Ha ha ha ha ha

It is said that the mere experience of laughter will generate mirth. As the last fortnight has left me beleaguered, I'm gonna start laughing despite my inclination to fret. I will chronicle the results of this, my abjectly informal mockery of science, throughout the day.

I will start by laughing. Here goes:

Forced. It's 8:30 a.m.

Update to follow.

10:00 a.m.

All that I can manage is a snicker that sounds a bit like a scoff. Too much tedium. I did laugh at breakfast. Now, I am feeling amuseder at last night's Desmond after-dinner attempt to describe an animal ("It's like a tiger; it has like a lemony face [SQUINCHES] it's like, ...short and all sweating and everything, like covered in drops of water, and there are some scales on it and it looks out of its shell at you like... [GESTURES TO APPEAR SNEAKY AND MALEVOLENT]. What's the name of it?") that turned out to be the armadillo. "That is the BEST game!" Molly exclaimed, and I agree with her.

Flying Leaps

Good morning, everybody!

I hope that it's all going nicely today. It's Thursday, which always amazes me because, with a twinge of synaethesia, I always think of days like today feels. It's a color like this: 

Now, lest anyone think that Thursday's perceived liaison with this color is a complaint, I can assure you that it is not. It’s distinctive. The sun may be visible on days like this, but it’s not terribly relevant.

So, I started this bit of writing for the blog yestereve, and it went on for hours, but I realized after a time that I likely had other things to do, and I was getting a bit worked up about my subject (about redneck America and the blight of our economic and cultural imperialism and the disgusting depths of our respective and collective sanctimony and how the paradigm of scarcity cripples imagination in worse ways than we’re no longer capable of imagining), typing rapidly and incorrectly, holding my breath through entire sentences (though not this one, thank goodness, because I’d’ve lost consciousness by now) and feeling very motivated, entering something of a self-imposed exile, when Molly came to see me, at which I saved my nearly completed post and we ate berries and talked past midnight until we started to fall asleep and I love her more constantly and I awoke this morning and approached my post to finish it but it was a snarling and seething blob of invective in which I was just getting ready to give those Baby Boomers a piece of my mind and when I remembered:

I quit smoking (for like the bazillionth time) yesterday. Ugh.

No wonder consumerist conformity pisses me off to an unmanageable extent!

I had almost 8 years of being quit, but not really, because I was a social smoker. So, I’m sad that I lost my mock-control of my ongoing low-level nicotine fit.

And I can’t be placated, which is sorrowful, because I’d like to take a placation (NEW WORD ALERT).

Oh, and this is good, and it pertains to the strident post of last night that did not tumble into public view: I’m going to post some writing (later today) that I did (back in 1999) about the town in which I lived as a child (Frederick, Maryland). (Sorry about all of the parentheses. I’m disorganized.)

MY MIND IS CHAFING,

WHICH MEANS THAT I SHOULD

WALK AROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD

AND BREATHE DEEPLY. AIR ONLY.

THAT’S WHAT THE EXPERTS ALL SAY THAT

PEOPLE IN MY SITUATION OUGHT TO DO,

BUT THEY CAN TAKE A FLYING LEAP.

I WISH THAT I COULD TAKE A FLYING LEAP.

THAT’S WHAT I’LL DO; I SHALL PRETEND THAT

I AM ON AN AIRPLANE, AND THAT I AM GOING

TO VISIT THE MALDIVES. THE INDIAN OCEAN IS

FASCINATING! I WILL GO TO SRI LANKA, TOO.

AND OTHER PLACES AFTER THAT.

Sentimental Entropy

I’ve got a peg on a singular trust: that sequence is either everything or a passable facsimile thereof, and that "correct" collisions of matter and meaning and relative relevance will, in the sweetness of chance, befriend this still-arcane saga.

Select any unit of time—it does not, evidently, matter what the interval—and the chosen amount will amount to a single frame in a film that is recklessly sluggish. I continue, as ever, to strive for improvement of our fortunes, but it actually, well and truly, seems not to matter. A change of perspective, or the addition of for-now-italicized perspicacity, has been, and still is, the “thing” of it.

In response, I have come not only to realize, but also to accept, that I'm fastened to the overarching/underpinning conviction that there's a punchline somewhere. In frustrating proximity, probably. And furthermore, I have observed—with more humiliation than humility—that the extent to which I’ve aggrieved myself may have, at the end of all of this, served as my undoing. Like a scuba diver, surfacing with breath instinctively bated, developing an embolism. That's grim. 

It’s funnier than that, though. I have, in my rather-teensy lifetime, gone from being a person whose “success” was never at issue—my promise was such that I was regaled with hyperbole from all ilk of well-meaning adulty types (themselves incapable of accommodating the fact that I was merely biding my time with trifling muck until I could commit suicide)—to an adulty type whose legion attempts at establishing the level of self-sufficiency requisite to Life These Days have each and all met with ignominy of some sort or another. It seems nasty, but is more accurate than not, to say that, in the actualized primacy of this very-basic capacity, I am a failure.

