Filling the High Demand for Blog'd Cat Pictures...

...so you don't have to!

I caught our cat in the peach tree but he was already jumping down by the time I got my cell phone out:

All Those Twitters Can Get Old

"My Twitter problem is that spontaneously publishing whatever comes into my head is the exact opposite of what they told me to do in journalism school."

I think Blundo will get over it. Most other professional journalists have today. See, for example, David Gregory or Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. Anyway, funny Dispatch column on the Twitter phenomenon:

In what sort of hell would you be subjected to the passing thoughts of not only Martha Stewart and Marc Dann but also car dealerships and a building under construction?

That hell would be called Twitter.

My daughter, who is 18 and therefore an authority on social networking, told me not to sign up.

"You won't like it," she said.

I signed up anyway. By doing so, I violated my rule of technology adoption: Always wait five years, to see whether it will go away on its own.

But "everyone" is Twittering: celebrities, politicians, inanimate objects. I didn't want to be left out.

("Everyone" means about 8 million people, a scant 2 percent of the population. So why does Twitter get so much attention? Members of the media use it, and each member equals 100,000 regular people.)

Twittering, which you do by going to www.twitter.com and opening an account, is a way of sending brief messages (tweets) that friends, relatives, acquaintances and the terminally bored can follow on their computers or cell phones.

Anyone who thinks it necessary to receive regular Martha Stewart status reports (and 219,000 do, according to her "follower" statistics) can get them.

Among her recent tweets: "Today we celebrated bunnies on the show."

Tweets are limited to 140 characters, but that still allows Fred Ricart plenty of space to remind me that Chevy Cobalts get good gas mileage.

Yes, Fred tweets. So does the Ohio Union, a building that won't even open for many months.

"I'm being built" was its first tweet...

I can see how Twitter might be a useful tool in a democracy: If an elected official tweets often to constituents, he or she isn't busy enough and should be removed from office. At last check, Barack Obama had sent one tweet since his inauguration (inviting us to participate in the Internet town hall last month), so I think he's under the threshold.

Despite opening a Twitter account, I haven't tweeted. Yet, within a day of signing up, I had four followers. They must be fans of brooding silences.

My Twitter problem is that spontaneously publishing whatever comes into my head is the exact opposite of what they told me to do in journalism school. I'm still getting accustomed to the fact that the Internet is, in effect, a giant baby monitor that stands ready to disseminate any squeal I make.

I'd like whatever I send to be at least as useful as the tweets of, say, Jym Ganahl, who tells you whether you need a jacket ("56 tomorrow, 63 Friday"), or Pabst Blue Ribbon (yes, beer can tweet), which alerts drinkers to the location of $2 PBRs.

Until I reach those minimal standards, I might stay silent. Talk to the fake pope, the building or the bottle of beer instead.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.

Western Tales

Despite (because of?) my verbosity, part of what attracts me to Westerns is the laconic hero of few words. It touches something in deep in the soul when the Clint Eastwood-like character looks over a situation, assesses it, and responds with two words:

"Looks it," he said.

Makes me want to dig out my old Louis L'Amour novels.

There’s a thrill in the leanness. Modern movies are horribly talky and so a good Western is like a salve to the soul, a visit to a cloistered monastery in which the monks, like hooded Eastwoods, rarely speak.

It's particularly appealing after a week in which work seemed to consist of an unending string of interruptions. Call it death by the cut of a thousand verbalized trivialities.

My wife is wearied by people repeating themselves two and three times over a short period of time. She is wearied by people repeating themselves. (Rimshot!)

Characters in Westerners never repeat themselves. Instead they dispense proverbs like “you can't kill human weakness son” (from the movie Shooter). Perhaps it's human weakness for monks to seek verbosity and non-monks to seek quiet.

What would happen if you substituted the modern word-slinger for the Western gunslinger? Imagine if Jammes Michener met the late David Foster Wallace:

It was mid-August at the University of Mississippi when young gun David Foster Wallace, progenitor of the novel Infinite Jest, met seasoned hand James Michener, progenitor of single-named historical tomes of infinite length like Alaska and Texas and Madgascar.

