I have one little tidbit that I’ve found to help me get back to posting. And I know that J.D. Salinger isn’t Christ, but his old toilet is for sale at a Million dollars…

NC memorabilia dealer selling J.D. Salinger’s toilet

Published: Saturday, August 21, 2010, 8:40 AM    

The Associated Press

KERNERSVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina collectibles dealer is hawking a toilet ripped from reclusive author J.D. Salinger’s former home.

Rick Kohl of The Vault said Friday he bought the standard white porcelain fixture from a New Hampshire couple who owned a home where the author of “Catcher in the Rye” once lived.

To vouch that this is no phony, Kohl has a letter from the homeowner attesting that she and her husband replaced the toilet while remodeling, and that they knew the workmen who installed it decades ago.

The receptacle has an eBay asking price of $1 million, though Kohl says he’s willing to see what the literary giant’s home throne will fetch.

The toilet’s lid is stamped with a manufacturing date of 1962, well after the 1951 publication date of Salinger’s classic novel.

http://blog.syracuse.com/entertainment/2010/08/nc_memorabilia_dealer_selling.html

Andy Hull and his comrades are some of my favorite musicians to go see play. Listening to Manchester Orchestra  in front of their hometown crowd is always an enjoyable experience. They played back to back shows last Wednesday and Thursday at Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points, and opened with Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend”. But I couldn’t resist posting this video instead; a song for his good friend 50 Cent.

My friend David shared his thoughts on the evening. And although he’s not a poet, it’s worth the read nonetheless: http://davidhuey.posterous.com/manchester-orchestra-at-variety-playhouse

“Birds do it. Bees do it. Beetles, bats and light summer breezes do it.

I refer, of course, to that raunchiest of sex acts: the pollination of flowers.

When it comes to sex, plants have more headaches than the rest of us. One problem is that they can’t travel about to find a mate - they are, after all, rooted to the spot - so they have to depend on intermediaries to bring egg and sperm cells together.”

And she goes on to say, “…A bee, after all, can only carry so much pollen at once. The wind is not so limited…”

Oh how similar we humans are to the bees, I might add.

It’s worth reading the whole article, but only if you like that sort of thing:

“Breezy Love, or the Sacking of the Bees“

10 Words

beer and meat
Aaron and Megan
liberal
Freelance Whales
bloom
cloth diapers
lunch or coffee?
blessing
A Severe Mercy
risk

The sun rose with clouds covering its upward enclosure. Their hovering above can’t keep up with the break of the day. The fading orange softly utters an amen to another days beginning. I’m compelled to do the same. I’m on my way again, up in the air, traveling above a blanket of clouds now, the present soundtrack in my ears towards New York City. I haven’t been to this great city since 2002. And believe me, I’ve been trying to get there for some time now. I’m always putting out the idea to friends, hoping for a reason to make it.

Much of life changes over the course of a few years. To think for most of my upbringing, I was coming to visit year after year. My Grandparent’s home was an apartment in Forest Hills that my dad had spent most of his growing up years. I remember the overly-full stomach I had after every meal of oatmeal or pasta or pea soup. The upstairs was a couple of bedrooms, one of which hosted countless trophies of my father’s baseball glory days. He played college ball for St. John’s until he got hurt. There was a fire place on the main floor with photos of all of us grandkids scattered about on the sil. The couch in the living room was always covered with some plasticy material I can’t believe guests ever allowed, sitting near the windows facing the street. The
“dining room” was central, where the record player sang her tunes, leading to the kitchen with yellow wall paper making me feel at home.

But my favorite room was through the kitchen down to the basement. There was the antique smell, full of goodies, old collectibles from years of living, working and playing. For a kid like me it was perfect. And my brother and I would often create mischief and have Grandpa Benedito running down the stairs yelling at us in some Italian verbage. That of course only made us laugh and him more angry.

Since 2002, much of life has changed. My Grandpa has passed away. And in April of last year, Grandma Rose moved to Hilton Head  just 10 minutes away from my parents. My older cousin Laura and her husband have two children growing up. Cousin JP, just a month younger than I, lives in Manhattan working for the music industry. My Aunt and Uncle’s house was host to countless parties we attended, dressing up to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s.

I’ve not only graduated high school, but also college. Come May, I’ll have lived on the same street on the eastside of Atlanta for four years. My love for Atlanta has grown and grown and grown, rolling over from an ideal aspiration, to a pressing reality. I could spend the rest of my life there, live and die there, and not have any regrets.

Traveling is always more fulfilling and healthy if you know where home is. My roots have been sinking in to the city of Resurgence. But here I am on my way again, headed to another land. On Monday I’ll be touring around Upper Westside at Union Theological Seminary, the seminary of Columbia University. This could be my abode come September, taking classes on theology and culture.

Can I leave Atlanta, where too few people understand rootedness? Isn’t it true that Atlanta will be the same when I come back? I will be the one who’s changed. I don’t know if I want to let go of all the people I love, all of my places I stroll.

I guess I don’t have to answer these questions now. Let me enjoy my weekend retreat, my time with family amidst this great place, this cultural mecca of American society. We can tell stories, share in meals and remember our connectedness. Today I will leave my future behind me and enjoy the present. And when I return, the future will find its way in me once again.

We are reminded today
that people and interfaces
impose what holidays we celebrate,
what colors we wear
just by their subtleties.

