In the pipeline: Postcards; Twinsets; Ebonics poems; Our first chapbook essay collection.

Yoga, coffee, pack, load new books to the wompus bookstore, that’s my day. Tomorrow we finish up a production run and send out a lot of books, and ship some equipment back to our supplier to be sorted out. We love our supplier up in Michigan, but one of our printers has been plagued with a problem we’re unable to diagnose long-distance. No amount of switching out suspect parts has fixed it, so it goes home to Greg’s workbench where he will doubtless have it set to rights in an hour. I’d drive it up there myself if I weren’t about to log a thousand miles of road time for other purposes.

First stop on the road trip: Candlewood Lake, a friend who at 80-something is still a working artist, still teaching. Her one woman show is up in a local gallery and we might also go down to the Yale Art Museum, where she has a couple of pieces on exhibit.

I’ll meet summer there in Connecticut and a couple days later, celebrate writing at the tip of Cape Cod. And by celebrate I mean settle into a small room on the bay with my laptop and a bunch of books. And maybe my printer. Years ago a friend told me he alternates between editing his own work on screen and on paper, the mind works differently with hard copy.

I lost a blog entry when the browser crashed. A third of the words in this sentence did not exist (in this form) twenty years ago.

So here’s the highlight of that lost missive: Edward Snowden appears to be just what he says he is, a troubled patriot who’s risked everything to blow the whistle on government overreach. Best discussion I’ve seen: Big Brother’s Prying Eyes, Bill Moyers with Lawrence Lessig (prolific writer, Harvard prof and ethics center director, founder of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society).

Also: faux books to decorate your home or hide that secret passageway. Delightful or just plain wrong?

The G8 meetings will be held soon in Fermanagh, Ireland, where abandoned stores have been plastered with stickers which give them the appearance of thriving enterprises. RootsAction sent out a photo of one such “butcher shop.” This is precisely what was done on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, NY, back in the eighties when the neighborhood was very run down and many of the once opulent apartments along the concourse were abandoned, rotting husks. The city decided to seal the windows and apply fake painted scenes, complete with curtains, cat silhouettes, flower pots. They did this along other major thoroughfares used by wealthier New Yorkers and tourists to traverse impoverished communites on their way to and from fancier places. For local residents it was shocking, a slap in the face of real community needs. The G8 are meeting to tighten the austerity belt, a belt which widens even further the wealth gap of our economies. Some very smart people disgaree with the premise that high public debt stifles economies–see that theory debunked on The Real News. Meantime the G8’s Irish hosts are said to be prepping additional prison space, should protests swell.

The wompus cats are always tricking me into slowing down, setting aside my urgent human task in order to loll about and caress them. They have no respect for clock or calendar. They want food, love, shelter, a bit of entertainment. They utilize spare moments to meditate. They read the news of the world on the soles of my shoes.

The lushness of summer is almost overwhelming. Leaves dancing on the trees mesmerize me the same as waves lapping a shoreline, with the ineffable music of the heartbeat of the world.