For one of my classes, my assignment is to do a mimetic (imitation) of Lorine Niedecker, who writes these incredibly small, dense, multi-layered poems. They seem simplistic on the surface, but once you start looking more closely, you realize that each word works on many levels: as sound, as image, as metaphor; each word seems to be the perfect word.

And Niedecker does this amazing thing where words which have multiple definitions can be read in many ways, and the poem's meaning shifts with each new reading. It's difficult to explain, but trust me, once you learn to see it in her stuff, it's impressive.

So I'm trying to write a Niedecker-esque poem, and it's going fairly well-- I've got some rhyme, imagery, simple language, etc. And I even have a couple of words that can be read in more than one way. But each time I look at one of my words, I am almost overwhelmed with the number of directions I can go. Each word in this tiny poem is so weighted that it has the power to enrich or undermine the entire poem. And just the act of choosing one word-- to the exclusion of all the other possible words-- is difficult.

And once you start seeing words in this way, it becomes a compulsion. So I'm revising my other poems with this incredible weight of possibility on my shoulders. I've never micromanaged my poetry like this before. It's easy to get overwhelmed. It is rare that a word feels perfect when it's slipped into the snug setting of the poem. That does happen, but not often. Most of the time, it feels like a good word-- but that's not enough to make me give up trying to get it perfect.

Needless to say, this is a thrilling development. One of the things I wanted to work on this year was my revision. And now I'm making progress.

It's amazing, too, how often what I'm learning dovetails with what I'm teaching. On Monday I am giving a lecture on revision, since midterm revisions are due the following week. (My students need to turn in a mini-portfolio: five revised poems.) So I've been researching revision, and finding out even more interesting techniques. But it's just such serendipity that this would be particularly applicable to me as a writer, as well.

This does mean that I can sit with a poem for a much longer period of time. Which is what I've been doing, among other things. Because really, that's what I've been looking for. More things to do with my time. (Blowjob face.)

So, I'm going to a chiropractor. I've been experiencing back and neck pain for a long time, and each time I would go to work, it would get worse, until I got to the point where I couldn't work a full shift. I would go home and be in agonizing pain, and the pain wouldn't go away. Not even a scalding hot shower helped me anymore.

This sounds incredibly silly, but for months I thought it was sort of normal, so I just lived with it. Until I realized that debilitating pain is probably not "normal" and perhaps I should do something about it. So I filled in a report form, and got a letter from my company's workers comp insurance people explaining that I could go get medical attention. Then Toker's wife recommended her chiropractor, and I scheduled an appointment.

She took this electrode reading of my spine, and this is it:

All those red things? Not good. Not good at all. She even said my right leg is an inch shorter than the other because the muscles are all contracted weird. (Once she said this, I noticed that it's true.) So, you know, I guess I do need a chiropractor. She started right away doing adjustments, and when she did my neck, there was an incredibly loud popping sound, and my breathing got better. It was so strange, but she said that it was a common experience.

Can you tell I've never been to a chiropractor before?

I worked at an insurance company for four years, and I sort of always had the idea that chiropractic care was bullshit. Like, these people who got in accidents would go to the chiropractor three times a week for months, and I always thought they were just padding their claims. Some of them undoubtedly were. But it helped me: I went to work the next day, and her ten minute adjustment made a huge difference.

By the end of my shift, I was in pain, don't get me wrong. (Why did I go to work anyway? I don't know. I'm an idiot. I was raised Catholic. I can't skip work without tremendous amounts of guilt.) I have another shift next weekend, but I have three chiropractic appointments this week. So I am hoping that I will be able to work that shift without pain.

Although I'm going to ask my chiropractor. Maybe she'll tell me not to go to work at all next week. Which would be, let's face it, a great break for me. And possibly an intelligent thing to do.

I had a nightmare last night.

I was in a room that was supposed to be a classroom, with my one professor (Alexander Hamilton) who, in the dream, I was in love with, and all my classmates. Well, I don't remember which ones, but I know there were a lot of people in the room and they were supposed to be my classmates.

So anyway, all of a sudden we hear this loud airplane roar, and looking up, we see a scary, ominous gray plane take off-- as if the stealth bomber was made out of giant grey tubes. And it starts to fly off, and then pulls up and circles back, and crashes with this loud explosion. And then debris starts flying towards us, and basically, we know it's going to hit us and we're going to die. So we try to run away, and I try to get to Alexander and run away with him, because in this dream, I love him.

Then a piece of debris is flying directly toward me, and right before it's about to hit and kill me, the dream rewinds. It's like I get to do it all over again. And the plane takes off again, only this time it's different-- blue and white and smaller-- and it crashes right away, much closer, and this time it's the fireball that's coming towards me about to kill me. And then the dream rewinds again. And again.

Each time, I try something different-- trying to call the "air force base" where the planes are leaving from and telling them not to let the plane take off, or hiding under a desk, or running away as fast as possible. But each time, I fail. I am about to die. And then it starts all over again.

So pretty much, the entire dream was just terror and destruction and death.

I wonder what the dream means, if anything. Probst and I made up (happy happy) so it can't be about that. I sort of thought it was war anxiety, but Laurie's theory is that it's about revising poetry-- going back again and again, and never getting it right. (And now that I think about it, I was worrying about what would happen to my poetry after I was dead-- who would be my literary executor and what they would do.)

That is an interesting theory, but in that case, my subconscious is just plain mean.

Oh, and one last thing. I now look like this:

Neither of these pictures shows my hair all that well, but it's all I've got. All I can say is that I haven't had hair this short since I was fifteen. Probst says that I look like Scully, with a little bit of Evil Willow thrown in. I wish! But I do dig it.

"I said that I didn't want to lead her on the way I had been led on in the past. I didn't want to allow her to cling to me. 'I've been there,'I said, obviously talking about me and Tim. 'I can't let her cling to me because she wants whatever she can get, hoping I'll change my mind. I can't draw the line there. Because it's stupid, and it's hurtful, and it doesn't work.'"