High Holy Day. Above is this blog's Theme Song 2, and David Thomas' Pere Ubu is permanently in my Desert Island Two while the other one rotates among many.
I love being on vacation but hate going on vacation. I hate the run up to and especially the come down from. Hate loath abhor. Hate.
Here's the itinerary:
Saturday: Arrive in London approx noon, stay overnight. Hotel is in Kensington.
Sunday: All day in London.
Monday: Bus to Cambridge, York, Leeds. Dinner is included so I'm assuming we get to Leeds in time to eat and go to sleep.
Tuesday: Bus to Jedburgh, Melrose, Edinburgh.
Wednesday: All day in Edinburgh.
Thursday: Bus to Lake District, Chester, Wrexham. Dinner is included so see Leeds above.
Friday: Bus to Stratford, Cardiff.
Saturday: Bath, Stonehenge, Salisbury, London. Late, I imagine.
Sunday: Home.
Monday: Jetlag.
Suggestions sought for the whole day in London and the whole day in Edinburgh.* The girls (did I mention I'm responsible for three eighteen and one seventeen year old girl) will either do what Earthgirl and I am doing or do their own thing. I've been to The Tower and The Tate and The Eye. Earthgirl wants to do this and cool, I know this guy will suggest this and maybe, but all other suggestions solicited!
I know nothing about Edinburgh except that I think Hearts' maroon is motherfucking gorgeous and I want a shirt from the club store. Suggestions, please! Any other general advice re: not getting ripped off in Britain, please. And if you see a white bald American tourist getting off a tour bus in a United sweatshirt, please say Hi.
As opposed to capitalist extremists exploiting the situation. This was the banner headline in YFWP as I link; you can guess what that means.
Today's YFWP also has a column by this fat fucker, a Hred Fiatt scolding of Obama, and the presumptive next World's Shittiest Human and current World's Second Shittiest Human again attacks Obama for not putting the interests of Israel ahead of the United States.
Fire Bob Bradley: The “staleness” issue has not been dealt with. There has been nothing new from Bradley. Either he cannot change his thinking, or he doesn’t want to -- it makes no difference, we’ve now had a year in which to see if a “new” Bradley would emerge to give us something different, and he has totally failed to come through. We’re still seeing a team that does not excite and that plays well only when its back is against the wall -- in other words, in games where the players have to take over, and carefully worked-out game plans have to be abandoned. I doubt it’s a bad as Jozy Altidore painted it after the Spain game -- “I mean, you go into every game with a tactical plan and as soon as the game starts, it tends to get thrown out the window ...” but the impression is unmistakable that these guys play better when they can escape the dead hand of Bradley’s tactics. Read the whole takedown.
I'm a techtard. What's the best way for me to post links to photos so I don't crash motherfucking Blooger with photos (from my new Canon A3300! Like.)? (Also, Planet bought herself a Canon G12 and it's love.)
I've never heard of Patrick Wolf, but Sunday I discovered he covers the Kate Bush song I posted Saturday, and shittily too!
Sounds like a reason to post more Kate Bush. My reaction to the moral crisis is to go back and fall in love again for blindingly selfish reasons.
PLAGUE OF DEAD SHARKS
Alan Dugan
Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes? The wading, wintered pack-beasts of the feet slough off, in spring, the dead rind of the shoes' leather detention, the big toe's yellow horn shines with a natural polish, and the whole person seems to profit. The opposite appears when dead sharks wash up along the beach for no known reason. What is more built for winning than the swept-back teeth, water-finished fins, and pure bad eyes these old, efficient forms of appetite are dressed in? Yet it looks as if the sea digested what is wished of them with viral ease and threw up what was left to stink and dry. If this shows how the sea approaches life in its propensity to feed as animal entire, then sharks are comforts, feet are terrified, but they vacation in the mystery and why not? Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?: what the sun burns up of it, the moon puts back.
