How long is your to do list? I have neglected so many things for so long in deference to my plate spinning labors at the HAC that it now seems that my to do list expands exponentially in every diretion that I look.

I don’t suppose that I am feeling overwhelmed, it’s just like that moment when you walk into a house that hasn’t been cleaned in a very long time and you have to ask yourself, “What order do I tackle these messes in?” Ok, a little overwhelmed, but not reduced to inaction. I think you start and end in the kitchen? Thoughts?

I’ve shifted into practical gear. Instead of packing for my trip to the ville I threw all my dirty laundry in the back of the van and availed myself of Bob’s laundry. Joseph covered my gas to the ville as a travel expense relating to our potential project. I’m not sure how much I am going to talk about that here. I think maybe not much at all. I’m sure you’re curious, but I am mostly going to follow William Gibson’s advice, if you keep letting the steam out then the water will never boil.

Let’s just say I am at the research phase of the project. I know what I don’t know, what I need to know, and how I plan on learning it. This will involve digesting several of the books in my library on Tibetan Buddhism. Reading cover to cover the back issues of “Enlightenment” magazine, kindly supplied by my brother Phil. And a friendly chunk o’ time at the old Wash U library located convieniently a short fifteen-minute walk from my front door. I need to become an expert and get the back-story on the New Age. Derek, who are my must reads?

There is also the not so small matter of altering my style, so you can gauge my progress through the reduction of stylistic faux paus. In my personal writing I’ve always been a member of the stream of consciousness Gertrude Stein indifference school of free form, but as Mary oft points out “Mr. English teacher” the medium is the message and your credibility can hang on a semicolon. Given the spiritual subject matter of this book, credibility will be key. I will also presumably be outsourcing a line edit. I mean, whom am I kidding? This lake has depth, but the surface she is choppy.

Sunday in the ville I woke up on Jen’s couch and went back to Bob’s. While he continued his kip, I finished up my laundry and watched “Joe Vs. The Volcano,” quite an appropriate film for my circumstance. Tom Hanks three years in a dead end job for three hundred a week, my exact situation. Volcanoes or bust baby.

Karen, my friend who teaches high school here in St. Louis, has just discovered Joseph Campbell. She’s using it to give her students a language to talk about The Odyssey.

M.B. “Really? I thought everyone found Campbell and Emerson in High School. Then you get a little older and read Nietzsche so you can put their idealism in context. Sort of a “wow” followed by a “hang on a minute”.”

Aren’t you going to miss these quotes from M.B.? Last Wednesday started the hundred-day count down to her move to be with Maureen. Yet another series of transition questions loom: do I get another roommate, a smaller place, move in with my sister, move to the state in which I hope to attend graduate school while keeping fluid enough that I don’t get stuck should something else open up, etc.?

Are you cool? Do you want to move in with me? Beware potential roommate, for I am not substantially on the sane side of circumstance. I am generally and without a doubt a fosterer of fun, but creativity and destruction have been carpooling in my fast lane for some time now.

Ha. Well anyway I’ve been thinking about old Joe Campbell (The Power of Myth guy on PBS every year) and the call to adventure to which the hero must rise. What comes after the call? Why, the arming of the hero by Athena on the beach of course. That sounds fun, except she’s going to hand me a mop to start with.

Funster scene #32 from the most recent lost weekend:

Julie Minn, of Minn’s cuisine, has joined our table. Bob is drinking my family recipie for modified Manhattans, a special secret blend of herbs and spices meant to enliven any family card game. Rod and I have taken to bottomless gin martinis, over which the eight-ounce peppercorn filet that is resting against my rib cage has only so much sopping up authority. They are bottomless because Rod never finishes one before he calls for a “topper,” and so our support staff has run an I.V. line from the shaker at the bar.

We are the only ones in the restaurant. We are hidden from the bar by an oriental screen. The bar patrons have given up on their own coversation and are watching us through the screen like a Mylasian puppet show.

A side note – I am a world traveler who has had filet from London to Honolulu and Ruth’s Chris cannot touch the magic that is wrought in Julie’s kitchen. That filet alone is worth a trip to the ville. It is the best I have ever had and it is consistently so. I am never disappointed.

Now my Scottish Brogue has come out and I am being encouraged to say ridiculous things like, “There is no teetotalling in Davy Jones’ locker!” One of the women at the bar is so impressed by us that she retrieves a bottle of her home brewed brandy from the trunk of her car and adds a layer to our inebriation. We shoot snifters of the honey-flavored distillate and compliment her grace and fortitude.

Illegal Tense Shift

What would classical German philosophy be if not for its’ historic romantic obsession with the Orient? Rod was wishing to sing the praises of the Orient for Julie and began an oration on the Tao Te Ching, to which I raised some objections of interpretation, and before I knew it Rod had stormed off. Yes, we had a fight about the Tao Te Ching and he went home.

Having lost half our floor show through Rod’s departure we adjurned to the Dukum for Irish Car Bombs, Guiness, and the sort of rollicking that leaves bumps and bruises that lack interpretive context. The weeklong Bob fest had begun (there are still several days to go. I’ve tagged out, but Bill is arriving after his gig in Columbia with poker and Jazz on his agenda). Would that we had overlapped, but alas I had a dog at Vanessa’s to retrieve and a Mark to pick up from the airport.

Mark and I had a nice chat about his time in Seattle and we got him out the door this morning in plenty of time to make that 2:30 class.

Sebastian is barking at door-to-door Catholics. I just had to put him in the basement.

“Are you aware that the Catholic Church is the only Church established by Christ?”

“I’m aware that Paul thought that.”

“Catholicism is the faith from which all other Christian denominations have branched off. Catholics are the only keepers of the apostolic line, I’m sure you know what that is.”

I’ve heard some good lines before Gracie, but the apostolic ones have never worked on me.

They were two very sweet old ladies from a local church that I was very nice to, even if my dog did scare them a bit. He did not like them one bit. I took their literature and we chatted pleasantly for a short while. Unfortunately that probably means they’ll be coming back to make disciples of all nations. Did you know that Nietzsche was both the son and the grandson of prominent Lutheran ministers? Imagine that. When one stops looking for the logical conclusions of a theology and starts looking for their logical precursors then dinosaurs and Zarathustra become much more problematic.