Mark and I celebrate Valentine's Day week every year as a kind of anniversary...

...in part due to a Valentine's Day/anti-Valentine's Day party that a friend hosted 9 years ago. So, yes, we've been together for 9 years.

This picture, which is a picture of a picture in one of our photo albums, is from summer 2001. We're in Washington, DC, of course, and we've just finished playing a softball game and have gone up to the Post Pub for "Office Hours," a regular Wednesday happy hour hang out and talk about poetry. I'm doing a kind of fake swoon, and Mark looks like he usually looks when he's thinking or about to say something funny and/or biting. I love this picture because look like ourselves, and we're in the middle of a very ordinary activity during an ordinary week that was all very happy.

I'm okay with death, but aging is not okay

Today I miss Washington, DC. This does not mean that I am unhappy or dislike San Diego. But today I miss the biannual reading series organizing meetings at Brickskeller and elsewhere, and the relative ease of organizing events there in general--a relative ease created through plenty of work and years of relaxed socializing and friendships, but still. Here in San Diego, we work harder for less art.

I miss major rain storms, even though we are in the middle of as major a rainstorm as ever happens here. And yes, I miss thunder. I miss humidity and green. I miss cherry blossoms and the tidal basin and the monuments at night. I miss the public transportation that took me to all those places.

I miss Bridge Street Books, teaching at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, and Moby Dick's House of Kabob (the original Georgetown location). And I miss being able to go for beers after a reading and sit next to Carolyne Forche and talk to her confidently without having any clue who she was. I miss living within walking distance to the Black Cat. I miss writing while having donuts and coffee at Sparky's cafe on 14th street (which I think has closed) until being driven out by all the chain smoking or the random appearance of my MA thesis advisor. I miss the prostitutes.

I think I am going to bake a cake today

I had a very brief but concentrated feeling of nostalgia today for Sunday afternoon readings at DCAC. Especially when it is the Sunday before Thanksgiving and the readers are Kevin Davies and Rod Smith. I guess the feeling wasn't brief, since I had it right before brunch, and that happened four hours ago.

I've uploaded most of the pictures from my trip to DC & NY.

So I'm going to read in the Segue series on October 20.

I haven't been back East since I left, and I haven't been in New York in ages. Maybe I'll go to DC, too, if I can. Obviously there's a lot of people there I'd like to see, even though the marvelous Mr. Orange has moved away.

A trip to the east coast will force me to come to terms with how Californian or not I've become. Since I moved to California, the answer to "where are you from?" has become easy for me--I say I'm from DC. I'm not from DC, but it's the place that growed me up as a poet. So I suppose my poems are from there, sort of.