We’re in a room across town from home to celebrate our anniversary early. Sushi dinner, moules marinières lunch, & I had a shop reopen my left ear piercing, which closed 2yrs ago when I left the earring out for frequent x-rays for a fractured neck. Good to be alive with the woman I’ve loved so long.

Yeah I can live with this.

The early role in the New England whaling industry of Jews who had fled persecution in their native Portugal, the long role of the Wampanoag, Wampanoag-carved whale stamps to record the take, and more: Yesterday’s entry in Flaming Hydra’s Moby Dick Week gives great, great context to the novel.

A little taste of my San Francisco ‘hood, the Excelsior: Walking home with banh mi for movie night from the Vietnamese takeout place next door to the Hawaiian BBQ, we came by this taquería shut down for a private fiesta, and these guys sounding pretty good.

Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste being swept away reaching out like a drowning man in the waves of the joyous Parisian Mardi Gras crowd, while Arletty as Garance in her carriage becomes ever more distant. Les Enfants du paradis.

Could someone leak Canada the Epstein files? We'll only use them in self defence, honest.

I am of an age and of a crowd of siblings (we’re 9) where the 3rd generation is multiplying, and today’s beautiful and fragile new arrival and hope in the future is my great-nephew Luís José.

My story “And So a Terror” is out for a predawn run through San Francisco’s Excelsior District now in issue 8 of driplitmag.com, the “fear” edition. Tie on your running shoes and tag along: www.driplitmag.com/issue-8-fear

Complete the 3rd draft of a very very long novel. Start submitting self-contained chapters from it. Find a taker for a collection of 20 stories pub’d since 2022. Complete a 5th run of 10 stories (since 2022) through 4th or 5th draft and begin a 6th run.

Got up at night for old man reasons, heard an owl but didn’t recognize its hoots. Sad experience says I can’t trust memory to carry to morning what I encounter in thought or fact by night, so I made a note of the hoots’ rhythm. My wife insisted I post it. Audubon says it was a great horned owl.

Also, says this Ironworker, whatever place they’ve earned, it isn’t a seat on that beam.

After writing a poem on language, re-reading some Wittgenstein today.

Busy literary 24hrs. This a.m. @twinbirdreview.bsky.social published my story I and the I-not-I. A roving lineman who can no longer rove finds an alternative self who can: www.twinbirdreview.com/issue-32--wi... And last night the magazine drip, driplitmag.com, accepted my story And So a Terror.

Now I live by a famous strand where seabirds cry in the small hours like incredible souls and even the range wall of the promenade that I press down on for conviction hardly tempts me to credit it. -Seamus Heaney, In Illo Tempore

Hoy para el día de Santa Barbara y @mariabustillos.com : “Dicen que cada vez que cae la lluvia vuelven a renacer las esperanzas.” -La Excelencia, “Ochun y Changó” youtube.com/watch?v=MQ1G...

Parce que Wikipedia est fondée sur le principe du partage libre et égal des savoirs et que dans partage libre et égal des savoirs il y a deux substantifs et deux adjectifs que Musk et ses amis détestent.

okay, nice little jolt in a San Francisco quake just now

And over on French Wikipedia, the delicious controversy, one that seems a luxury here, is whether Cinderella’s slippers were of glass or of squirrel fur:

Morning poetry Seamus Heaney

Tonight’s head of radicchio from my San Francisco fall garden.

Cost me more than an hour of sleep, but I rescued my wife from a mosquito last night. I am merciless in fulfilling this marital obligation. San Francisco fortunately doesn’t impose it often.

I’d love to attach this Diane Seuss poem to ChatGPT like a block of C4, light its fuse, and walk away in slow motion.

sorry to report that if you want to get up early to write for an hour & exercise outside, you have to get out of bed when the alarm goes off in the morning

Over at @flaminghydra.com, a first verse of fado?:

NEW POEM ALERT! got a couple new ones in the latest issue of @lamplitmag.bsky.social. Here's the lamp-iest one :)

Papalito says, Never cross a picket line, even for a walnut.

@twinbirdreview.bsky.social has taken my story “I and the I-not-I” for Dec2025 publication. The story, in which a roving lineman who can no longer rove discovers an alternative self who might — and so make a needed connection — justifies the bizarre title. My thanks to Editor-in-Chief Amanda K Horn.

Chuck, this is maybe not a good moment.

“I must break the language to tell it myself…” Donna Vorreyer

I had bone scans today, which I get annually for a thing, and before the technician moved on to the next patient I had a glimpse of the screen. I am not a handsome skeleton.

