The Unswung Bat

2008-11-04T20:04:00.000-08:00

WE WON!

In my words: Damn right.

In the words of a friend: SUCK ON IT JOHN MCCAIN, YOU LITTLE BASTARD!

AHHHHHHHH that feels so good. So good. Like, eight years good.

2008-11-03T14:09:00.000-08:00

Action Items: Great Raymonds in History

For future action, here below is a Google-compiled list, reproduced exactly as it was compiled to me by Google, of "Great Raymonds in History." The nature of each Raymond is shown as Google computed it, and thus it is how each person would represent themselves if only they could speak to us.

A Google-compiled list of 20 Great Raymonds in History and their Nature

1. THE GREAT RAYMOND (MAGICIAN, SUBJECT OF FASCINATING FACTS) | www.magictricks.com/raymond/

2. RAYMOND A SPRUANCE (NAVAL HISTORIAN, AUTHOR OF BOOK: "THE QUIET WARRIOR") | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_A._Spruance

3. ALONZO PEARIS RAYMOND (D. 1904 "as a consequence of great exposure, hard work and hardships.") | freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~raymondfamily/alonzo.html

4. RAYMOND BADACH (DELI OWNER) | www.raymondsnj.com/history.html

5. ERIC S. RAYMOND (HACKER HISTORIAN) | oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond.html

6. DANIEL RAYMOND (ECONOMIST FROM HISTORY) HISTORY ARTICLE: | muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_of_political_economy/v032/32.3frey.html

7. RAYMOND APPLE (JEWISH HISTORIAN) | www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9780868409276.htm

8. RAYMOND HOOD (ARCHITECT, ROCKEFELLER CENTRE) | www.archiplanet.org/buildings/Rockefeller_Center.html

9. RAYMOND IBRAHIM (AUTHOR, TODAY IN HISTORY) | jihadwatch.org/archives/023059.php

10. RAYMOND (OF DAIMBERT, GODFREY AND RAYMOND, THE WRITERS OF A LETTER TO THE POPE) | history.hanover.edu/texts/1stcru3.html

11. RAYMOND A FOSS (FAMOUS POET) | famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/raymond_a__foss/poems/22180

12. ROY RAYMOND (CALIFORNIA CABERNET MAKER WITH SONS) | www.epinions.com/review/fddk-Wines-By_Name-All-Raymond.../fddk-review-BE7-51F72EC-38B8685F-prod1

13. RAYMOND A BEHR, DR. (PEDIATRIC/ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRIST) | www.healthgrades.com/directory_search/physician/profiles/dr-md-reports/Dr-Raymond-Behr-MD-EBC93EEA.cfm

14. RAYMOND R SKYE (WAMPUM HISTORIAN) | www.realpeopleshistory.com/raymond-r-skye

15. RAYMOND JOHN CHAMBERS (HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT ACCOUNTANT) | Findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3933/is_/ai_n8862550

16. KANDLER, MRS. RAYMOND (EDITH) | boards.ancestry.com.au/surnames.kandler/35/mb.ashx

17. RAYMOND GUBBAY (PROVIDER OF CLASSICAL MUSIC TICKETS) | www.raymondgubbay.co.uk/composers.asp

18. BARBARA RAYMOND (LONGTIME WESTPORTER) | www.westportnow.com/index.php?/v2/comments/longtime_westporter_barbara_raymond_dies_at_83/

19. URI RAYMOND (PATRIARCH, RAYMOND'S HARDWARE, PORT SANILHAC MI) | www.raymondhardware.com/AboutUs.chtml

20. SAINT RAYMOND OF PENAFORT (SAINT) | www.saintraymond.net/history.shtml

2008-08-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

From this valley they say you are going

My grandmother died on Saturday. I heard this Monday when I went home to meet mom on her return from a trip to Anchorage to be with the family. It was good--and unusual--that almost the whole immediate family lived there, especially considering how much they all moved around and have no roots in the area other than those they quickly fabricated. When they have no history, my maternal family will quickly stubborn one into existence.

This powerful bullheadedness is, as you might detect, a bit of a family emblem. Mom said that grandma died as she wanted to. She wanted only her immediate family there, none of her grandchildren, both to prevent us from having the memory of her dying and to draw in the most familiar people in her life while she waited. Mom also said she eventually wasn't even afraid. Though she still had bad stretches where she couldn't breathe and panicked, she was telling everyone that it was natural, what was happening to her.

So grandma had the death she wanted. She was the only person who still called me "Ani" (pronounce it "Onny"), a nickname my mom called me by when I was very young. Grandma always called me that--more the older I got, I swear. I don't remember the exact last time I said goodbye to her, and I'm glad for that. If I did, it would stand falsely as a summary of our connection. I'm left with a long and gappy memory of her. She was as stern and unbending a figure as I have ever known--more so, much more, than any other family member I can think of. But she wouldn't say anything against a view of yours she did not share. I know she was very kind and intelligent, perceptive and different, and worried. I miss my grandmother, and the question of when I, personally, lost her troubles me.

