Thursday, August 12, 2004

Thursday Febrility

Thanks for sticking around today; I’ve been way too busy to do much writing but I’ve had lots of interesting ideas which I’ll be exploring in upcoming days through a combination of modern dance and food sculpture.  Bring a bodysuit and a washcloth tomorrow. 

Yes yes yes the Chucklequiz: What, I asked you, do you do with an elephant with three balls? 

Heed well then this answer: Walk him and pitch to the giraffe. 

And for that one, thanks, dad.  So instead of writing something up that’s actually worth your time to read, I’ll give you a tropical tidbit (tm) and a glimpse through a soiled window into an even more soiled psyche.  Sounds fun?  Oh shut up.  In my day we blogged where they told us to blog; I had to blog seven miles through the snow to school; you kids got it way too easy. 

THE TIDBIT: this is tropical because I heard it while on vacation, but otherwise has nothing to do with the tropics, and I realize you may object to this loose descriptive manner, so if you have any sand lying around, feel free to pound some.  That’s more tropical, isn’t it?  The story, as Charles tells it, goes something like this: there was a man whose mother told him one year that she had started reading Bukowski and really liked his work.  He was surprised, but relieved to know what to get mom for xmas - a collection of Bukowski’s short stories, a really pungent volume choking on its own bile and anger and brutality, a book (as I imagine it) dripping with the most distasteful excrescences modern society can wrench from a debased soul.  Mom received the book dubiously, and after a few pages, appeared put off by it.  Turns out, she liked Buscaglia. Well, we thought it was funny.  Oh go to hell. 

And now, as promised, THE SOILED GLIMPSE: The following is taken from a notebook from which I do not post.  There is a lot of stuff I write that does not belong on this blog for any number of reasons, but I never had a good place for it.  Over the holidays last year I got a very cool little notebook (thanks pea) which was the perfect place to unburden myself of thoughts that would never go on line, but I had to overcome some psychic resistence to the notion of having a specific place to write them out, which implies accepting that I have these thoughts in the first place.  It took me a while to feel like I owned both the book and the process enough to engage them both, but eventually I scrawled out the following on the first two pages or so.  I’ve reread these words many times since then, and I recognize them now as something that I can share - even though it is an introduction to things I will keep to myself for a very long time:

Such a lovely notebook, a sleek little tool for marking down ideas, so sturdy and utile, and crying out for use, to be written in, inscribed, a lazy dog in the making*, and all that remains is to do the writing, and it’s not as if words don’t come to me easily - too easily, the truth be told, as it occasionally is - but that the first words in this book beg to be chosen carefully, pick something to say with a little poetry in it, not some list of chores or silly frivol, but words of some substance - for this book is clearly designed and intended for permanence, not like those throwaway spiral binders I go through every few months - things go in this [book] not to be crossed out as I ‘finish’ with them. 

What’s more, something about this particular volume makes me feel quite free to write my mind just as I think it, even with the strange stilted words and tortured grammar that spins itself out in my head, total freedom of vocabulary, which makes me wonder, or rather, think, that this book may be for personal ruminations, for setting down thoughts I don’t want appearing in public, solely for private review and solitary consumption, or vice versa, a place to write bad thoughts and to excavate my own ruined dungeons, but that’s the thing isn’t it, I wouldn’t want the very first thing on the first page of this book to be some sort of freaked-out messed-up confession or revelation or such.

Perhaps it’s all very Italo Calvino of me but this is a nice notebook and I want to be thoughtful about how I choose to use it and what goes in it, and while I choose here not to censor myself, I don’t think I want to christen the first page with ink spilled to tell a lurid or tawdry tale.  As if I had any.  Or not.  At any rate I think I’ve made my point, and more importantly, I’ve gotten past that first page.  Time to dig in. 

*: This is a really bad joke I learned as a small child: a printed page is like a lazy dog because it’s an ink-lined plane, and an inclined plane is a slope up, and a slow pup is a lazy dog.  Damn, it’s not even a joke.  It’s just an mutation of linguistics.  No wonder I got beat up a lot as a kid.  See, this is why I don’t post everything that’s in my head - I’d be hunted for a bounty.