 Good evening. Thank you so much for coming. I'm Dan Groberg. I'm the Executive Director of the Kellogg-Hubert Library. I'm so excited to see so many people here supporting the library. I'm really grateful to have all of you here. Thank you so much. And I'm so excited for this special event with Ros Gay. I want to thank the Savoy for hosting us this evening, and to Ross for generously donating his time, and to Bearpond Books for collaborating with us on this event. And I want to invite Shane Knight from Bearpond to say a few words. Oh, y'all, butter and paper is an occupational hazard. Hi. It is a delight, too. Yes, absolutely. I want to thank Ross Gay for jumping in to help out our little town. I'm pretty sure that most of you here tonight had your hands in the sludge back in July, jumping in day after day. Bearpond is so happy to be slinging Ross's books again, and we are more than happy to pay this opportunity forward to our beloved second home, the Kellogg-Hubert, a place where all are affirmed, welcomed, and safe. And I know I'm speaking to the choir here, but I implore you to continue to support one of the last bastions of publicly supported community spaces, our libraries. We all know that book bans, the hijacking of public boards by fascists, and the willingness of elected officials to defund these publicly held goods, are tearing down our nice things across the country. So please continue to show up, get dirty, ask questions, run for things, and find out what awesome organizations such as For the People are doing, which helps train and empower citizens to protect and defend our beloved public spaces. We actually can have nice things, and we do when we work together. So thank you for showing up, and enjoy. Thank you again to Bearpond Books. As Jane said, at a time where libraries around the country are under attack, this community has always been here for the Kellogg-Hubert. With your support, we're proud to be a bastion of free thought, free expression, and lifelong learning. When the library flooded in July, we immediately jumped to work to say, how can we serve our community? But even more remarkably, you immediately jumped to work to say, how can we serve our library? 160 volunteers showed up with 24 hours notice on a hot human day to carry heavy, wet oil, sod, and books. I know a lot of you are in the audience, and I'm so grateful to all of you. More than 600 people have donated since the flood to support our recovery efforts, and we were able to start curbside services just a week after the flood because of you. We were able to reopen the building to the public just a few weeks ago, thanks to you, and we'll rebuild a better, more resilient library thanks to you. The road ahead is long and expensive, and we don't expect to have our building fully restored until at least the spring, but with your help, we look forward to continuing to serve as a third place in our community, as a safe and welcoming place where all are welcome. So thank you so much. Tonight, I'm so excited to welcome National Book Award finalists and New York Times bestselling author, Ross Gay. Ross is the author of four books of poetry against which bringing the shovel down, beholding, and catalog of unabashed gratitude, which was the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tough Poetry Award. And in addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays. The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. Insighting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of Mordelights, was just released in September of this year. Ross studies joy. And with all the darkness in the world right now and all the challenges facing Montpelier and Central Vermont after the flooding, joy is something we could all use right now. Time Magazine wrote, Ross's delightful observations of everyday life are a reminder that joy is all around us. We just have to be willing to look for it. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Ross Gay. Good to see you. Thank you so much. And thank you for having me here. I was saying to Jane, who said, oh, this is your first time to Montpelier, the bookstore. And I said, no, I've been here like several times, you know, I come through anytime I've been in Montpelier pretty much, you know, I go to the bookstore. And the library, God damn, it's beautiful in there. Yeah, the Calder prints upstairs. Jesus. If you haven't seen it, there are like four, five or six of these Alexander Calder prints that are just gorgeous. God damn. And also the seats. I don't know if people do this, but the seats that have the, you know, the windows that have the things that are big enough that you can kind of take a nap in them, if you wanted to. Anyway, yeah, I'm glad to be here. I'm really, really glad. And it's amazing to hear about all the, you know, when we take care of each other. It's really beautiful. Let me read this first essay that is, it's actually about, it's about a bookstore in Philadelphia that I adore, but I feel like it's for both the bookstore and the library. I'm going to read it. And it has this long title. It's called, also what a cool theater. God, yeah. We were talking back there about this place and man, it is awesome. This is called friends. Let us do our best not to leave this life having not loved what we love enough. I learned today from Dave that Joseph Fox bookshop has gone out of business. I hope it wasn't the pandemic by which has really meant the lockdown policies that made the rich richer and kicked the shit out of most everyone else. I just looked it up. It was. Anyway, there is a cliche circulating these days like genital warts meant to suggest something was jarred. It's a weird way to introduce myself to you. We're all adults meant to suggest something was jarring or upsetting or super heart stirring or something. I assure you someone is saying it at this very moment. I hate that I too am about to say it, but the news that Joseph Fox had closed felt like a gut punch. When Dave said it, I actually put my hand on my tummy and said ug and no and why to which Dave shrugged and made a sad and sympathetic face. He loved the store too. Joseph Fox was a beautifully curated bookstore for my tastes, which needn't be yours. Lots of essays and nonfiction, lots of poems and novels and nearly whole runs of certain presses stuff. I think a bunch of the New York review books, that whole Melville House last interview series, I'm pretty sure I remember probably some of those petite penguin classics and a bunch of the stout archipelago bricks books with which to make a house that won't blow down. They had a gardening section where I once got a seed saving book and an art section where I got a book of Annie Albers' work. It was small. The back room was very close to the front room and the hallway between them was often packed, encouraging lots of excuse me's and after use and such, which are themselves among the products, the gifts of the small bookstore. We put those after use and such those let me grab it for you and such in the satchels of our hearts. Though it was a little place, a packed little place, I meandered, I got lost, I got found, I got lost again. I guarantee you there were nooks I had not yet discovered. No to Bene, a good bookstore is also a nook store, a store of nooks inside of which await what you cannot begin to know. Also, and crucially and