Company for Dinner

Thanks, Asheville.

2011-10-04T14:28:00.001-05:00

It's difficult to appreciate how large this painting is. Probably five feet tall, and oil. Someone spent A LOT of time on this, and I love it. Like most hilarious things, it's hard to tell if it's sincere or a joke. I don't know the artist's name; it was in Spiritex downtown. If I were rich and eccentric, I would buy it.

Broadside for Maxine Hong Kingston

2011-09-26T17:31:00.007-05:00

Hey MHK fans! Blue Barnhouse is printing a broadside of one of Kingston's poems, at her request. The design is below. I cut it from a sheet of heavy white paper with an exacto blade, all in one piece. I started by drawing the image and blacking it out with acrylic, but it didn't satisfy; I needed something more... xtreme. The final product will be midnight blue on silver paper, aka, the shit. Some will be signed.

P.S. For admirers of gorgeous long silver old lady hair (I know who you are), take a look at this picture of Maxine *swwooon*

minisculology

2011-09-07T21:12:00.001-05:00

What do you do with the fact that, if you wanted to be thorough, you would have to use up your entire life to explore one miniscule thing, say, the lifecycle of the monotropa uniflora?

Which means that all the other miniscule and major things would have to pass you by like whales under a swimmer, in darkness, as mysteries. And it would still be unlikely that the monotropa uniflora would have unrobed itself for you. What do you do in light of this? Where do you take your hours, the strength in your limbs, the open eye in your brain, to satisfy yourself?

2011-08-27T19:31:00.007-05:00

Remember that time I tried to be a train conductor? Here's a recap of the hiring session:

HR lady had a cheese blintz fixation, and the first hour of the orientation was dominated by increasingly dire predictions of our future in train conducting. One little known fact is that trains, much like dobermans, can smell fear...

...and will act upon that. If you aren't "truefful" to yourself, if, for example, you did not wear your seatbelt, or did not really mean it when you prayed, the train may CUT YOU IN HALF (they really said this). It's like the final scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy and the bad guy have to pick the real holy grail, and the bad guy picks the wrong one and gets eaten up by maggots and rot and blows into dust. Sobering, folks. Also, not for me. And for our hours of early a.m. misery, they didn't give us so much as a cup of coffee, hence my wistful tracing of the carrot nipple I brought in my pocket.

Anyway, on Monday I begin a different job, a job which has risen from the ashes of my transportation industry career dreams on warm gentle winds: hot air balloon launcher. I know! So much better than being a train conductor. Wish me luck.

P.S. Sally, these drawings are very inspired by the ones you used to do in class. Thanks for showing me that coping mechanism.

Dreams and Sour Grapes

2011-08-20T21:01:00.005-05:00

The night before last I dreamed of a woman with seven vaginas arranged vertically down her middle, multiply (-plee) pregnant and a highly popular prostitute. Last night my wayward soul must have inadvertently entered a swimmer at some foreign, perhaps English or French beach, scaring the swimmer's friend and causing other beachgoers to believe she had lost her mind. One shocked old man in red flowered swim trunks stands out particularly; he stared at me when I buried my hands in the sand for stability. I reeled my soul in asap when I realized the mix-up and lurched into the kitchen for water. On an unrelated (?) subject, I decided optimistically to attempt the ivory tower of grad school. As with any tower, the approach to this one begins easily but becomes totally dismal when you get to the tower part. I registered for the GRE. I looked for scholarships, because nothing is happening without generous moneys. Would you like to know why I am prepared to resign myself to a life of sometime babysitting and quail egg-peddling? This is a sample awardee. Please do read it:

Skroch graduated in 2009 with degrees in Political Science, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, and African Studies. She studied at Université Gaston Berger in Senegal. She was the recipient of the Abraham S. Burack and F. Chandler Young Awards for outstanding research abroad for her year-long fieldwork examining local resolutions to violent civil war in the Casamance region of Senegal. She has worked with international students and refugees in various capacities, with a dialogue and reconciliation initiative in Israel and the West Bank through the QUEST Program, and as a Soliya Connect Program Facilitator, using new media to mediate dialogue on relevant political and social issues between young people around the world. She worked for Wisconsin Public Television as a documentary editor and transcriber, was interviewed on NPR’s Here on Earth about her experiences, and presented a thesis on dependency theory in the Congo at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Violence. Post-college, Skroch was a Fulbright Scholar in Morocco, researching post-conflict democratic transition via the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, while also interning at a medical rehabilitation center for torture victims. She grew up in the Philippines and Wisconsin, and speaks French, Arabic, Moroccan Darija, and Wolof."

Wolof, huh? They can program machines to do some pretty amazing things these days. All that boring human stuff like food, sleep, sex, tears, failure -- gone. Maximum efficiency. Fuck me.

My own CV has the stale flavor of a life crisis and seems to be saying, "You're old enough to know that if you ever want to get off food stamps: ITT Tech." Nonetheless, can I show you a funny thing I made?

Malediction

2011-08-06T23:19:00.010-05:00

You wise men and your hideous, oppressive unities, your eternal progressions, regressions, fractals, and universal laws, pure and empty as a fresh condom. When I see your gnostic, patient smile, glassy, thousand-year fisheye stare, I shudder. I throw myself behind Satan and say, "better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven!" Swallow your enlightenment like the tongue of a paralytic -- you have settled, mummified in your high seat without even the quickening of maggots or the thrilling odor of bacteria. If you, preacher of the ONE, the GOOD, all-seer, all-knower, benevolent puffy-lidded lord, are the gatekeeper, keep your nation -- of order, of fascistic columns, serendipitous coincidences, providential meetings, holy numbers, asymptotic lines. May they rot you through and through like ingested fiberglass, like rigid diatoms do flies.

Oh sweet, wild life, keep me from wisdom. Gift me with confusion and disaster. Crush my kingdom. Undo me. May I never believe. May I never ascend to enlightenment. Give me no powers of persuasion. Give me sex, accidents, paroxysms of terror, early morning light, swarms of insects, unruly fruits, flowers, thorns, poisons. Impale me with unlooked-for ecstasies. I adore you, life. I scream in adoration, hatred, joy. Take no prisoners here.

A hard place to be, like Kabul in winter.

2011-04-22T21:26:00.000-05:00

Like most of us, I've spent the last decade swimming in a buzz of war words, political yammering, and combat footage that could not be less engaging. I have never paid any attention to it. I have been vaguely critical, but only vaguely. If I have ever felt anything, it was skepticism and futility. I have never started or entered any conversation on America's wars. If I have complained, it was only about the things that touched my rights, like the Patriot Act.

I signed up last month to teach an Afghani girl English via Skype. I had (have) mixed feelings about it. I knew almost nothing about Afghanistan, despite attempting to keep up with geopolitics. Afghanistan was like a movie you hear everyone talking about, so you never bother to see yourself. But I felt obligated to know something about Farida's milieu. What was it like to be her? I studied the geography; I tuned in to the chatter. Almost immediately I was tempted to pull out of the program because I felt I was just another gullible idealistic American being do-gooded into furthering imperialist neoliberal aims. But I think knowledge is essentially, well, not good, but catalystic. Who's to say what Farida will use her English for?

