Darkest Substance Ever!

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Now, the two or three people in the world who have been working on developing their awareness of OPOYUL~ know that the charcoal briquette is the key visualization object: the "black body" of physics - the 100% efficient absorber of energy and the 100% efficient emitter of energy. So, according to my 10th grade physics teacher, "The only thing that really exists that is something like that is a charcoal briquette."

Here I am, slowly over less than a decade but for a pretty long time, thinking about charcoal and about achieving maximum efficiency in both the absorbing and emitting of thought, and now they are turning charcoal briquettes into material [if you mentally conflate all black carboniferous stuff with what you want to talk about, and I do]. At the Atlanta ArtNews listserve, Chris Stevens aptly commented, "This is going to revolutionize the Little Black Dress."

He is awesome, and once made me a hat that completed my 60's stewardess outfit.

Fun with Signs in Tennessee - Part 2!

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So - Julie Puttgen sent me this photo of a sign she sees on the drive to the Nashville, TN, airport:


Her comment essentially was, "Is this OPOYUL~ or what?" And, "This bothers me in a 'so what is the subconscious part' kind of way" (of which more later). The sign says

• 1) "Sherriff's Correctional Complex" [fair enough, I can't see anyone without a 'correctional complex' achieving the job of Sherriff];

• 2) "Offender Re-entry Center" [?! We need some subject/object clarification here]; and

• 3) "Metro Animal Control" [?!!!!! Julie entitled the photo "Animal Offender" and I laughed, but now that I think it through, the implications of the sign taken as a whole could be much spookier -- I still want to do that graphic novel about all the abused suburban animals rounding up a bunch of humans for their own Death Race 2000.]

It is OPOYUL~Y in a hard to pin down way. There is something very simple and obvious to be communicated here, but at the same time is aimed only at people who have specific business there and already know exactly what is going on. So, the official/ formal/ appropriate words are superfluous as to their intended audience and meaningless to everyone else. The new term I am making up right this moment for such an unsatisfactory usage is contralogism. It is efficient and often necessary to perpetrate the old contralogism now and then, especially in the legal field, but it hurts a little to see language flapping uselessly/meaninglessly beside the road that way.



The "so, what is the subconscious part" is something mentioned in the very useful book The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. A man goes to a psychiatrist and says "I think I am subconsciously avoiding having sex with my wife." The psychiatrist, very psychiatristily, says "Why do you think that?" The man says, "Well, every night I watch TV until an hour after she goes to bed, and then, if it turns out she is still awake, I go back and watch TV until I am sure she is asleep. I figure I must be subconsciously avoiding the possibility of sex with her." The psychiatrist then asks, "What's the subconscious part?"

Fun with Signs in Tennessee - Part 1!

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Signs are fun everywhere, but it looks like Sewannee, TN is fixing to lead the pack for me personally. Here is one that inspired me particularly:

the 4 seasons restaurant will be closed until spring
4 in this case being a mathematical symbol unrelated to any tangible concept in the material world-
seasons being, in their way, tangible.
Restaurant names generally are in the same category as car model names,
will suggest or connote and won't or can't really signify or
be convincing, predictive signs of what is supposedly signified.
Closed for one out of four would be three seasons, and therefore logically impossible.
Until we get stricter about names this sort of thing will continue to happen.
Spring is what we need, some kind of renaissance, maybe.

(For proof, there's a picture at the link to Ratsalad DeLuxe above!)

from junior year of college - way on back

a stab at a kind of modified ballad meter in modified sonnet rhyme -

Oh my, old seasick Captain Red,
Out drinking in the park,
Still smashing empty bottles green,
Still draining others dry,
Recall what made your spine go soft -
which sailors left to die
in groaning wooden galleons tossed
in blood and ocean dark.

And what strange lands you may have seen,
and what quaint fables tell
of captives bound with golden chains
at noble ladies' whim,
of fishes gasping empty air
who never learned to swim,
who loved the ocean only once
but claim they know it well.

My iron captain crawled to shore
when water turned him rust.
His salty smile will never speak
of what he understood:
Uncertain feet that roll on land
remember only wood
and fear they'll sink him to his neck
and drown him in the dust.

Oh my, old drunken Captain Red,
still dripping on the shore,
You'll cough up twenty bottles worth,
and - thirsty - call for more.

haiku resurfaced from memory

from 4 or so years ago, a time when I had an office with such a view:

distant Stone Mountain
floats on a dark haze of pine
Mount Fuji it ain’t

the big tornado

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A bunch of windows are themselves blown out.
Usually other things are blown out of windows.
This is not, technically, irony -
and some things were, in fact, blown out of those windows.
There is not much that is conceptually contradictory about it,
except that broken glass closed off Luckie Street all weekend.
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and another pantoum -

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these were discussed earlier.