delightfully, a staff that could answer the hell out of your questions, which I will go ahead and declare a quality, a bouncy, a beauty of the small independent bookstore. People who know their shit and are glad to share it. The last time I was in there, I was looking for W. E. B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction, a book I wish I had read when it was assigned to me in college. Lots of those books. No regrets, no regrets. When I asked the 20-something woman working behind the counter hopped off her stool and walked directly to the floor to ceiling shelf across the way and pulled the Du Bois from the shelf, placing the tome, and it's not too much to say, my life in my hands, again and again they do. These booksellers, these librarians, these guides, these friends, smiling. Here it is. This is, you know, this book, it was written between August 1st of 2021 and August 1st of 2022. And I think that's right. And so the first four or five we were actually in Vermont, where we like to come for my birthday sometimes, and other times. This is called My Birthday Again. Well, here we are again, this time my 47th birthday. This year we decided to enjoy a week away up in a little rented cabin in Vermont, which has a bounty of delights. The first of which is that apple trees grow everywhere here. Yards, roadside tickets, parking lots, and this year they are loaded. I mean, I have never seen forageable bounty quite like this. It makes me want to come back with a pickup truck to snag a few years worth of applesauce. As we were driving around admiring all the apple trees, I was also admiring that very Vermont-y and Catholic sounding roadside feature called the pullout. Also called pull-offs, they are common here as air, room enough for a few cars to pull over and look down at the beautiful river roiling through the boulders below, or overlook the valley with the first embers of fall in the leaves. Shortly after we pulled out of a pull-off, we pulled into yet another of the delights of Vermont, a roadside farm stand. This one peopled by people, though sometimes they're peopled solely by a box in which to slide your money. A trust box, I've never heard it called, though we should. As we were getting some blueberries and raspberries, we overheard some Vermont's who were happily whooped from somebody in a past earlier today. They described it while picking out their fruit. Beautiful this and beautiful that, challenging but fun. So we got directions from them and after we settled up, we headed over there. The trail started right at the edge of the parking lot, which was more like a pull-off. And we entered what was immediately a lush and magical forest, birches with their bark curling like pages of old books, ferns luminous from the light dappling through the canopy, plush carpets of moss, nearly fluorescent mushrooms. It was rugged-ish, lots of scrambling up slick slabs of, I think, granite. We were both sweating pretty good within the first half hour or so, and Stephanie stashed her sweatshirt behind a fallen tree. We passed through what felt like several ecosystems and when, about two hours later, we finally approached a sign that we knew in our heart of hearts was going to tell us a hundred feet, maybe fifty, to the summit. It said one mile to go. We'd only eaten a couple handfuls of berries. I'd only brought a not-all-the-way full court glass jar of water for both of us. And then, that's like someone said, ooh, you're not from here. And as we were contemplating reaching the top, a couple hikers approached the same sign we were looking at. They both had on big packs. One looked to be about mid-60s, the other late 20s or early 30s. We learned they worked together and were practicing for a longer trip on the Appalachian Trail, with which this trail intersected. The older of the two was the boss. She had hiking poles, and the younger looked a little bit coerced. The boss asked us which way we were going, and we told her that we were deciding whether or not to go the final mile, pointing in the direction of the summit. Upon which she looked us up and down, noting, I guess, our attire, t-shirt and shorts, and she asked us, or maybe actually she was telling us, you know cotton's a killer, right? Which we didn't know. Then pointing to our feet, unsupportive sneakers, she made an, are you kidding me, face and shook her head, no. Then she asked how much water we had, and I shook the half full court glass jar, cutely, I thought, at which she sneered that's not even close to enough, making an, are you stupid face, before saying no glass on the trail. I was already backing away, trying to sneak down the trail, for who wants to get chewed out on their birthday? When Stephanie for some reason blabbed about, yeah, I am a little hungry too, and yeah, I have a little bit of a headache too, and yeah, my knees kind of bothering me too, blab, blab, blab. At which I recoiled and ducked my head like, why would you tell her that? Like she's going to yell at me, which in a Vermont way she did. In full on, take your head out of your ass ease. She asked, I mean, she actually asked, what's wrong with you? After we told her everything is wrong with this, you're right. Thank you very much. And no more glass on the trail. Sorry about that, ma'am. She said, sort of chipper again. Okay, take care now. Enjoy Vermont. As we were descending, we could hear her talking shit about us to the ranger a few yards farther up the trail. She was hungry. He had a glass jar. They were wearing cotton, trotting down and joined myself, trying to not smoke Stephanie and her hurting knee and head. I found myself whistling and feeling the soft earth receiving my inadequate footwear and the glowing ferns dragging their feathery fronds along my suicidal cotton shorts. And I noted how pleased I was delighted even as I tend often to be at having not reached the summit to have gotten close but no cigar and interesting quality I was turning over in my head on my glad descent. Maybe I'm afraid of failure. Maybe I'm afraid of the ends of things. Maybe it's a rejection of the conquering spirit of some of my forefathers. Maybe it's a distant cousin to the way I for some reason always leave out a tiny bit of a few ingredients when I'm cooking. Maybe it's a small and weird gesture of hope leaving something in the tank for tomorrow, which implies there will be a tomorrow. Maybe not finishing as a prayer for the tomorrow. An interesting prayer to make on the first day of a year long project. Though it was a dueling prayer I made when Stephanie brought home four very delicious birthday tacos for me, which along with the chips and guac and the kimchi and the roasted sweet potatoes and the kombucha, I did in fact summit. That was mad taco that we were eating. Yeah. So good. Yeah. This is called the wide berth. Today as I walked on a narrow shouldered road, very distracted by the abundance of forageable food, more rogue apples, raspberries, choked cherries, a whole eight foot wall of thimbleberries. It's like Willy Wonka's out here. Leeds from Montes driving in their Subaru's or pickups. I got to just tell you a thing about this book. So, you know, like if you're, I think probably any writer, but a writer like me, you really depend on a type, what is it called an editor, a type editor? What's it called? A copy editor. You really depend on them because they