autopilot off

"Looking Glass Secret" by Richard Fein

2009-12-30T19:51:00.000-08:00

Most creatures never learn the looking glass secret.
A songbird does a duet for hours and always thinks itself in good company,
without an inkling it’s singing solo.
But comes the day when baby finds no other baby behind the mirror.
Before, if he laughed that other baby laughed, and if he cried. . ..
So all babies laughed and all babies cried and he was all babies.
But came the day he peeked behind the mirror and found no other baby.
He danced and so did the mirrored baby but never out of step with him.
He spread finger and thumb across the mirror’s edge
and suddenly discovered there’s no room within for a baby playmate.
He cried and babbled words like mama and dada.
And many, many words later the child again looked deep into the mirror.
But by then he could mouth that unsettling word —

ALONE.

"The key to the tower" by Laura Kasischke

2009-12-30T19:01:00.000-08:00

There was never
There was never
A key to the tower

There was never a key to the tower, you fool

It was a dream
It was a dream
A mosquito's dream

A mosquito dreaming in a cage for a bird

It's October
It's October
The summer's over

Your passionate candle in a pumpkin's head
And the old woman's hand in this photograph
Appears to be nailed to the old man's hand

And the sky
And the sky
And the sky above you

Is a drunken loved one asleep in your bed

And the tower
And the tower
And the key to the tower

There was never a key to the tower, I said

And this insistence
This insistence
It will only bring you sorrow

Your ridiculous key, your laughable tower

But there was
There was
A tower there

I swear

And the key
And the key
I still have it here somewhere

"Baked Ziti" by Jeffrey Rotter

2009-12-21T22:12:00.000-08:00

a couple names their child Baked Ziti
then she is orphaned
this is one example of the joke against humanity
a man beside you on the train
has been diagnosed with a learning disorder
his doctor sends him home with a pamphlet
the man struggles between station stops
to decipher “Sexy Dial,” advice for the dyslexic
written in anagrams
this is another example
the sleet pays you compliments
but to receive them you must stand outside
with your stocking cap stuffed in your coatsleeve
until your hair is crusted with ice

"'Sadomasochism is Not for the Forgetful" by David Phillips

2009-12-19T19:03:00.000-08:00

As cranks turned and straps tightened, Bill momentarily delighted. But then he was struck by a most terrible realisation: he had forgotten his safe word.

"O, Penelope!" by Lynne Knight

2009-05-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

The nuns of Mount St. Mary's loved Penelope, whose skills
they urged us all to emulate: She fought off men. She used
her mind. Long after we'd read the prose version, slightly
sexed down (those nights with Calypso eclipsed),

Penelope was steadily invoked—wily, though not quite
as wily as Mr. Wiliness himself; patient, so that even Job
might take his text from her; discreet in her appetites,
which the nuns chose to ignore, never quizzing us on

the scar (since God forbid we should mention
the man's thigh) or the bed with its highly unusual post.
No, ours was the Penelope of Attic vases,
gowned, accepting gifts from suitors, or sitting

at her loom, elbow on knee, head on hand, thoughtful
Telemachus beside her as she figured out her next move
now that the maids had betrayed her. No more unravelling!
But she was shining among all women, the gods would intervene ...

Heretical, yes, but we mustn't blame the Greeks;
at least [finger wag] they believed in something.
And they liked a good story: Odysseus stringing the bow,
stripping off his rags to guide the fatal arrows

to the suitors until the great hall smoked with blood ...
Not that we were being asked to condone violence.
But anything to preserve virtue! [sigh] Anything!
No wonder so many of us headed straight

for the back seat of a car. Why wait any longer?
We wanted to test our pluck and ingenuity ...
and then, hand sliding down a bare thigh,
whisper, Oh, I'd know you anywhere ...

"The Language Problem" by Philip Levine

2009-05-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

Cuban Spanish is incomprehensible even to Cubans. "If you spit in his face he'll tell you it's raining," the cab driver said. In Cuban it means, "Your cigar is from Tampa." Single, desperate, almost forty, my ex-wife told the Cuban doctor she'd give a million dollars for a perfect pair of tits. "God hates a coward," he said & directed her to an orthopedic shoe store where everything smelled like iodine. A full-page ad on the back of Nueva Prensa Cubanaclearly read "Free rum 24 hours a day & more on weekends." ("Free rum" was in italics.) When I showed up that evening at the right address, Calle Obispo, 28, the little merchant I spoke to said, "Rum? This is not a distillery." They were flogging Venetian blue umbrellas for $4 American. Mine was made in Taiwan and when it rained refused to open. Before sunset the streets filled with music. In the great Plaza de la Revolución the dark came slowly, filled with the perfume of automobile exhaust and wisteria. I danced with a girl from Santiago de Cuba. Gabriela Mistral García was her name; she was taller than I & wore her black hair in a wiry tangle. She was a year from her doctorate in Critical Theory. After our dance she grabbed me powerfully by the shoulders as a commandante in a movie might, leaned down as though to kiss me on the cheek, & whispered in my good ear, "I dream of tenure." It was the Fifties all over again.

"Landscape with Arson" by Jennifer Grotz

2009-05-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

Have you ever watched a cigarette released from a driver's fingers
swim through the night air and disintegrate in tiny embers?
Invisible by day, fire's little shards, its quiet dissemination.

That's how, one hot afternoon, no one noticed when
something desperate made the boy devise the strategy
to siphon gas from the motorcycle with a discarded straw,

spitting mouthfuls into a fast food cup until there was enough
to set the apartment complex on fire.
It happened in a neighborhood at the edge of town

where the wind sifted a constant precipitation of dust
like desiccated snow and the newly-poured streets
looked like frosting spread across the desert field.

Ducks had just found the man-made pond.
At dusk, they waddled ashore
to explore the construction site like the boy.

He started with the door. Stood mesmerized
as the fire took on new colors. He fed it litter
collected from the field. It hissed and turned green,

it splintered pink, it bloomed aureoles of blue.
But there was hardly time to admire it before
remorse overtook him and he fled.

Before the howl of sirens. He was
gone before—he started with the door—whatever
he wanted to let out.

Something can stop being true in the time it takes
a cigarette to burn to its filter. It was your crime
but it's me who goes back to the scene. Now it's only me

who wants to burn something for you, but there's nothing left—how
do you set fire to the past? Only an impulse to shake free—like cellophane
peeled from a pack—something that clings.

Sometimes I conjure a fire for you in my mind,
the gnats swarming furiously above the water, up and down,
can you see it? How they mimic flame, hovering

at the pond's edge. Lately I find myself there all the time.

"Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone" by Christian Wiman

2009-04-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

Brachest, she called it, gentling grease
over blanching yolks with an expertise
honed from three decades of dawns
at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine,
where even the oldest in the old men’s booth
swore as if it were scripture truth
they’d never had a breakfast better,
rapping a glass sharply to get her
attention when it went sorrowing
so far into some simple thing—
the jangly door or a crusted pan,
the wall clock’s black, hitchy hands—
that she would startle, blink, then grin
as if discovering them all again.
Who remembers now when one died
the space that he had occupied
went unfilled for a day, then two, three,
until she unceremoniously
plunked plates down in the wrong places
and stared their wronged faces
back to banter she could hardly follow.
Unmarried, childless, homely, “slow,”
she knew coffee cut with chamomile
kept the grocer Paul’s ulcer cool,
yarrow in gravy eased the islands
of lesions in Larry Borwick’s hands,
and when some nightlong nameless urgency
made him seek some human company
Brother Tom needed hash-browns with cheese.
She knew to nod at the litany of cities
the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past,
to laugh when the hunters asked
if she’d pray for them or for the quail
they went laughing off to kill,
and then—envisioning one
rising so fast it seemed the sun
tugged at it—to do exactly that.
Who remembers where they all sat:
crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers,
VF’ers muttering through their wars,
night-shift roughnecks so caked in black
it seemed they made their way back
every morning from the dead.
Who remembers one word they said?
The Longhorn Diner’s long torn down,
the gin and feedlots gone, the town
itself now nothing but a name
at which some bored boy has taken aim,
every letter light-pierced and partial.
Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill,
I picture you some dime-bright dawn
grown even brighter now for being gone
bustling amid the formica and chrome
of that small house we both called home
during the spring that was your last.
All stories stop: once more you are lost
in something I can merely see:
steam spiriting out of black coffee,
the scorched pores of toast, a bowl
of apple butter like edible soil,
bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass,
my plate’s gleaming, teeming emptiness.

"Twelve Movies" by Ishai Barnoy

2009-04-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

hen I was told to watch twelve movies—
oh, any twelve—which isn't
bad advice, told
probably to make me take time off
from being so serious.
Or as if time, like this, can be so simply
gleaned into rough twelfths
to some effect,
which isn't an incorrect view, nor an imperfect figure—
on the contrary, both correct and good!
Like twelve people I know, like twelve perfected parts of me.
And the books in the room turned,
or just angled slightly,
as if to say, "Hell,
why not? We don't know!"
And since I normally place my trust in them,
I let it come,
the deluge of phrases.
I let it wash off these layers of mine—
these confused skins—
until it would be satisfied with its flensing.
And I let the movie theater
wrench itself out of the concrete and creep up
seductively, with its lips
gradually opening over my head—"Hello, Ishai," it said.
"Hello, movie theater," I echoed
from inside that long throat.

And my scarf rolled off my neck, and my coat
dropped ripe onto the carpeted floor,
then my shirt and pants and other mentionables,
and I came out pink as on my birthday—though, I suppose
with black spots here and there,
a partly healthy, partly still-alright
pinkish onion.
Like an overgrown child,
imagining myself unveiled—
a tragically trusting twelve-year-old,
which is the person that I resemble
when drunk, or when heavily flattered,
as in a room—the room—
hearing a voice recite all the possible courses of action,
and me, ah me,
expecting that this time (whatever time it is),
when I step outside, it might finally be Spring,
or possibly the end of days,
which is okay—perfect even!

And I would reach out
in the post-apocalyptic dark of the movie theater
for those handles grafted
in between the other animals,
those ones that used to eat one another,
the handles that marked my place
in that poetic future,
all of which I surely must have seen
and somewhere still remembered from a dozen movies.

"Beautiful without Money" by T. Zachary Cotler

2009-04-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

Suddenly fatigued among French
women in the Roman

Empire rooms of the museum,
I fall out of circulation

on a bench. Bronze
heads, helms, a Byzantine

spoon, sixth century, engraved,
attributed to Virgil: O handsome

youth, do not believe too much
in beauty; you cannot be

beautiful without money ... women fall,
tucking skirts, onto my bench,

being suddenly flesh and scent,
and do not speak to me.

"The Meeting in Madrid" by Ron Slate

2009-04-22T18:43:00.000-07:00

Listen, the band still plays in the plaza
but my Spanish friends are weary.
They turn from each other sluggishly,
simply tired, but it feels like a misfortune.

Among all people they suffer the most
from prosperity, assuming the habits
of updated Danes, globalized Poles.
Alejandro departs early from his house
in the new suburb, too far to return
for a nap at siesta time, siete,
the seventh hour after dawn.

It was my job to incite the nations
to productivity, inducing Greeks to adopt
the advances of Swedes. One could deceive
a whole world by staying alert.

Alejandro's eyelids quivered while the Germans
presented their plan for expansion.
The Spaniards nap in buses,
barber chairs, dressing rooms, toilet stalls.
The most exhausted people of Europe,
deprived of their devoted shadow, their dream.
Caffeinated but dull, fatigued by enthusiasm.

Waking at dawn in New York in 1930,
Lorca lamented the pillars of slime.
He gazed at the palisades and saw,
staggering in the suburbs, insomniacs.

In Madrid I heard the dual tongues
of the present—the first, quelling the tension
felt in the past and feared for the future—
the other, tragic and personal, continuous
with the past, ambiguous, conflicted.
It all made me miss the comfort of my wife.

The hotel manager entered our meeting room
without knocking: a threat,
please take your coats,
there's a breeze this evening,
the police have arrived,
please use the stairway, not the lift.

We waited on the plaza
while the band wondered what to play
at a time like this—something
to console or wake the world,
or simply to please themselves.

zatanna

2008-10-24T23:27:00.000-07:00

miss atomic bomb 1957

2008-10-23T01:25:00.000-07:00

list of nuclear holocaust speculative fiction

where in the world is carmen sandiego (california? she'll be back)

2008-10-23T01:12:00.000-07:00

poison ivy

2008-10-23T01:06:00.000-07:00

catwoman

2008-10-23T01:03:00.001-07:00

≈

firshist

le chat
le chat deux

wishlist/ shopping list - books and dvds

2008-10-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

Books:
"To Here and the Easel" by Theodore Sturgeon
"The Atrocity Exhibition" by J.G. Ballard
"The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell
"Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life" by Steven H. Strogatz
"Autobiography of Red" by Anne Carson
"Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem
"The Ginger Man" by J.P. Donleavy
"Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day-and What You Can Do About It" by Bob Sullivan

DVDs:
Jesus Camp
Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Noise
Y tu mamá también
Blade Runner
Reefer Madness (The Movie Musical) (2005)
Out of the Past
The Painted Veil (2007)
Bruno Bozzetto's: Allegro Non Troppo (1977)
Naked Lunch
The Graduate
American Beauty
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Pulp Fiction
Brazil
The Dreamers
The Silence of the Lambs
The Land Before Time
Mean Girls
Transamerica

"Man Listening To Disc" by Billy Collins

2008-09-29T19:22:00.000-07:00

This is not bad --
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
of these earphones,

as if he were right beside me
on this clear day in March,
the pavement sparkling with sunlight,
pigeons fluttering off the curb,
nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.

