http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2008/07/20.html

insensate: lacking sensation or awareness.

When I asked him over beers one night

what the meaning of life was

my friend Jon replied, We all think we’re ugly,

but we’re not.  And for once

 

I agreed with him—how seductive, the idea

that arbitrary cruelty might evaporate

if everyone felt beautiful

in their own skins.  I went to talk

 

to the local eleventh grade class

about writing poetry, was reminded

how everyone is asymmetrical then,

heads huge and ungainly, limbs restless and taut;

 

the kid in the back row hiding behind a curtain of hair

carving swear words into his arm with the staple remover,

the girl in the second row sizing me up

with her jeweler’s eye.  In high school

 

they showed us films once a year

to boost our self-esteem, keep us

off drugs—lavish multi-screened productions

with titles like The Prize, soundtracks singing,

 

My future’s so bright I gotta wear shades. 

We are what we think we are, and one thing

inevitably leads to another—drugs to sex, sex

to cigarettes.  A head leaning on a shoulder

 

and suddenly you’re naked, I’m naked,

air conditioner washing over us like ocean,

moon shining off the brick wall in the back

of a Tribeca art gallery, the detritus

 

of the party around us, trance music spinning

on a turntable, making out high like high-schoolers

in front of someone else’s locker.  Remember

being the kid who had to get your lunch or math book, ask

 

the lip-locked couple in front of your locker to move? 

Did you say, Excuse me, tap them gently? 

I never had that courage, shared

a neighbor’s book, bought hot lunch.  But tonight

 

we are as cool as our daydreams were then,

magazine pages and mirrors, straight-edge skaters,

drama queens, hair gods and punk princesses

smoking in the back row, the health teacher’s nightmare,

 

impossibly drugged, and when I touch

your clay lips with my iron fingers,

trace your beveled collarbone

with my fluted mouth, the tune I play

 

pushes hallway lockers open with gale force. 

Uneaten lunches and uncovered books fly,

everything slams, and blinded

we all get a good, fluorescent look at each other.

What is it you forget in your vigil,
cell after cell like petals on the grave
of first days, so often strange, your veil
of skin ruffled, renewed, as if you grieved

in the blind color of too much light.
So late you sleep there, so leaden the pour
of suns that cannot touch you. The blood you let,
the foaming of the crevice—what old prayer

of needle and thread could ever answer
the power of arrival. The body opens
its red door which in turn opens the flare
of the eye. Don't you remember. You pinned

each to itself like an armless sleeve.
Unlikely, true. White shadow of the wound
that is no wound. The wind in the leaves
and the sound it makes, after the wind.

I had forgotten how to say yes. That's the trick of heartbreak.
It makes you forget yes. The voices in my head were not kind,
so you took me to the woods to empty out.
My old shoulder was wired with pain, and there was a needle
in my hip, but we lay on a wide flat rock in the snow
as the intoxicated sun licked our faces with breathing light

like a yellow dog, simple in its joy, licking our chins and lips and necks
and a long wind came from over the mountaintop
and cooled our left sides, and the Sacramento River
wept through us like time, and spoke its liquid foolish syllables,
senseless, sensual, almost sentient, and I lay with my head
nested between your breasts and listened.

Time to climb, you said, and I felt snow-wing angelic as we snowshoed
above Castle Lake, leaving traces behind like snow rabbits
with webbed feet, silver squirrels, prints on the glass of the world,
a little evidence for angels to investigate after that death magic
resolves us to nothing again. I heard omens in the wind, psalms
in the bent warm sunlight that makes the snow mountains weep.

Something was coming, something foreign as joy, a clue
to how to live once you're done with sorrow, a way of being
in being like a long breath exhaled, leaving a trace on the air
before it resolves again to air, the frozen lake, ice fishers waiting
for something great to rise, the mountaintop lifting
its white head in trance and saying its one good word: snow.

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/2008/07/sunday-secrets_12.html

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-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 4:41 AM
Subject: ABBA

Are you kidding me? I was blasting ABBA while browsing PostSecret just now. (I'm a guy.)!

