I Slept Like a Log,

I slept like a log that had been fresh-felled on a rock mountainside, cut through at the foot, falling and crashing through other branches, limbs hacked, draglined through mud, over rocks, to the precipice, hurled, spinning, tumbling to the icy torrents below, rolled, spiked, chained, over rapids, crashing over rock and jams, oh yes, to the lakes, to the chained raft, the towboat, the sawmill, the screaming saws, the scent of resin, the tree's lifeblood, billowing clouds of sawdust, of high flung shavings, as hot steel teeth gnaw, oh gnaw, I'm chained, dragged, hooked toward that line, the spinning toothed debarkers, listen, that saw's howling, a short while ago I was a tree, rippling green in the breeze, filled with calm mountain zen....

And now mutilated, hooked, foot first toward the screaming nemesis.
Planked?
Oh god, please no, not Ikea!


And so, I wake, sweating, the alarm trills and that hook in my ankle ceases its relentless pull. It takes a few moments, for my wakened human brain to realise I'm not a tree.
There is no mountain.



Oh my dreams this week. So much toil, so much turmoil. Dread and foreboding.
In one, though, I got to eat doughnuts. Raspberry ones, hot raspberry.

Oh Juanita? I call your name.

Rolling and tumbling? Down the road I go.

And Now for Something Completely Different!

The first two videos play out continuing aspects of the same story, the third, I just put in because I like it and I think it's fun. Although it continues a theme, cinematographicall from video number 2, the storyline is unrelated.

Olympian

Why are some things olympic sports and others not? How about cabinetmaking... See, he's got a lovely dovetail joint there, but the North Koreans are already inlaying rosewood, and pearl around the lock, Oh no! Gunther's chisel has slipped, it's a nasty gouge, oh my, that will cost him an extra sheet of sandpaper... what? Oh, I see? this year of course, the sandpaper allowance has been reduced, and I think... Yes, the  judges are holding up a finger, he's used up all his chances, poor chap, but! Look! he's converting that chisel slip into a carved decoration on the lid, the north koreans are glancing over, nervous, and oh my, look, the camerounian, always an outsider, this lad's only fifteen, only took up a tenon-saw for the first time a couple of years ago, and he's already starting his first coat of varnish. Well, from here, we'll report further in a little while, but now our cameras are going over to the hundred-meter lawn-mowing finals...."

Poo Wi-Fi!

Okay, it's in Spanish, but you'll get the gist of it.
Stop press: No, it isn't, I found a version in english!

An encouragement to clean up after your dog... or somebody else's, in the park.

Meanwhile, in Gilbert, Arizona, Arizona State University's developed a dog-waste powered methane digester that runs a streetlight in the dog-park.

Sheep?

 

Mail Order Brides, A Warning From 1873

 

(As usual, "click to embiggen") 

Infinity

by Amit Majmudar

Reading
for Jorge Luis Borges

I stand before the books as I might stand
beneath the night sky. They’re in stacks and stacks
of self-contained infinities demand-
ing exploration. I have neither maps
nor ladders to pursue these stars,
these books that burn within themselves. That’s when
he comes and shows me where to start,
a blind librarian with a lantern and
a hand that takes my own. He knows the books
for me, he knows exactly where they are.
When he points, I at last know where to look.
The deep night sky he navigates by heart,
and as he shows them to me, one by one
I find those far stars opening into suns.

Working Title. Thats what I'll call it.

I carry a notepad.
A moleskine.
Is that too pretentious?

I carry a notepad. I have lots of them. So many that notes get lost. Sometimes I even carry a pen too. My notepads are legion. there are ratty old spiral-bound ones, measurements, stains, sketches, lists, recipes, stories. Most of my stories never make it out to paper, most never make it out to anywhere, they stay in my head, crumble, decay, and are gone, overwritten, forgotten, fragments of sentences, sometimes whole words and letters,  or maybe just a crushed ampersand in the dust. Were it ever to happen that a pathologist scooped out my brain, I'm sure beneath it would be all the leaked words, stories, dreams.

