I’ve been meaning to put this up for a few months now. I wrote it back in November, after a poetry reading night at Birdies in town. This was my impression, written mostly in about forty minutes after we got home.

Pretty girl in the red coat
And the black stockings
And the Audrey Hepburn black hat –
Donna makes a reference
To Breakfast at Tiffany’s
I don’t quite understand.

Tales of New York
Told from Grandpa’s letters
And photographs on the roof.
Manhattan is not a mountain top;
It never will be.
She’s too good for that.

The girl in the red coat
Is here with friends
They chatter for a while
In the back room
Before getting a table
By the radiator.
Her friend with the beard
Wears an interesting coat.

What’s that policeman doing
Out in the street?
I think I parked legally
For what it’s worth.

JK (or JC? No, it’s RJ) spits poetry
The partner in crime says,
Speaking briefly of [trying hard to remember … nope]
And now Cliff’s on his way to
Six months in Afghanistan.

A woman reads from her laptop
Muttering vaguely about technology
Everyone else has papers
or books
Loses her place
When she tries to scroll too fast;
Mutters a vague “oh, sh..”
Under her breath
As she finds
Her place
And continues reading.

An older man speaks
Of thinning the buffalo herd,
And all I can think is that
You can’t roller skate there (in the buffalo herd),
And so I missed his point
Altogether.
But he won’t do Haiku
Unless he can do it in Japanese, too.

Homeless man walks by
Outside the window –
Or maybe he’s just some guy
traveling through –
A hiker or something –
He’s got a pretty decent pack
and shoes
and supplies
For a homeless man.

Le Hinton.
Black on most days,
I chuckle
Because I think I get it –
Reminds me of Elliott.
Le closes his book
In the key of G-minor.
My favorite key.

Now, there is music.
The man in the red shirt
Smiling his way across the street
I see through the window
Comes in very late –
The night is almost over.

The man in the red shirt
Sits at the table next to the girl
In the red coat
And the black stockings
And the Audrey Hepburn hat
There with friends.
What’s he drinking?

And now,
The lovely lady singing
About the weather
Has a cold behind;
Shouldn’t there be a song about tuning?
Why didn’t she dress in Layers?

Dream a Little Dream of Me
Brings childhood memories:
WBAL used to play records,
And sometimes you could hear them
As far south as Georgia.
We all sing along
With the chorus
Because it’s the only part
Most of us remember.

Driving home –
Shoot.
Is that my turn?
How long have I lived here now?
We laugh about it,
But is scares me sometimes.
Thank goodness for Maggie.

That’s pretty much my total impression of an entire evening. I remembered only the scattered details I wrote about, but there was a lot more to the night. It makes me believe I have A.A.D.D., and have probably had it for most of my life. Which explains a lot…

Go ahead and do what you really love to do! Do nothing else! You have so little time. How can you think of wasting a moment doing something for a LIVING you don’t like to do? What kind of a living is THAT? That is not a living, that is a DYING!

- God, per ND Walsch

With their country in the midst of a colossal disaster – The Japanese citizens can teach plenty of lessons to the world:

1. THE  CALM: Not a single visual of  chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated.

2. THE  DIGNITY: Disciplined queues for water  and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture. Their patience is  admirable and praiseworthy.

3. THE  ABILITY: The incredible architects, for  instance. Buildings swayed but didn’t fall.

4. THE GRACE  (Selflessness): People  bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get  something.

5. THE ORDER: No looting in shops. No  honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just  understanding.

6. THE  SACRIFICE: Fifty workers stayed back to  pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid?

7. THE  TENDERNESS :Restaurants cut prices. An  unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the  weak.

8. THE  TRAINING: The old and the children, everyone  knew exactly what to do. And they did just that.

9. THE  MEDIA: They showed magnificent  restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage. Most of  all – NO POLITICIANS TRYING TO GET CHEAP MILEAGE.

10. THE  CONSCIENCE: When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves and left  quietly.

Since I wrote about reduced-functionality writing programs, and the benefits of a text tool with few or no bells and whistles, new ones have been popping up like spring lilies on Apple’s App Store. With prices ranging from free to $25 or more, they’ve become a really interesting genre of writing tools.

Of course, they are not without their drawbacks — no printing, saving only as plaintext, etc. They were all about nothing but providing a “clean piece of paper” approach to writing. Until now, that is. Yesterday, Byword appeared on the App Store’s “New and Noteworthy” page. It’s a functional “step up” from OmmWriter and Writeroom, maintaining the “plain piece of paper” interface, while allowing on-the-fly choices for rich text or plain text, printing, minimal formatting and saving to PDF. Nice. And exceptionally affordable, at $4.99 ($3.99 for the rest of today).

I’ve been playing around a bit with a very cool (and free) word processing … nay, writing … program called Ommwriter. They currently offer two versions. One is free, the other is cheap. It is available only for Mac, and you can get the paid version from Apple’s App Store. The free version is available at the OmmWriter web site.

To say this app is simple would not do it any justice, although it is pretty simple, as you can see if you watch their little introductory video:

Introducing OmmWriter D?na from herraizsoto&co on Vimeo.

The obvious focus of this software is creating a writing environment that is free from distraction. In my case, I have it set to display a completely blank screen, most of which is defined as writing space. Some quiet wind chimes play in the background as I type. The font is a simple, clean san-serif. And I have the key-click turned off, as the free keyboard sounds are pretty annoying. The pay version has a sound that is just like an IBM Selectric. Nice.

Ommwriter is not an ordinary word processor. There’s no formatting, setting of indents, outdents, tables, image insertion, or any of a myriad of other things that we’ve come to expect from a program like Pages or Word. Ommwriter is about writing. The usual user interface is a blank screen (or background image) with a blinking cursor. No menus, no inspector windows. Nothing. As I mentioned, I have just a blank screen that looks like a piece of paper.

I am tempted to type, “It was a dark and stormy night…” It would look quite appropriate.

At any rate, if you are a writer, and you use a Mac, you may wish to look into this. Or not.