By Way of Explanation

It was yesterday morning, not yet 10:00, and 3 people had written demanding that I update my blog.

There was just one problem: I hadn't a thing on my mind! In fact, I haven't had a thing on my mind in days.

But I do have endless bits of old writings floating around my computer and also brain, & most of it unread by you, if you didn't live in Pittsburgh in the early part of the twenty-first century, & much of it beloved of me, all of its parent-creator. The preceding story -- which was originally in the sad sad undergrad literary journal of the University of Pittsburgh in 2004 -- is one such item, and here it is one more time, and I will meditate upon the implications of this in a later post.

For now, good day.

An Oldie But A Goodie

How to be Some Sort of Beetle

Your legs clackel over soft crumbles, and your feelers twitch, and tell you the future. The future has food in it, the food that falls apart in the ground and warms the body and hardens the shell. You see with your seers the way ahead, and smaller ones cross you, and larger ones. And food is still in the future.

Continue: The ground shifts and stranges, and you can feel the empty-moving pushing down the wrong way, and struggle but the world is rearranged, and your legs waggle and wiggle but can't find a grip, and your feelers tell you that up has turned into down.

And you panic! Up must not be down never never never never never, and your legs flail and fling and your feelers twitter and twatter and your upside opens and your upside-legs whap the upside-ground and down must never never never be up--

And then it's down again, and up is up. And there is still eating in the future. And so you clakcel on. And now your legs find a crumbling ground to land on, and now a jumbled ground, and now they must pull you over stringy things and tufted things, and over fluid ground that trickles away and away to far off elsewhere.

And you can taste the future in the empty-above. And in your shell hardness you're warming and glowing in the feast that's foreseen.

And then it happens.

And then IT happens!

There are powers and pressures that punish and pinch!

There is squeezing and crunching and crushing and pain!

And up will never be down again, and up is not even up, and your legs wraggle and your tearing-face hisses and your upward-legs flutter! And everything stops being anything and nothing is anything forever.

**

Your legs clutter on hardness forever in every way. Your feelers are telling you strangeness, and others, and nothing like food. Your up-legs are telling you nothing, and you don't wonder why you thought you had up-legs, and you remember that you don't.

And onward: The future is a circle that has walls you cannot walk on, and it is filled with others and hunger. And now your feelers tell you changes, and yous ee now grass in the future, now crumbles land on your shell and your head, and everything shudders and trembles.

And now there is an other. And you see it with your seers and feel it with your feelers. And then you know:

The other is food!

And you are hot now and hotter, and hazy and hazier, and the world is the smell of eating! And your legs twirl and trample and flail and fling and your eaters are clacking and clamping, the other one writhing and wriggling and now yours! your're inside and the other is gory and gooey, you taste it now warmer and redder, fluttering hot and frenzy, it slurms through your eating place into yourself that's inside of your shell, and now you are warmer and redder.

And the world is strange. And the future is strange. And your feelers feel the others surround you and see you and feel you and taste you on the empty-above. And they move on many legs, and they move with venom stabbers, and they move with the up-legs in many directions.

And now there is another other: and this one is another of you. You feel its feelers and smell what it is, and the smell is now hunger and anger and fighting. And it makes itself larger and gnashes above, and wails its legs and crashes and clacks! And you can feel that you're cracking and your legs scramble backward, and the other is taking the food! The food must always be yours, and never never never be taken! And forward you're scrambling thrashing your eating-parts clacking your clackers and hissing and screeing, and now you crack! And the other moves back on its legs and you crack! it again with your great hardy eaters, up on your legs and gnashing the air! And the other goes back, and back into faraway and the treasure is yours, the food that warms you the goo that sustains.

And the everywhere continues in strangeness. You drag off your prize to a lump of tufts and fiber, and scree at a smaller thing already there, a one that clamps with the end of iself and scrambles down low on many small legs. It backs itself clicking away, and you burrow your legs back into the sinews. But nothing is still the same! And the world seems shifted and you can't feel what's ahead, and the future is danger in every direction, danger from frightening panicked and frenzy, and fearsome trapped hatefulness pours into your mind.

And now: there are deaths approaching. The seers that see are seeing right through you and your feelers are threatened and frightened and feel of a future of cracking and pain, and venom-strike stabbers are gathering closer and eaters to clamp off the whole of your head, and inside you grow warmer with terror and cornered, and many-claws clack at your head, and jaws that bite are biting toward you and the pattering clatter of toomany legs are clattering at you, your feelers feel fighting and killing and a clack! on your head and a snack! on your shell, a thing grips your leg and a thing grips your eeler, you flail your face cracking another thing's head, and it falls off to be eaten by some other thing else.

And now the world is burst! You fall and shift and everything stranges! You're jostled and jounced and your leg breaks away and your feelers feel less but feel broken in half, and downside turns upside and jumbles and falls, the herenow is shuddered the future is shattered, and the feelers feel nothing and the seers see no more!