I've read a lot of books on Afghanistan lately, most of them showing their ideological seams at some point or another. The most succinct, fair, well-researched, and deeply felt, and the one I recommend to anyone who has the time and emotional energy to invest in considering some profoundly disturbing insights into American foreign policy (I mean existential crisis disturbing), is Kabul in Winter by Ann Jones. I am sorry to say that whatever corrupt, depraved, avaricious schemes you can think up (and a lot you probably can't) are facts of life in Afghanistan, thanks to American taxpayer billions.

The most shocking thing I have learned (which may be common knowledge I somehow missed) is that the present war in Afghanistan is an outgrowth of the proxy war fought by the US against the USSR. From Carter to Clinton, the weapons the Taliban use now are weapons WE gave them to fight the Soviet Union at any cost to the life and freedom of non-combatant Afghanis. This is such an old story; it's repeated all over Africa and Latin America ad nauseum. But it is one I had to dig for in the case of Afghanistan and which I never recall hearing from mainstream American news. It gets even better! For decades, the Afghan mujahidin were referred to as "freedom fighters" by US politicians, and Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers." So... the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center are the moral equivalent of Washington, Jefferson, and Hancock, according to the once and future king of the Tea Party. With doublespeak like this, maybe they fucking are.

I would like to beg everyone who reads this note to research, to care, to dig deep and speak out. But I know what an exhausting, heartbreaking thing that is, and we all have more immediate battles to fight. I would never have gotten into this unless I had to. But if you think of it, if you are curious, if one nice spring evening on your porch with a glass of tea you get to wondering... don't stop.

"The developed country does not, as Marx thought, show the backward country its future; the fragmenting countries show the integrating ones the dark side of their common present. The violence and decay of Afghanistan is the reflection...of the violence that created and maintains our security." Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System

New Tat

2010-11-13T11:51:00.004-06:00

Did this drawing last night, in one marathon sitting. I'm pretty slow (and deer legs are wicked hard to get right -- they still look pretty stiff to me). It was midnight when I finished. I'd been reading Russian Fairy Tales illustrated by the remarkable Ivan Bilibin all day, and re-reading The Master and Margarita, so maybe that's why it's so... um.... whimsical? macabre? Whimsico-macabre. I promised my girlfriend that I'd design a tattoo for her, to finish her sleeve which already has a Japanese folk tale wound up in it. So I figured this would fit in. It will be mostly green with some red for the blood and fungi, and the deer will be fawn-colored. If she accepts it, that is. If not, I don't blame her. It's weird-lookin.

Thanks for that, BP.

2010-05-29T12:54:00.009-05:00

It's like reruns of your favorite sitcom. Day or night, if you start feeling a little dead, a little disconnected, like you need a bigger narrative to connect with, want to cry a bit maybe, or maybe all that talk of the "junk shot" in the news has got you hot and bothered in that trashy midafternoon cable-porn kinda way, just take a gander at those black billows and feel your puny sorrows and vagrant loin-heat leach out into big Mama Gulf:

Live feed of the oil spill.

Thanks, BP, for attempting to fill a hole in our collective gut with tires, string, human hair, tennis balls, and whatever other cheap shit you can lay hands on. Because sometimes we just feel so empty inside.

Heart of Darkness, or Yes, I Took a Lot of Theory.

2010-04-28T18:22:00.024-05:00

IMPORT REPORT SUPPORT TRANSPORT
COMPORT DEPORT EXPORT
APPORTION DISPROPORTION
PORTFOLIO
PORTAL
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT
IMPORTANT OPPORTUNITY

[In training today I noticed a remarkable number of words contain "port." My cynical and corroded heart told me the following, in a pretentious monotone, to be sure.]

Corporate language and the PORT.
Hot blue receiving bays of sweet virgin lands locked across waters (accidental and irreversible like swollen waters before parturition) to scummy chilly harbors where burdened northern rivers expire with stretched mouths, entered and left by teeming thousands. PORT- -PORT- -PORT is: an inner, suprahistorical preoccupation with commerce's first rapine birth in sorrow and riches (EXEUNT: riches) by ports, ports, ports opened everywhere on every continent. Forced open with guns. Eased open with gifts. Latin gate, entrance, harbor; Latin to bear, carry, bring. We always give back. Open the port. Wider. Put a burger in it. A bigger burger. Thank you for your participation. This is a very important opportunity.

[I'm no hater. I can't wait for this paycheck. I warned you. My heart is bitter and corroded and makes the worst of a really good situation.]

Day One in Brah-son City

2010-04-26T21:37:00.009-05:00

And I've already trashed my hotel room like a rock star. Not only that, but I am simultaneously typing this, reading the New York Times, and watching music videos on a giant flat screen TV about three feet from my face (why did they hang the TV above the desk? I have the resistance of a homeschooled freshman at a college party.)

This new job is a big deal, I guess. Five days of training and piles of manuals and four course lunches and big hotel rooms and two-hour powerpoints on business ethics and black-and-white suits... all paid. I made a hundred bucks today sitting on my ass. Actually I only sat on my ass half the day because around 3 I became violently ill and had to be taken upstairs to lie down on a king size resort bed overlooking the spring forests, after a hot bath. I wasn't faking, jerk.

The most interesting part has been watching the subtle power plays between the local mountain folk, some of them Cherokee (though none look it, to be honest, probably due to Cherokee's famously liberal enrollment policies), and the training staff flown in from Chicago. Sweet-faced office-muffin lady gestures Vanna-like to the bullet point which reads, "PETS," and says, "Now most pets are perfectly friendly, but we just ask, for the purposes of this study [involving in-home interviews, FYI] that you request the owner of the pet to please put him or her in another room for the duration of the interview." A lot of my fellow trainees have worked on various reservations before, and a chuckle goes round the room. I'm thinking about the feral dog herds of my hometown whose sole human connection is with a bullet, and the chained furies of the Navajo res in their circles of barren earth through which one passes like a ball on a mini-golf course, with fear and trembling. One lady says, "Ma'am, hev you ay-ver been on a resurvay-tion?" (Excuse the weak attempt at dialect; you really just had to hear this woman.) "Well, um, no," says the HR muffin nervously, amidst more laughter. "Guess you got nothin to say about dogs then!" hollers one of the men. And then the lady (veteran park ranger) politely prepped us all on what to do WHEN we run into bears, and another man followed up with a tutorial on bull elk. The trainers were crestfallen.

This kind of thing went on all day. When the trainers suggested professional clothing, they were laughed out. When they suggested certain ways of speaking, someone said, "No ma'am. You jest best have a sense of humor is all." The slow-talking, in-the-know locals versus the big city professionals.

Tomorrow we do role-playing. I'm nervous in the way one used to get before those prepared speeches in high school, not for any particular reason, just trembly and fuzzy-brained.

Dear Denver,

2010-03-12T11:28:00.009-06:00

Push out blossoms from your filthy frosty fingers.
Roll a big rowdy sun up from the plains.
Leave off stacking snow for a minute.
Come out, my mountain city loves,
come out! It's almost spring,
and I
am coming
back.

Account of the Murder of Isaac Kountz, 1876, Kimble Co., Texas

2010-03-03T15:02:00.062-06:00

The hooves of the comanche horses strike even to the roots of the grass, crunching the water hidden there. At the western edge of the yellow fields of the air, the sun pauses in its rush for night. Isaac and Sebastian watch the men come up the ridge. Their sheep drift. They tuck their dingy tails between their legs and skulk into the junipers. No one will come for them.

