Metamorphosism

Bush woos gangsta vote

I suppose if I'm going to link that then I ought to link this and this as well.

Bush twins eat opossum testicles live on Fox television

Fog this morning.
Mmm, fog.
There was a wreck on the freeway, so probably not everyone feels the way I do.
I woke up in a good mood.
My daughter cuddled with us in the big bed last night. The big daughter, Beta. I'm writing it here so I don't forget it. Actually, she was just going to cuddle, but she fell asleep and stayed there the whole night. Beta the blanket thief. I woke up at midnight and got up to turn off the hall light, then moved to Beta's bed where I had both a blanket and a pillow to myself. Alpha, on the other hand, spent the night in the big bed without any blanket. Which was okay since she fell asleep in her lounge wear.
We were all exhausted yesterday, I guess.
When I woke up in the morning a certain stuffed rabbit was on the floor, although it had started the night in bed with me, making me wonder what I had dreamed. I never remember my dreams lately. Except the wild nightmares.
Anyway, sitting there at breakfast I said out loud, I'm in such a good mood today.
Anyway.
I was looking at people in their cars yesterday. They all looked so desperate and sad. What a world, where desperation, fear and dread are so abundant, where depression, grief, aggression and frustration are the sane reactions and the only solution seems to be an array of pills or walking on hot coals.
When your conscience hits you knock it back with pills.
(Had Led Zeppelin in the car stereo this morning until the fucker started to skip.)
People looked so isolated and sad. So oblivious to the love and beauty around us.
Because it's there, man.
If we could only be made aware of it. Of our fundamental love for each other, our connection to each other.
If you could only make everyone aware of that, I thought. If you could only make everyone aware of that. There must be a ton of money in that, I thought.

Condoleeza Rice sex video

If the day went, you know, directly from your morning commute back to bed, that would be best some days. Some days, you would be ahead of the game if they ended right then.
Like, I mean, it's still pitch dark, you're in the kitchen head-on-the-table tired waiting for the coffee machine to finish its brewing cycle and while you wait you go outside to look for the moon and it's warm as a summer evening (16 degrees celsius) and you really have to look for the moon, because although it is full it is in the middle of a total lunar eclipse too.
You finally find it over the neighbor's house with the barking German shepherd, about 100 degrees from where you expected it (over the neighbor's house with the biting tortoise), emerging from the Earth's shadow like a grey pollywog out of its egg sac.
Your wife goes and wakes up the kids so they can see it. They look and go back to bed.
You forget why your wife was mad at you and maybe she does too.
You drink coffee. You forget to eat anything.
The sunrise is the best of all. It's that nice light again. You wish the sun wouldn't come up, would just sit there just below the horizon until all the chickens gave up and climbed out of their coops and scratched around the flowerbeds, squinting in the dim golden pink light to see if they turned up anything good.
If you could go to bed right then, you'd be ahead of the game. You'd be sustained sufficiently to begin the next day already.
Just skip work, skip trying to decide what to eat for lunch, or whether to skip lunch and buy some more time for your cell phone. Skip trying to start outlining that novel, skip the drive home and everything else.
You wonder if you could sort of close your eyes and coast through it.
You wonder how long it will take for this depression to peter out.
You wonder, if you found the energy instead, if it could be a productive day, friends won and enemies influenced.
You wonder all sorts of things.

Hello, is this history?

Get your war on #42

Civic duty

Okay, voted.
Now if I can just remember to mail the absentee ballot back in time.

Do not feed the naugas

It was a 1968 Pontiac something-something station wagon. It was blue. I would have to have been ten or eleven; I feel smaller in the memory, but I would have to have been at least that old because my parents never bought cars new back then. On the way home from the beach, on a long, straight empty stretch of road, mom in the passenger seat, us three kids in the back seat with our crackers and games and the coffee can full of urine (Dad was a busdriver and didn't like to stop for anything) dad stepped on it. (On the accelerator, not the coffee can.)

