The Golden Words, Opium, and my dog Charlie

The big vacant lot, Weed, California, July 4, 2008: I was walking with my dogs, and I got to talking to my dog Charlie, who is young and impulsive. He's a great listener. I can say any kind of nonsense and he's still interested.

But I was talking to Charlie and I asked him if he liked poetry. He didn't answer, being a dog, and I asked him if he like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He didn't answer that either.

But it got me to musing about that story. Do you remember how Coleridge was an opium smoker?

Well, he was.

And there he was, high as a kite, and in his mind's eye he saw this really swell poem, and he went to write it down. It's really quite wonderful. Has several paragraphs, and the first one goes like this ...

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."

But at that moment, a guy to whom Coleridge owed money came banging on the door! Interrupted our Samuel, and that was the end of the swell poem.

Bummer.

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