considering

flitting through and over and around winchester: what should i say? i couldn't make enough time for all the lovely persons involved. it can't be good nor altogether evil (!) that i really hate the idea of work these days. if you want to go back after a break, perfectly do, but the converse is also perfectly true. a conception of mysterious cosmic service convenes with the opposite. thank you, mighty claus, for enabling internet on my computer again after a year. this is sweet. now i have to clean my room

in a) seneces ditissimi b) senatores

yes, today was catering the third in a series. folks pay two to three thousand dollars a pop for a day dressing like british gamekeepers: there is much plaid, tattersall and otherwise, earth tones but mind you RICH earth tones; aloofness; baldness to bullet-tip on old men who went to uva, no doubt: they are bred with something of the horse, selected for panoramic sinuses and a thousand-count satin voice. but i, hired help though i was, dropped a petit toast livermousse-side down to the feet of the host.

the hostess, a hose: 'oh, i'm so very glad the senator got to make it today. he does love to tramp around shooting when he can. usually comes once a season, but lately he's been on the television every day!' many good clean folks making fun of the land's fat would have recorded this, 'O i'm SOO glad the senator...on TV...' but do not realize that articulation and careful pauses mark a gentleman or a lady, along with soft r's and never shouting. everyone was out shooting pheasants and after that, we waited for the senator, to descry his palpable humanity;

i've seen another senator dolled up and dragged ornamentally around. this was a few years ago, woodberry, The Game (maybe even The Hundredth Game) when a louisianan chum's parents paraded then the junior, now the senior senator of that state on their arm and/or lapel. was introduced. no big deal, but neither am i. later i was not much longer friends with this fellow who was not very interested, as was the case with most of these fine young citizens, in remaining buddies with a quer.

but today's senator was a gentleman. he didn't have the getup down to the nines- no breeches, no sea-blue or cerise kneesocks of finest combed angora, and it looked like he made a pass at all these things with a permutation of items from his senatorial wardrobe. it came out looking kind of silly; maybe this was the reason everyone else there (rather than simply swimming grinning brazen to him to shake his hand off, and keep a hangnail or a button) took to him with vicarious regret.

to ladysmith black mambazo

night before last i caught the end of this heralded series with this heralded sir SIR david attenborough or is he a lord by now? for its imperturbable or genial narrator. insects in depth, in color, acting a fool, by way of the hottest & coolest in new technology and lenses, so they looked the size of our everyday dogs and baboons. two summers ago when the cicadas buried winchester and missed us in charlottesville, he'd meanwhile touched down for a hot second somewhere in the northeast (maple bark and sugar leaves told me so) and filmed it there too, and we saw him perturbed only then, when the male cicada he was tantalizing with the female cicada sound- close enough to the snapping of fingers for his pet to follow it- cut the shit, made haste to desire his filleted head and cuddled his ear. pfoo! oh! i never! i had myself, after his o-british example, cooing for the rest of the night like teacozy dalloway in st. james' street. when the cicadas encountered winchester two summers ago i had wished they'd come here, too. i can remember the last time they ALL CAME OUT AT ONCE, when i was three, in certain friendly shades of sunlight that lit up all the cicadas and me zipping by one another, hot on our loopy way to nowhere,

also there was a Feature on insect supercities, afterwards, pursuant to a glass of wine and one of champagne, i walked home and fell into bed in contacts and unwashed- the last few weeks have me taking adult pride in going unwashed for a day or two- and promptly found myself in a dream, of which i remember very little except a hard-driving sense of function trumps all: so maybe i was a robot, maybe an ant. a shadow of antennae asking another pair remains to tell me it was the latter. certainly i remember no chrome and no silicone. i did wake up the morning tired still: champagne, or speedy delivery? sir david puts forth a glance, or perhaps a pheromone- quite unintentionally, you know- such that the ladies have crushed the others to bruising under their pandemonium, and he's had quite regularly to knock the extras aside with the face of a shovel. he revealed that army ants choose their new camps not on a dossier through central intelligence, but through a matrix of chance (imagine!) and the decisions of thousands of individual ants. so maybe i was telling myself the story of My Big Day as an Ant, when my intrepid scuttling led the others into, instead of around, this comfy rotten hole.

there was just a wrong number. i sounded inexplicably confused (who no this is hedge fine blooms) and the vigor of that guy's apology accorded with it

delights & queries

:: in the Netherlands, lesbian S&M clubs can receive government funding through some sort of 'gay emancipation' item
http://www.wildside.dds.nl /house_rules/house_rules-e.html
:: when I start moving again, I'll go outside and it's nice and get some lunch and read the new newspaper
:: Cathy is coming and we will dance
:: very nearly almost done with THAT thing that's been hanging over my head for a year and a half, it'll be done within three days
:: anti-Zionist orthodox jews in Tehran? the world is more complex than we thought
:: Kofi Annan is a snuggly-wuggly teddybear, now in the dulcet years of his denouement
:: "the shins changed lives in garden state with their amazing song"-connor mckay
:: o time for lunch

today's items

During sickness I finished this little book, this story by little Jew how you say, fresh off the boat from motherland? and then Counterfeiters (faux-monnayeurs! strain that through your teeth) by Frenchman. Then bought Pynchon and criticism and Joyce, because I did not have, but don't like Joyce much, shoot me if you will but 's kind of drudgery. This is only two hundred pages in. I can't read without thinking I should be doing something else. Til Friday I'm broke and it's reading in the evening. Someone show me the Way of Resourcefulness, or perhaps it means selling all items and squatting. Slug of a mind ain't having it. Get on. Get out.