But, dig this—what I’m saying is that that’s okay, because that definition of failure was tailored for those in situations like mine (certainly befitting me, by existing standards); it is seldom wielded publicly, because it’s divisive and rotten, and I can see a real argument for the thinker’s self-serving reluctance. Be that as it may, such discretion is not of any value to me—why not be frank? To consider today’s underfoot underclass as having failed is rather liberating, as it is not a treatise on anything but nomenclature, honest self-appraisal, and the obsolete values of an amorphous capitalistic thought virus. This process has been hell for untold numbers—sufferers and bystanders alike—that it's devastating to comprehend, but seeing myself as a failure actually EMPOWERS me. It allows the punishing yoke of boorish and reactive reeling to shift into revealing what life is rather than what life isn’t.

“Well, that’s great and grand and groovy, Benb, and now we know that you’re a frayed wick or something similarly screwy and ineffective,” says my projected Peanut Gallery. “But,” I protest, with immediacy, verve, and aplomb, “that’s the beauty of it—I haven't any choice but to forge forwardly! I've exhausted my own elastic in response to the vagaries of whatever contortion of my identity is demanded at a given moment. So, all that I can do is my best, in the devout service of maintaining what little stability we've managed to eke from the vast opacity of                                              ."

          (ABSTRACT NOUN)

I have always loved surprises, and ever have I shuddered at the plodding and prosaic attrition that lurks with rattling ubiquity in pockets and envelopes the world over. I can almost hear it breathe, slinking around me when alone in my car, on the toilet, or in the kitchen watching the mercury drop on a perfunctory thermometer. It was such an indelicate certainty that I had identified time as the antipode to spontaneity.

Anyway, I know (and will someday-maybe accept) that I’m in school, and I’ve had to acknowledge that the pervasive presence mentioned above is THE SAME INGREDIENT that

-         makes you so uncomfortable upon hearing certain music that you HAVE TO DANCE.

-         pushes swear words out your damn mouth at the dinner table when the exquisite experience of the food that you’re eating unbinds you and confiscates your manners.

-         turns sentences into paragraphs, for no reason other than that you are capsized with joy at being near the person with whom you’re speaking.

And this fact—that the niggling currents in and out of a day are the feckless eddies of a second, that it is not only a surprise, but the surprise—is a gargantuan surprise. Which is a scorcher of a punchline.

Same Old Novelty

I'm still in Baltimore, but I'm going to make it home. I tell myself that, in and from the throes of a barrage of contrary obstacles. It's humiliating, but the net effect is somehow even more destabilizing. I have done everything "right," and everything has responded by malfunctioning grandly.

And I miss my family A GREAT DEAL.

What is the synthesis that is lacking from all of this blasted life-and-living thing? At the risk of drowning in a stale puddle of metaphorical fluid, I will say through my resigned grimace that it's like an arch minus the keystone. So much will seem during these times to be going so well, and as my stride grows more assured and comfortable with that awareness, I encounter a snare that is (or at least appears to have been) designed for people that dare to be that way. Then commences the horrid cascade of thorny consequences, with trite-but-ever-truer results.

(Like, dig this: since we live in a world of cellphones, it is expected that the owner will be available at ALL TIMES. They take umbrage at your lack of complete, drop-everything accessibility. Why? When things happen faster, people become even more impatient? Fools.

And, as if there were somehow an insufficient basis in the miasma du jour for keeping poor people in perpetual states and senses of lack, there's always a line of profiteers that are interested in exploiting any mistakes that could possibly made. No "trust" or any similar liability--merely unmitigated greed. And suspicion! For instance, combatting "abuse of the system" is a central aspect of political lip service [in this country, at least], and finding help in general is a dehumanizing procedure in which the person seeking assistance is subjected to constant monitoring, viewed as being somehow less than an actual adult. Yet, as this happens and happens, there is no accountability for iniquities that bring people to where today finds or has found them.

And for all of the heartless, stratified hogwash about an "ownership" society being bandied about in these last years, I've seen nary a shred of detectable ownership regarding privilege. It's anybody's privilege not to recognize his or her own privilege, but it's a prison that separates a person from people. And does so ever more with the passage of time; as the true consequences of an impropriety reverberate through decades, that betrayal is ever more likely to be dismissed as something from the past [blame for the victim's struggle with residue of the past], and is less likely to be examined authentically [disenfranchisement]. THIS IS A FLAWED SYSTEM. It's dripping with the very privilege that survives in the absence of its acknowledgment, and nobody at all actually benefits.)

That was indeed a lengthy digression.

Anyway, I'm happy with my negative bottom line, but just because that's the way that things have gone lately, and I owe it to every person that cares about me to have a happy life. So, I dedicate my only self to that premise. It won't deter me from looking, but it might enhance the quality of my family's life in this awfully meantime.
I hope that everybody's doing great today.

Love, Benb xoxoxoxoxo

Adjective Heavens!

It is April. Welcome to that, for all that it may be (but, in my experience, typically isn't) worth. It seems nice enough outdoors, and it is, here in Baltimore. Not that I'd really know, having sat in uncomfortable proximity to my feelings over the weekend.

Sunday was Glenn's memorial service, and I attended. It was jocundity in the face of tragedy, with tenderness and laughter and uncharacteristically articulate accounts of Glenn when he was among us. New friendships were forged, by way of connectedness unearthed by the common vulnerability of our grief, that will doubtless span and endure decades. And, from everything that I could tell, none of it softened the precipitous sense of loss that we felt. But we all seemed to realize that there was little, if anything, that we could do to address that pain, so we tacitly agreed to transcend it with our unique respective love for our dear friend.

