olfactories and nufactories

Paint fumes and the chirping of female complaint psychedelicize the hallway sickeningly still. This morning I bought an air freshener on my way to work. Rushing to snag a decent parking spot at work, I grabbed quick from limited selection. Lavender and chamomile like the most fertile poppy field. Made from chemicals. I am a red-eye flight. A puff-faced woodland creature. A woman passed me in the hallway and left patchouli in my nose. Patchouli in a hospital! The audacity, the inconsideration, the gall! A trip down, hell and the women chirp. Coffee tastes painted, milk chocolate chemicality. A large red apple shiny and crisp by sight sits on the brink of rot on the file cabinet, days in and only looked at. I fear putting it in my mouth—it must be stuck with paint particles. Chirp, chirp. Chirp. Thank you, intelligent designer, for not making me a woman like those women chirping. Dramadalama. Noted: many of these women chirping about the paint wear perfume daily which makes my eyes tear when they pass my office. Some people pick and choose foes by flimsy currency.

A graveyard upside-down is a xanadu in dancing boots. Tomorrow I’m driving my crane to work to begin upheaval. The dead will live.

(That’s from a post that never got posted. Who was I that day? I do not know. Will repeat it until it makes sense. Or until it rhymes.)

Now for the news…

Moving towns like legos. I hate to sound like a writing teacher, but there are some delicious concrete details in this article. Not as tasty as Hopkins’s "The Windhover" but darn near.

Here’s to curing cancer, the anomalous genetic disease? Maybe.

Even out your breasts or lose your job (via Mr Anigans).

I’d rather read about this fine couple than "Bradgelina" or "TomKat". (I can’t believe I just typed that.) "Owen may have been attracted by Mzee's round shape and gray color that are somewhat similar to that of an adult hippopotamus." Plans to bring in another hippo are under way. I dare say I smell a sultry three-way. It smells like peach and warm chilies.

the fuzz of rectitude

Illinois was good to me for Christmas. The office where I work, however, conspires to quash the lingering warmth with paint fumes. Is there no law against painting the workplace while people are present during work hours with all doors and windows closed?

Yesterday painters painted my office at 10am. I worked until 5pm. People who fill personal emptiness by criticizing the workplace regardless of reason annoy me, so I gave it a good think why painters might be painting during this unfortunate period of time, and I see no reason for it.

People put in the hardwood floor last week outside work hours. Already again my brain is crawling with chemical mites and my belly is nauseous. I reiterate: I work in a hospital. A fire alarm went off yesterday and nobody knew what to do. Safety first.

Apparently if employees leave while the alarm is sounding and the fire isn’t in their part of the building, they will not be allowed back in. Apparently some people feel threatened enough by this to remain in a hallway full of smoke.

Somewhere over the rainbow people are smart. Because their brain cells haven’t been swallowed by paint fumes.

The news the news tells us:

Congratulations, meatloaf. You’re movin’ on up. Meatloaf has graduated from diner food to restaurant food.

It is a fuzzy line that moles between bone loss and bone promotion: three drink, four drink, five drink, six?

Scientific study proves newlyweds who are nice to each other stay together longer. Given the complex and often backward nature of human interaction, regular beatings, insults, and negligence could work, but not absolutely. Now we know.

Kato's Conjecture solved at last!

Letterman speaks in code. You know, the way he looked at me through the tv screen one night, I kind of thought he wanted me to tickle his feet while co-hosting the show. Bastard.

What else can we pull the rug out from under? Scientist turned hack magician falls from heroism to empty impitude. What’s the point of being a scientist if you’re going to sculpt the data?

As per Doug Martsch, make it up as you go.

nocturnal voids

A term I came across while proofing a proof for an article discussing nocturia (=nocturnal urination). But I’d rather have it out with nostalgia, the definition of.

Honing closely in on a word’s meaning kickstarts in me a case of scatter-and-slip. Look closer, closer—meaning buckles under observation.

The dictionary offers this: a bittersweet longing for the past, rooted in the Greek word nostos (=a return home), which is a word repeated multiply in The Odyssey, a book I truly always return to. My perspective on the use of nostos is gridlike.

When in college I translated a few books of The Odyssey from the Greek. Most of the words I needed to look up, which made for very slow reading; however, nostos was a posit of safety, a word I knew well because it recurred so frequently, spots of light in the grid.

A tidy definition still is made of words--semblances of solid lines, each composed of many separate points of meaning, pointillistically unstable close up, thereby defying definition. I hope some day this drives me truly mad.

Nostalgia slings arousing balance between dichotomous times and their emotions. Urn material of the Keatsian Grecian sort. Some days I want to dive into my photo album like Mary Poppins dove into chalk drawings on the sidewalk. Poof--unmoving semblance alive!

I know I can’t, for physics’ sake (though I hold onto a pea of hope). The stably unstable tension is magically, perversely invigorating.

