Thought the last blog entry was just too darn depressing to leave up much longer, so I will chime in from Cincinnati, Ohio, where I am visiting my parents, in-laws, several brothers and friends, and various pets. The pizza here is very good, I don’t know that Cincinnati in general is at the top of many culinary scales, but for pizza, they’re up there. I think I have eaten pizza for dinner three nights in a row. Pepperoni, fig and proscuitto, apple and apricot, some veggie-combo, and one which was some disgusting combination of pineapple, bacon and onion, which I really can’t recommend. I have also been staying up til six or seven in the morning every night, which may be b/c of the time change, but also because my brothers and their friends are genuinely fun to hang out with. PS Watching a bunch of twenty-something guys try to be manly while outdoing each other at the game “Dance Dance Revolution,” esp. after they’ve drunk a lot of whiskey, is very, very entertaining. One of them was a nuclear physicist. There’s just something extra funny about that.

While I’ve been gone, one of my good friends (also a poet) as been watching my house and cats and very kindly e-mailing me when any poetry news comes in. Only poets can accurately ascertain which mail may be of interest to other poets. So, while it’s been mostly rejections, at least I don’t have to worry that I’m missing some incredibly important time-sensitive poetry-related correspondence, like some famous poet writing that I’ve won a book contest but if I don’t get back to them within 48 hours the prize will go to someone else, not that that is likely, but it’s the kind of insane thinking that I’ve succumbed to on other trips. Thanks N!

The trip has been good and making me realize how much time I normally spend by myself, since we are staying at my parents house and my brothers are staying too and various people drop by all the time, and there is very little alone time. The guys are all playing video games as I write which gives me a little break. I consider myself very social, but since I’ve become a freelancer I usually spend about six hours a day alone working. I guess that’s a lot, and I’ve gotten used to it, even though I thought I would miss the social interaction of either the office or a “regular” grad school program (I’m going low-res.) It has really boosted my writing productivity, which just proves the old theorem – solitary time=more poetry. I did manage to sneak in a poem tonight, which was good. And snuck in some visits to some other poet-blogs, for fun. Now, back to the Xbox madness.