“All right then, what’s your idea of heaven?”   Wyatt Earp asks.

“Room service,” the woman replies.

I’m a big fan of room service especially because in spite of staying in my share of hotels, I only get it once a year or so.

When I’m in NY, I feel very close to the room service because it’s me.  In the morning, I stumble out in a coat and flip flops and walk two blocks down the street to the Starbucks and get coffee and in the afternoon, I go to the Westside Market Deli and get some salads and stuff.  So that’s my room service.

Room service is wonderful and decadent.  I long to be staying somewhere on someone else’s tab and be walking around in a silk robe (it would help if I owned one) with my hair all up (not a mess) and then I would have my Bollinger brought in or my coffee, juice and croissants.  It would be just heavenly.

Oddly, Americans used to think of hotels as having all kinds of luxuries you just couldn’t get at home.  That was before the bathroom superstores like Bed,Bathand Beyond.  Thanks to them and the internet, we can all have high thread count sheets, appointed bathrooms, downy pillows and comforters.  So if we’re staying in a hotel, we want it to be at least as comfortable as our home.

I stayed in the Doubletree inClaremontover the weekend and had room service one morning which was nice.  Coffee brought up.  Then the last two nights I was at hotels, the one inSan Diegowas a Hampton Inn which had no room service, but you could walk down the hall and get coffee and juice.  The one I stayed in last night which was near where I had to be this morning was an Extended Stay and I am never staying there again.  It has one good thing going for it which is that it is $50/night, but that’s the end of it.

They have no maid service until you leave which is fine for one night, but what the heck?  Last night the whole lobby was being painted and to make it worse, the hotel was very noisy.  You could hear all your neighbors’ activities.  It was scary.  I dreamed all night that homeless people were coming into my room, then I began to dream that I was a homeless person in my room.  I mean the one thing the hotel has going is that you are inside, but you feel homeless.  The whole room is as cheerless as a Motel 6 inKansas.  Normally, I feel a sigh of relief when I enter a hotel room, the white large bed, the expanse of flat TV which I know hides hours of stupidity, the clean bathroom, the absolute lack of blood stains and dirt.  But, the Extended Stay inGardenalacked these amenities.  There was a feeling of dirt and stain and sadness everywhere; the towels looked like prison towels (I’ve never been in prison, but I can only guess,) the blankets like camping blankets and the whole room looked like somewhere you would stay right after you got out of the Big House.  (Why all the prison references?  What is going on in Kate’s life?  Has she recently been incarcerated and failed to blog about it?)  All good questions.

Anyway, next time I drive toSan Diego, I’m spending the night with my friend or at the Hampton Inn and next time I stay inGardena, I’m staying at the Hampton Inn inCarson.  This Extended Stay business is too depressing.  I want to feel like I’m safe and warm, not cold and lonely.  So, here’s to nice hotels.

Some people saunter through their poetry, some wail through it as if they were drowning a thousand song birds.  Some simply make you want to scream and cry.  But the most significant problem at poetry readings is the urge to go to sleep or simply to leave the room.

My favorite passage on this subject of poetry readings is in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent are forced to listen to Vogon poetry which as it turns out is the third worse poetry in the universe.  And that’s always a good thing to keep in mind when listening to bad poetry, that it may not be the very worst.  There could be poetry that is even more vomit inducing that whatever you are listening to.

The Book: Vogon poetry is the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience members died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. The very worst poetry in the universe was written by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex. Thankfully it was destroyed when the earth was. 

That being said, there are good poetry readings too, but simply not enough.  Too many are just crazy making.  I have been too way more than my share of readings.

Do you want to be good at reading?  Here are some hints.

1. Watch this video and learn.http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/how-not-to-read-poetry_b46205
2. Go to readings and take notes on what people do badly.  Avoid being boring.
3. Also avoid trying to read better than you know how.  If you aren’t a singer, don’t try to sing.  If you aren’t an actor, don’t try to act and for god’s sake, if you aren’t a dancer, DO NOT try to dance.  There is nothing that is more painful than watching someone attempt to dance alone at a reading.
4. At the sign that anyone in the audience is super bored, wrap it up.
5. Try to read under your limit.  Like the world’s best Casanova, leave them begging for more.  If you are expecting 15 minutes, at 20 minutes you want to shoot yourself.

Enough advice for one day.