Differences in temperament were reflected in their clothing. Michener wore plaid pants with a shirt that was neither short-sleeved nor long-sleeved but something in between. Wallace wore a red kerchief and a black t-shirt with the words “What’s After Post-Modern?”.

Michener was old school, doggedly piling up respectable Anglo-Saxon words on his Underwood and winning readers the way Chrissie Evert won tennis matches: with a relentless baseline game. Wallace was new school, showing up on campus with stacks of newly coined words that he served like flashy revolvers under the southern sun.

Their advance men met and shook hands, followed by Wallace and Michener themselves. James extended his hand and David shook it, saying that he read him when he was just a boy.

They stood twenty paces apart as called for in the script of any good Western. Wallace drew first blood: “Macarism!” he yelled before Michener could say "malapropism".

Michener answered, “that’s easy. Noun. ‘Pleasure in another’s joy.’”

Michener then said, “Tathagatagarbha!”

Wallace paused and said, “A gimme! The Buddhistic teaching of the eternal and absolute essence of all reality.”

“Tachyphylaxis,” said Wallace.

“Rapid development of immunity to the effects of a drug, especially to those of a poison through previous ingestion of small amount of same,” answered Michener.

“Dactylioglyph?”

“Engraver of gems.”

And so it went, each taking their shot until the sun faded and the bystanders who stood next to facades of old buildings had gone and only the stars in the heavens witnessed the rest of the exchange.

"Bull-" slurred Wallace.

"a male bovine," said a fatigued Michener.

Drunkenly stumbling, they hung onto each other's shoulders for balance as Wallace whispered in James' ear, "how 'bout we co-write something? Like Infinite Russia?"

"Sounds good ...and, uh, ain't gonna be no rematch!"

My Brush with Greatness

I was momentarily irrationally exuberant, to borrow Greenspan's wonderfully apt phrase, when Karl Rove decided to "follow me" on Twitter. I figured that no doubt he saw in some of my one-liners the possibility of re-use on O'Reilly or Hannity. To quote the great Luse, "delusions of grandeur keep me going".

I found soon enough that he automatically follows everybody who follows him, which means he effectively follows nobody. His Twittering is merely of an outgoing variety, which is fine. But a sort of "depersonalized personalization", the impression of intimacy where none is present, is the great modern habit. It applies most obviously to the hook-up culture.

God, of course, follows everybody but that doesn't mean he follows nobody. It's a particularity exclusive to God, He who can be intimate outside the bounds of monogamy (figuratively speaking) because of his infiniteness. What is the meaning of Luke 18:27 but that God alone is capable of making oxymorons true?

He Even Looks Like a Former Philadelphian

Quote o' the day by Rich Russo: "You can't just call them an idiot because that won't get you anywhere." I can't argue with that.

Spoken by a true-blue Columbus hockey fan; full column here:

I would submit that Russo's choice of seats, there behind the visitors' bench, is one of the more fortunate turns in franchise history. Granted, franchise history is not swathed in glory, so the bar isn't set too high here. But the point is, if someone was going to sit behind the opposing bench, who better than a moke from Staten Island who went to college in Philadelphia? Think about it: a New York-Philly hybrid, a cross between Mel Blanc and W.C. Fields, stationed at the immediate rear of the enemy. It's practically unfair.

"I get under their skin a lot," Russo said. "It's funny. Like, I'll ask (Edmonton's Ales) Hemsky why his mom would name a boy Alice. Stuff like that. They'll turn around, if you know their first name and you know something about them and you say something pretty smart hockey-wise. You can't just call them an idiot because that won't get you anywhere."

Uncounted times, Russo has gotten a gush of Gatorade from the other side of the glass. Darius Kasparaitis launched smelling salts (nasty stuff). Todd Bertuzzi turned to punch the glass (and evoked some fear). Jeremy Roenick, harangued about his gambling habits, was asked about the state of his finances. He turned, smiled and said, "I'm still rich, buddy."

