Poetry Museum: Kerouac

Kerouac in 1968, explained the importance of Haiku to the Paris Review :

Haiku? You want to hear haiku? You see you got to compress into three short lines a great big story. First you start with a haiku situation—so you see a leaf, as I told her the other night, falling on the back of a sparrow during a great big October wind storm. A big leaf falls on the back of a little sparrow. How you going to compress that into three lines? Now in Japanese you got to compress it into seventeen syllables. We don't have to do that in American—or English—because we don't have the same syllabic bullshit that your Japanese language has. So you say: “Little sparrow”—you don't have to say little—everybody knows a sparrow is little because they fall so you say”

Men Naked in the Woods:

Addiction begins through the thinking that an altered existence will make us more lovely to one another. 
Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant and the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him....Then we feel awkward and want to hide behind the mask of an altered life. The Animal within me licking the chops of memory The altered life can be created through a variety of vehicles (eg. Porn, Sex, Drugs and other addictions). Stevenson, Robert Louis The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde

What turns Dr Jekyll into Mr. Hyde is that he knows he is broken but attempts to find the answer to this brokenness in himself.   He does not turn from himself.   His only chance was to turn away from the attention of selfish needs and enterprises which propagated the horror in his life.   He wants to cope with the addiction but his cure is going deeper into the addiction itself.   His viewpoint is of the observable universe.  He thinks that he has scene an improvement with more of the venom.   So he takes more and more of the potion till his universe is flipped into hell itself.   This is similar to those addicted to prescribed medication, Oxycontin turns to heroine.  (E.g. The Chris Herren Story).  It does not take long to find yourself in a place of no exit. 

Sunday Dinner: Pepper Me Outmeal

Pepper me oatmeal, Matey!  Or kiss the gunner's daughter.*

I like to have my oatmeal in the morning with a bit of heat; Pirate Bite is the perfect partner to heat up my steel cut oatmeal.   

*A punishment: to be bent over one of the ship's guns and flogged.