Let me hip you

You may think I am in your inbox--but actually I'm in Albuquerque, brought to you from a modest hotel room where the midnight oil burns beside the wireless broadband cable converter. When I was last in this town, it was 1969 and we had my grandmother (and a tent trailer) in tow. A canoe on top, bikes strapped fore and aft, and half our worldly goods to act as air bags. The only laptop device was the food tray from the A&W drive-in. It was the summer of Woodstock and landing on the moon, but I just couldn't talk grandma into a Haight-Ashbury detour. We did the national park thing instead. Albuquerque was dusty and only two stories tall. I was old enough wear my girlfriend's love beads, but young enough to only wear them when my parents were out of sight. It's 35 years later, and next week I will finally make it to California. Peace baby.

Io is more than just a moon of Jupiter

It's the Ides of April, tax day, when we render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. (Although I rather thought we covered that on the Ides of March.) I think of the IRS as a protection racket--paying money in the vain hope they will leave me alone. My understanding of government is considered primitive by some. But I have learned to take my civic duties seriously, and no longer try to deduct my purchase of helium as an entertainment expense, or claim my PBS station as a dependent. My little rebellion is to procrastinate as long as possible--the 1040 will go into the mail just before bedtime.

Holy Week

The hymns and the palms were just as I remember from childhood this Palm Sunday, but the sermon commemorated a different Passover miracle, the survival of one young girl, passed over in the massacre of thousands of Tutsis seeking sanctuary in a Rwandan church ten years ago this week. Saturday, my wife and I had gone to see The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ottawa. Nowhere in the exhibit did anyone question why people would feel the need to hide their holy books in jars in caves. And this was the week the wheels fell off the rickety peace with Iraq's Shia majority. So the tone at dinner was a lttle somber last night, as the zen abbot and the visiting taoism lecturer, the religion professor and the two mathmeticians, and the potter and the poet, and the rest of the sangha, gathered to dine on a Sikh buffet and celebrate the Buddha's birthday. Amid the flowers and incense, the chanting and the quiet, we soothed the baby Siddhartha with a bath of sweet tea.

Many--if you use the trash compacter

April is the cruelest month--national poetry month. It's an annual ordeal, not unlike a prostate exam, or creating that work of spring fiction known as Form 1040. Children in particular will be singled out for torture, set to memorizing "The Highwayman" and other morbid Victoriana, and studying verse scansion such as dipodal sinistrality (an awkward verse form where each line is comprised of two left feet), not to mention that popular 1970s rhyme scheme--ABBA--in which every other line must rhyme with the phrase "dancing queen." So be sure to tune in this evening at 7 pm for the "Revenge Against the Poets" edition of Readers & Writers on the Air, where we'll see just how many poets you can cram into a sound booth.