That Kindle-icious Smell

Booksquare amusingly relates an over-the-top idea:

If there is one thing we can agree on, in the discussion surrounding digital books, it is that the issue is not “if ebooks ever take off” but “how ebooks will assimilate”. To my mind, too much energy is wasted on the idea that digital books are not the same as physical books. Focusing on the tactile, the kinesthetic, the heft of books and comparing that experience to a digital book makes no sense.

Of course they’re different, just like cars, boats, and airplanes are different. Trains are different. All are forms of transportation, all have their strengths and weaknesses. We choose one type of transport over the other for a host of reasons: speed, convenience, experience. Why not so with books?

So when I see a product positioning itself to recreate the “smell of books” on your ereader, I just want to scream. Stop. The. Madness. Now.

Criminy next thing you know they'll be selling "new car smell" and no one will ever buy a new car again and the automobile manufacturers will all go bankrupt.

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos explains that the smell of books is satisfying simply due to association, which makes sense. The law of association is such that I try not to mess with it too much.

Ponderances Shaken, not Stirred

Multiculturalism has made me more aware of diversity such that on the elevator this morning there seemed a perfect balancing act, each of us in our four corners: black male at northeast corner, white female at northwest, China girl at southwest and me holding down the southeast.
______
Kudos are in order, I understand, for one of dotCommonweal's writers for questioning Notre Dame's decision to honor President Obama. It strikes me as odd and condescending that we should applaud someone for something as self-evident as the questioning of the propriety of the Obama invite, but I guess that's what we've come to today. I ought not minimize the (predictable) outcry of outrage he received on that group blog; no doubt it took courage to question the heter-orthodoxy. Baby steps, as they say, baby steps. Gosh that sounded condescending, didn't it?
______
Excerpt of poem found at the New Yorker by a poet named Michael Dickman:

We did not make ourselves is one thing

I keep singing into my hands

while falling

asleep


for just a second


before I have to get up and turn on all the lights in the house, one after the

other, like opening an Advent calendar

...

I didn’t make my brain

but I’m helping

to finish it


Carefully stacking up everything I made next to everything I ruined in broad

daylight in bright

brainlight

It's hard to explain our lack of faith in God given the examples we have all around us, such as the Dickman twins and how they have "special access to the experience of union", illustrated by the numerous numinous experiences such as having the same nightmare at the same time and waking up from it at the same point in the dream, and all the other psychic stuff that twins experience, like the knowledge that the other is in danger or is hurt despite being miles apart. Their union of souls is associated with their union of bodies; it is their closeness that brings psychic abilities to the fore rather than anything unique to "twinship". You get the sense that with the saints, the mystical phenomena that accompanies their journeys are simply a byproduct of closeness to God more than anything else. And yet we see plenty of examples, such as with St. Paul, when we were still far away when we were brought close.
______
As a computer programmer, I have to constantly guard against looking at everything from a cold, engineering viewpoint. Pope Benedict has been especially able in communicating that even if I've not always put the message into practice. With Christianity this typically manifests itself as emphasizing morality rather than relationship. Rules. Standards. Which is why it's easy for me to complain about the Obama invite at Notre Dame since it's not my particular sin. It's also easy for me to see my relationship with God primarily in terms of contract. Even "faith alone" can be seen with that lens.

I hark back to what Jeff Culbreath once wrote concerning the necessity of sentiment and in being sentimental. When I look around the blogosphere I see the math brains and engineers concerned less about relationship than with morality. I see the more artistic, right-brained folks typically more concerned about relationship than morality. But it's not either/or, it's and/both. John Meehan titled his book about there being two towers: faith and morals.