All day the weathermen called for torrential, possibly dangerous thunderstorms at or near game time. For the first time in memory I actually brought my rain gear into the stadium. Here's the sky ten minutes into the game:
Here's Benny saying word for word exactly what you thought he'd say:
It was very disappointing; we looked like young kids. This is going to happen, we have always said that we are going to have games when young kids make mistakes – that I can live with. But the lack of commitment at times was unacceptable. I think we started reading our own press a little bit, everybody thought we were on a roll, so now we don’t have to do what got us a little success – and it’s a little success. We are in the middle of the table if you take this whole league.
We think we are a little bit better than we are, so maybe it’s a good thing that we got punched in the face. Maybe we will get the message that even at home you don’t get games handed to you.
Maybe, but also San Jose had a plan and United never adjusted to it. Maybe, but when your withdrawn midfielders with major defensive responsibilities are a cooked Clyde Simms and Fred, when your two attacking midfielders won't track back on defense, your rookie back line is sliced open like a melon. (There was one sequence when Najar was stripped of the ball, and he tracked back forty yards on a sprint and brilliantly took the ball back, meaning he can play defense when he wants to, he just usually doesn't want to.) Maybe, but when you start three rookies and a journeyman on the back line in front of a second year keeper (and Hamid was awful, especially on the fourth goal) these nights happen. Maybe, but maybe the other team is bigger, faster, stronger, better organized, better.
The young defense has had its teething troubles this season, and I was shocked that they managed to shut out LA last week on the road. Looks like they just deferred the inevitable. Three rooks and a USL guy arrayed ahead of a second-year keeper isn’t anybody’s recipe for consistency. It probably doesn’t help that they were maybe a little overconfident after a successful west coast swing to boot.
He also takes on the USMNT v Panama game. I'll start paying attention again to USMNT once Bob Bradley is fired. Here's hoping they don't make it out of group.
A friend went to his opthamologist two months ago for a check-up, and when he complained that he couldn't read in bed anymore, the opthamologist suggested he get one. When I complained a week ago at Thursday Night Pints that I can't read in bed anymore, he loaned me his. Shazam! of not small sorts, and I now own this:
What a fucking revolutionary endorsing a consumerist boycott of those tools that repress us! I also claim a certain trip to England in a week and wanting to travel light as justification, and that I can and will share it with Earthgirl during and after the trip, but what a fucking revolutionary. I'm buying a camera this afternoon.
Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?
It's true! and there's a home game tonight! but there's horrible news:
D.C. United captain Dax McCarty has recovered from a groin ailment that sidelined him for both West Coast matches and is likely to start Saturday night against the San Jose Earthquakes at RFK Stadium.
GAH! Maybe they'll win anyway. A good time will be had regardless of result.
Not kindlable! What a fucking old hehful of rube am I.
ON SEEING LARRY RIVER'S WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE RIVER AT THE MODERN MUSEUM OF ART
Frank O'Hara
Now that our hero has come back to us in his white pants and we know his nose trembling like a flag under fire, we see the calm cold river is supporting our forces, the beautiful history.
To be more revolutionary than a nun is our desire, to be secular and intimate as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile and pull the trigger. Anxieties and animosities, flaming and feeding
on theoretical considerations and the jealous spiritualities of the abstract the robot? they're smoke, billows above the physical event. They have burned up. See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
Dear father of our country, so alive you must have lied incessantly to be immediate, here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate's flag, bravely specific
and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to a shore other than that the bridge reaches for. Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.
Weiner was discussed at Thursday Night Pints, just two this week, me and D. We each told each other exactly what we could have guessed each of us would say re: Weiner. That's not precisely true: he had heard me tell the George Carlin joke about power before, how anyone driving slower than me is a jerk and anyone driving faster an asshole, though he hadn't heard me say that the only person I know who ever ran for any office who wasn't an asshole ran for office to keep a particular asshole out of office but also to prove a non-asshole could win, and he lost.
