Fire I'm having a swell time reading Lonesome Dove , glad I still have 400 pages to go, but this paperback is one of a thousand things around me I would not grab as I dashed into the street if the house ever decided to burst into flames. I probably couldn't find the cat for all the smoke filling every room, so let me see, give me a minute . I should have thought of this earlier before the fire trucks arrived and men in helmets were rushing past me. But here I am out on the lawn in a bathrobe with a few sleepy neighbors, red lights flashing all over us. I'm holding a photograph to my chest and the cat is sitting next to me, apparently mesmerized by the flames. I'm happy with my choice as I look down at you and me in a frame. Here's a chance for a fresh start, I figure. And as for the ashes of Lonesome Dove , I can always get another copy, or maybe that's just where I was meant to stop reading.

Marijuana When I was young and dreamy, I longed to be a poet, not one with his arms wrapped around the universe or on his knees before a goddess, not waving from Mount Parnassus nor wearing a cape like Lord Byron, rather just reporting on a dog or an orange. But one soft night in California I walked outside during a party, lay down on the lawn beneath a lively sky, and after an interlude of nonstop gazing, I happened to swallow the moon, yes, I opened my mouth in awe and swallowed the full moon whole. And the moon dwelled within me when I returned to the lights of the party, where I was welcomed back with understanding and hilarity and was recognized long into the night as The Man Who Swallowed the Moon , he who had walked out of a storybook and was dancing now with a girl in the kitchen. Ode to Joy Friedrich Schiller called Joy the spark of divinity , but she visits me on a regular basis, and it doesn't take much for her to appear-- the salt next to the pepper by the stove, the garbage man ascending his station on the back of the moving garbage truck, or I'm just eating a banana in the car and listening to Buddy Guy. In other words, she seems down to earth, like a girl getting off a bus with a suitcase and no one's there to meet her. It's a little after 4 in the afternoon, one of the first warm days of spring. She sits on her suitcase to wait and slides on her sunglasses. How do I know she's listening to the birds?.