welcome! and oh what a state we find ourselves in

welcome, bex and caro, to this spongy visceral mess--
(or darkened quaker-esque meeting hall)
i like to think of it as the dank fold between the femur and the ephemera.

write freely, free lovely: your words-thoughts-poems-freeassociation-sketches-pictures-stories-songs-breaths-learnings-mindflips-lessons-confessions are welcome. conventional grammar not enforced. i love hearing what you're up to.

oh and don't mind the friendly chinese 'botpuppies. they don't bite, but they comment vociferously.

with the approach of the total solar eclipse on sunday, i'm glad to think we are loosely webbed across oceans and words as the moon's shadowy finger is drawing its tip across the pacific. celebrate somehow if you like! these are magickin days, or so they say.

and a sidenote: t.rex and i just folded another 100 copies of the game zine! free(&wh)eeeeeeeeeeeeee! get a lil stack from the bäo or if yr faraways i'll send you one. good ol family fun.

mugged by the muggy

it's been awhile--

my skin's a little browner, my tummy a little emptier, my room a little messier, a couple projects finished, a new couple projects in utero, my thoughts tumbling around like damp clothes in this broken-dryer-wet heat,

in the mornings, i stumble out of my bed (sort of like sheets left on the floor of a sauna) and put on the minimals and walk to the lake. so the first apprehension of my day is engineered, clear--i count to ten before i can dunk myself into the icy water. then i take a deep breath and count to ten again. and then i breathe for a little while. and then i dive--

this morning i sat on the porch swing with my coffee

and noticed a tiny spider hanging on a web
between the ropes of the swing

she must have built that home last night
while i dreamed of clay bodies

while no one was watching, she began to wait

and i watched her crawl around and didn't want to ruin the intimacy

(the promise of my silence, our tacit agreement that our shared story would turn out a particular way, that is,

enduring)

i didn't want to break our moment
by being the one to point out that

her home couldn't stay there,
that her home would be folded in upon itself

within the hour.
(and then that i might be the one to do it, to undercut
the optimistic fantasy that drove her to create a home.)

the man who supports the weight of his white crippled dog as they walk through the ally walked through the ally with his dog. the biker who lives in the house with the garden rolled his bike out, strapped on his helmet, and squinted at his watch. a car-driver in a car drove by. things went as they do, the listeners listening and the coffee-drinkers drinking their coffee and the bikers biking and the wakers waking and the sleepers sleeping.

LB wrote, "'i didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy."

(and i wonder, how do i change my living to avoid that--

not to say cynically, authoritatively "i knew it would turn out like this,"

but to think that in our intimacy, nothing is sure or promised or forever,

and this is okay and good and beautiful because it is)--

and to the spider, what i might have wished i could say was:
"i'm sorry i cannot be seduced by your web
but my aesthetics of attachment are not careful enough
for us to flourish together. it doesn't have to make sense."
but the quietude was tempting and i intimated with my breath
...it doesn't have to make sense.

last week my brother was here, what a quiet charming fresh young mind,

we adventured around and i felt my spirit of adventure returning,

to the MCA to live on metal mobile islands, biking, bäoing, sitting by the lake,

a sip of a beer is an illicit transgressive simple delight,

the world is not so hard, it is good, and the days flow by filled with ideas that are sometimes followed through till completion and sometimes the sketches are left behind.

and these days have been days of making and unmaking,

tinctures pickles lentils paintings drawings beginnings plans truths quietudes stories bread zines

promises obligations burdens annoyances aspirations falseness messes stresses desires pressures expectations stories bread zines

i'm finding great satisfaction in these small projects which have become daily rituals, and though sometimes the process is painful the reward is always great. i am content being alone and together, quiet in groups, fermenting and bubbling in my desires and allowing them to slowly unwind as i bike up, down, back, forth, through the prairie and the froth and the broken-dryer-air.

for now, that's all. i'm thriving on air and memories and presents and futures and glasses of water and icy mornings and the sparest of intimacies and the occasional loaf of hot hot bread.

telling dreams (latest updates)

in conclusion, my dreams predict
that i would make a very poor newspaper salesman,
and an excellent harmonica player.

a moment before.

readying
sweeping cleaning washing moving stacking chewing
transforming
the living room, once close and warm, is now echoy and the floors are aching for moving feet.
wondering, too,
and missing and loving
and aching and sneezing
and building and painting
making nests as we clear out hollows

"[the bride] walks to her husband's home, never looks back or she'll turn to stone."
i mean,
fuck some patriarchal short-sighted family-breaking family-defining bullshit,
but i think there's something about not looking back
after all, our history is in our skin and our skin is dead until we begin to dance.

tonight i will be gray with lust and love,
spirit-filled stone,
concrete and fantastical.
and we will dance and dance and if you doubt for a moment and turn, you will join my ranks.

b brought up a good point--
to be in nature is quite a thing,
hard to believe that it was always there and will be there whenever we want it,
or perhaps pause to wander with our eyes and hearts,
and in the mean time the city holds for us so much, something like tonight,
something like multitudinous explosions,
social experiments,
a different souvenier to take into the woods.

and like wide-eyed rabbits, strong branches, sharp thorns, tufts of grass, furry humans,
we can love many a stranger if only for a moment

"guilty robots"

check this out-- scroll down to "guilty robots" on time magazine's "year in ideas"

"This July, the roboticist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech finished a three-year project with the U.S. Army designing prototype software for autonomous ethical robots. He maintains that in limited situations, like countersniper operations or storming buildings, the software will actually allow robots to outperform humans from an ethical perspective...but being an ethical robot involves more than just following rules. These machines will have something akin to emotions - in particular, guilt."

the chunk on "gourmet dirt" is pretty good too.

