Lake Forest: surfers; stuff; the poet’s delusion

You may have seen the above photo taken during a surf competition in Western Australia.  I like to believe all the surfers are feeling the same joy.

Stuff oppresses me.

As is known I have twice lost all my physical possessions.  

When I drove north from Key West in a rental car to buy a boat and try to put my life back together nine months after sinking RESURGAM all I owned then in the world fit in a single duffle bag.

I have long thought that the best size boat for two people is between 35’ and 40’.  I have owned and lived aboard with the then woman in my life on a 26’, a 35’, a 36’, and two 37’.  I have said that if something will not fit on a 37’ boat I don’t need to own it.  Now, by proxy, I own or half own, much that will not fit on a 37’.  

For myself alone I would now say that if it does not fit on GANNET I don’t need to own it.  Part of this is due to technology.  I need books and music and what a few decades ago would have taken up considerable space no longer does.  I have four or five hundred books and seven or eight hundred albums of music on my phone alone.  But I can live ever more simply..

There is too much stuff.

I finished reading the thousand mostly very short poems in AN ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSICAL JAPANESE POETRY.

Here is one.  I have sympathy with Monk Saigyo’s delusion, but I don’t share it.  On the other hand, his words have lasted, however faintly, more than a thousand years.