What's it like in Blogland, he asked. Everyone's digitally competing to be the definer of the ultimate cultural significance of Weiner, I said. That everyone's digitally competing to be the definer of the ultimate cultural significance of Weiner instead of impotently yammering about about anything that matters IS the ultimate cultural significance of Weiner. My blog will say this Friday morning. You don't get a scotch for that, he said, though I got a charity pint for effort since I don't drink scotch.
Things are busy. We leave for England a week from tomorrow, so I'm not only busy I'm weary of working the cud of aargh I've been working. Fuck the clusterfuck, I've a 90% chance of one of the best vacations ever and a 10% chance it's the worst, so I'm thinking about that. Plus, jeebus, the Blog Days of Summer. Wait for August, especially if there's not an apocalypse between now and then.
I'm buying a new camera, thinking this one maybe, though any suggestions in the same price range I solicit. Do remember, I'm a techtard, so if there's a better camera for my grade of tech idiot than this one, please let me know. Consider this forewarning on what this blog will be doing from next Friday to the second following Monday. Consider this post a forewarning of what this blog may be doing until then (though there will be a game recap Sunday - home game Saturday. I can't wait).
Link farming? I call it blogwhoring! (Thanks for bump a week or two ago.)
Go here. Scroll down to where is says music behind DC Curd Duca and pull up the pop-up player. Question - if I wanted that song to play anytime someone accesses this shitty blog, is there a way to do that in blooger?
She's not angry exactly but all business, eating them right off the tree, with confidence, the kind that lets her spit out the bad ones clear of the sidewalk into the street. It's sunny, though who can tell what she's tasting, rowan or one of the serviceberries— the animal at work, so everybody, save the traffic, keeps a distance. She's picking clean what the birds have left, and even, in her hurry, a few dark leaves. In the air the dusting of exhaust that still turns pennies green, the way the cloudy surfaces of things obscure their differences, like the mock orange or the apple rose that cracks the paving stone, rooted in the plaza. No one will say your name, and when you come to the door no one will know you, a parable of the afterlife on earth. Poor grapes, poor crabs, wild black cherry trees, on which some forty-six or so species of birds have fed, some boy's dead weight or the tragic summer lightning killing the seed, how boyish now that hunger to bring those branches down to scale, to eat of that which otherwise was waste, how natural this woman eating berries, how alone.
I feel compelled to digitally stamp the time I posted this lame joke before not another single person out of ten billion people on the planet does, just in case:
Either at this juncture of late-capitalist economics there's literally nothing any action by humans can do to alter the world economy's crash - it's Obama can't not won't - or he's been told to speed up the liquidation - Mitt Romney is equal in the polls? Like those free dinners at 1789, Obama?
Death to the Either/Or! Corporate knows how fucked up the clusterfuck is, and even if Obama knew how to fix it and had the political capital to fix it so your kids aren't blood farming in 2030, he wouldn't.
Sorry for the reiterative post opening. I have conversations with people, I read people, who fervently hope that the Obama administration is STUPID! and STUPID! as a moral quality as in "hopelessly fair, means well, but..." The arguments are now shifting to his being both stupid AND a eunuch, his impotency noble, his efforts now directed to making the coming suck as suckless as nobly possible in its suckfulness.
Had the conversation yesterday at lunch in fact, told that I cannot imagine all the impediments Obama faces to enact his noble agenda. Bit my tongue - no profit in telling this particular obamapostle to obamapostate - but I needed to blawrg, so here I am.
And is scolded by the would be next World's Shittiest Human.
A question: I was a roob and a stooge when the Mark Foley scandal broke, so I thought it the bestest scandal ever and embraced the partisan and media noise: I can't judge: is the media shitstorm just as intense over Weiner? Regardless the different particulars of the two cases, is there a qualitative difference in how this shitstorm has been broadcast?
OK, I watched. Tim Howard is in the discussion of best keepers in the world. His save at 70 was as good as I've ever seen. And Jozy Altidore is a punk. And fuck Bob Bradley, purveyor of the most joyless, soulless soccer in the world.
