Yeats or maybe Auden or perhaps Pound (probably all three) said that the only subjects worthy of poetry are sex and death.
Thus, in honor of those great poets, a list to draw on:

depart
expire
croak
keel over
kick off
bite the dust
pass on
pass away
perish
succumb
answer the final summons
answer the last call
breathe your last
take the long sleep
cash in your chips
climb the golden staircase
coil up your ropes
cross the great divide
give up the ghost
go to a better world
go to meet your maker
go the way of all flesh
lay down your knife and fork
shuffle off this mortal coil
pull a cluck
step off
step onto the last bus
tip over
cross over
buy the farm
take an earth bath
take a dirt nap

““… Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… ”
– Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

I’m not much of a party guy. Used to be. Not any more. I’m dangerously clumsy at the art of air-kissing and never have figured out how to make small talk. Get a couple drinks in me and ask what I think of this crazy weather we’ve been having and I’m likely to drag you off into a corner and ask intense and embarrassingly personal questions about your life.

My strategy then is to listen more and talk less, which naturally has turned me into an eavesdropper. For years I’ve collected fragments of conversations overhead at parties. Here’s a selection:

“…Collie. No, his nickname. A pun on his dreadlocks, I guess, because when they get wet they smell like wet dog.

“…ultramodern music, apparently anti-sense, but deconstructed you could discern threads of melody.”

“…They’re a closed shop. You and I can’t get in. I don’t think we could get in if we won the Nobel, Pulitzer, and National Book Award all in the same year. Unless you’re an obscure Russian poet. They love obscure Russian poets.”

“…People like us should never have to work. We should be identified at birth and separated from the common herd and set up with stipends that allow us to live lives of creative lethargy. When we sleep until noon it’s for the common good. We’re escape valves for a too-pressured society. The world needs people like us to be wholly unproductive. The world does owe us a living.”

“…Look, you will never, under any circumstances – I must stress this – absolutely never, it’s impossible — find better ones than Tupperware. They’re the crème-de-crème. It’s one of the tragedies of the modern world that you can’t buy them in stores – you have to go to those horrid parties – we should have one ourselves! Oh but Rubbermaid sucks. Planned obsolescence, like panty hose, except it’s not that they wear out, it’s that they have dozens of sizes in round, square, rectangular – or I should say cylinder, cube, and what’s the three-dimensional form of a rectangle? Little caskets, all in a dozen sizes, so no matter how careful you are, you always lose the lids and have to buy new ones.”

“…Most people lack a ruling principle.”

“…What’s the opposite of an epic story? That’s my life.”

Things the Consumer Society Thinks You Should Own (based upon advertisements in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly):

– a stone from Hadrian’s Wall
– a hood ornament from a Mercedez-Benz
– a Blackberry
– Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones
– a clarinet
– Junghams Apollo Mega Multi Frequency Atomic Watch (with radio-controlled accuracy; accurate to 1 second in 1 million years)
– a Panama fedora
– flawlessly tailored two-ply cotton pinpoint Oxford shirt
– the world’s first crumple zone
– an heirloom-breed, pasture-raised chicken

For a writer, of course, it’s a necessary tool. For many years I’ve kept full-sized spiral notebooks as idea banks – where I jot random thoughts, dreams, rough drafts, quotes from my reading, miscellaneous observations, overheard conversations, phrases that have become stuck in my head, arcane information of all kinds – anything I consider noteworthy. So far it adds up to more than 4,000 handwritten pages. Most of my published work has originated there.

I also carry pocket-sized notebooks for taking field notes, sometimes literally in fields but also on the water, in airplanes, in opera houses and subways and taxis and restaurants. Often those brief notes find their way into my larger notebooks and from there into essays, stories, and books.

Recently a friend presented me with a 48-page pocket-sized memo book titled “Field Notes” which has given me some unexpected pleasure. On the inside back cover is a list of recommended uses or “Practical Applications” for the notebook. (The list is solicited from customers, who offer up their thoughts via an entertaining website).

Here are my favorites from that surprisingly fertile list:

Corn Dog Batter Recipes
Scrapbooking Tips
Meat Goat Methodology
Sketches of Prize-Winning Rutabaga
Swine Suckling Schedules
Survivor/Eddie Money/Styx Setlist
Vegetable Judging Notes
Dart vs. Balloon Strategic Analysis
Animal Husbandry Techniques
Dairy Diatribes
Quilting Patterns
Freehand Drawings
Carny Contacts
Tractor Carburetor Calibrations
Rabbit Cage Diagrams
Crop Circle Designs/Schemes
Garden Gossip
Hybrid Pea Punnett Squares
Silo Content/Levels/Schematics
Expected Progeny Differences

Now I wonder, to what purposes do YOU put your notebooks?

Andy Wakeman photo

Last week Glenn Wolff and I posed as poster children for an upcoming campaign by the Grand Traverse Conservation District to raise awareness about the beautiful and fragile Boardman River. We spent a pleasant couple hours in the evening fishing on the upper river, just above Ranch Rudolph, while photographer Andy Wakeman shot us casting to imaginary trout and huddled together discussing weighty philosophical issues such as whether to use a Royal Coachman dry fly or a bead-head nymph. Later we stood on the bank with Conservation District director Treenen Sturman, outreach specialist John Gessner, and Eric Campbell, Director of Proof Positive Design, and swapped fishing stories.

Naturally, all of that got Glenn and me thinking about the Boardman in particular and rivers in general, subjects that are never far from our thinking anyway but have special urgency in these days when rivers are so at risk from careless land-use policies and galloping development. Those who know the Boardman know that she is among the most pristine and beautiful of Michigan’s rivers, that she is the jewel at the heart of the Grand Traverse region, and that she needs all the protection we can give her. The fine people at the Conservation District have been working tirelessly for many years to keep the river healthy and well protected.