know their shit and like they know all the grammar and all the stuff like that. But periodically, they miss something that's so obvious. Like, I'd spelled the word Bramanta, V-E-R-M-O-N-T-A-H. And they said, well, you know, you spell this V-E-R-M-O-N-T-E-R. I said, I fucking know. It's a joke. Anyway, so there's all these things when I see in this book, I'm like, oh, that was a good one. These for Montes driving in their Subaru's or pickups almost to a one gave me a wide berth veering a good eight or so feet away from me. Sometimes they crossed all the way across the double lane into the other lane into the double line into the other lane. And most often while birthing me widely, they waved. Though this is not the first birth of note of delight for today is my beloved friend Walt's 50th birthday. No doubt some extra confetti for this party because Walt was supposed to be a goner from leukemia over a decade ago. Not to mention that like me, he's had an intermittently troubled mind. He's had a mind itself intermittently difficult to survive. And yet here he is. Here we are still together on this side, our friendship nearly 40 years old, which some days makes me look at it like it's my child. I guess it's our child to say, my god, you're 40 years old. How'd that happen? Our 40 year old child, which we have watched grow up, which we have grown up together is one of the great comforts of my life. All that becoming, all that floundering, all that stumbling, all that wonder. Walt's the one helped me with my slap shot. Walt's the one taught me how to cook eggs. Walt's the one helped me paint the shirt I donned at homecoming that said fuck apartheid and on the front and stop police brutality on the back. Walt's the one picked me up when I needed a ride, gave me money when I needed it, shared his sorbet, his gummy bears, his cheese steak and pizza, his extra hockey stick, his car. Walt's the one who said when I was not quite sure how to extract myself from a relationship that was making me sad. Dude, what are you doing? Walt's the one who would tell me I'm fucking up, but would never judge me a fuck up. Walt's the one who makes me think of Donnie Hathaway's song. He ain't heavy. He's my brother. Walt's the one who never fled from my need, flailing and sloppy and shitty and even cruel sometimes though it might be, which maybe explains why I will never put his phone number in my phone. I keep it by heart. Oh, one last thing, sort of a first thing truth be told, for my 17th birthday when I still mainly only read the sports page of the Bucks County Courier Times, dude gave me Kant's critique of pure reason and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, which you might call, in addition to throwing your money down the drain, setting a ridiculously high bar or you might call it belief, which though I never would have said this out loud, I've actually needed people to have in me. I have needed to be, we need to be believed in, which in a certain kind of way is like being birthed. And just like his gummy bears and hockey sticks, I guess I'm taking Walt's birthday because when Walt was born, so too was I. This is called the lady in the tree. I just put my laundry, I just put in my laundry at the laundromat. And as I was sitting on the curb in the sun, looking across the parking lot, I heard but did not see a woman yell, a girl, right? And a brown dude walking beneath the voice and pushing a baby stroller, turned the chariot to the woman who was, now I could tell, obscured by a tree. And so her voice, a white Hoosier voice with a touch of the East, a little pinch of Jersey or Philly back there, which gotta say, smooths out my hackles some, seemed to be coming from the tree. This brown dude, who pretty sure was not a black dude, which I think I gathered, stay with me, from his footwear, a certain kind of sandal, very thin, possibly leather, with a loop over the toe, was darker skinned than me, although I am in common parlance in many parts of this country anyway, though the world and overall an entirely different story, a black dude, races like God, it'll do whatever you need it to do. Dude turned his baby girl to the white woman shouting to him from up in the tree, something about Halloween, which, what do I know, a thousand assumptions a second, this dude ain't trick or treating. And she said, something, something beautiful, something, something precious. And he seemed not to be saying anything, though I could see him looking up into the tree, nodding, a somewhat reticent or guarded smile. And I heard from the tree something like hair ties. And then the brown dude nodded, his baby girl still tilted on her rear wheels. And then it was quiet for a second. And the brown dude rested the carriage back down on all fours before taking a few steps to his right, where he bent over to pick up whatever the woman threw down from the tree. I'm guessing some hair ties for his beautiful, precious baby girl. After he grabbed the hair ties, he waved to the tree with the same hand that was holding the gift. And the woman in the tree said something like, okay, baby, as the man turned his carriage and baby girl to carry on their way. Immediately after which she hollered at this big burly white dude in a camo hat leaning against the phone pole across the street. You okay? Which he didn't quite look. But he smiled too. I could see it beneath his camo cap. And he nodded and gave the tree a thumbs up. And this is called the lady on the porch. This is one of those days the book isn't big enough because in the intervening 45 minutes, the white voice lady in the tree has spoken to literally every single person who has gone by every single one, which is up to about 13 if I was counting right. My Nana always loved to sit on her porch, regardless of where she lived, probably because she loved being a black voice lady in the tree, dispensing goodies and advice and compliments and critiques and hair ties and such. My Nana loved talking shit at the world. Nana also liked to sit on the porch. She said probably because her last name was porch from her third husband, who my mother reports wasn't great. Though I never met him. I knew her first husband, my father's father, who I called Papa. And her second husband, I met once at their son's funeral. Keith died of a heart attack at 35. When I was having some heart stuff and they did a family history, I was like, nope, nope. And then I called my brother to double check and we remembered, oh yeah, Uncle Keith. And when I said, you know, I had an uncle. Should I put that down? They said, yeah, you probably should. Nana's second husband, Mr. Turner, like Keith was dark. It was tall, dark brown, very handsome with pretty hands. But about Nana's third husband, porch, the one I never met. My mom's beef, like my Nana's incidentally, was that he was always playing golf instead of working. I have no beef with not working, though I do have beef with golf. It sounds like Nana is maybe at last truly on her way. She's 96 and all three of her siblings, aged 90, 90, 90 are alive. In a nursing home in Youngstown, no longer able to get out of bed. Very tired. You can let go, Nana. Spent a long time. About a decade ago, when I was visiting her in her high rise old folks home across from a Cleveland clinic, in addition to flirting hard with some man in the elevator, you got a car? Because I don't mess