Jobs tend to form us, almost as much as the images we look at can and my job is one that is completely anti-sentimental. The computer is unforgiving and completely indifferent to anything but 1s and 0s. Relationships, by contrast, are inherently sentimental:

One of the complaints against pornography is that men begin to form their standards of beauty by what they see in the magazines despite the air-brushed and at times cartoonish proportions of those depicted, and yet I wonder if the same danger could be possible with friendships. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that much of friendship is a commonality of interests combined with a similar world view. And via the virtual world of the web, we can find friends, if we seek them out, with the exactly the same obscure interests and those with very similar world views. Does this coarsen our appreciation of friends in our "real" life, such that they suffer from comparison since interests and world views can never intersect as so perfectly they may on the 'net? Of course the difference with friends in real life is that you have the history, the memories, the sentimental attachments, the verbal shorthands, the facial expressions and tics that add immensely to the richness.

Let's Play...

.....Why Is My Bookbag or eReader-Equivalent so Heavy or Virtually Heavy? (the title that grows and grows...)

From David Sedaris's When Engulfed in Flames:

An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I’d found an affordable one it wouldn’t have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques. What I could never fathom, and still can’t, really, is that at one point all those things were new. The wheezing Victrola, the hulking davenport — how were they any different from the eight-track tape player or my parents’ Scandinavian dining room set? Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive...

It was hard to live in a college town and not go to college. The students I saw out my window were a constant reminder that I was just spinning my wheels, and I was beginning to imagine how I would feel in another ten years, when they started looking like kids to me.

....

What changed my mind was a television show, a weekly drama about a close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. This family didn’t have a blender or a country club membership, but they did have one another — that and a really great house, an old one, built in the twenties or something. All of their bedrooms had slanted clapboard walls and oil lamps that bathed everything in fragile golden light. I wouldn’t have used the word “romantic,” but that’s how I thought of it.

I know! (Hand gesticulates wildly in the air.) The Walton's! Sorry, I'll keep quiet now.

From John Updike's Widows of Eastwick:

...whose own playing had once formed the fiery center, the furious inner resort, of her emotive life, listened with a seething impatience as the figures on the stage insistently sawed and swayed through Vivaldi with his sugary whine, Beethoven’s surly tangle of near-dissonance, and a bit of Ravel like a wispy handkerchief disappearing up a wide-cuffed sleeve. Then, after a brief intermission during which the narrow lobby loudly overflowed with all the exciting things that small-town people manage to find to say to one another, day after day, get-together after get-together, while only a sneaky remnant of former addicted multitudes ventured outdoors to pollute with cigarette smoke the night air above the drastically diminished green, one of Bach’s great cat’s cradles was essayed, an arrangement for strings from Die Kunst der Fuge, its themes crisscrossing and lifting a third and then a fifth between his giant ghostly fingers...brought to the last and highest paroxysm of the Baroque...

Baroque indeed. More:

Sukie had imagined before turning old that quirks—bad traits and mannerisms—would fall away, once the need to make a sexual impression was removed; without the distraction of sex, a realer, more honest self would be revealed. But it is sex, it turned out, that engages us in society, and keeps us on our toes, and persuades us to retract our rough edges, so we can mix in. Without the sexual need to negotiate, there is little to curb neurotic crankiness. Jane was succumbing to hers. “I remember Eastwick as a fun hick place,” Jane complained, “but it’s gotten homogenized, all ssmoothed..."
...
"Eastwick’s lost its messy charm.” “Hasn’t the whole world?” Sukie asked idly, unpacking milk and orange juice and yogurt and ground coffee and cranberry juice and Jewish rye into the refrigerator...."People adjust, is the frightening thing. They forget, generation by generation, what it ever was to be free.” “Free,” Jane mused. “What does that mean? You have to be born, you have to die. You’re never in control.”

Blogger at "Anecdotal Evidence":

My father, like Chekhov, was a doctor. He also tended to reserve judgement, I think because so many of his patients were drug addicts or violent criminals that judgement would quickly have overwhelmed the clarity he needed for his work. It wasn't that he was oblivious to a patient's character as that he witheld condemnation because it was irrelevant. He wasn't what I would call compassionate; he was businesslike in his work, without any theory of doing good or helping humanity: it was what he was good at, what he enjoyed, and I think his patients appreciated the sense that he was a good businessman, his business being Medicine. So when he gets on a bus, passengers often recognise him from 15 or more years ago, and offer him their seats. And yet, he was simply doing his job.

