Eat Meat

In all seriousness hiding from the world today. Cooked on the grill and made enough of these for the next two day's meals. What can you do with Spicy Mango & Jalapeno Chicken sausages?
Do yourself a favor and watch The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virgina. If you don't love 'em we can't be friends. Have a hillbilly good day and don't forget Shark Week on Discovery.

Sunlight

It's been a bummer summer day.

The Hail Mary

Not too scared that he caught me looking at my past. (Thanks internet history.)
More worried he caught me looking to my future. A future we haven't discussed.


Hung out with Big Jim for a while after work today and watched a few hours of a world poker tour. Got heated when a rookie checked twice with the worst odds before trying to bluff a man who's been playing poker THREE times her whole lifetime.

I believe in Lady Luck, and and the almighty power of the Hail Mary, but even I know not to ask too much of the universe.

It's never been about not knowing what I want, but not knowing what I deserve. What can I ask the universe for?

Infatuated

I don't know what he's wearing, and I don't care. I love this man. Completely infatuated. Completely.

The Handmaid's Tale

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is usual. Even this is as usual, now.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in the ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.

You forgot how much you loved this song

Until it unexpectedly came on the car radio right as you park your car.

You loved it even more around the 2:59 mark when Clarence tears through the air with those delicious notes enticing every muscle in your body to move.

Then you were sad because you realize it's been exactly a month since he's been gone.

So you play the air-sax in tribute to him the song blasting from your car's window as your white trash neighbors and their friends invited to their BBQ watch.

You slowly get out of your car and slunk to your porch steps as Rat-Tail-MC-Hammer Pants yells, "Come pour one out for Clarence."

So you do.

What it feels like to

Slide down slides




Howl






Pop plastic wrap








That's how good life feels right now. That good.

Ear Candy

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

--- Seamus Heaney

Catching My Interest

As of late mildly obsessed with

Dave Canterbury and Cody Lundin, rock on with your bad ass selves.

Hip Hop And R&B Top 20. Not too proud but it keeps my butt working out longer.

Margaret Atwood

Tom Robbins

Ronnie and Donnie. Let your freak flag fly boys.

Denny's Pacific Northwest Iced Coffee

Seamus Heaney

Summer Solstice

Let the summer fun begin!


1. Hammock Time
2. Tina's School of Driving
3. July 4th Cookouts. Yes, in the plural.
4. Play Date with Newly Engaged friend Kate
5. Christmas in July Wedding of M&M
6. End of One Class!
7. Beach Days!
8. Batting Cages
9. Mini-golf
10. More Hammock Time
11. Salem Willows with baby AnnaLynn
12. Margaritas at the 99
13. ILLINOIS TRIP!!!
14. Jordan's Birthday!
15. End of last class!!!!!
16. Illinois State Fair!
17. Boyz II Men and MC Hammer Concert
18. Day trip to St. Louis!
19. Bike riding with Dearboyfriend
20. After dinner walks with Big Jim
21. Falling asleep outside while reading

One night of freedom

It was a stupid fight that's been over for weeks. But I can't move past this one statement, because on some level I feel it, too. I mean, I've felt it before. Not in such a hateful way or in a moment of anger, but laying on my bed naked after getting out of the shower, letting the soft breeze air dry my skin figuring out what to wear on our date. Feeling the ticking of the clock, worrying that each moment I make him wait will frustrate him, but still unable to get moving. Wishing I didn't have to rush, wishing I could lounge around in my robe listening to any sort of music I like but he didn't. Wishing now that the tenses of these statements weren't . . . aren't . . . so hard to nail down. Is it a freedom I want long term, or just for now? Just for one night. I faced this moment, a little over a year back, knowing that for one night I could have my cake and eat it, too. Instead I couldn't run from this freedom any faster. I remember bolting down the stairs so fast, I forgot I was running from a decent, yet lost, human being. One who had taught me more than he'd ever know. One worth saying good-bye to, at the very least. I was so sure that night as I snuggled up next to my gentle giant, that he was the one I wanted. Freedom was over-rated, I wanted him. I wanted love. I wanted someone who was hard to walk away from. I wanted a reason to stick around.

But knowing he feels the same sometime. What does this mean to me? To us? It's opened so many questions in my heart I don't know how to quiet them. It makes me wonder if you can really tame a wanderlust or turn your back on the fact that some of us were truly just born to run.

Either way I love him, but I wonder if this is what it's supposed to be like. Laying in each others arms longing for escape, a sea of loneliness found in the inches between you on the king size bed. Even if it's just for one night, or one moment of one night, is this acceptable? Is this love?

iPhone Fail: Frank Prevails!

