From the french passager which means "to pass by"

I have been reading about the passenger pigeon, which reportedly roosted by the hundreds of thousands over areas of hundreds of miles in Wisconsin at one point. Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon and the last known of them all, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. I always think about her on my birthday.

I have been reading Wikipedia and even Wikipedia is enough to break the heart:

"One method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flock landed near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger."

I think Wisconsin, my birthplace birthright and motherland, ought to be filled with dark clouds of pigeons.

Technobot

Praxilla will run some poems of mine soon. I should "market" my writing better but one of the two is not a good reflection of how I usually write and I feel discomfort about it parading around on a website with my name attached. How the mind changes in the lag between April submission and January acceptance.

Discomfort is a place for growth, though, I guess. The other one was a lot of fun to write and I'm glad it found a home.

I spent my last freelancing paycheck on a widescreen monitor to hook up to my laptop, and it feels like I upgraded my attention span hardware. A nagging guilt - shouldn't every writer be able to write by hand? I really can't. Notebooks are for scribbles, wisps, outlines, to-do lists, & sketchy outlines of fixed biographical details and my feelings thereabout. In the end, though, everything coheres by type.

Away message vs. spambot

I win.

For a while I thought I was the dragon

Amazon e-mailed me the other day.

"C.T., sell back 'Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets),'" Amazon pleaded in the subject line. So I read the rest of the e-mail, a bit aghast.

Then Amazon said I should be pleased to know I can trade in my used copies at the Book Buyback store.

I suspect this is a tool for reminding students they can get rid of their unwanted textbooks, even if they bought them used, but why, Amazon, would you come after a book which I am mentally clutching tightly and ferociously for fear that you would actually want it back from me? Is a booknapping imminent?

"Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup."

- Richard Siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out

Lately I have stopped really reading about global warming. The Cancun talks. Ocean acidification. Ice melt. The Republicans' plan to hold Scopes-esque hearings on climate change next year. It grinds at my kidneys to think about. There's too much else on my to-do list. Poems and plans and projects.

Plans abound to dive back into the world of bad news in 2011. Flippers & oxygen tank at the ready.

If the world is really ending in 2012

More people should read books with science fiction and fantasy and any other word for "alternative version of life as we know it" involved. The world is a strange place, and the likely future seems in many ways sadder and more wilted, but it is stranger and harder to cope with if you've never mentally visited the "what ifs."

I think, if we are parachuting into a new universe, and it is in one way or another dystopian, at least those who have read The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx&Crake, Pastwatch, The Player Piano, etc etc etc, will not be shocked that such things can exist. We have visited that country in our minds. It's grim country, but we will not be flattened by shock. Maybe we'll get our sleeves rolled up and get started on whatever meager repairs we can that much sooner. I like to think, anyway.

I also have this theory about zombies. Because we've incorporated them so smoothly into our pop culture mythos, we're more likely to survive them because we already know what they are and have a set of possible survival strategies to start out with. They may be completely wrong, but at least we won't be paralyzed. I like to think, anyway.

Dear friends. Let's build a lighthouse in Montana, and wait for the sea to find us there.

I listen to this on loop and I feel optimistic.

I haven't figured out how to fix the way this site chops off photos and videos that are too wide for it.

There's a really flabbergasting slideshow on the NYT website of photos from nuclear weapons testing between 1945 and 1962.

If you have 3 minutes for an audio voiceover, photographer George Yoshitake, who himself lost family at Hiroshima, has good things to say.

Some days I suspect my workplace is really an elaborate social engineering experiment that also happens to deal in information technology.

Like, "what would happen if we threw a bunch of academically successful nerdy young people into the equivalent of a small village, denied them soda or plastic utensils, gave them cheap healthy cafeteria food and discounted gym memberships and enough money to feel secure, but also worked them really hard and tried to instill in them this mentality of, 'if there is anything you can do for this company above and beyond your job description, you should definitely stay late and do that and also join a book club and a softball team and bring your pet in on the many weekends we want you to work."

It's very weird.

Anyway, today is a staff meeting day, meaning all 4,000 of us are going to pile into a big auditorium and feel really excited about the fact that this is the one day of the month where our CEO will let us have soda. Oh boy!

when I was 12 I wrote "dear diary" and asked how my diary's day had been

Hey blog, did you hear about the latest oil tanker exploding in the Gulf of Mexico? I am worried we're going to get used to it. I have serious doubts about the future of Us, blog, as in the human race. I don't think we're going to achieve that Star Trek egalitarianism any day soon. I am thinking about a trial separation.

