Sander Roscoe Wolff

While waiting for an appointment at the County Animal Shelter on Friday, Feb 20 2009, I decided to use the time for some exercise. I walked on the sidewalk, North on Pangborn, then East on Washburn, then North again on Regentview. I then turned East on Downey Norwalk Road. About half way down the street I stepped on a fiberglass cover to an inset hole. The fiberglass cover had, from environmental forces, degraded to the point where my foot went straight through it and down into the hole. My leg was torn up, both in the front and back.

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Lauren and several of her friends went out trick-or-treating last Friday, and they came up with some great costumes. First is a group shot, taken some hours after they’d been pounding the pavement in search of terror and/or candy:

From left to right: October, Angel, Lauren, Sierra, and Ashley

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Raindog Armstrong is a poet, publisher, and pied piper for poetry. With his Lummox Press, he published the Lummox Journal as a monthly magazine, which showcased artists from around the country, and around the world. Publishing both poetry and in-depth interviews, the Journal has now moved onto the internet. This has freed him, at last, to publish the first of several volumes of his own work, the first of which is called Fire & Rain. It reaches back to some of his earliest work, and spans nearly 15 years of creativity.

Raindog joined me for a free wheeling, and wide ranging, conversation that includes three poetry recitations, discussions of 9/11, and his past and future musical efforts. It is 50 minutes of honest talk with one of our fair City’s creative icons.

If you can’t commit to listening to an hour-long conversation, you can hear all three of his poems:

Pinto

Traveling Man (an homage to Charles Kuralt)

The Poem Will Save You

Also, you can see a brief video of Raindog reciting Eyes Like Mingus:

Niko was beating up on our other kitty, Violet, so I went out to the living room to play with him. He wasn’t playing:

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Come To Me (Lyrics to a song)
by Sander Roscoe Wolff

The pain inside has died at last
All hope has perished too
And every dream has turned to ash
There’s nothing left to do

I’ve walked alone through worse, I know,
And faced my every fear
Yet somehow as the end draws close
I wish that you were here

I don’t want your comfort, lord,
Forgiveness will not come
I want for you to know me once
Before I’m really gone

Your devils waiting patiently
Their flames are drawing near
And as their talons tear my flesh
I wish that you were here

I wish you stood inside these shoes
And bore this misery
But I refuse to call your name
And you won’t come to me

You made me in your image, lord
Yet you will shed no tear
This mother’s son has earned no love
I wish that you were here

On my recent trip to Washington I took some time to visit the Glass Museum. I’ve always loved glass, and it was thrilling to watch experts work with such a dyamic media. While there, I discovered that a very nice lady was doing a workshop where people were invited to carve images of their choosing into pieces of rubber which would be inked then pressed to paper, much like a woodcut. She suggested the theme of birds and bugs, and so desided to create a bird eating a bug.

Here’s the result:

I wrote to my friend, Rick Lewis, telling him about my blog, saying “Yes, I know its silly, as I have very little to say, but I have a blog. Why? Because I can.”

To which, he responded:

Blogs. Your comment last night got me to thinking about blogs, and what’s right and wrong with them. I can’t say I reached any profound conclusions; only mildly interesting observations. In the heyday of network television news, not so long ago, approximately three major anchors reached 50 million or so viewers or a regular basis. Blogging seems to have turned that equation on its head. I don’t know the numbers, but what if it’s now five million bloggers, each reaching a regular audience of 100 people? Clearly we are no longer describing the same model at all. Meanwhile, network television news as we knew it is vanishing before our eyes; just not fast enough.

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