Happy Birthday Kelly Rae

I love a list. Inspired by many, here's a top 10 list I've got on Kelly, who's birthday it is today. Happy Birthday, Kelly!

10. How beautiful she makes the spaces she lives in. Blue walls, framed posters (even in college), gorgeously arranged furniture and decor. She's been letting her artist-self out in fits and starts for years, and I'm so glad she's full-time on it, now. The world is a better place for it.

9. The fact that she says, "Can I just say..." to begin a sentence. Whether it's about the color of her shoe laces or her favorite new song, she begins with "Can I just say that I LOVE brown shoe laces? They are the best thing ever. Seriously." She brings enthusiasm and wonder to the seemingly smallest details of life, thus imbuing everything around her with the same.

8. She's charmed. And she also says, "catnapped." Her kitty Pumpkin Pie was "catnapped!" but Kelly found her a few days later, hanging out in the catnapper's yard.

7. Kelly always tells people how much she loves them, and makes a conscious effort to keep in touch. She sends packages and letters in the actual mail!

6. Kelly and I once hopped in the car and drove to Atlanta from Tallahassee on a total whim, listening to Pavement's "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" the whole 12-hour round trip.

5. Kelly rapidly flutters her eyelashes when she's angry.

4. She's the funniest person who completely never intends to be funny. Or does she?

3. She's an incredible inspiration. The vibrancy of her work coupled with the deep, spiritual inner drive has been amazing to watch. Her transformation from practicality to the risk of her heart's dream has been deeply moving to watch this year.

2. She wore red shoes at her wedding.

1. She laughs like this: "HA!" For real.

Some News

Abstinence Innoculation

Now that my pops is staying at my house for a bit, I've got my fill of news again. Too much. Check out his article here -- it will also be in the print edition. He called it "Family Affairs," The Nation called it "Abstinence Gluttons." It's important.

What the Helvetica?

Arial is a cheap imitation and Helvetica is so establishment-heavy some designers claim it brought on the Vietnam War. Find out all about it here.

French-Speaking Tigers

I loved this little bit of news on my favorite blog of the moment. Bonjour, grande chat, comment-allez-vous? Tu est tres, tres belle. Je t'aime! Check it out ici.

Who Saved You?

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/quintanaroo/ for more beautiful photos such as the one above.

I'm at work. It should be raining but it's not. The movement in my brain is sending me to darker places. I fall to my knees and beg for light. It will come. Illumination, grace, love, clumsy saviors, all always, eventually, move into your line of vision and save you from your funny self.

It's always essential, isn't it, to be kinder than necessary.

You never know what another being is suffering. So. Offer them a library pass.

Mrs. Krikorian (By Sharon Olds)

This poem was on writersalmanac.org this morning.

She saved me. When I arrived in 6th grade,
a known criminal, the new teacher
asked me to stay after school the first day, she said
I've heard about you. She was a tall woman,
with a deep crevice between her breasts,
and a large, calm nose. She said,
This is a special library pass.
As soon as you finish your hour's work—
that hour's work that took ten minutes
and then the devil glanced into the room
and found me empty, a house standing open—
you can go to the library. Every hour
I'd zip through the work in a dash and slip out of my
seat as if out of God's side and sail
down to the library, solo through the empty
powerful halls, flash my pass
and stroll over to the dictionary
to look up the most interesting word
I knew, spank, dipping two fingers
into the jar of library paste to
suck that tart mucilage as I
came to the page with the cocker spaniel's
silks curling up like the fine steam of the body.
After spank, and breast, I'd move on
to Abe Lincoln and Helen Keller,
safe in their goodness till the bell, thanks
to Mrs. Krikorian, amiable giantess
with the kind eyes. When she asked me to write
a play, and direct it, and it was a flop, and I
hid in the coat-closet, she brought me a candy-cane
as you lay a peppermint on the tongue, and the worm
will come up out of the bowel to get it.
And so I was emptied of Lucifer
and filled with school glue and eros and
Amelia Earhart, saved by Mrs. Krikorian.
And who had saved Mrs. Krikorian?
When the Turks came across Armenia, who
slid her into the belly of a quilt, who
locked her in a chest, who mailed her to America?
And that one, who saved her, and that one—
who saved her, to save the one
who saved Mrs. Krikorian, who was
standing there on the sill of 6th grade, a
wide-hipped angel, smokey hair
standing up weightless all around her head?
I end up owing my soul to so many,
to the Armenian nation, one more soul someone
jammed behind a stove, drove
deep into a crack in a wall,
shoved under a bed. I would wake
up, in the morning, under my bed—not
knowing how I had got there—and lie
in the dusk, the dustballs beside my face
round and ashen, shining slightly
with the eerie comfort of what is neither good nor evil.