Isaac and Sebastian climb a stone to see. Isaac's eyes, blue as the prussian army, flash their signals down below. The wind which has blown across the plains all the way from the ice nation dies and the brothers lose their balance in the stillness. The riders have read the signal. Sadly, Sebastian puts his new hat on. They jump down and Isaac looks back in time to see the last of the sheep vanish.

"Sheep are gone," murmurs Isaac.

The comanches are beautiful. Their arms and necks are like stones that lie under the river and their hair shines blue with oil. Their smell rises up as sweet as the skin of horses with the freshness of living organs and the bite of juniper berries. They advance in a constellation, knotted to the sun and the going of the sun, sweeping over the ridge and over the fixed elements of life.

The riders stop in front of them. Down below in the arms of the river Isaac and Sebastian see the house, resourceful and brittle like the castings of caddis fly larvae; but the shape, almost square, suggests a wound on the world, a forecast of something inevitable and painful. They are filled with sadness because they do not think they will walk through that door again. Nostalgia for this ridge, the last ridge, and this last evening of eleven years, overcomes the child Sebastian. The tears run down his face and he does not hang his head to hide them from his brother; the dry air licks them up. Fletched grass quivers in the last light, and the stones soften and turn sweet like the german marzipan Isaac only just remembers, but his eyes look to that single cloud hung like a mask over the mountain across the valley, and he wrinkles his forehead, trying to remember a name of it he never heard. Tomorrow is Christmas.

The first man aligns the rifle with his black fringed eye on one end and Isaac's grass-gold head on the other and joins them with a blast. Sebastian sighs. He kneels slowly, hands, right knee, left knee, to the magnetic earth. A shadow falls across his face. The comanche reaches down from his saddle and takes the hat from his head, and the riders follow the ancient day west, throwing their shadows back.

[Note: This was the last recorded Comanche conflict in Kimble County, Texas.]

Trials of the Vagabond-King

2010-02-20T10:03:00.019-06:00

There were many years of preparation for the act. Many years of hearing the stories told and telling them back correctly, of affirming that I did understand, did believe, had indeed invited the sweet bearded vagabond-king into my heart and only him. It was after the otherwise ordinary crackers and juice had been spiced with the unique terror of ritual, the necessity of the true-heart's test, "Be sure! If you doubt, you will die," that I took communion.

The lights were dim and pearly. My head did not yet reach over the seats. The blood and body came on silver trays, borne by ordinary ladies I had seen on other days in ordinary places. I wondered if the grown-ups were afraid for me. I was not afraid for myself, having that certitude children have of passing all trials of purity of heart. I picked the biggest piece of Saltine cracker and the fullest thimble of Welch's grape juice. The room was silent. The blood lipped the lily cup, blue-sheened, lights on it. The body brown, salty. A tiny amount. No feast. A modicum of meat and moisture, an inoculation.

I had found, creeping around the church on Wednesday evenings with my best friend the pastor's daughter the boxes of Saltines and jugs of Welch's kept in a cabinet under the sink for this occasion. We helped ourselves. At home my parents called it grape juice and crackers. So the fact was no scandal. The realities of the juice & crackers and body & blood existed beside or upon or within each other. It was the mystery of the single object that draws to itself by its power a number of stories which move through it without tyranny, a mystery I recognized from a game I played with my mother in which we listened to wordless music with our eyes closed and told each other what we saw, and also from this fresh, cryptic realm of letters, whereby marks represented sounds which referred to things. Later I would learn one of its names: metaphor.

I was a great lover of science in those days. I passionately declared my intention to be a scientist and deal in mysteries. Likewise I was a great lover of the divine, and declared with equal passion my intention to run after the vagabond-king with white lilies, cup of blood, and dust in my shoes forever.

Science lost me first, sometime in late junior high, when it wedded itself to strangling, monochratic mathematics, which quietly squeezed mysteries into hypotheses and sieved the still slightly warm hypotheses through the seven severe layers of interrogation which were supposed to produce, through repeated refinement, a lump of pure truth. I could not believe it any more than I could master the alchemy. Christianity, though, with its dark capacity for transmutation, god to man, water to wine, wine to blood, retained my ardor for a long time. It lost me only when its grip tightened, when it demanded certainty instead of curiosity, when it had more answers than mysteries, and a dearth of silence and simple terror.

When the multiplicities that must move are fixed, the vivifying, electric, scandalous, mystery-cult collision of unlike substances proceeds elsewhere. Walk on, vagabond-king.

Do Not Interrogate the Heart

2010-02-07T11:56:00.019-06:00

Last night I cut my heart out with a knife at a public pool. I was under the impression that it was something everyone tried at some point, like meditation or reading Ulysses. It was unwaveringly painful, in the way it hurts when someone dies or leaves you forever. I held it in my hands. It was white and still. My limbs grew heavy with that sinking that happens before a faint, but I didn't faint. It wasn't enough to hold it. I couldn't see the problem. So I slit it open like a peach, just to peek inside, but the knife was sharper than I'd thought, or the heart was softer, and the blade slipped straight through. The halves fell open. It was hollow and cool. Vertigo swamped me. I thought it was time to put it back, but I couldn't get it in straight. It was so delicate it kept tearing, and the most alarming thing was the way it was drying, so that the cut edges turned hard, curled in, and didn't fit together anymore.
My aunt found me. "You are going to die," she said coldly.
"No, no I'm not," I said. "A doctor could put it back."
"Put THAT back? No. That is ruined. They might be able to save you with some other heart, but, THAT..." and she stalked away to find a doctor. I watched a diving contest, feeling my vitality sink and sink gently down.
Later some kind stranger gave me a briny, clotted cow's heart swimming in blood in a plastic bag. My aunt approached with a surgeon. The new heart was going to be too big, but at least I might live. I kept the shriveled, yellowish pieces in my hands.

2010-02-06T20:42:00.003-06:00

If you're viewing this from anywhere in the Southern Appalachian region, you'd best come.

2010-02-06T11:42:00.003-06:00

I dreamed that Puck came back. He had lost his leg, so I made him one from my own hair. I fitted tiny thorns in for the claws. I tucked it up under the feathers, against the bone. Then he jumped up on my shoulder, and never left me again.

Birth of a Flyer

2010-02-05T21:52:00.004-06:00

Layer 3: Coming soon!

Layer 2:

Layer 1:

The Brahman Delegation

2010-01-31T00:21:00.003-06:00

My contribution to BBH's collection at the New York show.
I've been all about the chipboard lately.

Puck Fix

2010-01-31T00:16:00.006-06:00

You know what? I might as well get a tattoo of Puck, if I were to get one, that is. That little jerk really buried himself in my heart.
This was going to be a card, too. I might still print it. It's my favorite.

Affordable Dental Solution

2010-01-30T21:59:00.009-06:00

If I sit with my mouth open, flies attracted by the odor of rot will lay eggs in my teeth, and when the maggots hatch, they will nibble out my cavities painlessly with their tiny mandibles, and when they are done, I will shut my mouth and swallow, seeing as how they are made entirely of my own teeth, and seeing as how I don't like flies.

So Disgusting It's Almost Delicious.

2010-01-19T12:31:00.003-06:00

Swarming Carnivorous Worms and Sea Stars

Here's to you, Sally.

Popemobile runs over, crushes "Avatar"

2010-01-13T09:43:00.011-06:00

For all the deeply fucked up things that issue forth from the fiery mount known as the Vatican, sometimes I just can't help but admire the balls. While Protestants are carrying on an alternately manic ("scriptural") and weak-kneed ("relevant") culture war against people who couldn't care less, the big Papa just wrinkles his mouth into a magnificent moue and says, "No."

