January 18. Sunday.

Dear Barry,

I finished "Still Life With Woodpecker" today. The plot is more an outline for a comedy sketch than a novel, but as word are it's often a delight. I folded down the corners of the pages in a dozen places because I want to be able to find some of the things he says again. For instance:

     "Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment
     is necessarily the measure [of the quality of sexual
     love] -- there are one-night stands in Jersey City
     more glorious than six month affairs in Paris--but
     there is a commitment, however brief; a purity,
     however threatened; a generosity of spirit, however
     marbled with need; an honest caring, however
     singed by lust that must be present if couplings are
     to be salubrious and not slow poison."

I think the real reason Tom Robbins wrote this book was that he wanted an audience for various essays on love and the human condition and no one buys essays any more. And I think it's particularly nice that he found a use for the word "salubrious." Humpty Dumpty hardly ever has to pay it, and it was living, malnourished, in Roget's thesaurus.

But I really want to tell you about yesterday, and I guess that I better take it in order.

Yesterday actually starts Friday night at the dojo. I hadn't practiced Thursday because I needed to work with the computer. I had good intentions of only taking one class on Friday and leaving around 7:30PM to continue that work, but I didn't. I was enjoying myself too much. We had an Aikidoist visitor from France who is very good, and after the second class he and I spent a few minutes throwing each other around. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards, fifteen of us wound up having pizza and beer at a local dive and talking until midnight.

The conversation at my end of the table was about the U.S. drug laws and how they resemble prohibition. It had two memorable moments, both with Morgan, and M.D. who practices with me. The first was when we agreed that we would be better off not having to try to stop the drug traffic. The second occurred when we were talking about "personal responsibility" and damning drunken drivers and praising single parents. Our exchange went something like this.

Morgan:	"It's hard to be responsible if you don't know who you are to be responsible as..."
Me:	"But don't you know who you are?"
Morgan:	"Do you?"
Me:	"Yes."
Morgan:	"You're lucky. I'm not so sure."

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