Archive for category Uncategorized
Blair reflects.
Jul 12
Ten minutes last night of frantic flapping on the screen. Then he settles on the siding, unperturbed by flashlight.
She comes inside for winter, but iridesces all the summer long, oiled steel electrified with color.
Through her antennae she reaches, three boards higher than last night,
where the Luna moth has parked, on the morning of the next day.
Ah! She has him!
Romance that never may be. Forever shall she yearn and he be free.
The lovely lunatic is perched, for one long moment.
Nevermore.
Sun’s in the notch.
Jul 7
When everything is just right, even the stone hinges have to open.
Looking south.
Above the back door, the carving says 1976, Dan did it, one of the years we built this house.
Looking north.
But, 38 years on, I never knew it could do this, this specific shadow trap thing.
Where have I been?
So glad that I’m here now.
Blair reflects.
Come and sit a spell.
For a limited time only — starting this week,
July 5-9, 2014 — Thursday through Monday.
Kindle e-book format only.
If you do not have a Kindle, one will be appointed for you,
and installed on your computer or cell phone or toaster oven.
Buy one book at no charge and get the second book free!
Or pick just one — still free!
Book 1 Cover
Book 2 Cover
Of course, this is not the first time this offer has been tendered, nor the last time. But it is this time, and that won’t come again.
The idea is to open a wider readership by pandering to the universal delight in getting something for free.
You find new readers for your work, who tell their friends, who put up five-star reviews, which reviews entice a fresh cohort of readers, who tell their friends, until the virus takes hold, fame fights fortune for the upper hand, and you come to rule the internets.
It’s fool-proof and fun.
As Amazon has opened in ever more markets, an author gets to watch the results come in from around the planet. I’ve never yet sold a book in Italy or Mexico (mx is a brand new site, it is just refractory, probably a side-effect of the Mediterranean diet). Britain and France and Germany always come through. Japan and India inevitably bring several (probably utterly bewildered) new readers. Brazil and Australia will put toes in the water, two or three or four. Canada, after the United States, is the most solid. During some months of regular sales, Canada beats the US.
You can get my books anytime, of course, but you’ll have to pay when there’s not a free promotion going on.
There really is a whole suite of Kindle Aps you can download for free for PC, Mac, iphone, Android, tablets and pads,
if you haven’t got one of the ever-growing family of dedicated Kindle Readers.
Try ordering from the Italian or Mexican site (I’m easy to entertain). But you can’t do China, I’m not there yet.
And as always, tell me what you think. Comments & reviews are not just welcome but eagerly sought.
Simple Sunday.
Jun 30
We tried to discourage this nest. Three times we knocked it down, four times the phoebes built it back.
Little unfledged chick twitching on the cement Saturday evening; not good, but not dead, so we pushed her back into the nest. Sunday, evolution reiterated the case. Weakest of the four, end of the road for one phoebe; phoebe-hood for the other three still on track. Species go!
Rescue butt.
90% sleep, 10% eat. Soon they will fledge and trade sleep for twitch: the phoebe cry and the jerky tail. And they will in turn make nests, in inappropriate places.
Between meals.
Two inches of headroom, apparently, is enough.
Good choice.
We used to run a halogen par-38 in this fixture. Way too hot to touch: hard-boiled bird. Compact fluorescent, barely warm, like a substitute mother. Good, because mom has to fly off for a while every time we go in or out the door.
CFL bulb. Imagine the hard boil of a halogen.
Someday one of the series: knitted shawls taken from moth wings. We’re building a portfolio.
Shawl template.
When good outhouses develop attitude. Past using now, but you can’t knock it over. Suffering from a structurally enfeebled right edge on the ground, that’s the problem digging with a back hoe. Shovel and bucket, you can get hospital corners. Probably a tea party thing, didn’t want to be seen supporting something that got half its stability from the left. A shame: sealed joints, screened crescent, heat lamp, reading light, vent, front porch, full roof overhang. Fine work.
Right leaning.
The white birches in the middle were six-inch seedlings when we planted them thirty-six years ago. The house grew for a few years, too. But the birches kept on.
The house stopped, the trees kept on growing.
Appalachia has briar patches, too. But the signature entanglement is the laurel thicket. It’s just 10 yards from the road. But it’s half a mile deep. Deep woods woven shade. Easy to get in.
Innocent edge of a laurel thicket.
The committe assembles on the 600-volt feeder. Good place for watching the blueberries (we’ll be finished soon) and safe from the return line or the ground. But can they feel the pulse between their toes?
Taking a meeting.
