Music, not Aaron Brown!

What I've really got to do is turn off the background of CNN and replace it with music. I once loved music. I just lost it.

I'm going to walk over to my TV and turn it off and put on some music right now.

There we go. Bill Laswell's Sacred System/Nagual Site fills the room. A new phase of my life begins.

I need a new phase, because I haven't gotten back on whatever horse I'm supposed to be on since my trip to the Kootenays last spring. I did go to three days of training last week for Centauri Summer Arts Camp, and that was a blast! I learned a lot, met heaps of neat people, got lots of fresh air. Now I can't wait for August 10 when I head back to camp to actually do my Poetry... With Fiction! workshop. It's going to be quite a ride -- there are 130 kids aged 9 through 18, plus about 40 staff members at Centauri. The dining hall gets a little loud, and everyone is in camp mode. Camp mode doesn't come naturally to me, but I'm gonna do my best to be something approaching high energy and upbeat.

On the way to camp on Thursday, I met up with my friends Steve and Anne, and their children George and Eloia, from Minnesota, who were on their way to Niagara Falls. We convened in a great vegetarian joint called the Sleeping Dog Coffee House in beautiful downtown Grimsby and had about an hour and a half to catch up on the previous eight years. I met Steve and Anne through my dear friend Joe, a Minnesotan I met in 1989 in Guatemala. Joe and I are going to engineer our second annual Windsor Convening later this month -- me driving in from Toronto for the day and Joe from Ann Arbor, where he lives now with his wife, Suzanne.

In other news, today I started what I hope will become a book-length poem. I will not reveal the subject yet. It sure felt good to write some poetry, though. I'm hoping I can add to it each day, and let each day control the way the poem evolves, keeping intact the central topic.

Wrestling over another publishing dilemma now: Word: Toronto's Literary Calendar, where I write my Hunkamooga column every two weeks, is going electronic, with a thrice-yearly physical document of the online content. I'm really attached to actual corporeal books and magazines, and don't know if I want to continue writing Hunkamooga for an online publication. I think I don't.

It's nice having this music on in the background. If I can keep the news off, and just catch up with the daily Globe & Mail, my life will be a better place. It began on that trajectory last night when Dana and I actually had a barbecue -- her landlords were gone for the weekend and had offered up their grill and backyard. It was nice. It made me want to own a house.

Over and out.