It’s been quiet and cool for a few days & i’m loving it. Perfect weather to listen to Ben Webster. I hear that the warmest front of the summer is sliding eastward across the country and will be here early next week. Yesterday it was 128 degrees in Death Valley. It’s nice to enjoy a bit of peace before things get absurd and it’s difficult to think again.

Of course, now that I CAN think there’s nothing much on my mind. I’d love to write something right now, a new story or a poem or something, but I can’t think of anything I want to say. I’m not feeling any extreme emotions or profound insights. Recently I’ve noticed I’m in a definite ‘input’ mode: listening to tons of music, watching movies voraciously, surfing the net for far too long at one time. Just absorbing things, or at least allowing things to pass me by while I watch. I guess if I have nothing creatively to say at the moment then I shouldn’t force myself to try to say something. Otherwise it’s just talking to hear the sound of my voice.

On Monday Andy will start his new job as head of fiction at the bookstore, leaving the world of the newsstand & bargain books behind. The day he found out he was both astonished and overjoyed. I hope he likes it. It means that he won’t have a set schedule anymore; just like me, his hours and shifts will change from week to week. Asd I told him, I think that’s a good thing. Shake things up a bit.

The new Morcheeba album is damn good. It falls somewhere in between their first and second albums, stylistically, and that’s a great place to be. “Slow Down” is my new favorite song-of-the-moment. So hypnotic. I also bought “Ole Coltrane” and it’s beautiful too. Very dense, heavy stuff; a lot to absorb there. And yet somehow very fluid, almost casual-sounding.

Just finished reading “My Last Martini” by Barry Gifford. A very nice collection, but the pieces are so succinct that it left me feeling kind of unsatisfied. Still hungry. He can be really funny. The way the gets inside a character when he writes in the first person, inhabiting their soul, it’s flawless. Not a false note. Maybe I should mosey on over the library and check out something else.

I wonder what we’ll end up doing tonight. Living with someone, there can be the burden of having to entertain yourself every night of the week. Living alone you can goof off and it’s no big deal; you’re wasting no one’s time but your own.