This admirable gadget, when it is Wound on a string and spun with steady force, Maintains its balance on most any smooth Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes. It is whirled not on a constant course, but still Stands in unshivering integrity For quite some time, meaning nothing perhaps But being something agreeable to watch, A silver nearly silence gleaning a still- ness out of speed, composing unity From spin, so that its hollow spaces seem Solids of light, until it wobbles and Begins to whine, and then with an odd lunge Eccentric and reckless, it skids away And drops dead into its own skeleton.
I won't post here what's ignited my moleskine because I need and want to protect multiple parties' privacy. I can say entirely new galaxies in which to matrix my own complicity have been discovered, none of them good, all of them irresistibly juicy.
Hey! Look what Creamy brought us!
Walked to the door and dropped it. She loves us. She was at the party Sunday too.
Holyfuck! Look what I just found looking to complete a joke in links:
Creamy is the female of the three feral children of the mother who had the litter in our shed. She's the one we tried to convert to an indoor cat because her two brothers chase her when they see her. She's always been the best hunter of the three. She's a sweetheart and purr-machine.
Which isn't to say I'm not going to post what I'm not writing about here elsewhere (though in my scribbled calligraphy) or that I'm not going to write sideways here what I'm not writing about directly here.
The slow-grained slide to embed the blade of the key is a sheathing, a gliding on graphite, pushing inside to find the ribs of the lock.
Sunk home, the true key slots to its matrix; geared, tight-fitting, they turn together, shooting the spring-lock, throwing the bolt. Dactyls, iambics-- the clinch of words--the hidden couplings in the cased machine. A chime of sound on sound: the way the sung note snibs on meaning and holds. The lines engage and marry now, their bells are keeping time; the church doors close and open underground.
Twice in the same week in the morning before a celebratory event for Planet I post doom I wrote the night before. It wasn't intentional, just happened - I didn't think to notice until last night. When she turns my age in 2044....
The doom isn't (mostly) for you and me, though as I was deservedly chided, fuck gloom. And another wonderful day: Thank you very much to my dearest friends and family, all of whom recognize that if anyone can save the planet it's Planet.
One reason my Jeremiah bones are jangling: a professor/friend, an Arabist with connections in Lebanon and Israel, tells me the vibes from Israel suggest a war by end of summer.
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.
Yes, you're right, there was no Theme Song May 2011, the first month I couldn't find - and I looked, I listened - a song to theme the month since I first started that stupid bit six or seven years ago on two or three blogs ago. Thank you for playing along!
Play it now please while you're reading this post. There can never be a Theme Song May 2011 and this isn't June's theme song just this post's excellent theme song (though Holyfuck! finding my Yo La Tengo stash looking for something else, it's like love again).
Speaking of old bits, my canary synapses are chirping, my weathervane's frantically aiming at impending KABOOM! my Cassandra predictions are dependably predictable, my fool says some major man made shitstorm of some paradigm shifting - as in reinforcing then advancing Corporate's paradigmatic dream of reduced you, greater it (and Corporate's paradigmatic nightmare of reduced it, you peasant bastard!) - kabooms soon.
For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror.
Me, I've been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing.
It is the non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and the mind guided by stars.
So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage, like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions, would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass, staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like having an image go out and return to itself, so that it's power transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal faces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.
Stayed up to see the red kits (fuck the red kits) and watched until Wolff gacked a Najar cross around 25, went to bed convinced the scoreline would hold at 0-0.
Everything I've read suggests it was (for reasons logistical, practical, and self-preservational) the correct, if horribly disloyal, decision. Blah game. Selfishly, I'm glad. Apparently Wolff gacked another chance in the second half, as did Davies. The backline threw a shutout, which is a positive even if Gax was without Donovan.
And if I'd been offered four points out of road games in Portland and Los Angeles before United got on the plane west, I'd have snapped them in a second.
UPDATE! Here's Fullback's quick observations on last night's game.