He floored it.

"What are you doing?" my mom asked him in a voice that suggested white knuckles and fingernails digging into blue imitation leather upholstery.

"Cleaning the cobwebs out," he said.

I looked over the top of the seat at the speed-o-meter. He got the needle all the way to the right, to where it maxxed out at 120 mph. Then he took his foot off the accelerator pedal and we coasted back down to 65.

I did that once in February 1981 in Czechoslovakia, which has (or at least had then) some long straightaways and nice flat freeways en route to Poland. I was driving a Polish woman to Cracow in her blue Volkswagen Scirocco and got it up to 240 kph before she started screaming.

It's fun to do that when you're writing, pile on the hyperbole until you burn out the cobwebs. It works best with humor. If people think you're serious about it it sounds stupid, so you act like you're not serious.

It was pitch dark this morning and I couldn't see a damn thing. It was drizzling and my headlights seemed to be powered by fading AA batteries. The heat was on and so was the Bylsma/Bach CD and Beta was snoozing in the passenger seat. Sometimes I wish I understood her better. Maybe I do, and just amn't sure. Maybe I understand no one really; bad for someone who wants to write, on the one hand, but I have sworn allegiance to bewilderment and confusion, on the other.

I posted to Painsuit a story I wrote about 15 1/2 years ago, just before Beta was born. I posted it because I recently found it again and hadn't posted anything there for so long.

Re-reading it, I saw it was not brilliant but also I seem to have worked harder on the structure end of things back then. It still needs work, but it's not a bad story. It's interesting to see how I've changed and how I've stayed the same since then.

In particular, from a non-literary point of view, I found three things most interesting:

• There is an "adult bookstore" in it, which no longer exist in that form so much, due I suppose to the Internets etc.
  
• There are no cell phones
  
• The description of the one character at the end proved to be a near-perfect match for the way Beta looked when she was born

This story, in fact, was one of about three I wrote back then that came true in unexpected ways. Since most of what I wrote back then -- no, all of it -- was negative or scary or sad, I quit writing for a long time.

Oblivio has a story about this very thing, called End of Story, that you should go read. He writes better than I do.

Here is a bit of the description from my story:

...face was purple... tubes ran up ... nose... respirator tube ...
... so tiny... on bleached white sheets.
...I stroked his forehead. All his hair had been shaved, eyebrows, everything. "I never knew you were so tiny," I said. There were big yellow and purple bruises on his arms where needles and tubes were taped. I sat on the edge of his bed and listened to the machines click and hum and peep. I ... held his tiny hand. ... I cradled him in my arms and he felt hot. It wasn't until I saw tears falling on my skin that I realized I was crying...
I was so close to him that I could feel my own hot breath bouncing back when I whispered. I smelled acrid medicine on his skin. I held him close. He was so light in my arms, like a single breath.

Whatever. Writing the story, I thought I was describing a little guy who had been beaten, but when my daughter was born 10 weeks early, it was too close for comfort.

Mission Accomplished

George W. Bush and the 14 points of fascism

[Via Eeksy-Peeksy]

Hi

On my home planet we recognize the fundamental oneness of all beings and therefore don't get too exercised over names. This of course causes problems for my fellow planetarians and me while here on Earth, where people say things like "Hi, Mig," when they meet you and sort of expect you to say their name, too, when you issue your countergreeting, or at least react more positively to that if not actually a little disappointed when you just say, "Hi," back or at best, "Hi, beautiful" because who, face it, who doesn't like to be called beautiful?