Concerning the Matter of Voice Inflection, Puppies

Should I stop talking to people as if they were puppies?

Is it inappropriate to up my octave range to 5 billion whatevers and trash my grammar and common sense for no particular reason when at work? When talking to coworkers, and really just about anybody anywhere at any place in time? I know how to speak. What happens to me? What comes over me?

I am not Dr. Doolittle. What can I do? How can I stop?

maya love

Maya the Bee

just a few things on my thousands-long list of reasons i love maya:

1.) she always hooked me up with free food at whatever restaurant she worked at. no matter what you need from maya, there's always an abundance from her, even if she broke a hell.
2.) she's the wittiest, funniest, most hilarious girl you will ever meet.
3.) she brought me flowers at work when i was depressed.
4.) she had people far and near write lovely letters to tell me how they loved me === as a birthday gift. it's hard to replicate kindnesses like this.
5.) she once woke me up in the middle of the night to give me a makeover...and then woke up karen to show her. karen was not excited.
6.) she's been through fire and back and is all the sweeter for it. but her sass just kicks your ass.
7.) she loves sasparilla and coffee.
8.) she used to call me at work to talk for an hour. it was just funny cause i had a 9-5 and she was a booking manager/party planner/hustler. she didn't understand why i couldn't just chill on the phone and discuss the subtle nuances of a boy saying, "i dunno." What did he MEAN?! She'd ask.
9. she still does the same as above even though she does have a 9-5 job.
10. she looks more and more like her mother every day.

Good Night, Mr. Rosewater

He was a good person to have on this earth, my mother said. Because he saw things with a different reality. Trappings in amber, railings for kindness, and religions and societies of numerously lyrical and beautiful and hilarious creation, Vonnegut made you feel a little bit safer. Just knowing there was someone around to name wars as children's crusades, to proffer greetings to babies, to chainsmoke, and write stories like trains of imagination and beauty...it made you feel a little bit better about being alive. So, goodnight, Mr. Vonnegut. I think you liked it here a bit, after all, no matter what your requiem says. Thank you for flies trapped in amber. Thank you for saying hello to us when we got here. And thank you for giving us your imagination and light and funny, funny, funny mind.

Gratitude and Collage and a Poe=m

Who Are You, Who Are You, Strange Human, Who?

A list of my day's gratitudes.
But it's not gonna happen right now. Right now my brother is singing, "blogsicle, blogsicle, i want write my blog," so he's taking all the light and airy and spiritual element out of all this. Now he's talking about the new movie "Blades of Glory" with the strangely brilliant Will Ferrel and everyone's favorite weirdo loser Ben Stiller. "Doin Situps." "I'm gonna get you drunk, get you drunk with my lady hump." What? And now he's talking to Tala the dog in the kitchen while he makes pasta at midnight.
So. We'll have to save this deep, meaningful list for another time, another place.

A Picture from My Collage Journal















Now An Old Poem About My Mother
I wrote this for her in my signed copy of Connie May Fowler's Before Women Had Wings, riding in the car from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, watching the trees and sky go by, 10 years ago or more. I was still in the college then, so definitely more. Without, as they say, further adieu, here 'tis.

Mama My Bones

Mama My Bones
they are spun from yours
And grown.
Mama these eyes of mine,
they are yours, yours,
And I see what you have seen.
know the same stories, I know
The same rolling hills--

The words and the feel,
They shed from my skin
Like the lives of snakes—

This all ours to share,
All the years, all my years—
They are yours, too.

And I kneel to the earth
for the love of this.

Mama who lies
That I am prettier than she was,

Mama whose face
stopped a racing train
dead in its Souherthern tracks.

We are falling oh
square and light
into the east ocean.

What am I now if not
a child anymore,

Where have I been
if not circling
One single, lovely space
Under the fluttering shelter
Of those bird-like wings
That have sprung
From your shoulders,
sudden as birth?

--April 1996

Deneument
So, some attempts at sacred gratitude, some songs about humps, a picture of one of my collages, and an old poem about my mama.