In fact, I would say
my delight at being suffused
with phrases from his saxophone --
some like honey, some like vinegar --
is surpassed only by my gratitude

to Tommy Potter for taking the time
to join us on this breezy afternoon
with his most unwieldy bass
and to the esteemed Arthur Taylor
who is somehow managing to navigate

this crowd with his cumbersome drums.
And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monk
for figuring out a way
to motorize -- or whatever -- his huge piano
so he could be with us today.

This music is loud yet so confidential.
I cannot help feeling even more
like the center of the universe
than usual as I walk along to a rapid
little version of "The Way You Look Tonight,"

and all I can say to my fellow pedestrians,
to the woman in the white sweater,
the man in the tan raincoat and the heavy glasses,
who mistake themselves for the center of the universe --
all I can say is watch your step,

because the five of us, instruments and all,
are about to angle over
to the south side of the street
and then, in our own tightly knit way,
turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.

And if any of you are curious
about where this aggregation,
this whole battery-powered crew,
is headed, let us just say
that the real center of the universe,

the only true point of view,
is full of hope that he,
the hub of the cosmos
with his hair blown sideways,
will eventually make it all the way downtown.

"My Affair with Rumpelstiltskin" by Ina Loewenberg

2008-09-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

He wasn't really bad to look at
if you don't mind your men so short.
His head was disproportionate
but forceful, and his neck was taut,
his eyebrows were pointed and curly
and of course his black eyes burned
with mad glee, his arms were fully
muscled, his booted feet neatly turned.

He made his offer, good as gold,
so confident I would accept his special skill
to save my skin, but I, surprisingly bold,
countered with the skin itself, the heart, the will.
The straw was scratchy but the man was smooth,
he brought down pillows to cushion our elation;
I slept then while he labored to produce
the glitter that insured my royal station.

It was a bargain that was fair to each
of us, he mellowed, I grew wild,
and he knew games that he was glad to teach
and in our playfulness we made the child.
When I resumed the throne, all validated,
we knew we could no longer carry on;
he took his pleasure in what we had created—
the king would have a surprisingly short son.

word verification : phzed sqeeeo : fo shizzle

2008-09-26T01:07:00.000-07:00

one of these is not like the others and dislocated itself in pixeland...

A Holy Trinity of Poetry (that title mine) by Elizabeth Willis

2008-09-26T00:37:00.000-07:00

Primeval Islands

This I, this me, I’m speaking from a book. That brain that taught me delicious things, forgivable trains, a signal business. I don’t want to be tragic, even to the goldleafed bug. I, Walt Whitman, with Texas in my mouth. Dismiss this fantasy in favor of our startled shade. I remembered my tricks and what they did. Even apples aren’t free. Our life against the midnight lens: poor Crusoe on Mars. I’m walking through this wall of air to comfort my senate.

Why No New Planets Are Ejected from the Sun

These our ships are the copies of copies. This x is that, lifting off the dock. We think we’re here because we’re crouching in the umber of syllables, that sun is “killing me,” a flag among flies, our frozen boat in frozen oil. Let’s haunt the beach instead of this history beset with cosmic jelly. At the blind is it morning already? This word has meant so many things, I need a fence to move this gem-like feeling. Or I’m that bus, in hacked-up disquiet, stuck at the light.

Oil and Water

One person’s idyll is another’s confinement. Midnight everywhere is praying through the noise, a token of the obvious. Hours blurt out buds like synonyms of battle. Depending on your subject, a cup may be a sword, dropped on the tile like a capital “is.” To put away, to be instant, like “the sands of Iwo Jima,” an eager policy toward the nearest sea. Something dreamed a fire would quench it, something drew a finger through the fire.

via No: A Journal of the Arts.

sexy by proxy, by proxy

2008-09-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

"caught in the act"

sex by proxy

2008-09-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

antoiletta

.

^andy warhol ("I don't know if he's a genius, but he certainly has a dirty mind")

it's like a balloon animal

determining the personhood of the dog

I slept in this position the other day, it's actually comfier than it looks.

.

it's like a chastity belt but without the chastity

"There is no crying in baseball"

2008-09-21T00:15:00.000-07:00

Thank god this isn't Baseball.

cinco de whyo

2008-09-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

lake wobegon blues

2008-09-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

tentacles expanding in my mind

2008-01-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

the countertop toilet

2007-12-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

"The Prophecies of Mathematics" by Gary Fincke

2007-11-27T19:35:00.000-08:00

Not even his wife wanted to listen
To Francis Galton explain that prayer made
No difference, that insurance companies
Knew the facts of longevity, and there
Was no adjustment for people who prayed
And the various buildings they lived in.
Not even, but he said it anyway—
The pious live no longer than the bad.
It's always this way with Jeremiahs.
In the prophecies of mathematics
Are equations for hours in the sun,
Alcohol in the blood, early marriage.
There, among the numbers, lies the total
Of the truth of ourselves, and I admit
I've counted the daily steps from my house
To my office through six possible routes;
I've counted the frequency of letters,
Rooting for underdogs like b and k
To outdo their predicted sums of use.

Trivial? Stupid? I estimated
The minutes, once, until the end of school,
Wrote seventy-five thousand, six hundred,
In my September notebook and followed
The lurch of each long minute on the clock
For three periods of world history,
Latin, and plane geometry until
I rejoined the classroom of common sense,
Abandoning the women who number
The knocks on a door to seven, the breaths
Before starting their cars to six, knowing
Nothing about the habits of Galton,
Who kept track of boredom by numbering
The small fidgets of a congregation,
Who counted the brush strokes as his portrait
Was painted, who evaluated place,
At last, by the beauty of its women,
Selecting London like a pageant judge,
Leaving it to us to tally the days
Till what's longed for mayor may not arrive,
Keeping calendars of Xs that end,
Each time, on the eve of possible joy
Like a merciless cliffhanger for faith.

desktop wallpaper pictures

2007-11-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

Tom Waits' "Fumblin' with the Blues" rewritten to be sung by a heterosexual woman.

2007-09-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

Friday left me fumblin' with the blues.
And it's hard to win when you always lose
because the nightspots spend your spirit,
beat your head against the wall:
Two dead ends and you've still got to choose.

You know the bartenders,
they all know your name
and they catch you when you're pulling up lame.
You're a pool-shooting-shimmy-shyster shaking your head
when you should be living clean instead.

You know the ladies you've been seeing off and on,
well they spend your love and then they're gone.
You can't be lovin' someone who is savage and cruel;
take your love and then they leave on out of town.
No they do!

Well now fallin' in love is such a breeze
but it's standin' up that's so hard for me!
I want you to squeeze me but I'm scared to death you'd break my back.
And I know her perfume,
well it won't let you be.

You know the bartenders all know your name
and they catch you when you're pulling up lame.
You're a pool-shooting-shimmy-shyster shaking your head
when you should be living clean instead.

Come on baby!
Let your love light shine,
gotta bury me inside of your fire.
Because your eyes are 'nough to blind me,
you're like a-looking at the sun.
You gotta whisper tell me I'm the one.
Come on and whisper tell me I'm the one.
Gotta whisper tell me I'm the one.
Come on and whisper tell me I'm the one.

The real point of art?

2007-09-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

No god can gloat over all of this dying.

2007-09-16T19:38:00.000-07:00

American Goth

2007-09-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

Bush can't hide his excitement at getting to wear a dress in public.

2007-03-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

Finallyyyy, some satisfaction.

2007-02-07T19:51:00.000-08:00

Whitney Houston - I Have Nothing

Aummygod, aummygod, what have we done?

2006-11-21T23:56:00.000-08:00

my country is a state of mind
country is a state of mind
cunt is a state of mind
t is a state of mind
state of mind
ate of mi
a divine
a o mi
aom
oooooommmmmmmmmmmm

Zoe and Alice unite for a quidam-like wonder-fest.

2006-11-06T02:43:00.000-08:00

Religion is an adult's way of trying to remain a child.
It often disdains sex to some degree or another, which is fitting given that childhood is hallmarked by less interest in sexuality as compared to adulthood.
Childhood and youth are also, theoretically, further from death. Staying a child constantly keeps death at bay, at least psychologically speaking.
You can't stay a child forever, but you can always be God's child! Ah. Grow up, you cowards. Take it ON.

From "Understanding Infrared Metaphysics":

2006-10-30T23:52:00.000-08:00

“What is especially interesting about the notion of intelligibility tools, however, is again that any factor involved in experimental practice can be viewed as an aid towards the provision of understanding. Metaphysical assumptions do not necessarily hold centre stage in scientific explanations: they might do so occasionally, but the determination of which intelligibility tool is more helpful in acquiring understanding depends on the specific research context rather than on pre-existing structures for the acquisition of knowledge. In a sense, intelligibility tools are comparable to Bacon’s privileged instances. Both notions intend to capture the idea that scientific understanding can only be obtained through a series of instruments for the practical investigation of reality as we perceive it. The difference between them consists in Bacon’s characterisation of his instances as epistemic aids to the human quest for the fundamental truths of nature: ‘True induction is not completed until it reaches an affirmation’ (130). By contrast, intelligibility tools do not guarantee the achievement of a univocally true (or objective) account of what reality consist of and of how it can be explained. They further scientific understanding by allowing the scientists to gain experience about the world in different ways, thus favouring the elaboration of increasingly sophisticated theoretical interpretations for those experiences.”

So, things are getting ridiculous.

2006-10-29T22:51:00.000-08:00

Who Needs Harvard?
Competition for the Ivies is as fierce as ever, but kids who look beyond the famous schools may be the smartest applicants of all
By NANCY GIBBS, NATHAN THORNBURGH

It's the summer before your senior year, and you're sweating. The college brochures are spread across the table, along with itineraries, SAT review books, downloaded copies of Web pages that let you chart the grades and scores of every kid from your high school who applied to a given college in the past five years and whether they got in or not. You're hunting for a school where the principal oboe player is graduating, or the soccer goalie, so it might be in the market for someone with your particular skills. You can be fifth-generation Princeton or the first in your family to apply to college: it's still the most important decision you've ever made, and the most confounding.

You're a parent watching your child, so proud, and so worried. Your neighbors' son was a nationally ranked swimmer, straight As, great boards, nice kid. Got rejected at his top three choices, wait-listed at two more. Who gets into Yale these days anyway? Maybe they should have sent him to Mali for the summer to dig wells, fight malaria, give him something to write about in his essay.

You're the college counselor at a public school in a hothouse ZIP code, and you wish you could grab the students, grab the parents by the shoulders and shake them. Twenty thousand dollars for a college consultant? They're paying for help getting into a school where the kid probably doesn't belong. Do they really think there are only 10 great colleges in the country? There are scores of them, hundreds even, honors colleges embedded inside public universities that offer an Ivy education at state-school prices; small liberal-arts colleges that exalt the undergraduate experience in a way that the big schools can't rival. And if they hope to go on to grad school? Getting good grades at a small school looks better than floundering at a famous one. Think they need to be able to tap into the old-boy network to get a job? Chances are, the kid is going to be doing a job that doesn't even exist now, so connections won't do much good. The rules have changed. The world has changed. You have a sign over your office door: COLLEGE IS A MATCH TO BE MADE, NOT A PRIZE TO BE WON.

"In my generation," says Bill Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions at Harvard, "America wasted a lot of talent." Applying to college was less brutal mainly because "three-quarters of the population was excluded from these types of schools." Now 62% more students are going to college than did in the '60s, when Fitzsimmons was a Harvard undergrad, and while many of them head off to state universities and community colleges, the top schools are determined to tear down barriers to entry for the brightest of them. Admissions officers from Harvard, Yale and Stanford weave their outreach tours through low-income ZIP codes and remote rural areas, starting new summer academies for promising candidates and waiving their tuition if they do make it in. Harvard's class of 2009 included 22% more students from families who earned under $60,000 than the class of 2008. Like many other colleges, Harvard also gives some preferences to well-connected applicants like legacies (the children of alumni), but Fitzsimmons says his school is making a statement with its broader outreach. "The word has gone out that if you are talented, the sky is the limit," Fitzsimmons says. "If we don't take advantage of that energy, America will languish."

The math is simple: when so many more kids are applying, a smaller percentage get in, which yields the annual headlines about COLLEGE ADMISSIONS INSANITY. Princeton turned down 4 of every 5 of the valedictorians who applied last year, and Dartmouth could have filled its freshman class with students with a perfect score in at least one SAT subject and had some to spare. But in the meantime, partly as a result, partly in response to all kinds of social and economic trends, the rest of the college universe has shifted as well. The parents may be the last ones to come around--but talk to high school teachers and guidance counselors and especially to the students themselves, and you can glimpse a new spirit, almost a liberation, when it comes to thinking about college. "Sometimes I see it with families with their second or third child, and they've learned their lesson with the first," observes Jim Conroy, a college counselor at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill. Their message: while you may not be able to get into Harvard, it also does not matter anymore. Just ask the kids who have chosen to follow a different road.

Small Is Beautiful

The apostle of the alternative way is a white-haired, bespectacled former education editor of the New York Times named Loren Pope, whose book Colleges That Change Lives is the best-selling admissions guide, ahead of A Is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges. He lays out all the ways in which the past 30 years have smiled on smaller schools. With rising prosperity, their endowments have grown. The number of Ph.D.s doubled from 1968 to 1998, meaning a deeper pool of professors to choose from. And in some ways the small schools gained an advantage over their prestigious rivals: after Sputnik, many colleges became research universities, "and smaller has been better for undergraduate education ever since," Pope says. "At big research universities, professors spend more time researching than teaching."
In a kind of virtuous circle, the "second tier" schools got better as applications rose and they could become choosier in assembling a class--which in turn raised the quality of the whole experience on campus and made the school more attractive to both topflight professors and the next wave of applicants. "Just because you haven't heard of a college doesn't mean it's no good," argues Marilee Jones, the admissions dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an outspoken advocate of the idea that parents need to lighten up. "Just as you've changed and grown since college, colleges are changing and growing."