And here we sit, among the setting and trappings of April. Life is not moving as deliberately, nor with as much alacrity, as I would choose (if ever I were faced with a choice). I wonder if there's an April equivalent to the axiom that's wielded in concert with the idea of March. You've heard it a nauseating number of times, I'm sure: "in like a lion, out like a lamb." That's a very beautiful concept, and I do love beauty so, but what if the lamb gets eaten by the lion that will no doubt say, in arrogant Lionese, "April Fool!"?

I'll tell you what if. Everyone would be revealed as an outright sucker in that equation--including lions, dwellers of the jungle, having been left to suffer the failed fruits of their hunger with cold weather.

Having just said all of that, I am completely unaware of the current temperature or climate or whathaveyou. I long to see Molly, Desmond, and Ivor, I ponder just how I'll return home (awaiting a delinquent paycheck), and I'm reminded with maximal poignancy about all that I've learned to accept NOT having in life. This neither implies nor infers anything about what I DO have, as all of that is totally amazing. But it seems labor-intensive in a way that it shouldn't be. So, armed with some-or-other strength, I would like very much to declare the following for myself, I hope that you're ready. I am not ready.

1. I am not disabled. Yes, I have a disease and all of its accordant issues, but I remain aware of the world around me, am desperate to contribute to it,  and won't (although I'd love to) mail satchels of barf to all of the purveyors of abuse and hapless judgment that I have encountered regarding my health. To them, I have only to say: YOU ARE MAKING THIS INCALCULABLY WORSE.

2. I need a reliable job. This is more serious than it's possible to imagine. While it may seem reductive to say that this is all that I need, it is the agonizing truth. The stress that my family and I feel from the relentless drip-drab of freelancing and unpredictable pay cycles is positively lethal. I am able to work. I want badly to work. This New-Age bullshit of visualizing a bountiful future is all well and good, but I have applied to 1,400 jobs. It has been said (by Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin [or another person of far-greater financial means than meager old me, no doubt]) that "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Well, does that mean that I should refrain from applying for jobs?

3. I am committed to parenting. This supersedes everything else in my life, and the level of resentment that I feel toward those that have ignorantly drawn conclusions to the contrary cannot be exaggerated. I do not wish to inundate my children with television or plastic or sex-role stereotypes that will instill them with the same hinges and buttons, the same onus of irrelevant privilege, that I have worked tirelessly to surmount. My goal with my children is to help them be, without shame or fear, exactly themselves. And, despite, or even because of, my health, I am a capable and conscientious parent.

I have become so incensed with the well-meaning attempts to corral me that are actually deleterious that I am quite sure that I need to end here and possibly sleep.

Going on with Our Bad Selves

hi there short post today oh look and free of punctuates
but worry not for i will deploy them shortly

!@#$%R^Y&*(.?"? pretend it's a swear word.

Anywise, it's life in Brunswick, M to the E.

Weather people apparatus creatures said, for at least the fourth time this week, that it's set to snow today, but they lie.We are that person's sniveling consituency.

I think that I am numb from having fried my suspense nerves (suspenders?) without resolution this week in terms of the job. It's still infinitely possible.

Everybody in the family is ill with this admirably persistent nettlefest of a cold. The boys, who refer to mucus as "oogum boogums"  (in deference to that excellent Brenton Wood song; maybe I'll attach it to this post and have a listen now, just to remind me of what I should never forget: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLXvMb5bYHE

Awful Masterpieces

These insomnolent nights of late (in advance of a decision about whether or not I am a suitable candidate to work at this stupendous job to which I have applied [and for which I have interviewed]) are giving me fallible impetus for cursing the epiphenomenal February cold with which I am an have been so grievously afflicted.

I just had a wonderful meeting (accompanied by Desmond and Ivor) with a former partner (you know, like a romanticality-type partner), and I am awed how nobody actually fits into any narrative. You know what I mean? There is always more to every seeming than is comprehensible. I'll explain by way of muddling everything.

The dubious dust-settling clarity that is alleged with hindsight is actually only masquerading as clarity; as "hindsight" is immanently temporal, then all that's happening is the birth of yet another knot.

[On that note, what'd be the word for greater/more/farther hindsight? Hindersight? Call the cops.]

New (re)visions and (re)versions exist only to justify whatever cascading consequence, unrelated agenda, or ambition (degree of fulfillment or folly regardless) that the perceiver perceives the need to perceive. The teller will call it "explaining," but it's only explaining the teller's need to a) explain, and b) tell you about it.

In preposterously crude terms: "Good Friday" wasn't always so good, but now it justifies Easter. Because of things that happened afterward, right? But what if we found out that some profane evildoer sought to perpetuate an as-yet-unspecified injustice by way of inverting the calendar, and that we're participating unwittingly with our half-conscious conceptions of time as we understand it?

"Well, heck," one might say. I would not have started reading this post in the first place.

I remember how Molly said, early in our relationship, to her frenetic boyfriend: "There is no finish line." She was and is absolutely right. I would even say that any conclusion drawn without a distinct timestamp is forgettably flawful. We could be right about one thing in 2012, yet be dreadfully mistaken at a future juncture. Look at building with asbestos, or Urban Renewal, or the Atkins Diet, or the illegality of once-treasured cinematic courtship rituals. What about when all of those tedious texter types have forgotten how to spell AND have developed arthritis in their thumbs?

