These things happened

Wheat field Yo Yo Ma approves of everything you do.


Where did you park?

The latest

• There's an owl who lives in the tree outside my apartment.
• I have a bruise that looks like dragon smoke, but purple.
• My remaining cat is love-thirsty and cries when I touch her. Then after a while she settles into rumbling peace.
• A much-missed visitor coming.
• My poems are slack, limp little things.
• Minor legal troubles.
  
• My job is interfering with my work.
• I want to learn to play banjo. Thanks, Dark Dark Dark.
  
• I am considering moving again (elsewhere in Madison), this summer. Most of the good things are east of here. This building feels like a shelf lonely people stick themselves on to gather dust. I feel like even my occasional visitor is a disruption of this. We talk and the walls rattle and threaten to fold. I exaggerate.
• Meteor shower tonight. I think I am getting up supremely early instead of staying up late.

My friend Matt visited from Chicago this weekend. At breakfast today he told the story of his night curled on the floor by his friend CJ's bed, driven there (from the couch) by ghosts. Strange footsteps in the hallway (there are no neighbors on that floor) and, "It sounded like it put my shoes on and was walking around in them." CJ swears the place is haunted, and the cat was mewing at shadows.

"I was going to call you guys," he tells me and Carrie over our respective scramblers.

I kind of wish I could have gotten that phone call. If only because no one has ever called me while in the process of being haunted. I am not sure I would have said anything useful, but I like giving useless advice.

Forward

Dear blog. I want to talk about politics, I want to talk about poetry, and I want to talk about the things I am doing that are not my job.

There is just too much happening.

I do miss my cat, though.

Also, I kind of want to give Wisconsin a big hug. We'll make it, guys. In one form or another, we'll make it through these politics we do not like, which scare us, which make us clutch our guts in pain at their illogic, and we'll do what we can do limit the damage, and when we get the chance, we'll turn things around in a better direction.

I hold up the hope that the new Republican leadership will somehow stumble upon success by accident, and, worst case, I hope they are somehow right about what will fix this state's economy. Because that's better than them being wrong and all of us suffering for it.

it was after the fire but before the flood
after the ashes, the dust, similar sordid particulates
before fifty words for water-needle

November is looking to be productive. I just have to get through this week.

glowing young ruffians

The National show last week was kind of like this.

I think I just like crowd energy, as long as it's focused on a point that is very far from me.

There's a pause most people take that wards off such disasters.

This city is crawling with poets who know me. I haven't written anything worthwhile in months, so I start to feel panicked and acidy when I see old professors or the one curmudgeonly jazz poet who remembers me from my high school competition days and says really encouraging things about how I can totally make it without an MFA. I managed to bump into both varieties yesterday and acid, acid, acid.

I also took the garbage out yesterday and was two seconds too late to stop the back door from swinging closed. I forget for a critical moment that my building has auto-locking outer doors. None of my neighbors was home. All the doorbells seem broken, anyway. I learned I can climb to my back porch by standing on a railing and grabbing another railing and just hoisting. But the door I never lock was locked anyway. I sat up there until I got cold.

Luckily I'd already finalized my plan to meet some friends at the top of State St. for dinner and a Book Festival reading, so I just started walking, phoneless walletless, wearing not quite enough, passing the big "legalize pot" festival and accompanying fire dancers on Library Mall. About 45 minutes, I think. I got to the rendezvous just in time, bummed dinner off one friend and a scarf off the other. Mary was crashing on my couch, and had a car, so we drove back afterward, and knocked on the front door until the downstairs neighbor who I never see wordlessly let me in. I think he hates everyone, and has potential to become the reluctant but heartwarming friendship you see in Sean Connery movies.

I really enjoyed climbing up and down from my porch. I have this fantasy of coming and going that way all the time. Or forcing friends to do so.

Seeing The National play last night was really great. They actually stuck a nice mix of songs from not-High Violet in there, and played nearly all my favorite Boxer songs. R and I both wore oversized hipster-mocking glasses. Saw two people from my 20-person work team, including my mentor. I always manage to be wearing animal hats when I bump into work people.

