fractions: sweet talk for suckers?

the heat of the past week has killed our heretofore-struggling-in-earnest vegetable garden. done fried it up good and proper.

i keep getting interviews and being oh-so-close to getting work, but alas, no. this is miles from interesting, but is "funny" when seen through the lens of Grand Overarching Philosophy that i've had to assume in order to prevent a wholesale loss of my sanity and my shit.

everybody is nice and fine and well and good. that's a relief.

speaking of relief, i'm one-third of one century old today, and i feel like an uninformative lump on a relief map.

yesterday, when the air finally cooled, just before a big rainstorm, the wind blew around things and things around, like it's done, does, and almost certainly will do, but what was notable was the fugly creature that was detectable within it. WINTER. like Voldemort.  

Recreationism

I’ve become something of a fool for these “stacked” daily blog posts, wherein I begin with Part 2: the wholesome-generally-anyway supplement to what doubtless a different (and, sometimes, baleful) Part 1. And, if I’m lucky enough to be struck with the notion, I’ll retitle the post . Like this post.

One of the many subjects that I’ve not yet broached in this ostensibly hallowed forum is BIODIVERSITY. We live in world of ever-greater and always-lesser plenty. I’m taking a wildly underlearned/overeducated guess, but I know that there exist on this planet AT LEAST 2 million distinct named/described species. How did that happen? Well, I thought of what was happening in terms of the sheer plenitude that is here for us humans to comprehend.

You (i.e., I) have to wonder how this could happen in the theoretical Creationist totality of 6,000 years; indeed, to fit such proliferation into that relatively microscopic epoch seems unnatural, given the lifespans and rates of evolution among and between living creatures.

Soon, however, a viable theory emerged, defiant AND triumphant, from the porridge/pudding resident in my head. It is brief in exposition, but its impact is incalculable:

Think about Noah. Think about the whole ark adventure that happened because divine force wanted to see if people drowned and boats floated—and, furthermore, whether either of those things were at all related to whatever slummy, vengeful kind of piety served as justification.

It’s reported pretty widely that Noah brought copies of every species in couple form on this nautical excursion. That’s all well and good, but the animals had to stay below deck. Thing is, it’s dark down there, so they didn’t know (or necessarily care) about whether they were keeping their “grown-up” adventures under wraps. I mean, they were, by definition, “below board.”

But—and this is where it gets amusingly interesting—the area stank like anything. That’s all well and good, but the pervading stench was an equalizing and anonymizing force. Basically, the distinctions vaporized between what species were present.

You get the idea. New species abounded, with innumerable permutations of mammalia introduced to a world that nobody understands anyway.  

All in that little fetid vessel.

Old Post ("Is This or That So?")

Goodness gracious people persons

All day I spend indoors with wallpaper and it would be disingenuous to suggest that any part of me found it unpleasant. Something about the adventure of house&yard work generates in me a feeling like I'm in the Goonies.

So, last May, when I fell through the floor of our woodshed, I was sharply disappointed that it was a mere 2-foot drop to the ground; 

I'd hoped that I would find myself in some flume, utterly unwitting of some yet-to-be-revealed overarching sense that would be made within 

just a couple of hours, complete with room for allegorical backfires.

So, that's what I do in the summertime. dig huge rocks and errant bricks out of the ground, build walkways and terraces, tear down invasive tree things by hand, get gloriously befouled, and allow something to consume me that could be called "ambition" if it weren't so life-affirming.

I have to go and walk around outside because it's brilliantly beautiful out. Sorry for brevity.

Summer of Thursdays

Okay, well, I'm covered with sweat, and I probably stink, but my nose won't stop bleeding.

Dignity. Ding dang dignity.

Currently, I'm engaged in telephonic pleas with a battalion of creditors, but that's only because i have a superb view of the 6:50 PM sun, and it's making anything possible.

This hold music is atrocious. "The Lady in Red (Has Destroyed Everything Worth Saving)." Oh, and now we're on a new song that whose similarity to its predecessor is ridiculous. Perhaps it's entitled "This Lady Instead."