I tried mercilessly to use my iPhone to post this poem the other day. Copy and pasting on this beast still alludes me, as does talking on the phone WITHOUT accidentally hanging up.


SLEEPING ON THE WING


Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries "Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!"
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.

Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!

The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it's dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.

Frank O'Hara
[1957]

For realz

<3

The Maker Makes

It's just so much bigger than us. You know?

Dream a Little Dream of Me: Unless Your Name is Mr.Orr

The Classification of a Legend: The Queen Mother of Science Fiction

Usually I find classifying books somewhat detrimental to their enjoyment. But when encountering an author like Ursula K. Le Guin, finding where modern bookstores choose to shelve her work can be an adventure. Le Guin has specifically classified this particular work, The Lathe of Heaven as a work of science fiction, meaning she would surely frown if she stumbled across it in the Fantasy section. Le Guin herself eloquently defines science fiction in these terms in an interview by Seth Fried with Vice Magazine,

This distinction makes most sense to me … science fiction . . . uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it’s doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.

I would have to whole heartedly agree. Her book is very much based upon the science of dreaming with one key fictional element, Orr’s dreams become reality. Not in some deja vu or psychic way either, he can alter reality with his dreams. The book was published in 1971 but the story is set in Portland, Oregon in the future year, 2002. While the publication I am working from is bundled neatly into 184 pages by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc, the piece was originally serialized in the science fiction rag, Amazing Stories. The world we learn about within its pages is no longer our future, yet an all too near past, and some of its tales are too close for comfort, a war in the Middle East, severe global warming, over-population, world hunger, etc. The threat of nuclear holocaust seems more likely than an alien invasion, but if it’s only one message a reader walks away with from The Lathe of Heaven, it’s that all that we see and all that we seem just may be a dream within a dream.
While my wit usually equips me with the words for entertaining, amusing yet accurate critiques, my absolute devotion to the author, Ursula K. Le Guin and her predecessor Philip K. Dick and my love for the “sf” genre itself are pushing me towards a careful analysis of Le Guin’s purposeful use of the genre and her creation of the anti-hero, George Orr. I argue that the use of science fiction is to disarm its readers of preconceived notions in order to get down to core issues without previous bias and prejudices. She creates in George a character readers can easily relate to and empathize with allowing a natural, gradual following of his journey through the pages.

The Dream Within a Dream: An Unfolding of Events

The story begins with George Orr near death from radiation poisoning and being pinned under concrete after a nuclear war has destroyed most of the living organisms on Earth, as George lay dying he is suddenly sitting on the cement steps with a dandelion, a breathe glimpse of life, by his hand. The story then jumps to George being accused of over dosing on drugs he realizes he has been taking to suppress his dreams. It is tempting to believe George’s experience of near death is simply a bad dream, however as he is committed to Voluntary Therapy we learn that is not the case at all.
At Voluntary Therapy George is introduced to Dr. William Haber who he attempts to open up to about his “effective dreaming.” To explain his “ability” George recounts the story of his first memory of effective dreaming to Dr. Haber. George’s Aunt Ethel had been staying with his family while going through a divorce when he was the impressionable age of 17. She would come on to him and the tension was becoming way too much for his young psyche to deal with. He dreamed she had been in a horrible car accident. He awoke the next morning to learn she had never stayed with them, but had died in an accident after leaving her divorce attorney’s office weeks earlier. George’s dream had changed reality. Haber, an accomplished dream specialist (an oneirologist) while intrigued does not believe George at first. Haber is not a detestable man, and in one short paragraph he sums his own character up:

I frequently daydream heroics. I am the hero. I’m saving the girl . . . or the whole damn planet. Messiah dreams, do-gooder dreams. Haber saves the world! We all need that ego boost we get from daydreams, but when we start relying on it, then our reality-parameters are getting a bit shaky (Le Guin 33).