In a bucket on the porch, all stages, up the curve and down, are beautiful. Power flowers.
Consider the lilies. Or the marigolds.
That was a good break: fifteen storey climb and back. But I’ve got the final 148 pages of edits to process. Ghost Walk isn’t going to finish itself. But there is an end in sight. Press self firmly into chair, lift your hands, and wrap it up.
Narrative alive.
Jun 15
There is, to begin with, possibility.
Then I spot him, traveling towards the tractor at one foot per minute, a turtle snug inside a richly embellished box. The turtle I have been looking for all week.
Seeking shelter from the storm?
He sees me, but he doesn’t take me very seriously. He keeps the nose extended by which he beat Achilles across the line, so many races ago. Been here longer than you, he says, and I know things you are not equipped to know.
Looking at you.
I record the hieroglyphics, of course, for reading later. I’m on to him, the little hardshell walking billboard.
Ready to take the weight.
He holds me with his glittering eye. I could put you on your back, I say, and make a soup tureen of your shell. You may now go, he says, commit less harm today than yesterday. I’m expecting the world will be on my back soon enough. Was that not, I ask, exactly what I proposed a moment ago? Gravity is established law. You’re annoying me, he says, go on, I’ve prepared your way; but do not imagine I will forget about the soup tureen.
Red eye.
The turtle is right, I see that now. The path ahead beckons to me. We’d better both get moving, each at his native pace.
The way in.
Follow the stone crop along the stones, past the creeping thyme, then right to the Peace Rose, unseen.
Wot, mai I not stonden here?
But first I’ll have to decide about the mushroom. I could cut it up for dinner, which would not at all hurt the underlying life-form, but might prove fatal for me. It is a great white, so it is pure, the poison unalloyed, toxin simple. Unless it is wholesome despite it’s shade. Dilemma, dilemma.
With divots from fairie golf.
Ah! She will know, the tiny red toad. And she will speak to me, unlike the mute ‘shroom.
And she does speak, says that a toadstool is wherever a toad sits, not separately extant; that I must not malign the turtles under the earth or the pillar of toads that holds up the dome of heaven; and that she suggests I should not eat the fungus. After I offer, and she accepts, a tiny thimble of a somewhat hoppy local ale, she tells me everything I must do tomorrow.
Thumb toad at ready.
But that’s a story for another day.
The Zombie Army of Iraq.
Jun 15
Our handiwork.
America rules.
For we created the army that is now slouching towards Baghdad.
We killed Saddam’s army once when we invaded, with shock and awe.
We killed it again when we disbanded the army, de-Baathification (Paul Bremer, almost offhandedly: cue the looters).
We killed it a third time with our “surge” to destroy the subsequent insurgency.
But each time we killed the Sunni Baathist Army of Iraq, it resurrected, mightier and meaner than before,
for it is of that place as we are not.
This time, the zombies may win it all back.
Only one thing can stop them: the lack of any remaining brains, either here or there, worth eating.
Flesh alone may not be enough to sustain them — marching as Napoleon said all armies do on their stomaches.
Shall we test if the flesh of chicken-hawks might prove toxic?
Behold what we have wrought, America.
Just toads, all the way up.
Jun 15
The orange one returned yesterday. The cup without a seedling was not what he had in mind, but neither was the seedling. They shared for a while; afterwards, fluffed and straightened up a bit, the seedling was unhurt.
Orange is the old toad.
Today a smaller gray visitor occupied the same toad-tested cup most of the morning. Why did he come? Why that cup? Why did he go? Will he return? To that cup?
We see you, too, but it’s not the same.
The slot eyes are fathomless, solid black, ten million years deep. Not a hostile stare, but fixed and judging. I am glad we have not disturbed the pristine watershed that extends 1200 feet (vertically, 1800 along the ground) up from the house to the Little Bald, glad that our gardening is (almost perfectly) organic. That will be in your report, won’t it?
Sharing with the toad.
The bushman laughed, asked what was underneath the turtle that carried the earth on its back. It’s just turtles, he said, turtles all the way down.
I think, all the way up, it’s toads. The eye of heaven is the omniscient unblinking eye of the highest and holiest toad in the stack.
Are our visitors one of the varieties that excretes psychedelic sweat? We shall not try that question; it would be presumption of a most unwholesome and disturbing sort. We are better for not knowing.
To be visited, that is enough; allowed to host.
That time of year has come: riotous abundance, whichever way you look.
Native flame azalea.
The astonishing strategies evolved to propagate as each generation pays forward for the next.
Gerbera daisy.
There’s manipulation, of course — to enlarge flowers or fruits or flavors — bending the wild beginnings. And there’s cultivation — to optimize conditions for growth.