Her ability to find her good death leaves as strong an impression on me as the fatalistic sprit underlying all her wise deciding. She chose what was dearest and steadiest in her life to die beside, which is the first thought to almost bring tears to my eyes since the news began to hit. But she didn't choose to save her life when she could have. I'm unsatisfied we'll ever explain that habit well--is it unrequited curiosity that pulls you to die, fear and rationalization, disenchantment, disappointment, loneliness, weakness, shame, a complicated enjoyment of the object of your guilt, a simple act of mental avoidance? I don't know whether she reached any conclusion or was covered by an iron shield during the worst of it. I know my grandfather, who was exhausted, awoke magically ten minutes before she died, and she became calm when he came in to be with her.

If we have such control over the things we know about, if we can sweep away, more or less, the obstacles we'd hate to encounter even in the face of death, then why does it seem so right for everyone to do everything too late?

Love,

André

2008-04-08T18:01:00.001-07:00

I'm not dead yet

This year will be hard. I'm not going to have any of my own time, and I'll have to be very clever to have enough time for the stuff I've committed to do. I think next year I'll go hollow out a boulder and live in hermitage, enjoying only the simple burdens and absences of a contemplative life, like crickets chirping, hunger, the inability to have odd bumps diagnosed or cuts properly treated, and the sense that those facelike imaginary patterns in foliage are actual people.

2007-10-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

An adjective est mort

And you can have my overblown tragic pronouncements when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

I like to use up all my adjectives for a day at once, so I can coast by on clever nouns, gentle pronouns, verbs, and truculent adverbs. Statements simply made ease the strain of communication. Poetry is a consolation of restriction...or in restriction...or just a restriction. I argued the point to a stump today. Is "today" adverbial?

The point is...the stump is...

That is to say...

What I'm getting at is...

...

Well, at least I'm not dead yet.

2007-09-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

I am not now now have a ever been a member of a sexy party

Just in time, a pack of Jack Kerouac books (nice alliteration) came by buzzer and obnoxious deliveryman (what did I say?). How they won me over: the first one's title is "Why Kerouac Matters."
He ain't much of a writer, but I'll give him a shot on the strength of that title and how fucking weak I'm personally feeling at the moment.
I'm an anemic kitten. I worked an extra day and a half and set rigid deadlines for the news section, and got all the copy in—written, edited, ready to go—by 8 p.m., only to see it all fell apart in a production bottleneck and clusterbomb explosion of fuckups, and no one knows why.
I have my theories, but like my crappier books and more pointless writing, they don't satisfy.
I slept in the office. I may die of mesothelioma. Or whatever you get from instant coffee.

[Away for a moment—where could I have been? Was it a tragicomic interlude? Did I prepare a bisque? The answer to these and more: yes. Microwave bisque is gross. Embracing my American heritage, I'm throwing money at the problem...it's 12:18, class is at 2 and in the meantime I can have anything I want near U of T for breakfast.]

How the hell am I supposed to finish a piece for this newfangled writers' group this Friday? Would Miz Laura notice if I brought one of her own, earlier projects to the table under my name...? Maybe I'll just write down the proceedings of the meeting, imagined in advance.

[A second interlude, y'ain't invited to the details, but it were loud, here.]

Is this anything? G'night, anyone, I do not know what I'm tired of, but I am so God damned tired of it.

A deep breath and regrouping: sitting in on a meditation seminar this term, gonna see what that's all about. Enlightenment pending, compiling inner peace...

2007-09-07T22:18:00.000-07:00

2007-08-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

Encore

There's a shopping cart in the ravine
The foam on the creek is like pop and ice cream
A field full of tires that is always on fire
To light my way home

"It's just a little soggy, it's still good, it's still good."

2007-08-08T18:12:00.000-07:00

Blue puppies

The phone is off the hook.

Here are someone else's writings.

Four Short Crushes

Well, well, well.
     Just look at you, walking into this dreary bar and lighting the place up like the noonday sun at midnight twirling your long, auburn hair pensively as you search the room--for what?
     For a soul mate, perhaps?
     (I know, I know--I hate that phrase, too. Maybe that will end up being one of those things we both hate.) Maybe a few weeks from now, lying in your bed on a Sunday morning, I'll ask you, "What's your least favorite word or phrase?," and you'll say, "Soul mate," and I'll laugh till you say, "What? Tell me!," and I'll tell you how I knew that from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and then we'll have sex again.
     But I'm getting ahead of myself. You haven't even noticed me yet. That's O.K. I can wait.
     Maybe when your gaze settles on me, and we lock eyes in that mutual Hitchcockian tunnel-vision effect where the camera is, like, pushing in at the same time it zooms out, or however that do that, you'll come sit down next to me and we'll--
     Now you've spotted the friends you came to meet. They look like good friends.
     Maybe they'll be my friends, too.
     Our friends.
     Your eyes just came to life like emeralds lit by subterranean torches, and as you move across the room toward your friends you shriek at them, "What the fuck is up, yo?," in a voice so piercing that the entire bar goes silent for a moment, and I have to check my glasses to make sure the lenses didn't crack. You continue to bellow your every utterance (including the lines "Jagermeister is the bomb, dawg!" and "Just 'cause I'm a white girl don't mean I don't got some serious junk in the trunk!" and "Random! Random! Random!"), and the bartender leans in and whispers something to his bar back, and they look at you and laugh.
     You must be a regular here.
     (Duration of crush: seventeen seconds.)

