1. The Ebony Hillbillies

"Thomas Wolfe couldn’t go home and William Faulkner couldn’t seem to leave very successfully and Ernest Hemingway seemed to be looking for some lost idea of it everywhere and T.S. Eliot apparently found it about five minutes after arriving in England, becoming even paler and more prunish and speaking with an accent, and then you’ve got Annie Proulx who seems to feel so right at home just about anywhere she is that she can’t get a pen in her hand fast enough to suit her, and there’s Eudora Welty who says home is where everything begins, really, in whatever little place, to which someone like James Baldwin might say, Yeah, right, it does, and isn’t that a bitch, and then F. Scott Fitzgerald comes along and trumps them all by pointing out how home is not just a place, but a place in time, how we’re all borne (born?) ceaselessly into the past." -Keith Lee Morris

1. Never mind what you're selling, it's what you're buying.

2. "Here's a prediction:

when you have stories to tell,

you will tell them." -David Grubbs, "Kentucky Karaoke"

3. Focus on the experience of life and not materiality.

"Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective." -Francis Jennings, writing about Captain John Mason's attack on a Pequot village on the Mystic River in 1636, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, 1974

1. Flail wildly on the precipice.

2. Skeleton Blues by Simon Joyner. After years of paying attention to Joyner, how did I miss his best album when it came out?

3. Cycling today turns from light drizzle ride to 43 mile slog through some serious rain. I wind along the coast in a downpour. The sea looks like silver. Blotches of rain on the water are like undefined birth marks. Oil tankers dot the horizon. Catalina is a ghost ship in the low storm clouds. It's all quite thrilling until my right foot becomes completely submerged in my shoe. Then my left. My socks turn grey. I literally climb out of the rain to the sun on Palos Verdes East. I have to pay close attention to dodge all the snails crawling across the road. Their world is too slow for them to realize that humans and bicycles and cars are things that can be avoided - to them it's just more force majeure. One of the switchbacks is covered with foamy soap that looks like snow. On the descent, I think of Merckx and Ocana dragging their shoes on the pavement to slow down in a hail storm. Miraculously, on the way back, I can see one of the Channel Islands. By the time I get home, I am cold, wet, somehow - muddy, and the sun is out. True Autumn road riding.

4. "I'd like to see you --

I had a funny dream

and you were wearing funny shoes,

you were going to a dance,

you were dressed like a punk

but you were too young to remember."

Hiatus complete. Leaving for Berlin on Sunday.

"'Don't be reconciled. Turn off your television sets,' Peterson said, 'cash in your life insurance, indulge in a mindless optimism. Visit girls at dusk. Play the guitar. How can you be alienated without first having been connected? Think back and remember how it was.'"         -Donald Barthelme, A Shower Of Gold, from Sixty Stories, 1981

1. "We ride together, we die together, Bad Boys for life."

2. "The rituals are unimportant. What matters is what's inside." -Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, The People vs. Larry Flynt

3. "Thank God it's only a movie." -Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

4. Califone

5. You know how you can see the breeze in a photo? 

It's kinda like the feelings in a letter.

6. Ballast