deep deep deep in an underground vault with no walls: a short essay on essays

figure 1. extending boundaries to enable depth

alack, alack!
the hail earlier today hit my face sharply, a welcome relief from the nebulous cloud of nonsense (see fig.2) that i breathe in when i try hard to focus on the cloud without thinking about its units of nonsense. (but what is a unit of nonsense? and would not the cloud bring me greater nourishment than a tiny unit thereof?)

figure 2. the possibility of borders

fuck time, i will refuse to disintegrate and somehow forge forward.

figure 3. a question of borders

it is hard to remember to take pleasure
in contradictions
when they begin
to melt
all over
my
glasses

figure 4. on the edge of concern, there is just one more thing

enough, i say! enough!
i demand more!
it's too much! do you really need to--
totally overlooked.

figure 5. the desire to draw boundaries induces dilemma

now is the time.
(how can the time be now? i'm not ready yet!)
the world is as it is because it is as it should be and
all is how it should be because it is how it is
(***reference proof for "why giraffes go up in lifts," car cemetery 12(4):2009)

figure 6. the recent discovery of additional dimensions to the problem has dire implications for the accessibility of shimmering intergalactic portals to contemporary youth culture

and of all possibilities
we are left with the comfort that:
all things are possible
which we can conceive of as possible!

figure 7. a statistical abnormality suggests the need for new methods of analysis



comment!, e.g. with your favorite little screenshot of brain2.0?
(these invisible mediators, these quiet prompts)

Exhortation now that we're older

Goal One: Learn to love structure or perhaps the destruction of it or perhaps knowledge of it to reconstruct it and make it new again. Resist the common urges of your synapses to wander and wiggle through the world of your brain stew. STRUCTURE STRUCTURE STRUCTURE IT. Not in a necessarily WMP-y kind of way or a bell curve or a Aristotelian tangle but enough to say exactly what you mean. Spill no more milk, tumble no more tunes from lips, button up. Will you be able to say in a year "Limitation inspires creativity" when you do not believe it now? Probably not (secretly you will still believe that you yourself already contain so many limitations that further limitations would only offer less and not more). Think about how rules that you could make up could be AWESOME. Is this subversion or is this acceptance of a rule-based, competition-driven, have/have-not societal mode? In a year, will the opposite be true and will you cycle back to where you are now?

Learn to interact with, face up to, acknowledge, and form opinions on

• borders
• edges of bodies
• skin and cell membranes
• tripartite religions and storylines and how every bullet pointed list must contain more than three bullet points
  
• spacing in text
• silence and noise (John Cage and his listless mumble)
• line breaks
• the place where exhaling ends and inhaling begins or the other way around
• lines, queues, waiting
• age

Goal Two: Ask yourself - "When the words come out and on to the page, why do they come out in a block?" or "Why do you like things that are parallel as opposed to perpendicular?" Really answer these questions.

Goal Three: Stop ignoring these questions. Stop ignoring structure. You must decide whether or not it is your friend. Prose is not the only model of living. But also, don't jolt awake when your dreams follow some semblance of reality, when there is story-line. Regard every impulse with suspicion. See if you can reformat not only your words but your very neurons.

basically
unlearn your functions

hop over here
and here

and over there
because
well
the thing is

there isn't enough time to stay the same.

polyamory can get so complicated

i've had a number of extended intimate relationships with ideas today. i've curled around a few of them and let them poke their edges into my sternum. i got smacked around a little bit, i played a fair amount. and some of the ideas i threw out the window, but i put little strings on them because i know deep down that i'll probably want them back someday soon.
the point is, i've been nestling around with a lot of different theories and practices and i'm getting tested at the scc on monday but i'm not sure i have the kind of insurance coverage to detect the insidiousness of ex-ideas and self-doubt that are lingering and stalking my brain. leli suggested i be more ruthless with my ideas. i imagine i am probably better at disciplining other people than disciplining myself.

on the other hand, if i've learned anything, it's that intellectual monogamy would be terribly boring.

also, hello squidders--haven't posted in a while, but i've been reading and appreciating and nestling (and more) with your thoughts.

Bite me.

If you can find me to catch me to bite me, you'll find that I taste sweet. All the hitting the ceilings and bumping into walls and shouldering doors swollen in their jambs - all that has a tenderizing effect on a body. I'm a delicacy in any of the places you could think of where they eat strange things. A little raspberry chipotle marinade and a few hours over a roasting pit, dug by your dad, and I'm the tastiest dish on this side of Lake Michigan.

It' all cool! Everybody's got a little cannibal in them.

And you don't have to worry about me telling. Discretion runs in the family after all. For years people have been biting my relatives, predecessors, antecedents and cousins. And none of us has ever breathed a word. Once, in the early 20th century, a Silverleaf boychild pondered going to the authorities, but that's as far is it's ever gotten. Zipped lips with a little hot glue to ensure extra hold. That's our promise to you.

So, get out your knife and fork, sweetness, and maybe your finest silver spoon. I got a recipe you can't miss out on.

finding roaches in the pot

leli's new idea for weed edibles:
make weed butter, put it in a frying pan, and then throw in some eggplant. ("it'll soak it all up like sqqqqqrch.")

three squidlings have been rooting and unrooting themselves from this couch, making cranberry oatmeal chocolate green-cookies (i'll let you know how they turn out) buoyed by russian mumblings and excellent books.

recently i've been reading: bitch magazines from 2001, "the invisible man" (ralph ellison), and a book of perry bible fellowship comics which are kind of funny and kind of lame. also this article on prosecuting mass rape as genocide and tying it doctrinally to ideas of shame, stigma...some international court of justice framing it as "a fate worse than death." so, as leli illuminated to me, talking about talking about talking about rape (meta 3x).

hmmmm and i just received a sobering call. life is strange and fabulous.