It is risen

I got me a fresh sheet of virtual paper and I roll it into the carriage...

I think I’ve been sick of typing. I’ve even found it difficult to effectively do e-mail, and that is one of the few ways to reliably get ahold of me. The FaceBook, 2-3 sentences and I’m out, has been de rigeur around here.

It was a really harsh winter around La cerise de chateau, maison du fumeur de detente. So right now forsythia is like the breath of the atman made manifest on earth.

I had a really, tremendously, bad bout of infection that started just before Thanksgiving. For the most part I missed all the holidays. On Thanksgiving itself I was too sick to even walk next door. About a week of 104 fevers. Since then it’s been a long, slow, road back.

I popped into UBU’s one of the very first good days, that was a good thing, getting out, into town, having lunch. Now I have have to pop back and give him back the books I bought as well as a few additional. I find myself in the market to get rid of, in some cases sell, books. That is something I’ve never been good at at all. It feels pretty free to be in a place where I can let a book go deliberately as opposed to losing it.

I’m ready to let more things go.
I have started sorting out anything I don’t have a pretty legitimate claim on to be sent back. I’m watching the hoarders and I don’t want to be there or leave that for someone else to deal with. Keep the precious and let the chaff blow away. That’s the new mantra. There will be a porch sale this year.

Freaking Brilliant 1st post of the year (koff koff)

My end of the year festivus feat of strength was reading 21 Travis McGee novels by John MacDonald in 19 days. I may never have been more cynical and bitter. I have been more angry. But that was in youth when it was an un-formulated, nonspecific, anger. A sort of devil-may-care, lash out at anyone and get in drunken fist fights with my best friends sort of anger. This one is pretty specific.
But now I pay the horrordays price, because I’m sick. Real sick. So just leave me alone. No, wait coddle me. No, no, just fuck off. But wait, can you bring me some juice and the thermometer first? Oh, and the TV guide?

It ain't Burroughs but....

“Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer’s recent lectures on international standards of living was all too well remembered.”

“... so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts . Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody’s share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?”
“You come up with a bleak fact Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we’re used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge - not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We’ve hogged it all. Technology won’t come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with (sleek, high powered speedboats).
“It was OK Travis, when the world couldn’t see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communication by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, God help them. And what is the only thing we can say? ‘Sorry, You’re a little too late. We used it all up all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’ What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don’t dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well materially, as we once did. And now as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else.”
John MacDonald “The Scarlet Ruse” 1973

Oh happy, happy XMAS.

Shucks and sucks

I am writing a paper, between today and Friday. It gets all, you get none. Even my earworms are all just me lately, so no loss there.
I am, however, verging, all up on, my 1st, vanity press, chap style, poetry book. So that probably gets next priority, probably over us.
Oh, and parties, I have decided that I am, w/out fail, going to every single party, dinner and lunch I am invited to this year. So far one lame party and one, fun happy hour friends band viewing, down, 8 parties and dinners, 3 anticipated lunches to go. I am in DESPERATE need of socialization. I am so very striking some hot iron before the bucket dip.

Tis the season

For an awful lot of family friendly television. While I know this is a day late and a dollar short, as they rerun a bunch of “family classics”, here are my thoughts on one.
As much as I adore you Johnny Depp (and that is fairly embarrassing, as I don’t generally play the celebrity game), this time you fail. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory completely bites. Because I may love you, but you know who I love more? Both Roald Dahl and Gene Wilder.
And by the way,
There is no need to edit out the drug references from Willy Wonka, (Family Channel). I saw this, in the theater, at age 7 and did not jump from the mast of any tre jolie boats into a chocolate river and die because I thought I could fly.

Been there done it, HorrorDays style

I have had the requisite
• Day of cooking until I hurt myself and limped around all the next day
• Perfect turkey sandwich
• Turkey tetrazinni casserole, as good or better than, Mom’s
• So much stuffing that I had to freeze a quart
• Fully satisfactory amount of creamed onions
• Disturbing encounter with someone I care about resulting in emotional and physical injury. Which is different than it sounds... I have a kinked neck from the stress
• Drunken Friday night out with the girls bitch session
• Dinner with the neighbors, slipping away after pie
• New cooking secret discovery. Cranberries taste better with booze in them.
• Making of the best gravy of my career
• Procrastination about homework
• First shoveling of snow
• Not taking the tent awning down in time before wet, heavy, snow killed it
• HorrorDay blog entry

