Murphy’s Bye-Laws

I’m still being visited by the Muse and I’m still struggling to get it all recorded. In the depths of my commute home yesterday, an idea for a poem had injected itself into my head like a magma flow into crevasses in the bedrock.  I managed to record some notes via the memo recorder on my phone, but this method is awkward for me, perhaps only serving to embed it in my memory from actually forming the sentences.  I absolutely must learn how to write while I drive!

This idea fomented based on a quote from the Writer’s Almanac or the random quotes that greet me on my iGoogle page each morning.  The quote was a poet lamenting that people didn’t write about love or with humor anymore; modern poems now mostly consisting of nature or something, under the influence of the Romantics (counter-intuitive?).  This has stuck in my brain, especially since I ruminate poetically mostly about nature, I think. I have written love poems for A___ that won’t be seen here.  I gave them to her as a personal gift and she can choose to do what she wants with them, including post them.

The poem born yesterday will only carry a dedication to A___, as it is now posted on its own poetry page (listed under the “Poetry” page at the top or on the right sidebar) and entitled “Your Love Builds Mountains.”  While the poem may not carry overt humor I’m sure some may be found, since some people can find humor in anything.  It definitely carries a theme of love, all inside of a natural metaphor.  Whoever the lamenting poet was will have to accept the compromise.

Beyond the references to extreme heat in the poem, the other aspect of hotness in this post are the links to my Pandora stations, meaning if you click on them you are transported to Pandora.com to play the station.  (I would like to apologize for the lameness of that last statement; it really was a stretch.  But then, you have to pay for non-lame web content.)  The building and tweaking of the music stations became quite a game for me, and so there is some overlap in my created stations.  There are also stations created by others that I have linked to appearing in the list as well.  For anyone who likes the random button, Pandora is your mecca.  Personally, I hardly ever listen to a CD straight through, unless it is a soundtrack, compilation, or live recording.

So enjoy the new poem while chilling out to some moderately random, though quite musically related, tunes.

That isn’t the only good news – I’m finally starting to write down my vacation journal from our recent Ireland trip. I have journal entries that I wrote on the airplanes on the trip over and one long entry from the flight back, but everything in between went undocumented in the journal due to being very busy vacationing. So, I’ll start this by transcribing what I already have written down, then I’ll either insert my thoughts with a day-by-day account of the trip chronologically before the already transcribed thoughts on the return trip, or put it all in as it currently exists and fill the holes afterwards. Either way, I’ll denote clearly which is which.

Ireland Trip Journal

January 16-23, 2008

“After Me Lucky Charms” or “Guaranteed Cozy” Read the rest of this entry »

It may come as a surprise to many of my readers, but I don’t drink copious amounts of beer, such as my moniker suggests, because of the state of the world (though it helps!). No, most of the time when drinking outside of my home it is usually for the reason of listening to live music. If I’m drinking for the buzz, why not do it with some rhythm? Sometimes I go out simply for the sake of promoting it and/or contributing what I can.

Live local music drives a great deal of my social life. I’ve gotten to know some pretty amazing and interesting people in and around the bands that we frequently see. It has gotten to the point at Kelly’s in Bridgewater, PA, that on Tuesday nights the entire left side of the bar is full of what seems like a reunion. A___ and I are always invited to join a table or two and the service staff knows us by name and drink! It is this atmosphere and the approachability of the musicians in places such as this that is a major attraction for me. None of the bands or musicians we see are too “big,” but they are big enough. I’d sort of like to change that a little, since some of them make their living from playing in bars and other such venues. So this is a post to promote and share these favorites. Read the rest of this entry »