Calycantha (plural?)
When you build a book, the wild world is everything you’ve ever seen, your inventory of images and persons and events. Of course you can make up stuff, if it’s true. The work of writing is to manipulate and cultivate the wild ingredients until you’ve folded them in and teased your new story into being. Your story is from the wild world, but not of it.
Calycanthus.
When you think you’re done, release your story back into the wild to test if it still is true. Probably it needs work. Probably a lot. Rinse, repeat, rejoice.
Eye in the sky.
Events sometimes transcend expectations. Disparate strands intersect and loop through to build transitory structures, luminous and teasing and beautiful. Unforeseen, implausible, but joyful crystallizations.
For three years now the Asheville Ballet has benefited from a fund-raiser, specifically targeting the costume department. Reasonable enough. A golf tournament is the vehicle: foursomes compete (shotgun start, captain’s choice, single chance mulligan immunity and single red tee allowance available for a small fee). Comfortable terms and a relaxed atmosphere almost mask the ferocious desire to take the trophy home. Friendly ferocious.
We serve doughnuts and coffee for breakfast before the contest. Dancers from the school and company run golf carts laden with snacks and soft drinks out for mid-course refreshment. And there’s a barbecue lunch afterwards. Prize drawings insure nobody loses. And when the receipts and expenses settle, a bump for the costume fund. Sport, charity, and art converge to good purpose. And there’s barbecue.
That’s the underlying structure. Ballet and golf are not often coupled, this is true. Ballet is usually an inside and cooperative business. And golf is played to win, outside in the sunshine on wide swathes of grass. Still. Why not? It’s worked three times now, a little bit implausible and quite successful.
Cue the drone: a new strand engages with the braid.
Quadra copter.
On the grass, revving up, then she rises with a scratchy buzz.
Down the valley.
Eventually the little vessel sails hundreds of feet overhead and far down the valley.
Drone rising.
Cue the provocateur (incidentally, most of the second-place team’s best scores were his). To provide an enlarged context? To embellish the instant? To open the gates?
HK and his banner.
And bringing the little ship home. Whether it will land upon the same planet it left just minutes before, is one of the questions. When the magic of a Fool stirs fresh spices in the dish, your barbecue modulates. Also all the rest, as everything shifts to bind in the new information.
Return to earth.
With luck, one outcome for all this may be a new pink tutu for the dewdrop fairy, or new skirts for the snow corps. Can anyone diagram the process we have engaged here, first to last, leaving nothing out, giving to each element its due weight? Well, bless you for trying.
For all, a lovely morning. And for this year, a wrap.
He’s not our only visitor this spring. There’s been the doe with the twin fawns, the big buck, the pair of tom turkeys, the trio of hens. Fearless rabbits, squirrels gray and brown and white (the ones that fly at night), groundhogs, raccoons en familie, possums, and Noregian wharf rats. The usual populace, plus one orange toad.
Eye of toad.
No bears yet, possible bear signs; no bobcats seen, nor foxes. Signs of boars, coyote sounds. The raven’s croak, owl hoots. Some several salamanders.
The dotted line
Every expected avian: hummers, catbirds, cowbirds, jays, crows, cardinals, buntings, gross beaks, robins, gold finches, doves, thrashers, nuthatches, Carolina wrens, the pileated impact hammer, phoebes inappropriately siting nests. Turkey vulture on the lawn, red-tails parked in treetops. And, to prove spring has transitioned to summer (the calendar always lags), a galaxy of lightening bugs and another daddy long-legs every time you turn your head.
The profusion stuns, the density of biota at every stratum, here in the temperate rain forest of the Southern Appalachians. Overload of sound and scent and scene. Riches beyond tally.
Mutual incomprehension generates space between people, which allows us to breathe and turn about.
I didn’t do the jig-saw puzzle. No credit, no blame. But it was done at the other end of the table I write on, so it played out in front of me. Four persons, together and in shifts: they were pleased to be finished, a full day later. It was a challenge engaged and accomplished. They fought entropy to a standstill, at least until the thousand pieces were unplugged and returned to the box. If you like jig-saw puzzles, the only questions are “was it hard, how long did it take?” If you’re not a fan, you ask “why?”
This question comes from one who does daily Sudokos and KenKens and Cryptograms. Except I get my puzzles, it’s yours that don’t make any sense. Okay, whichever strokes folks wish to be struck with. Sure, fine. But, still, why?
A thousand in one.
Here is another puzzle, one of mine, meaning one in which I participated.