Oh my. What have we here? A rainy night in the city has cleared the sidewalk of all but the most intrepid pedestrians, and those who didn't brave the elements have no idea what they're missing,
     Because there you are, gliding along on your bicycle, just a few feet in front of me.
     You're obviously not one of those tedious hard-core cycling enthusiasts--no skin-tight black spandex for you. No, just a simple white T-shirt (soaked through to the skin, clinging to the small of your back) and a long blond ponytail, whipping back and forth like the tail of a cartoon pony, as those long legs of yours pump the pedals and you raise your face to the sky, letting the raindrops freckle your cheeks with sweet diamonds of moisture.
     Dare I try to catch up with you? I'm on foot, carrying a bunch of shopping bags, but you've paused at a red light, and--what the heck? I don't know what I'll say to you, but even the clumsiest of introductions on these glistening nighttime streets will give us a romantic how-we-met anecdote that we'll love telling for years to come.
     Caught you! Here I am!
     And there you are. I see now that you're a dude. My mistake. It was the ponytail that threw me off.
     (Duration of crush: thirty-three seconds.)

Another restaurant dinner with my boring girlfriend, another lecture about how I never really listen to whatever she's yammering on about.
     But how can I listen--how could anyone?--when across the room, alone at a table, reading the newspaper and nursing a glass of white wine, is a silent confection like you?
     You, with your jet-black hair (like a latter-day version of Veronica from "Archie") and your skin so pale that the bubble-gummy pinkness of your pouty lips seems almost obscene, especially when you scrunch them up the way you do every time you lick your forefinger and turn the page.
     And I know you see me, too. Your first glance betrayed a glimmer of recognition--as if you knew me but couldn't remember from where--followed by puzzlement, your eyes entreating me to silently remind you, which I couldn't do at the time because my current girlfriend was staring across the table at me, apparently waiting for my answer to some kind of relationship question I thought was rhetorical.
     And so it goes. For an eternity, it seems--through the entire meal, until I watch you ask for the check, and pay it, and get up to walk out of the restaurant, and my life, forever.
     But what's this? You're crossing the room toward me? So brazen--just as I knew you'd be. Are you going to surreptitiously slip me your number, written on a sugar packet, perhaps dropping it in my pocket as you fake-jostle me, like a spy handing off microfilm?
     My heart beats like underwater thunder in my ears, until you tap my girlfriend on the shoulder and she sees you and says, "Hey!," and you say, "I thought that was you!," and I realize that you are one of my girlfriend's college roommates.
     After you leave, my girlfriend tells me a hilarious story about how one time in college some guy broke up with you, so you found some photos of him nude with the word "Patriarchy" written on his chest in Magic Marker which you took for an art class, and you sent them to his parents and then posted them on your blog, where you apparently like to write incredibly detailed confessionals about the asshole guys you always end up dating, and also, while you don't use the guys' real names, everyone knows that the guy you immortalized as Pencil Dick is actually a guy I used to work with.
     (Duration of crush: forty-five minutes.)

So silly does my impatience now seem, stuck as I am in the Starbucks line during the morning rush. But that was before I noticed you in line ahead of me.
     And now that I've seen you--with your gossamer hair still damp from the shower, with your well-moisturized ankles strapped and buckled into high heels that make you wobble and sway like a young colt just finding her stride, with your scent of lilacs and Dial, and, most of all, your sense of calmness and serenity, which makes me wish that the world itself would stop spinning, so that gravity would cease and we two could float into the sky and kiss in the clouds, giddy with love and vertigo--
     Now you're at the register, and the dreaded moment when we part without meeting rushes toward me like a slow-motion car crash in a dream.
     You've been at the register for, like, fifteen seconds now, still scanning the menu board with those almond-shaped eyes that would make Nefertiti herself weep with envy.
     Seriously, you've been to a Starbucks before, right? I mean, it seems like there are a lot of choices, but most people find a drink they like and stick with it. And order it quickly.
     But maybe I've caught you on a day when you've decided to make a fresh start. To make a fresh start, to try a new drink, to walk a different way to work, to finally dump that boyfriend who doesn't appreciate you.
     O.K., even if that were the case you could have picked out your new drink while you were waiting in line, right? I mean, come on.
     Well, you've won me back, my future Mrs. Me--by turning to me and mouthing, "Sorry," after you finally noticed me tapping my foot, looking at my watch, and exhaling loudly. Sensitivity like that can be neither learned nor taught, and it's a rare thing indeed. The rarest of all possible--
     Jesus Christ, you've ordered your drink and paid; do I really have to stand here for another forty-five seconds while you repack your purse, the contents of which you've spilled out on the counter like you're setting up a fucking yard sale or something?
     That's right, the bills go in the billfold, the coins go in the little coin purse, the billfold and the coin purse go back in the pocketbook--no, in a side pocket of the pocketbook, which seems to have a clasp whose design incorporates some proprietary technology that you haven't yet mastered.
     I think I hate you now.
     (Duration of crush: five minutes.)
     - Paul Simms

Beagle Or Something

The composer's name was Beagle or something,
one of those Brits who make the world wistful
with chorales and canticles and this piece,
a tone poem or what-have-you,
chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one
whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears.
The music occupied the car where
I had parked and then sat, staring at
a tree, a smallish maple,
fire-gold and half-undone by the wind,
shaking in itself,
shocking blue morning sky behind, and also
the trucks and telephone wires and dogs
and children late to school along Orange Street, but
it was the tree that caused an uproar,
it was the tree that shook and shed,
aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered
I was supposed to have one--for convenience

I placed it in my chest, the heart being away,
and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking,
golden-orange, half-spent but clanging
truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed
hard on the steering wheel in petition for release.
     -- April Bernard

"I know how two people can be talking to each other and thinking 'oh, they know exactly how I feel,' but really they're talking about blue puppies or something."

