Cut myself today. Dumb. I may not have had a thousand cuts, but over a lifetime it's starting to add up. I cut that spot on your hand that has no name (at least in English) about an inch behind the base of my left thumb. Deep. Five stitches and it didn't hurt a bit. Till now. It is going to be one of those throbbers, I can tell already. I'll just call this one #756. That leaves me only about 9 or ten cuts per year until I croak. I'll try not to make a habit out of this.
Single girl, oh single girl
I lost someone.
I just can't help but wonder if she will play with your hair like I did, make you collages, write you poetry, think about you when they watch the sunset, yell at you for smoking, listen to your heartbeat with a devotion so strong as to count every beat towards the minute like I did.
He hissed.
Thumbing through The New Yorker magazine today, I became intrigued by one of those perfume inserts- you know the kind- where you put your nose up to the page and it smellls just like - INK! Then you realize that you have to open a flap, or scratch a spot, and then it smells just like CHEAP PERFUME AND INK!
As the two year anniversary of Flippism Is The Key approaches, your humble host takes time to reflect on his efforts. Lord knows I try to mix it up, I think that some of my better efforts are those that I re-read that cause me to say to myself: "I wrote that?" Disregarding my own impressions, the #1 Google hit on my site is "Mel Jass." It isn't even close. The words "Mel" and "Jass" combined get more hits than "Flippism" itself. Usually I get a couple hits on Mr J. per week, lately it has been more like a couple hits a day. He hasn't been in the news, the last I heard of him was that he was still dead.
"Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase
They call it mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)" - Donovan
In a tattered cotton flannel shirt, a boy stood on the back steps, basking in the sunshine.
Everybody's working.
Attended a birthday party today. The honored one was turning fifty. She was part of a group of girls that had gone to school together, partied together as young women, and now that they are turning the half century mark, still remain close. When I was younger and single, for one wild year, I was on the fringe of their "group". They took me along on a few of their adventures, even christened me "Alice" so as to symbolically make me "one of the girls". Outside of a fair amount of drinking and herbalism, it was pretty much good clean fun. I had even taken the birthday girl on a date once, but nothing "happened". We all got along, it was good to be in a low-key, non-sexual relationship with all of them. Later, as we were "married off", those days were put behind us.
A phenomenon of my early childhood was the neighborhood candy store. Even smaller than a true mom-and-pop grocery, the candy stores were often in a front room, or a side porch, glassed in and set up with a display case or two with boxes of "penny candy" propped up inside the box cover. Some had a cooler for soft drinks, most did not. They were usually staffed by older women, retirees, who used the stores as a source of supplementary income.
Has maintaining a blog improved my life? -a question from Reshma
In the living room sits a CD player - Radio. A fine product, made by Sony, in a designer style with a faux birdseye-maple finish, a remote control and a variety of features, most of which are never used. You see, the infernal gizmo is a music critic. Whenever I wish to relax with a fine quality music CD, I put on my smoking jacket, my slippers and grab my (bubble) pipe, and pop in a disc. All's well, the room pulsates with beautiful music (MegaBass™), and as those bubbles float to the ceiling they pop- and my cares with them.
For some, sailing is a way of life. Make that life itself. Not for me. Stuck on a boat with no way off. I've been that fix a few times, with my sister and brother-in-law. A very nice 30 foot sailboat, with sleeping for four (or six, if you don't mind the sky for a roof), a galley and a head. We sailed Lake Pepin, a large and wide stretch of the Mississippi river, between Wisconsin and Minnesota, about 60 miles south-east of the Twin Cities.
Tagged again, this time from Reshma:
"...the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence."- Trevor Butterworth
Once upon a time...
MEN! If you've got a hankerin' to continue your genetic heritage, we've got just the place for you. No need to mess with courtship, marriage or family! Just come on in, do your dirty work, and with a little luck, in nine months Junior pops out- and there ain't nothing any damn woman can do about it! IT'S THE LAW! The rape biz here is already flourishing, a woman is just about as likely to be raped here as she is to have her car stolen* already, I am sure that with a little help from you daddy wanna-bees we can up that percentage. Oh, and lets not forget you fathers that want to "keep it all in the family" - that daughter or niece or granddaughter is fair game too! IT'S THE LAW!
My grandparents lived on a half acre in Morrison County, Minnesota, about a mile and a half south of Upsala. They lived in a small farm house, with a barn that had seen better days. Central Minnesota is where the glaciers dropped a whole lot of gravel during the end of the last ice age. The house lacked running water, so my grand mother had to take the dishwater and slop out every day. It had been decided that a small cesspool would be constructed for her, a short distance from the kitchen and connected to her sink, to ease her burden a bit. I was old enough to be allowed to help shoveling out the pit for the cesspool. My dad, some uncles and I took turns digging the grave-like pit. The soil was quite compact, and as we got deeper it became quite cool in the shaft. Examining the strata in the walls, I noticed that the gravelly composition of the earth below the top soil was full of crushed granite. There was a cool mineral smell to it, very fresh and moist.
