Spent today in Ocean Beach - swam in the Pacific (very briefly!) for the first time. 79 degrees, though the water was cold. Still, as good a beach day as you could hope for in January in the Northern hemisphere. At the airport now, getting ready to take the red-eye back to the East Coast. Supposed to be around 15 degrees in Baltimore Friday. Damn.

Glad the airport bartender told me it's not always so nice and warm here in January - else I'd never leave!

I was sitting in a Baja Fresh burrito joint writing that last entry, when a young kid came up to me and started asking about my Zaurus (the little PDA that I write most of this stuff on). I ending up talking to his mother, starting innocently enough with the trouble her son (about 9 years old) sometimes got for having long hair, a topic near and dear to my heart - or scalp, perhaps. But then it was another instance where that weird aura of mine that attracts the bizarre and twisted people was shining bright...she went on about the kid's father who had just gotten out of jail, and how he was a crack addict, and she herself was an alcoholic. So that was interesting.

Had a good conference out here the past few days, good classes: Saturday cupping and auricular therapy (I volunteered to be the cupping demo dummy and now my back looks like I got amorous with a giant octopus, and I've got seeds taped to my right ear - I must have had a good time), abdominal massage yesterday, and this morning a great Thai massage class. But above and beyond that, just a great group of people sharing knowledge and a love of this craft of Asian Bodywork Therapy. I had a strong feeling of community, and I happened to stumble across an interview with John Robbins where he talked about the importance of strong community connections for healthy longevity, an important way of dealing with grief and loss in our lives. So I shared that at the closing circle today...only to find out afterward that one of the members had lost her husband to a car accident just two weeks before. Sometimes our words have far, far more resonance than we know.

Took the Blue Line trolley all the way down to the border and walked around Tijuana for a few hours. It's a peculiar thing to walk over a national border - there's a little marker, but that's it. And there's no border control or customs check entering Mexico.

If you stayed right around the crossing, you might think that one out of five Mexican men play guitar. Apparently playing in the cafes right there is a booming business. And every store you walk by, there's a guy trying to get you to come in, hawking his wares. Silver bracelets. "Cuban" cigar (almost certainly not Cuban.) Ponchos - I guess at least these would be real ponchos and not Sears ponchos. The usual tourist crap t-shirts.

Tremendous number of dentists and pharmacies right over the border, catering to Americans who can't afford health care at home.

Walked the whole length of the Avenue de Revolucion, past where the tourist zone peters out. Down past the "Tijuana Swap Meet", where booths made out of hung tarps sell clothes and DVDs...like a ghetto third-world shotengai; down to a few blocks of car repair joints, where the cement is all cracked up.

In San Diego...flew in this morning, an oh-my-god-it's-early flight. Managed to grab a few hours sleep between BWI and my plane change Las Vegas, otherwise I'd be unconscious by now. Took a cab to the hotel, got a good hot shower, and walked about two miles to the trolley stop (the local light rail service). Went down to the Maritime Museum, which has some interesting old ships docked in the harbor - from a mid 1800s sailing ship that took emigrees from Britain to New Zealand, to an 1950s Soviet sub. Walked around the "gaslight district", got dinner at a sushi place, now a beer at "Patrick's II", a place that bills itself "San Diego's only real blues joint." A vibe like Leadbetter's or The Cat's Eye - might hang out for the live music later if I'm not exhausted.

The bartender, talking with the patron next to me, remarks that the most dangerous sport in the 2008 Olympics was horse jumping - people going for higher or fancier jumps, only to have the horse fall over on them. Notable fact that will have to find its way into a poem or story sometime.

Happy new year!

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write the poem that gets you disqualified from consideration as poet laureate

"considering the poet laureate"

the state is the opposite -
the polar opposite, the antithesis, the additive inverse, the eternal opponent -
of poetry

it was the state that put Thoreau into a jail;
it was poetry that kept him free inside those walls

music art and poetry can
only free a soul
only bring us closer to
that angelic state
that bodhisattva state
where every man and woman and child and dog
knows and acts the lovingkindesswisdom way

and what need then for guns of governence?
what purpose then to the state's violent threats?

poetry steals Caesar's thunder from him
makes empty the angry threats of kings
when every person knows their gods directly
there's no place left for fear of church or state

so, no:
propaganda is not the poet's place
non servium

Letter to the editor, Washington Post:

Besides slaughtering civilians, Israel has deliberately killed Palestinian Authority police in the Gaza strip. Targeting civil authorities in the occupied territories - the only people who could enforce a political solution, who could stop rogue attacks from being launched - shows that the current Israeli leadership has no interest in a peaceful settlement, and makes Charles Krauthammer's claim ["Moral Clarity in Gaza", Jan. 2] that Israel has some sort of moral high ground nothing short of nauseating.

Brendan Gregg, from Sun's "Fishworks" team, demonstrates how shouting at a disk drive causes vibrations that cause latency (i.e., slows down the process of accessing stuff from the disk). Wild.