A day or two ago. Our car sounds like an idling jet engine chewing up sand and chalk. I drove it up to the University anyway, hoping to get some face time on a computer, betting on the quality of our crystallized conversation. I would net it, like a digital butterfly and "email it to myself". It would pass through the ether and be waiting at home should I find more time or the need to continue.
Campus was as near deserted as I'd ever seen it. I parked in a random spot I wasn't sure I was supposed to. Seeing the Union closed I damned its eyes, but noticed the cloud work up and to the north, mostly hidden by the Union and the new Multicultural Resource Center. The parking garage was all but empty so I found a spot to sit and watch the array of colors and shapes that filled the sky. My mind raced for words to describe it immediately, but I knew it was in vain. Who could relay such information?
To the west a broad thunderhead was fanning out at mind-altering hights. The sun as it set shone through its curling silver lining (or set it on fire - it looked high enough), just enough so as to throw a stark golden spray on the main event: a line of developing thunder heads cummulo nimbi or some such thing, that stretched out to the north west, above the Kaw Valley, swooping just close and low enough to brush the north face of Mt. Oread, to acculmulate in an odd dark-blue stasis just over downtown Lawrence. The clouds there swept down in coudal-arch patterns, scrapping tree tops and buildings. Further north the rain was dripping from the flat undersides of the clouds, and I could tell it was falling on highway 24, Perry and the power plant. Names and places synonymous with my life. The backside of the line of clouds was the real breath taker. There is no way to imagine the pinks and blues and oranges, how high the contrast could be and gentle the shades, how clear their outline could form, how immovable and liquid it seemed.
It was almost perfectly still down on the ground. The birds were still singing, the slightest of cool breezes blew now and again. Silent lightning feathered out sporadically on the cloud's underbelly, spreading like fire on a ceiling and then disappearing.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Funny.
I've written my share of jokes. If by my share I mean no one has ever either asked or commissioned me to do it. And those who have heard the finished product have asked me never to utter another word under the heading "A Joke I Wrote" again.
My jokes have the profound ability to make everyone who comes near them feel intensely awful about humanity and long for something as pleasant as shame or embarrassment to feel.
So in order to both not be and be cruel, here are the only two completed jokes I've ever written.
Joke #1
When I was a teenager I was trying to change the oil in my car for the first time. The only thing was: I had no funnel. My dad, seeing what was going on told me to hold on and he'd show me a trick. Emerging from the garage with a piece of paper he fashioned it into a funnel-esque shape.
"Aw Dad." I said. "That's no FUN-nel!"
(I can feel you dying.)
Joke #2
What do you call a raccoon with pincers on his front paws and six legs?
"Crab Raccoon."
Wow.
The only other one I have I've only written half of, that is, the setting and the punchline. It happens at an archeological dig in Egypt and at the end of it, a guy says:
"Well, at least we have Toots-n-common."
Of course it's a fart joke. I think the joke will actually turn out to be the whole explanation of trying to write the joke and then springing the punchline on my listeners because it seems to be funny enough on its own.
I used to have a theory of hierarchy of funny involving elements like whether or not the joke involves rhyming, is dirty, is a pun, etc. But besides being ridiculously subjective, I really don't care anymore. It was probably those jokes.
My jokes have the profound ability to make everyone who comes near them feel intensely awful about humanity and long for something as pleasant as shame or embarrassment to feel.
So in order to both not be and be cruel, here are the only two completed jokes I've ever written.
Joke #1
When I was a teenager I was trying to change the oil in my car for the first time. The only thing was: I had no funnel. My dad, seeing what was going on told me to hold on and he'd show me a trick. Emerging from the garage with a piece of paper he fashioned it into a funnel-esque shape.
"Aw Dad." I said. "That's no FUN-nel!"
(I can feel you dying.)
Joke #2
What do you call a raccoon with pincers on his front paws and six legs?
"Crab Raccoon."
Wow.
The only other one I have I've only written half of, that is, the setting and the punchline. It happens at an archeological dig in Egypt and at the end of it, a guy says:
"Well, at least we have Toots-n-common."
Of course it's a fart joke. I think the joke will actually turn out to be the whole explanation of trying to write the joke and then springing the punchline on my listeners because it seems to be funny enough on its own.
I used to have a theory of hierarchy of funny involving elements like whether or not the joke involves rhyming, is dirty, is a pun, etc. But besides being ridiculously subjective, I really don't care anymore. It was probably those jokes.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
A & B This Time Instead
A. Sitting down for class, a friend of mine pulled out his new pen, setting it meticulously before where his open notebook was to go.