From an Associated Press article on the Vatican's criticism of "Avatar":

"The movie has drawn a number of critical voices. Some American conservative bloggers have decried its anti-militaristic message; a small group of people have said the movie contains racist themes.

But to Vatican critics, the alien extravaganza is just 'bland.'"

After two thousand years, the supreme pontiff is still way too cool for school.

Be of good cheer, Black Mesa Conquers!

2010-01-12T13:11:00.017-06:00

Remember that day in December when we stood out on Broadway in the freezing wind, snow blowing down Denver's canyonlands, under the Office of Surface Mining with our signs and banners, good friends and high spirits? And the Hopi delegation went up to meet with the Big Men and we stood out there til our fingers froze and our eyelashes crusted with ice hour after hour, crossing and recrossing the streets, stamping our brick-feet and hollering sometimes, less out of enthusiasm than to keep our throats from freezing, maybe make the indifferent stare. And remember when the delegation finally came down, after we thought we couldn't stand another minute, the elders helped along by the younger people, and they all looked heartbroken. Then, did you feel like I did the colossal irrelevance of what we had attempted? Did you feel so small under that tectonic glass mountain forever mounting that old church that offered to let us in to keep warm? Did you feel pathetic with that sign that, however huge we painted it, they would never see? Do you remember looking in that particular window half-way up where the bureaucrats were taking their lunch break to jog in place on the treadmills, in sports bras and spandex? Did you feel the ax still fresh in your hands from Black Mesa, and the cascade of painted Anasazi shards that you'd risked a curse to touch so gently with one finger, on a mesa at dusk? Did you want to cry but couldn't because you'd already cried as much as you had for this single crushing, bitter thing that had fallen over all of life: impotence? And did you maybe even think, like I did, "Well of course they didn't listen. How comical, how naive, to think that we could budge even a single function of this machine."

Well, then, cheer up: it worked.

Not that day, or even that year. But now, the life of mine permit that would have given Peabody Coal practically limitless authority over the water and mineral resources of Black Mesa was rescinded. Taken to court, the judge ruled that Peabody had not respected the wishes of the community and had not informed the community of its full intentions and of the environmental impact of the mining proposition. They are required to re-work and resubmit everything. Admittedly, the OSM probably couldn't care less about our outcry; it was a small army of UCLA law students that did the trick. Nonetheless. Don't forget this. The machine can be derailed under the right circumstances, with the right kind of force. Time to learn mechanics, friends.

So Long, Milada

2009-12-30T22:00:00.011-06:00

In Czech, milada means "my love." I first saw the Milada squat from the Libensky bridge on the north side of Praha. It boiled my blood. A crumbling mansion in the shadow of monolithic glass skyscrapers, holding down a scrap of wild brush. I ran the rest of the way there.
The second time I went, it was night. The squat had no electricity, so I blundered into the sunken yard, pitted with contraptions that could have been booby traps, ruins, sculptures, or all of the above, and stood outside in the orange gloaming of a winter city night for a long time, studying that building, dense, mad, and morbid as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I've forgotten his name now, but with that dutiful hospitality I associate with anarchists and good Christians both, a young man came and took me inside and we went up to his room where we talked into the night, me attempting to use my dozen or so Czech phrases while he sallied bravely into English to meet me.
I was stunned by Milada. It was the antithesis of so much I hated. It was absolutely to the last speck of neon graffiti inimitable, savage, brazen, unconquerable, and palpably fragile. I listened in awe to the tales of Milada's past, victory after victory against the powers that be. It was a fortress literally held together by the violently creative force of its denizens, past and present, epic as Heorot and doomed as Troy. My host kept a little butter on the window sill, to keep it cool, and a dog to keep the bed warm. There was no running water, but his room was separated from the sky by a mere skin of tiles, so he caught rainwater in buckets and piped it down through the house. It was without doubt one of the most exquisite and terrifying places I have ever been.

Milada is no more. The government contracted a security company to remove the squatters, who were relocated after a long battle and negotiations to an apartment complex. Then they leveled the house.
Goodbye, Milada. May the ground you held remember you.

Postlapsarian Love

2009-12-28T15:20:00.017-06:00

A buck and a doe. Entered the doe under the oak tree and a three day old horned moon. Insides poured out like flowers in a time-lapse clip. Pink nipples four in the white fur. Tore through blue cloaks of tendon to the mortal red fount. No fat to speak of. Less edible material than a labrador. Hours, hours of cutting with a dulling knife, separating gristle, bone, organs, air. Gorged. Flesh from her back dries in the kitchen.
Dreamed of love in the shadow of swords, without a sword.
Morning.
Went back to the sendero where the corn was laid out and sat on a bucket with my back to the rising sun. Gun in lap. Read those sections of The Second Sex entitled "The Lesbian" and "The Mother." No doe. Came home. Got my grandpa's shears out of the cabinet with his steel gray hairs stuck in them and shaved half my head. Only half.

The Answer to Your Big Question

2009-12-23T12:55:00.005-06:00

There's been a lot of debate lately on a number of important issues. Obviously, though, one question has risen to the top, a question the importance of which cannot have escaped you. So when you find yourself asking yet again, "Really, though, what is the best squash soup in the world?" you know where to look.

1 big winter squash (butternut, Mother Hubbard, whatever)
a lot of carrots
thumb-sized chunk of ginger, minced
5 or so cloves of garlic
spoonful of bouillon concentrate dissolved in water

Bake all of the above together until soft. Toast a cup+ of pecans at the same time, but on a separate pan. Meanwhile...

1 red onion
maple syrup
black pepper
nutmeg

Sautee the red onion until it's almost done, brown. Add a bit of maple syrup, not too much, because the other ingredients will already be sweet, but enough to candy the onion. Cook a while longer, until the bottom of the pan is sweet n crusty.

Mix in some almond milk, say half a cup. If it boils a little, that's good because it will boil the tasty crust off into the mix. Chop up as finely as possible (grind might be the word for it) the toasted pecans. Mix in. Should come out thick, gooey, and unbelievably tasty. Puree all the oven stuff, including juice, in with the sweet gooey in a pot. Prepare to eat yourself sick.

Becoming:

2009-12-15T20:43:00.037-06:00

I have had a lot of time to myself lately. In the past week, I blazed through my housemate's comic book/graphic novel collection, read two Vargas Llosa novels, Arguedas' Deep Rivers, the first of Galeano's trilogy on the Western Hemisphere, Leaves of Grass, and The Master and Margarita, again. Interestingly, this prolonged period of nerdery has catapulted me into a state of high-strung fandom. Let me count the ways.

#1. Love and Rockets. I was always a good girl. A good, comic-free girl. I encountered my gateway drug on our kitchen table one ordinary day in the form of a fat red and pink book called Maggie the Mechanic. I suspect Emily planted it there to ensnare me. This comic started in the early 80s, and chronicles the relationships/travels/mechanical vagaries of (primarily) Margarita and Esperanza, sometime punks and lovers in L.A. It's kind of a bad influence on me. I have had to stop myself from making some major life decisions "because Maggie would think it's cool."

