Up chin, down chin (an extra-literary exercise)

Small tasks are comforting. They are quiet in their forgetability and their ability to offer a correct answer in a mode of life that most often demands interpretive dance, conundrums and all of the above. The small task can be closed, can be right, can be a perfect quatrain and still leave room for the interliners of thought and the vagueries of intertextuality.

Thackery, Gorey, Satrapi, Powers.

She had written down the date in her pocket-book of the day when she dispatched it. To her son's guardian, the good Major at Madras, she had not communicated any of her grief and perplexities.

In the small task you can meditate on a glance. Shift eyes your to the left, close and then open and send out semaphore that takes the slow train (the one that delivers the mail to Fossil, Medina and Mist along the way) before arriving at the recipient's back and crumpling to the floor. Oh well, here comes the next creased dollar, the next Naugahyde bag and pulpy codex. Ad infinatum circulation. Closed system. Plastic and tape. Close the pages. Tuck it in. It will keep until tomorrow.

That is all.

an excess of gravity

Sometimes I think about vaulting endlessly through the air. I am a rag doll or a 100 pound gymnast and my backflips are phantasmagoric pinwheels. I'm not sure what these visions mean. Perhaps they are just a way of moving widdershins. Maybe I'm trying to draw a map with the soles of my feet. Or maybe I just want to be in two places at once.

Get thee to a mulberry bush!

It came to my attention recently that there have been many blog-worthy events in my life of late. And perhaps there are, but as is often the case when the truly, disgusting, ridiculous or dramatic enters your my, it leaves me tired/jaded/sick of the whole damn business. So, I'll encapsulate the current saga in my house with this innocent haiku instead. Ahem!

Urination on
the coffee table clogs my
my inbox with outrage

There, done. Let's instead talk about being able to go to the Textile Museum at 1pm on a Thurs. and reap the not inconsiderable benefits of unemployment. Today I actually had the presence of mind to enjoy the sweetness of cold hands, warm ears and the reaches of the urban unknown. I also reacquainted myself with the delicate intricacies of warp, weft, tweed, ikat, mordants, twinging, carding, spinning and backstrap looms. On fabrics like these, you can measure time in inches and image that a coating of skin from calloused fingers, an invisible embroidery, is still caught in the threads.

Oh that I too lived on the razor edge of time!

So, it's been a long time, I have no apologies to make. Only .05% percent of the possible monkeys are bothering to read me anyhow.

So, what have I been doing, you ask? Or perhaps you don't ask but merely look at me balefully and smirk. But I ignore such rudeness and tell you have I have been maddeningly non-busy. Stupefyingly slothful. Lasciviously leisurely, er, strike out that last one. In other words, I'm reaping the fruits of my colleagues, hm, strike out that one too, and experiencing a week where most of the work has been done before hand and, as a temp for only a week, long term projects are sort of untenable and I'm still spending 9 hours a work. But, as usual, I complain unnecessarily. I'm happy to be working and I've gotten to do fun things like play with audio and know that it will actually make it on the air with my greasy thumbprint thuramagicaly transmitted from the mouse as a meticulous impulse to the audio represented in the third degree as little waves of varying frequencies and amplitudes. Damn, it sucks to think too much sometimes.

There are other good things. I'm rooming with one of the other 10 people on this earth who owns the Labyrinth soundtrack and we both share a propensity for absurd foreign movie and complex ambient indi music. Who'd have guessed?

I'm also reading an damn good Sci-Fi novel by the feminist, sort of post-modernist author, Joanna Russ. At least that's my description from the one other novel I've read by her. The cover is almost a parody of itself and, from the choice of subject matter, the illustrator didn't read beyond the first 20 pages. A woman clad in a pink (of course) short (likewise) dress that is riding sexily up her thighs is plunging a large harpoon into something like a cross between a codfish and a bar of Irish Spring soap. It's caption "The Adventures of Alyx: The swashbuckling saga of Alyx--woman warrior on the razor edge of time!" shout, "I was short of cash and I had to whore out my writing talents." But this is merely the publisher's attempt to conceal its remarkably palatable innards--chewy, with hints of coffee grounds, blood and a musty finish.

Oh, and there are sparkly pillows on my bed, even though the comforter currently resides in some suburban UPS retreat, taking the waters no doubt. Hmmm.

Unease

I want my life to be poetic, poignant and easy. I also want to fly Orion's Belt like a kite on a very long piece of string.

Here in Santa Barbara, the succulents are generating giant white stocks that are bigger than the entire plant. They genuflect gracefully and remind me inevitably of large white phalli. What if humans could project out appendages bigger than their bodies? Blahhhh. Sorry I asked that.

Disturbing thought for the day number two: have you ever noticed how a single grain of white rice looks a lot like a larva? Needless to say, I have.