Face a fever and eyes glass, tomorrow I embark on a five-day trip home. Tonight I will sleep with sirens and hydra in a bed of lotus.

* * * *

End-of-year lists begin and I am a sucker for them:

music
books

End-of-year lists remind me each year that I have no common sense of time. Ask me the best or worst this or that for a given year. I can name a couple before I start naming representatives from two or three or more years earlier. Lunatic amnesiac or sailor of cyclical time? I arbitrarily and affirmatively confirm the latter.

in the cabin time is an inanimate object

Stodgy inspectors are at the hospital this week and everybody is frenzied. Everybody’s collectively inhaling, inhaling, inhaling—there is no exhaling. Stiff. To prepare, like when the parents are about to come home from vacation and you’ve been partying the house to rags, I, as per instruction, have put the antenna on my CD player down. Everything must be at least 18 inches below the ceiling. I heaved up a box containing medical equipment that belongs to The Good Doctor and set it on my table already holding a shoddy printer, an ambitious little fax machine, a stack of books, papers, and manuscripts, and speakers. It looks like a storage basement. Boxes are not allowed on floors, I suppose so not to impede escape in case of fire or spontaneous nudity. I have memorized where the nearest fire extinguisher and pull box are. Should a fire occur, I will RACE.

Wear your name tag and do not prop open your door, they have ordered. Wearing the name tag in a closed private office, especially when a person (e.g. Sara) has little need to leave the office, except to visit the printer a few yards away or the bathroom just a few yards further, is asinine. I know who I am. Or do I? Am I even here? Hark, the hospital’s taken on existentialism. The philosophic mania! Doubt all and then doubt again, I think. Know thyself by isolation and stagnant air. I have removed the name tag, except for previously mentioned excursions into the hallway. I expect The Shining to occur by mid-afternoon—creepy twin girls appear on the file cabinet, illusory whiskey warms my body at the illusory bar in the company of people long dead, I chase my wife around with an ax and show my teeth. Like clockwork I race to the end of light.


Before I had status and before I had a pager…news from the tribe:

These hybrids ain’t cars: Mice with human brains. One scientist assures: "You will never ever have a little human trapped inside a mouse or monkey's body."

What’s the genetic makeup of cancer? Answer to come.

The ongoing misguidance of the government and its pussy marijuana challenged by a University of Massachusetts professor.

prophecy & spa

"The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames."
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 15

Tonight will be a bath of cab-sav and utter lack of human contact as the pulp thickens. Tomorrow the EEG will be clean and delphiniums will fill the hallway. The jester will take the podium.

elusive ninjas split cities into dreams

Nocturnal alphabet:

The past two nights I’ve dreamed thick and lively. My consciousness inside the dreams and my consciousness as the dreamer were simultaneously unified and distinct.

In sketchy detail…two nights ago, Dream Q: I walked out into a large grey-blue parking lot. My car was not on the other side of the semi, around which I peeked my head. Bright blue Gracie had been stolen. At my mom I began screaming about money I’d spent on it, money I’d saved for school (I’m curious about these plans for school—could the answer for what to do with my life lie therein?). My outside consciousness felt ashamed for screaming but my inside consciousness couldn’t stop. I was upset.

Dream M: Outside a house across the street from my parents’ house I encountered a homeless couple of early twenty-somethings, dirty-faced and ragged. I offered to let them sleep and eat at my parents’ house. Within minutes three large hippy buses showed up, and dirty (this is not an assessment of hippies in general but rather an accurate description of the people in my dream) hippies spilled out and began to "party." I stood in the garage talking with them, when it hit me I'd seen some go inside. I woke up and thought it all a scam to steal my parents’ belongings. I wished I’d been more keen.

Last night, Dream F: At my parents’ house. My brother, a 20-year-old Navy boy, was there. We just got news he was being sent to war. My cousin, 20 years old and not in the Navy, was also being sent to war. He ran up to the neighbors’ porch, big smile on his face, dropped to his knees and hugged them. "They were always like parents to him," my mom said to me. My brother was being sent to war. I woke up upset.

Dream X: Somewhere springy and New Englandish, bright green grass and dark wooden swings and sheds, clear day but not sunny. I'd been asked to give a poetry reading. Fortunately I’d just written some new poems, and it hit me about an hour before the reading: I’d stumbled upon a whole new way of writing. I began frantically refining what I’d written. Pencil didn't work, time-consuming and wrinkled with scribble. Needed a computer, but none were available or worked. Back to pencil. Cowboys and cowboy belongings ran thematic in the poems. Final plan for the reading: first half read old-style poems, second half read the new style. Despite the rushing I didn't feel anxious but rather sure things would be fine. I woke up in darkness, half an hour late.


In the world I’ve seen today (a tad delayed):

* The urbanization of India.