Encinitas is a nice town.  Never had been there before, but I spent the afternoon hanging out there.  There is one store called Bliss which I fell madly in love with.  They had all these house decorations, these huge green pillows with Indian silk shams and these wall paintings, candles that were magical and lovely, but unfortunately all out of my price range.  But walking around the store made me happy like entering the world of magical mad cabinet maker.  My friend and I  went to the East Village Asian Diner for dinner and had this clay pot full of rice and salmon and sprouts and marmalade tea and sake.  It was great, I would go back in a second.

If you get the Zone, will you look like the guy in the commercial?  Probably not.  You won’t have the best abs on the planet.  Personally, my abs don’t want to be the best abs in my county, city or even zip code, let alone the planet.  I’ve been working out six days a week since the beginning of the year.  Nothing’s happening yet, so I am going to try to up the ante to seven days a week.  It makes me sick with jealousy to think about my friend Lisa who works out for at least an hour seven days a week.  I only wish I had that kind of discipline, but I’m too much of a slacker.  Plus, going to the gym and running really interferes with me sleeping and I hate to mess up my bed time.  I like getting enough sleep.  Being tired makes me want to throw up.

My friend Karen is really thin and she only does yoga once a week.  She pretty much lives on lettuce.  But she eats a lot of sushi when we go out.  I would like to look like Karen, but it’s not happening.  I’m almost a foot taller than she is.  Shaving my legs takes many minutes longer than it takes her.  I bet she saves a fortune in razors.  Small cute people have fun buying clothes too.  She’s got a whole closet full of adorable little numbers that I bet she had fun trying on.

But I told her tonight that she has a problem.  She is thin so she doesn’t really have an incentive to work out even though she wishes she would.  I told her that if she had a fat ass she’d feel like taking it to the gym, but she doesn’t.  She says she doesn’t spend much time looking in the mirror trying to admire the view and that’s part of the problem too.  If she spent hours admiring her rack, she’d want to work out and improve the whole package, but she doesn’t seem into that either.  I don’t know what I can do to inspire her to work out more if she won’t either have a fat ass or spend some timing checking her non ass out.  I’m fresh out of ideas.

I like this little hotel inSan Diego.  It’s comfortable and there’s a little desk.  They also gave me a cookie and some tea.  I need some sleep pretty desperately though. San Diegois a pretty little town.  I like it down here.  I’m spending the day inDelMar tomorrow just chilling it.  I wish I’d been here in the early days of the Del Mar Racetrack.  If I were a rich girl I’d go there now wearing a white hat and gloves.

Let’s start with this.  If you are married to a sweet quiet woman who does what you say, who smiles and laughs at your jokes, God bless you.  Who wouldn’t want such a wife? The great thing about being married to someone who is quiet, obedient and if she’s smarter than you in any way is smart enough to hide that, the best thing about that is that you feel like the king of your castle all the time.  Who doesn’t want to be king?

Being king means that you own the casle, that you give the orders.  Who hasn’t dreamed of being the king of the castle?  If you want to be king of your castle, then you need an obedient princess and you should choose your princess wisely, ideally someone who will follow orders, be awed by your accomplishments and be willing to watch pictures/slide shows/DVDs of your travels and impressive leaps and jumps.  She should like hearing you talk and not talk too much herself.  She should be willing to give up her name/favorite foods/weird friends to be with you.

The Fifties was a real heyday for this kind of activity.  You could say to your wife, “Hey darling, we’re moving toTexas,” and she would start packing.  “Hey honey, I just bought us a new Chevy,” and she would run out to see the car and thank you with big wet kisses.  (Nothing against big wet kisses.)

You could boss your wife and no one would think less of you.  Now if you tell your wife to make you dinner, to pack the car, iron your clothes, or bathe the kids, you’re likely to get the look, and if you’re lucky, only the look.  Smart women don’t like to be given orders.  They like you to make requests.

We have several couple friends who are married to women as smart and outspoken as they are.  Karen, Lisa, Sasha, Tracy and Deborah all give their spouses a run for their money.  And of course our lesbian couple friends all seem pretty even as well.  It’s always fun to be around couples with smart women because they get sassy and have stuff on their brain.

The reason men don’t marry women as smart as they are is very simple.  They’re scared.  Scared of feeling stupid and small.  Nobody likes to feel stupid or small.  Nor should they.

