late sunday night, or rather monday morning, before a busy week of work, i'm tapping away at a laptop as the six-year-old sleeps on the couch across the room. i've been entering old haiku, scrawled out and carried around in my pocket, for weeks, for months maybe, and now finally put on its web home so i can throw away the scraps, lighten my load. slowly this project is coming together: i've got all fifty states now, but need a few for each season for each state; some states have unrepresented seasons; most need lots more. the seasons, all linked from their kigo (season word); the state-maps linked from their location clues; both are designed to be a kind of hyper-link subconscious. every haiku has both season and location, location giving us clues and atmosphere that we'd have to guess at otherwise. a kind of north american innovation, one could say.

it brings up a number of other projects, continuous and on hold at the same time. it's play season; another play is about to come out of the closet and be performed, this one in early november, the best time of year, imho. a holiday season. this play, about the interfaith itself; people have seen it, but it hasn't been performed.

my music, steadily improving, but not on the web, to speak of; still, i'm feeling good about it.

my pop art, computer-based, spread onto several sites, some just for siuc, some in other places. for example, quaker pop, which has entirely taken over the site of my plays, but which brings up lots of mixed feelings in me. this pop is generally just pictures taken from here and there, not exactly an ethical practice, though i'm not selling them or anything. pop is a shallow, surface-based appeal to color-splashed impression; as i read a little about it, and about andy warhol, i want to work out some of these issues. to that end i've started a site just to talk about it. thought i'd finish designing it, put a template on it, maybe put some pop art on it, and advertise it, but haven't got around to any of that. also, want to collect andy warhol links and quotes and pop art information in general. why? because it's there. because my pocket is too full; i have some andy warhol criticism, i've been carrying it around also, for months.

it's a wonder i can ever find my keys, got so much junk in my pockets. and the heck of it is, i'm not even doing my big one, which would be the novel, incubating now for years. a story occasionally, yes. big plans to print & publish, yes. professional writing, yes, some of that also. but the stuff i'm still waiting for the time to do is staggering. if i can load & publish a haiku, slip it in, link it, put the state in order, more or less, it's a little like bringing musty novels in from the garage to dry out over the winter. use it, or forget it; put it online, or forget about it altogether. these blogs are my gardens, many going to seed and becoming weed patches in front of my eyes. have to do something about that, and that's what pop is for: to be like a songbird, to the web through-hiker, to sing out, maybe, and make a world, a world of gardens, where everything makes its own kind of sense. g'night.

coming up to the week in which my son turned 21, i was overtaken with a number of feelings.....one, it was a long but good 21 years, he's definitely walking through the door, and that's something to notice. two, any kid that has friends, those friends will make him get drunk with no regard, i know, one of those birthdays i ended up asleep in a parking lot, though there was no vomit anywhere in site, and it was a small town, not like anyone was gonna roll me or anything. the friends were gone though, and there were lots of stars out.

so anyway i got this idea to facebook bomb him, and i wrote as many of his friends as i could, and got on his facebook as often as i could, a dozen times over a period of a day and a half. that alone was a celebration of the fact that, of his own free will, he had made me his "friend" just weeks ago. so there i was, dropping messages and pop-art on his facebook and traveling around various fb's seeing what was going on. i learned a lot- like that he has over 500 friends...that over a million people protested the "new FB" (which i didn't know from the old one)- like that you could chat down at the bottom and some of my 100 friends would be down there most of the time, including son & daughter; that you can actually make a movie & put it right on your fb, which i did, that some people spend lots of time there and are quite good at providing "feeds" or "status updates" which i see all the time, or at least saw while i was there. kind of like a real small town, where you go into the diner and everyone's wearing feed caps but you get lots of status updates just about the minute they open their mouths. most of all, it's a social place, and i was stepping all over his social life, and that of others, what they're doing, & thinking, & sharing, etc. lots of photos too.

it's warm out, leaves drying up, getting ready to fall, trees and brush drying up and making a crackly curtain by the road as i pedal around; fall is coming, and it's now getting a bit cooler, a nice time to lean on a tree, take in a breath of air, if i were to get a minute.