2007-07-22T12:05:00.001-07:00

Prior thoughts revisited upon me unexpectedly

It is really unfair how I seize on the small recognizable things. I do it with you, all, I know no other way to know a person than to catch them with one of their own. And I work as hard to do it as to not realize that as soon as they don't show me their own, I won't know what's with no-one.

So this is an education?

This poem was in my head (no man is an island entire...bell tolls)
This poem was in my head (and light and labor past)
This poem was in my head (your cloud words...amoeba, sigh, divide, begin; So sorry I can barely say to be full of invisible words).

A great deal was up around me. I have been digging a while—depth equating with extent of knowledge, familiarity, commitment even, in a football-teamspeak. Being that it is impossible to dig across the entire surface of ground (without blasting the excavated earth into space), depth means high walls. Tempting to say I've dug an island, in light of the first poem, but an analogy is an analogy is an analogy and like us they only go so far before they give out.

I've not dug a moat around a little patch of ground. There, only, was air filling the cleared space between matters I have not disturbed. Is a hole the air or the walls, is a house the inside or the structure, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Yeah. What is the sound of one dumb question? Dumb meaning mute, is it the same as one dumb answer? If these walls could'a talked...

But a great deal has come down, and the thing to do isn't to frame statements, which will only come out asinine no matter how they sound on the inside; the thing is only to pick through the new-broken chunks and pockets and inspect, decide what what is, and where I want to put all this dirt.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying.

2007-07-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Extended coverage

In what may be the least ignoble of his public deeds, prez. Bush set an example about getting screened for colorectal cancer. Not that he set out to publicize it, but there was obviously going to be no hushing it up since it involved making Cheney acting president for a few hours (they state that he spent the morning reading, not that you'd ever know...). ABC News paired the political note with a detailed overview of the surgical process: "Well, the preparation the night before is the difficult part, euphemistically we call it 'cleaning out the bowels.'"

May it be his epitaph.

2007-07-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

Well that was frightening

I don't know how to feel about not being able to confidently say that that was the scariest few minutes of my life. The steam main explosion happened right outside the building I'm working in. What we saw out the window was a huge shower of rubble and dust, while the floors shook and the roar just got louder. Yeah, what do you think was the first possiblity we thought of? You think you are going to be skeptical when an explosion is underway in your very immediate vicinty, possibily in your building? No. The in-charge part of your brain astutely notes that it's so unlikely for you to be on the seventh storey of an office building, which is shaking, as a solid wall of debris pelts all the windows and something near and BIG roars, that—hey—who knows? All bets are off, and speculation that the deafening sound could come from a falling building, or an exploded plane, ain't so much of a stretch as to not be worth taking into account.

And not only am I proud to say that despite starting from the seventh floor far from the stairwell, I was the fourth person out. Nothing you can say can change that. I would'a lived. And I wasn't pushing or cattle-driving—in fact, it was impressive to see that even people on the edge of hysteria were being decent. Not helping each other really, everyone was more or less panicked, but not hindering or anything.

I, and the editor-in-chief, and two other people with their heads screwed on, however, were far too busy getting the living hell out of there. Let me be clear: when our canoe got caught in a deadly storm, six miles from the middle of nowhere, with Andra in front and me steering, I was rowing for her at least as much as for me. That was sketchy, and awful, and I never want to be in a prolonged life-or-death situation like that again. Or even a short one. The point is, this time, I was alone and running for me. I don't know how or whether that's better or worse, and like I said, I'm good not knowing.

This was not a life or death situation, as became clear once outside. The street was ripped open and out of the three-lane-wide gash was blasting what in the fraction of a second I saw it looked like an avalanche in rewind. What from my vantage looked like the entire guts of Manhattan were erupting through the street. The steam pipe rupture happened at the crossroads of 41st Street and Lexington Ave, which is to say, at the northeast corner of my building, half a block from where I was standing at the fire exit. That initial geyser, I'm now told, was taller than the Chrysler building (easy to judge, since they were almost side-by-side). I saw a wall of rubble coming out of the ground and thought, as I turned to run in the correct direction (I still didn't have my bearings but that one point of reference was all anyone needed) "up from the ground is good." And it is: Whatever's blasting out must be getting forced, which limits it and makes it controllable. It's localized, the mere fact that I've seen it is reassuring even if at that instant I've no idea what could cause it, and, more to the point, monstrous plumes of rubble shooting out of the ground just doesn't scream "terrorist").

