head-butted a tour guide operator in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

When wookies go wild...

But that's not important now. What is important is that I'm back to daily writings, whether those be postings here, on the new journal or elsewhere. I'm vaguely playing around with the idea of working on my pieces for "This Wallingford Life" and the proposed book of essays publicly, as in writing and editing in a place that is visible, with a versioning system via tags. I'm not sure why that's intriguing to me today, or why that channel seems to be more conducive to something as experimental as a revealed writing workshop approach. I've never, ever considered displaying a work in progress before, let alone providing a glass window through which to view the process.

At any rate, I'm going to sit with it and see what it wants and what's best for its development.

The recent and brilliant post by my buddy drshorn has me aching for essays of a more simple format and more personal nature, to begin that long-waiting project that lives in Glass, Bryson, Sedaris, Rackoff, and Vowell lands. Actually, his post had me very happy and impressed and then it had me really jealous. THEN it had me aching. The Shorn guy is a great writer, don't let him tell you otherwise.

But the overall idea is to create space. That's the big theme for me this year and probably the biggest shift and transformation of my approach to everything. Create the space. See what shows up. Work your energy to its utmost to make the space welcoming and ready and attractive and flexible. Things will grow in it organically, or they won't. But the creation of space is the key. The providing of experience is the workshop equivalent, but that won't come into play for some time yet.

I've created this space, and one in the new journal. The Blonde Swedes create their own space. So now it's up to me to figure out the spaces that my other projects would like to live in.

As you might be able to tell, I feel better. I slept for just over eight hours last night and woke up not interested in sleeping anymore. So I hopped on the computer and spent some time tweaking the new journal's look and feel, then cleaned and adjusted the living room... and as soon as I realized that I was still in my robe with the loose belt in front of very large bay windows.. I decided to give the neighbors a break and go shower and get dressed.

Nobody needs to see that.

So yes, I am now having the "Yeah, I'm just getting over a bad cold" feelings, bit achy and prone to sudden drops of energy and not too interested in much activity. But overall, I'm good, much, much better. I'm hoping that next week, being well, I can have a clearer and better perspective on things.

I also really, really want my MacBook... but patience is a something or whatever.

One of the things that posting daily as a practice is accomplishing is limbering up my mind and allowing it to be more and more flexibly random. The repeated act of expression is crucial in achieving the fluidity to express. As somebody who lives alone and spends many days without speaking a single word aloud, writing becomes a necessary thing to keep the language centers limber.

( Tonight... )