A really smart woman who is also a good human being would never make her man feel like an idiot.  Because in fact, if she needs to make her man feel like an idiot then she obviously has low self esteem herself.  I am always amazed when spouses say negative things about each other in public.  What you have to wonder is what the hell they say to each other in private.

Which brings up another point.  In my opinion, you should treat your spouse way better than you treat the mailman, (unless the mailman is your lover in which case you have a way cuter mailman than I do) and sometimes you see people who treat their spouses so offhandedly that you really wonder what they’re thinking.

Choose wisely with your spouse.  Choose someone you can respect because you’ll be your best person if you are challenged.  Being challenged by the person you love is amazing.  It’s everything.  Have a Kate Hepburn type wife, someone who has a mind and can speak her mind.

This is the weekend of the Kingsley/Kate Tufts judging.  The judges are Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, David Barber, Ted Genoways and yours truly.  One learns a great deal from being on a judging panel.  I can’t really describe it.  But it’s both tiring and invigorating at the same time.

There is a poetry media game that some people play very successfully.  They know all the right people, they have all the right publicity and when you walk by these people in the evening just as twilight comes in, the first thing you notice is that they glow in the dark.  Literally, certain poets have this phosphorescence.   This comes from having done all the right things.

Examples of poets who glow in the dark:  Matthea Harvey, both of the Dickman twins,  Dana Goodyear, Matthew Zapruder and while we’re on the subject of Zapruder, most of the authors published by Wave.  You see, there is a poetry machine.  To be part of that machine means that you will be written up in the poetry media, that you will get lots of well paid speaking engagements and of course, choice teaching jobs.  What this will enable you to do is have plenty of time to write something really epic which involves Greek gods.  You can also walk around lording it over all of lesser mortals.  Actually, I don’t think any of the writers above do much lording, but the point is that they can.  They’re blessed.

We started Red Hen Press to publish poets that were not part of the poetry machine.  Poets that hadn’t played the game.  Poets who were invisible.  Poets who were not going to be famous unless we worked hard together to get their book out there.  Poets who weren’t doing all the right things.  Poets who were not part of the huge machine, people who didn’t study with Jorie Graham or Robert Pinsky.  Poets who write well but are outside the system.

The problem is that eventually you need to have the publishing company succeed and that means books that sell and that’s where the old machine comes back.

Pretty soon and before you know it, you don’t have any red hens laying fresh brown organic eggs.  You are instead eating white eggs that you got at Costco.  They look very nice and you can buy them in 18 packs. They keep those white eggs in cold storage forever.  It’s inevitable if you want to have big commercial omelets.

Okay, maybe that’s not a good analogy.  But I’m just saying that neither poetry or publishing is what I thought it would be.

What I like about poetry is the part where you just sit quietly and read and think and write.  What I like about gardening and cooking is just playing with it and thinking and dreaming.   What I like about running is just running, not trying to win races, just running.  Poetry, running and lovemaking should not be competitive sports –at least for me.

Important quotes from Matrix Reloaded

Trinity: You always told me to stay off the freeway.
Morpheus: Yes, that’s true.
Trinity: You said it was suicide.
Morpheus: Then let us hope that I was wrong.

I think about this when I drive LA freeways.  But now, mostly, I think of sleep.

What does it mean to play the poetry game?  Some people play the game, the media poetry game so everyone important in poetry knows who they are.  If you don’t,  you are left out in the cold.  I can’t think of this.  Let’s think of something more cheerful.  I’m tired.

I’ll tell you a story.  I was in a boat once sailing across a lake and it capsized.  I never thought I was going to die.  The other people on the boat frantically called for help and put on their life jackets.  They wore their orange life jackets and people came by and scooped them up and took them off to get popcorn and hot chocolate.  I swam two miles across the lake and when I landed on the beach I slept on the pine needles.  I smelled like pine when I woke.  There were pinwheels in the trees.

Tonight after the restaurant everyone left and caught a cab.  I found my car and drove home.  Not deliberate.

Sleeping now.

Eddie: So tell me about your boyfriend before us.

Maggie:  We’ve been over this a thousand times, I’m not going to tell you about that.  You’ll get mad and jealous.

Eddie: No, I won’t.  Just tell me, I’m asking you.

Maggie: Well you have to promise.

Eddie: I promise. As long as he didn’t have a twelve inch dick.