Sounds a bit like Dr. House, although of course not as misanthropic.

From NY Times piece on Newt Gingrich:

“Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial,” he lamented to me. “They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.” At our first meeting in November, Gingrich laid out for me his latest preoccupation, which, surprisingly, had nothing to do with stimulus or banking. “One of the projects I’m going to launch — we don’t have a name for it yet — is an air-traffic modernization project,” Gingrich told me excitedly. “You can do a space-based air-traffic-control system with half the current number...

From The Scarlet Letter:

The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered...

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

All biblical interpretations share in the hypothetical, relative, "iffiness" of historical study and the word of God still comes through the relativity of finite historical judgments. The relative and inconclusive nature of historical biblical study, in which there is never absolute certainty, is no liability. To long for the Absolute, uncontaminated by the finitude of historical existence, is to disregard the incarnation and to make the Bible into something it is not. This 'scandal of particularity' of a God who acts in history is part of the scandal of the cross itself (1 Cor. 1:23; Gal. 5:11) and is inherent in the Christian faith. Bible interpretation must be historically oriented, because the Bible is oriented to the might acts of God in history. - M. Eugene Boring in book "Revelation"

The God of the Bible is both a God of justice and mercy, of righteousness and compassion, of love and lordship, of order and creativity, of hierarchy and equality. Unless you can hold these antinomies in tension, you cannot paint a full picture of the Biblical God. - from Ben Witherington's review of "The Shack"

Much of the scandal in the Church has come not from the weakness of the few clergy who have fallen so much as the inability of their superiors to acknowledge this weakness publicly. - Michael Dubruiel

I think that giving wealthy and powerful individuals Church honorifics of any kind - whether we call the knights or canons or whatever - is one of the worst, and least necessary remnants of a previous era.) Oh, and by the way - I think Bishop D'Arcy should go to the commencement and do the teaching he asked Mary Ann Glendon to do himself. - Amy Welborn

It looks like the Federal Government is going to be passing out money by the truckload to try to prevent another Great Depression, and a fair chunk of that money is most likely going to end up in Ohio's education system, just because of the political power of the school employee unions. If we're not careful, this (hopefully) one-time influx of money will permanently raise the cost of running our public schools through the creation of all kinds of good and not-so-good initiatives that morph into 'must-have' components of our education system – just like air-conditioned buildings and football stadiums. - Paul Lambert

Ennui is the trouble of those who have no other troubles. - The Old Farmer's Almanac, 1901

When Democrats took over BOTH chambers of Congress after [the 2006 election], the economy was stable and growing, and the projected budget deficit was around 200 billion. Since January 2007, Democratic policies have authored the mess that we "inherit" today. All of the increase in deficits since then have come from the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives where Federal spending originates. President Bush and the GOP prior to 2006 bear some responsibility for increasing Federal spending beyond acceptable limits, for "spending like Democrats" as it were. But today the first sixty days of one party rule under President Obama and the Democratic Party have proven Republicans don't know anything about off-the-charts deficit spending. - Ham of "Social Engineer"

[I'm] contemplating outsourcing my Twittering like other big name celebrities, since I can't take time out of my busy schedule to compose a thought in 140 characters or less. - Christopher Blosser

Be open to the healing of Christ. Never presume that what Jesus has to offer is only for someone else. - Michael Dubruiel in "The Power of the Cross"

And now for something completely different...

Via The Inn at the End of the Pool World

Reveries

They say - "they" being John Updike in particular - that all writing is if not a return to the womb then at least a return to earliest youth. Those early experiences are what the writer mines. I recall those summer nights in the early '70s during which the '70s weren't yet interesting because kitsch wasn't yet in vogue. I recall ordering 7-ups in those absurdly small bar glasses they served soft drinks in back then. The Elbow Room was one such bar which my Dad frequented and thus I visited as a tag-along. Other than the 7-ups and tasty beer nuts I can recall nothing. If I could revisit that rare ground now I would pay attention, for my grandfather was still alive then and sitting a barstool from my dad. I would look around at the other drinkers and listen to the dialogue. Work? Sex? Politics? What did they talk about in a small Germanically-flavored town in Ohio in the '70s?