with no man without a car. And boasting about how a couple nights prior she had been at a geriatric dance off and was by far the best one down there. She bragged me up and down the hallways telling the other old folks, this is my baby. And he's a writer and telling everyone she made me greens without the ham hot because he doesn't eat meat and still they're good. We went to Corky and Lenny's out on Chagrin Boulevard just past Shaker Heights where Nana got a pastrami and I got a veggie burger, which they for some reason kindly made a double. And she told me the waitress was flirting with me. She dipped her french fry into the ketchup and pointed it at my double, then giggled the wispy way she did. She's trying to get with you Rossi. Takes one to no one, I guess. We came back to sit on her sixth floor porch overlooking the parking lot where she was growing peppers and tomatoes and greens and pots. She was telling me about her mama's garden. Just like I am incapable of calling my father's mother anything but Nana, my Nana was incapable it seemed of calling her mother anything but mama. Before she excused herself for a second and came back with a bag of goodies from what she called I'm pretty sure the Hunger Center. Inside was a cheap electric toothbrush she grabbed two, some store brand toothpaste she grabbed two, some beans and some spaghetti. Baby could you use this? She asked and though I didn't really need it I said yes please and thank you. Oh but I also wanted to mention that after listening to the lady in the tree for a while I went back in to change my laundry and noticed the third of my three machines was empty. I figured the attendant maybe moved my clothes somewhere but when I asked she told me she didn't know and then went into detective mode. She eventually figured opening a washer a few doors down and seeing some granny panties in there. Aha that lady must have taken your clothes. We laughed together considering that granny finding my clothes which though I am shedding some pounds through these times they ain't going to kill me like that. I'm still six foot four and my clothes on that lady will be very big. My clothes will make that granny a baby. Lord I believe in almost nothing anymore except these fleeting sweetnesses, these dime a dozen precious sweetnesses, these sweetnesses that seem to me the organizing fact of our lives or maybe more accurately the reasons to stay alive. These people in trees and on porches and in laundromats taking my phone number for when my clothes came back and while I was giving her my number a woman in a tank top and jeans standing guard next to her washer good idea reading her phone who I'd noticed glancing up periodically at our conversation called out looking down so at her phone but smiling that's life in the laundromat. How are you doing? You're doing all right? Okay okay this is called Daisy Returns. The cat the cat we cohabitate with common parlance our cat though it's obvious enough that we belong to her is sitting atop my legs which are beneath a handmade old-time equipped liver spotted with coffee stains as bedclothes in my proximity always are and probably always will be. You are who you are I once told my friend Sebastian when he got eggs on his shirt again. Daisy takes off on the regular because there have been dogs and another cat who intermittently visit or live here. One of those dogs a recent addition to the family is batshit as we say and to any little creature squirrel, bunny, puppy, cat she lunges and screams I mean she screams like she's being scalded or having her skin peeled off from her or something and though it seems to me the scream is murderous I guess it's possible it is a scream of curiosity and collegiality. Either way Daisy's not hanging around to find out. Daisy's foundational inquiry her primary and abiding question is whether or not the coast is clear which because we live in a neighborhood of cats it's often not Zeke and Zora brother and sister are the neighbor cats Zora talks like a rusty swing set and a lot Zeke had been for a few years until Gizmo's arrival the sole baddest dude on this block Zeke walks slow and luxuriously almost princely they both kick Daisy's ass Turmeric is a recent addition to Zeke and Zora's house whose human mother claimed her from a junk yard in Indianapolis hoping against hope that she was ginger the former badass matriarch of the neighborhood who one day disappeared she's not not even close toothless now because of some kind of mouth disease and it seems to me with a bum leg or two she also kicks Daisy's ass Gizmo is the deaf side means cat who moved across the street a couple years back who's a little bit like Omar from the wire the streets mostly clear when he pokes his head from his cat door and by the time he's tried it down the steps it's a ghost town except one time Zeke stayed put thickening up his coat and getting low looking just past Gizmo and Gizmo slightly smaller than Zeke but wiry saunter directly to Zeke getting lower with each step and looking also just past him and when they got within spitting distance they started howling at which point on my porch I put my book all the way down on my lap for I knew it was soon to be on I guess I could have broken it up but I'm sorry to tell you I like to watch mixed martial arts I was curious when they commenced to brawling it was straight out of Tom and Jerry in the first round they whirled about four feet into the air clutching each other in a kind of corkscrew motion after a 15 second intermission they jumped back on each other and this time it was somersaults a few feet into the air after which Zeke back pedaled very slowly probably saying stuff like you're lucky I didn't sleep good last night and you're lucky I had a sore paw etc before scampering away needless to say Gizmo sometimes kicks Daisy's ass there's that chubby homebody cat whose name I don't know across the street beneath the pear tree who never leaves her yard but would surely kick Daisy's ass then there's baby Jake like Paris from the Iliad gorgeous regal always in the cut seems mostly to be in seductive repose and who when he moves he flounces if it doesn't interfere with his preening he kicks Daisy's ass and finally there's crazy Jake baby Jake's dad sometimes we'll see them catching up in the alley a true wildcat with matted fur who crawls almost like a snake and sleeps under our garage in a dugout with a woodchuck crazy Jake you don't believe me crazy Jake I'm pretty sure is Daisy's friend her counselor her her confidant her Yoda a few times I've seen them lying on the same wall no hackles working things through all to say Daisy's often on edge though I've not had my ass beat like she has daily I have for other reasons at times in my life been all brainstem all anxiety all darting eyes and every sound coming for your throat and so how lucky it feels to have her snuggle down relaxed safe on my lap purring so loud and so hard I can feel it into my chest and when I take a sip of coffee or turn the page of my book and so stop petting her for a second she puts her hand on my wrist and looks into my eyes as though to say please don't stop a plea I feel so lucky to heed this is called being read to in what would prove to be a somewhat lazy day a day we would neither seize nor attack nor crush nor murder nor decapitate nor defenest straight but simply live langurously