Once students start Looking Beyond the Ivy League--the title of another Pope book--they see for themselves the advantages that can come with an open mind. They find a school that lets students work with NASA on deep-space experiments, or maintains a year-round ski cabin or funds a full year of traveling in the developing world. Schools once derided as "safeties" stand taller now, as they make the case that excellence is not always a function of exclusivity. Some kids end up getting into Harvard and then turning it down because of the $30,000 tuition or the lecture-hall class sizes or because in the course of the hunt they conclude that they would fit better elsewhere. And in making their choice, they get to make their own statement about what is important in an education, and even teach their parents some lessons.

Investing in the Future

Given the changes in the economy as well as the academy in the past 20 years, advocates for smaller schools argue that they give students a sharper competitive edge. "What most parents are concerned about is providing the best security for their child," says Gay Pepper, head of college guidance at Greens Farms Academy, a private school in Westport, Conn. "Some see going to a brand-name college as providing that security. We have to shift that thinking. A college that is right for the student is the best form of investment."

There's growing evidence to support that claim. The Quarterly Journal of Economics published a study in 2002 showing that students who were accepted at top schools but for various reasons went to less selective ones were earning just as much 20 years later as their peers from more highly selective colleges. Much of the old-boy networking value has diminished in an increasingly performance-based economy: only seven CEOs from the current top 50 FORTUNE 500 companies were Ivy League undergraduates. In an economy in which people typically change jobs seven or eight times and new fields open up all the time, Pope notes, "connections won't do a whole hell of a lot of good. It's your own specific gravity, not the name of the school, that matters."

For students aspiring to go to graduate school, the more personalized education offered at small schools can often provide the best preparation. Pomona College sent a higher percentage of its students to Harvard Law in 2005 than Brown or Duke. The academic might of these less fabled colleges was never a secret, but it's becoming more appreciated than ever before. "Most of the good, small schools were church related to begin with, and it was bad form to beat your chest and brag," Pope says.
James Sanchez, 21, from the dusty high-desert town of Española, N.M., is a senior at Davidson College in North Carolina and an aspiring neuroscientist. He figured that at a bigger school he would have been lucky to spend his lab time washing beakers for the star scientists. At Davidson, where there are no grad students, Sanchez's senior thesis is an integral part of a larger three-year study of memory and learning in rats that may offer new insights into Alzheimer's. His professor anticipates that the research will be published in a top-shelf neuroscience journal, and says that Sanchez will be listed as a co-author. That's a rare honor for an undergraduate, and Sanchez thinks it has given him a boost in his applications to medical school.

Students see a strategy: choose intimacy and attention now, and reach for the world-class research university for grad school. Ashley Rufus, 19, gave up a coveted spot on Harvard's waiting list in favor of Truman State University in rural Kirksville, Mo.: "It started out as a financial issue," says Rufus, who got a full ride to Truman. She loved Harvard when she visited, but she hated the idea of eight years of debt if she were to go on to medical school. Truman was closer to home, had a student-faculty ratio of 15:1, and its graduates have a "very impressive" rate of acceptance to medical schools. Carla Valenzuela, 18, who graduated in the spring from Martin Luther King Academic Magnet school in Nashville, Tenn., applied to 13 schools--and wound up picking her last choice. She turned down Amherst, Wellesley and Dartmouth in favor of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Part of the draw was being near a big city; part was the offer of a Meyerhoff scholarship, a prestigious, four-year grant for talented high school students studying science and related fields. All 52 Meyerhoff scholars from the class of 2005 went on to graduate schools, 45 of them to M.D., Ph.D. or M.D.-Ph.D. combination programs.

"If I wanted to work right after college, I would have gone to a more 'name school' like Dartmouth," Valenzuela says. But she hopes to become a doctor, so she did some research. "I definitely looked at the medical-acceptance rates of each college and how strong their pre-med programs were, and that helped knock out a lot of colleges." Students with clear professional goals will pay more attention to the reputation of a single department than the whole university. Among the artistically inclined, the Rhode Island School of Design has always been pre-eminent, but schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emerson College and Northeastern University are now attracting kids specifically for their arts curriculums. Gabriel Slavitt, 17, who this spring graduated from Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Calif., says his stepsister "basically flipped out" when she heard he was turning down Brown University in favor of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He admits that he applied to Brown for the name, but he concluded that its arts program was not as strong. "For what I want to study, it doesn't mean anything to me to be around students that are going to help me get a job later in life, business students and the like."

Make Me a Match

To see what a more ecumenical approach to college hunting looks like, you have only to drop in on Pope's Colleges That Change Lives tour, a kind of low-key Lollapalooza for freethinking colleges that are looking for liberated students. Last year more than 600 people attended each of the sessions in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Washington. In a crowded Manhattan hotel ballroom, Maria Furtado, director of admissions at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., grabs the wireless microphone in front of a crowd of more than 500 parents, students and college counselors and happily shatters conventional wisdom. "Every spring and every fall, this is what you will see and hear in the media: 'No one gets in anywhere,'" she says. "Gloom and doom. Well, we're here to tell you that people get in everywhere!" She polls the crowd: What percentage of kids do you think get into their first-choice school? One guess is 5%; another is 20%. Furtado beams and announces slowly, so as not to let the Good Word slip out too carelessly: "79.8% of first-year students are at their first-choice school."

Other studies say the number is closer to 70%. But whatever the exact figure, if you want to be one of them, Furtado says, "you have to be brave and bold and explore a school you haven't heard of before." That shouldn't be hard for this crowd. As a group, the kids are unorthodox, outspoken late bloomers. "They're very bright, but they didn't discover it until they were juniors or seniors in high school," says Goucher College president Sanford Ungar, who makes the point that those who find their way to a place like Goucher can be more creative than their highly polished peers. "They haven't been flattened by steamrollers in high school," he says. "They haven't been so bruised in the application process that they are incapable of creative thought. Many kids have been so overgroomed by their parents and others."
Elizabeth Pantone, 17, listens closely as admissions officers make their pitch. She's an aspiring writer in an intense Westchester, N.Y., school, who is both pushing against the culture and admitting that she's working harder now in hopes of aiming higher. Her dad, meanwhile, has been trying to meet her halfway, since no matter what she does she's not likely to make it to the schools he originally had in mind. "It's been quite an education for me," he says. "I was thinking name brand in the beginning, but now I really believe in this match idea."

This can be a slow process, educating parents. "After Colleges That Change Lives came out, I got letters from all around the country from mamas saying 'You saved us,'" Pope says. "Well, more mamas need saving." At Brookline High School in Brookline, Mass., headmaster Bob Weintraub estimates that fully 1 in 3 of his students' parents went to Harvard. That means one of his many jobs is defusing the tension they promote. On their own, students set up a wall by the counseling office where they post their rejection letters. They call it the Wall of Shame, but it's a great way for them to realize they're not alone in having their Ivy dreams dashed. "It's a community of the rejected," jokes Weintraub.

At freshman orientation, Weintraub includes a plea for parents to check their college anxieties at the door. "Their kids are just transitioning into high school," he says. "They're going to be exposed to drugs, sex, lots of changes. Can we just deal with the developmental issues first?" By the time they enter the college hunt, many kids have been conditioned to treat the process more as a race than a romance, a test of who comes in first, not what will make them happy. "You ask students what they want," says Rachel Petrella, a counselor at California's La Jolla Country Day School, "and they say, 'What do you mean, What do I want? What do I get? I've been working for four years without daylight. I'm supposed to go to the most selective school I've earned, right?'"

Actually, no. And thus begins their higher education about higher education. "The more sophisticated kids who take on the search as a research project, they are getting past the prestige," says Petrella. Students see that schools like Vassar, Lehigh, Colgate and Dickinson really care about the quality of undergraduate life, she says. Since many counselors will advise the more anxious students to apply to at least nine schools (three stretches, three matches and three safeties), students run spreadsheets rating various criteria on a scale of 1 to 10, from the food to the student-teacher ratio to rates of acceptance into grad school. And then there are the unquantifiable assets. At Davidson, townspeople and professors bake cakes for the winners of the freshman cake race and students boast that scattered around the campus are dollar bills held down by rocks, tangible evidence of an honor code so entrenched that if a dollar falls on campus soil, it stays there until the owner claims it. Kenyon in Ohio includes a paragraph in its acceptance letter that is entirely personal to the particular student: good job on the essay, nice season in basketball. The big schools can't do that--"and it's making a difference," says Sharon Merrow Cuseo, dean at Los Angeles' Harvard-Westlake Academy. "I think of my students as cynical consumers of college propaganda, but they love that personal touch. They come in and say, 'Jeez, look at this note they wrote me. It's good to be wanted.'" She can map the change in priorities based on the school's spring 2006 college tour. Five years ago, they just did the northeast. This year the group, after visiting a campus or two in New York, split into two parts. The first went south to University of Richmond, Davidson, William and Mary, and George Washington. "People are starting to understand that a lot of the Southern schools in general are great," she says. The second broke north into Canada to visit McGill University in Montreal and the University of Toronto. Cuseo calls Canada "the new frontier."

Who Needs Consultants?

So how do the private consultants fit into all this? As many as 1 in 5 applicants to private four-year colleges get some kind of independent coaching, which can range in price from $469 for Kaplan's three-hour consultation by webcam to $36,000 for four years of hand holding offered by superconsultant Michele Hernandez. Although consultants are easy to caricature for sanding down and varnishing a nice, raw kid, admissions officers insist that they can see past the polishing to the real human being beneath. How useful counselors are may depend as much on the attitude of the client as the approach of the counselor. "Some of them are very helpful and are helping students learn how to tell us about themselves," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, in a rare defense of the breed. "I don't think it's fair to say they're all negative."

For better or worse, working with a consultant forces students to decide who they are as they shape their self-portraits and what sacrifices they are willing to make in the course of their college search. Emma Robson, 17, a junior in Westport, Conn., found herself wrestling with a consultant who tried to spike her favorite activity of the entire year, her seven weeks at a summer camp on Moose Pond in Maine, where she and a bunch of girls she has known since she was 10 sing campfire songs and canoe and make lanyards. Many of her classmates will be spending their summers racking up achievements, while Robson will be collecting and recollecting, in a very old-fashioned way, memories. "Camp is very dear to me," she says, and she's prepared to give up whatever edge a more intense summer might give her. "It's a time I get to recharge from a pretty stressful school year. If I spent the summer taking extra classes, I would just be worn down by the time school starts."

If parents see college admission as the culmination of years of investment--the homework showdowns and soccer shuttles--it's not hard to find kids like Robson who see it as their deliverance. "I don't really want to continue all this hypercompetitiveness," says Greg Smith, 18, a senior in Charlotte, N.C., who cringes as he notes how, when history projects were announced at his high school, there was a literal footrace to the library to be the first to get the key books. He won a Morehead scholarship to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a full ride offered to the very top students. It was not only the money but also the feel of the place that drew him. "The Ivy Leagues just seemed like a very intense four years where I'd get more of the same that I've been through here," he says. "There's such a seek-and-destroy mentality." Others seek out schools like Sarah Lawrence, which has no required courses and few exams but rather research papers and essays. Or Hampshire, where students focus on projects instead of courses and receive detailed evaluations rather than grades.

College students this spring watched the flameout of Kaavya Viswanathan, the prepackaged Harvard prodigy who published a best seller at 19 and had been exposed as a plagiarist by 20. That's not the way things are supposed to unfold. College is supposed to be about the Best Four Years of Your Life, "the love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books," not to mention pizza and football and long, caffeinated nights of debate and confusion and discovery. All that families have to do to succeed, say veterans of the admissions wars, is let go of some old assumptions and allow themselves to be pleasantly surprised by how much has changed on campuses across the country in the past generation. That ability in the end may be the admissions test that matters most.

Not quite delicious but still satisfactorily tasty:

2006-10-29T22:09:00.000-08:00

The Freestyle Art Manifesto

"The Higher, the Fewer”: Discrimination Against Women in Academia

Medical Fascism

Reasonably Clever LEGO Tarrot

Irreversible Error in Texas

snappy repartee: What you'd say if you had another chance.

2006-10-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

" I am inexplicably drawn (in)to fountains. I am comforted by empty, silent buildings and the weight of a good blanket. I enjoy reading instruction manuals and filling out government forms. I am thrilled by the surreal and the absurd, and fascinated by the seemingly simplistic. The smell of musty basements, the sound of plastic beads being swished around, and the feeling of sneezing all give me intense pleasure. Easter gummy candies taste like gasoline. Commercials irritate me more in the morning than they do in the afternoon or evening. Vivid greenish-yellow makes my spine tingle with delight. I laugh often at inopportune moments. I'm terrified of growing old. I love the smell of my clothes after a campfire. I delight in acts of quiet sabotage. I revel in nostalgia. I am rarely bored. I love reading letters that people have lost, forgotten, or thrown away. Voilà; c'est moi.
Expertise: Plentiful!
Occupation: Student"

Find three similarities and two differences. And no, people aren't sheep.

2006-10-17T00:55:00.000-07:00

Uniformly-Accelerated Motion and The Big Five (p. 17 PR)

2006-10-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

The simplest type of motion to analyze is motion in which the acceleration is constant. Although true uniform acceleration is rarely achieved in the real word, many common motions are governed by approximately constant acceleration and, in these cases, the kinematics of uniformly accelerated motion provide a pretty good description of what's happening. Notice that if the acceleration is constant, then taking an average yields nothing new, so a = a.

