I have a dozen or so daily me and mine, two-three dozen more who check every two, three days, and three-four dozen who every couple of weeks, months, think, I haven't pinged this guy in while, why the fuck did I bookmark or blogroll him in the first place. I get hits on the googles I've mentioned, especially eformeday eoplepay (the majority of my hits, truthfully), but on a good, busy day before the election, I was good for a thirteen, fourteen dozen genuine and deliberate individual hits. I'm nobody, in spite of, despite my best efforts.
I suck, but not enough to drive away that many readers - many of whose own blogs have gone sucky and/or dormant - so suddenly on the riptide of my post-election suckiness(?). To be that sucky now implies I was that unsucky then, and while demonstrably not true, it hasn't been that more so recently.
This is true: in the months leading up to the election, I wrote in this tablet
with strict rules: page lines must be completely filled - no paragraph breaks, with line breaks, marked with /s when writing poetry - and only blue, purple, black, or dark maroon ink permitted.
On November 10, digging through my desk at work looking for bleh, I found a still shrink-wrapped Moleskin and all the pens of bright colors banished to desk drawer bottom by above-tablet's rules. Started writing in it that night, just poetry initially, with no line rules, ink rules, any rules, and am smitten.
Haven't written in master tablet since, and while I began with the full complement of blues and purples in new tablet, looking through new tablet last night, the reds, oranges, and pinks are dominating.
Everyone's exhausted, giftmas is coming, making fun of stupid isn't fun anymore, plus hollering for beating the bigger-pigs is gone, and the bwahalessness of defending our pig while pig-stuck on the .06% less shitty rule looms. What fucking rubes.
Plus everything is in recession. We don't know half of how shitty deep shittiness is gonna be. Considering how shitty we think it's gonna be, holy fuckingfuck, that too.
*
HOLLYHOCKS IN THE FOG
August Kleinzahler
Every evening smoke blows in from the sea,
sea smoke, ghost vapour
of lost frigates, sunken destroyers.
It hangs over the eucalyptus grove,
cancels the hills,
curls around garbage sacks outside the lesbian bar.
And every evening the black bus arrives,
the black Information bus from down the Peninsula,
unloading the workers at the foot of the block.
They wander off, this way and that, into the fog.
Young, impassive, inlanded within their tunes:
Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire....
From this distance they seem almost suspended,
extirpated, floating creatures of exile,
as the walk past the Victorian facades
and hollyhocks in their fenced-in plots,
red purple apricot
solitary as widows or disgraced metaphysicians.
Perhaps they're exhausted, overwhelmed by it all:
spidering the endless key words, web pages,
appetite feeding on itself:
frantic genealogists, like swarms of killer bees.
The countless, urgent inquiries:
the poor Cathars and the Siege of Carcassonne -
what can these long-ago misfortunes tell us of ourselves, of life -
Epinephrine-induced response,
Ryne Duren + wildpitches + 1958...
Knowledge a trembling Himalayas of rubble:
Huitzilopochtili, Chubby Checker...
But for now they are done, till the bus comes again tomorrow.
There is nothing further to be known.
The fog, like that animate nothingness
of Lao-Tzu's sacred Tao,
has taken over the world, and, with night setting in,
all that had been, has ever been, is gone,
gone but for the sound of the wind.
*
- Elric is invited to dinner, has story and pictures.
- OBAMYFUCKINGGOD!
- Hacktacular!
- Sasha wishes you merry (depression-tainted) giftmas.
- Hacktacular!
- Pomo lexicon!
- Cultural ignorance or overt racism. I'm more interested in the Wal-Mart* storm-troopers, actually.
- True, this.
- Down TV Memory Lane.
- Post Book World's Top Ten, plus fiction list.
- Please look at wrd.wthn.wrd.wthn.wrd.
- Cello-love.
- College Radio.
- Please don't forget it's Zappadan! Reminding everyone again, it's not the god you believe in, it's how you believe in your god.
*