~Honey I'm still free, Take a chance on me....~





























-----Email Message-----
Subject: Hope

A few months ago I saw a postcard saying "If you're waiting for a sign, this is it. Do it. It will be amazing."

Well I did it...and while I am the most vulnerable I've ever been in my life, I'm also the happiest.

For anyone else: This is your sign.

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I got home a few days ago and have been quite happy putting around and not really doing anything at all.

Anyway, M and I are rearranging a few things, turning a room into a studio for M to work on and moving a large mass of my books from one room to another.

Anyway, this leaves open a large nice bookshelf in our front room. And from the mass of books, this gives two options.
One, I could fill it with nice horror books. Big, thick scary volumes of various authors.

Two, M pointed out that everyone we have over more of less ignores the horror and tends to pull out ome of my -ahem- large collection of comic books to look through. They really act like little magnets for people to look through. So, contrary to actually acting like an adult, I'm thinking about putting my bunch of comics front and center into my living room.

So, I thought I would call on taste and experience that greatly exceed my own. You guys.

Poll #1226327
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

So, what goes on the shelf?

very happy with this one i am

Good story on L. Frank Baum and the Wizard of Oz in the Guardian by Marina Warner.

The milieu of turn-of-the-century 19th/20th century America with its dreams of technological utopia and eco-feminism/transcendentalism which she invokes makes me think about the way things haven't really changed that much. Though perhaps they have. It could be argued that we have regressed as a culture since WWII. What we view as liberally progressive today actually has quite long roots historically, and current cultural debates have raged, in somewhat different forms, for centuries. When I say we have regressed since WWII, I should rephrase that and see it as a constant back-sliding, a sort of one step-forward, three-steps back which has gone on throughout modern history. WWII is a huge break though .. looking at my parents youth I can "understand" the 50s, but to look back to the 30s or say the 1890s becomes more conceptual.

The article mentions The White City, The Worlds Fair of Chicago 1893


(The beaux art style was a sort of iron-girder classicism which we see mostly in governmental buildings and museums today. Penn Station in NY is a great example of this style, which has proved to be too wasteful of space, and expensive to produce.)

and the films of Lotte Reiniger

lovely_living - - - Frightening. This woman, is scary. Like some weird June Cleaver from the twilight zone. Have YOU worn bright colours and a sundress lately?! No, no I have not. I like to scrap lead paint in gym shorts The entire "Budgeted Cleaning TIme" for some reason grates on my soul  (that's right.) Lately, my "Budgeted Cleaning Time" has consisted of

1. Throwing out a cowheart that's been in the microwave for over a day because my boyfriend apparently doesn't believe in refridgeration or you know, other parts of the cow.
2. Killing 34 ants for fun outside
3. Pouring bleach over a suspect stain in our clawfoot tub
4. Squeezing orange juice with my barehands!!!! No, not really though. I opened a bottle of tropicana. 

Woman who are that excited about housekeeping worry me.

In the infamous words of The Joker, "Riddle Me This"... (great movie by the way, saw it last night)

Why do people on welfare always have money to buy cigarettes? I don't smoke so I don't know the going rate for Marlboros, but it's pretty costly these days, isn't it? A pack of smokes costs almost $6, doesn't it? How can people on welfare afford that and why should they be allowed to?

If your lazy ass wants to rely on the taxpayers for your existence, here's how it should be: Welfare should pay your rent and utilities directly to the landlord and utility companies. You don't see a dime. You get vouchers for local stores that specify what can be purchased with them. For example, "This voucher good for $100 in children's clothing items ONLY". The receipt and the voucher must match or the retailer won't receive payment from the government, so there won't be any cheating. The voucher is made out to the specific person and their photo ID has to be scanned for the purchase, so selling the voucher won't be easy.

