5:05 p.m. Thank you, you.

Beautiful late afternoon. Up in the aerie opening up an email from Omi Writers Colony, located a couple of miles down a couple of country roads from me. Reading next Saturday. I think I'll go. Sounds really good. I went to one last fall, which I enjoyed very much. And it's not a BBQ so much as a really lovely catered spread.

Trying to get my Head on Straight, as the Graham Parker song goes. Went for a long walk this morning with the weights. The meadow, so vast and lightly curved that one almost has the impression that it reflects the curvature of the earth, which in recent days, weeks, has been resplendent with goldenrod and asters of various sorts has been completely shorn, mowed down. It's a bit of a shock to see it so denuded. I'm going to trust that the land conservancy people know what they're doing, that it's ultimately for the health of the meadow. Still, since it is so particularly beautiful this time of year - I wish they could have waited. Did it break the tractor operator's heart to clearcut like that? For some reason I think he's English, and I think he knows what he's doing. With one path, for example, he's formed the path not as a straight line, but as a gentle beckoning curve. Also, once he was mowing the regular narrow paths as I was walking and he stopped the motor as I passed which wasn't strictly necessary, but I thought was a very nice gesture. Anyway - I'll just have to trust that somehow it was necessary, and all for the best. I wonder about little animals though, too. What are they going to do without the meadow? Ah well - there's always next spring.

Spent some time this afternoon skimming the first half of a book entitled Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture, by Lewis Hyde - in the American form, charming, sexy, boundary busting confidence men of sorts with voracious appetites and a talent to trap and to toy and to evade and to prevaricate. I am constitutionally not at all like that - but I had a fatal attraction to one, once in my youth, revived more recently. And plowed under again.

I love the energy of that sort, and of course creativity abounds, and achievement, and charm, and erotic energy, and all the rest. The only "but" I have is the casualties in their wake. At the moment - me, not that a large part of my hurt isn't self-inflicted. Look - I'm 51 - why can I never be brisk & dismissive?

I think about this on a scalar level. I'm reminded of how an aspect of the United States has aspects of the "adventurer" about it - bold, assertive, asserting narratives, making all sorts of messes, cutting and running, keeping up appearances where necessary. I mean, aspects of our government have been doing this for a long time, especially in recent foreign war adventures. And somehow there's something so seductive about that swashbuckling about the world. Individuals are like that - and whole countries too. I have this theory that that's why people get selected to go to certain colleges or universities. The sortings and selections are useful on some level. The guy I am/was fatally attracted to has - all matters of intelligence and intellect aside - a certain kind of very particular psychological profile that I think even in his prep school youth must have been perceived as especially useful in a particular kind of way - that something in his personality reflects a certain kind of American assertive adventurousness.

I know I'm babbling and I'm not going to return to fix this post a hundred times.

I myself graduated from a very illustrious college - but sometimes (even though I actually transferred, didn't even start out there!) feel that I was one of their "mistakes." I don't mean that so literally, they knew what they were doing accepting me (I'm not from a wealthy family, either) - but there's a certain form of achievement that certain colleges of this Ivy/Seven Sister type that I think they're just better at.

I don't know. Of course it doesn't matter anymore in the slightest. And I'm grateful - most certainly - for my education. But if you're a liquidy sort of reflective person such as myself - well, there's no use trying to make me over into a high-powered achiever of the usual ascendant sort.

Wow, this nation of baby-boomers. There's a whole huge demographic of us out there, too many to become so redundant. What's going to happen? If we're not the Kick-Ass High Achieving Sorts, we're not wanted. And yet, in our age group (50-plus) in some ways we're just coming into our own...

Anyway, I don't mean this as a big huge policy discussion. I mean - there's a seductive allure to the United States (or was) when you're, say - well I don't know, I wish Mr. Judt were around to supply the postwar European country to complete the analogy.

I'm a first generation Polish American, born of traumatized parents who were doubly, trebly or more exiled after European (and Kazakstanian labor camped) childhoods at war. There was nothing in my upbringing, from what my parents had experienced and could possibly offer, that prepared me for the American adventurer.

Launching this as is, with photos from the garden this late afternoon. Sweet dreams, dear all.