Bite My Knee

The last few weeks have been preternaturally stressful, with my synapses snapping like twigs under the feet of an oaf. 

Today, however, brought us into May, and heralded the appearance of a significant thing that I made with my pal Mick. It's a record of my poetry, recited over backings from Mick and me. It's called "Bite My Knee"―I'd love for you to hear it, and you can do that here. It’s also on other digital-music sites and excitements, like iTunes.

Amazon made me put [explicit] on it, which makes me wanna puke.

Reprisal

here, i am reprising an earlier post, because all sorts of flowerpots&safes&anvils are descend from the heavens unlike clockwork, but often enough. And besides, we're nearing the actual, old-school (pre-1752) New Year and  am nothing if not a lifelong "april fool" (that term, by the way, originated as a lame-ass swipe at those that chose to continue observing the year's change with the approximate arrival of spring); as such, a New Year post is apter than otherwise.

12/28/2010, 8:10 PM

O, everybody. It's been forever, and I would apologize but I've been subsumed by factors.

This keyboard is kinda busted, so you may see the odd juxtaposition of "b" with "n"; I have yet to stumble upon a way to make that entertaining (less-than-successful examples: narbes & bonle, the neatles, barbia, narack onama, get thee to a bubbery), so I try to catch it. Apologies in advance for any confusion created.

So much of this whole adulthood rigmarole is turbid with limitations. There is a painful plenitude of factors, all of which receive attention from me that is overwhelmingly undeserved and rancid with the residue of other factors.What's more is that factors seem expertly calibrated in ways that I defy others to understand (any attempts to do so are justly resented). There's some part of this human's mind that thinks (before the grisly collision of impulses and factors):

YES! I am a GROWN-UP!
I can eat crappy food!
[and... develop all kinds of nasty-ass health problems that make people not wanna sit near me.]
I can drink booze!
[and... go broke and be hungover and grow progressively stupider, utterly oblivious to my decay.]
I can have SEX whenever I want!
[and... not really. No, seriously.]

En toto, being an adult is remarkably similar to being less of an adult—only now, evidently, I'm responsible for providing the effing structure. Which would be fine if people that mean something to me (my own self very much included) didn't have to live in that suspect structure.

And the people that always made day-to-day life capitally unpleasant (COPS, for instance, in the Boss-Hog bastion of family-value putrescence where I spent most of my childhood) are now your contemporaries! Are you joking? I got scolded by a police officer (not for anything seeeeerious) a couple of years ago, and he was visibly younger than me; I wanted to tell on him. Or say, "Get back to class."

I should be plotting resolutions right now, but it's kind of a woeful condition, having to choose which promise(s) you'll definitely, definitely break. Better to be flip about it, I suggest, but with an understanding of the tragicomical plight that is self-improvement in the face of inexorable finitude.

An example here would be helpful, and I'll give you one. It's more hypothetical than anything, and is certainly not a "finalist" for me (I say "finalist" as a picture of Susan Boyle looks at me from the sidebar of this very page. A good resolution might be to be grateful that Britain's Got Talent. But that won't work.) For now, and this is all subject to change:

In 2011, I resolve to successfully run away from my own bottom.

Developmentality

12/16/2010, 11:46 AM

Issuing assurance (but not advice) to people is something that I've always done. Assurance from an outside source is a funny thing, in that so many attributions are given to its motivations, begging the question of what motivations are behind those attributions given to those motivations behind to those attributions ad infinitum  until everybody perishes with their heads either full or empty (like in a barbershop when you see a mirror reflecting a mirror and are confronted with apparently infinite versions of yourself getting a haircut, but you still look as closely as possible at the glowering multitudes of you to see one that differs from the rest, like that'll make you feel any better). The majority of assurance is either marginalized as effusive palaver ("Of course you like my macaroni art--you're my parents.") or viewed with suspicion (no explanation necessary, really).

However, I must offer this assurance to each and all of you, as we frantically ready ourselves for I forget what it's called: It is eternally okay to enjoy the heck out of your breakfast.

Ivor Gallaher's A.M. Aftermath, 16 December 2010

I'll write more in a trice. Several trices, actually, but certainly within a tricey span.

Mercury Poisoning

12/10/2010, 4:04 PM

Hi from December 10th.

I'd sworn to myself that entries would occur on a daily basis, but I was eyebrow-deep in variously futile episodes of abject tedium; when it was over, tomorrow was no longer tomorrow, while today had been discarded onto a clammy, moribund heap of subpar song-lyric fodder. In any case, it's today. Again. That's all that I'm willing to say about it. Except that Mercury has now gone retrograde, and we're totally done for.