and loungely Stephanie drinking her tea me my coffee in bed and PJ's past noon and in no big hurry to fix that which makes the Puritans in us whirl in their graves hastening happily their conversion into soil and worm shit and flowers from our sloth Stephanie started reading Eduardo Galliano's book soccer in sun and shadow which is one of my favorite books and I think now hers it's a kind of history of soccer football told in short essays essay it's from galliano's perspective not only as a pretty hardcore fan but also is one of our most important and searing writers on colonialism and empire also there are drawings this is the second or third time we've read galliano's book having come to it first stumbling around the public library browsing is the word wandering wondering for some guidance on a book of epistolary basketball essays I'm working on with a friend I'd read and taught some of galliano's memory of fire trilogy and his book of fables the book of embraces but I still need to or should read his open veins of Latin America which I understand is one of the most important books I'll ever read per that last sentence that should how lucky even if it sometimes prick you with shame should is one of the cudgels of shame especially should have even if it has compelled you to pretend to the contrary not yet to have read even near everything by your favorite authors thanks to your having been a shabby and half-ass student there are so many books to look forward to I was reclined with my coffee on my chest as Stephanie flipped back and forth through the book reading essays which though galliano's book moves chronologically it invites it might be the brevity of the essays or that they mostly stand alone or just that reading a book not front to back can be a delight I recently realized reading the poet cd writes book cooling time an american poetry vigil that I really love to read books maybe especially a book of poems or poem adjacent stuff back to front vignettes of favorite favorite players stories of miraculous games how brazil became brazil when they finally started playing their black players among whom was pele and slightly longer riffs on the world cups which galliano being galliano historicizes makes events in and of and with the world never missing a chance to describe often with comedic flourish the plow powers that be teasing for instance that castro's revolution is any day this starts in 1962 to be overthrown there is also a slight nostalgia nostalgic bent to soccer and sun and shadow a longing for the good old days of the game footnote no to bene although sometimes the good old days is code for when women and black people couldn't really vote etc sometimes it's really not sometimes it means when I like the soccer or the pizza or the buildings or the unions or the price of college or the roe v wade more a nostalgic bent to it which seems to me to include a more flamboyant and dancerly manner of play a game in which form or style was as important as function or winning a game free of things like owners and corporate sponsorships and everyone and everything branded like cattle i.e. the general bleak consumptive way of sport which emerges hard to remember sometimes from play the vast wonderful collaborative unknown which is pretty sure antithetical to capital and which galliano a romantic with a fierce memory dreams of dreams he likewise gave to me as I drifted into sleep to his words from stephanie's mouth floating like a ball punted by the goalie back into play helmets free today after shooting some hoops with jared up in eastern then spinning around the neighborhood looking for old buildings we might convert into dreamy basketball courts we got a couple smoothies at the public market and past us wishes a parade of kids doing wheelies on north hampton street swerving sometimes between cars to keep the wheelies going wheelie gangs jared called them pointing and smiling before asking if we have those in bloomington which we do not at least not in my neighborhood which seems to have few children and where there are children if they are out of your sight and not at a lesson or practice or some kind of improvement session they wear two or three helmets and probably elbow pads to boot the children in my neighborhood so many of the children these days seem to wear wrist guards and tracking devices to and take a water bottle and their cell phones to get the mail my god it filled me up this parade of helmetless children veering their precious little lawless brains through traffic on one wheel with nary apparent to be seen now that gave me hope this called i'd prefer not to i was walking into town today and i ran into a lovely guy i used to see all the time in the afghan joint acupuncture joint walking the streets etc though it's been a while you know how it is he was walking his charmingly aloof dog a petite squirt who is sniffing around in one of the prettiest gardens in town while inside the house about 10 feet away were a couple dogs crashing against the windows and walls to get out here so they could murder this little aloof fella who happened to be peeing on their peonies when i asked how it's been going implying how it's been going these past couple years the shit show he shrugged and he smiled sort of puzzledly because his business which is called pr did not take a hit like many other businesses did in fact in the midst of the crisis it kind of took off he said in that sort of i'm happy but i know i shouldn't be way that is so common these days he explained to me that pr is no longer only for humans but also for a bunch of acronyms i did not understand though i knew enough to know to get nervous knowing the acronyms exist the one i remembered was nft which when he said it i interrupted him to ask what's that stand for non fungible token he told me whatever that is it evidently needs a pr campaign then we got around to megan the stallion who if i understood it right and it's very likely i didn't because i was nervous panicking a little though trying to keep up is doing a tour where i think the audience i suspect this means thousands and thousands of people i'm guessing megan the stallion isn't playing small venues these days will all put on virtual reality i'm sorry i mean vr helmets i guess together i guess that's what some people these days are calling together apart together together apart you know however they say it anyway they're doing pr for that vr show too which i think meant maybe this was the flicker in his eyes the gleam that pr no longer needs there to be a there there at which point you can start printing your own mula i know nothing about the financial system but i have seen the big short about six times and i'm pretty sure the great innovation in there maybe it was derivatives maybe it was bundled mortgages maybe it was cdo's maybe i better go watch the big short a seventh time was inventing out of thin air a mechanism a great golden way to make a small handful of people rich side note but no biggie also making many large many many handfuls of people homeless for or by what we might in another frame of mind call a conspiracy theory i.e. i know they're there anyway i was trying to be a sport and track what was being said to me despite feeling like the great whirling ravenous void from evil dead two was opening up in my chest and sucking me and everything i could