I don't really blog

obviously, I cannot be trusted to keep up this blog.  Or any blog.  I just prefer to spread my wisdoms around the internets, filling up other peoples' blogs (opb) and working on the wikis.  I am an incredibly humble and generous human being, if I am a human being.  

You're welcome.

what I'm learning on the internets

Stephen Colbert

has been teaching me how to google bomb

my next goal is to put it to the best possible use
for people like, hmmm....

Mitch McConnell
Elaine Chao
and other coal whores who cover up environmental disaster

Lung Recruitment

Since I don't really use this blog for blogging anymore, I might as well use it for something, right? I thought this might be a good lung film to show during the upcoming live show of Catalogue of Ships.

almost a year

Eleven months is not a year. No one would say it was.

I like to bring things into the world, give them a whole lot of attention for a brief period of time, and then abandon them. It's very true. I'm a terrible mother. I'm an excellent incubator, but that doesn't mean much amongst the human kind. Sorry, peeps. I never was very good at the people stuff.

My kid doesn't mind too much, though. He's not very good at the people stuff, either. He also likes to incubate, and doesn't mind the abandoning of 257 things for the completion of 6. If you'd like to see one of our collaborative abandonings, you can visit the pie pirates blog that is somehow linked to this one. I don't remember the name right now; I might come back and fix it. Anyway, it started as a project where I transcribed the stories that Judah and I were collectively making up each night (really he does all the work - I just suggest bigger words to see if he can incorporate them). But we have other things to do, always. So...

I don't know. I don't mean to be an abandoner of projects. I don't deliberately enter everything thinking "Oh, I'm going to quit this soon." There are some things that I start that way, sure - smoking, for one. But I have stuck by that, let me tell you! No quitting there.

Ahh... whatever.

black walnuts

Walking the other day by a gulch, Bachelard's Water and Dreams tucked under my arm, I stopped to watch a squirrel. Some unrecognizable dark matter bulged from his mouth, and I was drawn and repulsed by this sight. What was that thing? I tried to make sense of it as a foodstuff for squirrels, but couldn't place what kind of nut that must be. The squirrel and I stared at each other for a moment -- perhaps he was wondering what book I was reading? -- before heading on in our separate directions (squirrel up, me only forward, as I'm unfortunately more limited in my ability to travel vertically).

After a few more feet, I realized what the squirrel had been schlepping. The ground here was covered with walnuts, their once-green outer coverings turned winter shades of darkest hummus, beginning the slow process of rotting off to reveal the lighter brown walnut shell. I am intimate with this nut, with the multi-layered and labored process of its exposure, not because I particularly like walnuts (I don't), but because they are bound to my memories of my grandmother, Pearl Price.

I remember her in an image: shoulder-length shock white hair and arms black to the elbow from shelling walnuts. Her name doubling the association with shelling and revealing as she herself linked it to the story of (the) Pearl (of great) Price. Like me, she was to some degree a shell-dweller as well as a shell opener. Her life remains a mystery to me, and something of a shell-game, too; I watch the pieces of her history move around the table, but when I look underneath I'm not sure I see her there. I think of Bachelard again, not Water and Dreams but his chapter on shells in Poetics of Space, where he writes that when we observe or examine shells “it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious.”


that's all I can write for now, and it's not even the beginning, but I'm putting it up because I want something nicer at the top of the page.

an ugly one

A Mentor’s Memento

Abjuring the ease that comes
from demurely accepting your
proffered avuncular spunk,

I refuse to let this roll down my backside.

I, too, can profess.
You took something of mine.
(the idea of rape)
(to pillage my idea is still stealing)

Looking for some numericity --
(how many invasions of body and thought must I assume?)

I am not up for grabs, nor grab-ass.

Familiar betrayal, friendly fire:
The wound where I wanted to like you.

not about water or caves

Everything I do lately seems to reference water or caves. I don't know why. But this doesn't, at least not overtly. Share my continued nostalgic suspension? (Thanks to Matt and fair use for the sound.)