The Friday List is a day early this week because I’m heading to Walloon Lake for the Bear River Writers Conference. As always, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Ways to look at a river:
– as a thing of beauty
– as sanctuary/retreat
– as ecosystem
– as highway
– as energy source/water source/resource
– as playground
– as classroom
– as shaper of the land
– as metaphor for time or journey
– as sustenance (physical/spiritual)
– as metaphysical puzzle
– as residence of myths
– as itself

Am I missing anything?

What inspires you? The late fiction writer Edward D. Hoch, who published more than 900 mystery stories, including one every month for 35 years in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, must have found his inspiration in hardware stores, Walmarts, old Sears catalogs, and his own garage and attic.

Hoch’s obituary in the New York Times (January 24, 2008), noted that his serial character, Nick Velvet, was a professional thief who over the years had been hired by clients to steal a “bewildering array of things,” including “an ashtray, a cobweb, a canceled stamp, a dead houseplant, a used tea bag, a sliver of soap, a ball of twine, a bingo card, an empty paint can, a Thanksgiving turkey, a blue-ribbon pie, a bathroom scale, a bald man’s comb, an ostrich, a skunk, a major-league baseball team, and – in perhaps the most blatantly criminal act of all – an overdue library book.”

I find this list, with its startling juxtapositions and tumbling randomness, flat-out delightful. But even more delightful are the stories implied by the items. The prolific Mr. Hoch knew better than most of us that every object in the universe throbs with stories just waiting to be told.

You know how it is. You’ve worked hard all week saving orphans from fires, framing condos, sewing up knife wounds, digging coal from deep caverns, painting interior walls and trim for senators, forging steel death machines, composing reams of prose that will probably win a Pulitzer – basically being industrious and brilliant, just like Mom always hoped you’d be – then Friday afternoon comes along and you’re exhausted. Depleted. Stupid. Just screwing the pooch until you can get to the bar.

When I run out of juice on Fridays I compose lists on the principle that it’s better to write something than nothing, even when that something serves no useful purpose in the world. Sometimes the list is nonsense. Sometimes it’s a ridiculous waste of time. But once in a while it will sort itself into a kind of poem. Here’s this week’s offering:

WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU GOOGLE “GOT MORE TROUBLES THAN”

“I got more troubles than there’s bubbles in champagne.”
– Ward Hayden, “Girls, Guns, and Glory”

“I got more troubles than a diamond’s got shine.”
– Sam Roberts, “The Pilgrim”

“I got more troubles than your eyes can see.”
– Fingercheese

“I already got more troubles than I need.”
– Delbert McClinton, “Honky Tonkin’ (I Guess I Done Me Some)”

“Got more troubles than you’ve ever had.”
– Phil Ochs, “Sing Along With Me”

“Got more troubles than I could ever use.”
– Thaddeus Dale Johnson, “Shitload of Blues”

“They got more troubles than a trailer park.”
– Dr. Phil, about the Republican Party

Burritos! Quesadillas! Flank steak on the grill! Anything on the grill!  My friends and I were tending the grill while our wives drank wine on the patio and we fell into discussing the cultural phenomenon of men taking over in the kitchen. Just about every man we know under the age of 60 does most of the cooking. Why is that? I brought up our childhood chemistry sets as a possible explanation. Does following a recipe differ much from stewing up a mess of chemicals, other than there’s less chance of an explosion?

But explosions are why we played with our chemistry sets, said G.

And who follows recipes? said J.

Don’t glamorize it, said R. We cook because our wives work. We have to split the duties somehow, and cooking is a hell of a lot more fun than vacuuming or laundry. I’d rather cook any day than scrub toilets.

Oh yeah.

Hell yeah.

Grab me another beer while you’re up

Anybody have thoughts/instincts/insight into this cultural phenomenon?

Gail’s photo of some of 2011′s bounty

Ah, the season of bounty! Morels started popping weeks ahead of schedule here in northern Michigan and are still going strong. I found a couple on March 26, a consequence of that freakish spell of hot weather that everyone is still talking about — first time ever I’ve found them during that month when the woods are usually still clogged with  snow. Now the big whites are showing up in the usual places: along roadsides, in grassy patches around ash and apple trees, in the neighbor’s yard.
And morels are just the start of it. As always in spring, it’s tough deciding whether to spend my free time hunting mushrooms, fishing, canoeing, or birding, so I’ve been combining them all into weekend Bacchanalias. Here’s to trout, warblers, ‘shrooms, and J-strokes! As the great Kinky Freedman said, find what you love and do it ’till it kills you!

With morels on everyone’s minds, it’s a great time to check out this splendid new book from The University of Michigan Press: The Art of Cooking Morels.
And though many of Ruth Johnston’s recipes are a bit elaborate for my taste (and abilities — I’m a toss-’em-in-flour-and-fry-’em-in-butter guy), they might inspire you to try startling and innovative ways of preparing this tastiest of fungi.

And there’s a terrific bonus on the cover and throughout the book: The stunning illustrations by David McCall Johnston, as below. An utterly delightful — and delicious — book.

What an honor  it is for an author to learn that his work is giving a reader he has never met some much needed comfort in a comfortless place. This is a young soldier named Nick Warren, on patrol in northern Afghanistan, reading my memoir of growing up outdoors, A Place on the Water. Nick wrote to say that the book has given him a taste of home, and he can’t wait to get back to western Michigan.