Cinderella must have a clock to mark the magic hour, columns to shudder and slide, a backdrop for the palace. Also, not shown here, a mantle for her hearth, and a pumpkin carriage for conveyance, every piece fresh-built. And a godmother, forest friends and fairies, step-mother & -sisters, a prince and a royal court. The performances were the middle week of May, so this puzzle, too, is back in the box. Scores of dancers remember, scores of costumes are returned to hangers, around a thousand persons saw the show. But it is done. All gone, except the elements, the memories, and the video. Dance is as transient as a jig-saw: a thousand pieces must be fit and made to work as one. Then, the box. With luck there’s a picture, or a film.
Columns and the midnight clock.
The palace drop.
Everything else we do, almost, from the most ordinary to the most wonderful, is pulled through the event-horizon of the mundane world. Meals cooked, lawns mowed, laundry folded, floors scrubbed—all gone, nor any trace. Breathe, sleep, talk; strut and fret for a while.
The big puzzles we take on and resolve can endure a little longer, be seen by many, be remembered; or be cut into a more persistent medium to stand for an hour or a century. As we all attempt to solve each puzzle set for us, the odds go up that someone, someday, gets it right.
A good day for any of us pays something forward, towards the long horizon.
When you start at 99 cents, the distance is not so great, even all the way to zero.
Still: someone you haven’t read, might like, might not, it’s an opportunity.
So, if you’re a Kindle reader (or have one, or have one of its alter egos) and like to read mysteries,
you might like to meet Geoffrey and Ellen in their first two adventures.
The Asheville story:
Fit To Curve cover
And the Williamsburg story:
Heart Attack cover.
They’ll be free from Friday (4 April 2014) through Tuesday (8 April 2014) on Amazon.com (per AST, Amazon Standard Time, similar to PST). Direct links below:
Nothing to lose, a wide world to win. Take a chance.
Just-happy-to-see-you pas.
Feb 23
Joy just is. Probably there is a reason, but the reason is not the joy.
Gonna get lucky.
Do you wish your line was this open and clear?
There’s somebody, somewhere, someday, who already thinks it is.
Be prepared, but be aware it will cost your head.
For she has all who ate her mate.
Three weeks it will be spring, when the multitudinous cees bust loose.
Cees come right after Bees, you will need to know this.
But you do, already, in perilous perspicacity. Halleluiah.
Should we eat the rich?
Feb 2
Okay. It depends on whether their caloric load is proportional to their wealth. If so, yes, it’s very cost effective.
There are about 30,000, the one percent of the one percent. And they control roughly 26% of, well, of everything. The ninety-nine percent of the whole (we’ll get back to the 99% of the one percent in a minute) hold nearly 60% of the wealth. It’s not very evenly distributed, but that’s another discussion. There are 330,000,000 or so 99-percenters. A little arithmetic lets us know that our average 1-of-1 has nearly 5000 times the share of the average 99er.
Let’s take 150 pounds for an average weight (a figure that lets us skip over differences by gender or age). Remember that many of these people are lean: they acquire exponentially more than they consume.
The super-rich, 5000 times richer, should yield, each one of them, the equivalent of 5000 (richness) x 4 (servings per pound) x 150 (pounds per plutocrat). That’s about 3,000,000 servings, a fantastic outcome. It’s ninety billion, for the whole cohort, 300 per person for everyone in the country. That’s a year’s worth of protein for every living American (except the 30,000, of course).
As a one-time bounty, that’s terrific. But the greatest part is the rollover. The next percent of the one-percent will slide right into place as the top 1-of-1. Probably we’ll need a full year for the enrichment to take hold, but once underway, we have a self-sustaining momentum, an inexhaustible source of shared wealth.
I realize there are moral and nutritional considerations. I’m just assessing feasibility. One important point to close. This route avoids the sort of class-warfare we’d have if we confiscated the wealth itself. We leave the awesome wealth creation machine of capitalism running full out. The markets will soar.
Color play.
It wouldn’t have to be every food, but just to pick some examples relevant in my household: what if onions were modified (just the least little bit) so any dish that included them would have a soft orange glow? Or if all meat (any food with a face) flashed every couple seconds like a fire-fly? Or red peppers emitted a soft growly noise?
Food allergy reactions would be a thing of the past. You’d hear the peanuts chirp, the murmur of the gluten, the chartreuse glitter of milk products.
Brave new world that has such foods! Be not afraid.
When you put your Kindle titles on a brief free promotion, your “sales” always go up. Not your receipts, but there are new readers willing to take a chance for free for someone they’ve never heard of. Rational, human, inarguable.