so i didn't really have the time to go there so much, chat, make pop art & drop it & all, and so was up late, trying to refocus on grammar homework, & chatting occasionally w/people. one former student said, the new f-b is s-ck, using a mantra of millions, along with f-b vulgarity and international st. grammar; but, it seemed to me, if i could chat with all these friends, & make a movie on the spot, maybe it had s/th to offer. still an open question. but i was confronted with the fact that, the main reason i was there, was, i was still worried about him. and it was just boiling over, in the form of me dropping pictures every couple of hours. here's your family, here's your brothers. his younger brother used to say, infiddion, to mean infinity, as in, do you know how much i love you? infiddion. it's a stock answer around this house, picked up & adopted by the younger ones too, the last thing they hear before they go to bed, some nights. so i'm putting the younger ones to bed and getting ready to do some more fb bombing, and i hear about his friend, a guy he went to school with all the way up, from age 7, through graduations, through history fairs, school holiday sings, etc., and this guy apparently died at the little grand canyon over the weekend, just around the corner from his own 21st. took the wind out of my sails. i couldn't imagine. had to feel, for a minute, the feeling of those parents, their infinite grief, the deep canyon, the scary woods. a moment, at least, i had to stop.

life goes on, it's true, but it's been a long day, even much later, and i'm still thinking about the whole thing. he'd already known about it, it's true, i was the last to find out, i'm sure, but the timing of it was kind of right in my face, so to speak, and as i chatted about it a little, i dragged, my voice, my feet, my spirit. could hardly wheel the bike in, or get to my classes, or keep up the show. it was a tight community, a place that had maybe only one or two classes in a single grade, so they were in each other's classes, not once but many times, over and over. it's like, you sometimes don't really know people, even if you see them that often, how can you know? or do anything? back to fb, people are still flying around, dropping news feeds, status updates, comments, etc. it was pointed out that i was mumbling on my movie (experimental). true. i was wishing him a happy birthday, yes, a day late by now, but, also reflecting on signing over the use of the videocam to f-b or anyone who invented an application that used it...as a world, to step into, to walk through that door, to see adulthood for what it is, & what it offers, i hand it to ya, you did it, you're there. with >500 friends, a family back here, a whole crowd spread all over, you'll be ok. infiddion, is the answer. i'm lucky, & that's the simple truth, as i stand here, look down the road both ways, one way toward graduations, school carnivals, the other, to whatever the future holds. for i have been given more than i ever could have imagined possible, and i still have all that and more. with the click of the publish button, i send thee this prayer...for those that didn't make it, for whatever reason. i will let go of the tree, and the leaves will fall, from now until about mid-november. and spring will, i hope, bring them back, but all in due time.

a rain came through, and that's good because things were looking dry and crinkly as all the uncleaned and now dead brush continue to line the streets waiting for the city or whoever to haul it off. it makes good wood chips, and also firewood for the winter, for those who want to come into town to get it; all week, i rode corey in back of me, in a carriage behind the bicycle, past these huge piles of brush and fallen trees.

it's a bit of a traffic problem, sometimes, on busy roads, as i cross hauling a little guy, but i'm really careful, make full stops at stop signs, and go by the book. "i am vehicle" is my mantra, ok, i'm thinking to myself, you cars & trucks want to go around me, it's your problem, you make sure you have room. i'm enjoying it, actually, and so is corey, i think, though after it's over he's kind of jammed in there like the bumps have lodged him and made him stuck. we've had pretty good weather, right up until tonight, and rode every morning at least; we sometimes see other people hauling kids, going the other way or even passing us up.

