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This might have done it. 6 months of non- posting and neglecting my blog may have actually alienated all my of readers. That's right all 4 of you are gone now, so I can write again with out censoring and wondering what ... will think of this .... blah. blah.

I haven't written in 6 months because for the last six months I have had a lack of insight and inspiration. And then from a far off dusty place, I hear the voices of my college professors echoing through my conscience saying that a true artist works through the dry spells and forces their hand to keep working. I begin to feel pressured to live up to my own expectations as well as the perceived expectations of my future memoirist but under the weight of the pressure I cave and recoil and recede.

I have been trying to read a little bit each day, between the diapers and laundry and lesson plans and now have some one else's insight that I would like to share. I'm a bit rusty so forgive my preface.

First a quote:

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness. --- Aaron Copland

Next a passage from Cannery Row:

They are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy every thing lovable about them. Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed up men scream at them and call them no goods, come to bad ends, blots on the town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no goods and blots on the town and bums and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

---John Steinbeck