Saturday Night Lullaby

Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such a sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Dream a little dream

Ground
A New Poem
by Rae Armantrout

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Let me tell you something personal.
As a child, I worried about quicksand.
I don't know why I mention this.
I feel no connection
to the child who had that fear,
instilled, as it was,
by '50s films about explorers,
hokey
and tainted now.

I hold out my hand.


*


Brownian motion;
primal shudder.


The way it's hotter


to go to bed with someone
while imagining


yourself
to be another person.

Wendy

Who is this Wendy and why is she soooooo popular?


The Beach Boys

David Bowie

Bruce Springsteen

The Cure

Just a quickie

Words/phrases that kill my soul.

"Diet"

"Deadline"

"Dead End"

Unless it's Nny's "Die-ary" I try real hard to stay away from words with "dead" or "die" in them.

Also anything that references a box. Ick.

Go here. Laugh. Drink. Be Merry. It's lucrative for your penis.

Today I woke up to the great news that I'm going to have a new baby to spoil. Auntie Cindy rocks.




Ahhhhhhh.

I dug the tail . . .

Picture a fury little creature, with a scary tail. I loved critters of all kinds, reptiles and amphibians were not excluded. Rats and mice had the charm of a fury with the sleekness of of those "cooler" critters. When people meet my pet rat they're usually skeeved out by the tail. They call her dirty, they reference sewer rats. I lived in NYC for a few years and I've seen some rats and confused them for dogs. "Sewer" rats couldn't exist if there weren't any sewers. Thank you Roman aqueducts for ensuring the emergence of those "scarier" critters. We made them.

"Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."--- Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

"How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all good things!" Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals.

Oh, and the above quote is a rhetorical question. Hence the lack of question mark. Spoken out loud in the context of an argument, face to face, or even on the phone, that tone comes across.





Be autonomous.

Caring is Creepy

I've never been a fast reader (easily distracted, hello?). Doesn't mean I don't care about things with the same conviction as others. Just on a different frequency (and sometimes in a different time zone), I'd like to think. Illiteracy, next to poverty, is one of the saddest tragedies this century faces. First we take away a man's basic right to subsist (Late Latin subsistere to exist, from Latin, to come to a halt, remain, from sub- + sistere to come to a stand; akin to Latin stare to stand), next we neglect his intellectual need to read. Yeah, there's a need for speed, but there's a need to read. Big Jim's not "big" on the novels, but he tears through newspapers and he never graduated high school.
The first letter I wrote for Amnesty International was on behalf of a group of youngsters from Turkey who were caught "speaking out" against their leader at the time. I will dispense with the details (as I cannot remember them, that is why there is a job for historians, politicians . . . etc.). If I were presenting this as an academic somewhere, I would do my research. But I am amongst friends, and I'd like to get at the source of the problem. So yes, caught in the depths of Socratic method, these youths ranging from the ages of 6 to about 14, I believe, were carted away and thrown in prison. Promises were made by the police that they could see their parents if they signed a confession. Not a single one of them could read. They ended up signing confessions that condemned them to prison. I wrote a paper about our responsibility to try to end world hunger. In that paper I hoped to show that at the very least we need to start acknowledging that how we "define" certain things, classify them, in some sense judge them has to come under scrutiny. We can't be afraid to be wrong about tradition. There is no greater source of rebels and idealists than the youth. So there, on that day, on those park benches in the hearts of those youths burned a fire for change. But because along with a basic right to subsist, children are not being provided another basic tool of survival, basic skills in reading and in writing, this fire for change is easily snuffed out. The written word has existed . . . how long historians? Yeah, it's that important. I cry when I think how much darker my world would be without reading and without writing. My mother read to my brother and I every night. Every night whole new worlds were introduced to us.
I was taught the art of imagination. I learned how to dream.



Ameliorate.
Provide the world with legs to stand, next provide them with wings to fly.
Be happy (not as a pig content with what one has) but as in Aristotle's Eudaimonia. Flourish. Inspire and aspire.
By our hands, be we whole.

Hold Steady, Loves

Saturday Night Lullaby pushed up for a dear friend's sake . . .




