Aperture

Even though it was only last night
I keep turning to the image of you
leaning in to kiss me
as if it were an old photograph.

The early moonlight on your face,
the open doorway. I keep entering
and then leaving the frame.

And every time I bend into the glossy edge,
I see the small shadow I cast across your body
hover, and then lift
like something briefly darkening the lens.

-Danusha Laméris

Hm, well after typing it, I don’t like it as much as I did before. I like the sentiment and the imagery, but I don’t like the language so much. I think I would put the thoughts in a different order.

I also liked the following poem, because it’s pretty bitter and cruel, which surprises me. At least it feels bitter. I don’t know if it’s meant to be taken that way. Maybe just angry. Maybe sour grapes.

I am trying to break your heart

I am hoping
to hang your head

on my wall
in shame–

the slightest taxidermy
thrills me. Fish

forever leaping
on the living room wall–

paperweights made
from the skulls

of small animals.
I want to wear

your smile on my sleeve
& break

your heart like a horse
or its leg. Weeks of being

bucked off, then
all at once, you’re mine–

Put me down.

I want to call you thine

to tattoo mercy
along my knuckles. I assassin

down the avenue.
I hope

to have you forgotten
by noon. To know you

by your knees
palsied by prayer.

Loneliness is a science–

consider the taxidermist’s
tender hands

trying to keep from losing
skin, the bobcat grin

of the living.

- Kevin Young

I don’t like that poem either, after typing it. What does taxidermy have to do with a broken heart? (It reminds me of people who have their dead dogs stuffed so they can put them in their living room and still pet them.) Maybe the author is talking to himself. What if he’s trying to break his own heart? That would make more sense to me.

It’s strange to think of someone laboring so long over a poem, getting the words just right, deciding to use “&” instead of “and”… and then me, reading the poem, failing to understand it or feel compelled to really understand it, moving on to the next thing. Poor poets. I bet they work the hardest, and for the smallest return.

Jen struggles with socks, 2009

(because I never post strange things otherwise)

here is a poem I wrote last week. It is called “Cork”.

WTF: I dreamed about cork last night.
I saw how it forms naturally,
and what it looks like before it is carved.
It falls from pine trees
in the shape of ginger roots.
Clearly this reflects the reality of cork.

This morning I stepped outside onto the warm bricks and wrote a haiku:

Mockingbirds, stray cat
Lizards scurry underfoot
Today will be hot.

And here is a video of our contrail shadow and a weak glory, as viewed from the window on the flight to our layover in Georgia. Do you see it? If so, give yourself a pat on the back.

Now it’s time for my first Cuban coffee of this vacation. Yes.

So, I am not poetry literate at all, but after I started to read Mary Oliver last year, I realized poetry could be very cool. And after listening to these Dorothy Parker poems, which are both moving and hilarious, I just… I don’t know. I think she must’ve been a pretty badass woman. I wish I could have met her. (I think I have a new hero.) I can’t believe she was born in 1893. What a sassy, sassy lady!

Here are two poems I especially liked. The first reminds me a lot of Seattle; the second reminds me a lot of myself before I spent a small fortune on therapy.

Bohemia

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses’ necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!
1928

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
1926

So I was reading the oncology chapter last night, and while I was reading and sort of having a panic attack (full color photos of sarcomas will do that), in the back of my mind, I was thinking about other things. I was reminded of how people often compare the human race to a cancerous growth on Earth. I think it’s a stupid, overused metaphor, piggybacking on the emotional impact of “cancer” to shock the reader, much in the same way that you can throw around the words “fascist” and “Hitler” and still get people to listen to you, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

It’s easy to see where this metaphor came from. Malignant tumors increase in size rapidly, and they are invasive and infiltrative, extending into neighboring normal tissue. When they metastasize, cells detach from the primary site and travel around the body, starting new tumors at distant locations.

Here’s what I didn’t know about cancer. Malignant cells are anaplastic. This means that their DNA stops allowing the cells to differentiate and carry on mature cell functions. They start out as immature cells and never change into the cells they were supposed to be. Some cancer cells lose the ability to spontaneously disintegrate when their time is up (that is, apoptosis is no longer programmed into their DNA). That’s pretty weird, and honestly, thinking about it for too long scares me. You’ve got these cells that just keep proliferating and living… forever…

The human/malignancy metaphor breaks down there, because us human cancer cells all grow old and die. (I think some people fear that we lose our identity in a global/wired community, in which so much connectivity causes an inability to “differentiate,” but I think those people just have a limited view of identity.)

When I was getting ready for bed last night, I thought, “cancer doesn’t care”. It doesn’t. That’s one of the scariest things to me. It’s not even that it doesn’t care in the way people don’t care about things, which can at least be rude or heartless– it completely lacks consciousness. It’s a rapidly proliferating “something” that is full of “nothing”.

That’s the biggest failure of the human/malignancy metaphor to me. Us human cancer cells are conscious. Many of us know we’re terrible stewards of our planet. Many of us know we are going to be so, so screwed some day due to our rapid species proliferation. We know, and we regret, and we do something to try and fix it, or put it out of our minds– we keep living, and then we die, usually while thinking about dying (unless the palliative drugs are really good).