the sixteen-year-old wanted to go to a football game tonight, so i asked him who we were playing, on the way down to the high school, and it turns out it's centralia. now i have a thing for centralia; it's a town about 60 miles up the road, that i don't know too well, a stop on the train, a town that has faded maybe, a little, with the mines closing, but i don't really know. when i called my song "long way to centralia" (only song i ever got produced) i was thinking about the train, how once you jump on you can't jump off, but also, how "long way to centralia" was a metaphor for "out there" or "way out beyond the pale of normal people's everyday thoughts" which is where i seem to spend a bit of my mental traveling time. so we get to the high school, tonight, and i pull into the high school drive, and lots of people are standing around, including football boosters from centralia itself, and they stand out because their shirts are bright red and say "orphans" on them. how the centralia team came to be known as the orphans, i have no idea, that's surely another story, another post, but when i went to look it up much later i encountered this story about a fire that's been burning under centralia pennsylvania for forty-five years. but at the time, i'm thinking, it would be nice to just talk to someone from centralia illinois, since it's become a topic at my performances when i have to explain that the song is about jumping on trains, or not, as opposed to being about this particular town. so i said to this guy, welcome to carbondale, and he says hello, glad, i think, that the locals welcome him. and he says the game is delayed by lightning and possible weather, and i tell him that, at this very place, a kid was killed by lightning a while back, and he remembers that a little, i'm sure it was in the news. my son, meanwhile, has jumped out of the van, being at the age where just being seen with a parent is kind of embarassing, though, he's home about an hour later, after the game is cancelled due to rain. and, putting the little guys to bed, i'm reminded of the morning, because the little one likes to carry a tinker-toy sword, more like an orthodox cross, and brandish it in the air, which, for some reason, he did this morning as i pedalled down sunset boulevard (actually sunset rd., maybe), and he's in the carriage, behind the bike, going "i am the power," a kind of anthem from a he-man movie he's watched, maybe two dozen times in the last week. out-a the way, cars. he sings this song, and morning rush-hour traffic moves right out of the way. the little branches of brush that have been littering the bike-path, go crunch under the tires, it's not even necessary to try to go around them.

go salukis!

it got a lot cooler around here, after hurricane ike came through and knocked down a few trees. cooler, but there are a lot of branches out on the curbs as you go around, lots of trucks hauling it away, people dragging them around. it was an asplundh holiday, which is what i call it just because i love that name, which i see on the cherry pickers they use to get way up in the trees to cut off wayward branches. that asplundh guy was pretty clever, so i like to repeat his name and imagine what he'd want himself to be called, if he were still around.

the hurricane came at an unusual confluence of events. first, this blog was becoming famous, as someone mentioned it at the webheads anniversary chat; dozens were there and many of them looked at it right on the spot. this could have been my most famous moment ever, as i generally do nothing to advertise the blog and am more than happy if i get four hits a day, and can generally count among my friends and relatives each of them. that's no problem, really, i have a side like andy warhol that wouldn't mind a little more fame, but a much larger side that says, you're already a big fish in a small town, you already have bit off more than you can chew, what's the sense of gathering in fame, especially of the notorious kind that's so easy to get, when, what would i have to do, appear on letterman anyway. so no thanks,
i'm happy to toil away on this blog, pro bono so to speak, and let the chips fall where they may.

but i'm not beyond looking at the site meter, and seeing who's checking in, counting them by geographical location which gives me an odd sense of awareness of the wide geography of my audience. so, i go to check in at the site meter, and it's down: sunday morning, moving to another server, temporarily out. and may still be, for all i know. no site meter on sun. morning. webheads move on to wiziQ, serious flash, which i haven't downloaded yet, esp. on the laptop i'm using while folks are still snoozing away, so i decide to step out to get the sunday paper, since the boys are entrenched on their he-man movie, which they've now watched more than once. and that's when i saw it, a hurricane, blowing wind with trees and water in it, coming up the street from the south. wow. big ike. glad to meet ya.

had a song prepared for the webhead anniversary, for a webhead banjo picker who has moved on out of this life. didn't know how to put it on mp3, but got my banjo fixed in time for my performance on friday night, a day or two before the chat i just mentioned. got down there, and saw, the place was crowded, time would be tight, no time to fit this particular song in. so, i took the opportunity of tuning the banjo to strum it out, to a gathering audience that was paying scarce attention. guess i thought i'd just play it, put it out there, put it on the table, whether anyone knew what it was or not. people went about choosing seats, making coffee, getting ready for the evening. the song went well and the banjo sounded good, though we almost forgot about it later. but, oddly enough, during the performance, which went well in general, my partner started tripping up, during a song life goes on, a song we know well & know by heart, but, obviously, a song begging for interruption. she missed her words, missed her beat, got flustered, in general couldn't keep with the program. then, she got it back together, got back on track, and life went on. a confluence, maybe, of spirits, or just of things happening...makes me wonder if i'm the only one who even saw it.folks said the performance went well; i didn't hear anyone mention the fact that we tripped up on our cover song. then again, usually they wouldn't; so it goes....chou