Of course the fact that I was a child was part of why I was brought along in the first place. It's the same reason you allow your dog to be around when you're making love or going to the bathroom. I was essentially deaf, dumb and blind. I wouldn't understand most of what they were saying.

Change seems most recognizable only in retrospect and even then it must often be aided by artificial time dividers like hit songs. Is it only via music that I can remember now that 1982 differed radically from 1985 which differed radically from 1987? I can listen now to Alan Parsons Project's Eye in the Sky, released in 1982, and see how foreign it is to the time of Men at Work's It's a Mistake in '83, which is so different than, say, Simple Minds' Don't You (Forget About Me) or Katrina and the Waves' Walking on Sunshine just a couple years later.

Hillary: "Who Painted Our Lady of Guadalupe?"

Fascinating query from Hillary, especially seeing as she'd already been to the shrine before.

The proverbial hat tip goes to Ignatius Insight where I read the first chapter of the new novel (redundant?) by Lucy Beckett and am thinking of buying. Must. control. book. spending.

Writers and Naturalists

So I caught the last bit of an interview with writer Elizabeth Gilbert on the radio and thought, "hmmm...I wonder what she's been up to?"

Of course I'd seen her book Eat, Pray, Love with its crayola cover on the shelves of every bookstore since time began but it never occured to me to look at the author's name, so I didn't know she'd wrote it. The book screamed "chic flick!" or literary equivalent. Maybe I thought it was a cookbook and I avoid them like the plague. My impression now is that it's a combination diet, self-help, "seeker" memoir - all of which I'm pretty much allergic to.

So I had no idea it was my Elizabeth Gilbert, meaning the one who wrote the excellent biography of the amazing Eustace Conway. I wondered how Conway and Gilbert were both doing. A quick check of amazon.com and I find that Gilbert has become famous in her own right with the aforementioned book.

I searched Catlick blogs & Mama T came up:

I'm finding a lot that's interesting in Eat, Pray, Love. More than I thought I would when I picked up the book. Do I agree with her spiritual path? Oh, no. She's one of those "we all believe the same, deep down" folks. And I think that is manifestly untrue. BUT, her questions, her seeking, her drive for a relationship with God? THAT I can empathize with and see myself in. I don't think it's always necessary for us to agree with an author to get something out of the book.
I'm not necessarily recommending the book. But I am saying it's not being a bad read....
___

While I was interested in the first two sections (Eat (of course) and Pray), the book fell apart in the final third for me. The author goes off to Bali to find "balance" in her life (oh, would that we could all jet off to foreign destinations when we're "out of balance"). But in the end it turns out that she falls in love with a Brazilian ex-pat and the story devolves into a paean about the glories of sex with this guy. Um. OK.

With Mama T, it'd be easier for her to list the books she hasn't read. Meanwhile Meredith Gould has more on her blog:

Why would I want to read Liz Gilbert's best selling book, Eat, Pray, Love? I mean, really. Having people say, "she sounds like you" and "her story is like yours" is not exactly compelling. If I want to recall the dark years of my soul, I can take a handful of busprione and reread my journals. I need to read someone else's spiritual memoir?

But because a friend gave me a copy as a birthday gift, I recently read Eat, Pray, Love. Could not put it down thanks to my endless fascination with navel-gazing even when said navel is embedded in someone else's body.

Are Gilbert and I that much alike? I guess. The spiritual journey does, after all, follow a predictable trajectory that starts with a brutal wake-up call.

Differences: My so-called successful life imploded when I was in my late thirties. I did not take the language-food cure in Italy. The ashram where I spent my soul sabbatical was in the United States. (Her description of shakti kundalini is nicely done, especially since the experience is impossible to convey without sounding psychotic.) The healer who rocked my reality was from the Philippines, not Bali.

I've also yet to meet the much older lover who adores all my quirks, most which are floridly apparent either before, during, or after writing a book. And excuse me for whining about being a "mid-list" author, but no one has given me a whomping huge book advance to chronicle my journey from darkness to light. Not yet, anyway.

