July roundup

Posts that should be on this blog right now but aren't:

• Love song to my summer CSA: a refrigerator bursting with green things, the dramatic fight against time as I try to use everything before it goes bad, and the inherent feast/famine cycle of receiving one large crate of perishables every two weeks.
• A list of the changes in store mid-August, when everyone in town changes households, and whole configurations of couplehood either conjoin further or pull apart or more people leave for grad school. It looks like Willy St. and the North side are the places to be in 2012. I'll stay squatting on my shelf by the Arboretum, a little solitary, with no where I can walk to except one lovely little beer hole and the Trader Joe's I've forsworn in favor of a co-op, but still within biking distance of most other desirable things.
• I got a new job. It will completely reconfigure how my time and energy are spent. Back to more reporter-like tasks (though I won't go so far as to say it's journalism). Science writing of a sort. I'm excited.
• Some failures in my non-job life. Some are the usual failures. Some are new. What have we learned about ourselves and what we owe the world, et cetera.
• Pictures of spiders, boats, bicycles, clothes flapping housewifeish on the laundry line, and this t-shirt I turned into a tank top. A view of the street at 6 a.m. A view out a window that you hope no one looks up into. The particular trickles of sweat inside your elbow when you talk on the phone in Wisconsin in July. And so on.
  

After the job switch, I plan to focus a bit more on longform nonfictional writing of various types. This blog is second on the list of venues to benefit from that kind of attention.

Errors in the pre-flight stage

Hello blog.

My poems are condensing into thin, tight little clumps of words.

I blame technical writing.

Also feelings of spareness and economy that the world seems to encourage. The fat, rolling lyrics of Richard Siken seem like a relic of the 90s.

Note that this generalization is based on one example.

At work today I found a poem:



Everything is going so well for the personal lives of people I know. It's hard to believe, some days when the peepers chirp chirp in the wetlands, that the political landscape is so fraught, that there is so much misery in the public discourse.

Then I stumble back onto the news and my eyes are full of laserbeams.

Oh, spring.