For what do we reserve "feh" in our household and car? For the bogus and insinuating. Where can I restock litmus supplies? Mindfulness.

Yeah, ok grasshopper.

"Nothing is in my hand, and it's something tacky. A price!" The sticker from the soy sauce.

What I know about the situation: my life was saved by rock and roll, though not usually the albums I actually bought or borrowed. Mim Udovitch said something nice to me (yay me!) about a compendium of lies I recited in public in 1993 or 4, a Vedderesque (wanted to say Kurtische but E.V. is probably more accurate) list poem of every record that changed my life, but I knew it was a little off the point to say every song I thought was the best song ever had done something irreversible to me. It was a poem I'd written, though, and a list poem -- a form I'd been trained since high school to despise as beneath sophisticated adult consideration. Well that was a good example of the process Christa Wolf describes in one book or other, irritation verging on hate for someone or thing turning into total fond devotion.

Now James has stuck the sticker on the HunterDouglas shade pull. He's singing a new song. Was it Andrei Codrescu who said lately that NorthAmericans don't have poetry memorized, but from such an early age everyone knows hundreds of songs? I get glints off everyone from Hoagy Carmichael to John Davis in the poetry of my friends and enemies; the publisher of my first chapbook (ex-drummer for Versus) once told me he thought it was secretly a meditation on Creedence.

I also know rock mainly sputtered into oblivious irrelevance. My bro used to be in a hard rock band and a softer one, but from what I can tell all they play now is country. Around when James was born I searched everywhere for music to rock him to sleep to -- all he could stand day or night was reggae, especially rock steady. When I discovered Tubby and Jammy did well by him I went pretty far along the whole spectrum. A concerned friend lent me some calypso (and for good measure some rai) but the radio tubes worked best. Reggae words... "Fireman strike/Water man strike/Telephone company too/Down to the policeman, too"

The dark clover set this off a while back with a lyrics assignat. What I noticed then was that the songs I repeat are mood insulation. Do I want my 24 hour party catered by Archers of Barf? Nein. Do I get stuck in ruts? Somewhere in an attic in Westchester is a fine collection of Ultravox 12"s. Yes, I knew Midge was a tw[any vowel works]t; I also knew nobody else was interested, and therefore I had fine insulation for the concept of my own specialness. Depression, here we come!

When S/FJ goes off on the rock lyrics of the last fifteen years I think I know what he's responding to and what he means: a) the concept of matching alt-blowhards with novelists (generally if not universally poetes-manques) to make a political record is so ludicrous it bypasses the "whereof we do not give a sh*t thereof we shall not speak" filter and b) damn straight those bands need help with the words.

Beck led that charge -- said the alt/grunge gang was too locked in a downward spiral for him; he then proceeded to rotate while plummeting.

When I was very little, the three lyricists I heard grownups praise over and over were Joni Mitchell, Donald Fagen, and Elvis Costello: three mean-spirited self-involved perfectionists. Aside from "Rainy Day Women" I basically wasn't allowed to hear Dylan until I was fourteen -- at which point I was already loving Prince, Billy Squier, Def Leppard, and Tom Petty, but buying INXS, Japan, and... Def Leppard.

Unta gleeten glowdten globen. "I am going fishing with a ham," said the one girl in school with rudimentary German.

Suzanne Langer's essay on the function of snippets of foreign language and proper names in poetry: codes of inclusion and exclusion. I had a double-yearning to be acknowledged as cool in the perverse collector arena, but also to just rock out the way the Freedom Rock ads implied was possible for what, $17.95?

I didn't work a job until college, which made it difficult to pay for diesel for the Rabbit to take me back and forth to my girlfriend's in Connecticut.

"Daddy, I don't have nothing in my hand." Is it food?" "Yeah! Mouse food."

I'd been moved up in math and French; in one or the other the beautiful soccer-playing fraternal twin was doodling the word "Reckoning" on her textbook cover. For some reason, this was much more interesting to me than the words "Seven Seconds" and "Social Distortion" bic'd on the backs of the jean jackets I mostly saw the back of from the cafeteria looking out at the smoking patio.

So, how much is being cool a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents? Seeking out unpleaseable older kids to measure out fresh helpings of abuse.

Even Marley makes me tired after a while; laughed at for pronouncing as initials the words RZA and GZA I realized again I knew nothing about a whole kind of art that I was attracted to and was somewhat aware how to tell the difference in it between moving and mundane. I'm not much farther along than knowing a few brand names and feeling a few records. Jada's part of "Run" was one of the passages in my answer to the assignat, so what. So, a criticism that sounds based on mean-spirited perfectionism isn't going to make it.

It'll be guessed in advance that I go to Fairfield Porter to hear about paint, Edwin Denby to hear about movement, and as for poetry, we're all making that up as you read this. I would love to put Lester Bangs on that list, but I can't always hear what he hears. Crisco? It's de rigeur to feh the dean but I do still look to see who makes the grade. He's been doing it so long I can sing along -- which is kind of the goal, no?

No. The goal is to write about the experience in a way that says what's there, lets some feeling come through, and when possible, gives a generous critique of the turn-offs and buzz-release valves. The words get a lot hung on them; if we thought of inspiration in other media as a kind of criticism, such as if it turned out Jeremy Blake were riffing on a Beck sound-collage, say, then the words... the words would fade into the middle of the mix the way R.E.M. was alleged to have done with them in 83 or so.

Almost all these examples: white men. I've identified an area needing expansion.

"Dad, it's a fun magazine because there are these pictures of boats."

OK, it's too beautiful out; seen an orange turtle, a brown rabbit, and some greenish hummingbirds. We're going to go find a beach right after a light lunch of eggs and toast.