What’s kind of fun is watching the returns. I’ve got just one long day to go (long because I’m EST and the Kindle day is PST). So the current score may be close to the final store. Got hits in US, naturally, but also in Great Britain and Germany and France. Nothing (yet) in Spain or Italy or Japan. But some in India and Canada. None for Brazil or Mexico, but yes for Australia (the new store, this cycle, along with Mexico).
Have had “sales” previously in Spain and Japan and Brazil, never yet in Italy or Mexico. But I should go check. It’s been half an hour. Maybe some new ones.
In the end it’s not how much you win or lose but how the game has played you.
Let freedom ring! Again!
Dec 31
The idea is, every few months an author can sacrifice the revenue gusher of regular sales for an exposure to a wider audience. What harm could this possibly do?
So, I will be running a special Kindle promtional deal, from 2-6 January 2014, Thursday through Monday: both of these titles are free! For those five days only.
Penny savings for the pound foolish.
You must have to have a Kindle to play, either a Kindle device or a Kindle ap (also available free from Amazon for PC, Mac, IPhone, Android and most recent model toaster ovens).
Enjoy. And Happy New Year!
Far better to regret what you have done than what you have not done. Act now.
Judge Santa.
Dec 25
Dot calm, dark Santa.
Ho. Ho.
He sees you when you’re sweeping,
He knows when you eat cake,
So quit your silly creeping.
Don’t leave crumbs and don’t you take
More than half of that last piece.
It’s not rocket surgery,
You know that Santa sees you,
And bumble bees are Santa’s eyes,
They spot every foolery,
Doesn’t matter what you do.
And so you know, word to the wise
Sewn in the sleeves of Santa’s fleece,
The NSA has trackers;
And pays off nine elf hackers.
So keep your secrets in the cloud,
And don’t you ever think out loud.
Blame it all on Christmas fright
I’m wishing everyone good knight.
.
Justify the ways.
Dec 24
Go on now, have a wonderful time.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he said, to justify the ways of God to man.
I think the harder job would be to justify the ways of man to God.
Spare us, King of the Heavens, from the annihilation we deserve for all our murders and malice, because from time to time we do something truly cute and adorable.
Or: hey, maybe this is the best we can do with the tools we have, and who exactly was it that packed our tool box?
Please, give one more chance — just for what Quvenzhané Wallis does in Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Nelson Mandela? Malala Yousafzai? Jimmy Carter? Come on, cut us a little slack. We try really hard, sometimes.
You’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers from my staff, pale old man, I’m not going quietly.
Moses on a stick.
Nothing at the end but our chariot wheel tracks limning the hard sand.
Should be the easiest thing.
Dec 23
Just land the plane, already.
Cover
As revising goes, it’s so simple. Nothing much to carry in your head, not much by way of artistic issue. Just a press-your-butt-into-the-chair kind of job to do.
You set up a synchronized scroll, get the page widths right. Then all you have to do is roll to the next red mark, and accept or reject the edit. But there is something intensely and unavoidably personal at stake. An editor has the key to your sock drawer. She sees all, knows all. Consistency, Chicago style, agreement, continuity: all that is purely technical, semi-mechanical.
“CandlestickBut the higher value, and the deeper fright, comes in the comments:
What does this mean? I get the Star Wars reference, but I don’t know the second meaning.
A process you have chosen, engaged with, paid for. But can you bear it to the end, 350 pages more?
There have already been months of rehearsals and practice runs, but this week the focus pulls tight for this year’s performances of Asheville Ballet’s Nutcracker. Here’s how it came together, yesterday and today.
First thing, draw a line: this goes to the theater, this does not. You hope the does-not aisle hides no critical bits. You hope the goes heap does not include any unnecessary clutter. It’s a jig-saw puzzle with thousands of pieces.
Nutcracker kit: just assemble and add dancers.
This morning: the load out from the studio and load into the theater. Hang the drops, build the tree and scenery, Mother Ginger and the teapot, distribute the costumes and props.
Final studio run-through, this afternoon.
Tomorrow: finish dressing the stage, spike crucial places and routes. Fit the gels, focus the lights, cable everything, coordinate cues for the tech crew and company, pass over the final version of the music for the first theater run-through. On Tuesday, tech; Wednesday, dress; Thursday, absurdly early, the school shows; Friday and Saturday and Sunday, performances. Strike, load out from theater, load back into studio.
Next year, repeat, except there will be a hundred differences, new dancers, new costumes, new dances.
