Release

Today is the official release date of NATIVE JOY FOR REAL! It is available on Amazon.com, CDBaby, iTunes, Napster, and we're working on other distribution. If you have any ideas for distribution, venues, radio stations please advise. It was through one of the readers of the blog that the performance in DC on 23rd of September is happening. So, thank you thank you, or in the Mvskoke language, mvto, mvto. Just tried to upload the beautiful poster image announcing the DC Poets Against the War event at the Provisions Library. It didn't work. Will try again. Thank you C.L. and Provisions Library and the CD Poets Against the War.

Started the morning in a hotel room in Marina del Rey, at 8AM LA time which is 5AM Honolulu time. I was still in a time zone fog and there was a fog still over the marina obscuring the sun. Got dressed to work out and drove over to Washington St. to the beach for tea, and a look at this side of the Pacific. Still grey out, no surfeit of surfers (I couldn't help that one!)--the wavelets rather tame but more than the last time I stood here on this beach looking out to the west. The first time I stood in this spot floated through and there I was again, in the early eighties, parked in Venice Beach for two weeks in a friend of a friend's apartment. It was the second stop on my month of driving around the country alone, though the first few weeks I had a companion, a poet who was recovering from a terrible breakup. She asked for a ride as far as the coast. Those weeks began every morning with breakfast at a little place on Venice Beach for a few bucks. Then writing for a few hours, then walking. It was the longest break I'd every had from my children. They were with their reluctant fathers for a short vacation. I felt selfish to have this luxurious time just for the writing life, but I soaked it up. Afternoons I'd read or walk, never went far. One night we drove downtown for a reading by Audre Lorde, then over to Silver Lake to a bar, dancing. I didn't want to stop. Then after two weeks drove on up the coast to San Francisco for a few days, let my friend out there and kept going, all the way to Seattle, then to Meridel LeSueur's in Minneapolis, then to New York City, down as far as Jacksonville, then the Creek Nation in Alabama, then over to my father's trailer in Oyster Creek, Texas then back up to New Mexico. And a million stories in between. And I was in there somewhere, burning with a need to know all of it. I didn't die, or maybe I died a thousand deaths between then and now where I try to eke out a note tonight after slogging through a script rewrite in a hotel room all day. Time is a wave, a series of waves. I can see it now.

September 15, 2004 Los Angeles