Friday, March 31, 2006

not the birds but the machinery

Today I turn 30. They call me a child, but the wise one said I got younger again.

Today began with surprise messages from people who didn’t even know it was my birthday and twice live singing over the phone. Yesterday, tiramisu.

My mom sent this:

Dad and I wish we could spend your 30th birthday with you. We looked very hard for a crane of some kind to send you. Dad even looked for an erector set and wanted to build you one. Kids toys aren’t what they used to be. We looked for weeks until we took ill and then well you know the rest!! You do so deserve a crane, a Big beautiful crane and one day it will be yours!!

Priceless. I told her I wanted a crane for my 30th birthday. Cranes awe me. Not the birds but the machinery.

The morning included promises of health and stout elixir drunk by squirrels in my honor, cranberry, a chat with a sleep fellow.

We encouraged passersby to eat free cookies. Flowers arrived. And candy. I ate leftover tofu.

The sun is out and the air is warm.

Friday, March 24, 2006

flashdance

Somebody make me drunk. The week has had a mouthful of sharp teeth clamping clamping into my flesh—while it beat my brain side to side between its behemoth paws.

Ignore the initial command (maybe). Anyone who knows me knows I don’t plan drunkenness. Instead get me a masseuse with hearty, able hands.

The good doctor has given me official permission to wash my hands of all work related to Journal #2, the first issue of which I have been flurrily finalizing this week. One of my poems will appear in mix with a flush of articles on brain maladies. I love that.

The hypothesis has not been confirmed but I am throwing it out there: since Target installed the machines that take your card while the cashier is ringing up your items, the cashiers have become less friendly. Most do not acknowledge you’re there. They just run the faceless products across the scanner, toss them in the bag, and move to the products the next customer has placed on the belt. I'm not asking for annoying conversation about the weather or your crappy love life, but a hello and a thank you would be nice.

Who are you and where did you leave your forearm?

If anyone has documentation of episodes of sleep-writing, let me know immediately. The cruise ship will be embarking on the tour very soon.

An hour ago I was certifiably Sara Crankybutt. Then I became Sara Maniac-On-The-Floor. Now I am Sara Happy-To-Be-Going-Home-Very-Shortly.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

musing between tasking: a glass with a stem

Let’s hear another holy shit from the crowd. What a busy past few days. Work, work. I shouldn’t be breaking now, but bah.

Happy birthday to both Ovid and Fred Rogers today. I hope you both are having good dead lives.

Yesterday I heard on the radio, following a speech by Dick Cheney, a reporter ask a woman what she thought of what he said. Her response:

I don’t even know what he said. It was just good to hear him speak. It made me feel like a true American.

So being a true American is not giving a fuck what the politicians say because it’s just good they’re speaking and we can be sure they'll do the right thing. Blind faith in empty word-boxes. Please tell me this is not the majority. I know, I know.

Avert gaze in hallway.

This is a damn fine cup of coffee. A girl can fantasize.

If I were an elephant I would enjoy my trunk.

Hey! I am an elephant, and I can touch clouds with this trunk.

Digging my paws into the sand, standing my beach, speech-ballooning the stuff of grapes.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

frogs and valley-wide upheaval

Holy shit, I’ve been working without breath or break for 6 hours straight. Somebody kiss me and slather me with massage. Another one bites the dust like old memory. Rapport with doctors escalates and waves while I edit their ideas. I’m no longer drowning but my neck is stiff and tiger-balmed. Peripheral vision has been eliminated. A beer would be good.

Last night I dreamed the hip doctor met me after a class I was teaching and asked me to lunch. He showed me a harpsichord in the center of the restaurant. Its belly was full with jambalaya. We peered in, he with fork. A piece of sausage pushed up to the top. It tastes like water, he told me. Anyone could eat from the harpsichord dish. I woke.

After this blink, there will be a hiatus in transmissions. During the next few days I will be relocating my earthly things from one cave to another, shortly after which I will move into a new decade of my life. I feel tripped out by full-fledged anythings but not yet by the aging of stars.

