it rained hard and long here, so we thought it might flood parts of the town as it often does and you'd have to take the long way around to avoid losing a car in the wash. basements get flooded; sometimes it pours down into low-lying houses and people have messes to clean up for days. we are lucky to live on a hill so after we got our last groceries, were able to just stay home and not worry about it. i started thinking about my novel, but, like most of them, it's a bit mired in about chapter seven; actually i have to say, there's hope for this one, but it might need major revision, and that would require time i still don't have.

instead i've had the remains of the flu which is still, even now several weeks later, still hanging around. my wife also, who blasted her flu with the tamaflu anti-virus medicine, was spared the twenty-pound sinus that i've been carrying around, but still had recovery issues, needed a lot of sleep, and didn't feel well. the boys are now pretty much healthy, but we keep a wary eye on them as they are the ones that usually start it all out, and i'm pretty sure that's how it happened this time.

so i'm wondering how an earthquake could center itself on the oldest church in a town that is clearly named after this church, so that, of all the places in the world, the world's attention focuses on the town of christchurch and the people who are now buried in it, quite a few, the best i can figure. i can't say there's any rhyme or reason to how things happen. in the iowa city tornado a few years back it ravaged quite a few places selectively, so that one sorority would be totally destroyed and the one next to it untouched; the rival churches in town (one german, one irish, and one czech) also getting varying results, leading some to believe (i'm sure) that it wasn't a coincidence. either it's a coincidence, or it isn't. or, it isn't a coincidence, but it has nothing to do with whatever church you've chosen to call your own, or temple, as the case may be. we cast a wary eye for the hand of a purposeful god, but god's purpose may have more to do with the rocks underneath, and the water table, or some experimental nuclear bomb that was set off in the south pacific many generations ago and still hasn't worked its way through the infrastructure.

so i'm going through life with this 20-pound-sinus head, and putting a lot of things on the shelf, like the novel, and the batch of stories, and some projects i'd like to get started, some musical and some related to making movies with my own music. but i did pull together a page of my dad's photography, because that's one thing i can do, and that is almost done, almost gathered what i had; i came to appreciate his sense of composition and the way he used it. his nature photography seemed to culminate in the galapagos islands, where he suddenly found animals that weren't shy of humans, and he was able to walk right up to them and snap, whenever he wanted. this reminds me, really, that i've only scratched the surface here, and put up about thirty of the ones i have on hand, and even then it's barely representative. but it's what i've got, and, now that it's on the surface (cloud surface anyway), it's easier to use as pop, which he has basically given permission for. i've become his publicist. and he is aware that my philosophy is somewhat akin to that of andy warhol: use it. go for what's popular; get it around. i started with an abe lincoln that, believe it or not, had some obama-hope reds and blues in it, though it came from a real mt. rushmore. i had success with that. more could be done; i'm stewing on it. of course i also have rolls of my own photography, mostly of siuc and the surrounding area, and it's poorly catalogued, but rather sits on desktops of various computers, of which we often forget the passwords. it's a really urgent and yet wide and extensive job that will have to be done to get all this stuff in one place, and i'd like to put some of it in calendars, so that next year i'll have something to show for it.

o blog, you are the repository of my dreams, and i swear i put some good ones on here, then turn my back often for months or even years and forget i'd ever even thought of them. but othere, i put here, and they actually come to fruition, for all it takes is a little hard work, sometimes spread over years, and/or interrupted for months at a time by some stupid project or other; like the book of stories which is at this moment interrupted by the novel. or the recording project which is interrupted basically by the fact that i need to reorganize the room a little better, so i can use it a little better...but there's a chance i can actually do this. and a good chance that, having written it down here, i've more or less made a promise to myself.

so to the reader, i'm sorry to appear to leave you out - if any of this really happens, i'll surely let you in on it. the rain seems to have subsided, leaving a very cold and wet street, and empty and very quiet town; the university cooks in the days with the people it tries to process and graduate and run through the mill, and the plants more or less parching from neglect as people work so hard they tend to ignore other living beings. it comes down to the end of the week, and there i am, with my parched plants, and i've noticed them all along, but hardly even had a minute to walk down the hallway and get a spot of water for them...

and now here it is, almost one in the morning, the rain has left our street, and left behind a bit of a touchy, bitter wind, and it was a stray dog holiday, by that i mean it had been presidents day (what i like to call precedents day), back on monday, but everyone forgot and put their garbage out on thursday (when it should have waited a day) and i saw the neighbors' garbage on the curb, in the morning as i was getting dressed, and forgetting precedents day also put our garbage out also, where it sat an entire day until just now when, as i blog, an entire can keeled over and made a loud sound on the wet road as the garbage fell over with it. so my question, really, is, should i go out there, late as it is, and correct the matter - or, should i assume that whatever stray dogs there are, somewhere - they'll know, it's an annual stray dog holiday, a tradition that goes back beyond abe's birthday, pulaski day, columbus day, all those ones that people forget about but that are real nonetheless. if the city is celebrating, but you forgot to celebrate, you have no one to blame but yourself, and your garbage will be everybody's business for at least a day. that is, unless you go pick it up, at one a - m.