Drudgery Report

Brian told me last night I needed to post something here since it's been several days. Alas, the boy's right. There's just not much to write about. Usual round of things: gardening, reading, trying to write, etc etc etc.

~*~

It's the damnedest thing, really. It's fall now, we've had the equinox and everything, but it's still pushing 90 degrees here. Leaves are coloring and crisping and littering the yard but it's still frigging hot. Crazy. I want it to be autumn. I want to wear sweaters, cook soups and stews (but no those hideous Rachel Ray "stoup" things.)

~*~

It appears as though I'm tapped to read again next month, this time in concert with my friend Eric. I need to haul ass and get these new poems worked up.

~*~

My friend Minda sent me this list of "real life plot twists of famous authors" from Mental Floss. It's not a bad diversion. Some of them I knew, some I didn't think were necessarily "twistish" but some are gold.

2. Horatio Alger, Jr.

Apparently, the author of more than 120 "rags-to-riches" books featuring hard-working, highly moral young heroes was also an admitted pederast.

Before finding success as an author, Alger was a minister at a Unitarian Church in Brewster, Massachusetts, where he was accused of sexually assaulting two young boys. Alger admitted his guilt, but left town before the news hit the street.

Later, he wound up in New York City, where he penned hundreds of best-selling books for and about young boys, which went on to grace the shelves of homes, schools and church libraries across America.

Blame Canada.

Modes

Ach du Lieber! Chris Crocker...you know...the "leave Britney alone" guy from YouTube...has a tv development deal for a show called (I shit thee not) "The Chris Crocker Experience." More here. (h/t Brian.)

~*~

New poems cooking. Working early drafts in long hand, this round. It's always curious to me when I change how I work as the poems generate...sometimes it just has to be hand-written. There's a difference in how the poems turn out for me.

~*~

Tuesday night I went to a reading that was positively divine. A much better experience than my brush with kulture the previous week. A totally different style of reading and presenting poems than I generally see, and all the more exciting for that fact. Very performative and joyous. Not overly solemn or "meaningful." Declaimed from memory (a talent I just do NOT have, despite doing theatre) and much talk about "saying" the poems as opposed to "reading."

Caesurae

I've been fixated on pause and breath and rest and space, not just in terms of poetry but real life. It's getting to be that time--almost autumn, when it seems everything is space and rest. The gardens are giving up their last, though some determined plants are hanging on--there are a few zinnias in the beds that are as strong now as they were in early August. I need to work out a plan for dead-heading and collecting seeds from certain annuals for next year.

~*~

Harvested the last few salvageable tomatoes from my home beds last night. By this point I'm sick of canning and cold-packing. So I decided I'd make some tomato soup. I opted to make it with vegetable broth instead of purely cream (this also helped me get rid of some produce from the fridge that I needed to deal with (parsley, shrooms, bits of onion, celery and carrots.)) It turned out better than I'd hoped. Today is grey and drizzly--so it made a perfect lunch.

How to Rob...Beaux Arts Edition

As Eric said to me last night: I'm in the wrong racket. There's no other way to explain it. I am ready to renounce poetry entirely and become a visual artist. I can certainly put together as good a show as the one I saw last night.

It was one of the worst shows I've seen in years. I've seen undergraduate thesis shows that were more interesting (and better executed) than this one was. Billed as a series of photocollage work, the show was nothing more than a series of photos (not all taken by the artist) juxtaposed with "found" "repurposed" items (any old junk she had lying around) "mounted" on 18" x 24" artist's paper (it's sad when paper size is the only thing you remember from the artist's statement...but there it is.)

It was obvious--a black and white picture of trees had a snarl of black thread coming down from the lowest margin of the photo; a black and white picture of a stone wall had little squares of tracing paper painted grey taped in a stack beneath the lowest margin of the photo. It was sloppy--tape was visible on several of these pieces and one of the framed works had a crisp short kinky hair trapped between the matte and the glass...yes...she hung a piece of art with a visible pube (and no it wasn't intentional..."pubic hair" wasn't mentioned in the list of mixed media.) Plus the frames were cheap. If you're asking that much money for "recycled" art, for fuck's sake, professionally frame that shit.

Look around your house...if you have a black and white photo and some black electrical tape, you can slap it on some paper and ask 1200.00 for it. Or maybe you have some old negatives and a spool of thread? That's also 1200.00. Tulle? Bubble wrap? Packing material? 900.00 and 1000.00!

I was glad Brian called me just a minute or so into her "lecture" (a series of obvious statements about fun, form (Do you know what I mean when I say formal qualities?) that lasted a scant 10 minutes. Had I stayed for the whole thing, I think I'd have had to cut the bitch.

Give This Kid a Valium

More Photoblogging

Ashley & Tommy
Pretty in Pink


Ashley, Me & Jenny
Still no boobies.


Tommy & Eric

PhotoBlogging. The Party

Brian sent me the pics from our big birthday/anniversary do a couple of weeks ago. So in lieu of writing something I thought I'd just post some pictures.

Me and a plurality of my favorite men.
l to r: Brian, Me, Tommy, Eric & Michael


Me and my mama.


Brian's Paparazzi Face.
(No clue what's happening outside the frame, but the look slays me.)

Cookery

A few weeks ago, Peter posted a recipe for yogurt marinaded lamb kebabs. It sounded yummy so I bookmarked it. I've been craving something that tastes a little Indian...so I modified it and am trying it tonight with chicken. We'll see how it goes.

Oh...Lord...Go For It, Larry, Go For It.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the stall.

Pitard...Meet Hoist

The kids from New Hampshire's Concord High School quoted in this Yahoo News story need to moderate all future 2008 candidate debates. Seriously, they're hard asses. They certainly were not all impressed with John McCain.

