18 days

I had this weird dream last night. Silvio Berlusconi was in it and David Hasselhoff. At one point, while talking with David Hasselhoff, I got frustrated and kicked him down a flight of stairs. As I stepped over him, I announced to the barista that trying to talk to him was like trying to talk to a gerbil. I don't even want to go into what Silvio was doing.

Mind you, the dream actually makes sense to me and why those two fools would be in it. Sometimes dreams are tools of direction and import, sometimes they are just a mishmosh of the day. I just had way too much coffee yesterday and too little sleep.

What does it say about your mental state when dreams about Silvio Berlusconi make sense?

I don't even want to get into why Hasselhoff was hanging around in my mind. But I think it was because I had several conversations about the weather and for the life of me, couldn't remember the name of Punxatawney Phil. I kept going, 'you know, the little guy.' and the barista at my favorite café tried to guess who I meant and asked "A baby? A forecasting baby?" David Hasselhoff reminds me of a groundhog, well actually, a gerbil. The hair, you know?

Within some point (but not tomorrow) over the next 18-days I am going to be releasing the video for "The Executioner's Song." It is really...striking to me how my process has changed. I started writing the poem back in May 2010. It has gone through so many rewrites it is not even funny, but it is just about at a point where I am happy with it.

Helping me, is the writer's group. They are starting to blossom from being tentative about offering criticism on the very scary being of a poem, to finding ways to give feedback that really, is making me a better poet. We are in a last minute critique right now. I record the audio on Saturday/Sunday. I am already (as you heard in the promo vid) composing and arranging the music.

But it's the imagery and the approach to filming that has changed the most. 'Nuff said.

I have decided that Bernanke is an honorary Cassandra. I really worry that he will keep speaking the truth and the country will choose not to believe or bother to listen to him. He was all over the place yesterday saying it would be several years before unemployment would fall to sustainable levels and that by 2030, the way we are going, the national debt would be at a rate of 150% of the GDP.

That is slightly frightening.

He also hammered on the fact that our budget cuts/tax raises should be implemented in 10 year increments. He warned and wrung his hands at our habit of doing things too quick, too fast and based on reelection potential.

Then I saw CNN and one of the main stories was the phasing out of old-style incandescent light bulbs and the growing Republican drive to kill the change to the CFL light bulbs. People are actually stockpiling incandescent lightbulbs.

Irregardless that the new ones last 200% longer and use 75% less energy, people are bitching about the quality of the light.

You know, it takes about a week to get used to the new light bulbs. You would think we were all being asked to go back to candles and oil lamps (which actually, might transform this country in a wonderful way).

Then the talking heads came on and complained that the CFL bulbs were not as "pretty" as the old ones. Therefore, we should wait to implement the transition until they can be made prettier.

Now, the fact that CFL bulbs contain Mercury is a bit of a concern, but not much. If you have handled a CFL you know there is something about them that is far less fragile then old light bulbs. If you are truly concerned about the Mercury then you had better start leaving your car in the garage and walking everywhere, what a car puts out is far more dangerous then the amount of Mercury in a CFL. Or, in the house, stop eating and drinking any packaged food and using any type of cleaning product or personal hygiene product -there is more to be concerned about in those products.

The fact that the "prettiness" of a light bulb trumped the financial projections for the country on the news just....oh, its just more of the same.

It's a culture of entitlement. No, change that, it is a society with a psyche that is rooted in a sense of entitlement and a lack of responsibility. In a way, one of the results of being in a society like that is that we have lost our curiousity, our sense of our potential.

And yet, people feel this loss although I don't think they can name it. And perhaps that is the hardest thing to witness. Someone struggling to rediscover what it means to explore life and to take risks. As much as I think the majority of society suffers from the loss, I also think that the majority are struggling to find a way to break free.

Struggling to find a way to rediscover what it means to greet each day as an adventure. To feel like they could be explorers, inventors, discoverers. To feel like life is about more then pretty light bulbs.

And I strongly feel, especially for artists, that we need to support them in this struggle by challenging them with more than negative criticism, forming little sub cultures that giggle at the struggle or, the condescension of creating art that is not carefully considered for its potential to effect someone and that assumes a level of stupidity in the audience.

People, I have found, are starving for content and challenge.

Coffeecoffeecoffee.

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