So, anyway, the thing at which I was getting is that this tiresome apparatus of a "story" that we silly humans are so frequently (even unconsciously) attempting to make of our lives WILL OUTSMART US. Maybe after we’re dead, but eventually. As far as I've been able to construe it, living is a fluid empire.

Now I'm All Serious

Humans need to have some work done on their stupefying human brains.

Here in Brunswick, Maine, we are out of oil, with perhaps a thimbleful remaining.

Anyhow, I've just adjusted the thermostat upwards by 20% to 60°, so that my wife and children don’t feel like they’re hostages on an involuntary sojourn to a distinctly frostful hinterland. It’ll definitely drain what remains in our tank, which had been relatively plentiful prior to a polar yestereve. But, consequences be damned, say I, when it comes to my family knowing at least a semblance of comfort in their shared slumber. I’m staying awake in preparation of the emergency-refill call that I know that I’ll have to place sooner than later, even though I’ve no means of paying for a delivery (due to a succession of foibles that is keeping the money that I’ve earned at arm’s length). People say that compensation is forthcoming, and I hope that it is.

Granted, the party (where’s the party?) line is that a person should lie in the bed that they made, which is perfectly aligned with the puritanical and punitive notions that founded this intermittently great land. “Serve the heavens with your deprivation.”

This is all well and good, but why do we live in a country that appears to be allergic to alternatives, even as it is ruled by profiteering? It is actually, legitimately preposterous. To fill our oil tank would cost—and this is no joke—$974.00! Without the $50 in fees that we’d be obliged to pay. Per month, at this rate. How on earth can a person afford that in addition to everything else? There is assistance available, but Governor Paul LePage has decided to cut the amount by 70% so that he can provide tax cuts for wealthy people. He says that this spurs job creation, but it does no such thing. What is does do is let people be cold. We won’t freeze to death (I am, as I've stated before, famously exothermic), but there are heaps of impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. Many of them are ancient and proud, and what will become of them in all of this? What will happen? We’ll have a sudden onslaught of AARPsicles, that’s what.

Research into alternative heating has proven to be a fruitless enterprise; a summer visit from a Solar-Power consultant confirmed that a switch away from oil is, more or less, cost-prohibitive ($20,000) for people like us; we could finance it, and there are (rather piddly) tax credits, but they don’t outweigh a bleak employment and income scenario, and they won’t defray initial costs to any appreciable extent. So, in this very nasty meanwhile, we have to continue to “shell” out for heat, which mandates that we’ll accrue no savings.

And this is how the Great, Big “Them” works. I don’t think that it was ever really possible for me to appreciate before this cardboard-salad sector of my life, just what a joke the notion of class mobility is for most people. I would not be writing this post had I not been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis during my final semester of graduate school, only to be shunned on multiple occasions by Social Security and others like them when I sought assistance regarding my disabilities.

It happens to people all the time—gradually, momentum is lost, and you’re suddenly embalmed in the formaldehyde of class rigidity. It’s assumed that you have nothing to contribute, or that you’re cognitively incapable, or that you’re unable to manage adult life. The people that think thus, and strive to impress that upon you so that your limitations are bandied about constantly, don’t see the OTHER, more pernicious, set of limitations—borne of the fact that this culture is fueled by judgment and hierarchy, and that that's the default that every one of us is beholden to examining. 

With a chronic and (supposedly) terminal disease like MS, it’s so often the case that nobody believes in any chance of your improvement, but they’ll placate you when you talk about it by refraining from yawning when you speak. But then, when you are experiencing wellness, expectations of you are frightfully unrealistic, like your health is a bank account that you MUST empty whenever possible—usually by way of exposing yourself to the same stress-filled nonsense that begot this whole cycle in the first place.

And now, there are my wonderful, wonderful children and my stunningly excellent wife, who is my best-ever friend. They’re so, so important to me. And, truly, the love that we have for each other serves as a barometer for a life that is lived harmoniously with my self. That is precisely why all of this tedium has got to, and (I hereby declare) is going to, STOP.

No Fun Intended

The vicissitudes of January in Maine bother the heck out of me. I will admit, however reluctantly, that I am grateful to be living on this frigid overcast unday, but just because my vocally espousing the alternative (i.e., not living) would abnegate all of the specific goodnesses, general greatness and so forth of this milieu, but today is like a hackneyed quip at which there is a perceived obligation to respond pleasantly, even though such denial is incrementally lethal.

This post was going to comprise bits that I'd begun but was too exhausted to complete, but no.

Instead, I'll talk about something else, in the hopes that it will improve my altogether-turdly disposition.

Ready? I bet you are.

I'm gonna write a book. (You don't have to read it or anything.)

"What kind of book?" is a rhetorical question that I refuse answer until the sentence that follows this sentence.

It'll be an encyclopædia that contains "facts" and "opinions" (including theories).

The subject? Popular music, because current studies indicate that popularity is sexier than intercourse itself.