Bleu Moonday, how I hate bleu Moonday

I want to propose a new national holiday. Something to the effect of “whoopee for space day”. I’m thinking July 29th, as that was the day that Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act which established NASA. There are many other notable days related to space stuff. Lots of things occurred in various Aprils. As well as that on May 5 1961 Alan Shepard became the first American in space. But we already have bunches of holidays around that time of year and not nearly enough in July/August. So, maybe set it up for the last Friday in July. Then it could also be linked to July 20th, when in 1969 we landed on the moon. As well as July of 1975 when the Apollo-Soyuz test project was launched, and July 25, when in 1984 Svetlana Savitskaya was the first woman to perform an EVA (Extravehicular Activity or space walk).

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not at all one of those let’s fuck over this planet and then escape to space people. In fact I’m generally a bit pissed about the whole let’s shove a big metal machine into the inviting, dark, folds of space and/or shoot for the moon weird, hard to ignore, phallic symbolism of it all. Especially the idea of taking and plopping that energy onto the belly of my girl Luna, who I prefer as a thing of mystery and some kind of cool, yin, purity.

So then why would I encourage them in those activities at all you ask? Well, because I have to admit it is pretty awe-inspiring these things they do. And really, if we were to pull back a little, out of our business as usual in the 21st century modality, what is going on out there is nigh unto miraculous. If only we were to view this from any other perspective removed from the jade of the last 50 years. Say it’s 1908 instead of 2008. It would be terrifying, miraculous, or possibly an affront to God. Think about it now. Something we almost never even stop to think of, in going about the course of our everyday living is that, so are 10 or 20 or so people out there way beyond our perception and normal range of thought. Living in space. That is just, so, weird.

Additionally, I have this hope that much like every other stupid holiday, the marketers would freak out and start bombarding us with space stuff beginning a couple months ahead of it, that most TV stations would dig out all kinds of squidly sci-fi stuff to run all month long and that we could get away with dressing up all futuristic and/or space retro that whole week.

I pity the fool

I don’t get it. What are adults doing being all up into April Fools Day? Given, I never really got it as a child either...
Is it that we are desperately in need of any lame holiday because our “normal” American life is so F’in’ drab and excruciatingly, deadly dull?
Of course this is from someone who thinks “Talk like a pirate day” is awesome.

Can’t focus, need chocolate

• The student 'zine apparently now hates me, they print only one, of my worst poems, each time. I’m starting to feel patronized.

• Perhaps we shall hear the pitter of little patters? The vet has spoken that Little ghee likely needs a boy toy. We begin a searing and painful search this week.

• Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. Last day before holiday break. Christ you know it ain’t easy....

• I think I’m a senior Betty.

• Chilean Sea Bass. Lightly panfried, HOT PAN, after rolling in herbs, spices and flour then baked at 500, HOT PAN, for 6 minutes = Frickin’ totally fabulous.

• (A • C) ~ (C v A) write a truth table for that! (You only need 4 lines).

• Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. Kant vs. Mill in the battle of the centuries, @ the my brain arena, blood WILL spill. (Probably from my ears).

• The Eye Of The Sybil by Phillip K. Dick, soon to join Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban, in “The Best Things College Has Exposed Me To Hall Of Fame”.

What was will be

Any day now

I’m really supposed to be doing homework. Wonder if that is really going to happen? I suppose as I kinda want to go to Swank’o’Rama tonight I probably should.

I need to get out a little, this for me is the first of the horrordays festives. This one is not so much about the season as much as about my friend who owns several businesses doin’ a little do for a combination of friends and clients.

Some of her clients are classic examples of the neauveau riche, I have come close to drink, face, throwing, activities at these things previously due to their outrageously gauche and idiotic snobbery. But even that is entertaining in it’s own fashion.
I could probably have some fun with a little class war drama. And considering the shit I’ve been seeing my working class friends dealing with the past couple years, throwing a drink or two and possibly indulging in some light fisticuffs with some republicans might be cathartic.
I wish Nitro and Eva Destruction were going though. It would be nice to have a few buds around. I already know you guys aren’t coming. I’m just psychic that way.

All right off to compare and contrast various poems and poets against other ones and write “breaking down an essays arguments in the critical thinking vein” papers and read South American mythology and read “The Rose Tattoo” and continue my Ginsberg project and on and on and on.

When semester break comes I get 20 days off with no freakin’ homework. Any day now.