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summer radiates a vacation feel, a sense of excitement. the Millennium boxset has come in. the air conditioner has been out for at least three weeks. I blame my madness on that. madness as in writer’s block or writer’s silence.

instead of writing
I think about writing
I guess my
heart is in the right place
but I’m
starving myself

again I will return
to note writing
a sort of free hand

Houston was all that
(we went to Galveston
swam in the ocean)
I may even
wind up moving there
one day
what a lovely thought
to escape
getting our asses kicked
by blustery winters

still we get
our asses kicked
in other ways, too

. . .

my talk brought the moon down. “Dostoevsky didn’t know a damn thing about PowerPoint, so I’m going to pretend I don’t either.” this came off as bitchy to the front row, but I didn’t mean it to. (crazy, huh, how you say something, comes off bitchy, and it’s hard to retract — you have to pillow fight it off?!) described Dostoevsky as a sufferer who shaped himself into a philosopher through trials, tribulations, and hardcore dedication to writing.

when I got into summarizing a few of his stories, one of the front row girls was confused, started asking strange questions. I think what threw her was that I was presenting him first and foremost as a dark persona, or at least as someone who thought darkly, and she just wasn’t jaded enough in her overall world view to get the picture. this immediately led her to the conclusion that he was a psychopath, a murderer, and so why should I even be up there talking about and glorifying such a person?

I revisited some of his history in more detail, and suddenly it clicked in her head somewhere that when I was talking about certain characters in his stories, these weren’t his own particular feelings and experiences. he was not Raskolnikov with a hatchet, nor Ridiculous Man committing suicide. once we got that out of the way, I continued on telling the story of Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

I was psyched because I could tell I was holding their interest. one lady asked a couple times for me to repeat the name of his books, and she wrote them down. this alone told me I was accomplishing my goal. now they can seek it out on their own time. next time around I can get into concepts from Brothers Karamazov.