monday

I awoke this morning with a dull headache and low-level nausea - nothing I can't normally handle. But after rounding up the kids, seeing them and their mother out the door, drinking 1/2 a cup of coffee, eating two heels of toast with strawberry jelly, and thinking it over for a bit, I think I'm going to stay home. Also included in this decision-making process was my very real reticence to go to school in the first place, primarily due to my general malaise, which very well might be a type of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Across the street there are fellows putting new gutters on a house. It's a small house, with no overhang. It looks as though the fascia board beneath the old gutters is going to need replaced. Our neighbor is going to be all set for the winter soon. She's already had new shingles put on and a rickety old tree that was too close to her house cut down. Soon it will be time to hunker down, turn on some lights, and listen to the wind whistle around the house.

Bring us some figgy pudding.

We gave our pumpkins to the squirrels for a Thanksgiving meal. The one with the face carved into it (pumpkin not squirrel) is rotting, making its face cave in and look like its lost its dentures. What's more: the squirrels are constantly crawling in and out eating what's left of his brains.

A Propo, whatever that is.

If I had a nice camera this'd be a photoblog, filled with the beautiful people and interesting places I see and frequent daily.

If the United States were France, Webster's Dictionary would be a department of the Federal government, wherein arbiters appointed by our presidents would deliberate on the future of the legality of such words as "snotsickle" and "ginormous." UrbanDictionary.com would be a revolutionary element.

A warming pot of coffee gurgles in the kitchen. [My stomach gurgles.]

A metaphor is like an unblown balloon, potential shape and form waiting for someone's hot air to fill it up and give it meaning. [My butt is a like a balloon, waiting to release hot air.]

Tomorrow I will sleep in a bit, then get up and work around the house. Leaves, recycling, storage, [you know, man stuff *scratches groin*.]*

-Jthulhu

* Bracketed text pirated by my lovely wife, Rachel, while I was putting the youngest child down for the night.

I want to be at home.

List of things to do, in random order, starting the moment I get done with class tomorrow afternoon:

1. Clean off back porch, borrowing my father's truck in order to haul the massive overflow of cardboard, assorted plastics, aluminums, glass bottles and jars, etc. for recycling. b) Finding a new home for the large shipment of "Save Darfur" t-shirts the Save Darfur Coalition sent me after I'd already cancelled the order and since then have done nothing with nor had the money to mail back, and b.1) return the large rubbermaid tub in which the majority of them are stored to its rightful owners.

2. Find a place to store our Nissan for the winter, out of the weather so I can either 1) work on it or 2) not worry about it deteriorating. This will involve a) calling around to places for a cheap deal and b) figuring out exactly how I can afford to do it in the first place. Also, I will then c) clean out the parking space of the assorted junk that has accrued do to long years of disuse, and then d) trim the various and sundry shrubbery and plant life that has worked to reclaim the square footage for nature. Once these things are done, I will then e) beginning parking the car we actually use in the parking space.

* THOUGHT: Maybe if we find a good deal on storage for the car I can also store some of the random crap we've got sitting around the house as well. ANOTHER THOUGHT: I wish we could build a carport type structure over the parking spot to keep the snow off. RELATED THOUGHT: I've often considered some sort of rubber mat for the back porch, for when it is snowy and we've got to wipe off our boots. I've also always wanted to enclose a part of the porch in something akin to those plastic strip dividers you see in large walk - in coolers, to shield anyone shaking the snow off from the cold, and also to add another cold barrier to the house. I've thought of using a tarp but that's tacky, right? These thoughts lead me to number

3. Finish winterizing the remaining windows in the house, using the plastic and tape routine, and maybe locating some decent weatherstrip for the front door.

4. I also need to cut down the new threshold for the bathroom floor we put in forever ago, and find some temporary baseboard for the west wall of the bathroom, as well as maybe some plywood to act as a temporary plug for the hole in the wall.

5. The toilet water hose needs replaced probably, and the bolts that hold the toilet down need cut down and capped with those little white thingys, if I haven't lost them since we put it in.

6. Other winterization ideas involve the sewing of large curtains both for our windows as well as the hallway doors, to the end of keeping the bedroom/ bathroom side of the house warm via space heaters strategically placed in the bedrooms. Another heavy curtain will cut off the foyer from the main room, hopefully keeping more cold and higher gas bills at bay.

7. My ultimate dream is to get into the crawl space and staple heavy duty plastic to the underside of our floor joists, completing the anti-winter-bubble. Not sure how the landlady would handle that.

8. Assorted: Rake the yard. Take E1 and E2 outside for some fall fun. Tidy up. Attend to the gutters. Find a lid for our trashcan. Put up some Christmas lights?

9. Sell some bikes. Anybody want a bike? Just in time for winter.

The Verb must broker an agreement between the Subject and the Object.

