Autoblogography

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• UPDATE! Friends/MST3Kers only: Servo-Crowatians.
• UPDATE! Only my loyalest: Autoblogography!
  
• Revolting.
• Suffrage Green Preservation Society. (h/t)
• Hitchens is mirrorless.
• UPDATE! IOZ on the above.
• Astringent Corrective.
• Uh, yeah, this too. Why Blegsylvania fascinates me: daily reminders that every power discourse is the power discourse of high school. 
• On not being a grown-up.
• UPDATE! Pleasepleaseplease! because a fat white pig from Mississippi is the future!

• Only way to get off this chain gang.
• Full of fail.
• UPDATE! Passive-Aggressive Vegan Grocery Cashier: A Day in the Life.
• One reason WAMU no longer gets any of my money.
• UPDATE! Your Mocopolice.
• Newcastle's punishment for relegation? (h/t)

• USMNT win aided by South African hookers!
• Fuck-Me Jig!
• UPDATE! Still not going.
• UPDATE! I will be going to RFK July 28 to see United play Chalatenango.

• Aleksandar Hemon on vacations, reading, Yugoslavia.
• Tradition of Anti-Traditional Writing.
• Stefan Zweig.
• The joys of Nicholson Baker.
• Colum McCann?
• I hadn't though of Kenneth Fearing in literally decades.
• Clapton, Michelob, blahblahblah.
• Sculpting your iTune library.
• Today's Listening Assignment (in my head, not on bleg, forporate cuckers).
• UPDATE! Just put in my head, be in yours.
• Today's Listening Assignment (in case you missed it last time).
• UPDATE! A band called Elephant Stone.
• I love this song. So shoot me, I'm a rube for hooks.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

Updates later. Or not.

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In My Own Backyard

James Tate

I've seen fox, deer, wild turkey, pheasant, skunk,
snakes, moles, guinea hens. I've throw a boomerang
that never came back.

I've played croquet, badminton, wiffle ball, frisbee.
My flower garden has never amounted to much, but there it is,
blacked-eyed Susans and tiger lilies pushing up
against the odds.

There's an old weathered chicken-coop full
of empty paint cans, a homemade wheelbarrow.

Beyond that is an ersatz compost-heap - I'm not consciously
composting anything.

A mulberry tree, a red maple, a spirea bush.

My neighbor hits a golf ball into my yard once in a while.
I watch him from the kitchen window.
I share a laundry line with him and his wife.
We catch up on the neighborhood news about once a year:
he died, she left him, they took a trip to Canada.

Sometimes I walk the property line, first the side
adjacent to the forest, past the birch trees
and disused doghouse, then along the vacant field
where local kids played softball forty years ago -
the pitcher's rubber is still in place.

I try to appear as if I am inspecting something in the grass,
but I am a little daft, touched as they say,
a little on my way out to pasture.

I grab my throat and wrestle me to the ground.
"There, there," I say, "lighten up ol' boy."
"It's a free country, it's your own backyard."
I listen intently: sky and daisies burlesque each other,

bivouacked between worlds.

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