Upon the recommendation of aforementioned dear friend, I bought War Child- Heroes. He knew it encompassed several of my favorite things, music, great song covers and helping people in need with art. I've been waiting for the chance to thank him. I think The Hold Steady does a pretty ferocious cover of the Boss.

Oh what to Twitter . . .

I had Twitter for like two months and for someone who as ADD it was too much of a distraction. I think everything has a time and place, though, and the dumb broad I'm about to rant about needs to get a clue. Favorite tweet from some crazy guy named Rayke: "Didn't feel like going to Starbucks today. So I brewed my own coffee and lit four dollars on fire." It still makes me laugh.

The scene: Government Center, getting on the B Train. Me, some dumb broad in front of me twittering her life on her whatever cool phone is out nowadays (I can't totally hate, I got the Envy II, it's pretty sexy) and about 139834937558495849 drunk Red Sox fans behind me (I love the Sox, not the crazy, drunk, nut-bag fans). There is a time and a place to be engrossed with your phone/iPod/book. But when the doors of a subway car open, move. Yep. Snap back into the commuter world and do your commuter duties. So the doors open and she takes two steps into the door and then stops. I almost walk right into her. Fine . . . you don't want to move in. I politely say, "Excuse me." Click, click, click. "Ugh . . . excuse me." Click, tweet, click, tweet. So in order to make room for the 139834937558495849 people behind me, I have to rub up against her (not my idea of fun lady) to squeeze by her to move further into the cart.
She turns her head ever so slightly and says, "Well excuuuuuuuuuuse me."
I literally snap. Now normally I have this filter, but lack of sleep, hunger and general melancholy set in so yeah, I let her have it.
"Give me your number, next time I'll text you a personal fucking invitation to move into the damn car."
The surrounding Red Sox fans cheer. I bet she twittered about that incident.

Don't be a twit about twittering.
Love Cindy, giving you sexy birds something to twitter about since 1984.

And Alison, I really am pissed I never met the fail whale. We could have been friends.

Oh, Cruel World

That's the title of my favorite part of every Weekly Dig. It's just a little blurb posting some average-Joe's gripe/rant about the world. I'm glad to read other people in this world are moved to such eloquent rants. Sometimes they're directed at someone specific "To the asshole who cut me off . . . " Or sometimes they're rather general, "Dear MBTA." Either way, I love them. I promise one rant a week on this blog. At least.
Second order, I've been commenting on my friend Alison's blog. And she likes to use captcha for her comments. I like to make up sentences for her using the captcha words. I think a weekly compilation of those words is in order.

Some Like It Hot

I made friends with the Dunks lady

Thus ensuring my iced-coffee is always delicious. Then a man watched me eat my sandwich. Then this song came on WFNX. And that was my lunch break. Have a Tasty Tuesday!!!

String beans forever
XOXO
Cindy

Before the Story . . .

They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring.
They say he kept an eight-inch cockroach on a leash and that rats stood guard over him while he slept.
They say if you knew he was coming and you sprinkled salt on the ground and he ran over it, within two or three blocks he would be as slow as everybody else.
They say. Jerry Spinelli, "Maniac Magee."



Hey so I told people I was buying this book to give to a coworker's kid. By that I meant, I was going to read it again before giving it away. Share the love.

You got to cry without weeping

Little Girl Blue

All you can ever count on
are the rain drops that fall
but as the little boy
Caucasian
blows his
Hostess chocolate cupcake covered
nose
into his Grandpa's handkerchief
I have to believe there are creme-filled
moments one can count on fingers caked
in the delightful-ness of mess
followed by crumbs creeping in the corners
of a smile
always preferably licked
than wiped
clean
every sweet ounce
of a moment's morsel should be
savored
craved, remembered
relived
just as rain drops
they should at the very least
be counted, maybe not
as reliable as the rain
but go hand and hand with the tears
swept up in the hope
chest
they bring nostalgia
to the wanderlust


Again letting go of form on the blog, but never in my dreams. In my dreams as tangible as humid air I swim through each moment with you.

Dinner party with bubbles? Amazing.

If I collect anything . . . I would love to be considered a collector of moments.

There's a new kid on the blog.

Hey my name is Max, and I'LL EAT YOU UP!
I'm friends with Cindy because I like cookies too. But I don't like to share.

Two for the Road

Happy Palm Sunday!!!