Also, I realize I wrongly assume that everyone understands my allusions and bits even if they've only got here seconds ago or been here for years, so to clarify the Fuck Me Jig: so certain am I that United will not get a stadium in DC (or within any of the immediately adjacent jurisdictions) that in a pathetic attempt at reverse god-taunting four or five years ago at one or two blogs ago I promised to do a Fuck Me Jig in front of my seat in a new stadium, a Fuck Me Jig that will be videoed and uploaded to youtoob and posted on this shitty blog.
I would be delighted to do a Fuck Me Jig in a new Buzzard Point stadium.
Palin was discussed over Thursday Night Pints. Why wasn't Palin riding shotgun on a Harley her Dukakis in a tank moment, wondered L. She's a grifter, said D. Say, said me, she's not only a grifter but a world class grifter, a once in a lifetime grifter, a genius grifter that at this dawning moment in American consciousness of its empire's imminent collapse understands America wants one last American gold standard conman and Palin instinctively, deliberately, brilliantly, delivers?
Shame you can't write novels, said L. Didn't we have this conversation two, three weeks ago, asked D, each winning a ridiculously priced Scotch. What fascinates me, I said, is how she can simultaneously be both a rodeo clown and capitalist superstar, she transcends either/ors. The stupider she makes herself - what if she's brilliant and chooses to act stupid - the larger and loyaler her following. She brands herself as the anti-what makes her money, and the angrier we get at the tacky obviousness of it, the more money she makes.
You don't believe that, do you, L asked, that she's brilliant and acts stupid for profit. It's wishful thinking, I said, that she's a devious and subversive mastermind, a canny manipulator and brilliant actor rather than a cartoon grifter filling a vacuum in Crackerstan, a cipher and avatar of vacuous late American capitalism and collapsing American empire. There's hope in the former, tomorrow in the latter.
Yes, the above holds true for Obama too. And though I posted this from Jack yesterday, make sure you go back and read the comments.
One of the blogs that doesn't update on the blogroll is :::wood s lot ::: which provides me lots of stuff I show you. His rss feed works fine if you want to subscribe.
Because life's too short to blush, I keep my blood tucked in. I won't be mortified by what I drive or the flaccid vivacity of my last dinner party. I take my cue from statues posing only in their shoulder pads of snow: all January you can see them working on their granite tans.
That I woke at an ungainly hour, stripped of the merchandise that clothed me, distilled to pure suchness, means not enough to anyone for me to confess. I do not suffer from the excess of taste that spells embarrassment: mothers who find their kids unseemly in their condom earrings, girls cringing to think they could be frumpish as their mothers. Though the late nonerotic Elvis in his studded gut of jumpsuit made everybody squeamish, I admit. Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.
Was the audience afraid of being tainted --this might rub off on me-- or were they--surrendering-- what a femme word--feeling solicitous--glimpsing their fragility in his reversible purples and unwholesome goldish chains?
At least embarrassment is not an imitation. It's intimacy for beginners, the orgasm no one cares to fake. I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
While waiting for the graduation procession to begin on Tuesday, SeatSix and this guy were telling me how much this blog sucks, especially trying to read it on a phone the size of half a graham cracker - (use your imaginary whiny voice) the photos are too big, the youtubes take too long to download, the motherfucking blogroll scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, it takes forever for the fucking blog to load, and then there's that whole links won't open in another window piece of blooger shittiness (that was me). (Speaking of blooger shittiness, what the fuck is that +1 box next to a 0 box doing down at the bottom of every post? I didn't put it there.)
I agree completely, it takes too long to load, though know this: the too big photos and youtubes are non-negotiable: they stay, you go. But I've reduced the number of posts per page from ten to four and I've changed Because Left and Because Right blogrolls (which are stocked with new flavors, yo, and suggestions are always solicited) to only show the twenty-five most recently updated blogs. I have not disblogrolled you; you just haven't posted rapidly enough. Sometime, if I get around to it, I might create a sub-Because for those sites that don't feed the updating blogroller. Or not. And until blooger gives me a links open in separate window toggle switch, please right mouse; I'm not fucking with html.