Of course, I didn't stop to look back till I was two blocks away, and then only for a moment, and by that point I was already running upwind, knowing full well that demolition debris can have a ton of bad pollutants that are nothing to be cavalier about. One thing I can say of every Bovee and Begun I've met is that we are not damned fools. Someone was very kind to lend me her phone so I could call my uncle, who works in the building next door, and my aunt at home, and from there it was just a long walk to the next train station, after I picked up a 72 cent notebook at the first drugstore I decided was far enough away. Different people have different ways of dealing with shit. It was not, as it turns out, a disaster. It was maybe a travesty, but only if they should've done something about the known risk. Which in my opinion they damn well should have. Certainly it was more than a SNAFU.

But for about a minute, it was really bad: everything was shaking, everyone was thinking, and not without reason, that the floors might come down—imagine, a combined earthquake and rockslide hitting out of nowhere when you're in a high building, and try to think a comforting thing. We didn't even know if the exit was safe. It didn't "feel hot," but so what? Just before we opened the door someone shouted "Nonononono NO!" It's a bad feeling to think you're (maybe) trapped in a building in mid-disaster(?!). Buildings, being generally designed as static, should not be mid-anything, ever. Midwestern, maybe. Maybe.

In case you're inquisitive and don't already know, I've assembled a few lessons in convenient sentence form, that they may be taken into your heads for consideration through reading, rather than direct experience, or that they may be taken out of my head and massaged around into something I like better:

The silence of concentration is common and seldom noticed; that of disbelief, unsettlingly different. José Saramago said silence has nothing to do with noise, silence is when birds turn and fly away.

Panic starts with the sound of silent disbelief and someone saying "um."

In a situation so very bad-seeming that you want to wake up, a big chaw of your brain fixates on the elephant (or explosion) in the middle of the room. Possibly it's yelling "NO!", that one syllable stretched from one end to the other of everything you know, possibly that's just the light tubes humming, who has time to wonder?

Meanwhile, the talented tenth of your brain, the clever strip stapled but not talking to the bulky panicky muppet brain, is a master of ignorance and displacement, seeing not the elephant but the directest course of action leading away from it. Meanwhile it very wisely chooses not to notice how fucking frightened you are.

Five minutes later, everything is okay. Five minutes after that, everything really is okay. Standards change over time. Then suddenly ten minutes later you realize you're having trouble tying your shoes.

I need to learn the email addresses of the rest of my family.

Katee Sackhoff is gay? Dammit!
Nope, she's not. We win again!

2007-07-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

Extended Coverage

Dave in particular, but to anyone else who knows, too, why do people use MySpace?

2007-07-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

A cry in the dark,

That was the name of the "dingo ate your baby" movie. You in my class in grade 5, or maybe 6 remember. That sentence is short a comma, I'm sure of it. Two clauses that shouldn't be open to each other are fused in mutual juices like Siamese twins, not because of malice but redundancy, that is, absent absence or the lack of a nothing skin that confirms you are not me. Does not confirm you are me. Everything reduces in language, but I am a seeing a dark garden scintillating with fireflies that puncture the dull gray air with their tiny spikes of light that show the existence or needlessness of God, one of those, and I have no words for that. And anyway the sentence is better itself like that; is correctly deformed.

The Mexican wolfboys who became trampoline artists did so, they say, because they were tired of being a side show attraction, wanted people to come to see them for a skill rather than a condition. Though the posters for their new act, I'm sure, said come see the trampolining wolf boys. From the energy of the first act, the second is launched. Wolfboy is the new Madonna, is the new multi-stage Saturn V.

Energy! Maybe the dingo ate your baby.

Energy negotiatiates so it is alright for we'll say a trampoline skin to try to be both up and down at once. It brokers an accord between two states (S0 and S1, before and after, making possible during) the imaginable alternative being untenable.

It's never the right time to be pragmatic, especially ever. Clacking teeth.

That couple would've been better off if there'd been no dingo, you could say; when the woman went to jail her man put his everything behind trying to find the dingo, or even a few bitemarks where it'd been.

The scalar quantity of energy has positive or negative magnitude and no direction, and it is what makes up your mind.

I'll tell you a secret ("tell you" a "secret?" Energy!): If I ever am give up into the right time, I have let myself be hit by a train. Notwithstanding, I might stray, next to the tracks as it hurtles through. When I wandered at night, an overlooked luxury among many heaped on highschoolers, I once drifted past a girl toeing the yellow line on a subway platform, observing her steps like listening to a violin solo, and in a voice that was a baby's, singing, as the subway train, brutally and out of nowhere, displaced the air a pucker from her cheek. The distance away from your face your lips travel in the average kiss. her fascination was unbroken like a sentence without a period.

If she was singing Mariah Carrey. Who is no Madonna. Either she was high, or that's how she was.

If she was singing with her steps, who cares about a train?

Another secret is that where I hope to god I'll go when the other choice is to sell off my books, is a dark scrubby wilderness of ropy dry roots and thorny bits and drums, where I will camp me out around a fire and, in the fullness of time, cook maybe some chicken legs and listen to the wood sing high-pitched soft notes, and sit and the burning meat smell will get into the nostrils of one of those quiet big moving things around you that aren't there till you see them, and she'll lurch into the camp site and I hope she'll eat some chicken.