"I've got a new pen." he said.
During class we read an article on Intellectual Property and Virtual Reality. Afterwards he told me it had frustrated him.
"As an avowed Marxist," he said "I don't believe in private property."
"Can I have your pen?" I asked.
B. A couple of Robins stood talking on the brick sidewalk. One, with his back to me, was obviously haggling the other about something. The other noticed me. With a quick look over his shoulder, the first quickly dropped his fare on the ground. It was an unfortunate earth worm. The other snatched it up and they both flew off, rather hastily, in opposite directions.
"I've got a new pen." he said.
During class we read an article on Intellectual Property and Virtual Reality. Afterwards he told me it had frustrated him.
"As an avowed Marxist," he said "I don't believe in private property."
"Can I have your pen?" I asked.
B. A couple of Robins stood talking on the brick sidewalk. One, with his back to me, was obviously haggling the other about something. The other noticed me. With a quick look over his shoulder, the first quickly dropped his fare on the ground. It was an unfortunate earth worm. The other snatched it up and they both flew off, rather hastily, in opposite directions.
Life, Uh... Finds A Way.
This morning I caught a pretty interesting article on bdelloid rotifers at the New York Times dot com. I've been a little preoccupied with the concept of asexual reproduction lately, due in part to my recent class and lab in Biology - my first in over a decade. For reasons pertaining to the ever-budding tree of ideas for stories that will probably never get written as well as my usual mental meanderings on the natural world (daydreams), I've been giving the idea some mental face time. I also have Wikipedia and slow shifts at work to thank.
Youtube was also suprisingly fruitful in my search for some good rotifera action:
The idea of asexual reproduction really struck me when I learned that an asexually reproduced animal was actually a clone of its mother (though the more sources I read the more it seems genetic variation does occur somewhat sometimes, though not to the extent that it does in sexual reproduction). What further caught my mind's eye was the fact that some species actually "change" (I'm not sure how - generationally?) from sexual to asexual reproduction depending on the stability of the environment. The idea is that in a stable environment where an organism's evolved characteristics are a good match for the factors it meets there, said organisms will revert to asexual reproduction, in a sort of "if the shoe fits" maneuver. On the flip side, when the environment becomes unstable for any reason, it switches back to the card shuffling game of chance that is sexual reproduction, betting on a good hand to weather the storm. It smacks of Jurassic Park's gender-switching frogs that allowed the Dinosaurs to reproduce on Isla Nublar.
What has struck me in light of all this is the relationship between organism and environment. I've been attempting to ask myself what a perfectly evolved organism might look like and I think I'm having trouble because the answer to this question is relative to the organism's environment, right? Of course I'm thinking of writing a really cool story, so this means my organism's environment will be space, so what does the most perfectly evolved space organism look like? Probably not much unlike the above mentioned rotifers (who do resemble the moster in the movie "The Host", especially in the jaw area). One of the unique aspects of them is their ability to "dry up" when the water is scarce, and literally "blow away", only to reanimate when redessicated. Besides being a pretty huge step in the war against water loss that all but defines the struggle for life, scientists are saying that perhaps this is how the rotifer can pick up some random genes and maintain a slightly higher level of genetic variation than your normal asexually reproducing organism.
This has been another rabbit trail, have a good day.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Yes Captain.
1. Years ago I bought an old tan Ford Tempo from a friend's grandma in Kansas City, Kansas for 400 dollars. It had a nude-coloured exterior, a tan interior and a license plate that said "Mary Ida" that I couldn't get off as it had rusted to the car. Thus we named the car "Mary Ida", and bought a tan throw pillow for the back seat and a tan bobble-headed dog for the dash.
Before the kids were born I remember we would often go on road-trips to here and there. At one point, we were in the middle of Western Kansas - "no where", as they say - on a characteristically latitudinal east/west road. Tan prairie as far as the eye can see. I stopped the car to look around and take some video footage. We climbed up on the roof for a better view. I imagine if someone had seen us, it would've looked like we were standing on nothing.
2. I am so proud of my family. "Proud" is an odd word, I know, and I don't necessarily mean it the way it is meant to be used, but the idea is, I guess, that I am so happy that they exist and are mine. Not "mine" in the sense that I own them so much as the sense that Ephraim is "my" son, Estrella is "my" daughter, Rachel is "my" wife. Of these characteristics that help describe them I am the sole referent.