#2. When I find a Daniel Clowes comic book, I freeze in my tracks, wherever I may be, and read it in its entirety. This happened a lot in the Blue Barnhouse bathroom, until I read everything there. Between the Blue Barnhouse's bathroom library (and it's mighty impressive; Asheville Public could take a lesson) and Emily's collection, I have read enough to say: I am a fan of Daniel Clowes. And the fact that he is not dead frightens me a little bit, because I may have to hunt him down and shake him until he reciprocates my love. I don't throw this "fan" thing around lightly. I do not say I am a fan of Dostoevsky or I am a fan of the violin, though I esteem both beyond all reason. But in this case, well... maybe it was the prolonged isolation, during which Clowes' sick, tender voice became a perfect fix, his view of humans and actions so crystalline and prismatic that, struggling to discover his power, all I could think was that he must see the world like God, answering its mystery and perversion with bemusement, good-natured manipulation, and secret pleasure.

#3. Mongolian hip hop. I am not being cool. I am not being ironic. I don't like hip hop. I am square when it comes to music. This just kicks ass: Mongolian Bling. AND, I would like to remind everyone that I do have in my possession a Mongolian throat-singing rock CD called Yat-Kha, from Mongolia circa 2000, which I bought in high school and listened to on repeat for several years, in secret, in the land of Garth Brooks and the cumbia. The only other CD I bought at that time in my life was a Finnish folk revival band. Point is, I called this one.

#4. Last and most, I am finally a serious fan of Walt Whitman. I have a personal relationship with this man because he taught me to fly in my dreams before I even knew his name. Lots of less-great poets write poems about how much they despise Whitman because they're afraid of him. When I read Leaves of Grass in high school, I was terrified by the homoerotic godlessness of it, and was confused to see that this same man had given me flying lessons when I was nine. Now, having read Leaves of Grass a third time, I realize that there is nothing I have to say that Whitman has not already said, and furthermore if I had to choose another life to live, I would be an muscular and virile young buck in Whitman's exuberant sights.

Firefighter Shoots Bicyclist in Head, Gets 120 Days

2009-12-02T20:02:00.007-06:00

If you haven't heard this story (and if you're not living in Asheville I expect you won't), it goes like this. A man and his wife are biking on Tunnel Road. An off-duty firefighter sees them and pulls over to berate them for biking there "because it is unsafe." The biker ignores him, so the firefighter pulls out a pistol and shoots the man in the back of the head. The bullet passes through his helmet and misses his skull by less than an inch. The biker had a small child in a seat on the back. The firefighter reportedly shot the biker because he was "concerned for the child's safety." I'm not making this up.
Charges were pressed. First for attempted murder. Because the firefighter had attempted to murder the bicyclist. But the court threw that out. So the case was brought again, some euphemistic charge that amounts to a felony. The firefighter was found guilty... sort of. The judge gave him four months in jail because, as he put it, the firefighter, when not attempting to blow someone's head off, was a pretty nice guy with "a solid employment history" who had served in the military and stuff. (Can you imagine what would've happened to him if he were black? Or homeless?) Oh, and he had to pay the biker $1200 in medical bills for shredding his eardrum. As a biker, and as someone who has had at least one altercation with an aggressive and disrespectful driver in Asheville, I'm spooked.

This cartoon about it appeared in Asheville's Mountain Xpress. Anyone who bikes regularly will definitely feel this: The Psycholist

DUUUUUUUN.

2009-11-26T00:00:00.007-06:00

In one four hour, triple run marathon: that shit is printed. And it looks pretty much how Brandon's mock-up showed it. Not bad. The detail on that polymer is fairly mindblowing. If I like you, I'll send you one. Haha. No actually, if I remember your address, I'll send you one. So if you don't get anything, I still like you.

2009-11-11T15:46:00.003-06:00

The early stages of the next letterpress adventure (polymer!) can be found here, as told by Brandon.

The Dead

Ode to Our Lady

2009-11-08T12:26:00.004-06:00

This is the cover that will be on my paean to Betsy that I am attempting to set in type, (which is so much more trouble than I thought possible; I could write out a dozen copies faster than I could print them). I shouldn't be giving away the cover... but I couldn't resist. I did several color combinations, so each of the books will come out different.

Heavy Machinery + Beer = Hell yes we did.

2009-11-06T14:03:00.009-06:00

Brandon, the owner of the Blue Barnhouse, brought the beer. I'd Vandercooked a thousand prints already, it was dark, and I was starving, but I agreed to stay. We shifted that monster C&P, just the two of us. Cranked up the jack, put rollers under 'er, and moved two thousand pounds of steel through several doors, around a paper cutter, and into the back. Dented some shit. Drank some more beer. Then tried out the NEW COLOSSAL PAPERCUTTER OF SUPREME DOOM. This is a machine that would sever your arm like a kid pinching off an ant's head. And let me tell you: it slices that paper smooth. Chopped another couple thousand sheets. And that is how we roll at the BBH.

Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mists over the swamps!

2009-10-25T14:58:00.017-05:00

There are great and beautiful happenings afoot, though what they are, who knows.
It is finally autumn. This part of the world takes special pleasure in immolating itself. It is the final act of a tragic opera, wherein the heroine robed in flames screams out her lifeblood upon the stage with a gold sword in her heart and the hero falls down flat beside her like a black river. Let not your heart be troubled. She's Lady Lazarus. She dies in fact, but she comes back in fact as well.
All my high ideals pertaining to the use of my food stamps ended last week thus: A fine fall day. I squat on the curb outside a warehouse cramming a pound of smoked salmon into my mouth, with my fingers. My stomach begins to hurt. I don't stop until it's gone. Then I suck the fat off the skin. Unbelievably, I've run out of money and it's more than a week til the beginning of November. My dearest friend is coming to visit tomorrow and I didn't have the self-restraint to save enough to lavish yak milk ice cream on her. On the plus side, I sickened myself on the salmon, and so got what I deserved and will maybe learn a lesson. Though I have my doubts.
I have just read a book called The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, which I recommend very seriously to all readers of this missive. It is the kind of story which lodges in your chest and does not move ever again, suspended there like a water globe in perfect clarity and brightness with ample shadows.
My housemate works on her press incessantly, and something about the clanking of it infuses me with energy and daring. I am presently working on typesetting and printing a long poem to Betsy House, a story about two women who attempt to fund a sex change by counterfeiting, and a Prague + Antigone linocut I sadly fucked up by miscarving the words, but will repair in due time.
As of the end of the month, my apprenticeship is halfway done. Come February, where shall I fly? There are many, many possibilities, and so few obligations left to me. Not entirely by accident. Any off-hand suggestion could decide it all. If you have even the slightest desire to live vicariously through me, then just say a name and I will go. New Orleans? Providence? Flagstaff? Sarajevo?
St. Christopher look kindly on me.

FINAL CUT!

2009-10-11T21:43:00.002-05:00

Icehouse linocut: second layer

2009-10-11T17:22:00.001-05:00

God Killed the Queen

2009-09-30T21:25:00.009-05:00

I tried to be an anarchist for a little while, not very hard, admittedly. Only as long as it was interesting, aping the wild kids with their neo-tribal get-ups and crazy train-hopping tales. I knew that, whatever my intentions, it wouldn't work. I was not, am not a true believer. Sooner or later I was going to run like Gulliver from the Brobdingnagians (or whatever they were called). The reason for this is that, in my heart of hearts, I did not care that a large number of English children died of starvation, black lung, and/or industrial machine malfunction in order to produce the decadence that made Oscar Wilde's flowered necktie possible. I preferred Oscar Wilde, an unnecessary dandy and wit-about-town, to a number of innocent, common, tortured children. Therefore I could not be an anarchist. Nor can I be anything at all useful in the world. In fact, I did the only thing my talents and this perversion allowed, which was to read a lot of literature and write useless stories.

