Mindful

I know that it is ridiculous that I am still doing California posts weeks after we are back but i finally today felt like we had finally started to catch up from being gone. It is fabulous here with great Midwest colors and perfect weather, so i am finding it hard to come inside and do anything except make great food. I actually baked a cake today which is something I never do.

Anyway, one of the few things I really wanted to do while we were in San Francisco was to visit City Lights Bookstore. I know it is a total tourist trap now, however i could not resist the siren song of my Converse high-top wearing teenage years. It should not come a surprise to any of my readers that I I had a torrid love-affair with the Beat poets my senior year of high school after I was kicked out of my AP English class for telling my teacher that i found Beowulf "redundant. " To be fair, the poor woman didn't have much choice since had just I turned in the 7th Level Of Hell-The Board Game for Dante. Even though that game was fucking brilliant thanks to my incredibly talented illustrator/partner. C'est la vie, I convinced one of the young, idealistic special ed teachers to take me on for "independent study" and found Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I finished up the year by staging a sit in to protest the letting go of that special ed teacher, but that is another story for another day. Long story short humiliation and exile from AP English, totally worth it.

City Lights was a little more tame than I expected, but I picked up some European novels that I could never find in a store here and brought home the gorgeously reissued A Coney Island of The Mind, complete with a CD of the poet reading his works. I read some poems to Olivia in the bathtub tonight. Where she was trapped and had no choice but to listen. I'm hoping that it prevent her staging her own coup d'etat to get something for scintillating than Beowulf later.