perceive or imagine into it and i heroically managed to cling to the true living world in part by noticing the espalier apple tree against the picket fence just behind this very sweet pr man and that what had been just a few days prior the still tightly wrapped buds kissed with pink i pass this tree daily we're now open as his lips continued moving i watched just behind him little pollinators swirling around and into the new blooms i nodded and smiled and until he said well i better get back to work take care now waving sweetly over his shoulder as he and his dog trotted away you do the same i said moving to the tree which now seemed almost to be opening its arms to me i put my face to a few of the flowers and inhaled and i brushed my lips against them while doing so a honey bee was scooting through the neighbor bloom i took one more deep breath and headed up the street and there goes a magnolia tree and there goes the cardinal and there goes that woman with the bad limp and the big smile and there goes that sweet to coma with the long bed good for hauling and there goes Jim who just retired from the community radio station looking at its garden smiling and there goes the lilac and there goes the bunny and there goes the brick walkway and the breeze and the bird shit splatting from the mulberry tree and there goes that hiccup in my heart and there goes my favorite alley and there goes the rust in my knee and there goes that pink dogwood tree and there goes the sound of two people fighting behind me oh wait they're laughing they're laughing and touching each other arm in arm they are i see now it's glee okay one regular length one and one very short one is that okay okay okay if you tell me to stop i'll just stop that would be so rude though um this is called sunflower in the mortar in an almost uncanny feat of symmetry another affirmation of the palindromic world the world circling around to catch itself the world a flummoxment of beauty bells ringing in your every periphery step in and i noticed walking in bloomington down belton way almost directly across from the butterfly bush that emits the world's most wig flippinist smell outside our friend don's old house and that has been the past couple weeks flipping my wig a sunflower growing out of a crack in the mortar between two huge limestone blocks of the wall a wpa project the plaque says around rosehill cemetery how reasonable if you're going to have a thing called a country not a given to have a thing also called a wpa or any number of other things aside from a military that pay people decently and make things work better a trillion dollars yearly into the war industry where a trillion dollars into jobs planting trees and replacing the lead pipes and re-rivitating the bridges and putting in the high-speed trains already and beautifying the schools and the libraries and paying the teachers well and building limestone walls around the cemeteries seems a no-brainer to me but i'm just a poet i'm a flower guy despite which we almost walk right by this one which was still i'd say in early adolescence before the first flowers were beginning to form i can't remember who but one of us noticed stopped and grabbed the other's arm like is that we both laughed and shook our heads no meaning yes meaning impossible but indeed how often perhaps most often delight is shown to you by someone tugging your arm how often perhaps most often delight makes you want to tug someone's arm we inspected the tiny buds at the top the reddish furry stem the tiny crack it grew from in the mortar in the wall that was at the very most i mean the complete total fulsome absolute very much most about the size of a sunflower seed maybe a little smaller it was a kind of crack that if you were a lay person inspecting the mortar maybe even not a lay person you think almost nothing of it and certainly wouldn't think it needed pointing so how did it get there we wondered and surmised that among the possibilities the most likely was that a sparrow or finch stashed it there or squirreled it away maybe more apt finched it away even more and came back some weeks later for a snack to find now a flower or a flower soon to be and incidentally in a few more weeks a much bigger snack or who knows maybe the bird thought a sunflower would look nice right here can't hurt to try this is not unthinkable to me given as the the goldfinches planted all the sunflowers in our yard with what i would call superb design sensibility so good pedestrians often come through our alley to admire their work attributing it to us but it also has to be noted remembered that this was not a garden no soil or wood chips or compost or goat poo not even a little sludge or leaf litter or gravel this was a sunflower growing out of a crack in a rock a smidge of rain and light if you're thinking it's a little bit of a cliche all the obvious and potent meaning survival despite the harshness resilience making a way out of no way the fugitive seed finding a patch of survivable earth yeah yeah i guess so but more i'm thinking the unlikely collaborations by which we come to pass at all any of us the trillions and trillions the literal trillions and trillions to the bottom of which we will never lord let us get i'm gonna stop there thank you thank you so sometimes we do q and a is it these things do you want to do that we can for a little bit we don't have to so i'm gonna brag hi my family was one of the first ones to walk in when they reopened and we shared like before we went in we shared donuts with the librarians outside like immediately they were like we got these new books that you're gonna you guys should come check out and then i saw it inside enjoy and i got that and it was like it was like i'm tearing up now thinking about it we come every week and i yeah i love it it's magic thank you for that yeah yeah the staff the community i went to the library today to pick up a book on hold they didn't ask my name they know they know yeah the people they know the books that go there and what you read yeah wonderful yeah yeah when you are when talking about the like the function that a live public library in blooming in our public library is so important it's just like yeah it's a place to gather it's a place to do stuff it's a place to rest to place to all these things you know so crucial these public spaces someone's hand was up i was going to say that um the library in limited reminds me of a library here i first love the library oh yeah and from there i love the library yeah i see the library in st jones barry no really what's it like what's it like describe what's it like and her chance what's it like it's all hand carved little steps going up woodwork spiral stairs there's an art anthony in the back oh man it's pretty amazing with a huge burn spot at the back really okay yeah thank you yeah actually he went to the club right here as a kid oh really it still supports it strong oh see it's beautiful yeah yeah so i i just want to comment about what i've experienced listening to you i have not read you before um i can't think of a better time to have heard you and i think the joy and i'm going to ask you there do you what kind of generational scratches do you get because it's almost like that word or maybe it does exist it's just not being experienced especially today the word joy yeah and uh so thank you for that i feel