It seems to make some small but good difference loading on my laptop. As always, thank you for the Kind; please nudge me if I'm not reciprocating.
Perpetual war: The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.
The accidental bombings will continue.... Here's what we're doing in Afghanistan: floating the ponzi, for one, you can figure out numbers 2 through X all on your own....
Oinker. Gov. Chris Christie arrived at his son's baseball game this afternoon aboard a State Police helicopter. Right before the lineup cards were being exchanged on the field, a noise from above distracted the spectators as the 55-foot long helicopter buzzed over trees in left field, circled the outfield and landed in an adjacent football field. Christie disembarked from the helicopter and got into a black car with tinted windows that drove him about a 100 yards to the baseball field. During the 5th inning, Christie and First Lady Mary Pat Christie got into the car, rode back to the helicopter and left the game. During a pitching change, play was stopped for a couple of minutes while the helicopter took off.
I'm certain the media will focus on his budget-cutting credentials. And yes, I know he's not the first, the last, of either party, who's done, is doing, and will do this. The fucker.
(Note: a space station generates gravity by revolving one way and then another. When it reverses direction to revolve the other way, there are several moments when gravity is suspended.)
My mother and I and the dog were floating Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted Just below the ceiling. The dead who had been crushed By gravity were free to move about the room, To take their place at supper, lift a fork, knife, spoon— A spoon, knife, fork that, outside this moment's weightlessness, Would have been immovable as mountains.
My mother and I and the dog were orbiting In the void that follows after happiness Of an intimate gesture: Her hand stroking the dog's head And the dog looking up, expectant, into her eyes: The beast gaze so direct and alienly concerned To have its stare returned; the human gaze That forgets, for a moment, that it sees What it's seeing and simply, fervently, sees...
But only for a moment. Only for a moment were my mother And the dog looking at each other not mother Or dog but that look—I couldn't help but think, If only I were a dog, or Mother was, Then that intimate gesture, this happiness passing Could last forever...such a vain, hopeless wish I was wishing; I knew it and didn't know it Just as my mother knew she was my mother
And didn't...and as for the dog, her large black pupils, Fixed on my mother's faintly smiling face, Seemed to contain a drop of the void We were all suspended in; though only a dog Who chews a ragged rawhide chew toy shaped Into a bone, femur or cannonbone Of the heavy body that we no longer labored To lift against the miles-deep air pressing
Us to our chairs. The dog pricked her ears, Sensing a dead one approaching. Crossing the kitchen, My father was moving with the clumsy gestures Of a man in a space suit—the strangeness of death Moving among the living—though the world Was floating with a lightness that made us Feel we were phantoms: I don't know If my mother saw him—he didn't look at her
When he too put his hand on the dog's head And the dog turned its eyes from her stare to his... And then the moment on its axis reversed, The kitchen spun us the other way round And pressed heavy hands down on our shoulders So that my father sank into the carpet, My mother rested her chin on her hand And let her other hand slide off the dog's head,
Her knuckles bent in a kind of torment Of moonscape erosion, ridging up into Peaks giving way to seamed plains With names like The Sea of Tranquility —Though nothing but a metaphor for how I saw her hand, her empty, still strong hand Dangling all alone in the infinite space Between the carpet and the neon-lit ceiling.
A truly wonderful day with Earthgirl, my parents, my brother SeatSix, and this guy at incredible Planet's graduation (and excellent dinner with a favorite aunt afterwards).
As for yesterday morning's despondency, once we engaged with the event Planet's lungs ached less and my back unseized and Earthgirl's grieving evaporated.
That's it for today. Got home around eight, had no urge - felt no obligation - to aargh-bait or bleggalgaze or otherwise confront my complicity. All will return tomorrow, probably, Friday is the latest I believe I could keep from scratching, and when it does return it will include the poem that contains this post's title.
