My band is playing tonight at Paddy Murphy's in downtown Bangor, 9 to closing, which means I will be up all night on purpose for the first time in decades. I hope I survive because I'm not all that good at being up all night. If, by any chance, you live near Bangor, and you plan to swing by to watch me swill pails of black coffee between sets, and you also have an interest in acquiring Same Old Story, send me a note this morning. I'll already be bringing along a copy for one friend, so I might as well bring along copies for two friends.

By the way, the Bryant Park Word for Word reading series has fixed its website calendar. The CavanKerry Press feature is now correctly scheduled for June 12 at 12:45 p.m., and I'll be reading with press authors Teresa Carson and January O'Neil. Teresa is CavanKerry's associate publisher as well as associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, January is a professor at Salem State College and executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and I am a person who suspects that summer in the city is a mirage.

For now I am off to haul firewood and bake bread and hang laundry on the porch lines and sweep dried mud off the kitchen floor, and it is so hard to imagine a world where none of this exists. Can there really be a place where people cram themselves into already crammed subways and jostle one another on dry pavement and wear nice shoes that have no mudstains on them and look at Rembrandts and ancient Japanese armor whenever they feel like it and stay up all night at bars without having to drive an hour there and back while worrying about hitting a moose or skidding on sleet or destroying the car's suspension on a frost heave?