It is an astonishingly complex cooperative endeavor: seventy-some dancers (supported by a couple hundred parents and siblings), dancing a hundred-sixty parts, wearing half a thousand costume pieces. There are a few four to five year-olds, a few sixty-somethings, everything between, peaking from pre- to late-teen. Many seasoned professionals, a few novices, several seasoned teens, some remarkably clever little kids.
We are not equal behind the curtain, a cluster of bossy adults tries to run things, but when the curtain is up, everybody’s on the same stage, everybody dances. We’ve done this for fifty years. If you lined up all the dancers who’ve appeared in our show, end to end, they’d stretch from Albuquerque to Boston. Probably. Something like that.
Asheville Ballet’s Nutcracker opens this week, and there are two other Nuts in Asheville this year, one before and one after ours, plus a few thousand more around the country: classical, modern, burlesque, solemn, and silly. Some are exquisite, some kind of awful. Tchaikovsky rules American stages this month. Also TV ads and malls and elevators. Nothing else even comes close.
You’ll feel so foolish and so forlorn if you don’t come to the Diana Wortham Theatre this weekend for Nutcracker. Don’t do that to yourself.
(I know, we defeated the redcoats two hundred years ago so we didn’t have to keep on misspelling theater and colour; but in the provinces we pretend a sophistication we do not possess and, unforced, give Cornwallis back his sword.)
Do come.
Kamikazi Cardinal.
Dec 2
Disheveled, crazed, incomplete. Someday a grand red adult.
The side mirrors on the Toyota are favorites, anytime, as well as the windshield. Bedroom window, at 7:30 in the morning: peck, peck, peck-peck, peck. Pause, repeat. Any window, when the light is right.
Here’s me. And, there, glassed in, is this other guy. A young stud, just like me, only backwards. He’s got to give. Or make me give. But he just sits and cocks his head and pecks, so close, but keeps somehow just out of reach. He is not responding correctly. This is so weird! Why won’t he answer, or go the hell away?
It’s Narcissus in feather-drag. Such a handsome fellow, the other side of the glass. But it isn’t how it seems. Good fences make good neighbors, says Robert Frost. But he doesn’t say that, the neighbor does, Frost disagrees. Narcissus is slandered for self-love, self-absorption. But Narcissus doesn’t know that he’s the image in the pond. He loves the guy he sees, not himself.
Narcissism: love for a handsome stranger. It’s not a disorder, it’s love, disinterested and pure.
Let’s not even start on Echo.
Caught in another lie.
Nov 17
Everyone is talking about the shaky beginnings of the Affordable Care Act. Rightly so. But that isn’t the first time this President backed away from a promise, turned inside-out by bureaucratic and political infighting.
There’s nothing left, as far as I can tell, from the Gender Assignment Initiative that President Obama rolled out in May 2011. The one big speech, then nothing.
Sadly.
The promise was so clear, there was no equivocation then.
“Under the GAI, if you like your current gender, you can keep it. But when you’re ready to make a change you will be able to go to our website: www.usa.sex.gov. You will be able to view a menu of choices and, with a few clicks, began whatever degree of reassignment you choose. You will see, clearly presented, the exact cost of every option, and whether you qualify for assistance under the Where-You-Need-To-Be federal tax credit program.”
“We are absolutely committed to continuum neutrality. We respect the full equality of every point on all definable scales. But, let me repeat our fundamental promise: if you are happy with your gender, you will not be required to change.”
The original website was never fully operational, difficult to log on to, and prone to lock up. But the menus were tantalizing, liberating.
- Conviction scale.
Absolutely certain.
Reasonably certain.
Curious, yellow.
Curious, blue. - Degree scale.
Reversal, complete, permanent.
Reversal, complete, temporary, select term.
Partial transformation, permanent.
Partial transformation, temporary, select term.
Surprise me. - Procedure scale.
Physical, surgical and hormonal.
Physical, hormonal only.
Social only, wardrobe.
Social, wardrobe and pronoun.
Surprise me. - Timeline scale.
Begin process immediately (requires credit card, charged now).
Begin at specified date (requires credit card, charged later).
Save in shopping basket, I’ll be back.
Empty basket, not today.
Surprise me.
Oh, well. That was then. Now the refusal of Congress to implement key sections of the new law, especially for setting up the Federal Gender Exchanges, has been compounded by Sequester funding cuts. A flurry of GAI cancellation and reassignment notices has already been issued by the President’s Gender Czar, almost three million in October alone. Pink slips, blue slips, purple slips, the Interior Department has pulled the rug out from under all Americans.
We will be processed one-by-one through the new sex panels, not by our own choice any longer, the assignments will be determined by quota-filling bureaucrats.