Spring

February Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat, a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not I'm dead. If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am He'll think of something. He settles on my chest, breathing his breath of burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat, not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door, declaring war. It's all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run. Some cat owners around here should snip a few testicles. If we wise hominids were sensible, we'd do that too, or eat our young, like sharks. But it's love that does us in. Over and over Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits thirty below, and the pollution pours out of our chimneys to keep us warm. February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre. I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries with a splash of vinegar. Cat, enough of your greedy whining and your small pink bumhole. Off my face! You're the life principle, more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring. (Margaret Atwood).


And so it is, almost. Spring. Kittehs. Sun. O that magic breeze like cotton and childhood and unnameable hope. And, a year almost, since my new living began.

It's been a little while since I've been on here. Because logins and passwords still trip me up a bit. Like Matt Kane says, "I just make the internet. I don't know how to use it."

I've finally woken up. A couple of diet cokes and some camel no. 9s and I am ready to roll! Waiting for a friend to meet me for a late breakfast, and then to my Grandma's to watch her till my Mama gets home. Not too many thoughts right now, other than the promise of spring, and a word to loved ones that I'm still alive, even though I'm woefully out of touch. And hungry. And love kittehs. The end.

Live Poem

Horses in the wind, floating, a starscape, your heart.

Your heart is such a funny thing, a flower, a stringbean,
a muscle, a nuance, a grave, an automat, an opening--

where instances fall and are trampled like oranges, apples,
tangerines, too many fruits fallen too far from the tree, sweetening
soil that cannot speak, cannot let us know, and cannot see

what wonderful things it grows, makes known, like fallen leaves,
beds and shade for animals, plants and nuts and berries and me,
a little light somehow fallen from the tippity-toppity of it all,
brought down to size, ornery, cantankerous, but lovely, lovely and small.

All of Them, All of Them

All Lined Up...


I have wanted for little since I moved back home. There is no lack. And the living is most certainly easy. I am awake. I see the sun going purple and orange and blue and grey in the sky, silhouetting a naturescape of palm trees, century-old buildings, and Florida's intracoastal highway. I see my doggie Tala's enduringly, relentlessly kind, hopeful, and longing eyes. I see my 101-year-old grandmother, with the spirit of a child, eating chocolates in her rocking chair. I laugh so much, and am beginning to enjoy that my life has become longer, to enjoy the advantage of experience and perspective, the beauty of it, the wonder of it. As Carmella Soprano once said, "Our very existence on this earth is a puzzle."


I'm getting deeper in my soul, awakened by an ever-burgeoning sense of awareness. It's awesome. I even love lotsa pop songs again, like I did when I was a kid, before pretensions rose their ailing heads and separated my mind from my soul a little bit. It's fun getting back to it.


P.S.

• I am longing to become a regular smoker of those new Camel No. 9's, made especially for the lady's discering palette.
• I've become a diet coke addict. I love the efferfescent sweetness it brings to your being as it settles on ice. I love it in a can.
• Altoids now makes these delicious dark-chocolate-covered peppermints, which really help clear up your breath. Chocolate, purportedly, dissolves offensive mouth odors better than mint. So, we see the possibilities of that here.
• I want Mark Osborn to begin making monthly mix CDs to keep me on the scene.
• Band of Horses is playing St. Augustine in March.
• I'm going to see Yo La Tengo and Sun Ra Arkestra February 2.
• Tomorrow is Friday.
• Hillary Clinton's running for President!
  

The Good Life

We work in the dark.
We do what we can.
We give what we have.
-- Henry James

I've entered a whole new world of seeing. A new realm of experience. So filled with joy. Panic attacks every once in a while, but has eased enormously, and I am content. I identify with others instead of compare. I find that giving really is so much better than receiving. I am becoming an active participant of my life. It feel good to feel a part of instead of apart from. It feels good to open my heart, ease out denial, ease out fear, ease out all the anger and meanness that goes with it. Feels good to truly take care of myself. To pursue what I love without thinking of the end result, of feeling as if I need to prove myself to anyone. Creating for creation's sake, for the earthly, even heavenly pleasure of creative satisfaction. I work in the dark. I do what I can. I give what I have. My scope has widened, my well deepened. My reach stretches further, without strain. My world felt very small and terrifying for a very long time. Today it is huge, without limit, and filled with a love ever deepening, ever expanding. Experience and understanding are two very different things. From the terrified mind to the rhythmic, beating heart, where life goes red and raw and true. Experience kicks the ass of understanding. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Pour in love and thou shalt draw out love. You are what you perceive. Wherever you go, there you are. Cliches are cliches because they're proven truths. And it's the cliches, Jeannette Winterson once said, that get you in the end. But today, that's a good thing.