Ephraim wears his spittle like a crystal necklace around his neck, the depths of which we have not yet succeeded in plumbing by virtue of it's rotundity. I think rotundity was the word I wanted.
Estrella played soccer with me and some other kids and grown-ups today. She was running around chasing the ball and squealing. The sweat was pasting tiny threads of hair to her face. "Are you tired?" I'd ask. "No!" She'd say. She did get nailed with the ball once, but recouped, somewhat. We were all pretty tired.
Maybe She's Born With It
1. Once, while on a visit to a reservation with a crazy professor of philosophy, I was questioned by a man named Henry as to my interest in Native culture and resistance.
"Well, I've read a few books-" I said.
"Yeah, but those are just books." He said.
Since then I've done my best to do my reading outside.
He sand a loud song in his own tongue while his wife braided his hair. The tea-pot was boiling in preparation for an herbal concoction he had made for me that was to clear my sinuses. It had no name in the English language, but it did the job.
Earlier that morning, I unzipped the door to my tent to find the rotting skull of a dear hanging from the branch of a tree, silhouetted against the rising sun.
2. I am comfortable, the light from the sun not having found its way into the box office yet. It's "slow", so there isn't much to do. Accordingly, I pick up the already irrelevant 2007 movie guide and flip to (movies about) writers.
I check out dvds (movies) to people, walking back and forth mechanically, alphabetizing, shelving, talking and joking about movies. The transactions occur smoothly: titles, total, change, due back [Tuesday], sign on the space, thank you. There are stories all around me.
There are stories on the periphery of my mind, dancing in and out of the ring in a frustrated hokey-pokey, evolving to a game of dodge-ball, taking aim at the mechanical comfort of day-to-day activities.
3. All writing is practice until it's finished. Then the game is over. This literary actualization hinges on what it means to win it.
Are you brave enough to let it be an experiment? Or is calling it that a cop-out? What are you writing? Words. What are you writing about?
There was substance in there, somewhere. I was hoping to get to it.
I thought that by writing I'd get to it. This is the gamble part of the game. An outside, unknown factor we look for to give us the win.
4. The admission that I am a sinful person, or believe myself to be, is sure to sound odd to many people in the world. The idea of being sinful is not only misunderstood in our culture, but misrepresented. What it means to be sinful is an object of gross over-simplification, both on the part of both those who deny it and those who affirm it.
When I say that I am a sinful person I am saying two things: 1) that I , as a human, exist in a sinful state, or have a sinful nature. It is something innate and as part of me as my reasoning mind and my personality. 2) It also means that because of this nature I commit acts of a sinful nature - sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes very purposefully.
"Well, I've read a few books-" I said.
"Yeah, but those are just books." He said.
Since then I've done my best to do my reading outside.
He sand a loud song in his own tongue while his wife braided his hair. The tea-pot was boiling in preparation for an herbal concoction he had made for me that was to clear my sinuses. It had no name in the English language, but it did the job.
Earlier that morning, I unzipped the door to my tent to find the rotting skull of a dear hanging from the branch of a tree, silhouetted against the rising sun.
2. I am comfortable, the light from the sun not having found its way into the box office yet. It's "slow", so there isn't much to do. Accordingly, I pick up the already irrelevant 2007 movie guide and flip to (movies about) writers.
I check out dvds (movies) to people, walking back and forth mechanically, alphabetizing, shelving, talking and joking about movies. The transactions occur smoothly: titles, total, change, due back [Tuesday], sign on the space, thank you. There are stories all around me.
There are stories on the periphery of my mind, dancing in and out of the ring in a frustrated hokey-pokey, evolving to a game of dodge-ball, taking aim at the mechanical comfort of day-to-day activities.
3. All writing is practice until it's finished. Then the game is over. This literary actualization hinges on what it means to win it.
Are you brave enough to let it be an experiment? Or is calling it that a cop-out? What are you writing? Words. What are you writing about?
There was substance in there, somewhere. I was hoping to get to it.
I thought that by writing I'd get to it. This is the gamble part of the game. An outside, unknown factor we look for to give us the win.
4. The admission that I am a sinful person, or believe myself to be, is sure to sound odd to many people in the world. The idea of being sinful is not only misunderstood in our culture, but misrepresented. What it means to be sinful is an object of gross over-simplification, both on the part of both those who deny it and those who affirm it.
When I say that I am a sinful person I am saying two things: 1) that I , as a human, exist in a sinful state, or have a sinful nature. It is something innate and as part of me as my reasoning mind and my personality. 2) It also means that because of this nature I commit acts of a sinful nature - sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes very purposefully.
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