An unflinching John McCain was told Tuesday by New Hampshire high school students he might be too old to be president and too conservative to be respected. McCain, the Arizona senator whose presidential bid has stumbled through the summer, countered the Concord High School students with humor.

"Thanks for the question, you little jerk," McCain joked back to one student who asked the 71-year-old about his age. "You're drafted."

[snip]

"If elected, you'd be older than Ronald Reagan, making you the oldest president. Do you ever worry you might die in office or get Alzheimer's or some other disease that might affect your judgment?" one student asked.

The audience groaned; McCain slid into a joke.

"I think it was one of my sons that alleged I'm getting to the point I hide my own Easter eggs," McCain said to laughter. "When you saw my 95-year-old mother (on a video introduction), you saw the kind of genes I have."

[snip]

Another student pushed him on gay rights; McCain repeated his pledge to oppose discrimination but support for traditional marriage.

"I came here looking to see a good leader," 16-year-old William Sleaster told McCain, earning himself boos from his classmates. "I don't."

McCain, a veteran of such candid exchanges in New Hampshire, smoothly pushed forward and told the crowd not to disrespect its peer.

"I understand. I thank you," McCain said. "That's what America is all about."

I'm noticing a trend developing among coverage of some of the GOPers by the press--they keep stressing that these guys are funny, that they have senses of humor. Is this going to be the humanizing quotient for 2008?

After all 2000 and 2004's, "who would you like to have a beer with" proved a sure winner.

The Mouse that Soared

Riddle me this, riddle me that, who's afraid of the big, black bat?

I've realized living in the country, in a rehabbed farm house, you are not hermetically sealed and occasionally the space(s) you think of as your own is (are) not. Bugs get inside; sometimes mice; once a snake crawled up alongside the plumbing into the bathroom--these things happen. And they're temporarily freaky and I handle it and I feel itchy and skittish for a couple of weeks; I am at the very least very very cautious when I open drawers and cabinet doors.

But nothing really had me prepared for last night.

It had been a lovely lazy day and since I'd been grilling on the back porch that afternoon, I just left the door open. The cat appreciates it and doesn't need to yowl so much to let me know it's time to come in or go out (and anything that stops him from yowling is A-OK by me.) It's also been delightfully cool and keeping the door opens seems to help fight the mid-day heat. It's an odd feature of the house...once it gets cool or hot it holds it in really well.

So I'm at the computer last night, chatting with Brian online and surfing the web. I heard something thunk the one leg of my computer desk. I assumed it was the cat coming in for the night--it was about 10:00, I was ready for bed. I snapped my fingers for the cat, no cat. I did the kissy noise/tongue click thing that he responds to (no "here kitty kitty kitty" for me), no cat. So I turn the light on. No cat. But I see the shadow of something fly past.

First I think--o maybe it's a bird. Then when I realize that it's not flying into windows or making noise I know what it is and it becomes "holy shit, mother of fuck, it's a bat." I cuss some more (mainly about getting rid of my tennis racket a few years ago) and try to figure out how the shit I'm going to get this damned bat out of the house. I'm also thinking: rabies, plague fleas, that scene in Cujo where the future-meth-faced Danny Pintauro is dehydrated in that Pinto and trying to remember if they drink piss from a thermos in the movie like they do in the book. I open the front door and try to chase the bat out that way. No soap.

It flies upstairs. I figure this gives me time to come up with something to swat and shoo the bat away with. I arm myself: a ceiling tile left over from a repair job, my largest aquarium net, and a fly swatter. I get the banking chittering hideous thing back downstairs amidst much ducking flinching and profanity. It's at this point the cat comes in to watch. I think, great. He'll track it and try to catch it. Nope. He runs. Eventually, I get de fledermaus into the laundry room and shut the door. It's trapped and I'm trapped with it. I just start swinging at it wildly trying to exhaust it and hoping that just maybe I can hit it hard enough to stun it.

Ultimately, the bat became exhausted and lit on the floor where it began chittering and hissing at me. I realized that this thing looks less like a mouse with wings than it does a hamster--and it reminded me of a singularly unpleasant russian dwarf that a friend of mine owned. It is approximately the size of a young adult hamster and the fur looked suspiciously similar. It was larger than any brown bat I've seen around here. I got my aquarium net over it and it's fighting to get out, flipping itself around, pissing all over the floor. (I never knew bats peed as a defense mechanism and frankly I never wanted to know. Also--bat piss smells just as bad as you might imagine.)

I got it outside and slammed the doors and proceeded to scratch and tremble for the next hour. I got back online and filled Brian in, googling for info on bats in west virginia and discovered that it was a Red Bat. Funnily enough, according to this PDF I found, "Red Bats rarely come into human habitations."

Lethargy

It's nearly 5 pm eastern here and I'm still sort of groggy. It's one of those days where all I want most is to crash on the couch with a marathon of questionable tv viewing and nap. Truth be told that's what I've done until about 2:00. Breakfast and vitamins a bit before 10, coffee by 10:15 and clicked back and forth between the cable news shows and BBC America's Doctor Who marathon (despite the fact I watched most of it yesterday.) Talked to Brian for a bit then more telly and napping. Caught part of the Columbo where Johnny Cash is a killer and talked to Brian twice more. Finally decided to hop online and catch up on news and blogs.

So much for the gay agenda: Conversions: 0; Traditional Marriages Undone: 0; Pairs of Leather Chaps Worn: 0.

~*~

I have a hankering to redo my aquarium. It needs some new critters and plants.

~*~

Another hankering: chicken salad. I really really want chicken salad. But I hate it. Loathe it.