Aaaannnd…because a claim of objectivity, like a clumsy generalization, is itself a recipe for betrayal on its own terms (never trust anything that identifies itself as "true" or "accurate," because I could broadcast the "fact" that I would bite myself if I were a dog, and the audience would have NO BASIS for dissension), there can be a caveat in the book's opening pages about the urgent importance of metaphor to describe "untranslatable" sentiments, events, trends, ad nauseam.


I posted an entry just now, for nobody's benefit, but then I removed it, for nobody's benefit. And I badly want to conclude this post, but first I'll tell you about young Desmond's new family of not-exactly-visible friends. What I find most thrilling about them is, I'll admit, a bit shallow. I will leave you with their names, preceded by household-member "type":

The Churches

Father: Sushi Church

Mother: Berkland Church

Child: Trash Night Church

Oh, how I swoon.

Good January Things

It is so frightfully cold outside that everything is different. You don't see anybody on the street (pedestrianism being so very passé in these conditions), but upon entry to any establishment, people share an expression of grim resignation, a sort of, "Oh, shit. This is quite serious"--rather like the nanosecond in which you realize that the pepper that you just ate is roughly seventy times hotter than you'd anticpated; you don't yet feel the breadth and/or depth of its effect, but you know that the agony awaiting you is of untold magnitude. (That sentence was LONG.)

It's fundamentally comical, this mutually adversarial relationship with the hostile elements, but it can play very dramatically, especially when you feel singularly implicated. You know, the point at which camera's view selects your face in a rapid series of freeze-frame zooms. Also, there's usually a score--some doomsday sprong, or synchronize percussive gavel-type nonsense--that punctuates it, as if the sudden switch of focus had been inadequate in conveying tension.

At any rate, I'd venture to say that I'm just too cold to accommodate the brash vitriol that I keep reserved for times like this. Besides, there were and are other concerns afoot.

In the midst of this frigid foofaraw, La Befana visited our boys. When they awakened yesterday morning, I presented them with steamed milk and bagels from their favorite local place (whose official name is "The Bohemian Coffee House," even though Desmond has always [from the age of 16 months, when we moved here] referred to it as "The Hash Bar"--despite his never having been exposed to such a term), and it was all good and as easy as a Saturday morning could be. Then, they were going about their business and happened to look into our living room. And there it was--evidence of La Befana's visit.

Arranged for the boys was a pair of neighboring desks, at which sat a world of creative entertainments. There were hundreds of items--secret keys, pipe cleaners, tiny chests full of buttons and fabric swatches, an antique (i.e., HEAVY) rotary-dial phone, pens, paper. I'll just put a picture here:

And another, so that you can see their sweet faces.

Okay, so that one's a bit blurry. But you get the point.

Both boys were thrilled and swept away by the mystery of it all.

And the day-and-a-half since has been intensely creative. Desmond has made bracelets for all of us (I'm wearing mine right now), all sorts of writing and decorating and VERY IMPORTANT telephone calls, and a beautiful pair of puppets from yesterday afternoon:

Desmond's Puppet

Ivor's Puppet

Last night and all of today have been spent dancing raucously to the music that Molly and I gave each of them to complement La Befana's bevy of Important Things.

A resounding success, this celebration was. And this morning, I awoke to this most-gratifying sight, with which I leave you now:

All the World's an Age

Aging occurs. At all times. Are we left with any choice but to embrace it? Frankly, no. But does that work?

As we’ve seen, in an age during which ageless stars perish at ostensible ages, most of us unwitting players in a left-behind series would scratch our wispily covered heads if only they retained any aherence to a commonly held belief that everybody actually lives an actual life. I know that I don’t have a lick of confidence in that system’s universal application. There’s too much perceived entitlement to exemption from decay. But none of us have that.

I would say that my parents’ generation—the “Baby Boomers”—are largely responsible for this mainstream resuscitation of the same “Fountain of Youth” fixation that led Ponce de Leon to “discover” Florida—which is one of history’s great ironies, considering. (The Baby Boomers have also made life extremely difficult for every subsequent generation, but more about that in other posts.)

Here’s my attitude about it: In order to be young, young people NEED for old people to BE OLD. And this boisterous denial of aging, while a feeble tendril of denying mortality, is the PITS for every beholder.

David Bowie (née Jones, it's been suggested), recently 65, had always conducted himself relatively honorably in this realm. He continued to have things like ideas, and when that wasn’t the case, he had the decency and good sense to run off and be in a play or what have you.

In 2002, however, he wrote a song entitled “Never Get Old.” I’ve never heard the song, but I was around near the time of its composition, and I believe that there was even talk of "Never Get Old" being the album’s title. Anyway, I have read the lyrics, and it’s self-aware and all that, but I can’t help but feel critical toward his even suggesting such a trite, stale idea. Just think of the ways in which the world could experience incalculable betterment with an attitude shift as represented by a song called “Get Old.”

Yes. Get the fuck OLD. Be as excited about turning 61 as you were about turning 7. Of course, you’re still able to be you—even more so, actually, now that you’re not trying to magically transcend the aging process.  

So, have a wonderful day becoming old, please. I will, starting now. Or then, I mean. Meant.

testing taxing trying

Hooray?

I think that this might actually work, here with Blogger's new compatibility whateverness and such. The erstwhile lack thereof is prompting me to test. (five minutes, maybe six minutes, later) And the preliminary results appear to be satisfactory.

HOORAY!