Another restriction that will make our analysis easier is to consider only motion that takes place along a straight line. In these cases, there are only two possibly directions of motion. One is positive and the opposite direction is negative. Most of the quantities we've been dealing with--displacement, velocity, and acceleration--are vectors, which means that they include both a magnitude and a direction. With straight-line motion, direction can be specificied simply by adding a + or - sign to the magnitude of the quantity.

The fundamental quantities are displacement (Δs), velocity (v), and acceleration (a). Acceleration in a change in velocity, from an initial velocity (v₀ or v_i) to a final velocity (v_f or simply v--with no subscript). And, finally, the motion takes place during some elapsed time interval, Δt. Therefore, we have five kinematic quantities: Δs, v₀, v, a, and Δt.

These five quantities are related by a group of five equations that we call The Big Five. They work in cases where acceleration is uniform, which are the cases we're considering.

Big Five #1
Δs = vΔt
Variable that's missing: a

Big Five #2
Δv = aΔt
Variable that's missing: Δs

Big Five #3
Δs = v₀Δt + 0.5a(Δt)²
Variable that's missing: v

Big Five #4
Δs = vΔt - 0.5a(Δt)²
Variable that's missing: v₀Big Five #5
v² = v₀² + 2aΔs
Variable that's missing: Δt

"From the Floating World" by Carole Houlston

2006-10-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

Face down in a puddle,
hair Ophelia-spread,
my head bears a rainbow halo.

Scum sticks to my cheek
and the world distorts
as I turn to eye the sky.

Grey clouds shift,
scudding past at speed –
a pirate fleet sailing past my waiting arms.

"No Surer Heaven" by Mike Carson

2006-10-11T20:48:00.000-07:00

He taught me how to think the bullet in,
Along the flank behind the shoulder joint,
Or from the front, the line of crosshatched fur
That marks the heat upon the chest,
To not be smart and try and hit the brain
But always aim imagining the place
Behind the juncture in the bone, through ribs,
Snug in the softness of the lungs, the dark
Sung thing that I could picture even at ten.
As we sat silent against a tree, I looked
Till hand and eye were one, each made exact
Along the age-scarred, polished stock, dull gleam
of blue black metal, the tiny letters engraved—
A .22 Cal. Remington—outside
The chamber where the bullets sat tight in wait.
I lift the barrel, stare down the sight, steady
The bead into the notch, imagining
A knothole or a branch alive, the shot
Thought in through fur, through skin. It nicks the bone,
The emptied body lies in the leaves, my hand.

It's fifty years since he and I eased down
In Geren's Woods, his own heart years now gone—
So quiet and quick-eyed, kind to love a kid
Not his, by instinct never saying I love.
He put instead the rifle in my hands,
Gave me the name and use of all its parts.
And Sundays when my Dad, hungover, slept,
Though no one asked him to he'd pick me up,
Take me to Lourdes for Mass to keep me from
The mortal sin, I guessed. I had no prayer
But saw him kneel and knew his silence meant.
Beside him in the pew down near the front
Where votive candles burned in rows I dreamt
My separate dream, the trees high-arched and reaching through
The splays of sunlight sparkling with the wind,
The quiet they held because we listened for
The sound by which to sight the hidden one
That might come forth like Lazarus from the shadows
In the leaves - I hold my breath as he says to,
Think hard to squeeze the trigger slow. He is
A voice just out of sight, but close as prayer
To make me sure, to think the squirrel we'd skin
And then at dinner, tasting hard, I'd eat.
At ten there is no heaven surer than
A loaded rifle in your hands, but when
He'd gone, left me alone to be a man,
I heard his words inside my own alive
and in the woods again—You get one shot,
The true imagination of it. The heart,
and all he meant by that.

From David Galbraith:

2006-10-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

"People complain about costly things such as space exploration and high energy physics experiments. Why spend money on these things when we have issues like poverty?

This argument is nihilistic. Why do we build monuments, paint, make films, write music, when there is still poverty all around? There is enough food in the world; poverty is the result of politics, exploitation and war above all.

Human space exploration is one of our greatest achievements. To try and rationalize unmanned space flight on the grounds of practicality misses the point."

Satire. Once liverwire.

2006-08-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Internet is like the Tower of Babel, and by golly the Lord should strike it down because it helps men get together to plot evil which is against His plan for all of us, for we are naught but His scraggy-footed minions of divine doom and must not be distracted from this purpose by ambition and humanism. The translation sites shall be the first to go and along similar lines all translators shall perish, as they are not what God intended and translation should thus be tantamount to a sin. Kind of like those first-born sons. Of course people who translate bibles and shit to spread God's word might be spared if they mark up their email accounts with digitalised animal intestines or something.

We speak different languages because God wants it this way. Translators must die or repent by getting up the arse!

The Trade Towers were too close to the sky, and Pisa is leaning for a reason.

The Internet is really making it too easy for men to exchange ideas, and didn't God strike down the Babel Tower to prevent such stuff?

IN THE NAME OF THE LORD, ALL TRANSLATIONS EXCEPT THOSE TO SPREAD THE FAITH MUST CEASE AND THE INTERNET MUST BE DESTROYED. AMEN.

Okay, so, I really hope there isn't a bug crawling up my ass.

2006-08-21T23:29:00.000-07:00

Hopefully it's just the tampon string.

Yum.

2006-08-20T15:46:00.000-07:00

Rufus Wainwright - Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

Fat rat to make you smile.

2006-08-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

IT'S STUCK IN MY HEAD

2006-08-06T00:13:00.000-07:00

Fat Boy Slim - It's A Wonderful Night

On relationships and "shallowness".

2006-07-11T01:42:00.000-07:00

The difference between friendship and a romantic entanglement is first and foremost sexual attraction, and sexual attraction is in large part related to physical appearance. It is not shallow to take a potential mate's appearance into consideration, it is honest and intrinsic to the sexual chemistry that distinguishes lovers from platonic pals.

That said, and on a slightly different note, some people are naturally more predisposed toward certain things than others. Obesity may be more of a genetic bane for certain people, but the onus is still upon them to simply work harded to make up for it. However, while the obese person who makes a considerable effort to shed the extra pounds and to live a healthy lifestyle despite a demonstrated genetic disadvantage should be cut more slack, this does not make his/her fat rolls more attractive.

At present it is nigh impossible to conclusively pinpoint which factors most determine an individual's weight or abundance thereof. Until we can make such conclusions with vigour, the most productive attitude for most people is one which places the problem within their control and thus the solution within their grasp. Moreover, there is certainly a sizeable body of evidence to suggest that lifestyle choices really are the biggest and most heavy-handed (pardoning the pun) factor in most obsesity cases.

I try not to pass judgement on the work ethics of fat people, because there ARE exceptions to that rule, but no amount of benefit-of-the-doubt is going to make me find Jabba the Hutt sexy.

A Saucer Of Loneliness

2006-06-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

by Theodore Sturgeon

If she's dead, I thought, I'll never find her in this white flood of moonlight on the white sea, with the surf seething in and over the pale, pale sand like a great shampoo. Almost always, suicides who stab themselves or shoot themselves in the heart carefully bare their chests; the same strange impulse generally makes the sea-suicide go naked.

A little earlier, I thought, or later, and there would be shadows for the dunes and the breathing toss of the foam. Now the only real shadow is mine, a tiny thing just under me, but black enough to feed the blackness of the shadow of a blimp.

A little earlier, I thought, and I might have seen her plodding up the silver shore, seeking a place lonely enough to die in. A little later and my legs would rebel against this shuffling trot through sand, the maddening sand that could not hold and would not help a hurrying man.

My legs did give way then and I knelt suddenly, sobbing -- not for her; not yet -- just for air. There was such a rush about me: wing, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.

I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud.

And there she was.

Her white shoulders were a taller curve in the sloping foam. She must have sensed me -- perhaps I yelled -- for she turned and saw me kneeling there. She put her fists to her temples and her face twisted, and she uttered a piercing wail of despair and fury, and then plunged seaward and sank.

I kicked off my shoes and ran into the breakers, shouting, hunting, grasping at flashes of white that turned to sea-salt and coldness in my fingers. I plunged right past her, and her body struck my side as a wave whipped my face and tumbled both of us. I gasped in solid water, opened my eyes beneath the surface and saw a greenish-white distorted moon hurtle as I spun. Then there was sucking sand under my feet again and my left hand was tangled in her hair.

The receding wave towed her away and for a moment she streamed out from my hand like steam from a whistle. In that moment I was sure she was dead, but as she settled to the sand, she fought and scrambled to her feet.

She hit my ear, wet, hard, and a huge, pointed pain lanced into my head. She pulled, she lunged away from me, and all the while my hand was caught in her hair. I couldn't have freed her if I had wanted to. She spun to me with the next wave, battered and clawed at me, and we went into deeper water.

"Don't...don't...I can't swim!" I shouted, so she clawed me again.

"Leave me alone," she shrieked. "Oh, dear God, why can't you leave" (said her fingernails) "me..." (said her snapping teeth) "alone!" (said her small, hard first).

So by her hair I pulled her head down tight to her white shoulder; and with the edge of my free hand I hit her neck twice. She floated again, and I brought her ashore.

I carried her to where a dune was between us and the sea's broad, noisy tongue, and the wind was above us somewhere. But the light was as bright. I rubbed her wrists and stroked her face and said, "It's all right," and, "There!" and some names I used to have for a dream I had long, long before I ever heard of her.

She lay still on her back with the breath hissing between her teeth, with her lips in a smile which her twisted-tight, wrinkle-sealed eyes made not a smile but a torture. She was well and conscious for many moments and still her breath hissed and her closed eyes twisted.

"Why couldn't you leave me alone?" she asked at last. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She had so much misery that there was no room for fear. She shut her eyes again and said, "You know who I am."

"I know," I said.

She began to cry.

I waited, and when she stopped crying, there were shadows among the dunes. A long time.

She said, "You don't know who I am. Nobody knows who I am."

I said, "It was in all the papers."

"That!" She opened her eyes slowly and her gaze traveled over my face, my shoulders, stopped at my mouth, touched my eyes for the briefest second. She curled her lips and turned away her head. "Nobody knows who I am."

I waited for her to move or speak, and finally I said, "Tell me."

"Who are you?" she asked, with her head still turned away.

"Someone who..."

"Well?"

"Not now, " I said. "Later, maybe."

She sat up suddenly and tried to hide herself. "Where are my clothes?"

"I didn't see them."

"Oh," she said. "I remember. I put them down and kicked sand over them, just where a dune would come and smooth them over, hide them as if they never were...I hate sand. I wanted to drown in the sand, but it wouldn't let me...You mustn't look at me!" she shouted. "I hate to have you looking at me!" She threw her head from side to side, seeking. "I can't stay here like this! What can I do? Where can I go?"

"Here," I said.

She let me help her up and then snatched her hand away, half turned from me. "Don't touch me. Get away from me."

"Here," I said again, and walked down the dune where it curved in the moonlight, tipped back into the wind and down and became not dune but beach. "Here," I pointed behind the dune.

At last she followed me. She peered over the dune where it was chest-high, and again where it was knee-high. "Back there?"

She nodded.

"I didn't see them."

"So dark..." She stepped over the low dune and into the aching black of those moon-shadows. She moved away cautiously, feeling tenderly with her feet, back to where the dune was higher. She sank down into the blackness and disappeared there. I sat on the sand in the light. "Stay away from me," she spat.

I rose and stepped back. Invisible in the shadows, she breathed, "Don't go away. " I waited, then saw her hand press out of the clean-cut shadows. "There," she said, "over there. In the dark. Just be a...stay away from me now...be a -- voice."

I did as she asked, and sat in the shadows perhaps six feet from her.

She told me about it. Not the way it was in the papers.

She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slops had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning's hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belongs to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses
in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.

So she raised her eyes, and there above her was the saucer. It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical.

At first she felt no astonishment, for this was so different from anything she had ever seen before that it had to be a trick of the eye, a false evaluation of size and speed and distance that in a moment would resolve itself into a sun-flash on an airplane or the lingering glare of a welding arc.

She looked away from it and abruptly realized that many other people saw it -- saw something -- too. People all around her had stopped moving and speaking and were craning upward. Around her was a glove of silent astonishment, and outside it, she was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard breathing giant who never inhales.

She looked up again, and at last began to realize how large and how far away the saucer was. No: rather, how small and how very near it was. It was just the size of the largest circle she might make with her two hands, and it floated not quite eighteen inches over her head.

Fear came then. She drew back and raised a forearm, but the saucer simply hung there. She bent far sideways, twisted away, leaped forward, looked back and upward to see if she had escaped it. At first she couldn't see it; then as she looked up and up, there it was, close and gleaming, quivering and crooning, right over her head.

She bit her tongue.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a man cross himself. He did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought. And that was the greatest single thing that had ever happened to her. No one had ever looked at her and made a respectful gesture before, not once, not ever. Through terror, through panic and wonderment, the comfort of that thought nestled into her, to wait to be taken out and looked at again in lonely times.

The terror was uppermost now, however. She backed away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous cakewalk. She should have collided with people. There were plenty of people there, gaping and craning, but she reached none. She spun around and discovered to her horror that she was the center of a pointing, pressing crowd. Its mosaic of eyes all bulged, and its inner circle braced its many legs to press back and away from her.

The saucer's gentle note deepened. It tilted, dropped an inch or so. Someone screamed, and the crowd broke away from her in all directions, milled about, and settled again in a new dynamic balance, a much larger ring, as more and more people raced to thicken it against the efforts of the inner circle to escape.

The saucer hummed and tilted, tilted....

