it's turned really really steamy outside; the tomatoes are enjoying it, but i've taken to avoiding it and especially trying to keep those threshold experiences, where you experience a temperature difference of over forty degrees or so, between the inside of a building and the outside, to a minimum. this is one of the hazards of the modern world, besides insecticides and cell-phones, and such things are beginning to wear on me and make me tired at night.

i have however been working on just passing through, my autobiography and set of travel stories, and i have several things to report. first, the whole thing is basically already on this blog including the latest entries which you will see below if you scroll down. although i have put virtually everything in all-small-letters on this blog, i found it a pain to take all those entries down, and change them to caps when necessary, but that's how i read and did basic editing, so it wasn't all that bad. anyway there were a few with caps in there and by the time i finished i'd stopped worrying about it, and the ones below are in caps. notice that as you go through the ones on this blog that the all-small and all-italics makes them hard to read. ah, but they were here first. i'm thinking of calling it: just passing through: true stories from out there and beyond, which might be too long, or might imply that i made it out to space though i never really got past north america, until i got to korea which is relatively late. i'm still in something like 1995 in the autobiography part, having gotten tripped up where my rotten marriage ruled so many of the events yet i don't really want to talk about that. yet that is part of a true life and part of it is to go through, step by step, the parts of my life as i lived it and passed through it. then, interspersed, every other one, are the travel stories, which have to be put in order of a kind, i suppose, and i'm working on that also, and am glad to report that even as of now there are roughly as many of one as the other, with plenty of each yet to come. so it's a real document, about 55 pages single-spaced, almost ready for some serious editing.

now on the writing front i should mention that i finally made copies of pile of leaves: stories of a rake which i am distributing to friends and family as soon as possible, and, the walmart stories (a dozen crime stories from a well-known, big-box discount retail chain) will soon be reprinted: this first one is actually more marketable, a little odd, but also easier to print and tangier. short and sweet. the novel? it's bogged down as usual but it's up to about eight chapters too and isn't dead by any means. just kind of being re-jiggered, or altered, just a hair, while i reorganize.

and now, outside, it begins to swelter; the tornado season about ends, and it turns to miserable, humid, way-too-hot, kind of usual southern-illinois summer. it occurs to me that coffee is the wrong beverage for this kind of stuff but i'm kind of locked in a habit. i ride a bike a mile-and-a-half each way, and swim, yet still gain weight because it's so hot and i eat all the time, and i feel myself holding onto all the ice cream just to protect myself from the swelter. ach. but you don't want to hear about this.

it irritates me that this blog has lost some of its visual appeal; with the death of my photo service i've lost the pop lighthouse, and can't find it, though i know it's around and can make another one anyway, though i haven't. the fam pics are a bit stale and i really need a kind of redesign, and i'm thinking about doing that, and making this much more visual, more visuals all the time, but i'm kind of dragging my feet on that also it being ninety-nine in the shade and me being exhausted all the time just from the forty-degree jump four times, required just to go outside to get a cup of coffee. my band partner is down in texas, camping and playing folk music twenty-four seven, but it's dry down there and one can actually spend time outside without suffering from wishing-you-could-crawl-out-of-your-own-skin. today though as i was driving, i came upon this spot where pretty flowers were growing out from the cracks of a sidewalk and wall, and i stopped and took pictures, so i'm not totally dead, though i haven't been playing much music myself; i'm teaching again, and this time, it's the same old lesson as i've taught many times, yet i heard it a little differently this time; one lecturer, what she says is this: it's not being busy that kills you. it's not the stress of a test, the stress of taking it or making it or being too busy or being frazzled at work. it's thinking about the stress, and thinking about being busy, that sets of the chemicals that in effect weaken your immune system and make it so people who are too busy get sick a lot. so the secret is, obviously, if you can't make yourself less busy at work, make yourself more able to not think about it while you're not.

the tomatoes are early this year; the wildflowers are having a heyday; the grasses are going bonkers; the poison ivy is so happy that i'm breaking out just thinking about it, even though i teach a lesson about las vegas where they have less of it. it's a high-stress, high allergy kind of world, and it's not getting any better, though i'm finally getting some of my stuff printed...pictures coming.