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Four Thousand Nine Hundred
(in Roman Numerals)

When it’s Thanksgiving Day, say,
and you’ve gotten used to flying
solo (even after decades of dom
estic partnership holidays with in-
laws and romantic excursions and
men who cook turkeys in ovens,
and you think it’s a day like any

other, the familiarity with those
words and with being alone, but
yet it’s Thanksgiving, a significant
holiday, or it always was for you
however you’d wind up spend
ing it, whether in Charleston
or Conway or Little Rock or Fort
Smith (in the hospital with a burst
appendix), Arkansas or in Bowling 

Green, Ohio (why, oh, why, oh?),

or a few miles north in the Old West

End of Toledo in the same state, all 

flat and windswept with a spindrift 

of snow dust swirling just above the 

ground most days and nights for nearly
six months each year, or Ann Arbor, Mich
igan in the heart of winter in the early
1990s so in love and so romantic, in
that tiny little apartment with all of 

its potatoes and peas and episodes of 

The Next Generation, and what about 

in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts while
working in Boston or Cambridge at MIT
and all of the Thanksgivings, so far there
have been twenty-five, spent in San Fran
cisco, which is now called home.  Except,
well, the past eight years of holidays, the
big ones, that begin with turkey and go
through Christmas and into the New Year,
all times that were historically milestones, 

celebrations to be remembered with loved
ones, to be cherished, and in many ways
they still are, only the ones up to a certain
time, say, around 2015, or perhaps a couple
of years before that, when Thanksgiving
and Christmas and New Year’s got reduced
to whatever they’ve been since then.  Never
theless these have been historically monu
mental days, events that mark time, that
become nostalgic, marking moments or eras
ing whoever it was we were at each of those
given monumental moments.  And now to
poke a bit, there is this project which you (I)
alone have put together, bucking the system,
and publishing it in blog format, having been 

one of the first publishers to dispense with the 

notion that a book has to be something you can
hold, or something that’s made of wood and has
a semblance of soft or hard paper and a cover, but 

this has the intentional appearance of a modern 

day diary, the ones that, rather than locked with a
key that you hold on a chain around your neck,
say, are viewed and always available, somewhat
for free, in a public manner, as democratically
available as things get, in many ways. and within 

this past year, only a few short months ago, not 

only did you make a big deal of celebrating the 

20th anniversary of its existence, building your 

own fanfare, much as it is often not the easiest 

thing to do, and from this compendium, you 

have never really read from it with actual people 

around, or not in a very long time (but you 

definitelty want to), so instead you make vid

eos of you reading each piece, settling it
further into that same modern bookless vein,
what has been called a vlog, on top of the
diaristic twenty-years of entries posted most

every day, literally much of which has been 

stolen or half-stolen from your own previous
journals written at most every age of your life.

and sometimes you want to stay under the
radar, you know how embarrassing diaries
can be, but then maybe that’s the point and
you’re fine with it, and you want to tout it 

as loudly and proudly as you possibly can 

because this is who you are.  but then that 

seems a bit much, as you are not the 

fondest of showcasing your artistic acc
omplishments, if that is, indeed, what 

they should be called, but you can, in a disc
iplined fashion, use the modern powers that
be to make sure that people maintain an aw
areness that you’ve got this thing going on
over here, even though you never really
discuss what it is or why you do it or how
maybe it has saved your life or how it’s
been the most consistent thing, the only
thing, that’s remained constant in some
stretch close to twenty-two years now,
with no signs of a slowdown. and then one
day shortly after its big birthday you find
yourself finishing up the four thousand
nine hundredth entry and poem and photo
and video to post into this book that is not

a book thing that has taken up so much
of your life. that IS your life. that is perhaps 

the most accurate representation of it and

of who you are, the best and the worst of 

you, not just an idealization of who you want 

to be, even though it’s just poetry, collaged 

from slices of the many days that you’ve lived

thus far, turned semi-fictional often, or heartfelt
and very real, but you have done all of this,
it is quite an accomplishment, of what it’s
hard for you to, with any objectivity, relay,
yet who else might relay such a thing better,
given that you’ve now written that 4,900th piece.

and it’s done and you don’t even really have to 

look at it again .you just make sure there are 

no glaring errors, you pair a photo that seems
appropriate or inappropriate in some poignant
way that is all your own, that gives you away
a bit, just like you have done for the many pages 

in the compendium, in a composite way that might
begin to tout a life that has, for several years
now, felt quite unrelatable, quite ineffable.