She opened her mouth to scream, fell to her knees, and the saucer struck. It dropped against her forehead and clung there. It seemed almost to lift her. She came erect on her knees, made on effort to raise her hands against it, and then her arms stiffened down and back, her hands not reaching the ground. For perhaps a second and a half the saucer held her rigid, and then it passed a single ecstatic quiver to her body and dropped it. She plumped to the ground, the backs of her thighs heavy and painful on her heels and ankles.

The saucer dropped beside her, rolled once in a small circle, once just around its edge, and lay still. It lay still and dull and metallic, different and dead.

Hazily, she lay and gazed at the gray-shrouded blue of the good spring sky, and hazily she heard whistles.

And some tardy screams.

And a great stupid voice bellowing, "Give her air!" which made everyone press closer.

Then there wasn't so much sky because of the blue-clad bulk with its metal buttons and its leatherette notebook. "Okay, okay, what's happened here stand back fo’ gods sake."

And the widening ripples of observation, interpretation and comment: "It knocked her down." "Some guy knocked her down." "He knocked her down." "Some guy knocked her down and --" "Right in broad daylight this guy..." "The park's gettin’ to be..." onward and outward, the adulteration of fact until it was lost altogether because excitement is so much more important.

Somebody with a harder shoulder than the rest bullying close, a notebook here, too, a witnessing eye over it, ready to change "...a beautiful brunet..." to "an attractive brunet" for the afternoon editions, because "attractive" is as dowdy as any woman is allowed to get if she is a victim in the news.

The glittering shield and the florid face bending close: "You hurt bad, sister?" And the echoes, back and back through the crowd, "Hurt bad, hurt bad, badly injured, he beat the hell out of her, broad daylight..."

And still another man, slim and purposeful, tan gaberdine, cleft chin and beard-shadow: "Flyin' saucer, hm? Okay officer, I'll take over here."

"And who the hell might you be, takin' over?"

The flash of a brown leather wallet, a face so close behind that its chin was pressed into the gaverdine shoulder. The face said, awed; "FBI" and that rippled outward too. The policeman nodded -- the entire policeman nodded in one single bobbing genuflection.

"Get some help and clear this area," said the gaberdine.

"Yes, sir!" said the policeman.

"FBI, FBI" the crowd murmured, and there was more sky to look at above her. She sat up and there was glory in her face. "The saucer talked to me," she sang.

"You shut up, " said the gaberdine. "You'll have lots of chance to talk later."

"Yeah, sister," said the policeman. "My god, this mob could be full of Communists."

"You shut up, too," said the gaberdine.

Someone in the crowd told someone else a Communist beat up this girl, while someone else was saying she got beat up because she was a Communist.

She started to rise, but solicitous hands forced her down again. There were thirty police there by that time.

"I can walk," she said.

"Now, you just take it easy," they told her.

They put a stretcher down beside her and lifted her onto it and covered her with a big blanket.

"I can walk," she said as they carried her through the crowd.

A woman went white and turned away moaning, "Oh, my God, how awful!"

A small man with round eyes stared and stared at her and licked and licked his lips.

The ambulance. They slid her in. The gaberdine was already there.

A white-coated man with very clean hands: "How did it happen, miss?"

"No questions," said the gaberdine. "Security."

The hospital.

She said, "I got to get back to work."

"Take your clothes off," they told her.

She had a bedroom to herself then for the first time in her life. Whenever the door opened, she could see a policeman outside. It opened very often to admit the kind of civilians who were very polite to military people, and the kind of military people who were even more polite to certain civilians. She did not know what they all did nor what they wanted. Every single day they asked her four million five hundred thousand questions. Apparently they never talked to each other, because each of them asked her the same questions over and over.

"What is your name?"

"How old are you?"

"What year were you born?"

"What is your name?"

Sometimes they would push her down strange paths with their strange questions.

"Now, your uncle. Married a woman from Middle Europe did he? Where
in Middle Europe?"

"What clubs or fraternal organizations did you belong to? Ah! Now, about that Rinkeydinks gang on Sixty-third street. Who was really behind it?"

But over and over again, "What did you mean when you said the saucer
talked to you?"

And she would say, "It talked to me."

And they would say, "And it said --"

And she would shake her head.

There would be a lot of shouting ones, and then a lot of kind ones. No one had ever been so kind to her before, but she soon learned that no one was being kind to her. They were just getting her to relax, to think of other things, so they could suddenly shoot that question at her. "What do you mean it talked to you?"

Pretty soon it was just like Mom's or school or anyplace, and she used to sit with her mouth closed and let them yell. Once they sat her on a hard chair for hours and hours with a light in her eyes and let her get thirsty. Home, there was a transom over the bedroom door and Mom used to leave the kitchen light glaring through it all night, every night, so she wouldn't get the horrors. So the light didn't
bother her at all.

They took her out of the hospital and put her in jail. Some ways it was good. The food. The bed was all right, too. Through the window she could see lots of women exercising in the yard. It was explained to her that they all had much harder beds.

"You are a very important young lady, you know."

That was nice at first, but as usual, it turned out they didn't mean her at all. They kept working on her. Once they brought the saucer in to her. It was inside a big wooden crate with a padlock, and a steel box inside that with a Yale lock. It only weighed a couple of pounds, the saucer, but by the time they got it packed, it took two men to carry it and four men with guns to watch them.

They made her act out the whole thing just the way it happened, with some soldiers holding the saucer over her head. It wasn't the same. They'd cut a lot of shapes and pieces out of the saucer, and besides, it was that dead gray color. They asked her if she knew anything about that, and for once, she told them.

"It's empty now," she said.

The only one she would ever talk to was a little man with a fat belly who said to her the first time he was alone with her, "Listen, I think the way they've been treating you stinks. Now, get this: I have a job to do. My job is to find out why you won't tell what the saucer said. I don't want to know what it said and I'll never ask you. I don't even want you to tell me. Let's just find out why you're keeping it a secret."

Find out why she turned out to be hours of just talking about having pneumonia and the flower pot she made in second grade that Mom threw down the fire escape and getting left back in school and the dream about holding a wineglass in both hands and peeping over it at some man.

And one day she told him why she wouldn't say about the saucer, just the way it came to her: "Because it was talking to me, and it's nobody else's business."

She even told him about the man crossing himself that day. It was the only other thing she had of her own.

He was nice. He was the one who warned her about the trial. "I have no business saying this, but they're going to give you the full dress treatment. Judge and jury and all. You just say what you want to say, no less and no more, hear? And don't let 'em get your goat. You have a right to own something."

He got up and swore and left.

First a man came and talked to her for a long time about how maybe this Earth would be attacked from outer space by beings much stronger and cleverer than we were, and maybe she had the key to a defense. So she owed it to the whole world. And then even if Earth wasn't attacked, just think of what an advantage she might give this country over its enemies. Then he shook her finger in her face and said that what she was doing amounted to working for the enemies of her country. And he turned out to be the man defending her at the trial.

The jury found her guilty of contempt of court, and the judge recited a long list of penalties he could give her. He gave her one of them and suspended it. They put her back in jail for a few more days, and one fine day they turned her loose.

That was wonderful at first. She got a job in a restaurant, and a furnished room. She had been in the papers so much that Mom didn't want her back home. Mom was drunk most of the time and sometimes used to tear up the whole neighborhood, but all the same she had very special ideas about being respectable, and being in the papers all the time for spying was not her idea of being decent. So she put her maiden name on the mailbox downstairs and told her daughter not to live there anymore.

At the restaurant she met a man who asked her for a date. The first time. She spent every cent she had on a red handbag to go with her red shoes. They weren't the same shade, but anyway, they were both red. They went to the movies, and afterward he didn't try to kiss her or anything; he just tried to find out what the flying saucer told her. She didn't say anything. She went home and cried all night.

Then some men sat in a booth talking and they shut up and glared at her every time she came past. They spoke to her boss, and he came and told her that they were electronics engineers working for the government and they were afraid to talk shop while she was around --wasn't she some sort of spy or something? So she got fired.

Once she saw her name on a jukebox. She put in a nickel and punched the number, and the record was all about "the flyin' saucer came down one day, and taught her a brand-new way to play, and what it was I will not say, but she took me out of this world." And while she was listening to it, someone in the juke joint recognized her and called her by name. Four of them followed her home and she had to block the door shut.

Sometimes she'd be all right for months on end, and then someone would ask for a date. Three times out of five, she and the date were followed. Once the man she was with arrested the man who was tailing them. Twice the man who was tailing them arrested the man she was with. Five times out of five, the date would try to find out about the saucer. Sometimes she would go out with someone and pretend it was a real date, but she wasn't very good at it.

So she moved to the shore and got a job cleaning at night in offices and stores. There weren't many to clean, but that just meant there weren't many people to remember her face from the papers. Like clockwork, every eighteen months, some feature writer would drag it all out again in a magazine or a Sunday supplement; and every time anyone saw a headlight on a mountain or a light on a weather balloon, it had to be a flying saucer, and there had to be some tired quip about the saucer wanting to tell secrets. Then for two or three weeks she'd stay off the streets in the daytime.

Once she thought she had it whipped. People didn't want her, so she began reading. The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies -- all about the pretty ones who really own the world. So she learned things -- animals, trees. A lousy little chipmunk caught in a wire fence hit her. The animals didn't want her. The trees didn't care.

Then she hit on the idea of the bottles. She got all the bottles she could and wrote on papers which she corked into the bottles. She'd tramp miles up and down the beaches and throw the bottles out as far as she could. She knew that if the right person found one, it would give that person the only thing in the world that would help. Those bottles kept her going for three solid years. Everyone's got to have a secret little something he does.

And at last the time came when it was no use anymore. You can go on trying to help someone who maybe exists; but soon you can't pretend there's such a person anymore. And that's it. The end.

"Are you cold?" I asked when she was through telling me.

The surf was quieter and the shadows longer.

"No," she answered from the shadows. Suddenly she said, "Did you think I was mad at you because you saw me without my clothes?"

"Why wouldn't you be?"

“You know, I don't care? I wouldn't have wanted...wanted you to see
me even in a ball gown or overalls. You can't cover up my carcass. It
shows; it's there whatever. I just didn't want you to see me. At all."

"Me, or anyone?"

She hesitated. "You."

I got up and stretched and walked a little, thinking, "Didn't the FBI try to stop you throwing those bottles?"

"Oh, sure. They spent I don't know how much taxpayers' money gathering 'em up. They still make a spot check every once in awhile. They're getting tired of it, though. All the writing in the bottles is the same." She laughed. I didn't know she could.

"What's funny?"

"All of 'em -- judges, jailers, jukeboxes -- people. Do you know it wouldn't have saved me a minute's trouble if I'd told 'em the whole thing at the very beginning?"

"No?"

"No. They wouldn't have believed me. What they wanted was a new weapon. Super-science from a super-race, to slap the hell out of the super-race if they ever got a chance, or out of our own if they don't. All those brains," she breathes, with more wonder than scorn, "all that brass. They think 'super-race' and it comes out 'super-science'. Don't they ever imagine a super-race has super-feelings, too -- super-laughter, maybe, or super-hunger?" She paused. "Isn't it time you asked me what the saucer said?"

"I'll tell you," I blurted.

"There is in certain living souls
a quality of loneliness unspeakable,
so great it must be shared
as company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
that in immensity
there is one lonelier than you."

"Dear Jesus," she said devoutly, and began to weep. "And how is it addressed?"

"To the loneliest one..."

"How did you know?" she whispered.

"It's what you put in the bottles, isn't it?"

"Yes," she said. "Whenever it gets to be too much, that no one cares, that no one ever did...you throw a bottle into the sea, and out goes a part of your own loneliness. You sit and think of someone finding it...learning for the first time that the worst there is can be understood."

The moon was setting and the surf was hushed. We looked up and out to the stars. She said, "We don't know what loneliness is like. People thought the saucer was a saucer, but it wasn't. It was a bottle with a message inside. It had a bigger ocean to cross -- all of space -- and not much chance of finding anybody. Loneliness? We don't know loneliness."

When I could, I asked her why she had tried to kill herself.

"I've had it good," she said, "with what the saucer told me. I wanted to...pay back. I was bad enough to be helped; I had to know I was good enough to help. No one wants me? Fine. But don't tell me no one, anywhere, wants my help. I can't stand that."

I took a deep breath. "I found one of your bottles two years ago. I've been looking for you ever since. Tide charts, current tables, maps and...wandering. I heard some talk about you and the bottles hereabouts. Someone told me you'd quit doing it, you'd taken to wandering the dunes at night. I knew why. I ran all the way."

I needed another breath now. "I got a club foot. I think right, but the words don't come out of my mouth the way they're inside my head. I have this nose. I never had a woman. Nobody ever wanted to hire me to work where they'd have to look at me. You're beautiful," I said. "You're beautiful."

She said nothing, but it was as if a light came from her, more light and far less shadow than ever the practiced moon could cast. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.

The Man Who Lost The Sea

2006-06-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

by Theodore Sturgeon

Say you're a kid, and one dark night you're running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witch y-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you're too old to play wit-h toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn't a toy, it's a model. You tell him look hers, here's something most people don't know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell hun how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won't listen. He doesn't want to think about flying, about helicopters, or

About you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, "Don't move, boy. You've got the bends. Don't even try to move." He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.

His head isn't working right. But he knows clearly that it isn't working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn't remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later. . .forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn't stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did.... Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn't want to bother the sick man with it now.~

Look what you've done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now). The motionless effort t~osts him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never been, seasick, and the formula for that is to keep, your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he'd better get busy-now; for there's one place especially not to be seasick in, and that's locked up in a pressure suit. Now!

So he busies himself as best he can, with the seascape, landscape, sky. He lies on high ground, his head propped on a vertical wall of black rock. There is another such outcrop before him, whip-topped with white sand and with smooth fiat sand. Beyond and down is valley, salt-flat, estuary; he cannot yet be sure. He is sure of the line of footprints, which begin behind him, pass to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the shadows of the valley.

Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and between the holes the black is absolute-wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.

(Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can break. Get busier. Now.)

Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That'll get him. Hey, how about this for a gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the wingtips, see? and on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of compressed air.

But the sick man curls his sick lip: oh, git, kid, git, will you?-that has nothing to do with the sea. So you git.

Out 'and out the sick man forces his view, etching all he sees with a meticulous intensity, as if it might be his charge, one day, to duplicate all this, To his left is only starlit sea, windless. In front of him across the valley, rounded hills with dim white epaulettes of light. To his right, the jutfing corner of the black wall against which his helmet rests. (He thinks the distant moundings of nausea becalmed, but he will not look yet.) ~So he scans the sky, black and bright, calling Sirius, calling Pleiades, Polaris, Ursa Minor, calling that . . . that . . . Why, it moves. Watch it: yes, it moves! It is a fleck of light, seeming to be wrinkled, fissured, rather like a chip of boiled cauliflower in the sky. (Of course, he knows better than to trust his own eyes just now.) But that movement

As a child he had stood on cold sand in a frosty Cape Cod

evening, watching Sputnik's steady spark rise out of the haze (madly, dawning a little north of west); and after that he had sleeplessly wound special coils for his receiver, risked his life restringing high antennas, all for the brief capture of an unreadable tweetle-eep-tweetle in his earphones from Vanguard, Explorer, Lunik, Discoverer, Mercury. He knew them all (well, some people collect match-covers, stamps) and he knew especially that unmistakable steady sliding in the sky.

This moving fleck was a satellite, and in a moment, motionless, uninstrumented but for his chronometer and his part-brain, he will know which one. (He is grateful beyond expression-without that sliding chip of light, there were only those footprints, those wandering footprints, to tell a man he was not alone in the world.)

Say you were a kid, eager and challengeable and more than a little bright, you might in a day or so work out a way to measui~e the period of a satellite with nothing but a timepiece and a brain; you might eventually see that the shadow in the rocks ahead had been there from the first only because of the light from the rising satellite. Now if you check the time exactly at the moment when the shadow on the sand is equal to the height of the outcrop, and time it again when the light is at the zenith and the shadow gone, you will multiply this number of minutes by 8-think why, now: horizon to zenith is one-fourth of the orbit, give or take a little, and halfway up the sky is half that quarter- and you will then know this satellite's period. You know all the periods-ninety minutes, two, two-and-a-half hours; with that and the appearance of this bird, you'll find out which one it is.

But if you were that kid, eager or resourceful or whatever, you wouldn't jabber about it to the sick man, for not only does he not want to be bothered with you, he's thought of all that long since and is even now watching the shadows for that triangular split second of measurement. Now! His eyes drop to the face of his chronometer: 0400, near as makes no never mind.

He has minutes to wait now-ten?... thirty?.. . twentythree?-while this baby moon eats up its slice of shadowpie; and that's too bad, the waiting, for though the inner sea is calm there are currents below, shadows that shift and swim. Be busy. Be busy. He must not swim near that great invisible ameba, whatever happens: its first cold pseudopod is even now reaching for the vitals.

Being a knowledgeable young fellow, not quite a kid any more, wanting to help the sick man too, you want to tell him everything you know about that cold-in-the-gut, that reaching invisible surrounding implacable ameba. You know all about it-listen, you want to yell at him, don't let that touch of cold bother you. Just know what it is, that's all. Know what it is that is touching your gut. You want to tell him, listen:

Listen, this is how you met the monster and dissected it. Listen, you were skin-diving in the Grenadines, a hundred tropical shoal-water islands; you had a new blue snorkel mask, the kind with face-plate and breathing-tube all in one, and new blue ffippers on your feet, and a new blue spear-gun-all this new because you'd only begun, you see; you were a beginner, aghast with pleasure at your easy intrusion into this underwater otherworld. You'd been out in a boat, you were coming back, you'd just reached the mouth of the little bay, you'd taken the notion to swim the rest of the way. You'd said as much to the boys and slipped into the warm silky water. You brought your gun.

Not far to go at all, but then beginners find wet distances deceiving. For the first five minutes or so it was only delightful, the sun hot on your back and the water so warm it seemed not to have any temperature at all and you were flying. With your face under the water, your mask was not so much attached as part of you, your wide blue flippers trod away yards, yout gun rode all but weightless in your hand, the taut rubber sling making an occasional hum as your passage plucked it in the sunlit green. In your ears crooned the breathy monotone of the snorkel tube, and through the invisible disk of plate glass you saw wonders. The bay was shallow-ten, twelve feet or so-and sandy, with great growths of brain-, bone-, and fire-coral, intricate waving sea-fans, and fish-such fish! Scarlet and green and

aching azure, gold and rose and slate-color studded with sparks of enamel-blue, pink and peach and silver. And that thing got into you, that... monster.

There were enemies in this otherworld: the sand-colored spotted sea-snake with his big ugly head and turned-down mouth, who would not retreat but lay watching the intruder pass; and the mottled moray with jaws like bolt-cutters; and somewhere around, certainly, the barracuda with his undershot face and teeth turned in-ward so that he must take away whatever he might strike. There were urchins-the plump white sea-egg with its thick fur of sharp quills and the black ones with the long slender spines that would break off in unwary flesh and fester there for weeks; and file-fish and stone-fish with their poisoned barbs and lethal meat; and the stingaree who could drive his spike through a leg bone. Yet these were not monsters, and could not matter to you, the invader churning along above them all. For you were above them in so .many ways-armed, rational, comforted by the close shore (ahead the beach, the rocks on each side) and by the presence of the boat not too far behind. Yet you were. . . attacked.

At first it was uneasiness, not pressing, but pervasive, a contact quite as intimate as that of the sea; you were sheathed in it. And also there was the touch-the cold in-ward contact. Aware of it at last, you laughed: for Pete's sake, what's there to be scared of?

The monster, the ameba.

You raised your head and looked back in air. The boat had edged in to the cliff at the right; someone was giving a last poke around for lobster. You waved at the boat; it was your gun you waved, and emerging from the water it gained its latent ounces so tha,t you sank a bit, and as if you had no snorkle on, you tipped your head back to get a breath. But tipping your head back plunged the end of the tube under water; the valve closed; you drew in a hard lungful of nothing at all. You dropped your face under; up came the tube; you got your air, and along with it a bullet of seawater which struck you somewhere inside the throat. You coughed it out and floundered, sobbing as you sucked in air, inflating your chest until it hurt, and the air you got seemed no good, no good at all, a worthless devitalized inert gas.

You clenched your teeth and headed for the beach, kicking strongly and knowing it was the right thing to do; and then below and to the right you saw a great bulk mounding up out of the sand floor of the sea. You knew it was only the reef, rocks and coral and weed, but the sight of it made you scream; you didn't care what you knew. You turned hard left to avoid it, fought by as if it would reach for you, and you couldn't get air, couldn't get air, for all the unobstructed hooting of your snorkel tube. You couldn't bear the mask, suddenly, not for another second, so you shoved it upward clear of your mouth and rolled over, floating on your back and opening your mouth to the sky and breathing with a quacking noise.

It was then and there that the monster well and truly engulfed you, mantling you round and about within itself- formless, borderless, the illimitible ameba. The beach, mere yards away, and the rocky arms of the bay, and the not-too-distant boat-these you could identify but no longer distinguish, for they were all one and the same thing , the thing called unreachable.

You fought that way for a time, on your back, dangling the gun under and behind you and straining to get enough warm sun-stained air into your chest. And in time some particles of sanity began to swirl in the roil of your mind, and to dissolve and tint it. The air pumping in and out of your square-grinned frightened mouth began to be meaningful at last, and the monster relaxed away from you.

You took stock, saw surf, beach, a leaning tree. You felt the new scend of your body as the rollers humped to become breakers. Only a dozen firm kicks brought you to where you could roll over and double up; your shin struck coral with a lovely agony and ~ou stood in foam and waded ashore. You gained the wet sand, hard sand, and ultimately with two more paces powered by bravado, you crossed high-water mark and lay in the dry sand, unable to move.

You lay in the sand, and before you were able to move or to think, you were able to feel a triumph-a triumph because you were alive and knew that much without thinking at all.

When you were able to think, your first thought was of the gun, and the first move you were able to make was to let go at last of the thing. You had nearly died because you had not let it go before; without it you would not have been burdened and you would not have panicked. You had (you began to understand) kept it because someone else would have had to retrieve it-easily enough-and you could not have stood the laughter. You had almost died because They might laugh at you.

This was the beginning of the dissection, analysis, study of the monster. It began then; it had never finished. Some of what you had learned from it was merely important; some of the rest-vital.

You had learned, for example, never to swim farther with a snorkel than you could swim back without one. You learned never to burden yourself with the unnecessary in

an emergency: even a hand or a foot might be as expend- -able as a gun; pride was expendable, dignity was. You

learned never to dive alone, even if They laugh at you, even if you have to shoot a fish yourself and say afterward "we" shot it. Most of all, you learned that fear has many fingers, and one of them a simple one, made of too great a concentration of carbon dioxide in your blood, as from too rapid breathing in and out of the same tube-is not really fear at all but feels like fear, and can turn into panic and kill you.

Listen, you want to say, listen, there isn't anything wrong with such an experience or with all the study it leads to, because a man who can learn enough from it could become fit enough, cautious enough, foresighted, unafraid, modest, teachable enough to be chosen, to be qualified for- You lose the thought, or turn it away, because the sick man feels that cold touch deep inside, feels it right now, feels it beyond ignoring, above and beyond anything that you, with all your experience and certainty, could explain to him even if he would listen, which he won't. Make him, then; tell him the cold touch is some simple explainable thing like anoxia, like gladness even: some triumph that he will be able to appreciate when his head is working - right again.

Triumph? Here he's alive after . . . whatever it is, and that doesn't seem to be triumph enough, though it was in the Grenadines, and that other time, when he got the bends, saved his own life, saved two other lives. Now, somehow, it's not the same: there seems to be a reason why just being alive afterward isn't a triumph.

Why not triumph? Because not twelve, not twenty, not even thirty minutes is it taking the satellite to complete its eighth-of-an-orbit: fifty minutes are gone, and still there's a slice of shadow yonder. It is this, this which is placing the cold finger upon his heart, and he doesn't know why, he doesn't know why, he will not know why; he is afraid he shall when his head is working again.

Oh, where's the kid? Where is any way to busy the mind, apply it to something, anything else but the watchhand which outruns the moon? Here, kid: come over here-what you got there?

If you were the kid, then you'd forgive everything and hunker down with your new model, not a toy, not a helicopter or a rocket-plane, but the big one, the one that looks like an overgrown cartridge. It's so big, even as a model, that even an angry sick man wouldn't call it a toy. A giant cartridge, but watch: the lower four-fifths is Alpha-all muscle-over a million pounds thrust. (Snap it off, throw it away.) Half the rest is Beta-all brains-it puts you on your way. (Snap it off, throw it away.) And now look at the polished fraction which is left. Touch a control somewhere and see-see? it has wings-wide triangular wings. This is Gamma, the one with wings, and on its back is a small sausage; it is a moth with a sausage on its back. The sausage (click! it comes free) is Delta. Delta is the last, the smallest: Delta is the way home.

What will they think of next? Quite a toy. Quite a toy. Beat it, kid. The satellite is almost overhead, the sliver of shadow going-going-almost gone and . . . gone.

Check: 0459. Fifty-nine minutes? give or take a few. Times eight. . . 472 ... is, uh, 7 hours 52 minutes.

Seven hours fifty-two minutes? Why, there isn't a satellite round earth with a period like that. In all the solar system there's only

The cold finger turns fierce, implacable.

The east is paling and the sick man turns to it, wanting the light, the sun, an end to questions whose answers couldn't be looked upon. The sea stretches endlessly out to the growing light, and endlessly, somewhere out of sight, the~ surf roars. The paling east bleaches the sandy hilltops and throws the line of footprints into aching relief. That would be the buddy, the sick man knows, gone for help. He cannot-at the moment recall who the buddy is, but in time he will, and meanwhile the footprints make him less alone.

The sun's upper rim thrusts itself above the horizon with a flash of green, instantly gone. There is no dawn, just the green flash and then a clear white blast of unequivocal sunup. The sea could not be whiter, more still, if it were frozen and snow-blanketed. In the west, stars still blaze, and overhead the crinkled satellite is scarcely abashed by the growing light. A formless jumble in the valley below begins to resolve itself into a sort of tent-city, or installation of some kind, with tubelike and saillike buildings. This would have meaning for the sick man if his head were working right. Soon, it would. Will. (Oh...)

The sea, out on the horizon just under the rising sun, is behaving strangely, for in that place where properly be-longs a pool of unbearable brightness, there is instead a notch of brown. It is as if the white fire of the sun is drinking dry the sea-for look, look! the notch becomes a bow and the bow a crescent, racing ahead of the sunlight, white sea ahead of it and behind it a cocoa-dry stain spreading across and down toward where he watches.

Beside the finger of fear which lies on him, another finger places itself, and another, making ready for that clutch, that grip, that ultimate insane squeeze of panic. Yet beyond that again, past that squeeze when it comes, to be savored if the squeeze is only fear and not panic, lies triumph-triumph, and a glory. It is perhaps this which constitutes his whole battle: to fit himself, prepare himself to bear the utmost that fear could do, for if he can do that, there is a triumph on the other side. But . . . not yet. Please, not yet awhile,

Something flies (or flew, or will fly-he is a little confused on this point) toward him, fiom the far right where

-the stars still shine. It is not a bird and it is unlike any aircraft on earth, for the aerodynamics are wrong. Wings so wide and so fragile would be useless, would melt and tear away in any of earth's atmosphere but the outer fringes. He sees then (because he prefers to see it so) that it is the kid's model, or part of it, and for a toy, it does very well indeed.

