Jim Lally, I love you.

Sometimes, your best friends are surprising people. For many years my best friend was a man my father's age named Jim Lally. And I loved him. A few years ago I moved to Chicago and we kind of lost touch. Jim died today. This is a very sad thing to say, and I'm sorry. I'm also sorry for every day that I "meant" to call him, and for all the days I didn't. I think it's important to mention here that I never loved baseball until I loved Jim and that whenever I talk about baseball, or more specifically, the Cardinals, I'm always imagining talking to Jim, wishing, in fact, that that was the case.

Jim had file boxes full of scorecards from every baseball game he ever went to. I looked at them once and wondered what it would be like to keep any kind of history like this.

Also, Jim paid for a few years of my college, not directly, but he sat my bar every shift I worked for 7 years (even switching restaurants when I did) and left me embarrassingly large tips every time. But that money came and went, just like college. I still have baseball, though.

Jim had a big a family and I knew almost all of them, and like Jim, I loved them too. Bob and Gail, I miss you, and I hope to see you soon, really.

Today I took my class over to the Natural History Museum. They were supposed to write 30 descriptions of one thing, anything, that they could find. And they found everything, which was beautiful, but then they found even more beautiful ways to describe them, which was beautiful too!

What this is, is a list of all the things I've written poems about this semester:

• Bears
• The Internet
• Hurricanes
• Lethal Weapon
• A single growing season
• Benjamins
• Van Halen
• Data entry

I've also been writing epistolary poems with Lucas and dinosaur poems with Friedrich and a series of ekphrasis based on Norman Rockwell. I've been busy, but good busy.

Tomorrow is now being begrudgingly referred to as Therapy Thursday. How will you celebrate?

I will celebrate by remembering that today Aaron read me Kenneth Koch's, "Permanently," with his new cell phone. It was also quite beautiful, and might I mention, clear?

Maybe that will be enough.

We went to a museum, we saw priceless works of art! We ate pancreas!

Went to the FIGGE yesterday. It's small, but modern, and they host wedding receptions, which means free drinks on your way out. At this museum they have a special collection based around Hans Holbein's "Dance of Death," which is good, if not slightly frantic. They also had a tiny collection of Wright furniture and glass, but really had no chance to compete with the breadth and size of the collection at the AIC. Still, just seeing one FLlW chair is usually pretty cool. What was, actually, the coolest part of the museum, was that there were only like 6 people in the entire place (aside from the catering company setting up in the lobby), so it felt intimate...so much so, that I kept on accidentally touching the paintings because they looked so touchable.

We also walked down to the river, which was really full of water.