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

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.]

Posters Are for Posters

Oh, yes, well.

The title of this post is intended to mirthfully obscure the fact that there's really no purpose to writing now. Well, I do have a heap of work to do, and I just collected my old computer (with functional keys and all) from the computer store, and there has been an unseemly surfeit of frustrations causing problems like free radicals are alleged to cause (although that itself is a curious term; I mean, what's the alternative? Imprisoned radicals? Quaint notions abound.) 


Equinox is happening in several hours, and everything stinks to high heaven everywhere ("Decomposition in A Major Stench"). Winter, always at once both real and imagined, has a distinctly own-goal relation to the multifarious malfeasance of litter-creatures (insects being implicated, unjustly, by the term "litterbug") during those piteous weeks and months. Far from novel, this has become an ever-triter truism through Maine's Mud Season (an unofficial 5th climatic "quadrant" of ruts and rutting, a patch of shifting duration and temporal location nebulously attributed to somewhere during the first half of the calendar year). Anyway, it's dismal feeling to be mired thus, and I think that it is gagging to be chronicled, even if only to my precious, albeit snappily dwindling, cadre of blog readers.


Longing for evidence that could amount to a precedent, I found something that I'd written an ENTIRE DECADE AGO (2001); in it, I spoke even of the winter before (y2k, for all of you scared-y crackers--you should be ashamed of yourselves). I'm including it here, and getting away from this blasted contraption to find something that, with luck, will enradden proceedings.

THE END OF WINTER IN PORTLAND, MAINE—an editorial statement from Benb Gallaher

Last winter, living in the perversely magical off-season carcass of Old Orchard Beach, I would rise at 5:00 a.m. four times per week to drive [person whose name I shall refrain from disclosing] to work in Portland at Arabica Coffee. I never minded the drive, which soon was all-but-eliminated by a dubious move into a moribund Portland apartment in which I died, like, thrice. 

Anyway, the morning's drive home would see me detour from Danforth St., onto its scalene-situated colleague, Spring St. I would drive 3, maybe 4, blocks from my typical turn off (turnoff). I would pass Mercy Hospital, arriving at a small-ish side street called Winter St. Everyday, I would stop the car there—at the corner of Winter and Spring streets—and pray to an amorphous deity (I was without standards) for my own kind of mercy. It never worked; our last frost fell in June, and the next appeared ten rainy and cruelly mild weeks later. 

Perhaps it may sound cynical for me to say so, but the purpose of snow in Portland is to conceal to us, while the days are short and dreary, how disgusting and sinful we are. We have seen a lot of melt in the last eight or nine days, and the streets are sagging with the indiscretions of the people—cigarette butts, heaps of shit, broken beer bottles, and blatant TRASH (half-eaten Christmas candies, TV-dinner trays, and the like). Beholding the cross-section of a snow bank, you can see the evolution (à la tree rings) of these habits, and it seems that the true trespasses began as the snow really deepened. Like it ushered in a winter culture of waste. Now, the melt washes, foamy with motor oil, rock salt, old soda, and any number of fluid vilenesses, into street and storm drains asphyxiating with Little Debbie wrappers, and the people must figure that this will continue unaccountably until someone comes and cleans.

Heaven help us all.