Then there is the business of getting thoughts together. An entirely different kettle of fish, as it were. Which reminds me that my lunch (a twice-baked potato) looks completely inedible, like a still-life painting or those surreal faded-technicolor photos stationed above the backlit menu boards at take-away Asian restaurants. I've begun to eat it, and it tastes edible, but who knows? It could be power of suggestion, as I was paying for food when I purchased it.

I'm still in Vermont, having been felled yestereventide by an utterly lusterless sinus malady that precludes my tasting this twice-baked potato. It hasn't surpassed 10 degrees outside since I got here; yet, I love it. Anyway, I'm going back to Maine in the morning, brightly and earlily. Tonight, however, I'm going to learn how to leverage my once-flawless memory to my advantage by counting cards.

I've never been able to, in my words to often-unsuspecting people, "flush the toilet of my mind." For most of my life, or at least a majority of it, I've been gifted/cursed with near-total recall. Because humans are so fond of, and given to, forgetting when it serves the interest at hand, my memory has been, and become, nettlesome--by turns unruly at functions (like an unstable auntie) and unforgiving to the owner of the skull that houses the brain that stores the information. It's torture, in its way.

When I was 3 years old, I did something that my parents wouldn't have liked (e.g., speaking in a snotty tone of voice) if they'd been nearby (which they weren't). Because I did not want to be in a position of deceiving them, I decided to give myself amnesia so that I wouldn't remember having committed any infraction. I rode my tricycle down the knoll in our townhouse's backyard and pointed myself directly at a pine tree that, if memory serves, was quite imposing in stature.

Anyway, I sustained cuts on my knees, and I attempted to deploy that unsatisfying ruse ever again (as of this writing, anyway).

I'm not trying to distract anyone, though, and we were talking about counting cards, and I think that
this could be really easy:

Benb: Is that a deck of cards?
Bystander: Yes.
Benb: There are fifty-two of them, if I
Bystanders (for, by now, a crowd has gathered): How did you do that?
Benb: I'm tired of living this way.
Bystander (for, by now, the crowd has dispersed) Me too.
And
What a confusing rigmarole. I will post the results on this very blog.

I can breathe only through my mouth; doing so gives me the "slow, chic" look that automatically renders me exempt from average human expectation. It's much easier that way, but I don't know if the first half of this very sentence was or is true.

I miss Molly and Desy and Ivor waaaaaaaay bad.

[UPDATE: The card-counting mission fell through, but will doubtless commence with my next Vermont soljourn.]

The 2012 Time Capsule

Desmond, Ivor, Molly, and I have been attempting all day to construct a time "capsule" in as much of a nod to sadly outdated past predictions of the future as a way to sanctify the mundane in our lives.


Trouble is that we've been mired in this bog/fog/clog all the livelong day. But we'll have something going soon. It's an issue of focus, even though none of us had a drop to drink last nite.


This all started with my rarely (if ever) satiable curiosity about what happens in unseen/unheralded places. This curiosity is what leads to the phone's being answered when, by all probable accounts, it's a telemarketer or some vile Newsmax survey taker on the other end of the line. As we now "own" this house, I've taken to "exploring" it freely, which is not to say that I'll ever do all of the exploring that I would like to do.


There's an area beneath our stairs, for instance, where nothing is, as far as we know, excepting an envelope of space confined by walls. i've been yearning to experience the majesty of that tiny, esoteric nook for quite some time.


Molly has humored me extensively through our 8.3 years together, indulging my off-kilter theories and flights of fancy without judgment. This time, however, required a bit of doing, as our place is a wreck with all of its wallpaper removed and such. In the end, it was our dear friend and next-door neighbor, Maggie Sutton, whose suggestion really optimized the adventure. I'll paraphrase: "It's okay, because no matter what you find, you can leave something behind. Et voila! The Time Capsule. Contents forthcoming.


Here we are:


* 1 compact disc (a mix that I assembled and named "Philomena" as part of a project in which the songs on a disc would define a person's characteristics)


* 1 necktie


* 1 pair toddler's underwear


*1 Lindt Chocolate Bar packaging


*1 Electrical Outlet Cover


*1 Experian Credit Report, vandalized by Desmond


*1 Hot Wheels™ Vehicle


*1 "Feel Good" Card about How to Make Your Life Seem Meaningful


* 1 AA Battery


* 1 Alphabet Block, with letters and shit on it


* 2 DSL Filters


* 1 Family Portrait by Desmond Gallaher (ink on paper)


We deposited these things, sans "capsule," despite having found NOTHING in that "hiding place." And we were thrilled at what these items might convey to their future finders.

Ahh.

More of Them

oh my gosh i'm working i'm working 
it feels so good to finally be able to procrastinate in a merited manner
i'm joking but only as much as you'll find it amusing


Dig this: I'm doing pseudonymous writing for MTV as their Nerd Rock Correspondent. Thrilled am I. It's crazy. My name is 'Benjamin Daniels'; 'Daniel' is my middle name, and nobody saw fit to consider prior to application of said nom de plume that there just might be an erstwhile MTV personality named "Benjamin Daniels"—and there is! Life, I am frequently assured, is full of coincidental matter.


(Which reminds me—isn't coincidence in the temporal sense of the beholder? On past occasions of smoking cigarettes outdoors, before returning indoors, I would ask my companions, "Shall we coincide?")