This one is about trees, and I am very happy with it.

hate getting political

but sometimes it happens -

my country right or wrong

exclamation point, backspace
period, backspace
question mark, backspace
comma, backspace
enter

pruntiform - the usual thoughts about traffic

Seems like all the people want to drive in this lane.
Like this lane has something special about it -
All the lanes are headed the same way.
The traffic is dense and darting, inefficient -
People display a monstrous lack of patience.
Want is a state, it is desperate, has private motive.
To satisfy want, people are moved individually -
Drive unpredictably and that can cause accidents.
In this town, everyone is from elsewhere, each drives differently.
This lane must have special qualities, must seem worth the trouble,
Lane changes being so dangerous.

Why didn't I see these stories until I happened to catch BBC World News?

I am surprised.

1) They say the Carlyle Capital Corporation is collapsed. Some conspiracy folks think its parent (the Carlyle Group) is the cabal that runs the world - many web pages about that sort of thing are on the first page of a Google search. Crazy.

2) And, there is a tent city in California, contributed to in part by the foreclosure boom. (link is to a Reuters video from 2007, so this has been going on for a while.)

The American news I saw today was about oil prices and the dollar against the yen. Oh, and some politician in a scandal with a younger woman.

and, because I never neglect the apocalyptic scenario

There is this chipper news story, that would be the starting place for a novel akin to the Stand. The protagonist reads the story, then goes about her business, little knowing, etc. Now's the time to stock up your penicillin, beef jerky, batteries, and drinking water!

chicken and egg - here's two

It’s in my eye but not all the way in.
In among my lashes, it is touching some nerves.
My pulse, accordingly, accelerates.
Eye lid flutter, turn to shelter from the wind.
But - don’t touch -
Not big, not a lash, not a bug, just some ash, soon gone.
All it amounts to is a second of anxiety.
The danger of pain feels so real the
way it stops a moment
in another moment.

chicken and egg - here's one

You gotta love contractions!
Gotta get those verbs outta the way!
Love’s okay, though - most of the time it’s a noun.
Contractions make everything simpler.

Oh, you men.

This Onion article is a couple of years old. It is funny.

things look difficult - linking Credit Slips.

" . . . more credit card issuers are refusing to cut interest rates to help out consumers in trouble"
Here is the link.

One in ten homeowners are under water, also.

Everybody in the industry (and many out) should have seen this coming. I wrote this silliness sometime around 2004. My mien of outrage was not sufficient to convey an ongoing infinite thought process at the time, and the piece is weak. Things would be different now. (A rewrite and binding in paper form might be in the works once Julie and I land on the same planet again sometime.)

*sigh*

He said duck, you goose.
He said something is flying
just over your head.

insufficiencies,
no good service of process,
no jurisdiction

a bad customer,
the bank has now sued you-
note: certified mail.

true stories make dirty poems

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There is a suspicious package in the loading dock.

It has been inspected.

Ok, all clear.

A new poetry form to play with

I took note of an announcement at McSweeney's:

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is seeking poetry submissions of two very specific kinds: senryu and pantoums. For details, click here.

The senryu are a kind of poem (it seems to me) that may arrive fully formed in the mind, and require open-ness to the possibility of having one eventually. So, not something to dash off in a haze of hunger and fatigue. I still haven't written any, and might not ever.

The pantoum is a very delicious form. It appeals - rhythmic, repetitious, reminds me of the old IVOST series. It is like candy. This candy, particularly. I wrote two and submitted them to McS, but their particular use of the word "unpublished" suggests I not post them. I will say that one of them was slightly passive aggressive. Here is an inferior one I wrote in a spasm of anxiety about which pills I had taken in what order. What order? Doctor's order.

Everything turned out ok, no vomit, but there was a thunderstorm at 3 am and Bettie came and jumped on my bed trembling and panting and wouldn't lie down. I was a little shorter with her than I would have liked. The cat couldn't have cared less; he is such a steadying influence.

I can achieve certain goals.

A camera is purchased and should be here tomorrow. Then I will take pictures of things and there will be something to look at here. In the meantime, there is this poem about the homeless person who jumped off Spring Street a few days ago. I was sick that day and my car was in the shop anyway so I would have missed the whole thing regardless. Networks were the only source of information I have about this incident.

First Post

This is the first post. Good enough for now. I am going to buy a camera.