I confess that I do not believe in equality, a requisite thing for any reformer. Philsophically, yes. Ideally, without a doubt. Each soul is glorious, irreplicable, and so beyond value that the word "perfect" is an insult. But equality is an artificial attribute. Why throw away children? Because I can't. Because they aren't my children. Because I have no say in it. God has already killed them, and no amount of violent, egalitarian rearrangement (however much I love to "smash shit," however earnestly God smashed his own shit on the cross) will bring even one back. (Interestingly, I just remembered that this is what Ivan Karamazov said... and Alyosha's answer, his great mystery and first commandment given to him by the dying elder, was, "You ARE responsible for every man. Every man's sin is your own." Hardly Christian...)

In "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich," Boris the aging revolutionary par excellence fights the interrogator to write his own story, himself as Revolutionary. This is his tomb. Oh it is a beautiful story. Does he get his tomb? Every word is a stone, set, then destroyed, then set again with all the agony and devotion of an animal struggling against death. This is all that matters. What revolution? Build your monument. Wear your flowered necktie. Love the children. God loves them and the capitalists. God loves the brick and the window. God will kill the children. God will kill the anarchists. God killed Oscar Wilde.

P.S. I understand that it is unfashionable to use the word "God." I should have substituted "life," "Nature," "the universe," or some such other abstraction. To me, it will always be God. So what. If you believe in the death of the author, you may read in whatever noun you prefer. Cabbage, for all I care.

To the Wanderers:

2009-09-30T17:58:00.007-05:00

I feel you.

It's the cusp of the month. When I was in high school, this meant nothing. When I was in college, it meant that I would sign a check. When I was at Betsy, it meant that it was time to collect the always-too-little I'd gotten from various un-jobs and beg for the remainder from charitable souls. Now I'm just hoping I'll have someone to write a check to. I'm done with this house. Can't live here anymore. I put in my month's notice... looked for new places... kept looking... maybe found something... nope... Everything fell apart as fast as I could put it together. It was positively amusing until, oh, last week. And now my friend Lydia is going back to Connecticut, because she has no job and she fell and cracked her knee in three places like an egg. All the best-laid plans went down like eggs.

At this moment I'm waiting for a call from my friend to let me know whether or not I can take up residence in her house. To alleviate my feeling of uncertainty and abandonment, I cast my story out upon the waters of the internet. There.

Don't worry, whoever is reading this. Things will work out. Good times are a-coming. I can hear joy barreling down on me like a runaway tourist bus on Clingman.

Adventures of the Body

2009-09-18T09:30:00.011-05:00

"Misfortune comes from having a body.
Without a body, how could there be misfortune?"
- The Tao Te Ching

The Thumb
I was biking up Riverside, a long, winding road that follows the French Broad. I have passed over the railroad tracks many a time without misfortune. This time, it was raining. My front tire slipped on the steel and wedged in the crack. I flew, grouchy before I even hit the ground, but somehow I landed more or less on my feet with a mysterious combination of injuries. These things always amaze me. There was a single spot of blood on my right thumb, and the top of my right shoe was ripped open, as well as the sock underneath, as well as the skin underneath that. I pried my bike out and went on, pissed as a wet cat about the biker-unfriendliness of non-perpendicular RR tracks. Strangely, the worst part of it all is my thumb, which has developed a nail hernia. Over the past few days a bubble of meat has squished out the side of the nail, and it torments me terribly. It torments me as I type this. It tormented me for seven hours yesterday as I bashed it into things at the shop and pressed it hundreds of times onto the paper I was feeding.

The Heat
As soon as I got my paycheck, I took a chunk of it to a doctor of Chinese medicine. I have had very good luck with this kind of thing, and I want to be quite, quite well at this point in my life. The man I saw had grown up in Mexico City; his family lived in San Antonio, so we had a bit to talk about. He looked at my tongue, checked my pulse, asked me if I am frequently thirsty, etc. He said, "You are a robust person with an excess of energy that is not being moved through your body. So the energy is stagnating as heat, mostly in your liver and your uterus, but also in your lymphatic system." Which is a fairly remarkable diagnosis to make from looking at a tongue, so remarkable it sounds like palmistry, if it hadn't so exactly divined my problems. We talked for an hour about the strange constellation of physical difficulties that have settled on me like blackbirds on a telephone pole. He said the problem was complicated, but there is a root cause. There is something that derailed my health, perhaps a parasite, definitely the EB virus, and definitely compounded by a certain "excess of heat," emotionally speaking. This is why I see non-Western doctors. They are not reductionists nor materialists. They respect the body as a thing compounded of spirit and matter, and as a thing which belongs to someone, a fact which quite escapes the average practitioner.

talk talk talk talk SHOE! talktalktalktalk

2009-09-16T09:41:00.012-05:00

The leader of the free world handled the situation with aplomb. Neither shoe actually struck him. The offender was whisked away to his reward, and the president magnanimously declared, “That’s what people do in a free society." Mission accomplished! The ideals of democracy have penetrated the Iraqi soul!

News agencies proceeded to spill oceans of ink on the act, and Muntader al-Zaidi achieved a special notoriety.

"Actions speak louder than words," the saying goes. The actions and the words in this event tear each other apart. Against the talk, talk, talk, Al-Zaidi throws his shoes. Bush keeps talking, "That's freedom." Al-Zaidi is thrown into prison and tortured.

Al-Zaidi was released yesterday after serving his nine-month sentence. He is now in hiding, but before he left, he said,

“If those who blamed me knew how many destroyed houses I walked over with those shoes that I threw, and how many times those shoes mixed with the blood of the innocent, and how many times those shoes went into homes where the honor of those who lived there was disgraced, then it was probably the proper response.'

'I was roaming throughout the past years of the war in our scorched land and I was seeing with my own eyes the pains of the victims and hearing the weeping of the grieving widows and orphans. Shame was chasing me, like an ugly name for my helplessness.'

'Then the chance came, and I did not miss it."

Visit: Bosnia! The Heart-Shaped Land

2009-09-13T13:38:00.011-05:00

This tourism website is so tender and hopeful, it won me over immediately.
Bosnia and Herzegovina Tourism
The FAQ section alone is enough to bring one to tears. Question #1: Isn't there still a war in Bosnia? Question #2: Surely there are still landmines?
And the thoughtful but by no means alarmist advice, "Be careful about random taxi drivers."

American Food = American Health

2009-09-10T19:37:00.009-05:00

This is the most succinct summary of the whole complex of health care/food reform issues I have ever read:

"There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.'
'The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes...is one of the brighter spots in the American economy."

And a pretty good reason for health care reform:

"When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before."

From "Big Food vs. Big Insurance" by Michael Pollan

You know what would be awesome?

2009-09-07T22:18:00.004-05:00

Neko Case putting Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus to music. Hell yes.

Gimme the Biggest Spinners You've Got. That's Right. On the Bike.

2009-09-05T19:41:00.026-05:00

I walked into that store and went straight for the food equivalent of spinners. Due to some crimps in my unbelieving brain, I shied away from the organic bananas which cost 50 cents more a pound than the normal ones, but went straight for the rainbow trout.

