25 June 2009

Everybody Know About Winston the Cat?



He's Something Like a Phenomena, Baby. I am in thrall. Always and forever.
{ Via Cute Overload from his genius and adorable keepers at FourFour. }

23 June 2009

In What Shadow Night

In what shadow night did you fall, there between the cupboard and the stove, to a place no one will ever reach? We all have them, Jennifer said so, shadow selves, secret places, our insides out when the light moves quickly behind a cloud. But yours is long, too long. It’s wide and deep and I’m sick and sore from trying to catch you. Give me a hand, won’t you? Can you give me a sign, a flicker, a scratch, something? Anything? Because I’ll stop. I will. I’ll stop reaching. I’ll have to. No one keeps caring about another forever. Not really. I mean I don’t want you to keep it all to yourself, but come on. We all have limits. We’re all human. Just sick, dirty, old sad humans looking for some shade to stand in for a minute, just a brief second, one of those seconds that’s like God’s time, endless, too much sense, timeless, timeless, timeless. Something that stands still. Something that moves, too, that never stops moving either. Something pure something real something deep something that is everything something we all long for something none of us can ever understand. We scream for that shade that peace that union but all the weddings and babies in the world won’t guarantee it. It’s got to come from something completely interior, completely too powerful to describe, to architect, to articulate, or picture, or express in any way at all. From or to or by no one but God. And us. Just the two of us. {image via weheartit.com}

Reckoning was Re-Released Today

There is a black Memorex tape somewhere. Its label, once covered in Sharpie lines of many colors, the words, "REM reckoning" rendered in pop-art parlance, is likely fallen, like old, old paperback paper, crisp like an autumn leaf, is long fallen off that casette tape, if even the tape itself exists at all. For years, at night, in the morning, in light and in darkness, windows opened and closed, I listened to this radio-recorded album, always, always, always, for years and years, till casettes were a thing of the past, CDs took over, and college began, and we all, we all loved these songs, loved them still, loved them sweetly. I see kudzu. I feel rain on mah head. I envision old overalls covering our gorgeous bodies, the boys with their hair so long. Druggy summers. Late nights writing poetry. Early mornings sleeping still and small and so unimaginably young. The scent of jasmine coming in through the walls. The fig tree out back. The buried cat. The potluck dinners. The piles of dishes. The Cow Haus. Waterworks. Vinyl Fever. Hills. Train tracks. Ah, youth. "Something about listening to REM makes my soul do a wild dance..." those are the words of a KUT (Austin, TX) DJ introducing this album, played on the air in its entirety when it was first released in 1984. Recorded onto a cassette tape by my father...the tape stolen by his daughter...and the daughter who heard those cut-off words prior to every listen of these magical songs, over and over again, from the age of ten on. I'd say, 25 years later, I still agree. Something about early REM still makes my soul do a wild dance. Damn.