If you want to live in a nice world you have to support independent media and independent journalists that are doing the work and saying what needs to be said. @404media.co @defector.com @marisakabas.bsky.social @theflytrapmedia.com @flaminghydra.com @aftermath.site Probably missing quite a few!

OK, Gavin, I did my part.

30 octobre 1871 : Naissance de l’écrivain, poète et philosophe français Paul Valéry. Figure majeure de la littérature française, il devient immensément célèbre à la suite de la parution de son œuvre poétique « La Jeune Parque » en 1917. #CeJourLà fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Va...

Hate this sort of thing. Dark times keep getting darker. If you like Gone Lawn and you have the means, consider a donation to keep us going, even something small. Thank you. gonelawn.net/journal/glj_...

I'm grateful to the govt officials who quietly keep our food safe & air clean & taxes collected, but whenever I teach the St. Matthew Passion I realize that of all the govt officials in all the world I'm most grateful to Picander—18th-c postal employee, later Liquor Tax Collector & Wine Inspector

No surprise, but an oncologist - nervous to be named - told this Stage4 survivor (so far) this a.m. that among the things quickly canceled by the Trump admin, long before the shutdown, were several steering committees on cancer research. So that research won’t happen for the foreseeable future.

These nights a great horned owl is again in our pine. I’m praying to it to eat the rat that is eating the tomatoes that linger and ripen on my vines in a mild San Francisco October. This owl precedes its hoots with appoggiature.

My wife and I bicycled San Francisco-San Diego in 2019 and the only way to bike through Camp Pendleton is on the shoulder of I-5. Over which the Trump admin just sent artillery fire. From which one premature shell burst dropped shrapnel on a CHP cruiser. Imagining shrapnel on our ride.

Rimbaud’s birthday. I continue to be very very fond of this performance/recitation of Le Bateau ivre: youtu.be/7KXgKCL8XkM?... Give Sara Llorca the full screen. She’s worth it.

The San Francisco high rise upper/center frame clad in red Swedish granite was my first as an Ironworker apprentice forty-plus years ago, ten stories in the air my first day. I tried for a photo of it today and found myself in this crowd. In body and spirit. No kings, ever.

All of California Labor stands with David Huerta and we reject the unjust charges against him. Brother Huerta was peacefully protesting enforcement raids targeting working people when he was pushed to the ground and arrested. Standing up for workers is not a crime!

This in today’s San Francisco Chronicle while Marc Benioff and Elon Musk tell Trump Yes, please deploy the National Guard here, it’s so lawless. I’m 2 months shy of 70, which means the City is the safest it’s been all my long life here. The lies have abandoned any pretense of plausibility.

My short story His Mothers and the Mountain is out today in The Table Review. San Bruno Mountain rises between San Francisco and smaller cities. Climb it with eight-year-old Rory Leary unaccompanied in the dark of an autumn night: thetablereview.org/2025/10/09/h...

America’s unions mourn the loss of our brother Kent Wong. As APALA's founding president & a leader throughout our movement, he relentlessly fought for worker, immigrant, civil & human rights across the country & around the world. He inspired us all. Rest in power.

The Table Review has taken my short story “His Mothers and the Mountain” for 9Oct25 publication. San Bruno Mountain rises from the SE edge of San Francisco. The story sends an 8-yr-old boy up it in an autumn night, away from one home, in hope of another. I’ll post a link when it’s out.

Indie director Barbara Marques has been kidnapped by ICE. She is legally married to a U.S. citizen & was at a green card mtg when she was abducted and prevented from seeing her lawyer. Her husband Tucker May does not know where she is. Please spread the word so he can find her /1

El realismo mágico explicado en una frase:

A closet rod becomes a mode of communication and an element of power in my story Her Delight, out now in @rawheadjournal.bsky.social. My thanks to John T. Leonard and the editorial crew, and my greetings and congratulations to my fellow contributors. rawheadjournal.org/issue-one/

The rapidity of dreams: When this morning’s Berkeley earthquake woke us in San Francisco my wife says that I reported that it was from a dream that a former Ironworker employer of mine (1993-99) had assigned me to seismically reinforce THE INTERIOR OF A TOASTER OVEN.

My very short story “The Excelsior Water Tower,” taken yesterday for publication by the McNeese Review, looks up at this landmark of San Francisco’s working-class Excelsior District and asks questions of love, of heritage, of identity. I’m thrilled and grateful McNeese liked it. I hope others will.