Dear Orbitz

This morning in my email comes an offer from Orbitz: “Las Vegas four star hotels from $29.  I’d rather have five root canals than go to Vegas. Okay. I’m glad I got that off my chest. 

 

And I would rather have five root canals than go to Amityville, NY on a ghost tour. No more ersatz fright. 

 

And I would rather have five root canals than listen to country music. As Leadbelly said famously: “Never was no white person had the blues.”

 

White people have depression, then they go to Vegas or like me, they take something made by big pharma. 

 

And I’d rather have five root canals than watch tv advertisements by big pharma.

 

Anything else? 

 

I’m tired of neo-liberals talking about neo-liberalism. And I’m tired of words like “agency” and “intersectionality”–please go to a physical location and work with refugees or even better, refugees with disabilities. 

 

See? I told you I was distempered in my post last night. 

 

I’m not tired of John Lennon but I’m tired of Yoko Ono. 

 

John Lennon: “I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight neurotic narrow minded hypo-critics, all I want is some truth…”

 

I am not tired of Bob Marley or the entire Marley family. I want to put them on Mt. Rushmore.

 

I am not tired of poetry but I could do without the $100 million building that Poetry Magazine built for themselves after a rich benefactor left them a pile. Why didn’t they just move to Vegas? Or Amityville?

 

ON an airplane, a guy who works for big oil tells me that hydrogen fuel is going to save the planet. Of course I told him to hurry up. 

 

I am not tired of Michelle Obama. In fact I generally give first ladies a lot of slack. I even gave Nancy Reagan a lot of slack. I never did like Barbara Bush. I suspected her of loving her dogs more than her children. And we all know how that worked out.

 

And I’m not tired of wind in the trees. Theres a near willow that refreshed me yesterday. And I’m not tired of being alone. 

 

I wrote the following last night in a notebook: 

 

And so what does it mean, pale geographies of the heart,

Wishful hour alone at a window? Boyhood I was always alone,

blind kid with puppets and home made songs.

Will the hours ever be softer than they were in those days?

It was sweet to be lonesome with crickets 

Who sang in the broken furnace.

 

**

 

On Saturday last, I told a group of optometrists that the biggest contribution to cultural literacy after the invention of the printing press was the introduction of spectacles. I told them that Benjamin Franklin, James Joyce, and John Lennon were all incapable of seeing without spectacles. 

 

We better have some basic wonder about the things we do. That’s if we’re to get on with civilization. A pencil is a miracle. And shoes. And James Joyce. 

 

**

 

Dear Orbitz: write me when you have an offer that will send me to an island of small horses.