Good shows make me punchy. I was clutching at my elbows and vibrating in place.

Also, since they played for the Prez "Whoahbama" earlier that night, it's like I didn't even miss much by skipping the rally. Kidding. The lead singer was right, though, when he said they really don't actually have any songs that are political. Still, they dedicated a couple songs "to America." Eyeroll. The Decemberists somehow manage to be more hope-y change-y than them.

Getting tied/forgetting why.

Post-move update

Hi, blog. How have you been? Yeah, me too.

the church of poetry

"the heart,
which, when caught in certain lights,
combusts and flies apart,
like rhubarb, or the night's

remains; like bear traps rusted open long,
like song"

- excerpt from Ander Monson, "At Night My Armless Brother's Heart
Sounds Like This: Systole and Diastole"

I saw Ander Monson and the amazing Nick Lantz at a reading last week. The youthful "Monsters of Poetry" series, less than a year old, is already routinely providing the best poetry in town. It was so crowded that latecomers were forced to sit on the floor, right up front at the
foot of the stage, and it was kind of churchy, sitting all uncomfortably sore-assed, staring up (or sometimes across the floor, at the patterns of the wood grain, the poet's shoes, whatever) in silence while the works were read. Another day where I wanted to say "Mmmm yeah, sir, sing it" at key lines, not just chuckle or murmur the way people do when they like a line in a poem but it's not time to applaud yet. I get frustrated with the so-called distinction between High Art and Low Art and the way you cannot shout out your love of a phrase at poetry "readings" but can at poetry "slams." It's true that there are poems that take a lot of attention, quiet meditative
woodgrain-staring, yes, where a well-placed wolf whistle would distract other audience members. But those aren't the ones where I find myself wanting to be loudly appreciative anyway. Sometimes words, bare words, unadorned by rhythm or music, still are worth getting up and dancing to.

But then you have to start talking about what a reading "should" be anyway, which is a huge discussion and I'd rather just say, "Art is art and not actually my professional field and I'm just going to go back to my corner and write some poems in my free time and let other people argue about what things 'should' be."

Only liberal sometimes

My married high school friends who just bought a house and made me feel super old had their housewarming party last night. My friend Robin and I had joked that soon all we'd be hearing about would be the home improvements, as that is how we stereotype people who own houses but don't have kids. So I asked Travis about his plans right away. You know, to get it out of the way.

Travis, a former Marine who will happily take the conservative side on some issues where I would not, takes me out to the back yard and says, "See that tree in the corner? Part of it will have to go." I start to flinch in the dark. "That way I can put in a whole row of solar panels. They should catch the sun up until early afternoon."

He goes on with the other solar panels he wants on the other side of the yard, and then talks about selling the excess to MG&E (and if they won't give him a competitive rate, he'll just get himself mostly off the grid) and how he wants to replace all the appliances with more efficient ones. Oh, and then he wants to brick up part of the basement, the part with the weird fireplace, and turn it into a reading room. And if he ever had a load of money, it would be totally sweet to turn another part of the basement into an armory for all his knives.

The way he puts it, while he runs conservative on many things, he'll always be pro-choice, and he knows the country's fucked if we don't start making better choices about energy. Like I told him to his face, I think those are really great priorities if you're only liberal sometimes.

It's really nice to talk to old friends after a long time of not being much in touch and find you haven't both changed so much that you have nothing in common anymore.

In search of the Fountain of Youth

There is a non-blurry version of this one, but in it we are all really obviously sweaty.





Cemetery seahorses



Ernest Hemingway's writing studio-cum-mancave.



Sunset festival in Key West



Church in Key West



Our sweaty, suffocating homestead on Sugarloaf Key.



Powerlines



Giant prawn?



GIANT PRAWN!



Dragon fruit



Torrential downpour, with camera flash on.



Everglades with rain



That emu doesn't care at all that I'm about to kick its ass.



Shells playing cards.

Yeah, I don't care how long this post is. Some of the horizontals seem to be cut off, so for full views and more photos I recommend going to my Flickr page.