like i feel first time i'm also you couldn't write what you were writing if you had an iphone if you were constantly looking at screens you're like a plant you're like a cube for example nobody has iphone they're all they look you straight in the eye and they remember what the hell you said and they actually respond and they're alive and awake and open in the present moment so i just think that you that you're showing us that what it requires to be a poet first of all to have this ability to observe and to be true to observe that it doesn't exist in many places in here so first of all i just want to thank you and then ask you what kind of generational response do you get because i think the word joy yeah totally totally yeah i think that's a great observation i think there's something like it's vital it's really vital about even in that last essay where the sort of part of the experience of witnessing this having this experience of delight was one was being together it was social and it was being alert to someone else someone else be like yo look at this and that feels to me like very much like you know here's something i learned i was in a conversation with someone recently and someone said like i was talking about the light feels like sort of occasional like something prompts it you know you have a have a sweet interaction or you know like a bird flies right next to your lands on you something and um you feel suddenly connected joy i think of is like the fact of connection it's always there but you have to sort of practice whatever you call it entering it or submitting to it or you know um whatever the word is i'm not sure what the word is you have to practice being in you have to practice our entanglement because there's a lot of mythology i think a lot of very powerful mythology suggesting that we're not entangled or suggesting that we could be otherwise you know bootstraps is a version of that etc etc right so anyway but someone gave this beautiful metaphor and the metaphor was like oh yeah joy is like the mycelium and delight is like the mushrooms i thought that was pretty good it's not mine i think his name is michael or something um but when you think of it like that joy not is something that you get because you bought something joy not something that you could buy actually you know it's not like you can't like get a book and get joyful it's actually like something about connection and it's not just connection it's about you know to be connected to be truly connected means also to be sort of willing or participant or um capable or desiring to enter the sorrow of each other that seems to me that like our capacity to um carry each other's sorrow is absolutely crucial to joy it's not joy actually to me which is why to me you have joy as much at funerals as you do at births and weddings so so part of the cynicism which is sort of reasonable because you can you can imagine like if there's a commercial it's like get your joy and you're fucking heartbroken you're like a fuck you and you're fucking joy but if you're it's a funny thing to say but you know i would say it but if you're like oh this is actually the practice of acknowledging my own and uh each other's sorrow are changing our transformation our heartbreak then it's like not it's not like um light work you know it's not like kids play it's not it's the opposite of what might make one cynical it's deadly serious because it actually because it's about death and dying you know so that's the one thing that i think and i think i i have heard people you know i've heard older people i mean in the beginning of this book i have a little story about knowing the beginning of the inciting joy book a woman who seemed to probably be in her 70s and and she was responding to the book catalog of unabashed gratitude it was a book of poems and she was like i didn't know you could write about joy you know just about to cry saying saying that to me and then i thought of course young people who say their teachers have said things like joy is not a serious subject to write about or think about yeah it's heartbreaking it's awful um so anyway i think it's across the generations i don't know um um i'll just say that and what was the second part of your question oh yeah the technology yeah yeah in earth okay thank you yeah beautiful yeah i mean yeah i mean it feels absolutely crucial again um given all of these sort of um the admonitions to do the opposite in fact to be afraid of one another that we have to like really practice being with each other like i know my classes are going well when i walk into them because you know this again any of your teachers are like hanging around with like whatever you going on the fucking subway or whatever it doesn't matter and you walk into a place and most everyone is on the phone you can walk into a classroom it's like everyone's on their phone you know you know class is going good you're doing something right in your semester when people aren't looking at their phones or if they are it's like they're playing music and they're like playing around with each other you know um but where they're actually interested in being with each other and i think that is i think the desire and the capacity to be with each other is actually something that we have to practice you know i think we have to practice that and cultivate that and honor and celebrate it you know like this like this this is so beautiful the fact that we're actually all together in this nice space you know that's a big deal you know thank you yeah yeah that's a great question i think it is a little bit like you know so i'm writing a book um don't hold your breath um but i'm writing a book called book tour and um because i'm on a book tour and um um and you know so i was sitting in the library and i was observing the things that i was talking about i was observing this sort of like the those beautiful like what do they call them like the relief things around the freezes in a library it's beautiful you know or like again the windows like i love i love those windows how beautiful they are and also like another thing i was sort of thinking about a public library that is like actually a kind of a real kind of public space a communal space you can hear inside of it but also outside of it kids yelling it's a good sign you know and i was just sort of talking about that so the answer to your question is basically i'm just noting stuff i'm just noting stuff sort of regularly that's kind of my my process if i was driving i might pull over i might just note it down you know i used to drive a stick shift and that would be a little bit more hairy but um but yeah i just sort of practice as part of my writing practice now especially now because i've started writing these delights books and other things that feel like so much about a kind of daily noticing practice to inform what i'm what i'm trying to work through um yeah i think it's i think it's like that yeah is that help at all is that useful yeah thank you for your question yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah totally totally that was i have an essay here i sort of talk about this but the the experience or the learning how to make my writing experience um really about play like i'm just getting around i'm getting there to mess around and i'm gonna observe it and i'm gonna do my best not to like evaluate