Announcing the Jane Austen Network (or JAN)- the ultimate in literate cable programmming. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all Jane, all the time. Each night will feature one of the filmed versions of her classic novels, with Sunday reserved for her juvenilia. Whether it be Sense and Sensibility, Emma or sometimes even Clueless, Austen fans will always have access to all of Jane's Oevure. Betwixt the feature films, Austen scholars will lead lively discussions about the Author and her works. In the morning hours, Freshman term papers will be read with a background of images from her many adaptations. New adapatations will include an animated Lego version of Sir Charles Grandier, a claymation of The Beautifull Cassandra and ad hoc "Living Theatre" improvisations of all her literary output. Don't delay! Call your cable or satellite provider and simply say: "I want my JAN!"
...during supper, Dad is mad, but hey, I'm not going to let this go. "I'll take it in the basement. With her it can be 5 seconds or 5 hours. Usually toward the latter. One of those calls where the folds in your ears start hurting, the reciever is covered with nervous perspiration, and you are in heaven, or close to it. She's calling from thr hospital; her asthma is acting up. worse than ever, the August dog days have everyone wheezing from the pollution and pollen. I make a date to "visit" her that night.
...found me peering out into the flat Kansas plain, wondering what I was doing here. My brother-in-law suggested we take a look at the house next door. The landlord (who also ran the implement dealership) owned most of the town; in one house, which was not currently occupied, he had the entire stock of clothes from a pawnshop that he had liquidated. I never thought that pawnshops had much in the way of attire, but evidently not in in the late 60's Kansas. He let us in, and there- in every room, stacked in piles about four feet high- were clothes of every possible style. "See anything you like, make me an offer" he smiled. I did find a "Japan" embroidered jacket that must have been traded for cash by some returning G.I. That was all I could afford- I wish that I had access to it now, you could furnish a dozen retro boutiques with that stash!
...I was heading south with my sister's sister-in law, on a road trip of sorts, to Zeandale, Kansas. The convertible's rag top thrummed as we drove on through southern Minnesota and into Iowa. The band Chicago was on the radio, their clunky fusion of modern big-band jazz and rock assaulted my ears in much the same way as the road and wind noise did. Being 19 and alone in a sports car with a young woman would have been more stimulating, but the extended family thing had pretty well killed any romantic notions I might have entertained. Besides, at 19 I had just about zilch to offer any girl, anything other than my youthful enthusiasm, that is. We switched seats, I was actually pretty good with a stick-shift, and headed onto the Kansas turnpike. I missed our exit and it was about 20 miles to the next one, so by the time we pulled into Zeandale it was past midnight. Zeandale was a crossroads. A half-dozen houses, a farm implement dealership, and a now-closed gas station. My sister and her husband (who was in the military, stationed in Fort Riley) greeted us warmly into their half of a humble duplex. "We'll show you around town tomorrow," my sister joked, although the next day did hold a surprise or two. "Bye honey, have fun with your friends..."
"...blogs are personal statements by individuals, digital declarations of who they are and who they wish to be in the searchable world. Together with the system of links, both inbound and outbound, which grow around the specific site, the blog becomes a very nuanced... statement of individuals' social standing, relationships, interests, and history." -John Battelle, The Search
With the new OS installed (Tiger 10.4.3), I feel like I'm on a date with my wife's sister. Everything is the same, yet different. Text is crisper, my bookmarks will take a long time to get straightened out, but many of the "improvements" offered have already been deleted. And what is with the fake brushed aluminum on Safari, Mr. Jobs? Back to the preferences...
Nine-year-old boys have their secrets. One of ours was created in a large dog-house behind the big house on the corner. The house had elderly tenants as boarders, but in the summertime Bobby would come and spend a few weeks with his grandparents. Bobby was a few years older, and from south Minneapolis (far more urban than our rustic neighborhood on the outskirts of town.) Along with the Jensen brothers, who lived next door, we would use this large (6'x8') box-like structure for our card-playing. I'm not certain who suggested strip poker (probably the worldly Bobby}, but it was agreed that this would be a lively diversion from Hearts or Old Maid. For some unknown reason, I was lucky that day. (Not "got lucky", mind you- after all we were only preteens!) I ended up with my shirt off, while the others were stark naked. I didn't dwell on their condition (PREPUBESCENT SCROTA!) and I soon realized that we had gone too far. I left in a hurry.
