gutted raze it's the mundane dreams that'll get you. in this one, which isn't much of a dream at all, i'm listening to "music from big pink" in the car. only it isn't the same album that bit into me the year i turned twenty. all the richard manuel songs are gone. there's no "lonesome suzie". no "tears of rage". no "in a station" or "i shall be released". without those thick, urgent piano chords and that impossible falsetto, the whole heart of the thing drops right out of its sagging stomach. i have to turn it off. it isn't a nightmare, but it's not right. you don't do that to a stratford man who gave his soul to rock and roll and snapped his own neck when the music left him. 240603 ... ovenbird My son and father-in-law are fishing from the bank of a fast moving river. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They cast their hooks into the tumult of white water and bring up nothing but a salted song of defeat. The river runs with salmon, none of whom are tempted by the dying throes of an impaled worm. Fed up with ineptitude I throw myself into the glacial froth. My jeans become a weight that threatens to feed me to the fishes directly, but I brace my hip against a rock and use my legs to scoop a salmon towards the shore. I feel the living meat against my shin bone as I herd it towards the rocks. Then I stand, precarious on the riverbed, and heave the fish into my arms. It must weigh thirty pounds. I expect it to struggle, but it doesn’t. It is still, and cold, and alive in the crook of my elbows and my mind is inside its mind and its mind is inside mine. I want to set it free, but my body won’t do what I ask. I carry it down a gravel path to the parking lot, experiencing the terror of its drowning. It’s mouth opens and closes. I can hear its thoughts, but they are not made of language, they are made of feelings, impressions, instincts. When we reach the car my father-in-law takes the salmon from my arms and tosses it into the back of his Subaru station wagon. He whets a knife and guts the fish and cuts it into steaks so that the whole world is exposed pink flesh and the twitches that spell finality. That’s when I know the agony of being taken apart. But I already knew, didn’t I? Yes…I think I already knew. 260220 what's it to you? who go blather from