Maggie: Well he didn’t have that for sure. He was fun at first.  But he was bossy in bed.

Eddie:  Bossy?  How?

Maggie:  Well, he used to say, Come on, Maggie put your back into it. This was while we’re listening to Patti Smith and Jimmy Buffet.

Eddie:  What’d he mean by that?

Maggie:  I never was quite sure. I remember him saying that and one morning we’re at it and his kid comes in with the wheat colored hair and the kid calls out, ‘Daddy,’ and we pop our heads out from under the covers, and the kid’s not dumb; he’s watching us, and Jimmy Buffet there says, ‘Hey son, me and Maggie are wrestling, but you can’t wrestle with us, you have to go back to bed and we’ll be out in a little while for breakfast.’ The kid disappears, closes the door.

He says, ‘Maggie, put your back into it,’ but no woman wants to be given orders in the bedroom.  And he liked to tie me up by my arms with his belts to the bed posts and once he got drunk and left me there all night.  He went to take a piss in the yard and he got arrested for indecent exposure, the neighbors called the cops and I was stuck, tied up.

Eddie:  How come you couldn’t get untied?

Maggie:  I tried!  You make me sound incompetent.

Eddie:  He sounds like a lot of fun.

Maggie: He always liked to pee on the grass.  Whenever we were going anyplace he would stop the car and pee on the grass.  He’d stop off the freeway, parks. He stopped to piss off both theGolden Gatebridge and the Verrazano-Narrows both I’m glad to say in the middle of the night.  I’m amazed he didn’t get arrested.

Eddie:  You were in love with this guy?

Maggie:  You dated MissIdahowith no redeeming features except her boobs.

Eddie:  Ask any man if that even compares.  That is dating a woman for two amazing reasons. And you date an idiot who bosses you in bed, has bad taste in music and pees out of cars? I’m sorry Maggie, I’m way ahead here. I’m miles ahead.  If we are inventors.  I just invented the computer and you are working on glass.

Maggie:  I am so glad I told you this story.

Eddie:  So you left this guy before I came along.  How’d you tear yourself away?  I mean he sounds too good to be true.  I don’t know if I could have done it.

Maggie:  I pushed him over a bridge while he was peeing.

Eddie:  Really?

Maggie:  I forgot to bail him out of jail one time.

Eddie:  Get real.

Maggie:  Okay, I tried the usual.  Pulling away, going away for the weekend, he didn’t want to break up.  He liked me.

Eddie:  He felt sorry for you.

Maggie:  I’m sexy.  I’m likeable.

Eddie:  He was trying to save me.

Maggie:  I developed a strategy.  A plan to get rid of him. I won’t bore you with the details.   I was out of town.  We had girls show up with lots of alcohol.  His kid was with the ex.  Party out of control.  Peeing on the lawn.  He had sex with several girls.  Police called. Arrest.  Girls tied up.  Pictures in the paper.

What choice did I have?  His family could hardly blame me.  So that was that.  When you came along, I was relieved you had the decency to not be that kind of man. At least you haven’t told me to put my back into it, so I haven’t had to bring in any hookers.

Eddie:  I’ll keep it in mind if I want to avoid hookers.  Might be fun though.  Do I have to pee on the lawn?

Maggie:  Never know till you try.  So do I get to hear about your ex-lovers?

Eddie:  Well, I dated this one itchy librarian.

Maggie:  Yeah right.

Eddie:  I think she had allergies; she was always scratching herself.  Like a little cat.

Maggie:  I know when you’re kidding, you know. What about Charlie?

Eddie:  I broke up with Charlie when I met you.  She was fromLibya.  She had a great British accent; her dad worked in foreign service or something.

Maggie:  I like that.  Or something. That’s what I’m going to say about my days as a topless dancer.  I was into ballet or something.

Eddie:  She used to make the oddest foods. Since we didn’t date long, I had to eat them.

Maggie:  Oh so now that you’ve been with me so long if I give you oysters and coconut you don’t have to eat it?

Eddie:  I’m not saying that, I’m just saying when you’ve been with someone for a long time you can be a little more honest.  She put honey on turkey burgers.  She ate wasabi with a lot of things you wouldn’t normally think of, like green beans, and okay rice is normal I guess, but just rice and wasabi?  She said wasabi was good for weight loss.

Maggie:  I’ve actually read that.