Okay. I'm also editing manuscripts for a start-up publishing company. Aaaaaaaaand I'm still doing the freelance (a modest craze), which sort-of ensures that I am unlikely to ever feel stable. I was refused for disability, and they've threatened to take away my Medicaid (the total annual cost of my medicines exceeds $100,000 USD) and food supplement. But I haven't even been paid! And my tax return, due on Friday, is due also to be eaten, most thoughtlessly, by the watersewerelectricphoneinternetmortgagecomputer entities (I refuse to see them as being people) just as soon as it arrives. I am told that solvency is overrated, but it's been years since I've accepted that as a valid opinion.


The rain fell today, onto the snow, creating a town-sized puddle in which every pedestrian (however momentary the stint of their schlepping) was submerged well past their ankles. I call it "Soup of the Day." And now it's going to be March, and I would love a bona fide reason to be cheerful. I shouldn't say that, because I LOVE my family, but I'm hard-pressed to pretend that this current situation's anything other than absolute crap.


But I have to put some more old poems on here. I still don't have most of them, on account of my computer being in the shop, but that matters less than a whole lot else.


I'll start with a love poem. It's from 1998. I had been stunned into aliveness. The title came 5 years later, on the heels of torment that had been unfathomable.




5 years in every direction

i love you and you love yourself in

beams of freckled fringency, with

waves of subtle stringency, with

flat, distinctive englishness, your

landscapes pocked with canvas bare in

summer seas of stars and blood, a

lilted, spacious leavening – these

fruits with roots in heaven bring what’s

told in its unfolding.

(The font just changed, but that's because I've got a recalcitrant touchscreen.)

This next poem is old as shit, which means (in this case) that it's from 1995, when I was seventeen. I don't even think that I was sad when I wrote it, but there you are, and here we go:

Mean Either

fearing not sleep but a missed opportunity

free of diseases but free of immunity

scared and ensnared by a spurious unity

pleading despair to a jury of ghosts

scattered in dollops the reasons for everything

baked underwater i wait for the phone to ring

time that elapsed when i thought myself practicing

rose-tinted glasses proposing a toast

Now another, just 'cause it's a just cause. This is a poem about Molly, whom I adore. This is also old, but not that old (2003). When I met Molly, everything became very exciting very fast. It remains so, and all of my irascibility, so evident in this post, dissipates when I imagine her sleeping and the sound of her voice.

capital letters

it was helpful for me to remind my

self when starting to write this that it

doesn’t have to be new because well

everything was always here in its way

(rusted-out and lethal fire escapes/droppings

on windowsills and awnings/stubblefaced

dirtyshirt laundrysoon me/sink full of

dishes rinsed and unwashed/dying pen and

dead lighter/words and words used and used
/sealed bottle of vitamins /eight o'clock twilight
/hours-old coffee to go/obscenely mild june
/cars parked over crushed containers/people 
attired in various oblivions/sneezes and the 
odd blessing/lilac and refuse and swears in 
the wind/fingernails bitten beyond the quick

/floors and unpacked-box tabletops)—

but what no one would ever know to

look is that every moment that i am

alive is precious beyond prediction

and dizzy with its fullness of you


Thus refined (and in much-better mood), I'll attach a Deep Freeze Mice song onto this post. It's the opening track of their 4th record, The Gates of Lunch. 
"Red Light for the Greens"

Correctifications

See, I didn't even realize yesterday that I'd posted this exceptional program (programme, for you Anglotypes) as a separate blog entry—I thought that it was part of "Watch and Observe." So, that should tell you something, but likely doesn't.

Nonetheless, when I awakened at 1:30 in the morning, haunted by heartbreak, I began to reflect upon everything in my life that I've done incorrectly. And this post came to mind. Its original title was "Molly F, filmed this masterpiece," but I'd intended that as a descriptive sentence. Then I saw that I'd already posted a link in "Watch and Observe," and I realized that I had created a miniature golf course from a molehill. I still have very little idea of how blogging works, but that's more than I can say for before now.

Watch and Observe

I have allowed my slothful typing skills to deter my posting to this blog. Also, the fact that my computer is captive to a nearby computer-repair store. But, it is no longer a single shit that I give about any of that.  

How does a person curry favor with the cosmos? I'm speaking in terms of climate. This winter, a brutal and surreal creature, has fragmented us, kinda. We're still very much ourselves and everything, but that's just such an unsettled milieu. In order to like winter, I think that we'd have to sacrifice all of the parts of ourselves that are unique and beautiful at the altar of some allegorical Voldemort. Our disdain for cold just means that we should fucking move. (It's not as if anyone would issue sincere protestation.) I tire of being jubilant when the weather doesn't punish me. I prefer nice things and nice people, and I really couldn't care less about what that makes me.

Sakes alive, have I ever digressed! The true identity of this posting is positive indeed, and I will prove it.

I HAVE WORK! Yes! Writing and editing and omg! From home!

WE HAVE OIL! It's mindblowing and miraculous. Molly and I have resolved already not to repeat this humiliating hand-to-mouth next year, by way of situating ourselves in a considerably milder place.