But we had a fun party! Saturday we made quiche and mexican spaghetti and a keg. For Heifer International; I turn over a new leaf; I no longer harden my heart. Or maybe it seems like this is the most worthwhile charity I've seen. $210 raised, plus what we put in ourselves, gets us a water buffalo. I imagine it going to Cambodia. That is all

Dice Street

So the other day, Thursday 30 November 2006 I got a bunch of stitches in my hand- Friday before I cracked one of the larger vases we use at the Omni and filled it anyhow; vase degenerated even more in transit; Thursday we were changing these items out and I went to carry it to the dumpster (with intent to shatter violently as I could); jostled door, thicker part of vase collapsed under its own weight and guillotined my right hand from the pinkie to middle of palm. There's a lot of padding and tensile material that comprises the meat of your hand, I found, when this ribbon of fat decided to ooze from the gash and remind me of a liberated brain or the edge of a giant clam. Since has teemed with surrealities aided, no doubt, by this hydrocodone they gave me. The poor old guy in the bed next to me looked like he might not have made it- his wife was friendly and kind and for both their sakes I hope he did. She took it like a champ and there were a few apologetic little jokes he couldn't breathe to tell, but she knew them as well. And then since I escaped I feel socially lubricated or lucid enough, or free enough from my caustic sarcasm, to account for moving smoothly among a handful of friends I hadn't seen in a while, and an obscure pair of sexual encounters: I notice these things because I often want to escape my own skin, and in fits of momentary intensity I end up across some chasm even from the people I know and love best. Recently I read a self-congratulatory little book by some jerk named Paulo Coelho, and he (there's attempted no division there between author and narrator) would volunteer a reason that involved Living instead of being, maybe, but certainly some sort of self-imposed pleasure. That's no compelling or even interesting rationale. Nor is a chemical basis. It's just kind of nip to walk around and wave this leper's hand wrapped in spotty gauze.

Fury and a list

(saved and not posted, from Wednesday)

Get me the fuck out of here. I'm stagnating in Charlottesville- this has been a terrible day: I could stand not seeing another flower for a good long time, the weather's nasty, the power's out, and on top of all that it's hit me like a ton of bricks that I'm only getting bitterer and more ingrown here. I think I'll go to California; calculations need to be made to figure out how much I need to get there and get set up.

Yesterday's list: systematic governmental oppressions of the 20th century
:: Turkey against the Armenians, 1915-1917
:: Japanese internment camps, California, 1942-5
:: Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, 1956
:: Stalin's Great Purges, USSR, late 1930's
:: Preliminary stages and Endlösung der Judenfrage, German-controlled territory 1933-45
:: South African apartheid, 1948-1994
:: Israel's attitude toward the Palestinians, 1948-present
:: Darfur conflict, 2003-present
:: US-supported Contra activity in Nicaragua, 1978-1988
:: the Argentine National Reorganization Process, 1976-83
:: Yugoslav and Serbian repression of Kosovo, 1981-98
:: Treatment of dissenters during the presidency of Augusto Pinochet, Chile, 1973-90
:: the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, 1975-9
more, suggest

One way to suggest the possibility of infinity

After raiding the kitchen and retreating successfully I felt better; talked to Danny, felt even better; Uli called and we went out for a drink. We had a really great conversation and didn't spare gestures, either vocal or manual: so the range of angles to which my wrist will swivel grows daily. As for the conversation's alphabet, there were discussed actuarial exams, boyfriends, China, Danish royalty, English literature, fur coats, Gilgamesh, Heidegger, India, Japanese, kinky sex, luxury, Monaco, nasty, the Odyssey, playerhaterz, queens, Ryan, Shakespeare, turncoats, Uli, Vedas, women, existence, young men, and zillions of other things besides, each of which must displace one of those I've just listed.

More pressing dilemma

now: i am hungry. have hermited all day; stayed up all night in a furious whirlwind of myth and ritual, still. there is so much to collate and sort, and it's just now that i'm up to the task. so then i took a nap, and i'm famished. BUT it would prompt a fatal error if i were to run into another human and have to speak to it. about half an hour ago, jaime was wandering around the house- 'HALLOWWWWW? HALLOWWWWW?' and i just don't want to deal. she's still upstairs; the folks upstairs spend their leisure time sliding heavy wooden or rubber furniture against the grain of the floor. do you think i can go cook something and dart back into seclusion without being seen or heard? hiding from your housemates is only legit if you're not caught.