don't put a period where god put a comma, said the church sign at the dangerous intersection where i cross oakland and mill sometimes half a dozen times a day, sometimes on bicycle with carriage, sometimes in car. god's started grading writing, i thought, we're in the same line a' work, though i doubt if god stays up as late as i do, sometimes. weeks are long, grammar's bad, though students are to a person pleasant, polite, interested, & i pack 'em in, most days. also performed tonight, fiddle & hardware-mangled banjo, at a church not two blocks from the one with the sign; this was the opening for cousin andy's season of good folk in carbondale. music was good, helped my soul, and it was a local crowd, enthusiastic and friendly.

the church sign writer, i'm sure, was thinking of people who were giving up on life, which i'm not, and probably wasn't referring to late night bouts with essays. watching ike, i'm glad to be safe at home, dry, with kids asleep & a diabetic, thyroidian cat prowling to get better & enjoy what's left of life. humidity seems to be over 100% here, warm & tropical, with rain almost certainly coming, pushed up from ike, but i'm so tired, i kind of look forward to a break from soccer, running around, vet, all that stuff that usually happens when it's not raining. hate to say that, though; ike looks like iowa looked, & i wouldn't wish that on anyone.

at the corner of the construction fence, right outside the blue hallway stairs, where the fence looks out at the new library, there is a sign on either side of the post, with arrows pointing away from each other; each sign directs you to go a different way to the new library. it's a logical absurdity; you can look straight at the signs and be directed to go two different ways at once. i like this of course; want to grab a picture of it, and this is my favorite neighborhood anyway, as the long grasses going to seed on the other side of the construction fence, are interrupted only by an occasional concrete pipe tossed aside by construction workers, and the workers occasionally occupy parts of the fenced-in prairie to make more noise or dust, or just to enjoy the prairie with their lunch. on my side of the fence, the kamakura garden, orderly, blooming, different flowers, bamboo, kept in order by legions of workers directed to keep the university landscaping up to par. so, as i walk along this fence, an occasional animal gets trapped up against it, or, more often, i just enjoy the changes in color as both the construction grasses and the kamakura plants bloom & change slowly. dust, noise, mud, trucks etc. come from the library which itself has been under construction now for several years. in the other direction the pulliam bells go off, usually right as i'm walking, for either noon or five, as i'm walking there both times, & sometimes in the morning.

so finally the killer was, today, a three-hour blackboard session in the lab, as we exhausted harried teachers got led through the details of putting entire courses, and grades, up on a computer course-management situation. ok, so i have mixed feelings about the whole operation, i'm not here to complain, but my main problem is, fifty hours into the week or so, i'm in no mental shape to keep up with three straight hours of concentration...not going to happen. i do my best, but, then, lapse into pop art, a spontaneous exhibit that worked on the new library & its shapes & colors...i swear though, i've got to stop using other folks' conceptions, and bring my own camera- i'll start with that sign, but, there's lots of stuff i want to get. what i call salukihenge, for starters, big rocks jutting out of the center of campus in a prehistoric, celtic kind of way. or the little sculpture under the eaves of nw faner hall, the rocks in the basket. now that i've started seeing design, & texture, & meaning all over the place, i want to get a little more of it. it's a balance, it's a natural way of processing lots of writing, lots of commas, lots of misplaced articles. what can i do? pop art, i guess. embrace the dust, the grasses gone to seed, the stray snake, the signs on the construction fence- i can live in a one-horse town, long as i got a horsehair bow for my fiddle- and yes, everyone wants change now, obama wants change, mccain wants change, the panhandler on the corner wants change, don't worry about it, change is comin', we're talking 100 mile/hour winds. don't put a period where..., hey, listen, i don't ever, ever, put a period anywhere, unless i absolutely have to. in a url, maybe. but i got a few more...

