3/1/00

Walking down a country road with C. & K. We're talking about various things, or attempting to at least. K keeps dropping names I don't know and mentioning poetic movements I've never heard of. Whenever I ask him about one of them he starts spelling out the name of the person, movement, or whatever.

After a bit, we are trying to figure out what to do. C. mentions a church of some kind in Rockville that is doing poetry readings. K. says "Yes, lets go, I hear there's a Joagburg poetry reading there."

"A what?" I ask him.

He starts to spell: "J...O...A..." And I blow up.

"I don't care how it's fucking spelled, just tell me what it is!" I shout.

"It's a group of bearded poets," K. snaps, "Poets who have beards. Why are you attacking me? Is it some sort of petty jealousy because I'm in graduate school and you're not?"

"Why do you keep name-dropping and patronizing? Do you want to prove how smart you are? You're only in grad. school so you can pick up chicks."

Then we're standing on a grassy hill. I say to K., "Is any desire or motive ever pure? In the end does Buddha forgive us?"

We continue walking in silence, we come to a road which leads to my mom's house in Connecticut. In each of the neighbors' yards there is a large red dog. They look kind of like those dogs in the "Blue Dog" paintings except they are red and their eyes are big and yellow. They are growling at us.