**

The grinding ground crumbles with the clack of your legs, the legs that feel forward the way into Time. Your feelers feel little, and you don't wonder why, and you remember they never are very much good. Nor do you wonder the count of your legs; you remember that always you feel to one side.

Prediction

John McCain will be the next president of the United States.

It will suck.

Projecting the image of the square-jawed military hero and the courageous Christian mother, McCain-Palin will usher in a golden age of horrific rightwing values. Americans will revere them even as their own lives get genuinely worse and will join them in blaming gays, abortions, pot, and blowjobs for the state of the nation.

It will suck.

Blogtheft!!!!

The summer of 2008 was a fine one by all accounts, and recently there have on the internet emerged some fine photos thereof. Here are my two favorites, stolen, as always, from Gabe:







To the confused or distant:

In the first picture, Thomas has just been simultaneously drinking from a bottle of Rolling Rock and a bottle of Sutter Home. Megan and I are horrified -- though, as illustrated in photos which follow, we will both partake.

The next picture is taken on my birthday. Kat, Gabe, Matt and I engage in a group high-five in a photo taken by Ms. M____ R____.

(Speaking of my birthday, this is probably a good time to clear up certain internet urban legends that have sprung up about it. It did not, in fact, last for "weeks." Its official run is listed as Friday, August 8th until Saturday, August 16th. Attentive readers will note this is barely more than one week, let alone "weeks" plural.)

Other active participants in the summer include Megan At Law, Lexie, Sarah, Sarah, and the aforementioned M____ R____.

Final review: 8/Summer. Good job everybody!

Of Politics

I watched the Republican National Convention at the bar last night.

It made me think the following things:

1.

Republicans have a completely different America from the one you and I have. They live in a completely different reality. It doesn't even make sense for us to talk to each other, really, because we can't understand each other, because we're living from completely different truths.

2.

But it doesn't matter.

3.

It doesn't matter because national politics doesn't really affect things all that much. We talk about the last eight years like they've been a nightmare, but the only bad parts of it were news. The news was all bad. But news is just television.

4.

It doesn't matter who wins because all that will change is the news. To someone like me, an American like me, the thing that sucks about living in this country: We can't afford health care. We can't afford our cars. We can't find jobs that will provide these things. We don't have access to public transportation. These things suck. They suck a lot. But Obama won't make it any better. He can't, he doesn't have the money or the will or the power. But you know what else? McCain probably won't make it any worse.

5.

The only things I can think of that McCain will do to make things worse is, with his Family Values (hahahahahahahahahahahaha) VP in tow, continue the attack on reproductive rights and sexuality. That directly affects you and me and is fucked and vicious and cruel. He might also call programs that mitigate policies like these "wasteful spending" or "big government" and cut funding for them, hahahahaha.

6.

News isn't just television to people who are on the news, like the nation of Iraq. Like that kid in Afghanistan that was crying after a US airstrike killed his whole family. But you can't do anything about those things and neither can I.

7.

What about gas prices? That's not news and that sucks. I can't figure out what is causing all of it though. Rising demand from China and India combined with war and instability in oil-rich regions combined with a declining supply? I don't know. McCain might make this worse by being so fucking belligerent on the international scene.

8.

Obama In Charge might increase funding for things that you and I like and things that actually help us. But he'll only increase it a little and it won't be permanent because the other side will always come back into power and reverse everything.

9.

By the way, if you cut the military budget in half, you would still spend more money on "defense" (hahaha) than any other country in the world, and you'd still have the most powerful military in the history of the world, and you could cut taxes while investing massively in social programs and infrastructure.

10.

That will never happen.

The Pleasures of: Episode 12

Goodness, it's been a long time since we've visited my Pleasures, hasn't it, dear ones?

And yet there they are floating in that dark synaptic sea, little islands of happiness (and I think that sea is three dimensional and they are twinkling multi-colored stars) waiting to be swum to. So let's go, and there just right of the zenith is a pinkish glowing island which is in fact the story of

Orpheus and Eurydice

Why do I love this story so much? Do you remember it?

Eurydice steps on a snake and dies, and heartbroken Orpheus journeys into Hell to save her. With his sad music he charms Hades and Persephone and they agree that Eurydice may return with him to the world of the living: But she will walk behind him, and he cannot turn and look at her until they are back on the earth.

And of course, a ghost, she makes no sound as she walks. And of course, just as he is about to reach the cave-mouth gateway out of the land of the dead, he loses faith, and he turns, and there she is, and then she is gone.

Ahh the beautiful terrible of it! And how tortured do we feel in the considering. When I used to know how to write fiction I think I wanted to do my own version of it -- that having been one of my tricks or delights, retelling a traditional story in contemporary or science fictionly guise -- and I wonder how that would have looked.

As it is all we can settle for is the ending... The Maenads tear Orpheus apart and throw his head in the river, and there it floats away, still singing. Ha!

To Autumn

by John Keats:


1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.