It is the part called Gamma, and it glides in, balancing, parallels the sand and holds away, holds away slowing, then settles, all in slow motion, throwing up graceful sheet-fountains of fine sand from its skids. And it runs along the ground for an impossible distance, letting down its weight by the ounce and stingily the ounce, until look out until a skid look out fits itself into a bridged crevasse look out, look out! and still moving on, it settles down to the struts. Gamma then, tired, digs her wide left wingtip carefully into the racing sand, digs it in hard; and as the wing breaks off, Gamma slews, sidles, slides slowly, pointing her other triangular tentlike wing at the sky, and broadside crushes into the rocks at the valley's end.

As she rolls smashing over, there breaks from her broad back the sausage, the little Delta, which somersaults away to break its back upon the rocks, and through the broken hull, spill smashed shards of graphite from the moderator of her power-pile. Look out! Look out! and at the same instant from the finally checked mass of Gamma there explodes a doll, which slides and tumbles into the sand, into the rocks and smashed hot graphite from the wreck of Delta.

The sick man numbly watches this toy destroy itself: what will they think of next?-and wjth a gelid horror prays at the doll lying in the raging rubble of the atomic pile:

don't stay there, man-get away! get away! that's hot, you know? But it seems like a night and a day and half another night before the doll staggers to its feelt and, clumsy in its

pressure-suit, runs away up the valleyside, climbs a sand-topped outcrop, slips, falls, lies under a slow cascade of cold ancient sand until, but for an arm and the helmet, it is buried.

The sun is high now, high enough to show the sea is not a sea, but brown plain with the frost burned off it, as now it burns away from the hills, diffusing in air and blurring the edges of the sun's disk, so that in a very few minutes there is no sun at all, but only a glare in the east. Then the valley below loses its shadows, and like an arrangement in a diorama, reveals the form and nature of the wreckage below: no tent-city this, no installation, but the true real ruin of Gamma and the eviscerated hulk of Delta. (Alpha was the muscle, Beta the brain; Gamma was a bird, but Delta, Delta was the way home.)

And from it stretches the line of footprints, to and by the sick man, above to the bluff, and gone with the sand-slide which had buried him there. Whose footprints?

He knows whose, whether or not he knows that he knows, or wants to or not. He knows what satellite has (give or take a bit) a period like that (want it exactly?-it's 7.66 hours). He knows what world has such a night, and such a frosty giare by day. He knows these things as he knows how spilled radioactives will pour the crash and mutter of - surf into a man's earphones.

Say you were that kid: say, instead, at last, that you are the sick man, for they are the same; surely then you can understand why of all things, even while shattered, shocked, sick with radiation calculated (leaving) radiation computed (arriving) and radiation past all bearing (lying in the wreckage of Delta) you would want to think of the sea. For no farmer who fingers the soil with love and knowledge, no poet who sings of it, artist, contractor, engineer, even child bursting into tears at the inexpressible beauty of a field of daffodils-none of these is as intimate with Earth as those who live on, live with, breathe and drift in its seas. So of these things you must think; with these you must dwell until you are less sick and more ready to face the truth.

The truth, then, is that the satellite fading here is Phobos, that those footprints are your own, that there is no sea here, that you have crashed and are killed and will in a moment be dead. The cold hand ready to squeeze and still your heart is not anoxia at even fear, it is death. Now, if there is something more important than this, now is the time for it to show itself.

The sick man looks at the line of his own footprints, which testify that he is alone, and at the wreckage below, which states that there is no way back, and at the white east and the mottled west and the paling flecklike satellite above. Surf sounds in his ears. He hears his pumps. He hears what is left of his breathing. The cold clamps down and folds him round past measuring, past all limit.

Then he speaks, cries out: then with joy he takes his triumph at the other side of death, as one takes a great fish, as one completes a skilled and mighty task, rebalances at the end of some great daring leap; and as he used to say "we shot a fish" he uses no "I":

"God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it!"

Fever started long ago.

2006-06-18T22:43:00.000-07:00

Peggy Lee - Fever

postsecret stockpile 5-06

2006-06-04T18:47:00.000-07:00

["sorry"]

The Earth is not a cold, dead place.

2006-06-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in fairies, no no I don't.

Defy superstition.

2006-06-04T18:28:00.000-07:00

I feel so much more active when I wear shoes.

Cross-trainers make me feel ready for anything. Capable of anything. Maybe I could even fly.

The cursor wore an invisibility cloak when I was typing up the title of this post.

Why do we say "typing up" instead of "typing down"?

Is the fastest rollerblading time faster than the fastest running time?

muzeek

2006-05-28T20:45:00.000-07:00

I Am Robot And Proud - The Catch

I Am Robot And Proud- The Satellite Kids

This had better work this time.

2006-05-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

Wicked- Dancing Through Life

worth millions of monkeys at typwriters producing thousands of words

2006-04-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

WHY I SING THE BLUES

2006-04-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

B.B. King - If You Love Me

"Actually, I do have to wear this dress tonight, and it IS right."

2006-04-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

The Police/ Sting - Roxanne

Excerpt from Alan Ginsberg's "Footnote To Howl"

2006-04-09T18:20:00.000-07:00

Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!

"Mathrimony" by Keith Allen Daniels

2006-04-09T18:13:00.000-07:00

Calculating with exactitude
the definitive parameters
of his connubial existence,
the mathematical genius
considers for the nth time
the exquisite irony of marrying
a woman whose "math anxiety"
was nearly phobic in its intensity.

Perhaps her sexuality index, s,
appearing as it did
in the numerator of his equation
(where, raised to a very high power
indeed, it compensated
for various fault factors
in the denominator), had much
to do with it. But man
does not live on bed alone,
and the import of other variables,
equally complex, does not escape him.

He considers the possible solutions,
real and imaginary,
all neatly arrayed on the foolscap
of his cerebral cortex,
and realizes with dismay that,
despite their abiding love
for one another, he and his wife
had chosen asymptotic pathways
through life's topography:

always getting closer and closer,
the chasm between them
growing smaller and smaller forever,
they would never quite coincide.
He smiles, recognizing a good thing
when he sees it. Besides, not being
numbers, they could always
reach across the gap.

"The Law" by Eugene Gloria

2006-04-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

When the civil guards approached me
and asked me for my papers,

I pictured the face of a sunny saint
being disemboweled on the rack.

Widows in perennial black, addicts of prayer,
find comfort here the way monks

in hair shirts must take to penance,
or me, addled in my blissed-out days

in San Francisco, tugging daily on a roach.
And that's how I must've been,

befogged in Ávila on a visit
that coincided with the papal tour.

A murder of crows, clerics, nuns in wimples,
tarring the field with their black habits.

St. Francis de Sales dispenses, "The measure
of love is to love without measure."

This republic of goodness
was once peopled with spies. Maybe

that's what got the saints in trouble,
their willingness to surrender

once found out. I know authority
when I see it make a U-turn to pull me over.

I also know that the Burgos Christ
in pageant-red skirt is tethered to a story,

its weals and welts, blue-black,
the wounds Nicodemus witnessed as he

lowered Jesus, alone in his discarded body.
The carving by Nicodemus

would one day float its way
first to a monastery, then to Burgos.

When the civil guards approached me
and asked me for my papers,

I felt for a string around my neck, my scapular
like a leaf pressed on the road of pistils and stamens.

That moment stood
for something I can no longer recall.

What with those men and their gift
of whiteness, their constant need of proof.

I must've smiled at them, clueless yet longing
to be profound.

Excerpt from "Elena Ceauçescu's Bed" by W.D. Snodgrass

2006-04-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

There'll be just one bed, too soon, for us all.
What empire's hacked out by the meek, the kind?
The lioness kills; the lion feasts; the small
Bury their noses in what's left behind.

postsecret stockpile 4

2006-04-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

To restate my rationale for doing this: These postcards disappear off of the PostSecret site after a week or so, to make room for the next week's batch of secrets. I think that the old secrets needn't die for the new, so I'm archiving them in fits and spits.

Enjoy.

EM PEE TWIIEEYY

2006-04-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

The Mamas And The Papas- Monday, Monday

postsecret stockpile pt 3 (subversion's still succexy)

2006-03-11T18:46:00.000-08:00

Climb every wom-ant.

2006-03-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

I know that I will dream of it back home.
And now I'd best sign off: I'm out of room.

confessions of a digital packrat

2006-03-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

and all I wanna do is hit the floo-ooor

Keep on at it.

2006-03-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

postsecret stockpile pt 2 (subversion's so succexy)

2006-03-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

"International Incidents" by Robert Hershon

2006-03-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

1.

Wang Ping asks if
we went to a seder
last night
She did,
in Minneapolis
No, I say, we're not
observant
as though we constantly
overlook details

2.

The teachers in the lounge
crowd around the
Swedish visitor
You must be very proud
one of them beams
to be Swedish
She has no idea
what that means
She says,
I don't dislike
being Swedish

3.

Who's ever met a Bulgarian?
he would shout in the bar
Then one night
two homely blond sisters
smiled and said
We are Bulgarians!
They smiled for two weeks
then went away forever

stockpile time

2006-03-03T23:48:00.000-08:00

a weekly tradition to be: outwitting postsecret's marketing ploys, specifically targeting their deletion tactics for the utmost usurp:

"My Three Eclipses" by Martha Hollander

2006-02-04T19:54:00.000-08:00

Total, 1970

Direct viewing was forbidden, of course.
I remember how crescents formed in our hands
as we pursed fingers and thumbs together
to make shadows on the side of the house.
The sun, a perfect cashew of light,
emanated from our fingertips
like a gift, or a benevolent beam
to aim wherever we pleased.
Urged indoors to the safer light,
we could view the unimaginable on TV.
Hordes of Wisconsin schoolchildren
were pointing at the noontime black sky.
Our alter egos in infinite shades of gray,
they wore the same coats, same mittens —
as if there were no great interfering
ball of the world, no sprawling nation,
just electric ghosts hovering like angels
at the four corners of our New Haven street.
And how like the blurry screen
was the sky, silver, fabulous, outside!

Partial, 1986

Who can tell anyway on a grey day?
Yet there it was, savaging the mist.
I called you over to see it,
one hand gliding across your shoulders,
the other pointing into the sky,
"Up there — but don't look too long."
Our lowered heads rose and traveled together
like the spheres aligned above us.
The lovely modesty of this event
— no sudden darkness, no curse —
did nothing to ease the astonishment
of seeing an angry little sliver
where the sun should be.
We seemed to be catching the sun
in an intimate moment. White and awful
and incomplete, it offered the raw
knowledge that blinds us
to any foggy distinctions.
You squinted and looked away,
unable to bear unmediated sight,
while I held fast to you and stared until it hurt.

Annular, 1994

Surprise! a glacier's blue
like simultaneous dusk and dawn,
laid a filter over the city.
Crescents were everywhere, shifting
in the shadows of rustling trees
like thousands of tiny moons, smiles,
brows or birds, bubbles or whitecaps
hovering in festive fractals.
Mouths open, briefly beatified,
the lunch crowds laid down their bags to capture
crescents in their fingers once again.
Through the telescope installed in the park,
the crescents, with each universal motion,
were maturing into whole rings of light.
The mighty lens at the center of it all
revealed a golden O singing in blackness,
honoring, in the last eclipse of my life,
the epic marriage of earth and its only moon.

kwotes

2006-02-04T00:29:00.000-08:00

EvilEye:i just found out that i have competition for student government president
EvilEye:hes blind
EvilEye:so heres my campaign slogan: "I have a vision"

what would jesus do>
probably get crucified and die

Kanuck: i like to look at porn in pdf files.. just so i can make the little hand grab things.

Im going to be the next hitler
Im going to kill all the jews and 1 clown
why the clown
See? no one cares about the jews
lmao

somebody keeps jiggling the doorknob on my front door, then running away
i don't know if i should call the police, or hook up some electricity to the doorknob
why don't you put ice on the stairs
and heat up the door knob
and swing paint buckets down from your two story foyer
then a few years later, fade from the public eye.....

It seems you have been leading two lives, Mr. Anderson. In one life, you are Robert Anderson, assistant cook at a Jack in the Box in Mesquite....in the other...you go by the chat alias "Randerson"...spreading homosexual propoganda, lying, and being a generally immature pest...
One of these...has a future.
LMAO OMFG where's the phone, I have to tell Dean about this
How can you use the phone when you cannot...speak?
*** AgentSmith sets mode: +m

Remember, here in the U.S.A, we have reached a new age.
NOBODY is responsible for their own actions.
Remember that.
Holy shit! I killed somebody! Bob made me do it!
Bob: Joe made me do it!
Joe: I blame the media!
Media: Videogames.
Videogames: Personal responsibility?
Personal Responsibility:

can you guys see what I type?
no, raize
How do I set it up so you can see it?

what does your robot do, sam
it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU TELL THAT I'M 13 BY LOOKING AT WHAT I'M WRITEING?????????????????????????????????????????????????????