Except there's no way to say that in German that doesn't sound even more stupid than it already does in English. So yesterday evening, when I went to this meeting after getting a haircut at a place where everyone was dropping things -- first the customer next to me dropped her cigarettes, then some insert fell out of the magazine I was reading, where I read the coolest Plutarch quote: "Der Geist ist kein Schiff, das man beladen kann, sondern ein Feuer, das man entfachen muss," (which really got me thinking (it translates as "The spirit (or intellect (or mind)) is not a boat that you can load, but rather a fire you have to set") because I had always sort of seen the intellect, the mind, as this big warehouse, or maybe this big gigantic library to which you are adding books upon books during your education; and now I realize, it's a pyre, or the books are not just books, they're fuel and not worth a damn until you light them on fire, it's the conflagration that counts, not the pile of wood (give me a second to get my puncuation straight here...) and then the hair stylist's apprentice (Goethe version, not Walt Disney) dropped a stack of towels -- everyone was all, you know, "Hi, Mig," and I was all, "Hi, hi, hi, how you doing, hi, what's new" wondering if my name problem was a sign of senility and convincing myself I'd had it all my life, which I have and in addition to feeling stupid about that, I also felt stupid because I had sauce from the kebab sandwich (kebab bits in a toasted pita bread, with lettuce and tomato bits, with a big squirt of kebab sandwich sauce) I had gone and bought after my haircut to kill time becasue I was still early for the meeting all down the leg of my suit because I had stupidly tried eating it on the go and by the time I thought, "I'd better be careful with this, it's pretty juicy," I already had the sauce down my leg and the sauce was white of course and the girl had only given me one little dinky napkin with the sandwich, and it quickly transformed itself from a napkin into a little ball of cellulose saturated with white sauce and was more painting the sauce around the leg of my suit than wiping it off, and there I was at the meeting hoping the sauce will dry invisibly and it did go pretty far in that direction, leaving just these suspicious-looking grey traces which I tried to scratch off surreptitiously but unfortunately the stains just turned vivid white where scratched so I had to darken them, again surreptitiously, with a bit of saliva, which probably made an even odder impression than my inability to remember names. Stupid humans.

Ireland's green

Gamma: Ireland's green, right?
Mig: Pretty green. It rains a lot.
Gamma: We'll go there sometime, right?
Mig: You bet.
Gamma: Austria's yellow.
Mig: Sure.
Gamma: It is. And America, America's blue.
Mig: [Sigh]
Gamma: Red, what country is red? Iraq is red, because of all the war there.
Mig: ...

It's like bumping into someone you used to be crazy about on the street and wondering what you ever saw in them

I think I will be skipping this this year.

Could this mean mental health is just around the corner?

Handshake

He has one of those handshakes like forklift would have. It's weird: he has such a manly face, yet it looks so pretty on his daughter, who totally inherited it.
"Hi," he said.
No, wait. Actually, it was me who spoke first. I said, "servus," because we were in Austria. This was yesterday evening. "Servus" means "hi," more or less. I had seen him when I got out of the car to go into the DVD rental place, but only out the corner of my eye and hadn't recognized him. I told him as much.
"Returning a video?" he said. He shook my hand.
I said something like, Yes, and asked him what he was doing there. He said it had been raining and gestured at his bike in the back of his station-wagon.
"Raining, huh," I said. Everything was pretty dry, but there were puddles around. I assumed his wife had met him there to drive him the rest of the way home etc., cause there his bike was, right, in the back of the car.
"Well, it was raining pretty hard," he said. As it had been. On my way home, I had noticed a huge rainbow in my rear view mirror.
"Isn't that a great sunset?" I said, "Look at those clouds."
It had been a great day. The sunrise had been nice too, and I didn't know yet that I was going to suck badly in my cello lesson.
I said bye and he also did and I drove away. I saw him go into the drugstore and talk to someone who I then recognized as his daughter, my daughter's friend. One of her friends. She has more than one.

Guest post: Mig's cello

You start out as what, spruce, growing two hundred years up the side of a mountain then they cut you down and age you for another fifty or so. It's a grandfather - father - son - grandson business. Eventually you're a cello.

Eventually you're a cello. In the right hands: wow. You're the king. Even there in your case, leaned in the corner of the room: pure potential.

Look, in Mig's defense I'll admit he had an especially bad day yesterday. It didn't seem bad to him until he got to his cello lesson then he finally noticed.

