This picture was done with watercolor crayons and pencils on paper. It shows the poet Charles Butler on stage performing.
Today was sluggish. I woke up way too early and couldn't get back to sleep for maybe two hours. Then I woke up later than usual all groggy. I worked and went to the coffee shop and worked some more, getting everything done that I needed to but feeling less present for it than I would have preferred.
My attention is spread a bit thinner than usual. Along with my regular news job, I'm doing final edits for the story of CryptoFinney, starting a new work contract that's turning out to be somewhat larger than expected, and trying unsuccessfully to put together a viable plan for Rstory. Meanwhile, remodeling at my house continues and I keep making art despite being basically out of storage space.
Staying present in the moment makes it easy to manage so many different kinds of things. I didn't do a great job of that today. More than once, I found myself thinking about one thing while working on another. Maybe that's okay. It's just not how I like to operate.
This watercolor reminds me of the importance of poetry in all of it. Charles Butler is an incredible performer. When he's on stage, no member of the audience can really be anywhere else. I like to imagine that all of life consists of poetry so engaging. That's what I like to imagine, whether or not life cooperates.
When I consider how involved with poetry my younger self was, I wonder where that part of me now resides. Of all the poems I once had memorized, I recall only four perfectly. Three are my own poems and the fourth is A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London by Dylan Thomas. I learned this poem at age thirteen. But all the other poems and nearly all of the songs I learned after that have apparently faded into some dim corner of my mind. It's like I can still sense their shapes, but not their details.
These days, if I want to really memorize something, I have to pace around saying it aloud for days. I had to practice every day for over a month to learn my last three poems. Since then, I haven't been really inspired to write more poetry. Maybe that's for the best.
Maybe focusing on the poetry of moments is good enough. The rhythm of routines and the cadence of events. The emotional implications of surprises. Even on a dull day like this one, there's a certain poetry inside it all.
To be honest, I do kind of want to write some poetry for Rstory. This probably wouldn't make the project more popular, but neither could it possibly make it less popular. And if I'm going to have my own cryptocurrency, I may as well write poems about it.