It's noisy at the moment, presenting us as a larger family than we are. Desmond and Ivor are seated at our Hammond organ (singing something about ears), and people are fixing the roof to our bathroom as part of a government home-repair grant. This all seems great, and our feather tree is up and stunning and everything, but I've realized that December is kind of a shoddy month. (I know that it is that way here, amid a snarling cold snap whose capitalized anticipation did little to endear it to me.) It's as if it's to slyly lure us into winter with camaraderie and fatty foodstuffs (to provide insulation, I imagine) in a blissful poetic haze and all that, but January is unforgettable in terms of the intensity of punishment meted mercilessly to all mammals without fur. I've had it, I tell you, which is pretty much verbatim what I tell myself along with everybody cursed with knowing me, every single year. "This time, I mean it," I say, with predictable conviction. I never capitulate consciously--perhaps my gratitude for subsequent seasons provides a different sort of insulation.

As I walk down the street, there is a monologue that must be mine: yes its a huge world and i understand that and there are innumerable crises and iniquities everywhere and all of those people are important and i care but cannot see straight and i have facts and factors to consider holy crap it is cold why does december want to destroy me save draft no dont save this draft people in maine all live in maine and thats just wrong putamayo artwork irritates me so do people that discover things only to make them prohibitively expensive is the house gonna run of oil how am i going to get my car registered or insurance renewed oh i have to call the doctor for my thing and another thing no several things uniquely dehumanizing aspects of the human experience are called: and then I arrive at a pre-determined, yet unspecified, destination.

Help Me Understand

12/8/2010, 1:35 PM

Ev'ry time that I enter the site that a person enters in order to post another posting or to check on some other nonsense, I'm confronted with a gigantor, dull-red, full-screen warning that a "security threat" to my computer (which, for some, easily outranks 75% of appendages) COULD exist. One of the options given to me read, "Help Me Understand" (among the others: "Return to Safety"). Anywise, I didn't select it, because I didn't (and don't) want to understand that ilk of unwarranted arseness.

An exchange with whomever devoted any of his or her time to this rubbish would proceed thus:
----------------
ME: Hi there! How is everything going?

THEM: Hold on, sir... are you trying to tell us that you don't understand what COULD lie in wait for your computer?!!

ME: Well, no, because anything, ever, could be lurking anywhere, always. I just don't quite understand the urgency of your warning.

THEM: Okay, no. NO. This is a POTENTIAL THREAT!!! DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT COULD OR MIGHT HAPPEN?!! THERE IS EVERY POSSIBILITY THAT THIS LEGITIMATE, ACTUAL, AUTHENTIC POTENTIAL THREAT COULD, IF IT WERE A REAL THREAT AND/OR IF IT SO CHOSE, DESTROY YOUR LIFE!!!!!

ME: I'm pregnant with cats, and I have no idea how the heck I'm gonna get 'em out. Help me understand.
---------------
In other news, I had a 10:00 telephone interview for the job of Technical Writer with a distant snowplow-manufacturing company. I wouldn't ordinarily consider myself to be a candidate for considering this position at all, and it was suitably awkward. The woman phoning me was entirely inoffensive but for this bizarre scoff that (a) resembled a giggle being stifled; (b) was never accompanied by any pardon-me display of manners; and (c) followed nearly every answer that I gave to her variably terse questions.

I was increasingly disconcerted by this tendency to laugh, with its sometimes erupting to interrupt and disrupt a theretofore-articulate answer that i'd be in the midst of giving and all. I have no way of knowing (and I will probably never know) if this was gauche or graceless or what have you, but after 15 minutes or so, I asked her: "Ma'am, are you laughing?" She wheezily responded that she was attached to an oxygen tank, but even that expenditure of air was a bit much for her, judging by the fits of "laughter" that followed. I was most embarrassed. The interview proceeded and ended like a helium balloon deflates over days, except in seconds.

Three telephone interviews, out of 300 best-foot-forward entreaties to facilitate my being remotely functional/economically independent. I suppose that I am grateful to have made it to the 1% threshold, and I've twisted myself into all sorts of shapes and sizes for maximal accessibility, but I'm thinking that maybe it's "things" that need to be different.

good ideas on paper

12/6/2010, 8:35 AM

[NOTE: As this is the inaugural installment of this blog—a blog so new that it's waiting for random doctors to invert it and spank its behind—and the decorum of introduction tends to be a bunch of hooey, I will do what some of my favorite people do: begin speaking as if the exchange that I am initiating, is ongoing. The listener then is torn between present attention (if applicable) and establishing any sort of manageable context ("how did we get here?"). And, as if this process were somehow inadequately befuddling, it should be noted how seldom an interaction ends with a completed sentence. You know what I mean—the