Still, it was painful. I felt like I was watching Michael J. Fox try to eat Froot Loops with chopsticks on a bad day. Or: Larry Flynt getting a lap dance. Whatever.

OTOH, Mig did learn something important that might help him vastly, about the relationship of the white and the black keys on the piano with his finger positions.

We'll see.

Hyena

"If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing 'Hail to the Chief.'"

Endorsement

In view of the disasters the past four years have brought to the world, metamorphosism.com whole-heartedly endorses this morning's sunrise. What started out dark as night and deerless turned, in the space of just a few minutes, into a glory of pinks, blues, greys and greens so intense that if you painted them, you could only sell the painting in a furniture store, and no one tried to crash into me on the road today (in stark contrast to the fools let loose on the weekend).

And Beta was nice to me.

Light, again

One deer in a dark field this morning. Traffic was light.
Cold, cold and rainy. It felt almost like summer. The darkness shimmered, drawing me out, away from the back wall, towards the windows again.
When we were kids, we used to hold our hands in the icewater bucket when we were cranking ice cream in the summer, just to see who could stand it the longest. Yesterday, last night, I listened to Gamma's Shakira CD all the way home.
The plot to a movie blossomed in my mind, starring Shakira. One-sentence summary: "Different enough from "Being John Malkovic" so they couldn't really sue you." And two short stories in progress developed a bit as well. Simmered. Bubbled in the crock pot of my head, with its matte no-stick surface.
This morning I listened to Shakira for a bit, then replaced her with the Clash. I thought about true love. I wonder whether the love of a parent for a child is the truest of all, because you don't want anything from your kid, you only want good things for them. A partner, you want more sex from them or less sex, you want money or you want them to help out more with the housework or you want them to leave you alone or to say they love you. You want them to tell you more about their feelings or you want them to shut the hell up for once. Kids, all you want is their welfare maximised. You want them to study, but only because it will make them successful, and success you assume has a positive correlation with happiness.
And so on.
People who did not experience perfect love from their parents, or people who did: who is luckiest when they become parents, those who finally get a chance to create the perfect love they missed, or those who have half a chance of really managing it because they know what it is?
Only, does anyone get perfect love when they're kids? Is any parent capable of giving the absolute love a kid needs? Are we all doomed to fall short?
Quarter-past eight in the morning and it's still grainy grey out, drizzling and beautiful already.

You forgot Poland

I'm growing tired of the current title up at the top of this page, "You Forgot Poland," and would like to change it, say (after listening to the radio on the way home yesterday) to "Lucky that my breasts are small and humble," or (after listening to DePhazz on a sampler this morning titled "Bar Lounge Classics") "Looks like time for that certain holiday." Eventually it will change, sometime soon, but for now it stays since traffic has climbed by about 50% due to random innocent googleetceteraers coming by (repeat traffic has remained unchanged).

The only time I've seen a larger increase in traffic due to specific searches was shortly after 9/11 when the phrase "Bin Laden Jokes" ended up in a post somehow, and produced quite a spike.

Obviously, I have nothing to say today. The hedgehogs appear to be hibernating. It turns out that Central European hedgehogs are the world's sleepiest mammals, moving my wife and me into 2^nd and 3^rd places. Also the turtle tortoise has hidden herself beneath some leaves in her box. My mother-in-law wanted my father-in-law to bathe the tortoise yesterday; luckily my wife caught them before they had disturbed the animal.

And so it goes. Wish I had a TV to watch the "final" "presidential" "debates" tonight. From what I've heard, the bar has been set so low for Bush that he somehow can't lose. Scowling? Smirking? Confused? Defensive? Senile? Running amok? Cheating? Stupid or just brain-damaged? At least he didn't reach into his pants and play with his poop.

It's a sad world we live in.

Funny at times, but sad.

What concepts do not exist in the English language?

Interesting thread at metafilter.

Bush senile?