If every cancer cell in a malignant tumor was sentient and felt bad about what it was doing to its host, would we think cancer was as bad? If it could say, “I am so, so sorry I’m killing you,” would that change anything? Memo from cancer: “I have spread to every last one of your lymph nodes, and your immune system can no longer function. You’ll be dead soon. Fortunately, we launched probes a while ago and have found other hosts, and we’ll be able to salvage some of our civilization.”

Not much has been happening lately. The leaves are falling all at once, now… I have been raking them into piles over the garden beds. I have been feeling sick from a fibromyalgia flare-up for the last 3 days. This makes me want to throw things.

I have been thinking about my non-art job (will post on that more later), and my future non-art job (more later), and my art-job, and how really good it is to have a warm little house, and books, and warm blankets. I get cold a lot, and I would be really pissed if I were homeless right now.

I never understood when I was younger how much work goes into building an art “practice”. When I was younger (and it still may be so), people joked that artists were lazy and that art classes were easy. I think I bought into that stereotype, to a certain extent, not really knowing many artists, until I took my first art class a few years ago. It kicked my ass. It was also terrifying, because I had never had to draw in front of other people before, and I cared what other people thought about my sketches.

I have been thinking a lot about different forms of art, and how they are more similar than I ever realized. The writers crafts their stories with such attention, each word chosen like a carefully programmed note in a piece of electronic music, placed like an exacting brush stroke on a canvas, sung like a note in an aria that must be pure, on-pitch, and must contain the right phrasing and pronunciation. How long does a graphic designer stare at their monitor, considering the curve of a letter, considering the white space between the text and an illustration?

Some art builds slowly, is revealed slowly, is understood slowly. Some art rushes out fast in a frenzy, and spools away into the universe or metaverse without ever having been understood or even seen.

And here is a photo I took in October, of some pigeons on power lines. I love the way the poles tilt inward, and the wires span the photo like a net, and the clouds look so gloomy.

When I got home I crashed, and Richard woke me up from my nap and hustled me off to our friends’ apartment to watch the coverage…

I was talking to Jen this morning about the amazing results of the election, and about how it didn’t feel real yet. Her dad is a staunch right-wing Christian conservative, the kind that gets his news from Fox and bizarre gossipy e-mails forwarded between friends (I know the kind– I used to get those from my family in backwoods Spokane before I “opted out”– the kind of e-mails that no one who had ever been taught critical thinking skills would ever believe). Talking about him was kind of a downer and a reminder… ^[1]

Almost everything seems so bright and new, now. Is there anything wrong with fantasizing that the next eight years will be the best years in our country’s living memory? (It goes without saying that in my fantasy Obama will be re-elected!)

I’m barely 30, but I’ve already witnessed and lived and voted in a shameful period of American history– and hopefully I will get to witness its beautiful rise out of the ashes of this failure. During Obama’s campaign I started to feel a fluttering of true patriotism in my heart.

It’s strange, but I remember even in elementary school being confused and dismayed by the patriotic motions we were made to go through. Prior to the last four years, I never felt truly patriotic. Patriotism always seemed irrational and spoon-fed, something I didn’t really understand, something that teachers taught me in elementary school (”Hands over your hearts! Recite the pledge! YES you have to!”) and adults argued about at home. Fast forward many years… at a certain point during Dubya’s tenure something in me broke, and I became so angry that people in office were fucking up my country. How dare they say that because I wanted our soldiers to come home that I was unpatriotic and that I didn’t love America? How dare they? (When did I fall in love with America the Land? When did it become “my” America?)

Anyway, I guess that is the short version of how I learned the meaning of patriotism.

In closing, may I mention how excited I am to have a literate, well-spoken President-elect? I couldn’t even listen to Dubya’s voice on the radio or watch his face on TV for the last 8 years because he creeped me out so much. I just got my news from the web. There was something so wrong about his manner of speaking– so aggravating. Something that reminded me of all the evil people in my childhood.

And to Jen’s father, who is still pondering whether Obama may or may not be the antichrist, I say, “Is it any wonder that we seem to be elevating Obama to ‘godlike’ status? When an articulate, educated, thoughtful, even-tempered person stands next to a bumbling, foolish dry-drunk prone to embarrassing superlatives, of course he’s going to seem ‘godlike’.”

O-BA-MA!

^[1]One of the most important things I’ve learned in therapy is that there are some people who you just can’t reach, at all– there’s nothing you can do to change them. It says a lot about Jen that she is still able to love her dad when he believes such ridiculous things. It says a lot about me that I have trouble loving ridiculous people.

Hold your breath with me, and contemplate some photos of Newpimp the Bushytailed Ringtail. I promise I’ll be back later with some content.

If you hate Amazon, let it comfort you that I have so far made zero dollars through the affiliate program.

Anyway, Amazon recently revamped their affiliate tools site, and some of the widgets you can build are pretty damn funny. I seriously do not know why anyone would want to defile their website with something like this:

Okay, this is another good one– the “slideshow widget”, where you can just pick random crap from the site and then create a slideshow out of the preview images.

But he keeps coming up with the funniest shit. Check out yesterday’s strip, for example.

How can I ever be that funny?

Am I okay with having a kind of lame web comic? Yeah. Yeah, I think I am. So maybe one will appear soon. -Ish.

Update: I just discovered that some person translates XKCD into Spanish, which is awesome, because… is there a cooler way to practice my Spanish? Probably not. And it’s still funny in Spanish!

Oh man, another update: The New Yorker did an interview with Munroe — and the author challenged him to a cartoon-off which I believe Munroe clearly won: