I wondered yesterday if I look old enough to qualify for senior discount

I wondered yesterday if I look old enough to qualify for senior discount of 5% on Tuesdays at Felker’s. How busy that place seemed yesterday, at least in parking lot. The snow falls. Stickers [“YES” in white letters on green square & “MAYBE” in black on yellow square] are from an NEA-endorsed California Casualty (I think) car-insurance offer. It might be cheaper, but I want a local agent.

And yeah, so I’m debating whether to submit my poems to Poetry mag — only 4 at a time, and it might take me 5 months — well, 4, their website’s submission page said — to hear back. I mean, I can wait, but, blerg, do I really care enough to want to bother with Poetry mag? I mean, what good would getting published do for me? It’d be kinda nice, I guess — but, eh — the downside is that, well, it’d seem to take an attitude toward poetry and publishing that I may not want to take. I don’t want to please editors or compete with others, even if I could compete credibly.

I mean, I like the fun I’m having with writing poems lately, whether with Magpo.com as on Friday or with the radical editing of Rod McKuen’s poems over recent weeks — and maybe my Rod McKuen re-edits wouldn’t stand on their own as well as they stand next to, and in contrast of, Rod’s poems. I mean, my point is, I think, that I love writing poems, the process, and the poems that are left really are almost the by-product of that experience. I’m not sure my poems are that great, on their own, as if I were to publish them in Poetry mag. But that my poems on my blog are just one aspect of my creativity, of the model of creative life I’m living — not quite that. That the poems, the journals, the drawings and photos, that all of these together are — are what? All these are together the image I want to show others? Well, yes, but no — more like, I want to show a life lived creatively — is that it? That I want to show others a way to live? That’s typically what I’m looking for in others’ art and in biographies and memoirs and philosophies — and so this is also what I want to show: I want to say that I’m not just a crafter of poems but that I’m an interesting person — that I’m still learning, and not trying to be a pedagogue — but that I do love doing art things, more than I want to sell these art things.

[From journal of Monday, 23 March 2015, Journal 206, page 58-9 ]