Maybe it's not just stupidity after all.
http://home.comcast.net/~blogitics/BushTenYrs4MB.mov

[via DailyKos]

[The video appears to have been moved to here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1019.htm. Thanks to Bigtime Patriot for pointing that out.]

Annihilating the ego

I made up a Buddhist joke while walking around on my lunch break, but it turned out not to be so funny.

I'm making progress in the ego-annihilation process, however. Basically, my ego did not exist yesterday. If by ego you mean that part of our brain that remembers to do things and otherwise organizes us. Yesterday I thought about an appointment I had in the evening so much, so continuously, all day long, that I ended up forgetting when it was and thinking it was an hour later and ultimately missing it. At home last night, I forgot to do every single last thing my wife asked me to do. How can a normal person forget so many things? No idea. I lay there in bed thinking, Ahhh, when she reminded me again. At first I thought, hell, I'll just do it in the morning but it was too much stuff.

So I got dressed and did them.

Have I mentioned this already? I've been thinking about it ever since I read it quoted on someone's blog. A Buddhist idea about not judging people, and how "judge" means not only condemning others or looking down on them, but also admiring or looking up to people.

It's a fascinating idea. Ever since reading it, I've been all like, Bono, sheeyit, dude, and Mother Teresa? Nice wimple, baby.

Guest post, Mig's turtle #3

When fall comes and you want to hide, you must do this:
Choose the right place.
Go where it is quiet.
Go where there are sticker bushes.
Go where things are the color of your shell.
From above, my shell is the color of bark chips and dead rose leaves.
I can dig down a foot if the earth is soft.
Unfortunately, under the big rose bush it is hard and rocky after six inches.
Still, cover myself up with bark chips and leaves, and They can look for me all night.
Calling.
Shining their waning little AAA pocket flashlights and calling my name.
Go to hell, it's autumn.
Even just six inches down, it's temperate and quiet and peaceful.
What if one of them steps on me?
Mother-f*cker
That would suck.
But they're not going to step directly under no rosebush.
If they do though...
But they're not.
Their voices fade faster than their flashlight batteries.
They give up and walk off, their office clothes yellow with sunflower pollen.
It is dark and quiet.
It is night, and I am buried and hidden.
Mother-f*cker, put me down.
Sneaky bastard.
Go ahead, put me in the habitat.
I've found a possible crack, I'll climb out tomorrow when you're at work.
If I don't fall over onto my back or get wedged in vertically like yesterday.
And furthermore: tortoise, fool. Not turtle.

Rock on!!!

Elfriede Jelinek awarded Nobel Prize for Literature!!!!!

Woet!!

Just wondering

Oh, never mind.

Debate spotter

This is very cool.

[Via South Knox Bubba]

No volcanoes

"You were coughing last night, dad."
"I have to stop smoking."
"You shouldn't smoke at all."
"You're right."
"Are there tornadoes in Austria?"
"Nope."
"No volcanoes either?"
"Nope."
"Good. Austria is my favorite place to live."

I got Gamma off to school this morning. We had that conversation while getting her dressed and brushing her teeth.

I woke up with a headache this morning. I had been up late with Beta, watching "Underworld" (? Is that right? The one about the werewolves and vampires fighting?) and drinking wine (just me - she's not interested in wine yet).

It was hard to tell who was who during most of the film. They all had long hair, most of them, but the vampires washed theirs. They all wore long leather coats. Up close, the lycans looked like bikers or heavy metal band members, whereas the vampires were more, what, Placebo-fan-looking or something. When they were battling, it was often hard to tell who was who.

The only sure way to tell was, if they're smoking they're a vampire. None of the lycans smoked. The entire movie, in fact, was an allegory about the ongoing battle between smokers and non-smokers.

Overall, the movie rocked: acting sucked, script sucked, photography sucked, costumes sucked, direction sucked, weapons sucked, cars sucked, it was eminently confusing but, you know, chick in tight shiny black outfit.