I've visited this place before. There are only a few things there I can afford on my own, all of them in the legume family. But I'd window-shopped all the sweet shit. This time I was there to BUY. I only looked at the price tags to satisfy myself that this particular item really was the most expensive version they carried. I passed up all the sweets, however, due to the residue of a childhood memory. I was standing in the aisle and asking my mother for Lucky Charms, which I passionately loved, mostly to sneak under the kitchen table and pick the marshmallows out of. She said, "No, we can't get those anymore, not on WIC." The WIC (women and children's nutrition) program only allows the purchase of certain foods like meat, milk, eggs, and so on. My childish indignation was very great and accompanied by a revelation that the good things in the world are doled out by powers even bigger than my mommy. And from that time on, I inveighed fiercely against WIC, arguing that we ought to escape them so that we could buy the things we wanted to buy again. Such was the sentiment that filled this continent with my ancestors.

It was this memory that steered me away from the sweets. Because surely the powers would not allow frivolity. But everything I'd gotten was frivolous. That's why I'd gotten it! And the closer I got to the checkout, the more fearful I became. They couldn't allow me to buy this! Do not tempt Uncle Sam! I knew that the cashier, seeing my basket, would laugh at me and shoo me back to the bean aisle from whence I came.

My face got hot as I unloaded the loot. Suddenly there were two cashiers there, and a long line formed behind me instantaneously. What if I had to put all this back?
"How are you today?" (He means, "What, is this payday or something?")
"Fine."
Checking the goat cheese, "Ooh, this is so worth the price" (...of your independence and self-respect).
"Hey, Joe, can you cover me after this?" ("I don't even see the point of working anymore when little Ms. Government can come in here and buy a pint of blueberries on me.")
I handed him the card. He swiped it. It worked.
"You want a bag for all this?" ("Might as well since you're taking everything else in the store.")
I went home and made a piece of flatbread with which to eat my goat cheese, trout, and blueberries, because I considered crackers too expensive. Somehow, it wasn't that good. I didn't relish it. It had not come to me by any work I'd done, or by the work of anyone I knew. I had not had to wait until midnight, ride across town on my bicycle in a blizzard, pick a lock, and climb into a stinking cave to root it out. What had happened?

I never stole food, as a matter of principle, until after I dumpstered. Getting your livelihood from a dumpster is like sneaking behind the curtain at a theater and seeing it all from the inside out. The careful effects of makeup appear grainy and garish, the purple robes look like the thrift store polyester they are, and the new view simultaneously expands and contracts your experience. You have seen through the veneer, and the bigger story becomes apparent, that little affair going on between the director and the lead, the jealousy of an understudy. And even if you go back into the audience, you now see two shows playing one on top of the other. You are an insider because you have broken your character as audience member. You have defied the ritual and passed a barrier. Just so, the vast oceans of good food thrown away undeceived me as to the reality of the grocery store performance, and I ceased to take the contract seriously anymore. These are the options. One can go in by the front door during the open hours and pay $10 for a bag of fine blanched almonds. If one doesn't have $10, one can go to the back door after hours and take the bag of fine blanched almonds, which have been crossed off a list somewhere in red pen. Or one can go in by the front door during the open hours and take the bag of fine blanched almonds, which will be crossed off a list in red pen. This is why I allowed myself to steal, because I knew that it made no difference. The most destructive part of what I was doing did not involve food at all, it involved breaching the agreement that our society stands upon, a contract left over from a time when having food meant that you had produced something. This is not so now. The richest people are too often the ones who have done the least, who traffic in imagination. Need I even invoke the "financial crisis?"

There has been considerable discussion about whether or not welfare is really a helpful institution. According to my (yes, conservative) family, after a while it destroys initiative and self-reliance. The jury was out for me until today. Now I can say, yes, the ritual use of this piece of plastic will damage my initiative and self-reliance. But not for those reasons usually advanced; this is much more serious. This method of obtaining food is destructive because it both situates me within a world of ritual, and shows me that there is nothing to this world but ritual. The most basic human (and animal) activity of finding food is reduced to puppetry. It is more destructive even than stealing, because there is tension in stealing, there is the reality of police, security cameras, desperation; in short, it takes work. With the card, the system enervates itself and reveals its own duplicity. Nowhere do I see the necessity of work. Any rule of cause and effect is broken and I am further alienated from a world in which work produces food and inertia produces want. I drift, full of food that is tasteless, with a lump of sorrow in my throat, looking for something that has been lost, and I think I know what it is. A place where honesty and cooperation are needed and not ritualized artifacts. Rituals that expose themselves as mere ritual are putrid and frightening, and this what the "virtues" are, zombies, which the clever and even the most principled exploit.

Why work at all, at honesty or at growing food, when ritual can pass for work, and when work is an anachronism, with the sentimental sapidity of the horse-drawn plow, and hunger?

The Floating World

2009-09-04T19:09:00.025-05:00

I have just received my Appalachian ID -- the food stamp card. It is emblazoned in glorious, hopeful, faux-credit card fashion with our very own red, white, and blue, and, like a huge beer, it makes me feel both very relaxed and a touch off-kilter. Let me tell you, friends, my days of crashing art galleries for Flufferspam hors-d'oeuvres are over. I am dining at big brother's table tonight. When I called the help line to hear my balance read to me by the kindly machine-matron, I had to keep pressing the repeat button. Really? No, REALLY? I burst out laughing. It effectively trebles my monthly income. Now, it is crass to discuss personal financial matters in public, but bear with me. I am trying to decide how to feel about this.

I could think of it as an extended government loan. I will pay it off unless I die in February, in taxes or whatever. I am learning a skilled trade, which is far better than a liberal arts degree, so it could be a kind of scholarship. Plus the only people I know who don't have food stamps just moved here. So I'm joining a community.

Still, in some way I feel slightly robbed of reality. This is simply absurd. No single person, however poor, could eat this much in a month. Why should I be given this? Because I'm an American citizen? What the hell is that? I will, of course, be giving large amounts away. I will also be stockpiling, Depression grandma fashion, nonperishables and canning/freezing perishables in case when the term is up I'm still broke. But there's something warped about it, the way it feels warped to get infinite free plastic bags for life whenever you check out at a grocery store, or to be able to fly through the air across the world in hours for a month's salary. It doesn't add up. The labor, the benefits. Somewhere, someone is paying. Food does not come from a card. Food comes from work, and only work.

In a bout of homesickness, I started doing research on south central Texas. I found an online database of native plants, complete with descriptions of edibles. The list is long. I remember living on the Medina River (the banks of which are now known to have been peopled continuously for over ten thousand years). I remember the plants, every strange fruit in all their seasons, wild seasons that made the snowflake cutouts we did in school seem naive and picturesque. The native plants were not like our peach trees, our fat hybrid sweet corn, simpleton carrots, foreign cabbages. They were spare, strangely colored, and terrifying. Poisonous? Who knew. I picked them sometimes and mashed them into soups and pretended to eat. If one of the uncountable numbers of Medina River people could have seen, they might have laughed, or cried, or marveled at my devotion. Because I always carefully poured out and buried the stuff after, afraid of poison. They were feasts. Nearly all those unstoried fruits I feared were gifts, and I never knew. Learning this, a plan sprung fully-formed from my newly blown mind: what if one were to remake one's own body with the materials of one's land, eating only what one could dig, catch, pluck, and snare? They say it takes seven years for all the cells in the body to turn over, and then, almost alchemically, one could become a place. An urban myth, maybe. Seven is such a poetic number.

