Last year, Gabriel and I wrote NaPo poems using set titles that we had agreed on beforehand. So we each had 30 poems (well, I had 31 since one title gave me a split personality) with the same titles.

He and I decided to do that again this year, and have 15 titles so far.

1. The Pickle and the Caveman
2. A Wheel of Birds
3. Unnatural Selection
4. The Radio and the Water Balloon
5. Anastomosis
6. Flounders, Teacups, and Other Tempests
7. You Are Here
8. The Existential Dilemma of Rubber Bands
9. Chemical/Electrical
10. The Peculiar Poetry of Tommy Lee Jones
11. In the Event of Locusts, Dive
12. If You Can’t Be With the One You Love
13. Apocalypse Ow
14. Tesseraction Figure
15. Teething

She can turn the computer on and off. Grrrrreat. She’ll be getting her own kitty blog and charging kitty porn to my Discover card. Dammit, I think I need Net Nanny or something.

Bad kitty! BAAAAD KITTY!

Actually, mania might be an improvement.

This hasn’t been a good day. At all.

The icing on my Cake of Suckitude is the diagnosis of yet another of my cats with kidney disease–Halley, the fuzzball in the picture. That makes a total of four cats we’ve had diagnosed such.

The vet says it’s just that common, but I’m having a tough time not holding myself responsible for this the same way I seem to hold myself responsible for things that are also out of my control. The economy, tsunamis, high-waisted pants. I always feel guilt when things go bad, even when it isn’t my fault.

There’s my happy thoughts for the day.

I’m prone to anxiety. I didn’t used to be, but now I’m a veritable nervous Nellie.

I have a good job. I have a house. I have a safety net.

And I’m really afraid of what 2008 is going to do to this country and the people in it. I’m filled with dread.

I’m no economist. I don’t know if the chucklehead in chief is the problem, but I do know that my little town is being ravaged by foreclosures. This was hardly a rich area to start with, but this economy is taking its toll already. How flexible can Appalachia be if hard times come?

All of the discussion about the $2 Manuscript Hub fee for online submission makes me wonder about where each of us would put the financial burden for publication, generally.

Should the entire cost be shouldered by the publisher, whoever that is?

Should submitters be expected to defray some of the costs, either through things like fees or through required subscriptions?

I don’t want publishers to go broke publishing poetry. None of us benefit from that.

And I know none of them are getting rich from it.

The question is simply who should pay when there are necessary costs? And which costs, in the end, are absolutely necessary?

… I could always access this blog? I don’t even know, but it’s “more than now.”

Blogger is getting on my last nerve. WordPress doesn’t work from my workplace. I am a blogger without a country!

I’m switching computers, so I was clearing off my hard drive, wondering what to keep and what to toss. I found these three pictures, and have a vague recollection of creating them in order to have BATTLE BARDS! A poetry smackdown!

A very vague recollection.

There I was, all asnooze on the sofa with Irving, when Steve decides that we are prime photographic material.

Steve is, as you can see, completely insane.

The headband had been covering my eyes scant seconds before. The bitchface is from having a doofus point a flashy camera at me while I’m trying to snooze (and also because my right arm was completely dead at this point from Irving’s weight).

It’s only in photographs that I realize how pale I am. I look like a vampire.

Those who mooch off their mothers have zero standing to write letters to editors decrying other people’s lack of personal responsibility and self-reliance. GAH!