And sawdust restaurants with oyster - shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo... - T.S. Eliot

One of the Chinese women in my dreams tells me that she loves my poetry and finds it beautiful. I am embarassed by this, in my dream, because I have all but neglected writing any poetry for the last few years. I try to explain to her that I am an editor and a journalist now. She says that she will forget what she had planned to do today and stay with me if I will write a poem for her...

On Saturday morning, because I could think of no godly reason to get out of bed earlier, I lapsed back into dreaming and dreamt a short story. It was about Jim and LeeAnne. They reminded me of Deb and myself: they were an accomodating couple. If Jim was constipated, LeeAnne would have diarrhea, and so on. They were not dirt poor, but they did have to scuffle. They fell in with a rich crowd. They were invited to a party among that crowd, beautiful people, large house. At the party, they noticed that the couple who owned the house had written a series of manuals. The manuals were on everything from improving your sex life to managing your investments. All the other couples among this crowd all quoted passages from these manuals verbatim. Jim and LeeAnne were amazed and put off. They decide to go back to their own quirky lives of scuffling and accomodation...

I might have finished this edition of the magazine yesterday, though the VOX POPULI page again took loads of my time --- you have so much to say to us! But in mid-afternoon my telephone began ringing off the hook. People were calling me to get my take on the latest decision of the United States Supreme Court on this wacky Presidential election. What was I to say? I had not heard about this latest turn of events. When I did, all of my worst premonitions seemed to be bearing fruit. I had warned one of the callers two nights earlier that I foresaw a deepening of the divisions between the partisans. He had pooh-poohed my notion then but now took an interlude during our telephone call to tell me that he felt I might have been prescient. Another caller, an immigrant, chuckled with me and said that maybe now the rest of the world would see how shameful American democracy actually is and work to construct models of their own...

DOUGLAS MC DANIEL's predictions for the Internet in MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE this edition posit notions I hope you'll try to consider. KEVIN CAREY returns to our DAY ONE chair to critique Margaret Thatcher's latest pronouncement about the leadership of "civilization." RAHEEM's latest in RADIOACTIVE actually waxes poetic, something I would never have suspected.

With the completion of this edition of the G21 I shall have only one more to offer you in the year 2000. I have mixed emotions about the hiatus.

THE WOMAN sent me this photograph from the Fairmont in New Orleans. She now has decided, along with my old pal Matt Stowell, that that is the next city I should know... We'll see.

It seems that no one takes me seriously when I say that I sent ALL my money away to other writers and am now dependent on the kindness of old friends. The illusion abides that I am doing well. I don't know what else I need to say.

I spoke with my new Editor the other day and said, "Just send the assignments. When I have more than I can handle, I'll let you know."

Some e-mails bring up Christmas. I write back: "What's that?"

The Continuing Chronicle of the Ghost Who Walks

He saw us as the New Generation of the newspaper, the young bloods who would take it from being just another lily-white organ and make it represent the new demographic of Texas. I'll never forget his enthusiasm and energy. He is still with the paper today, twenty-odd years later, a manager of course; last I heard he was spearheading the launch of a new magazine they are offering.

His plan, back in 1979, was that I would become the youngest Credit Manager the organization had ever had. He had made it a point to introduce me to our most valued clients. Everything was in place. I would follow him up the management ladder, the Chicano and the Black man, forging new frontiers for a paper with some promise. But then Deb's Mom had the brain tumor operation and --- against Cat's advice and everyone else's --- I quit my job and moved to California.

I have felt that I have neglected speaking of my life in Texas too long. There was much that was wonderful there. Texas is NOT the place many of the people I've met in the "upper" part of the country imagine it to be. In many ways it has paradisical elements of its own and an ethos not easily forgotten... The "hill country" of central Texas, especially, has charms that come from an amalgram of influences. I remember days on those marvelous rivers, the Brazos, the Nueces, the Colorado, and even trips down to the Rio Grande. What the Bush people did to that wonderful place is saddening....

I guess I've always had a thing about rivers, from Egypt to Florence, Italy, to northern California, I've spent a lot of time on and around them. Probably always will... While I appreciate the romance of oceans, over the years I've come to respect the meaning of rivers in human life more. It has been around rivers that we have built our time.

An ocean is a vast, impersonal expanse, not much different than outer space. It provides passage to distant places and exotic lives. But a river is personal. It connects near people, makes for exchange, accepts the bodies of those who choose to flee this life. A river is a story waiting to be told...

THINGS THAT I'M PONDERING THIS WEEK

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He is now a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appears both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others.

Rod lives in Baltimore, MD, at the moment (though it seems to most people he *actually* lives on the Web,) edits the writing of people from six continents for The World's Magazine, and wonders who The Last Woman will be in his "spare time." Rumor has it he is considering moving to Tahiti and writing about what The World was like before he left.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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