Let students go early.  Running tonight, without fail.. yes, no fail.  I will be on that tread and run faster than I ever have.  And if not faster then more efficiently.  Quiet classroom.  What I need right now.  Students hopefully out there writing, working on something.  Writing their stories or working on the Kerouac papers or…

There’s always these two staplers on this desk, a desk that rises and descends upon command from button push, one of those two-part buttons with indentation in middle, clearly demarcating UP and DOWN.  My student use them, I don’t, and often when a student tries to use one, there’s not a staple found.

In the mood to take pictures in a vineyard but I don’t have enough time to go out and come back.  Not a problem for a writer like me.. using what I have and that’s an empty classroom.  I’m seeing more wine and in more the presence of wine here than I am in the tasting room.  How?  Life.  What you have, the immediacy and inescapability of your moment.  I find a picture on my computer, one I took not that long ago, and I don’t feel the level of life from image than I do from what’s in front of me.  Empty chairs, posters and maps on walls…. The off-projector.  The flavor of the room is anything but dull, or stale, one-dimensional or prosaic.  I’m in a contained freeness that shows me a similar vivacity to what I see in the shot.

They’re gone, but I’m here.  Acknowledging my freedom in the room, my liberty and my lust for moments, observations, of any kind.  Not only embracing what I have but elevating from it.  New life in new moments, new thoughts an character growth, stories to tell.  Packing up, and into air…