* A poll—Arab nations deeply suspicious of US motives [via Mr Anigans]


Shoelaces loop and loop until the goods surface:

* I didn’t realize Beta Band broke up, but frontman Steve Mason as King Biscuit Time is supposed to have an album out in February. This pleases me.

* A new Mojave 3 album, Puzzles, is supposed to be out in March. This also pleases me.

* Apparently my ass is bugged by Pixel guy. I say it almost every day: today feels bizarre for some reason. And this. Another day eluding ninjas is a successful day.

news from the misprioritized illuminatus of rivington

In lighter condom news, bas-relief gets the shaft

And consumers are going to love it! Yesterday one Mr Anigans and I began an e-mail dialogue in which he asked me about “some pre-tax thing” regarding “medical business” which covered…

Mr Anigans: …alternative therapy is ok as long as it's legal. condoms are covered too.
Sara: condoms too. that's great. even the fancy ones?
Mr. Anigans: define ‘fancy one.’
Sara: ribbed, flavored, jeweled, gilded, spatter-painted, bas-reliefed.

Hot damn, it hit me: Bas-relief condoms! I can quit my job and live deific like the Gatekeeper of Rivington should. This is my special purpose. Mr Anigans is already working on slogans:

"BAS RELIEF FOR HER PLEASURE."
"WHEN RIBBING JUST ISN'T ENOUGH."
"NOT JUST PROTECTION—ART!"
"NOW IT WILL BE NICE TO LOOK AT TOO"
"THE ART OF MAKING LOVE"
"HEY BABY, LOOK IT'S MATISSE!"
"A LITTLE GREEK RELIEF WITHOUT THE DISCOMFORT"

Bas-relief condoms will be marketed with a lewd product already in the works which can not be disclosed at this time. But sit tight—soon every day will be like Christmas with your pants down, without the bad attitudes and lousy driving in parking lots.
* * *

In darker condom news, in India “men will pay more for unprotected sex”

“Here, the danger of a culture that is simultaneously licentious and conservative, of seasoned husbands and sheltered wives, becomes clear.”

“In almost every doorway in the red-light district of Chilakaluripet, in Andhra Pradesh, women drape, wearing bright clothes, garish makeup and come-hither expressions that have served to lure both men and disease.”

“In a dusty parking lot at this truck trans-shipment point, an AIDS educator wielded a black dildo and a condom, encircled by truckers who stifled mirth and curiosity.”
* * *

In parenting news, learn to spot the signs

If you find your Caucasian daughter interested in literature, then alcohol, then drugs and motorcycles, then married to a Turkish man for citizenship purposes, watch out—soon she could reject all and show up wearing a head scarf and long robe with her long-bearded husband. A suicide bomb mission is the final foray into exoticism and experimentation.
* * *

Is this news? You decide

Some believe Bush may go down as the worst President—ever, replacing James Buchanan.

i am the dragon

Travels on lightfoot land colorfully, and I assume a new title. Saturday I snaked through Chinatown to purchase some fine red gifts for a family member et al. And then I skipped out and was crowned Gatekeeper of Rivington, much like a hobbit or elf only more human and less ornate but just as magical.

I have flip-flop directional syndrome (FFDS): I know intellectually the direction I need to head in but just as I do, left and right, north and south, up and down, reverse in my head. Which is hallucinogenic at best. Bears come out of bedroom closets and the sky slides down the glass globe.

The air was bite-cold and as I consulted the map to combat FFDS, a dark-haired fellow about my age approached me. "Excuse me, do you know where Rivington is?" In fact I’d just located it on the map. When I pointed it out I saw I needed to go in the same direction.

We walked like Dorothy and the Scarecrow Rivingtonward, he an amiable photographer from San Francisco, who was not accustomed to the cold, and I a budding go-to who was. We had a discussion subliminally about photogenia but really about the weather and the center of the world. We parted ways at Rivington.

After locating my destination, I deviated toward pizza. On the way back, a long-haired lady stopped me: "Do you know where Rivington is?" Certainly and directed her. Back at my destination I stood outside in the cold, finishing my slice of pizza. A blend-in girl wearing too much makeup and not enough clothing by standards of either taste or air temperature put her face in front of mine. "Do you know where Rivington is?"

By this time Rivington was like my belt. Mouth full of cheese and peppers, I pointed. At this point, I decided Jesus, Ganesh, and John Lennon must have been slated for an appearance together on this street of Rivington. And I was the illuminatus offering passage. I suppose there are other illuminati designated for other streets.

Everywhere I go people ask me for directions and rarely do I have a solid idea of where I am or where I am going. Looks can be deceiving. Or not. Somehow we get to where we’re going. Or, we get to where we’re going inevitably because wherever we end up is some configuration of where we intend, or need, to be at the time, receiving images and transforming impulses, camera-eyed and fiery.