Arizona Journal, Day 2

Last night I went on a walk and ended up at the bar of the Cup Cafe, the nice little restaurant inside the famed Hotel Congress. A fiftyish hippie dude--"I'm not from here, I came here in the seventies"--told me he likes to compose haiku when he bicycles. The motion of his peddling sets the rhythm of his poems. When he gets off the bike, he runs to his desk and writes down the finished poem. On my other side sat a chic fortyish woman from Montreal, in town for the giant annual Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase. She told me she was a gemologist, which at first I thought was something like a cosmetologist, but apparently it requires rigorous schooling involving geology and math and other things.

After dinner I came home to a big party for A's birthday. Lots of interesting people there--A & K have great friends--and I got to see the big house where A & K live. Dang! It has sixteen-foot beamed ceilings, tile floors, and adobe walls. The high ceilings give everything a kind of drama and import, as if this is the party that will be written up in poetry biographies forty years later.

D, one of the other residents, asked me if I read when I'm in the middle of a writing project. Sometimes, I said. I can't, he said. It's like trying to remember one song when another is playing. Isn't that great?

The night before last, A. said to me, "As much as I hate people, I love them." Happy birthday, dude.