As everybody knows, those who are condemned to remember history must be prepared to repeat it.
Join today at the HOOP! website (Hands Off Our Privates!): www.choosesex.com. No contribution is too large, and no support is better than none at all.
Without benefit of clergy.
Nov 10
At her house, her husband’s and son’s house now, we met this afternoon to celebrate the life and spirit of a friend whose body had failed. She died half a year ago, suddenly and too soon.
Julia released four white doves, three from the large basket then, a moment after, a single bird. They shot towards the ridge behind us, whiter than any real creature could be, swooped down over the valley below, the one dove cutting across, almost colliding, synching with the flock. They circled all four once more before passing beyond the ridge and our view. The three horses in the high pasture let go their trance: they had frozen, heads up, lined up, in perfect profile, at the first shudder of the wings of the freed birds.
Impossibly white.
They will get home, twenty-one air miles, Julia said, long before she will. We had sung a song, cheerily dark, read and recited poems, holding close in memory, at the same time letting go of Dory’s spirit. The Royal Black Cherry settled into its hole with help from a hundred hands. Inside, the feast was waiting.
Live long, Dory Brown, in the hearts of family and friends, in the aggregated recollection of all your intersecting communities.
I met her on the internet, I replied to her ad. Smooth sailing, surely, thence-from-there-forward.
She’s freelance, doesn’t work for a house. But her eye is good, and relentless. Some degree of compassion, also, I’m almost sure. Trust but verify. If you can.
Rates are within trade norms, fuzzy edges, though between the copy- and line- options.
But Ghost Walk is a big book, many pages, many words, many hours. Is she up to it? And is the edit worth the fee? Measured along what scale, or against what result?
Cover
I think so. But there is not a more intimate relation than a writer with an editor. Success in collaboration is not guaranteed nor in any way insurable. How will this end? All previous winnings bet on one number, on one spin, with no hedging on the red or even halves. What would Geoffrey do? What would Ellen do? So much easier to write their parts than mine.
Oh, look, that’s it: edge of the cliff. To the metal, Thelma, fly! Where’s my blankey?
I am so thankful and pleased to find such overwhelming Republican support for our new health care system. Everyone is now pulling together to make the system work as smoothly and effectively as possible. This is such a welcome change from the past several years, all the votes to repeal, all the efforts to weaken or defund or destroy the Affordable Care Act. Now all of you are as anxious as I am that the federal exchange website gets all glitches fixed posthaste so people can sign up by the millions, just as we all want them to and find good plans, affordable plans for themselves and their families.
I’ll admit I expected y’all to just sit back and gloat, with I-told-you-so smirks, maybe sometimes waving little train-wreck banners. But, no such thing. You’re standing up for our new law and demanding we make it all work properly, right now. Thank you, thank you.
I was twelve when we visited relatives in Austin, Minnesota, home to a Hormel hog-processing plant as well as to my cousins. I declined my father’s suggestion that I should take a tour of the famously efficient facility. Hogs walked in at one end, packaged meats were trucked away from the other. He thought I should know where bacon and pork chops come from, before they’re stacked in grocery store coolers. I thought I already knew more than enough about that, and had no wish to watch hogs die, however humanely the deed was done.
I was wrong, of course; not that I ever told him. Twenty years later, when we picked up Nerissa in two halves for the pig-roast and a hundred butcher-paper-wrapped pieces of Milton, sliced and ground and cured, for the freezer, for the winter, from the slaughterhouse in Tennessee, I remembered the afternoon in Austin. Not that I ever told him. We learned it was better not to give our pigs names, and some of us learned it was better to eat less or not any pork. The slogan we worked by in those days (the kindest of farmers) was: happy meat is good meat.
I missed that tour, but I did hear and still remember the Hormel facility’s slogan, celebrating their thoroughness, making mucilage and jowls and tanned skins and pickled feet and fertilizing blood, as well as the more familiar cuts: we use everything but the squeal. A laudable effort assuredly, then as now. I leave it up to you whether to linger over the squeal.
Fragrant.
Now that I kill people, professionally, on a regular basis, I have found a new sense for the Hormel slogan. When you take a life, in fiction, or in war, just as when you raise or hunt animals for meat, there is a moral aspect you neglect at your peril. You owe your victim, or game, or livestock, in the most profound sense.
I don’t like the “cozy” mystery convention that you kill some inconsequential stranger, or a character nobody else in the book much likes, to get your story going, forgetting instantly that the dead body ever belonged to a real daughter or bride-groom or economist, albeit a fictional one. That’s using only the squeal, and leaves the rest to rot. Murder rends a family, a neighborhood, a committee, a swimming team. A horrible hole torn. You must tell that cost, or the story doesn’t matter, the puzzle doesn’t matter, your other characters are cutouts, and their jeopardy cannot move your readers.