Happy Ides of March. Goodbye, Julius Caesar.

According to one web site, March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. I had no idea.

Learn about rare ultrasonic frogs in China.

Do you want to make DNA origami together this weekend?

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

dates and hitched figs

Today is Albert Einstein’s birthday (1879), and on this day in 1794 Eli Whitney received his patent for the cotton gin. Yes, I read this somewhere, but, for some reason, the fact that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin is one of the facts I remember best from long-ago history class.

Scent of tiger balm and hard-boiled eggs make the day I take in the unergonomic desk-chair. The egg is good for your eyes; the computer is not. The egg contains all 9 essential amino acids; the mouse does not. The eggs are in my belly.

When a person gets married and pregnant, is it part of the package for that person to become an emptily outspoken bitch? I’ve noticed a distinct change in the newly married pregnant women in my workplace. (The events seem to go hand in hand around here.) Attitude shifts ugly and they march as an army in the hallway.

That said, I know some married pregnant people outside the workplace who do not behave this way.

Dear Ganesh and your mouse-car, please if I wed and swell in the belly area, keep me strong against repugnant-bitch tendencies that might afflict me.


A few new words I learned (from Wired):

Olfrygt: how the Danish describe the nagging fear of being unable to find a beer while out of town

Iktsuarpok: the Inuit way of describing the act of repeatedly going outside to check if someone is coming

Dozvonit’sya: the Russian expression for ringing a doorbell or calling a phone number over and over until you get an answer

Monday, March 13, 2006

kubla khan yawned and people saw clearly again

It’s confirmed. I’m becoming my grandma. I woke up at 4:13 am and did not fall back to sleep. No cookies got baked and no shirts got ironed, but eventually I got up, made coffee, and went to work too early. What I learned: it doesn’t matter how early you leave the house; traffic in New Jersey is always abominable and the drivers always drive with little logic or awareness.

Edward O. Wilson, Intelligent Design, and a Darwin exhibit I want to see: "[Wilson] edited, annotated, and wrote introductory essays for an anthology of Darwin's writings, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books, published last fall. The timing of the show and Wilson's book were not intended to counter the rise of the intelligent-design movement, but the author is enjoying the coincidence. ‘I'm delighted - and so is my publisher,’ Wilson laughs. In September, he will address the neo-creationists directly in a book aimed at a hypothetical Southern Baptist pastor. Evolution will prevail, Wilson predicts: "As someone said recently, 'We've got the fossils. We win.'"

And just when a little stirring up of the still-life was needed, beer flowed like water in Norway.

This is all my head can make today. Neurons dare to nap on gray knolls.

Friday, March 10, 2006

the sun went out and left behind dysphonic spittle

Springdom temperatures, skirt-snatching winds. It’s apocalyptically nice here today and I am punchy. By punchy I mean that you should maintain a two-foot distance from my black-tower boots and aletheia-eyes and speak judiciously lest you incur the wrath of the Hera in my bosom.

My grandma uses that word, bosom; I watched Bosom Buddies regularly when I was younger. The word kind of makes me blush. For some reason when I hear it I think of large flesh-glands undulating too close to my face. With magic and honeydew wherewithal, I will transform this association. Dirty-stripper-breasts be gone! Bosom is a nice word.

And then the sun went out. And the sun went out again.

In a total eclipse of their psyches, the sun having been blocked once caused riots in northern Borno. Hopefully this time around, March 29, things will run more smoothly. The Information Minister says, "Some people even felt some evil people in their communities were responsible for the eclipse….The eclipse is not expected to have any real damaging effect, only social and psychological discomforts are envisaged." What might these discomforts be? Suicidal fear of apocalypse? Insecurity about facial acne? Chimney envy? Bathrobe depression?

I got the fear and a package of dynamite in the glove box.

* * * *

And then the sun came back, looking like a mouse on laughing gas.

A party ensued and all discomfort was pleasured into extinction.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

words exposed during a defiant last night

When you are creating a table of contents for a manuscript with many pieces, be sure you locate the longest title before you begin tabbing over for the page numbers, lest you repeat the tabbing mechanism like dumb again and again and again until everything is in line. Carpal tunnel, you know. Damn poems. Damn sick babies.

