Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence,
tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
 –George Santayana

Every so often the old Monsignor at our family parish would deliver a Sunday sermon castigating parishioners for skipping their Sunday obligations. My mother always found these performances funny. “Wagging his finger at empty pews, scolding the dutiful.”

I feel a kinship with the old Monsignor tonight. As blog readership has sloughed off, down to just the hyper-faithful, I wonder if Reality Salad has run its course. It’s been ten months now, fifty postings. Time to give it a rest, with a bow and a blown kiss to those of you who still check in. We won’t take the site down, just let it hibernate. I have Dominick novels to write.

Back in the day (that would be the ‘70s), when I was on the road a lot, I rolled my own cigarettes. Top tobacco (“STAY ON TOP”) came in a yellow paper packet with glued rolling papers. For a quarter I could roll thirty real smokes. The inner pouch was made of foil-backed white paper, which, when emptied, could be flattened out into a sturdy five-by-seven-inch piece of stationary—perfect for notes and poems with short lines. On the road that’s what I wrote on. Folded back up, foil-side out, they were impervious to the travails of backpack life. The size of the page dictated the content. My sprung sonnets matured there, constrained by the size of that foil-backed piece of paper. They collected themselves in a side pocket of my REI backpack—my blog site forty years ago.

That was a much more private time. People took pride in their secrets. Whatever was deemed worth sharing was shared with just a few intimates, and in person. Every so often back then I would go through the poems in the backpack and pick ones to type out and Xerox and staple together into a chapbook and mail out to 20 or 30 friends. Xerozines, poems for free. Rarely did people acknowledge receiving them; that was unnecessary.

So we will set the Reality Salad bowl adrift for a bit, see where happenstance floats it. Adieu, my friends.