George becomes convinced Haber believes him because while in d-state, he has George replace a painting he had originally changed in a previous dream session. With Haber’s Dream Machine, or the Augmentor, Haber begins to use George’s ability to carry out his own daydreams of grand heroics. First he has George dream of a sunny day in Portland, Oregon, a place that has been under constant rainfall and grey cast skies which is a start down a very slippery slope for Haber.
The next part of the novel focuses on George trying to get away from Haber who has grown increasingly dependent upon George’s “effective dreaming.” No longer does George attend session in a windowless office located in the interior of an obscure office building. Instead he visits Dr. Haber at the Oregon Oneirological Institute. George enlists the aid of civil rights attorney Heather Lelache who finds an excuse to witness one of George’s sessions at the Institute to see for herself what rights, if any of George, Haber was violating. Together, Haber and Lelache witness the outcome of one of George’s most horrific effective dreams. In order to control the over-population problem suggested by Haber in his d-state, George dreams about a horrible plague that wipes out six sevenths of the worlds population. Haber faces the truth, for the first time, that he has been using George, “This whole day, from his arrival at work on, he had not given one thought to the fact that, a week ago, he had not been the Director of the Oregon Oneirologoical Institute, because there had been no Institute” (63). He resolves to continue with his self-righteous path of saving the world and he plans to do it with George or without.
The rest of the novel spirals interlocking realities in true Philip K. Dick form. In order to get peace on Earth, George dreams of an alien invasion of the moon causing the leading warring nations to unite under the new threat. Heather Lelache, who George has fallen in love with, tries to help by suggesting to George in d-state that the aliens have left the moon. When they awake, the aliens are on their way to Earth. This is quickly resolved by suggesting the aliens are peaceful beings. They become store owners and hot dog stand operators. Haber thinks he can solve the problem of racism, by suggesting to George to get rid of race. Everyone is the same color of grey and in a way, George realizes a charm of the human race is gone. Imagine all the flowers of the world being the same color. No more Martin Luther King, great inspirational stories of fighting oppression, personal identities forever altered.

George the Jellyfish and Anti-hero: Who Still Ends Up With the Girl

Just like the jelly fish, George gives when he has to give and hangs when he has to hang. Heroes and martyrs die. But the rest of us have to survive. If we can agree on one thing in respect to Ursula’s character George, is that for one brief second, due to the mysterious gift bestowed to him, he gave mankind a second chance. He didn’t steer it this way or that, just simply gave the human race life. After near total nuclear destruction he dreamed a world where mother nature had another go, symbolized by the flower peeking through the concrete ground. I argue that this dream came naturally, as natural as any organism using whatever means to survive, and in George’s case, dreaming he and human kind were still alive just so happened to make it so.
By portraying George in such a passive manner through out the majority of the novel, Le Guin wants us to take notice when George the jellyfish, stands up to Haber in this poignant moment in the novel,

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are (82).

It is in this vain, I leave out the end of the novel. To Le Guin, the end is not nearly as important as the journey. The message of the novel is not nearly as important as the exercise of critical thinking that goes into reading it. Le Guin wanted a new character who became a part of the flux, rather than one who tried to dam things up and control the chaos. It is a new way of thinking of things, one that is second nature to George. He hopes to be reunited with Heather and in going with the flow of things, ends up with her.

Science Fiction as a Means Not an End

Perhaps my initial pause in classifying her work is the stigma science fiction carries. Somehow Philip K. Dick’s Ubik falls lower on the literary totem pole than Eric Arthur Blair’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which is cleverly classified as literary political fiction, with the subgenre of social science fiction. I mention the first piece because Le Guin draws heavily from the reality-in-flux Dick sets up in his novels, particularly Ubik. In Ubik, the character Pat Conley can change reality by changing past events. The novel’s ever changing reality spirals leaving the characters and the readers wondering which reality is the “real” reality, an element Le Guin is no doubt attempting to achieve.
Le Guin’s protagonist in The Lathe of Heaven George Orr is most undoubtedly named after Blair’s pen name George Orwell. The way Orwell proposes a world, in the future, without certain liberties because of government control was a way to delicately bring up core issues without coming out and accusing actual leaders of the time. Again, Le Guin sees this as a way for the non-political to think critically without being badgered into any particular political and social corner. I would like to make the point that finding yourself amidst a group of Sci-Fi nerds intent on “geeking out” is as intense and overwhelming as attending a Harvard Alumni event honoring George Orwell. Both sides of the coin are laden with chances for real debate on important issues relevant in any circle.
In following the science of dreaming as closely as she can, Le Guin maintains some scientific credibility building trust with the reader. She then flips the switch so to say, to a world only understandable by the reader’s willingness to suspend his or her own belief of the dimensions of reality. If you are willing to accept this initial flip, you will be more readily willing to see previous social, political and socioeconomic issues under different lights, even the bright lights of alien space ships.

Works Cited

Dick, Philip K. Ubik. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print.

Fried, By Seth. "URSULA K. LE GUIN." Vice Magazine. Dec. 2008. Web. 21 Dec.

2010. .

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven: a Novel. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.

Moyers, Bill, comp. The Lathe of Heaven (Film, DVD Bonus Material). 2000. Interview

with Ursula K. Le Guin.