There is a garden in the memory of America. There is a nightbird in its memory.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody...

12 March 1922--
21 October 1969

Every year at Christmas, my mother invariably buys me clothes. Which is fine, as long as it's just jeans or socks or maybe a button-down shirt. But she insists on buying me t-shirts with wacky sayings on them. It's a real window into what my mother thinks I'm like when you consider that past shirts have said things like "You call it slacking--I call it dedicated inactivity" or "I just can't take it anymore". I look forward to next year's shirt, which will most likely say something like "I'm not really a worthless piece of shit, but I can see why you would think that".