So, we're moving to Vermont, for sure, but I won't go without some kind of reliable vocation in place. As such, my hamfisted navigation of assorted associated brambles continues apace, lurchily and clunkily toward a vague destination.

Now here's the earlier half of this post, from when I was feeling distinctly hopeless earlier today.

Is this postworthy? Or even noteworthy?

I'm so desperately without funds that I've spent all of my piggy-bank change, and now it's time to grovel to people the have no involvement whatsoever in pricesetting the necessary commodities that I will soon have no choice but to forgo. I've got 24 hours to pay a gigantor cellphone (self-own) bill for a company that "appears" ethical in order to obscure its imposture for such suckers as me; my electricity company, also having hiked rates recently, is threatening to discontinue service at some point in the next week. The blatant moronity of mortgaging haunts me at least hourly―it's taken the company (whom I shall refrain from defaming, for now) that I've entrusted to refinance my family's house OVER SIX WEEKS to close. Which is fine, but only in the way that a constant fear of falling objects would be fine. I'm having such a wonderful time with my family lately that I can pretend, convincingly, that we are not delving headlong into a most-precarious present. I am doing everything possible that I can do to avoid it, and it is probable that there's teensy throng of people judging me, but there always is; the primary difference is that I'm far too scrambling and occupied to enact any front of it not messing with my feelings.

I'll try to write more soon, and perhaps with greater optimism.

Interdependence Day

Hi. I'm taking my the advice of my eldest brother, who's considerably shrewder and more savvy than I am, and posting daily. In full disclosure, I'm doing so begrudgingly.

The humidity that's hindered us―permeating everything that we do or don't touch, muddling and fuddling my erstwhile will to make meaning of and from a purportedly green pasture―is a thing to which I refer (with faux-fondness) as "the Soup of the Day."

Oh gosh now it's later and the humidity has at last abated and we ate a delicioys meal and i worked in the yard until the mosquitos emerged and I hit my left hand in the exact same place quice.

perhaps you're puzzled at the sight of "quice"; i, too, would be so. but it's a recently coined (and, until now, privately used) word meaning, basically "happened or happening four times." like once or twice or thrice.

In days of yore (1997, so ardently idealized now, but was actually the same bankrupt and exceptionalist pepsi-fizz gutter as that in which nearly all of us flouncy problem-inventors reside, doubly deluded, to this very day), my friend Jason and I devised this numbering system for the amount of times that an event has occured or will occur. When I'm not exhausted, I will gladly list them all for you.

Just now, I thought that someone in our piddly-but-pretentious village had discharged a firearm. Then I remembered that it's the Bob-Seger-Michelob-Weber-Grill holiday of holidays, and I realized that it's likely bedtime.

Reasons Why

That is a title of phenomenal inanity, but maybe I'll unearth in this process a reason for having titled this thus.

It's so damn gloopy that I spent 15 minutes, tops, outside today. For the unfathomable plodding remainder (cloudy days in Maine can't help but plod), I peeled wallpaper. We will be moving soon (although I definitely want to have secured sustainable work first)―most likely to Montpelier, Vermont.

Given that looming, which causes my ears to get hot and my pulse to quicken (because I tend to see myself as a mutated miscreant that's unwelcome everywhere), we've set about trying to optimize our home for alternate occupancy. So, I'm peeling wallpaper, which would be fine if it weren't a mainstay of the walls in EVERY ROOM. But I kinda dig it, in its way, as it is both meditative and methodical.

But then, the boys take to conducting themselves in uncharacteristically age-appropriate ways (i.e., causing each other injury and/or committing some grave material injustice), or the phone rings (although I can't read the display on my phone since a toddler's fit of pique damaged it), or something plucked from the hat full of factors in a way that might seem arbitrary, but in fact, is expertly calibrated to derail most doings.

I've got it!

Reasons Why Authoring a Short Blog Post Is Preferable to Authoring a Long Blog Post:

* I don't fall asleep.
* I don't forget about it.
* It's open-ended.
* It can be more frequent.

By the way, there's a book out, and there's a link to it: excuse me.


And, just to be that way, here's "Bite My Knee": yikes