Finally, if you haven't ready enough on Gilbert there's more here.

Scripts Past

I think it behooves to adorn this self-indulgent post with a picture of Olivia Hussey because the right picture can really add to the blog reader's experience. The perfect picture can lend gravitas to a post in which that is otherwise lacking. I'm not sure Hussey's is the right picture but it's the right one right now. I'm sure all of my male readers will agree.

Reveries of the earliest extant poem extrudes, the ur poem, the poem that launched a thousand bad poems, many of which now live in the deep recesses of my computer and are double-triple password-protected in order to prevent posthumous viewings since many were of a lascivious nature such that I thought I could write the lust out of me, wring out the heavy burden of semen much as the anger-besotted man thinks he can beat the anger out by wailing on his dog.

But it all started off in primeval innocence, cursive script on a Rainbow writing pad:

I want to write
a beautiful sight
I love my month
called June!

Being born in June I apparently felt a proprietary interest.

Later I kept a diary for three months. Like many relationships it ended for ill; the last page was full of recriminations and blame and accusations because it seemed to be all duty and I grew to hate the burden, an irrationality that seems incredibly puzzling now. What did it matter whether I kept one or not? I mean to go back to that three month 5-yr diary and try to piece together what frustration a kid could've felt towards something as benign as a diary. Perhaps it was merely that the cover felt like a binding contract: 5 Year Diary. Perhaps if it was called A One Month Diary I could've felt more at peace, knowing the goal was manageable.

Or maybe it was because it soon became like brushing my teeth. (Fortunately, I've never quit brushing my teeth.)

Ironic too given that now, without any personal stricture, vow or sacrifice, I've written a quadzillion blogposts over the past seven years, though admittedly most of an essay heuristic rather than diaristic one. So too does my home-grown journal grow, although perhaps the secret is updating it weekly rather than daily.

Journals and diaries seem important if only because it's the only time you ignore the censor, perhaps not the best thing to do since the Id is such a thoughtless bloke, but sometimes art can spring only when the superego's sleeping due to fatigue incurred from his tiresome mission.

I normally write on Friday nights but by Thursdays the words begin to burst their houses and the rain falls on just thoughts and unjust thoughts and I feel the duty to express them, to air them, in part just because I like words, I like the cut of their jib, I like the fact that they have long histories, I like that they are like rivers and always have a mouth, a beginning, even if we don't know when exactly or who first uttered it.

Fiction for a Thursday

...because it's been far too long since our last fictional installment:

Ben pictured the perfect modern Dickens novel as trolling the grim precincts of the fish fry and bingo hall, noting the abject labor conditions of the volunteers. He could see that, contra Einstein, Catholic guilt was a more powerful force than the compounding of money, evidenced most recently by the fact that volunteer Kim was hiding her proud hair under black netting, and, what's more, frying fish despite being allergic to fish. Her arms later broke out in Old Testament boils.

He'd entered the fry as a civilian this week, braving massive crowds for which parking was available only to the creative or impressively patient. Eight years ago they were serving 300 dinners a Lenten Friday and now over 1,000. "How unfortunate," he thought, "that St. Al’s makes really good fish and draws such huge crowds requiring a huge volunteer base with the penultimate result that Kim has to cover up her hair. How tragic that Catholics just can't tithe.”

Last week Ben had entered the Stygian chaos himself, spraying out vast vats and his face in the process, while behind him stood a stoic, moon-faced man in his early 40s. Ben imagined, or hoped, he was a frustrated chef and this was his outlet.

A blonde kitchen gadfly had just got back from a trip from Key West. Sincerely appreciative of the help, she attempted to befriend him as enthusiastically as that hooker on Times Square back in '86.... (to be continued)

UPDATE: It would be saintly if readers might offer a Hail Mary for Kim, a real-life bingo co-worker who inspired the above and whose grandmother is sick and entered a nursing home yesterday. They are an extremely close family for whom this is an extremely trying time.