Present everything, use everything. Including the squeal. It is better not to make sermons or long faces, but you must let the weight show. Then you can burn sage leaves and purify your scene. But save some for the sausage, it is the essential spice.
Heavenly blue.
Oct 14
People of a certain age recall when Morning Glory seeds were not made deliberately toxic, not even Pearly Gates White or Heavenly Blue.
Glorious.
After the peak, unlike us, they’re prettier than before.
We’re done.
We’re safer, though, right? Unless we’re a bird or a squirrel.
Ghost Walk is finished, the final big edit. Final read through, then publication. Question is, do I set a number of agent rejections before I send it up to Kindle? Hate those letters. But I do love bricks and mortar, paper and ink. And with a non-rejection, I’d be eligible for the grown-up clubs, though there’d be no reason left why I’d wish to join. It’s a little trippy to contemplate.
Suggestions, anyone?
We wake up every day and do our work, until suddenly, but not unexpectedly, we just can’t. Who takes over, when we’re done?
York apple.
This season’s heavy yield, century-old damage to the trunk, and gravity — versus the tenacity of the roots, the will-to-stand projecting upwards through the small remnant of live bark (less than a quarter circumference), plus support from the locust props — resolved into a tipping point. Expected for all thirty-eight of our years living adjacent, the remarkable old tree pressed up in defiance and survived season after season. All done now, after almost a century of making bloom for bees, keeper apples (Yorks, that still have snap the following March if well-cellared), drops for cider and the deer, and a lattice of branches for a hundred birds staging visits to the feeders it held. And cool green shade.
Our national government today, after two-hundred-some years (the some depending upon whether you begin with the Declaration or with the Constitution) is braced between forces that would pull it down and forces that would sustain it. Stability and continuance are not given, not even the norm, in the history of the world, for national governments. Not a super-majority or even a plurality, just a sufficient chunk of nihilists (end-days seekers, zombie apocalypsers, witless ideologues, the psychopathically greedy) can tug the roots loose.
We keep surviving, year after year. But one morning we may go to the window and see that, overnight, it all came down. Let’s not allow this. We need our national tree. Just as, at this moment, it needs us.
Incidental garden.
Oct 6
At the end of a story, the final reveal wants this inevitability. Here it is, and it could not be any different. The past three hundred pages have brought us to here, precisely here. Action, characters, narrative — resolved to this. Would that it could ever comprise such intricate texture and integration of form.
Lichen bloom.
By local legend, lichens require, and their presence proves, clean air. Seems lichely. These assemblies are not something a human can do, only allow to happen, if all conditions are right, and decades pass without a catastrophic interuption. A goddess is near.
Ballet in the park.
Oct 5
Lovely luck: the weather was mild and still and dry. The dancers pulled themselves and each other through stillness, reaching, leaping, turning, solo and unison and cannon and corps. Living musicians played to a live crowd, children mirrored the dancers, back and forth, through the audience. An hour-and-a-half outside of time.
At that time, 7:30 pm on the 4th and fifth of October, 2013, in that place, the Roger McGuire stage in the Pack Place Park, in Downtown Asheville, North Carolina, seven lovely dances blessed the evening.
Free! Free at last!
Oct 2
Special Kindle promtional deal, from 3-7 October 2013, Thursday through Monday: both of these titles are free. Penny savings for the pound foolish.
You must have to have a Kindle to play, either a Kindle device or a Kindle ap (also available free from Amazon for PC, Mac, IPhone, Android and most recent model washers and dryers).
Far better to regret what you have done than what you have not done. Enjoy anyway.
Go big, princess.
Oct 2
A carolina wren danced with a pin, dropped two feathers, and demanded with a voice as large as she is little, that somebody pay attention.
Pin for scale.
This happens, she said. I didn’t ask for it, and you didn’t ask, but you mustn’t let it pass. Do your Fletchers take whole birds for their arrows? Or only drops, like you? Please infer no judgement, we have a long codependence and there is both honor and utility in voicing a true flight, though we might prefer to know our own old age.
Then, I think, I was supposed to wake up.
Magic from below.
Sep 22
Between here and there an underground lifeform blooms in the air for a while.
Amanita?
If you cannot identify with certainty, see with your eyes only.
Sometimes, in the middle of a chapter you thought was under your control, such a bloom breaks through the mast and startles you. I fit here, right here, make it so.