Fool's Errand

Awright, gonna treat myself to a proper blog entry today...the sun is shining, the music's good, and I'm in the mood to fly...times have been busy, I've been working hard on Triplopia, and of course working at the pub, and trying to take care of all sorts of persistent paperwork in my ongoing efforts to remain ex-patriat. The Trip was tougher than usual this go round, in spite of the fact that the quality of subs has been consistently going up--word's getting out, as it will when the contributors are pleased to find themselves in your pages. Most of the challenges this time around, however, were computer related--we generally organize subs and editing work in a forum, and the forum we were using was attacked by two worms in the last quarter...after the first, the administrator expressed his disinclination to continue the work involved in maintaining the forum, and the second, which was considerably more damaging, put him over the edge, so we found ourselves unable to access the work we had done to that point--this was mid-December, and the second worm hit just 2 days before I took off for Christmas and New Years in Vigo, Spain, with my good friend Alfonso...a two week trip, during which I had limited access to the net, dial-up, and while there the computer I was using was disabled by a virus. Fortunately, we did have most of the files tucked away in other corners of the net and on disk, but the second worm entailed a mad crunch to get all files into one place, and, as I am generally a very fortunate man, I was able to impose upon the Great Tone to provide us with a couple of rooms on his already existing forum. Without his help, this last issue might have been finished on time, but it would have been one helluva lot harder--faced, as I was, with a 9 day crunch period immediately upon returning to Munich. The issue went up at 00:18 on Sunday, the 16th, so we missed our deadline by just 18 minutes. We're still making tweaks, but the issue is pretty complete...and if I do say so myself, there's some righteous work to be found there.

For those who have been engaging the ongoing discussion on all things evolutionary over at Robin's place,, and for that matter, everyone else, I most heartily invite you to not only read the Yawp, and to tell him exactly why he's full of shit, so to speak, with his Gastrocentric Theory of Cultural Evolution.

Excuses and promotions aside, I'm walking on air this morning because not only did we crunch the issue out (a significant accomplishment in itself), but on the very next day--last night, in other words--I had another session of Absolute Beginners to host--we'd been on hiatus for 5 months, had an abysmal meeting in January, in which two poets and two audience members showed up, and I really wasn't at all sure how well it would go this time around, but upon launching the promo material, I started receiving help almost immediately. One person stepped up to tweak my flyer, which needed it, because my graphics chops are VERY limited, another said she'd come, and I noted she was a DJ and asked her if she would come out and smooth the whole show over with before, after, and intermission music. She did, after a little convincing, and a damned nice crowd came out to play--nice in the sense of decent size, but also in the sense of well-behaved. We kept waiting for them to start acting like rowdy Bohemians, but, truth be told, they were much, much better behaved than a lot of other, more "respectable" crowds we've worked with. Guitarists-bloody good guitarists-poets, comedians, and the whole thing wrapped up with an impromptu sing-along that was, technically speaking, pretty horrible...until they started really getting into the song they were singing, and having fun on the stage, at which point most of the audience started providing the percussion. Excellent...and always good to end a show on such a note. And the service was damned near flawless.

So, this morning I'm in afterglow, dreaming, as I do after a good showing, of what I could do next...this process is so warming, and so--and this is gonna maybe sound strange, but it's true--heartbreaking...just being someone out there who encourages what is creative in those humans I can touch, to watch them through the initial shyness, and to take real pride when they reach past those limits they've convinced themselves they have. To simply see those limits expand is almost enough to give one hope, in spite of every crap thing that's going on in the world. And on mornings like this, I'm almost able to convince myself that the energy generated by that whole process could actually make a difference.

In any case, it's just about the only way I know how to contribute to the good of this world, so I kind of have to stick with it if I'm to think I have a purpose at all. All good--and mornings like this morning, I suspect, are precisely why I keep at it, no matter what.

Do hope your own morning is as bright as mine, and I'll post again soon.

Tschuss--tchitch