don't publish, when god wanted a draft...
don't use italics, unless god wants you to park diagonal...
don't keep pullin' horsehairs off the horse, without praising him once in a while...
don't sharpen, when god wants you to save as...
don't stop too long at the kamakura meditation shelter, the wasps that actually live there might take it the wrong way...
don't walk away with too many tadpoles, the frogs have it bad enough...
never forget the diaper bag...
save as pdf, send as an attachment...
drive safe, park legal, be "hayve"...
but most of all, live to see another day, don't let your hard drive crash, live to try google chrome, see another version of firefox, & see if macs can print blogs off whatever they come up with. store stuff on the desktop, even if it drives everyone nuts...it's 'cause i'm not finished with it... and, finally, moving stuff onto the trash is how you get stuff out the front door on a mac...makes perfect sense...whaddaya mean it's not intuitive...

happy 10th, webheads!



i put this on my personal page as a conscious decision...there is so much about the webheads that i learn for the purposes of using technology to teach...not being afraid...doing good stuff with students that helps them be part of the new world...learning how to use new tools...talking about esl/efl as i would in any teacher's lounge, only this one virtual, friends all over the world...

uae, argentina, australia, brazil, kuwait, pittsburgh, turkey, pakistan, caracas, maryland, germany, osaka, mexico, arizona, ottawa, oaxaca, paris, taiwan, sudan, kamloops, houston, virginia, china, west texas...

i tend to think geographically, so the first & most amazing thing is, every sunday morning, almost, sun rises on a quiet sleepy no-count one-horse town, & i'm with these people all over the world talking about this stuff & learning...i've learned so much i can't begin to express it...but, most of all, it's a community, it's friends, & i know them, so i care what happens & look forward to seeing them & knowing where they'll be next time they check in...& i find chat to be intensely personal, interesting, a whole new medium- and how would i know a thing about it if i hadn't done it? like everything, you have to just jump in there sometimes, but most of all, have someone to talk about it with later, tell about the goods and bads, compare it to other stuff that's out there, what you can do, & why you'd want to do it...

this cartoon is a good example...i tried following it, and ended up making my own...but couldn't copy my own, so i ended up linking to my own, but copying the webheads' which someone had already made & generously provided...



i no longer remember who, or where, i got it, ...i've been a webhead for a few years....i knew a couple of folks before i really joined...and, never had time much for hardly anything but the chat, even the f2f times, i'd like to have been there more, every meal, every time...but couldn't. first, though, let me say one important thing, you don't have to know 12:00 from a vcr to be a webhead, otherwise they never would have let me hang around, and i never was much of a technological genius, yet i never felt like i had to prove that i was, or that anybody was anything better than just trying to figure one's way around a new world...i am like lots of us in that i recognize the changing world, the need to be in the places where people are going, and especially where my students and my children are going, and where they're going to need to be going, and i know, we've all got to be getting familiar with this stuff, 'cause otherwise the bad guys will get there first & lock the doors behind them...but mostly, i just like hearing where they are, what they're doing, where they're going, what's up...

key west, la plata, abu dhabi, islamabad, yucatan, beijing, lisbon, seoul, phoenix, brasilia, chicago, melbourne, tashkent, oaxaca, galveston, seattle (f2f), new york city (f2f), fukuoka, ...

one more thing to say...lee baber was a schoolteacher in virginia, a banjo picker, a webhead, a kindred spirit...i'm playing the banjo this weekend, & i'll send a song out, i've got one for her...tried to put it on mp3, put it here, share it with webheads, but it hasn't happened yet....for one thing, i spent all week teaching, & trying to fix the banjo, no time to figure out the details of making one's own mp3, and the guy who could have helped me left town, such is life. webheads will hear it though, i promise you, the future is ours, and life is too good to keep this stuff to ourselves.

to the webheads, who share their real world in the virtual world, and offered me a hand up...

happy tenth! cheers, from southern illinois, to all!



come join the anniversary party...i'll be there if i can...
-tom leverett, carbondale illinois usa

new story: the sun sets on the western horizon. comments welcome!

will it play in peoria, an old expression from broadway in new york, was assumed to ask whether some outrageous piece of theater would go over in mid-america, in the heartland, in the heart of the heart of the country. but this gave the town of peoria a complex, or so local legend goes, so that in this illinois river town, four hours north of here, theater was said to be innovative and hoppin'. i never knew, of course, as i'd been through the place a number of times but never stopped to go to the theater. listened to john hartford's steamboat songs a few times though...