There was something about the Michael guy being important somehow, I'm not sure what, either the movie was confusing on that point or Alpha kept coming into the room talking to us or both. But he at some point or another, the beginning or the end, ends up combining lycan and vampire in a single person, which makes him stronger.

And it occurred to me that I, too, combine smoker and non-smoker in a single person. I detest smoking and what it does to the way I feel and the way I smell. I hate the way it tastes and I hate supplying money (indirectly, since I still bum all my smokes) to, doubtlessly, rich, powerful lying immoral monopolists.

On the other hand, I continue to smoke, off and on. Only in my case, I fear it doesn't give me triple-celled platelets. Or maybe it does, but they don't make me "stronger than both".

Miserable failure

Nice videos.

Boy, is this right

The President is not your daddy.

Maybe it was the light

Because the light started being perfect on Monday morning.

If it was Monday, and if it was the light I remember. Because you know I am always mixing up events and properties, switching them, only it's not mixing them up exactly, they're just all equidistant in my memory. But this gentle, sweet light that morning just drew me out.

Light that is harsh you don't want to view too closely, you stand back at the far wall, clear across the room, and look out the windows from fifteen feet away; this morning in question was just the opposite, with a blanket of fog over the river just thin enough so it could still reflect the pink and gold the sunrise stained the clouds with. More fog in the woods and fields, all full of deer. Sweet, gentle light that brings you across the room of your head until you're right there, face pressed up against the glass of your eyeballs, not wanting to miss a single detail.

Light that says You must remember every single thing. Paint it if you can or take a picture of it or write it down if you like, but remember every little thing.

When I look at the webcam of the Internet's biggest camgirl, Mt. St. Helens, I am reminded of the harshness of the light where I grew up, because I grew up just a few miles from that mountain. The light there, in the summers, in my memory, was too bright to look at without squinting and drove me far back into my skull.

No one can paint Greece. Correct me if I'm wrong. The say the light there is perfect, and it is bright and clear and unique, but I'm wondering whether the idea of it being perfect is influenced by it being Greek, as in, Here we are! Greece! Naked beaches! I'm going to try ouzo again, only not get sick this time! But if the light really were perfect, you'd think you could paint it.

Although, that reminds me of one sunrise many years ago: Alpha's face golden sitting on a dock somewhere on Crete. Not just her face, the rest of my then-girlfriend too: faded blue teeshirt and jeans, long straight blond hair, golden in the sunrise, the most perfect moment I've ever seen. Even if I could paint, I'd still leave that image alone. Although, here I am, trying to describe it. We slept on the beach, which was made of stones and filthy with tar, and woke to that sunrise.

Maybe I just have a thing about sunrises, except this light here has been perfect ever since Monday. The sunsets driving home are just as fine, and the light in between as well: right there, face pressed up against my eyeballs is where you'll find me. Taking it all in.

You forgot Poland

You forgot Poland.

[Probably distracted by Peacedividend.]

And who are you?

Jeong-A is not a charming globe-trotting Korean lawyer who just quit her job in Hong Kong, but is actually a middle-aged Australian professor of semantics whose wife left him because he spends all his time chatting on the computer with what he thinks are young women, but are in fact middle-aged men like himself posing as young women.

Careful what you leave around

When I was small and my little brother even smaller, he ate some thyroid pills my grandmother had left out on a counter at her house. We got to watch him get his stomach pumped at the hospital, through a tube stuck down his nose. A nun spoke to me, which was a bit frightening as I wasn't used to nuns.

So I should have expected this to happen: I left my Irish traditional music CDs out and now Gamma has discovered her love for traditional Irish music. No more Xtina or Shakira for her. There's a stack of CDs of jigs and reels and slow airs in the kitchen now, next to the CD player.

I come home rather late from work nowadays so it's mostly over by the time I get home, but sometimes Alpha is still hanging from the ceiling by her finger- and toenails. The only mitigating detail in this for Alpha is that Gamma seems to have good taste, and plays the better-quality stuff.