It was my birthday yesterday, and I've been referring to myself as "Ms. Quarter-Life-Crisis" for a while now, but I guess it's official now and I'm supposed to consider joining the Peace Corps. Someone pointed out teeny smile wrinkles on my eyes a few days ago. But I was smiling at the time. Anyway, I am kind of excited to have such things.

I am behind on everything, blog, but it's mostly okay that I am.

emergency intubation, anticoagulants, CBC panel stat.

I've been weirdly anxious about the new job. All the training is putting me through means a lottttt of staring at their software, creating fake children with fake pneumonia and then running them through a hospital stay. Every now and then I take a test or have a "graded" assignment that is necessary for me to eventually begin doing full-fledged writing-about-it work.

The anxiety never crops up at work itself. Instead my sleep is bad several nights a week, and I halfawake dream about my class schedule conflicting with my meeting schedule, or long involved processes of building orders for urinalysis. I'm actually really enjoying learning how to build things in the system (user security privileges, as one really oddly fun example), but the text-based screens and infinite keystrokes of that process are also working their way into some of the strangest nonsleep.

But I was watching TV the other night and a doctor rattled off a complex chain of orders in an emergency situation and I completely understood what he was saying, so that's pretty great.

some personal goals

• Finish putting my favorite photos on Flickr so it is a useful repository of my favorite photos the way Facebook used to be before I got proprietary.
• Purpose this blog. Or stop posting unless it's really a piece of writing I want to hang onto or an idea I really want to communicate or a life update that whoever reads this might actually care about.
  
• Spend some time with poetry. It's been too long since I read or wrote or even sat blankly attempting to write anything.
• The damn bees.
• Get a regular yoga habit going again.
  

misc

Bought a new hat today. Going to wear it all the time. Feel kind of emo-slash-French-slash-country-housewife. Also, after new people have started following both my long-idle Twitter and less-idle Tumblr accounts in recent weeks, really have to make some hard choices about what parts of the Internet I am actually using and whether I am just doing so because they seem like big ballroom dance parties that I don't want to miss out on even though I actually cannot ballroom dance.

The beets cooked up delicious. My tomato plants are in a race to produce all their tomatoes before they succumb to a strange yellow leaf disease. So far, it's looking like I will have to learn to make fried green tomatoes and then chortle about the literary connection. Like that time I bought plums and kept talking up how sweet and cold they were. What an asshole of an in-joke.

(hat plus cat)

There was a conversation I had with an Air Force sergeant who was in town with an F-16 demo team for the annual air show, which I was writing about for the paper. We were sitting around waiting for the show to get going, and conversation strayed into fuel consumption/costs/etc. I had no idea that airplanes burned so much. Especially stunt planes (he estimated 50-70 gallons/hour) and highly maneuverable fighter jets (up to 150 gallons/hour). I mentally stagger at the carbon footprint, he stays firmly in financial territory. “It’s all money spent in the defense of freedom.”

“So is the military looking into alternative fuels at all, given worries about supply?”
“Absolutely. There’s this process involving coal…”

Trying to stay neutral as possible, I wandered tentatively into BP territory: “It’s interesting, don’t you think, the extra attention it’s bringing to energy issues?” And he dismisses. “People forget that nearly everything they own is made from petroleum. Focus on fuel is short-sighted. Unless they find a way to make glass more cheaply, we’ll be using oil for a long time.” True, but it ignores the central question of what we CAN do, and the long-term concerns (opposing, in some ways, the short-term concerns of the military) that would make it worth pursuing.

It was an interesting anthropological moment. One of those where you say, Ah, the values here are very different, but they are held together by a certain kind of logic.

I went to that same air show “for fun” the next day. I have other thoughts, maybe for later, about air shows and America, the land where we go to events that boast about “turning fuel into fun,” the land where the deafening roar of a jet engine passing you at 650 mph is “the sound of freedom.”

Yes, it is a brilliant idea to put our entire newspaper chain on the same statewide network so that, when technology fails, we cannot even lay out our pages because all of our content is stuck in a computer somewhere far away which may not be accessible until tomorrow.