SparTacus (rulimbaww@3B942731.dsl.stlsmo.swbell.net) has joined #santcuary
*SparTacus is now known as Betty_Guns
wacko Jacko (lbeedy@1C57684.dsl.stlsmo.swbell.net) has joined #santcuary
ok spartacus just came n here i know it. which one of you is that loser?
I am spartacus
no im spartacus
I am spartacus
I’m spartacus
ur all freaks thats what u r

lets talk about my johnson
small talk, eh?
fuck
owned

yeah, don't be nasty. my grandad died in a concentration camp......!
he fell out a guard tower. broke his neck

you know what cracks me up.. trojan condoms, hehe.. I mean if you think about it, a trojan horse was really full off all these little men, and it was a trick to get them inside the fortress.. once inside, the horse BUSTS open, and all the little men come flowing out

I love school
Today our term paper due date's set
Our instructor says that we WILL hand in the paper on time, and she'll accept no excuses except illness, with a note from our doctor, or a death in the immediate family, with a note from the dead member.
So this wiseass pipes up: "What about extreme sexual exhaustion?"
She waits for the laughs to die down and says:
"Well, I guess you'll have to learn to write with your other hand"

I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.
For example, I didn't know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I'd be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me.
Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.
* ion has quit IRC (Ping timeout)
brings a tear to my eye... :') so true..
So if you're starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with "Linux is gay because it can't do XXX like Windows can". You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems.
this person must be a kindred spirit of mine

WE DID THE MASH
we did the keyboard mash
THE KEYBOARD MASH
it was a lihosdptjhskrjngiso;kihy,aehtptuyjgio;t

: If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
: If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
: Where u work?
: I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)

<@Chin^> My sister caught me jacking off the other week and calls me a pervert
<@Chin^> just the other day i walked into my room and caught my sister masturbating
<@Chin^> So she calls me a pervert again?!?
<@Chin^> there is no justice in the world...

Real life should have a fucking search function, or something.
I need my socks.

IronChef Foicite: well, there's a lot of reasons
IronChef Foicite: i mean, roses only last like a couple weeks
IronChef Foicite: and that's if you leave them in water
IronChef Foicite: and they really only exist to be pretty
IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying
IronChef Foicite: "my love for you is transitory and based solely on your appearance"
IronChef Foicite: but a potato!
IronChef Foicite: potatos last for fucking ever, man
IronChef Foicite: in fact, not only will they not rot, they actually grow shit even if you just leave them in the sack
IronChef Foicite: that part alone makes it a good symbol
IronChef Foicite: but there's more!
IronChef Foicite: there are so many ways to enjoy a potato! you can even make a battery with it!
IronChef Foicite: and that's like saying "i have many ways in which I show my love for you"
IronChef Foicite: and potatos may be ugly, but they're still awesome
IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying "it doesn't matter at all what you look like, I'll still love you"

I was in biology class once, and the teacher said there was sugar in sperm
And a girl asked why doesn't it taste sweet then
When she realised what she said her face became red like a spanked monkey ass
Then the teacher said, because you taste sweetness with the front of your tongue, not the part of your tongue back in your throat
The girl started crying and left class ^^

So a friend of mind comes over to my house and stays the night
Now there is a computer and t.v. in my room so naturally she spent most of the day in there and since I only have once chair in it she sat on my bed
Well at like 4am she fell asleep on it while I was on the computer and I didnt have the heart to wake her up so I slept on the couch downstairs
Like a month later Im over at her house with a bunch of her friends and since there was no where to sleep I slept on the couch again
The next morning during breakfast one of her friends says you look tired
and I was like yeah I didnt sleep great Im kinda used to my bed
then my friend goes yeah your bed is awesome!
I froze and glanced over at her parents who gave me the most evil look I have ever seen

get up
get on up
get up
get on up
and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances :D\-< * nmp3bot dances :D|-< * nmp3bot dances :D/-< <[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

<+kritical> christin: you need to learn how to figure out stuff yourself..
<+Christin1> how do i do that

<_riddler_> i was in the grocery store today
<_riddler_> and I got this boner
<_riddler_> I dunno
<_riddler_> Maybe it was the melons
Riddler: YOU SAW THE CARROTS

my band is gonna be called: rage against the answering machine

http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/finalmeals.htm is a list of peoples last meal requests in texas
before execution.
lots of cheeseburgers there
oh thats really sad
it looks like criminals drink coke. pepsi marketing needs to get hold of this

i was gonna call 911...but i was downloading a file

incest is at least something the whole family can do.

I had a boyfriend once that made me suck him off while I had a mouthful of beer.
HAHAHAHA that was me bitch!
DANNY?!?!?!
MOM?!?!?!?!

i beat the internet
the end guy is hard

67% of girls are stupid

i belong with the other 13%

if i added up all the penis enlargement emails i have, i would be entitled to, with a money back guarantee, a 14 foot 9 inch penis

you know you've just experienced an odd moment at 3:30am when you're completely naked making an away msg for aim and your dad (clothed only in breifs) strolls by, waves, and says, "i thought i smelled something. oh well, night!", and walks of

what should I give sister for unzipping?
Um. Ten bucks?
no I mean like, WinZip?

Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
well, you can stil get one from a strange country :-P

Hey Mike
what?
Pussy.
er?
Pussy.
and?
Pussy.
...
Pussy.
i dont get it
AND YOU NEVER WILL.
bastard

* vegai wears his reading bra.
umm, I mean glasses

HEY EURAKARTE
INSULT
RETORT
COUNTER-RETORT
QUESTIONING OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE
SUGGESTION TO SHUT THE FUCK UP
NOTATION THAT YOU CREATE A VACUUM
RIPOSTE
ADDON RIPOSTE
COUNTER-RIPOSTE
COUNTER-COUNTER RIPOSTE
NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON
RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES
WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMS

you're a towel
a towel of IMMENSE POWER, yes.

that day never came.

2006-01-31T17:48:00.000-08:00

For your downloading pleasure:

Simon & Garfunkel- Baby Driver

Metric- Grow Up and Blow Away

january by fred seidel

2006-01-25T17:11:00.000-08:00

The windchill factor
which is Western thought
received an IV drip of syrup of clove.
I have a dream. I have a dream the

background radiation is a
warm ocean, and a pasture for
desire, and a
beach of royal psalms.

The IV bag is a warm ocean,
is a body not your own feeding your body.
My body loves your body
is the motto of Tahiti.

Two flying saucers mating,
one on top the other, flap and flow, in love.
Each is a black
gun soft as a glove.

"The Mysterious Naked Man" by Alden Nowlan

2006-01-25T17:02:00.000-08:00

A mysterious naked man has been reported
on Cranston Avenue. The police are performing
the usual ceremonies with coloured lights and sirens.
Almost everyone is outdoors and strangers are conversing
excitedly
as they do during disasters when their involvement is
peripheral.
'What did he look like?' the lieutenant is asking.
'I don't know,' says the witness. 'He was naked.'
There is talk of dogs--this is no ordinary case
of indecent exposure, the man has been seen
a dozen times since the milkman spotted him and now
the sky is turning purple and voices
carry a long way and the children
have gone a little crazy as they often do at dusk
and cars are arriving
from other sections of the city.
And the mysterious naked man
is kneeling behind a garbage can or lying on his belly
in somebody's garden
or maybe even hiding in the branches of a tree,
where the wind from the harbour
whips at his naked body,
and by now he's probably done
whatever it was he wanted to do
and wishes he could go to sleep
or die
or take to the air like Superman.

on high in london

2006-01-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

If I can see them, the unicorns are gods.

2006-01-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

A man was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, the man discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

Freedom to casually sex you up in the back of a truck on the way to a museum.

2006-01-17T00:30:00.000-08:00

Not all casual sex is irresponsible.

Sexual freedom is a liberation from oppresive sex-related taboos, the notion that sex can be whatever an individual wants it to be, and that so long as that individual doesn't infringe upon anyone else's rights in the process, his/her sexual shenanigans should not incur societal wrath.

Some people regard sex as a casual joyride, while others consider it the apotheosis of a long-term romance and reserve it for special occasions. Sexual freedom at its most rudimentary is the idea that all of them should be treated with respect.

..."nicely woven fabric"? Oh please.

And yes, god forbid they complain of a discriminatory taboo that constricts their behavior in an almost entirely gender-oriented fashion.

The sexist double-standard nonwithstanding, perhaps they get pissed because they don't appreciate it when other people self-righteously shove restrictive ethics down their throats. Has it occured to you that not everyone considers consentual, protected sex a moral atrocity? It may not be the type of lifestyle that you personally adopt/ prefer, but unless the activity directly violates the rights of one or more of the parties involved, "society" needn't "look down upon" it.

Dreaming Of The Fountain Of Youth

2006-01-16T20:10:00.000-08:00

I'll sit cross-legged
and smile
at your closed eyes, imagining
myself in pigtails
in your dreams
and dancing
around, wearing a tiny, carefree dress.
We'll throw autumn leaves
at each other like elementary
school kids. I'll kick you
in the shins and pull
on your hair because
I like you
(I DO NOT).

May I have this dance with your brown eyes?
We can waltz to your steady breath,
and keep time with your heartbeat
You'll be leading.

Then I'll spot our reflections, tangled in
the wriggling vines and occasional blossoms
of the fading yellow(ed)
wallpaper in your room,
in a house so old and so clean that the only
things collecting dust are your parents.

Even when sleepy, I'm like a
five-year old with you.

I confess, then:
sometimes I almost wish that I could
control your dreams on a mixing board;
twisting and turning
levers and knobs to make this
daydream of mine so real that you'd awaken
with my fuzzy pink-and-purple hairtie
(the one that matched the tutu)
in your hand.

Charles Street, Late November

2006-01-16T19:57:00.000-08:00

A friend on the edge of death tap-taps
his way, cane-first, to the apothecary.
My arm is the apple branch at his side,
his hand more oriole than invalid.
Ever elegant, he wears a wide-brimmed hat
and mackintosh, pausing often to deplore
the self-indulgence of this wealthy corridor:
the French provincial rosewood perfume box
lined in velvet, "a little coffin for scents,"
and the Portuguese linen smocks
embroidered with ducklings
"who'll get their feet wet more often
than the poor heiresses for whom
these dresses will be bought."
At the corner, a pair of border collies
who seem to have just steered a herd
of sheep back up Mt. Vernon Street
bound to a halt at my friend's feet.
They admire each other, this man
and the neighborhood's working dogs
caught in the thrill of a fresh task.
Their names fall softly from his lips
as he struggles to remove one glove
so they may lick his fingers.
We continue over crazed brick.
Inside the narrow shop that smells of chocolate
and cellophane-wrapped cordwood,
he glides by the pharmacist and dwells
in the stationery aisle; I wait as he chooses
a pocket date book for the coming year.

down under (i didn't mangle J.D. Heskin)

2006-01-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

It was only then I made out the tiny words
tattooed above the hairline of her vagina.

"And what will you say of this?"
Much to my credit, I've never said anything,
but I admit to having thought about it a lot.

asleep

2006-01-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

sleep

ever since the day when the world was an onion

2006-01-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

He puffed upon his large cigar
and took a foetus from a jar.
Then he put me in the jar instead
and whispered, "Now it's time for bed.
Sleep soundly, son, and if you're lucky,
your dreams will be both rich and mucky."
I truly tried, with eyes shut tight,
but dreamt I could not dream all night.

On sexing virgins v. non-virgins.

2006-01-10T23:34:00.000-08:00

As relieved as I'd be that at least one of us knew what the fuck (haha, fuck) we were doing, I'd also be aware on some level that my playmate had gone on similar adventures with other people, people whose performances might vastly eclipse my own in god knows how many respects. I might not be a crucial, definitive part of that kind of experience for him; just another variety of it. That knowledge, despite the ardent effort I would make to keep it under wraps, would probably hurt just a teensy tiny bit.

Even if it meant risking the emergence of my Green Monster, though, I'd still prefer to try things out with someone who knew the ropes than to flop around like trout with another embarassingly clueless first-timer.

skimming

2005-12-27T21:24:00.000-08:00

I saw a man, the other day,
skimming stones across the tarmac of a car park.
I looked at him.
"I used to live near the sea",
he said.

today

2005-12-27T17:43:00.000-08:00

Today you poured out one too few drinks;
today you starved on a famine of loves,
this evening your heart is empty of kisses
and your dreams are thin from forgetting,
that the moon can be fog bound and mysterious
at the same time as the cruel seas open and wide
be white-winged and free on the soft warm blows
like an African pearl asleep in the black tide.

Today you rapped on my mind like a top ten;
today you picked me up so slowly, this evening
you scent my hiding place, a writers thirst sobered
up and hidden, the words found by your eyes.
Where can a poet be now but inside the moment
double whiskey singular, ice cubes floating
heat haze rising, the liquid red and black
like the bonfire of our love letters in Autumn?

stitch, part v

2005-12-26T14:40:00.000-08:00

stitch, part iv

2005-12-26T14:35:00.000-08:00

stitch, part iii

2005-12-26T14:28:00.000-08:00

stitch, part ii

2005-12-26T14:18:00.000-08:00

stitch, part i

2005-12-26T14:12:00.000-08:00

"eating shadows" by earnest slyman

2005-12-24T19:04:00.000-08:00

Shadows are the chief export
of Brazil, Argentina
and Ecuador.

Organically grown shadows
have twice the nutritional value
than those canned,
affording more taste than shadows bought
at the grocery.

Wild shadows
caught and roasted on a open fire
replenished the nervous system,
repair vital organs.

For a long healthy life
eat shadows poached,
baked, broiled or boilded.

Eaten raw shadows, if chopped up
finely, add much needed vitamin A & B
and minerals, phosphorus, magnesium & zinc.

A bowl of shadows has only
seventy calories.

In Italy, shadows of the Vatican
are harvested, and many of the best chefs
in Rome have deemed it the new pasta.

The sweetest shadows
come in late afternoon shadows
or early morning.

Shadows should be eaten
with a spoon. Though they may also
be sipped through a straw.

A diet supplement, yes,
but as well a rich source of nutrition,
replacing breakfast cereals,
bread, low fat crackers, flours
and if used as directed,
may serve as pie fillings,
cakes, pastries and biscuits.