Today, this morning, I had to go out to the phone shop, yet again. That's a saga in itself.
Afterward I found a cafe, sat on a leatherette bench, looking out at the world and at the other customers. Across the cafe, in another bench/table/bench booth, was a young woman with her two small children. She had a laptop open, and was obviously trying to concentrate, as her children swarmed over her.

I was fascinated. They weren't loud raucous kids, they were inquisitive, experimentative, I can't guess the age, maybe two or three, maybe twins? One slightly bigger than the other, girl and boy, the girl slightly bigger. Clean, neat, moderately affluent, the thing that struck me was that there were no boundaries between them, like puppies in a heap, they squeezed into the space between her and the wall, tried to climb over her back behind her neck, and she grabbed the clamberer, hushed and repositioned it, without taking her right hand from the keyboard, nor her eyes from the screen. They clambered over her thighs, played with her hair, tipped over a sippy-cup, tried to poke a straw in her mouth.
At all this, she seemed unperturbed, quietly coping, looking around a curly head as it blew bubbles against her neck.
Nothing they did seemed to faze her. I'm, of course, sitting there with my coffee, yes, coffee, not tea, though tea is my default beverage, and scribbling, drawing, trying to write something completely else, trying to concentrate on a zillion things I need to get done, but which slip through my fingers like greased piglets, not that I've ever actually encountered a greased piglet.
I'm trying to look as though I'm the sort of person who sits in coffee emporia and knows what all the things listed on the menu board are. I'm always totally humiliated when I try to order.  Still, unlike the 'barista', a sternly goateed young man, who's probably studying Nietsche, I do know who Starbuck was.

Here's an interesting digression. I always digress, y'know, I'm doing it right now, digressing from my digression. And that's why I'll never ever complete my novel, (apart from the fact that I never started writing it). Where was I?. Oh yes digressing, Starbuck, oh.
The first Hawaiian royalty to visit London.   King Kamehameha and Queen Kamamalu. They travelled to London on a whaling ship, captained by Valentine Starbuck.
I don't recall where or when I learned all this stuff, but the sad gist of Kamehameha's story was that, just like Pocahontas, he died.
The Hawaiians had no defence against measles, and that once-common childhood disease killed their king and queen.
Anyway, Starbuck. I'm not sure if he was the one who Melville based the first mate of the 'Pequod' upon.
Something I didn't know, and just learned, whilst looking up Kamehameha's name's proper spelling, is that the captain of the royal naval vessel tasked to return the bodies of the king and queen to Hawaii, had consulted with Captain Starbuck upon sailing directions, and Starbuck had mentioned an uncharted island and plotted its position. The captain, George Anson Byron, charted the island, in the Kiribati group, and named it "Starbuck Island"

Meanwhile, the small girl makes a grab at mummy's top, pulling at her shirt, and as she grabs, a breast pops out. Pale and rounded, ripe fruit, with dark areola and upright nipple. Mother calmly scoops it back into the briefly revealed pink bra, does that settling jiggle, and... I'm busted. She looks up, catches my eye. I pretend I didn't notice but I'm blushing. More embarassed than she is.

I'm thinking though, of the way the children  see no boundary whatsoever between themselves and her, I'm musing on motherhood, and how my own lady's kids are, though much older, forever as much a part of her. How its understood without words that the bond is absolute. They're growing up, starting to fly free, but where it matters, there's no distance between them. You can disagree with them, get mad at them, but they know, when it comes to it, there's always forgiveness, always love, always closeness.

I think of children, how they start, completely part of their mother, how they take over her body and mind as they gestate, how totally reliant they are when born, how that bond is created. They've been part of her body on the inside, then they cling to it to suckle and sleep, how fearful they are when she passes out of sight, how her reappearance is what they need. I'm a man, I have no children, I've no claim to any of this, I'm an observer from the outside.
The woman in the coffee shop.
Maybe she thinks I was ogling her and staring at her boobs.
I was envying her.