I am working from home to avoid the contagious editorial anxiety, and doing dishes between phone calls to soothe my own. Hell yes, working at home.

The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

From Pastwatch, a most excellent science fiction work by Orson Scott Card, 1996

Some people called it "the time of undoing"; some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as "the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth. All these names were accurate. Something had been done, and now it was being undone. Much had died or been broken or killed, and now it was coming back to life.

This was the work of the world in those days: Nutrients were put back in the soil of the great rain forests of the world, so the trees could grow tall again. Grazing was banished from the edges of the great deserts of Africa and Asia, and grass was planted so that steppe and then savanna could slowly reconquer territory they had lost to the stone and sand...In great preserves the surviving animals learned how to live again in the wild. All the nations of the world had an equal claim on food, and no one feared hunger anymore...

It should have been a happy time, with humanity pressing forward into a future in which the world would be healed, in which a comfortable life could be lived without the shame of knowing that it came at someone else's expense. And for many...it was. But many others could not turn their faces from the shadows of the past. Too many creatures were missing, never to be restored. Too many people, too many nations now lay buried in the soil of the past. Once the world had teemed with seven billion human lives. Now a tenth that number tended the gardens of Earth. The survivors could not easily forget the century of war and plaque, of drought and flood and famine, of desperate fury leading to despair. Every step of every living man and woman trod on someone's grave, or so it seemed.

I first read this book when I was 14-15-16ish and think of it often. In that story, though, the world is saved from catastrophic climate change (you know, the one everyone's still afraid of) because some people go back in time and divert the mission of Christopher Columbus just enough to save the indigenous Americans and alter the course of the United States dramatically.

Hey, have I been talking about all of the same things lately? Yes, it is true. I'm chewing my way toward finding something productive to do with my "desperate fury leading to despair." Apologies, maybe, for dragging you through the process with me.

Bloomsday, too, might be literature self-fetishizing.

Another day, another brand new pretentious $17 notebook to fill up. The last one took me more than 2 years, starting with a bullet point outline of a poem I never wrote, ending today with "we change our names and order pizzas / to be sent to the neighbors" so you see I started out with a much more finicky standard for what I wrote in it. Only solid ideas and words already by-my-standards perfect. Now I slosh anything remotely interesting (and many dull things that might eventually be made interesting) onto the pages like a 3 a.m. drunkard. I buy the expensive notebooks for my creative writings with the idea that I'll want to be able to flip through and re-read and re-use ideas for years. But there is no guarantee. It's possible the act of writing on acid-free pages is all just exercise. Words you expel like a long exhale, never to be considered again. I'm all for fetishizing the printed word, I'm all for bound books and the smell of rich mahogany. I still can't quite feel something is real unless I can see it without the help of electricity. Take it camping with me. Set it on fire.

The new notebook gleams with unrealized amazement. Blank pages still recall the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil, and that moment as a child when you first realize that a word is more than just an assortment of squiggles. Before you learn that a word is still not quite omnipotent. I think I am fair when I say many people who write do so because they believe (even if they do not admit this to themselves) that if they can just get The Most Perfect/Sharp/Lovely/Breathless/otherwise ideal arrangement of words to the right people's eyes, they can put the oil back in the well and raise the dead pelicans like feathered Christs. Or cure unkindness. Or rub the world's metaphorical feet on carpet until we spark at doorknobs and keyboards and become, all of us, electrical superheroes capable of incredible feats and glowing-eyed awesomeness. I don't think this can happen anymore, but the wish is still one horse in the team pulling my motivation stagecoach.

Zdzislaw Beksinski

I massively trimmed down my Facebook account because even though I didn't really have any secrets up there, I'm not interested in providing Mark Zucherburg salable data. Photos - gone. Most of my groups / "liked" pages - gone. Interests - privacy and being a nerd. I hate seeming unfriendly, but I think it's fair to have a minimal "profile" and say that if you want to know anything about me, you can e-mail me. Or come to this blog and hear me rattle on about creative writing and, occasionally, the joy of being a reporter on working weekends, crouched in the office while the sun shines on and on outside.

I am still sneezing all over the place. Wet doggy sneezes. Red murky eyes. I popped into Barnes & Noble yesterday for "a mother's day card" and "my next high-quality notebook" and "$2 copy of Ariel" and someone at the front door tried to make me try out a Nook. There are "Nooks only" tables in their cafe. Buy one for your mother.