And the fine sand-glints flying past on the ground like where the fireflies in the air were grains of mica on a rock discovered held to light and turned because special, dryness etching a minor light stillness into the rushing blur under the wheels. I won't look at them, I hardly did when they were fireflies. A firefly flew into my computer screen, once, twice, three times before getting frustrated and flying off in a state of consternation. One landed on my arm. Saved, as by divine grace, from my mosquito-conditioned reflex.

The kids when I get home from work laugh, giggle and ask restlessly when--"when!"--do I want to go on the trampoline. Play monkey in the middle. Tag. Isabel's too slow to play tag. That's 'cause she's a fool. No! I'm am not no I am not! Hunter's calling me a fool. And in short order he will, with a dumb look on his face, accidentally-on-purpose shove her with his nine-year-old shoulders and she will without even thinking about it counter with her five-year-old hands and in no time, but all of time is measured until you arrive at units of no meaning, they will be a snarl of sibling brutality. Or just as easily I'll say we're going outside, come on, and all will be forgotten, even the fact that Isabel's too slow to play tag, and I'll even the odds in monkey in the middle for her. But while we're out I can't say anything, only move like an animal, a horse with a boy on his back.

When I sit down on the carpet with my laptop in front of me and Isabel comes for me to imagine her up some amusement, she doesn't think for an instant that I'm the one who needs it. I pick up with one hand the duckling-colored stuffed rabbit on the floor, and Isabel lunges to grab it, and like that it's the struggle of humanity in the universe. Ms. Bunny Rabbit scurries back and forth, she darts, thinks, reacts, she turns her head to the sky in mute pathos, and when the other's claws are on her and there's no escaping the pull, it's so important to her for no reason she knows of to wave faster and faster that pink scarf which is sewed onto her hand, goodbye! Goodbye! And the contest ended I turn back to my laptop and for a while in her world Isabel becomes a bunny, somberly and with effortless concentration. A deep breath and crouch: hop!

And I, eventually, move outside, where it is becoming increasingly dull and gray, the fireflies having done what they came to do and retired. So you've got a train schedule in your wallet, and you've got maybe there's a dingo right behind some of that dark everywhereness.

It's what you don't have to be told when it means what you hear it. You're staring like someone who knows they're staring like an animal. It is the disbelief before a confrontation, what plays in your ears while the other thing gets close. It is it is it is it is it is

So this is what education is?

2007-07-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

How it Bes

That's pronounced "bees."

For three weeks, while I'm at work I want to put stuff on my blog, but when I get home I'm too tired and I've got better things to do in my one or two hours of free time than spend it on Blogger. So that would be that, except I am clearly not one to abandon my blog. So instead I'm going to try jotting down notes whenever, and posting them at the end of the day.

It will be disordered, clipped and fragmented, and probably lacking in extrinsic or tangible benefit to the reader. Or will it...?

This is a colon:

One P. Hilton (whose by-all-reports lame interview nonetheless tripled Larry King's ratings and who without fail prompts lengthy "news" stories every day, with oddball pictures and screamer headlines like "PARIS REVEALS NAKED FEAR") is now a "celebucon" in the lingo of the (brilliantly trashy) NY Post. This, presumably, is a development from her "celebutante" status in that paper last week. I could care less for updates on the woman, but the linguistic workshop that is entertainment reporting is thrilling to see in action.

A CNN guy, talking about P. Hilton's effects on Larry King's ratings: "She's the number-two guest we could possibly get. The number-one would be Osama bin Laden. What does that say about us?"

A fourth century holy relic was recovered from a Queens pawnshop. Two
dudes of a Grecian ethnic extraction were arrested for stealing it from the altar of a Queens, NY church.

Romanian cinema flourishes in NYC!
Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest!
Mitulescu's The Way I Spent the End of the World!

Incidentally, that first one links to the Onion AV club. It's one of my favorite things to read currently (there's a long list of favorites, but I read a lot), especially since I have to pore over trade journals like Variety for work. Being an initiate of such jargon as tenpercenteries, shingles, skeins, starrers, bow and prexy, and the neutral, clipped language of these industry reports dictating the course of entertainment media over the next few months, AV club features like "recent celebrity quotes in context" strike me as downright fabulous. There's also a clever set of charts explaining celebrity identity. What I love about it is the style and originality. What kills me is that people actually do need this kind of help putting Hollywoodish things into perspective.

Saw Ozomatli yesterday in Central Park, for free. At the end of their set, they jumped off the stage and started a parade through the audience, nearly causing all the security staff's heads to explode. Most awesome. Then they started a beachball volleyball conga line thing.

Sometimes I do then again I think I don't.

2007-06-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

Smuggin'

It's like Drew's watched the Rick Mercer boxed set.

News section's to be done soon, stop. Maybe 1 a.m, stop. Am getting motorbike from crazy lady, stop. Am well, send my love to Mr and Mrs Randolf, expect be home by September, stop.

2007-06-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

On Fire

Much like Oz the wizard, BAD house has been both great and terrible to us, and we are returning the favor. In this analogy, the man behind the curtain represents, I think, the ant colony living in Dave's toolbox. Pay no attention to them.