Autism

We're so comfortable, we want a callus around ourselves that protects us from the awful shit that's going down, or going to. I point out the fact that the people who make words (Romans and the rest of history) only inserted an 'o' to get to 'callous.' I have, and have had for a while, this dilemma rolling around my mind. There are close to seven billion people in the world- India and China can make the twisted boast that a billion persons walk or beg inside their borders. Most of the persons I know are fortunate: we have food at as many meals as we want, we have beds in heated rooms; I don't fine mine well-heated enough. That I can even make that complaint!

An argument for concern seems redundant to me- my clearest thoughts always push me to kindness. And the ideal assumes that each human life is infinitely valuable, which is also to say that each human life is worth the same as every other. They deal in potential- within himself, every human has at least the potential to consider his existence valid. Most probably do. We're not up against it yet, but there's enough disaster looming ahead of us in time that we might come up against these assumptions in a way we haven't so far. There are many possibilities that arise with ignoring global warming, for instance; the Stern Review indicates that allowing the 2 to 3 degrees centigrade rise in global temperature will correspondingly jumpstart the biggest market failure in human history. One upshot: 200 million persons permanently displaced, a good number from several of the world's largest cities, as the Greenland ice sheet and other huge blocks of ice melt and raise sea levels. These aren't the kind of natural disasters that take people's lives by their own force, though- people are going to fight over what's left as crop yields fall and the land on which they've lived is covered in water. This is just one problem, and I don't expect governments to give it more than lipservice before the effects are irreversible- apparently, the nature of this problem makes it pick up speed of its own accord. There are others: last year we had a good time with a book that gloated over oil running out and pitched a similar story, except with disaster coming from within the bounds of human activity. Unrest, combined with rogue groups in possession of nuclear weapons, adds another angle to this picture.

In light of these things I can see how we want to get our fill now, and how the Lord's Resistance Army and Darfur and other 'third-world' concerns don't really move us. But the commodification of human life makes a more willing partner to a surplus of it, with the outcome that it won't be shameful to have second-class citizens. My question is (I address this first to America on immigrants, and then to Israel, for introspection's sake) how are they chosen?

Symphony orchestra

As Jaime-jin plays the viola, the rest of us made a tacit pledge to go see her play in yesterday's orchestra concert. I was torn at every fork where I met a decision. The definition of having fun is this: an engagement enough that I don't notice myself yearning for elsewhere. Of course the auditorium teemed with old white people- a few of them were less terrifying than the others. One woman had her face painted all silver: an operatic mermaid or Medea. I think I managed not to catch death. There was so little elbowroom that the ushers had to shove a few walkers and their walked between the organpipes, or corral them at a corner of the ceiling.

I wonder idly how you go and get involved to become Music Director in the first place. Sinews in this process aren't very clear. She had an aureole of white hair and the benevolence of a harvest king in all her candid shots, to be located in the program. More feverishly I wonder how you go and write music for an orchestra. Well, for starters, you learn enough that you can shoot off the lingo of artistic sound and strain it thin enough that it floats in the vapors of the symphony hall. And then? Before us we have so many crazed little Mozarts and then Beethovens seized up in an august fury. They choose to decline for the greater good of their creations. Haydn looks too stately for the fever, and Bach looks too jowly. But maybe, given that each artist gets a finite volume of charisma, there falls into place a balance and its compensations. The composer is fashioning a fantastic creature who might not even fit in the animal kingdom, and he bleeds himself for it. The creature's made to dance an absurd dance. You first glimpse life in the twitching of the violinists' bows, all together, like a school of fish swimming under a battle of navies. The cellists enact a more sober, horizontal motion. He gives his life to funding this creature; he whinges and stumbles, collapses satisfied, and kicks it in the street.

A small critic objects. How do Bach and his seventeen-odd children allow this model? But surely Philip Glass is skulking around here somewhere, sniffing out gas leaks. We sigh and say, 'and yet it moves.'

Hello,

I have three mod little dots in lieu of a name or title. You don't even know what that means, how that thrills me- I'm broke for omens recently. I thought there was a really good one the other day, the kind I'd want most living in a civilization that valued haruspices and readers of birds: was cooking a pair of eggs. I broke one and two yolks came out. In the interval, I wondered whether the other would come out a twin as well, and that's it. And where it could be creepy, hormones weren't involved- these were, of course, vegetarian hormone-free cage-free free-range treehugging chickens from whom these eggs came. But then other eggs came out twins as well, something like six of the dozen, so really all the upshot there was was that my eggs came out yellower than usual.

I also have a kind of boil on the side of my face. Last night we went dancing and I would try and be smooth, or something, but the boil set out to sabotage my efforts at dancing instead of player-hating (come on, I'm white) by making faces and undercutting my comments at every turn. Were I a saint, a hero or the Ubermensch, I wouldn't even know what I was saying, and the boil would never have existed.