Rejection contains an ejection.

I got my submission back from Analog Science Fiction magazine. There was no comment anywhere, as they indict you to expect given the hundreds of manuscripts they get a week.

But there were TWO enclosures, one ambiguously providing extended writing guidelines for the magazine, which seemed to modulate the spartan rejection of the other form letter. Did "they" include writer's guidelines as a form of unsignatured encouragement?

Unsignatured contains a sign. It also contains a nature. It also contains a gnat....oh nevermind.

Resignation contains a sign.

I have almost completed the registration for Spring Semester at the U of M.

After an absence of 32 years. I considered that I was a sophomore all that time, and have the residue of sophomoric enthusiasms to prove it....

Now it is time to become a Junior.

My feeling is that I have resigned from the eternal nay saying of the drop out, and walked through a door into a blank scene. It will be painted in stroke by stroke as I reencounter the UofMolithic Bourgeoise assembly line. But it is a kinder, gentler assembly line, I trust.

My first experience with declaring a major and interviewing my College of Liberal Arts advisor on the phone convinces me to forgo the pleasures of an ironic commentary on these adventures. I must be serious.

Seriously.

A junior seriously, resigned at last to succeed.

After the moon, after the brides gone, after time

After Veteran's Day, 2003

I sit beside the pool where the boys played.
They played at being men, defending
Women and Faith.

The pool is filled with the shadow of its memories,
Which resemble rotting straw and
Leaves. It is not odd in autumn to be umber,
Barren, grisly by association and dead in fact.

Nothing survives of the noise we made.
Nothing survives of the shatter we visited
upon the sky's reflection.

I sit beside the pool where the boys played.
Other boys' voices under the hill
Approach.
There are women, and faiths yet.

The faiths change.
Only the women were worth it in the end, and
Now they play too.
Now they rake up the dry memories for burning
When the green has been spent, and the
Names are frozen in thier long black ice.

The pool is lovely in the sudden twilight of autumn,
A steep light, each star and wren
Falls off it
Into the pool, without
Ripples.

My birthday today.

I finished the draft of the story and sent it to Analog.

Today is my birthday.

My hair guy showed me a picture of HIS manx cat sitting up on her butt like a human...something Maggie does and I thought maybe all cats did...but it helps that they have no tail.

I am 56 years old.

I am 14 years old for the 4th time. Yeah, that's more like it.