& got the opportunity over labor day, a holiday which like others i take seriously, to go up there to peoria to see family, in a small house with a half-dozen pear trees in the yard. a good place for labor day, good fresh sweet corn, garden tomatoes, huge barbecue, nice family, and the city itself was definitely taking the day off. the hotel had a pool, and the kids swam twice; it sweltered outside but we relaxed inside. now by the way i've been cutting millionaire bucks out of the st. louis post dispatch, now well over ten million i've cut for sure, not realistically expecting to win anything as everyone knows, or at least i know, that church groups work together to amass bigtime millionaire bucks, and the newspaper employees are not beyond cutting them out of large stacks of leftover newspapers, for though they themselves are barred from the contest, what harm is it if their friend wins a free car? so i set my sights low, gamble on the small stuff like a book of pizza coupons, and still have to bid my entire bundle of eleven million and not win it because some schmuck gambles 11.1 at 2:59. so it goes. i do it to feel the newsprint on my fingers, i do it because shuffling through old newspapers that i haven't quite read very thoroughly gives me a personal sense of walking through the past, but also i offer my humble stack to any church group or individual who wants to go together and possibly win a free pizza. why not? i'm not going up to st. louis or anything, to really get involved, and, anyone who writes me is more than welcome...

peoria's a factory town, i remember driving through there one day at five when the factories were letting out and listening to factory rock on the radio, they have caterpillar, and who knows what other factories, maybe not so many anymore, but it's also surrounded by miles and miles of corn, shimmering in the labor-day light, tassels waving in the breeze, particularly near an empty stretch of road with a big road sign saying "Use" on it...maybe that's the name of a town? a day later i'm teaching the very word, i used to live in kansas, i used to drive to school, i'm used to waking up early, a hammer is used to pound a nail, and i say to them, swear to god, there's a town called use. not that you'd want to go there or anything, or maybe you would, what do i know.

so meanwhile, in the middle of a very busy time, a very sweet former student brings back a postcard from china, where she's been at the olympics, and it's a very important postcard, a postcard of the big stadium, the bird's nest, being mailed on the very day of the opening ceremony, very meaningful as she points out, so i make pop art out of it (below), i could hardly wait, for some reason...not sure what andy warhol was saying about marilyn monroe, but i figure i could say the same thing about the bird's nest myself, and who would know the difference? but the question is, whether i should point it out to her, whether she would appreciate it, or think maybe i was poking fun, or worse, messing with an important symbol. no. it's kind of like, if it's a serious symbol, prominent, important, meaningful, all the more reason to put it in colors. don't know if my students would agree, and at the moment, the building is decorated with all these gajillion flags from all over, and sure enough, all the new macs have these built in cameras to make pop-art. but i do have to look into andy w. a little more, what do i know about pop art? is there any evidence of what he actually meant, with his four marilyn monroes, all different colors, lips in purple, besides, art is what you can get away with, and, i'm a deeply superficial person?

had a good visit, a daughter and son-in-law came all the way from seattle, the peoria hosts were wonderful, musta eaten a half a dozen pears, but forgot to grab a bucket to bring home. back here, it's raining a soft drizzle, cooled it down a little, and i'm behind at work, behind on blogging, got stacks and plants taking over the office. i make pop art, i swim, i gamble on pizza with my millionaire bucks which i'd love to donate...the classes fly by, & i use the pop-art function on the school computer at every opp. why not. that rich taste of homegrown pear, fresh sweet corn, still in my mouth, stories of lake washington, microsoft, the iowa floods, and various things to chew on...

and then, in the peoria motel, i'm in a wet bathing suit with a wet kid or two maybe, and this older couple, tux and bridal gown and computer printer, get into the elevator. older, but tolerant, gentle, friendly people. obviously dressed for a wedding, and it turns out it's their daughter, and their daughter is a stage manager for the peoria theater. a stage manager who has every step of the wedding absolutely choreographed, and has even been printing the details, on this very printer, for months. guess that makes you parents of the bride- congratulations, i said. and have a happy labor day.