I’m sitting in that new office I told you about. The one with the blue farmhouse table and the big picture window. It rocks! There are little pink flowers outside—too delicate, it seems, for the Florida summer, but there they are. I’m trying to write the editor’s note for the latest issue of New CollAge and coming up disastrously short on coherent sentences.

So here are two procrastination links in honor of, well, procrastination.

1. John Wooden wrote this for Poetry magazine just before he died. I always wondered where Bill Walton got his poetical commentating prowess. Looks like I have found my answer. Great line from the piece, “The rules of poetry are and should be flexible; good words in good order is good enough for me.” What if the same were true for basketball? The rules of basketball should be flexible; good ball movement in good order is enough for me. Actually, I think a lot about the similarities between poetry and basketball—I’ve probably even written about them here—the most poignant of which are movement and flow and the necessity to break out of the fundamentals and find that space where real creativity can exist.

2. Neil Gaiman and some other dude have edited an anthology of stories. Here’s Nick Owchar in the L.A. Times gushing about it. He writes, “It should come as no surprise that Neil Gaiman has been on a crusade, throughout his career, to break fantasy out of the genre ghetto—to get people to focus on the power of the storytelling, regardless of the gothic atmospherics.” Hmm. I love me some Gaiman, so I’ll check it out.

Okay, back to the business of being…