So. I meant to write yesterday, honest, because all day long it was the 17th of September, 47 years since Charlie Finley, the owner of the KC Athletics, brought the Beatles to town. Why couldn't I go? Because we were living in a ratty old farmhouse, made worse by my messy family moving into it, down around Chilhowee, a good 60 miles from KC. I was 13. Couldn't drive. No friends. No money, but rich in anguish. My poor old long-commuting dad brought me a couple of Beatles singles. One was a Vee-Jay 45, the other a Capitol.... very, very, very nice of him, especially considering all the crap & ridicule I took off of him re: those long-hairs.... And I found out some time later that 17 Sept. 1964 marked 102 years since the Battle of Antietam. Nearly 23,000 men, lost, killed, wounded, just one day.

Just.

One.

Wretched, bloody day, poor souls.

And I got to participate [talk. sing (!), make people laugh - shoot, cut me off another slice of that! I love talking to a bunch o' people] in the annual author breakfast at the Reading Reptile. If you're ever in Kansas City, go there. You won't be sorry. You might think that you're walking into a bookstore. You'll quickly realize that you're entering Pete's & Deb's living work of art. I hurried home afterwards to take Mimi outside to relieve herself then got down to painting. Listening to The Good Earth. Boy oh boy, that Pearl Buck. no matter what else she wrote and she wrote a lot; she'd written her masterpiece. She was magic. [read it if you haven't] It's like no matter what J.,P.,Geo., & R. did, they'd been the Beatles to the world & carved their songs into the culture.

so I didn't write a word yesterday. didn't even sign a book. Nobody bought one.

Hard times, but there are compensations.

starting fresh

So, it seems fitting to revisit this blog this week, being a time for new beginnings, buying school supplies, sharpening pencils. After a very long inertia siege, I've taken up one of my several unfinished novels. Beastly it is to conjure characters into existence then leave them languishing in my hard drive. I've a painting [for a handful of historical panels hereabouts, in the Queen City o' the Trails - did you know that a man who had worked long & hard to buy his freedom ended up building many a wagon, intended for the long trails to Oregon & Santa Fe? that he became a most prosperous businessman just a few blocks from where I sit typing?] to do, a sculpture [I've been taking myself weekly to a ceramics studio] to complete, and a massive revision to do, for a book having to do with the Gold Rush, when my hometown was far and away livelier than it is these days. So heck, why not blog?

I can think of lots of reasons....