PARTY! Come prepared for festivities, revelry, and maybe even some shenanigans. If a certain someone brings his Wii, we shall endeavour to hook it up to our newer TV. If anyone else brings extra Wiimotes, well, then (hypothetically) we'll have more than two.

Theoretically, we will in fact burn down our house in effigy in our backyard. I am most interested to see whether this scheme will go off. We have all the matches we need, but we're shy on actual lumber, so I propose to have everyone bring a piece of wood out of which we'll construct our voodoo house and burn the whole thing down.

WHERE: BAD House, 35 Nealon Ave, Conjunction junction (north of Chester station, near the shores of opportunity, literally as far from funkytown as geometrically possible)

WHEN: 6 p.m., this Sunday (3rd of June)HOW: Through a complicated socioeconomic gestalt

BRING (any and all): Yourself; your friends if they are affable, generous, young and rich; party stuff; Wiimotes and multiplayer games which are totally a good idea to play in a befuddled and/or raucous crowded room; Magic tricks and nice hats.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: Bring something entirely wooden--a log, a 2x4, a beloved childhood toy, Mark Wahlberg's lone facial expression, a stick you broke off a tree on the way over, whatev's. If we get enough, we will make a house out of them and burn it in the backyard.Think that covers everything, see y'all down at the ranch.

2007-05-14T04:02:00.000-07:00

Reflections on the First Newspaper Night

Holy fucking hell!
Where'd I go so damned wrong?
Stone hops on taut water.

Got a certain poetry to it, don't it, Captain? Aiya. There will be a reckoning. And by reckoning, I mean "the act or instance of estimation or computation, taking the relevant matters into consideration to settle accounts or regard something in reference to a fixed or accepted basis." Or else heads will roll. Well, mine, anyway. And I don't believe mine head was made for rolling.

Enough with poetry! It is time for prose and line breaks!

One of my dudes at The Varsity,
one of my associates, so it goes,
identifies himself as bangla.bhai@... in email addresses.
An infamous terrorist in Bangladesh, this Bangla Bhai,
with an Old West twist to his name. Bangla Bhai (the Bengali Brother
[See? English and Bengali: not actually so far apart])
of the JMJB, caught and hanged by Bangladesh not seven weeks ago—
but my associate stole his name long before that.
He almost went with itsthejews@... but reconsidered:
"someone would get offended," he said.
A very thin set of people finds it funny.
Not people who think "Jews," and not people who think "Muslims"
and not people who suck in greedy scowls whenever they hear the nouns
"TERRORISM" or "ZIONISM."
Not even a little bit funny at all.
And that is why I like it.

Schedules are everything. What's happening? Put it in a calendar, and put the calendar in a calendar, and set the alarms. Context first, then the text inside, and let the damn subtext figure itself out.

2007-04-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

.

"7 / 10"

2007-04-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

Prières en Sports

"There's this idea that God isn't to be worshiped, isn't outside our imagination. Intead of God over all, He's your buddy—in evangelical Christianity, there's a growing tendency to look at God in a very subjective, even narcissistic way. It's God as therapy.

"When an athlete prays for a win while other players on the other team are doing the same...to think as though your personal performance equates to God's plan is a pretty confused thing to do."

- Sports and philosophy guy sur CBC

"The Lord deserve some of the credit for our win today."

- Some evangelical football player

"Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life."

- A song of some sort

***

I'm writing this on a nifty tablet PC majig that recognizes my (!) handwriting and renders it as text, albeit text that that needs some going-over, which divides my writing attention in previously unheard-of ways. So I sound different.

These sorts of things—the difference between writing on a keyboard vs. writing with pen and paper, or even between pen and pencil have interested me for, well, awhile. Same with reading techniques. But for even semi-serious writing, I don't really like this having to scrutinize every word twice to make sure it rendered right. Oh well, fun to try. Would have been fun to leave all its miswritings in place, now I think about it.

Whulp I'm off: been co-opted into yardwork detail. Now go and judge a book by its cover.

2007-04-15T01:04:00.000-07:00

I do, I did.

I am still, be it said, getting hang of the four defenses against libel.

   those being:
   truth (this shouldn't be shaky)
   consent (waiting for that one to come up)
   fair comment (all the damn time--look it up)
   privilege (?)

If you think I haven't, by the end of typing this, proofread it sufficiently, you would be wrong.

Then, however, you also wouldn't be you.

So.

On cowardice, of those who know my name, Adom Jeffers alone was thus far cognizant that midway--I think it was midway, maybe somewhat more far--

through a cross-country race, I quit.

Walked. Walked for maybe a whole minute!

marking the slant, obv.

(To mon ami: sorry. He helped me out: 'comment ça va' or something like it, he asked)

And I started again so late--even at that level of competition, five second's rest is much.

Charitable, very, to call nothing else blunt. I once thought (I do still think, but in early age thought) very literally, cross-country The Race.

Across the country: was there any more race? No! Ocean, only! Splash! Choking on salt and tuggy undertow! Though even in first grade I rationalized: surely it was only a distance equivalent to the breadth of Canada, run (by the CC runners, so I'd fabricated) over the course of a year. Olympian, worth the singular article and capital R. But doable.

Why in god's name--?

But I certainly did, mon ami.