it very quickly i'm just gonna try to watch what happens and participate and uh and recently actually in the last six weeks i realized something that feels important i don't quite know how to kind of articulate the importance or why but i know it is i realized at some point that when i write something that's the first time i read it like it comes out of my pen i'm like whoa okay neat like i'm the first reader um but it's not because it's not coming out of my head it's more coming out of my body or coming through my body in some kind of way and then you get to watch look at it and be like okay i couldn't have done that i couldn't have imposed that kind of follow it or something so you can tell i'm not quite sure how to talk about it but it feels like an important it's an important fact of my part of my process actually that i i'm learning about so we do one more i think there's one more yeah two more two more i'm 49 i probably started when i was like 20 yeah i think in my 20s i was losing my fucking shit i was losing my mind and i was cracking up and i was exposed many things many things many things you know what i was reading what i was doing but i was exposed to like you know writers and teachers like pamcha drone actually you know like i remember that someone gave me the book the wisdom of no escape when i was having a very hard time and um and then from her up to chogum trunk for Rinpoche i say that right um and then i was just rereading that the tic not han book being peace and i was just sort of thinking oh right there's so many things here that i read in my 20s that deeply informed kind of perspective and and you know like you know i think trunk for Rinpoche says something like when you're part of the practice or something i can't you know but part of the practice is to smile with tears in your eyes i've read that in my 20s and i kind of forgot that i'd read it but i feel like it's absolutely um a thing but i think the the most important thing i think about this is that i get two things one is that my my interest in this you know there's a variety of queries this sort of joy delight etc is in part because like i said i'm i'm curious about um connection and connection is devastating too you know so to study these things to be deeply enmeshed or practicing or trying to figure out these things about joy about connection means also to be um aware of and wondering about disconnection so it feels like um um you know the the joy guy feels to me like someone who's deep in the deep study of sorrow you know practicing trying to um also as i say that also as someone who has spent a lot of time being like terrified of sorrow you know um so there's that i would say i would say that and i would say that um the arrival to this kind of what is it how do we live holding this sort of full breadth of our lives not being like a child and wanting to be happy but also not not also sometimes not being like a child and wanting only to witness what is terrible you know though sometimes we can't help that because sometimes it's only terrible and we need each other to be able to sort of witness something else so there's something about there's there's something about this sort of um i mean i do i think of like all kinds of utilities but i think of like a kind of political utility to this you know that part of the thing is that part of the practice is to witness each other's heartbreak and in the practice of witnessing each other's heartbreak whether or not you say it i have a firm belief i could be wrong like one out of a million times but i have the firm belief that you are heartbroken and you can assume that i'm heartbroken because i am what does it mean if we try to sort of walk around like that you know that's kind of what i'm what i'm after so that's what that joy practice is but like i was saying at first it comes out of trouble you know i think it comes out of trouble you know yeah thank you um you can totally ask i was i mean and i can and i'll say like basically i'll say this without getting deep into it i'll say this i'll say that i think it could be many things you know many things but i think one of the things was that i was terrified of how connected in fact i was i think i was terrified of the fact of the of entanglement i think there's a way that i was terrified of the fact of entanglement i'll just leap to this other thing which is like how sorrow has been terrifying to me you know i write about this so it's not like sorrow has been terrifying to me in part because i think to be sorrowful means to be connected it's the evidence of connection you know and i feel like i've spent a good bit of my life for whatever various reasons some of them i think about like sort of masculinity training sometimes of like not wanting to be moved and not wanting to be movable um but i'll leave it at that yeah thank you here's one and then and then one more yeah yes i'm so shy about advice but since it's to myself i would um i don't know you know i do feel like um a question that feels like a really important question is something like what do you love i think i might just be asking myself that question every day you know what do you love oh and then no actually i'd ask another question too and what's loving you you know yeah because when you start to be like oh right the trees are actually loving me that breeze was loving me that light through that beautiful window and the library was loving me that's some way yeah thanks for that question was there one more or okay hey oh god so the poet jerald stern poet and essayist jerald stern he's um he's uh he died about a year ago maybe exactly i think yeah author of many books he was um one of my main teachers and a mentor there's so many things and i think about actually i'm glad you said that because i wanted to mention him too because he's someone who in his writing he's just he's always talking about the sorrow and the delight like they're always they're often hand in hand i mean he so many of his most beautiful poems they're they're in one direction and they get yanked into they're in the in they're in the delight or something they get yanked in the sorrow they're in the sorrow and they get yanked into the delight i feel like he's an absolute um guide in that way i also he's someone who throughout my life i'd start to write something or start to write you know like i was writing these delights in 2016 the first time and i remember sharing them with him when he was living in an insistent living place up in new york and he was so generous and lovely and listening to them and then it was like i don't know a couple months later i was like oh right jerry wrote these daily essays short essays that he wrote every day they were kind of occasional about like little things in his life diaristic almost five years earlier seven years earlier whatever and i it didn't even occur to me that i would the way that i came to this writing thing was probably through jerry's essays you know so again and again i would have that experience of being like oh yeah i would never have written this without jerald stern i wouldn't have thought it without jerald stern so that's that's a little bit what i would say but like you know probably of the writers in my life jerry's probably the one who is the most kind of threaded through stuff yeah hey it was so good to be with you all and thank you