Family Hour.

Yesterday got hot, but not so hot a body could not sit on the porch into the late evening and read Wells Tower, who I shan't quote here since this is a family show, but man, his characters string together exclamations so incantatory it feels as though I don't any longer know how to curse. I mean, damn. Perhaps I ought to go hit my thumb with a hammer. Or go back in time to AMR's glistening little grad-school apartment and pin my finger to the door again whilst hanging, via screw and screw gun, a full-length mirror. AMR's been on about having a full-length mirror again here at the castle. She thinks I just keep forgetting to help her look for one. Let her keep thinking that. This is about self-preservation, people. Helpful hint: fingers clear of the mirror before you snug it up to the door. Better still: no mirrors at all, vampire-style.

God fuck a milk cow, I'm tired of vampires. (Thanks, Wells Tower!) (Sorry, kids!)

Well, if you want the weather, and not the sports, then we probably ought to get to it: Bill's extratropical by now, if he's anything at all, and somewhere near Iceland or Norway, but never fear: Danny, a general mess of a storm, is forecast for a weekend sweep of the mid-Atlantic, which has the graphics people hither and yon in the requisite tizzy, and I say, let 'em. I myself am half a step away from chucking the end of my summer and learning Photoshop and building my very own proprietary exactly-the-same-as-everybody-else's forecast cone. That's got to be better than sitting out in the spidiary and tearing the same sentence out and then pasting it back in again and again and again— Or maybe it isn't. I know it isn't, in fact, and this afternoon's looming dirged department meeting out at the puppet show reminds me of my good fortune, has me pre-mourning the loss of my swank summer life of robe-wearing and half-assery and occasional west-looking to see if perchance we might dream of a little storm skating along—

Every fall I say things are going to be different, that this will be the year I learn, finally, to maintain what passes for the integrity of the inside of my classrooms while acting more openly as though the complete lack of integrity of endless meetings and email frenzy and goal-and-objectivizing is what it is, which is a song and dance meant to make us all look busy enough to where the lions hopefully won't pick us out of the herd. Since it is once again fall, friends and fans of poorly-organized tropical systems, I'll say it, and this time around, I'm trying, mantra-style, to mean it: This year things are going to be different. I will write during the year. I will write during the year. I will write during the year.

I love the classroom. There are times, though, when I despise the trappings of the academy so deeply that I can think of nothing else. That's what needs to get wiped off the radar: Hate it, and I'm spending time doing it. Let it be, and I could be writing.

And look: I don't want to say anything about this yet, because I fully expect to get my heart broken, but the forecast for early next week—for back-to-school—looks so pretty that, if it somehow comes to pass, I wouldn't have any choice but to take it as a sign that this year, in fact and actually, could finally bring maybe a little more writing shed in the mornings, a little more front porch in the evenings, a little less pedagogy, a little less whatever the hell other long words those folks hang onto for dear life, a little less, if you will, screwing my finger to the door.

Hot today. But check the forecast. Something's out there. Maybe more than one thing.