My two best long-distance races (oh, I am definitely a long-distance runner, even if one who made bad mistakes) ended in me throwing up.

actually, my very best, my medal-winner, did not (good for me, I brought home my lunch and a medal to boot)

but the other two...

Most unpleasant successes. Or, to borrow from First Year, [they] brought the inside out

   (gross; uncalled for)

that is, unravelled, as evolution; or, the down- and up-side of natural selection

(so uncalled for. But I did win that medal).

Just so: embarrassing, that first editorial. But, dear God, how I'm ready to slather my brain, or heartblood, across a page, provided it's the right one (it hasn't). And on the other side--bread (why not!) in the sandwich (?! I ask) with my poor head as meat--one leaden, firing straight as fuck.

I do not want to be forward
I do not want to be straightforward I don't
want--sometimes, and too often--
I don't want to be.

   'nite.

--

But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they

2007-04-13T04:20:00.001-07:00

April 12th, 31:13 a.m.

I hear birds outside my window. It's snowing. Why, why, why must you always pretend? asked Ms. Kenton. And then I laid down and waited to complete.

Essays are dripping like rain off a black bough from my hands, and I'm not doing anything I particularly should but shivering a little and clicking the keys. Or the other side of that is I'm doing great, 85s and 90s great. I just waited, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.

I was Tommy D. in elementary school and Kathy in high school and Stevens at various points and Farraday in spare moments. Tommy was the rightest but, unfortunately, at odd moments and with the usual result of some violence. And he did let them take out his guts when the note came for his fourth donation. I even saw Ezra Pound twisting his mustache back there.

What's the meaning of that obfuscation? All you've done (this is the André from the universe where André lives in a one-floor house near San Francisco) is smush together a few characters you've thought about for essays. Farraday and Pound you barely even mentioned in any paper!

He will go on. He has learned to communicate with me across the zero-point barrier, by thinking the exact negative of the thoughts he wants me to hear. I haven't learned the trick. I can only assume he has gifted spies who watch what I'm writing, or a wildly accurate imagination. The opposite, I'm sure, to my fuzzy one.

Hell, I bet right now he's just bought some big callous-headed koi for the pond he worked on the last couple months that his wife smiles about. Well that's certainly something. There must be some trouble in his life, though--just money (a serious problem, but boring) or what?

Oh, he goes on, but he knows when everything starts to go wrong. The skid point, when it hits, shocks his limbs rigid as mine--makes me a good skier, terrible soccer player, running ability unaffected.

That shock to the limbs, I know, is what keeps him up all night or stuck in his garden looking at a koi pond. Oh hell. That's just not true. He forgot about staring into dark shallow water late into the night.

Or if you like, 7:13 the next morning.

And there's the pair my little essay-writer, you can pretend well enough to know it:

I can-
not go
on I
go on.

2007-04-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

Every Essay Makes it Worse

I'm writing an essay about...never mind. You don't care what it's about. I don't care what it's about. I can't remember the last time I really loved writing something. I'm sure it was long ago, I just can't use my brain properly right now, so I can't remember.

And I'm only half-done. Oh Fuck. Someone shoot me in the face. Seriously, I'm sure I'll be fine. It'll wake me up.

*** *** ***

Wow, my eyes must have been pretty bloodshot, or my mind awfully bruised, to have left that saying how every essay "make it" worse. As it is it's a pretty damned shoddy thing to say, but at least it's grammatical.

On other notes, I do believe that Oscar Wilde never actually died, but instead flies across the face of the planet, possibly travelling through the interwebs through means obscurely technological and sufficiently witty, fighting evil and making eyes at things.

After this essay, I've two more books needed read for another essay, after a fiction thing and an exam. I might be a news editor as of tomorrow morn—later this morning. I might be a comment editor. I might have a news piece to throw together on the fast.

Growth, pressure, conditioning, tensility, catching, vine-clearing, lightning and the instinct of recoil. Five hundred pounds of spanish moss (the lower case denoting) hanging like a bag of pennies. Soft active ground and a boardwalk. Looking across the continent to the other coast (Pacific) and a dry room of wood the color of skin, of wooden shutters and heavy books palming the varnished clerical desk and lighted in slats that wash their color, and the smell of fuzzy green from a rock-pond nearby and drawer handles the color of worn pennies, and a hand at the back of the heavy neck.

I wonder when the branch breaks.

2007-03-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

Tragicomedie

Malaise! Mac Hall me manque, avec son style idiosyncratique--c'est un mot Francais, n'est pas?--et "Australian Indoor-Rules Quidditch."

(Maintenant, les douleurs.)

Mais! Qu'es-ce que c'est que ca? Ils sont revenus! En formes tout blancs et noirs, comme des etres sacrées...ou profanes!

**

This comic I like came back, in afterlife form. It's not Herzog the Vile, sadly, but the late Mac Hall.

Also, guy from there showed me this thing, which I will now be showing you by writing its name in letters using my keyboard.

Minus

Word to the wise, used, soggy peppermint tea bags look like rotten clammy turquoise fish turned inside out. I hate them.

2007-03-16T05:23:00.000-07:00

Stayed up all night. How come? Just couldn't sleep. Wanna know why? I don't believe you.

I'm tired.

Dear god, I have a busy day ahead of me. And two more after that.