Food stamps should be made available for necessary food items only, and should be changed to include personal items like toothpaste and chewable vitamins for children. Things like Ho-Hos, Oreos, chips, Lunchables, TV dinners, Pepsi, Doritos, takeout food (pizza and subs), bakery cakes and the like should be eliminated from the list of eligible items. People on food stamps need to learn to economize and exercise basic cooking skills. The problem with most of them is that they're too lazy to work, too lazy to practice birth control, and too lazy to cook. It's much too easy to throw a Lunchable at the kid and go hang out on the porch than it is to cook a decent meal and sit down with the family for some quality time. Unfortunately, the welfare system plays right into that notion.

We give these sponges way too much leeway. They shouldn't see any money at all, because in a good many cases what happens is they get their stipends, blow it on booze, drugs, lottery and stupid shit, and don't pay their rent and bills. Then they run back to the welfare office crying that their money got stolen and they apply for an emergency replacement. In a lot of cases, they get it. In the cases where they don't, they run off to Catholic Charities or Salvation Army and those do-gooders give them money even though they're pretty sure they're lying. If the welfare system doesn't give them cash, they can't claim it got stolen. Sure, it may cost up front to implement, but once it gets operational, it will save a lot and may even deter a lot of these losers from applying in the first place.

the class is almost full, there's still room for you as long as you aren't incredibly obese.

(not trying to discriminate, its just i said the class is almost "full" and incredibly obese people take up slightly more room) (i'm sorry) (i didn't mean to offend anyone) (my mom said Jenny Craig really works) (of course you're perfect just the way you are.)

Folks, after 7 months I am proud to say that I have lost 45 lbs and have reached my freshman year weight of

185 lbs!

Fuck yeah!

( Look more )

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2008/07/19.html

malinger: to feign illness or inability.

One of the more unusual things that I noticed in Sicily, particularly Siracusa, is the practice of posting public posters to commemorate deaths or anniversaries of deaths. These were pasted across the city, for a wide variety of people. I was quite surprised to see commemorations for Mussolini among them. But, in general, the more that I traveled in Sicily the more that I saw various Mussolini souvenirs, tee-shirts. Even, as you can see in the cut below--

( boxer shorts )

Freight by Peter Armstrong

The brave days of aviation!
Saint-Exupery, delerious
poet of a night atmosphere
turbulent and dangerous as black waves
fragmenting like safety-glass
on Viking dragon heads
went back to it smiling.

No camera unfortunately
to witness him huddled
there in the shuddering cockpit
counting his chances
with compass broken
and a sinking fuel meter,
only his own wild prose
to recreate the fear, the sing
of overstressed rigging wires.

But what photographs are
of similiar frail aircraft
with grinning (thumbs up!) pilots
wrestling them into the air
as if their own muscle
show often a taut windsock
as an eblem of brash confidence.

Something, perhaps
the ambiguity of adrenaline,
near love in watching
the wood and canvas wings
shake as the motor
stuttered into life
made such men seem fools:
Lindberg, who watched red-eyed
as the wrinkled Atlantic unrolled
for hours, too near
while flying under a storm,
Parer and M'intosh who crashed
their was from England to Australia,
arriving with one pint of petrol,
Allock and Brown, who
walked to an Irish village,
their plane upended in a peat-bog...

The dreaming travellers
slumped like mailbags
stir fretfully,
Somewhere, a match flickers,
a cigarette, a cough.

A sigh:
a shadow
like a man with arms outstretched
in permanently drugged sleep
passes over the earth,
many times
as a matter of routine.

From the book Children of Albion: Poetry of the 'Underground' in Britain (circa 1969). Found it at a charity shop - had to practically wrench it out of someone else's hands.

As pointed out to me by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict, a recipe for Flying Spaghetti Monster Treats

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

today's job, wonderful girl.

got a chance to finally do something in the new expanded studio space, this wall is just about done, i just need a few more books to complete it. this corner was ready to shoot though, i think it's coming along pretty good, it's got a nice classic playboy feel to it.

i think a lot of the new space will be going in that direction. it's so nice to have all this room to really dig into, i couldn't be happier with the expansion.