All of these fellows had birthdays. And days on which they died. Next to the truncated biography is a photo or a painting, and under that another reminder of the day they died and the day the lived. In parenthesis, as if an afterthought or a fun fact, are the number of years they were alive.


October 30, 1821. January 28, 1881. (aged 59)


November 13, 1850. December 2, 1894. (aged 44)


February 2, 1882. January 30, 1941. (aged 58)


August 20, 1890. March 15, 1937 (aged 46)

Food for the worms. Worm farm fodder. There are no political overtones to the fact that we die, making it somehow a refreshing thing to remember, though not poetic by default. Just dead.

no walls

I was standing on the second floor of a restaurant with no walls in Loiza. The ocean was dark; rolling white-noise oscilloscopes emerging from the silence of night, faint and gray, palpably fawning over the beach. The warmth of the sand complimented the warmth of the water. They danced, moving this way and that, in and out, together, apart, holding invisible hands.

I missed my children. I called my wife on our cell phone. The moon did a bad job of hiding behind a palm tree whose trunk was in arms length but whose palms were in space above the ocean. I thought of Christmas, St. Nicolas' Day in Lawrence, Kansas. White snow on a brown earth. I was a little drunk.

Memory is heavy like El Morro, perched on the edge of the world, the precipice of what I've learned up to this point. The implications of such memory are heavy and dark like El Morro's shadows. People I know and people I don't know pass through them, are heavy like shadow and then light, like air. It is a golden sun with a jealous blue sky. A vast battlefield separates us from the past.

an achronologous chronology

[situated in the so-called simple-present tense, a daily memoir that disregards any sense of chronology]

The children make messes peacefully, whispering amongst themselves. I prop the baby against myself and become absorbed in a book.

My blog is a repugnant mirror that shows me some part of myself I don’t want to see and can’t comprehend. My revulsion for the previous post - and somehow myself - grows every time I log on. I sense this thing, this blog, this despised new media/ literary phenomenon that I’ve bought into for some obscure and ridiculous reason, has some important role to play.

I’m on the plane. The book I will finish in two weeks I can’t touch, because white-hot rusty switchblades are being pressed into my brainpan via my inner ear. My eyes feel like they’re squeeking. The lady next to me doesn’t speak English, I try to act like I don’t feel like I’m dying, but I feel like I’m dying so I’m not sure if I care. Just then the ocean returns to me, first pulling me, then pushing me, gently. The waves come one after another but they’re the same waves, like the leaves, year after year. They don’t force me, they filter through me, spreading the different “me”s over a palate, a spectrum. On the plane I can feel the ocean, it’s too big, too powerful; too many countless grains of sand flow in too many directions. I’m not seasick. There is a halo around my memory, from the sun setting beyond the rocks.

The sun is setting over the neighborhood where our church and my daughter’s soon-to-be preschool is located, and the air is cool for the first time in a week. The deep green of the trees imposes a sense of the deep south, though we’re in the midwest. My son slobbers on my shoulder while attempting to consume his hand, pausing to watch the birds or the electric lines, both a stark black against a constant blue. The moon is lucid and half-illumined, the August evening gives me a sense of space between myself and it, and the moon becomes a very real cosmic presence to me; I sense its enormity and the miracle of its suspension, but also that I might reach up and pluck it from my vision if I wanted.

The clock says 6:59. I've woken with a start for some reason. The house is quiet.

In the park my wife and children and friends’ children are playing and resting in the shade on a park bench. My daughter approaches me with a request to swing. The hour-long walk hasn’t seemed to wear me out so I agree to it. Before I know it, the whole gang wants to swing. So I help them out and then join them. I haven’t done it in ages, due to an instant nausea trigger, but today for some reason I’ve managed to sidestep it. I pump my legs, lean back and forth, and force myself into an upside-down pendulum arch. The children are impressed. I turn upside down to look behind me, like when I was one of them, and I see the basketball court, its players walking on it like a ceiling, jumping but never falling, the trees and shrubs growing and shrinking, undulating like the ocean.

Walking with my son in the August evening a hymn to the Holy Spirit comes to mind, so I sing it:

You are most blessed, Oh Christ our God. For when you had made the fishermen most wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit, by them you drew the whole world into your net - lover of humankind glory to you.

My son cries.

I walk up the hill towards campus for the first time in awhile. That subtle sense of autumn approaching underlines everything, like a general, sustained prelude to a flashback or deja vu. Many of the houses will have different people living in them, since I began walking this way on a regular basis almost two years ago. I imagine passing glances out the window at me as I trudge up the hill, in sunshine, snow, rain, and that massive space in between all of those things.

The coffee carafe knocks against the sink and the unwashed dishes, the coffee pot itself, and the counter at regular intervals, the way it does every morning.