Woke early this morn — had a headache and needed to piss. Filled the bowl and popped a couple of advil. Wandered out to the living room and could see the crimson beginnings of day over the lake out the window. Settled down on the couch … old-man blanket on my lap. Buttercup, who has always had identity issues, did his best impersonation of a dog by jumping up on my lap, sniffing my face and a quick lick of my nose before settling down into a tight curl beside me. Pathetic old cat.

Reached for Norb Blei’s Meditations on a Small Lake — reprinted after 15 years being out of print. This is Norb at his best. Soothing country eco-writing with a simmering undercurrent of frustration and anger over the inevitable destruction of solitude and desolate living on the Door Peninsula. Meditations is both a contemplative reader and a manifesto for reactive action. During one of his beautifully-written passages about moonlight twinkling serenely on the black rippling water, I dozed off. I am certain I was in a row boat alone gazing at an irregular-shaped full moon wondering how many days before the perfect circle will be seen in the sky. I am feeling lucky that Meditations had arrived a couple days earlier and that I had finished the last couple of pages of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks the night before. The Kerouac / Burroughs novel based on the Lucien Carr incident would have transported me to a hot summer early 1940′s Greenwich Village walk-up where I’d be reaching for a bottle or a pack of smokes. The lake is more soothing than the echoes of unfulfilled yearnings.

Jeff