I’m going to go ahead, be narcissistic and quote my own poem: What, again, are we in training for? I don’t fucking know sometimes (frequently). Sometimes things seem heavy and then they lighten up like whipped cream. A little pumpkin pie with adornment and the air is different and easier to deal with.

Am I moody, or merely human?

Just because doctors have special degrees doesn’t mean they can talk down to people without those particular special degrees. Just because they wear fancy clothes doesn’t change anything. No, this is not personal. Yes it is.

I hate money.

I never use the term hate carelessly. I rarely use the term hate.

I disregard money. Or I try my darnedest to.

In some countries people still use stones as currency, the islanders of the Micronesian state of Yap, for example.

Call me a baby, but I don’t want to go to sleep just because I have to get up way too early to go to work tomorrow. Oh, what a big-baby feature of Generation Extreme. When I have pull, when I have shot many a clay pigeon, I will write a book on Generation Extreme.

Marianne Moore made me wonder once. Hero. Who are my heroes? I keep it personal for the most part. My mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, Kristin Hersh.

(Note: Kristin Hersh is the only hero mentioned who is not a family member. Some day I hope to achieve the sublimity, the raw and true, that she achieves in her music, in my living. Would that then make me my own hero? Is that possible? Is that foul? What a brick conundrum.)

Sometimes I want to be thoroughly connected to other people; sometimes I want no connection at all. Give me hermit or give me death. On the other hand, live free or die. Yay, New Hampshire.

Politics is a disgusting influence and guide. Cleanse me.

I don’t want my heroes to grow old and incapable. I don’t want to grow old and incapable.

I look forward to growing old. What would the sun say to all of this if it could speak? It would sound like Barry White with a little wine in him. Or like a Sara under the influence of Barry White who is under the influence of a little wine.

Please, when I put out my single, "Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe," buy it. Please, please, please, please.

No, I’m not on crack. Just pensive. And terribly flattered that Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought to write a poem about me long before I was born. I still don’t want to go to sleep (which means I may feel like shit tomorrow—so it goes, Mr Vonnegut).

p.s. I’m glad I don’t smoke anymore. I don’t like smelling like cigarette smoke.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

sara does world news like debbie does dallas

What fell out of today's ear:

onset carpal tunnel, heatless haunted house, chummy doctors, cantankerous sandwich-maker, Agent Cooper, fingerpicking in the dark, animated Hindu god, naval secrecy, transcendentalism, latinate states of being, and a declaration of hazelnut fiction after lunch.

Thank goodness for bottled water.

A spatter of newsbits:

Only ten years ago
did divorce become legal in Ireland, and my Irish source tells me that in his country of 4 million people about 5,000 people a year apply for divorce. Naturally, I came across this fact and thought to ask him about it as he wrote saying he was getting married in the spring.

If you’ve been spitting or blowing your nose onto the sidewalks of Beijing, cut it out or you’ll be fined. Because the Chinese have foresight, however, people wearing bright orange coats will be on the street, handing out bags marked by the symbol for "mucus," I guess to ease into the new regime. This is not one of my wild head-ventures.

Apparently, in Iceland, today is Beer Day, in celebration of the lifting of prohibition. Pehaps you want to try some Egils, or some Thule, or some Viking.

Today is also Whuppity Scoorie in Scotland. "[Children] gather before 6 pm, assembling at St Nicholas church, then as the wee bell rings run round it waving balls of paper around their heads. It is no longer a race, for safety reasons…."

And in America, another kind of spitting goes on, the kind that happens after a man bites a chunk of flesh out of his girlfriend’s cheek. Maybe I’ve told poor-me stories about bad-boyfriend events, but I was just being a pussy.

While researching some terminology used in a manuscript I was editing, I found early death records of the First Presbyterian Church of Goshen. Among reasons cited for causes of death are black vomit, old age, blister, drunkenness, and lunacy.