An Anniversary, Ms. Havisham Style

Well, this journal has made it to another year. This is my sixth anniversary here. But it's also the most bittersweet, since many of the friends I looked forward to reading have abandoned the site and others only post infrequently. As a measure of how things have changed, I almost went back and changed that "here" in the second sentence to "there," since most of the comments I get these days come indirectly, via the "notes" I import from Live Journal into Facebook. Sigh. It depresses me, because there are many things about LJ that I still dig, despite its many problems, from the ease with which concentric circles of friendship -- intimate to casual -- can be managed to the comment threading that still makes Facebook's implementation seem ridiculously lame. And I say all that despite a pretty strong hunch that my life would have gone a lot better if I'd never taken the plunge into personal blogging. Anyway, here's the tally, for what it's worth: 3267 journal entries, 13,849 comments received and 11,350 comments posted. I wonder if I'll make it to 4000?

Ten Minutes Well Spent

From Allen Ginsburg, Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954-1958--

10 Minute Sonnet

The cunts of wheelbarrows & the cocks of cars
Fuck in the starry nite; Embarcadero,
I'm working on the S.P. shifting bars
of gold & lead & iron, Jailhouse Joe
he works beside me, & I work by Mars,
the fattened trucksman with his tattered No.
Mailbags, Xmas, Frisco, whores of Port
Time's truck rides down the hiway to the hill
over the road home, over my nose a wart,
Joe's in Carolina, Tangiers in Bill,
Lucien's in N.Y., Neal's stopped short
I'm all alone on the dock I made my will,
all things tend to this moment, shadow,
and the rest, the past, this is my mad meadow.

Know Time Like the Present