I forfeit my choice,
my reason
for a saintly mindset
to drink a pint
and share a laugh,
because I want
authentic attitudes.

The line grows grey
and even today green
with confusion
like the Savannah river front.

Instead,
I reflect on friends
and loved ones
who are worth
every raised glass,
without someone
telling me
I have to listen.

For I need not
some morning reminder
to know who I love,
who I celebrate.
It just is.

Isn’t life delicate? People are so real, and often faced with the day to day grind, pent up and full of emotion on the inside. We’re all driving to and from work, or school, in and out of meetings, forgetting how delicate everyone else is.

I remember one night in particular. My buddy Chris and I were sitting at the light at 10th waiting to get on the interstate. And I looked over at the car next to me, only to see this young woman weeping, tears clearly falling from her eyes. My heart broke in that moment, and I wanted to reach out and touch her. The light turned green.

Yesterday evening our power went out at the house. It lasted from approximately 7 to 11PM. We were tempted to say, “Of course it would happen to us.” See, nobody else’s power went out. This was strange. We lit some candles, put on some hot water for tea and just waited.

Eventually in the evening, after trying to get a hold of our landlord, we decided to call Georgia Power. It was an automated service, but the woman actually attempted emotional responses. This was not only making me laugh, but it was sort of mind boggling. She tried to respond appropriately and effectively by helping my situation; checking numbers and offering solutions.

But what caught me most of all was our ending,

“You can just hang up the phone,” she said.

“Or say, goodbye.”

A real human being eventually showed up and diagnosed the problems. Our power returned shortly thereafter.

There are differences though, between admiring and following. Following necessarily incurs only when the one following takes on the character and personality of that which he or she is following; the leader. Admiring is not mimicking, but more of a distant expression, a cheering on approach, a watchful satisfaction.

Take for example this. And I have tried to avoid writing about a recent occurrence, but I keep coming back to it. This past week Owen Wilson, among others, was filming a movie in Glenwood Park. This is the development just down the hill from my house in East Atlanta. My roommate and I use the dry-cleaners there. Several of my past housemates and many of my closest friends have worked in this neighborhood. They were filming in and around Drip, the coffee shop, formerly known as Perk. This is crazy. “Famous” people were sipping lattes where I’ve been a regular for almost four years now.

Apparently the movie will be released in 2011 as Hall Pass, also starring Jenna Fischer (Pam of the Office). The premise of the movie is as follows; Jenna Fischer will play as Owen’s wife, and is allowing him a “hall pass” to go have a week of adultery at no consequences, to go explore other women. Now that isn’t so much worth admiring, but I did find myself with others coming to the set in Glenwood Park to watch. I was excited. Owen Wilson’s pretty “cool” and been in some great movies. In some ways I admire him. But mostly I admire his characters that he plays, as fun, witty, and making the most of life. Yet the reality is, Owen Wilson and his characters are just ones to admire. I have no desire to live the life of a movie star. It’s fun to watch from afar, to try to take a picture without a security guard noticing and to see a part of a movie being filmed. Yet he is not one to follow.

And while I was thinking about movie sets. It seems like lately Atlanta is becoming one of her own, a sort of fantastical, apocalyptic snowy entanglement. I mean, did you hear about the zebra that ran loose out of the circus?  This fearful and fearsome creature escaped through rush hour traffic downtown and into the interstate connector. Hundreds of folks pulled off to the side of the road in order to catch a glimpse of this freakish occurrence. Try imaging how sad it’d be as a zebra stuck in a circus. These fierce animals were meant to live out in the wilderness. They were meant to run, not to be caged in to a traveling entertainment prop.

Then I think; life is like a circus. And culture, American-western civilization has me tamed, boxed into a two hour act for everyone else to smile at. I’m performing for the masses to just accept me. But like the zebra, I’m just a little bit different. I’m more than just a simple horse. My colored stripes set me apart. And I love the one quote from the circus spokesman, “It was just an unavoidable accident…”

What! Wasn’t there something that could have been done? Was the zebra really always going to escape?

Like the Beach House lyrics say “This black and white horse arching among us, any way you run, you run before us.” May I follow this great other zebra, because no creature was made to be caged. The escape is unavoidable. And hopefully, we won’t turn back. For there is one who went before us, and broke open the circus doors.

Now, two weeks after Mr. Salinger’s death at age 91, the letters are being made public. They are likely to be among the first batch of many such correspondences, given Mr. Salinger’s history of letter-writing, that will surface and deepen — or perhaps even alter — the public’s understanding of one of the 20th-century’s most puzzling, and puzzled about, literary lights.

Now cloistered at the Morgan Library and Museum in Midtown Manhattan, the letters had reached the museum by way of gift, a single clamshell box of papers in a much larger collection of 20th-century American literature assembled by Carter Burden and donated to the museum in 1998, two years after Mr. Burden’s death.

The references to Mr. Salinger’s writings are tantalizingly specific. One 1966 letter refers to an accumulation of “ten, twelve years’ work” that includes “two particular scripts — books really — that I’ve been hoarding at and picking at for years.”

*all quoted from Ny Times article

I take a break from droning
and remind myself
I am a poet.

The snow was like flurries this morning
leaving clean, clear dust
on the windows
the kind that nobody’s allergic to