DESMOND AND IVOR ARE AWESOME!  Caught on tape, for all to enjoy, is their cooking program. It's posted on here somewheres via that link. As my beyond-awesome mother says, "Watch and observe."

http://s1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/mrfyfitz/February%20Love/?action=view&current=SAM_8069.mp4

Alright Already

excuses reasons

excuse this reasoned excuse

Sorry about that hiatus. I didn't mean to do that.

Okay, well—we live in a town called Brunswick, Maine. Everybody must know this by now. We've been in Maine for 5.3 lonely years, and we'd like to change all of that soon. As we shovel from yesterday's wintry deposit, we're preparing for tonight's installment. I've grown somewhat bitter about all, albeit in a wholesome and jesty way (e.g, people that like it here are referred to now as Snow Humpers.)

How did we get here? Why, maybe? Well, we really didn't see ourselves as having anywhere else to go, and I'll write more about that disastrous chapter someday soon.

We made a decision in August of 2008 to purchase a home, just before everything in the area collapsed economically. I had left my stable position at a Crisis-Stabilization Unit for other work (which appeared at that time to be both lucrative and abundantly forthcoming). Most important was that the house was smack in the middle of a village. A flaaaaaat village. With all amenities in near-obnoxious proximity. This would enable us to perform various errands without suffering beholden to the vagaries of vehicles, which was (and remains) truly amazing (Molly has never been [and doesn't want to be] licensed to drive; I have all of those health problems that, legally speaking, should preclude my driving [but really, any moron could be like

"E. 

F P. 

T O Z. 

L P E D." 

when given a vision test]). I do declare. 

At any rate, here's our house (even though it looks like a lengthy link):

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=17+everett+st.+brunswick,+me+04011-2403&layer=c&sll=43.913113,-69.965974&cbp=13,161.93,,0,0.03&cbll=43.913278,-69.966052&hl=en&sspn=0.006295,0.006295&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=17+Everett+St,+Brunswick,+Cumberland,+Maine+04011&ll=43.913267,-69.966066&spn=0.004498,0.009645&t=h&z=17&iwloc=A&panoid=Cv3SUbzhBj2lRNm86GQodw

Due to the continual good graces of loved ones, we have managed to eke something approaching survival out of the swirling completeness of atrophy entropy dystrophy that's about as much a part of our dayafterday as Nitrogen is of air. We're poor, and have largely been just hanging on, and that is no secret. Corners are cut (if not ignored) wherever possible, and I pray that my continued diligence in finding viable work will lead to more-promising pastures (this has already begun to happen, but I'll probably address that later). Every expense for us has been a source of discomfort. Abysmal and/or dismal, truly—I could very easily go on and on about how this doesn't feel like actual life and what's the point anyhow, but I'd much rather not do that, especially when there are such good stories to share, and especially when impecunity dovetails so neatly into the first of them:

Because of our propitious in-town location, I've seen fit to forgo the $1-per-bag weekly trash service pickup, discarding our refuse instead in nearby municipal and/or commercial facilities. I justify the questionable ethics by stating indignantly that it's a quality-of-life issue for all involved. (Actually, it's just poverty.) This was a veritable boon for some time (years, actually), saving us untold dozens of dollars that we could splurge flagrantly on utilities. To wit, it's a rather popular strategy, judging by the mongrel assortment of bags and items in said dumpster. (To everyone's credit, cardboard is separated from other waste and deposited into a different bin.)

Then, two Sundays ago, a police car pulled into our driveway for unknown reasons. My first thought was that it regarded the family's vehicle. I have a car, purchased quite inexpensively from a wonderful and generous friend whom we've yet to pay (it's been over a year, but we're awaiting our tax returns), whose registration (not in my name) is 5-months expired (and whose certificate met a Desmond-oriented demise at some point early last year), and whose inspection lapsed last spring. (At least I have insurance.) So, I thought that I would justly be taken away and flogged or what have you. But this occasion was altogether different.

COP: Benjamin... Gallagher?

ME: Gallaher, yes. That's me.

COP: This is 17 Everett Street?

ME: Yes it is.

COP: And Molly FitzGerald—where is she?

ME: Oh, she's with our baby at the moment; can I help you?

COP (produces crumpled-up household bills): Well, Rite Aid wants you to have these back. Have you been dumping your trash into Rite Aid's dumpster?

ME: Only sometimes. I like to spice it up a bit. Being right downtown, I figured that it was all okay. Nowhere is it posted that that dumpster is Rite-Aid property!

COP: Sir, that's considered to be Theft of Services, and it's a crime.

ME: Really? Even trash that we create when we're walking around? Or diaper trash?

COP: Uh, you'd better use your own trash can. Just don't do this anymore.

I deserved this. Well, I actually deserved far worse. Anyhow, my family has not permitted me to forget this unglamorous incident (although, to be fair, it is pretty recent). In quieter moments (which are few), I have sometimes mused about which is more disturbing—the fact that they searched through small bags of post-toddler waste to find "the culprit," or the fact that I was sufficiently thoughtless to discard my bills thus.

None of this changes that it's haunted me since. I am asked to declare the presence of trash (to Molly) before walking anywhere. And Desmond, who's variously astounding, created a painting, which is not news. The painting, though, is a rendering of the dumpster behind Rite Aid:

Note the yellow toward the bottom of the painting. Evidently, it is text. That text serves to notify passersby: 

"Pops is not allowed to put diapers and trash into the Rite Aid trashcans."