Reverend Taylor

We were joking around in the office today about weddings and one thing led to another and I got myself ordained at the Universal Life Church. I might be able to officiate your wedding, if you’ll give me like $30 so I can buy myself the official ULC wallet card and ordination credit and letter of good standing to confirm my holiness to state authorities.

Please keep in mind I am not actually Christian and also don’t really care much for marriage before you ask me to officiate your wedding.

O Brother

This one time I went to Girl Scout camp and my brother wrote me a letter. My iPhoto won't let me flip backwards things, so: "Christie / Oh how I do not miss you so thank you frogoing to camp." I found this in a box when I was working on having less clutter. Getting rid of the swim team ribbons and the leadership medal from 8th grade. Keeping this.

blundering fandom

My writer friends are all doing so well for themselves. Publications, graduate school acceptances, internships, prizes. It's really exciting to watch. I want a trophy case in my apartment just to show off the achievements of my friends.

Last night after a reading I accidentally gushed quite a lot at John Murillo while he was signing his book for me. "I know it's not a big part of what you do," I said, "but I loved your reading style. It's so great to go to a reading and hear someone be so engaged with what they're saying. I mean, the poems were really great too, but the way you read them really made it for me." "Thanks very much for saying that," he said. "Actually, how I read is definitely really important to me." Blush.

Just found a recording of this pianist I used to know who died in a car crash in 2008. Someone in his posse was driving drunk, the idiots (all of them). So talented. Chewing on my fingers listening.

In high school, one of my later-to-be best friends wrote a poem celebrating my then-very-unshaven shins and submitted it to the school newspaper. For the April Fool's issue, the editor of the school newspaper parodied her leg hair poem. I was rather cowardly then and didn't defend her, even though I was on the newspaper staff too and at the meeting where the mockery happened. I think I didn't want them knowing the poem was about me, because everyone else on the newspaper staff was very posh and suave and well-dressed and heteronormative. Anyway, the friend thought it was pretty flattering to be mocked like that, though, and so in the end, everyone won. Except me, the coward, who still felt guilty. Lesson!

A room of tatami mats and sore knees, a table crammed with fried pork and tofu and horse meat (the kind of thing a person has to try if she is only 85% vegetarian and which is, admittedly, delicious) and super chocolate brownies, four Japanese conversationalists, two American teachers, two gawk-eyed tourists, lots of laughter, rain on a tin roof. Robin and I teach the Japanese "party foul" and "jail bait," after they tell us Hal has already taught them "cougar," and "sugar mama." 24 hours in the country, and she still has not knocked anything over. I have knocked over wineglasses (party foul), and several small old people who just bow and say the Japanese or Korean equivalent of "no problem." At least I think this is what they said. I have a photo of me next to a woman who is way shorter than me. I am big and klutzy and I keep forgetting that it's rude to yawn.

I remember the day I learned matter was mostly empty space. 9th grade, Mr. Camosy's "ISP" (a fancy acronym for general survey of science) class, as he told us our chairs were just magnetic fields repelling our asses, I looked at the wall of the classroom and imagined running headfirst through it. Pushing aside the electrons and nuclei by sheer force of will like a curtain. White-painted cement. And the windows narrow as arrow slits.

This weekend I sold my body to science.

Fyi, at plasma donation centers you have to itemize all piercings, tattoos and self-inflicted scars like it's stuff you're declaring at customs. What is it? Where? What year? This is so they can tell when you've got new infection risks, in case you weren't planning on telling them about that tattoo, and defer you for X number of months while you either do or do not develop the symptoms of HIV infection.

So, at one point, a nurse approaches a guy waiting to donate and says, "Wait, I need to document those wounds on your neck!" He's got some fairly impressive hickeys, I can see them big and dark from across the room - "These are wounds?" - and she says smirkingly, "Yeah, those are WOUNDS. Go ahead and tell whoever wounded you…I don't even know how to spell hickey. What do I write, acquired in the act of lovemaking?" And he's smirking too and starts sending a text message.