Another first comes and kicks me between the eyes. Barely awake, the first morning I've slept past six a.m. in weeks, there I was innocently getting myself a cup of coffee when I realized it. October 1st!! Can it really be? Yesterday it was 94 degrees. Southern California is ablaze with fires that August usually boasts responsibility for. People are still blithely putting roofs on their houses all over town...can it really be October?

Well it is, and I've just got to come to grips that in another week, it will probably be 64 degrees. I'm never ready for the transition when you can no longer leave the house jacket-less. I haven't even looked at my jackets. In fact, I'm quite sure that my jackets and I are total strangers to one another and I will likely have to farm them all out for adoption at one of the local consignment stores. So much changes in a year, do you notice that?

Where was I last October? What was I doing? I could fetch one of my journals and find out exactly, or I could try to remember. Let's do it together. While you too are musing on where you were when the leaves started to fall in your town (if you're in one of those fancy halfway points that are permanent summer, go fix yourself a drink), go and read something very very good, my friend Myfanwy Collins' Essay in the respectable Agni Magazine. I'm quite partial to Agni because I spent time in the company of its founder--Askold Melnyczuck and its editor Sven Birkerts--while at Bennington, and have a couple anecdotes of endearment that somehow make me feel as if the magazine is an extension of them. Oh Sven with his little sailor's cap and brilliant mind! Oh Askold with his smoke-dreamy eyes of most icy blue, saying those smart things in lecture...sigh...

Ahem...
I also want to alert your attention to the new Word by Word blog. I must warn you, it's in its infancy, and will soon be much more exciting and will not bear that same coy photo of me, because it won't be all about me! But what you can expect are everything from questions of the day answered by authors to guest-blog spots by writers you love. It will be wild, it will dazzle and wow and stupefy. It might even be fatal if not cut properly. It might also be linked up to the fine, completely misunderstood folks over at Powell's Books, who have proved to me a couple of things: 1. Never assume your blog will go unread. 2. Don't be crass enough to compare a well-respected bastion of book-purveying goodness with a crusty evil right-wing retail organization like Wal-Mart, when what you really mean to say is that they have a swank and groovy Website of which you are jealous and overwhelmed in all your small-minded victim-conviction that your radio show is not powerful enough to rise above!

Got that?

Otherwise, I've been too frickin' over-worked to blog, but will resume normalcy soon.

JPR