The first European in south Texas was Cabeza de Vaca, Head of a Cow, who was shipwrecked at Galveston Island with a boatload of would-be conquistadors. They crawled ashore, "naked as the day they were born," and lay down to die in an alien land. But they were found and nursed back to health by a people who subsisted entirely upon what their hands could dig, catch, snare, and throttle. Beetles, spiders, fish, lizards, roots, mussels, termite eggs, and soil. "I believe these people would have eaten rock, if their land was made of rock," said de Vaca. He also said that they were never full. They wandered the coasts and rivers up and down in search of food. He was astonished at the women, who woke several times in the night to tend the root-cooking fires (they had the misfortune of having for a staple food a kind of root, lost to posterity, that had to be cooked overnight) and rose before daybreak to hunt more food. In the late summer, all the peoples of what would later be south Texas and northeastern Mexico convened in what is now Atascosa County and southward to gorge and celebrate the prickly pear. De Vaca eventually became a trader between tribes, and then a doctor, healing by the sign of the cross and a prayer to God. Interestingly, he wandered with those people for seven years. His body, once that of Spain, with perhaps an admixture of Marco Polo's Eastern spices, became purely that of the new world.

Those, then, are the kinds of labors it should take to keep a toehold in the world. How is it that I am floating above the earth now, that I live without having to dig, to chase, to tend fires all night, to watch the seasons, even to pray? How can I do this? They say it's technology that has multiplied our powers so that I can walk into a building and get food for free all this winter, without the faintest shadow of fear of starvation, but I don't even know what that technology might be. I don't run any machine that produces food for me. I am a beneficiary of some potent sleight-of-hand.

When the Betsies and I lived out of the organic boutique dumpsters, on the fat of the fat, we sometimes prayed to the dumpster gods to be kind to us and deliver us extra large papayas. And you know what? They did. They always did. But how?

What is this unreal world that secretes papayas in the dead of a Denver winter, where food from anywhere in the world flies into my arms at the swipe of a card? What are we standing on? Or whom? When will we come down?

The Dozen Words Game

2009-08-28T18:09:00.014-05:00

Here's how it works. I picked a dozen words at random from each of eight books. Just from the words, which are whatever my finger lands upon, you guess the book. Even if you don't know all the books, just guess. It's like one of those matching worksheets we got for busy work in school, but fun and interesting.

a. Collected Works of Emily Dickinson
b. Asheville Yellow Pages
c. The Tao Te Ching
d. Night and Day by Woolf
e. The Great Gatsby
f. Mythologies by Barthes
g. Don Quixote
h. The Brothers Karamazov

1.
explain, youth, live, faith, behaviour, destroy, humanity, promise, money, shouted, murder, universal

2.
nowadays, readiness, analogy, brain, extravagance, romantic, bended knees, attribute, sufficient, suburbanite, schism, child-like

3.
unpretending, bird, stuns, heaven, school, future, souls, embers, cattle, died, clock, fumbles

4.
steward, magistrate, lie, stones, pitched, squire, arms, broken, home, letter, chastisement, figure

5.
sewing, eighteenth, mantelpiece, walking, generation, happy, deeper, simultaneously, chokes, female, alone, bent

6.
heady, arrogant, contingencies, dance, barrier, seventeen-year-old, doctor, yacht, island, smart, triumph, garden

7.
two, sea, not, farther, soldier, detached, doing, refuge, learning, sense, sage, enough

8.
above, urban, since, medicine, private, office, quality, explosives, we, churches, precision, agency

P.S. If it's actually a boring game & you don't like it, you can tell me.

The Day Dawned Auspicious...

2009-08-25T19:23:00.008-05:00

My nose was against my handlebars, my weight was pressed down on one foot, on that pedal, but it would not go down an inch. The sinister growl of a gas machine approached. Too steep. The bike and I hung for a moment on the roadside, not moving, then the handlebars lurched and I plopped straight over into the ditch just as the truck passed. The truck braked, backed up, and I heard a laugh. It was kind of funny, so I started laughing, too. "Just throw that bike in the back and get in," he said. He drove me two hundred yards to the top of the hill. Now that is what I call neighborly.

After this adventure on the winding French Broad jungle road, I arrived at the job interview location. "All the way at the end of the business park, in a little white building beside the river," he had said. I rode through the warehouses, between big striped tents and men buzzing by on colorful motorcycles, past a heap of kayaks, across mysterious rails that zigzagged through the road and ran straight into a building. I looked and looked, but in all this gypsy circus I could not find a little white building. I stopped and got off, puzzling. Then I looked up, and there it was. A white shoebox shack on long legs like Baba Yaga's hut, with a rusty steel ladder climbing to the door. And on the door: "Cinema Preservation." A youngish man came out and waved to me. I climbed up into the office-nest. The walls were papered with huge maps of the states, spangled with rivers, cities, and county names. An enormous nautical map of some islands hung over the desk.
"This place is weird," I said.
"It used to be a coat factory," he told me. "The people who made all the knives for the Last of the Mohicans movie are right over there, and upstairs is the warehouse for the biggest used book store around. Anytime I want a book, I just climb up."

I knew he would hire me. Very few people do. It takes a special type. I knew when he opened up a google map to demonstrate the job, and found the town-speck of Cameron, Louisiana, and zoomed in and in and said, "My God, just look at that place. I bet the hurricane wiped them out... Look at that river... And right on the border..." and nosed around aerially until he remembered that I was still there. "Sorry, sorry. I really like maps..." Here was a man who could appreciate my long-distance romance with the place called North Mud Lumps, LA, initiated through just such idle mapping.

So this is my new job. There used to be little theatres that showed all the latest moving pictures in nascent American towns. These theatres are mostly demolished now, but some remain, maybe as churches or restaurants or bait shops, but they are still there, in disguise. And sometimes in certain of these theatres, someone did not remove every last vestige of the old equipment. Sometimes there are wires left there in the attic, all crusted with bat droppings and wound up in pigeons' nests. The goal is to locate these odds and ends via telephone, by calling anyone in the town who may have a memory of the old theatre. Nothing is off-limits: the library, the nursing home, the truck stop. Find someone, somehow, who will remember. And if someone remembers something, even if it's just a little something, then these guys go there and look for the bits. If they find anything, they buy them and send them to Chicago to be reassembled and restored. I have been assigned a large chunk of the state of Louisiana. Where the money comes from for this bizarre project, I have no idea. It's just weird enough to have a rich madman behind the curtain.

Swine Flu: Media Steroids, Yes. But Apparently Real as Well.

2009-08-23T14:14:00.005-05:00

It's here. In my house. In the next room. All over the blankets, the spoons, the cups. No kidding. Me n Andy, one of the housedwellers, were sick buddies last week. My throat was swollen up like a toad's. I forced myself to go to work, forced myself to pedal up and down the cruel hills, thought I was going to faint or puke a few times, but never did. I haven't been sick in a really, really long time, so I was mystified: what could this be? I drank a lot of hot tea and took vitamin C. I'm fine now. As of the day before yesterday, Andy was not fine. Andy had been lying on the couch for two days. His mom came to rescue him, and yesterday the news came that Andy has indeed been stricken with swine flu. Does this mean I had it, too? I don't know. Will we be quarantined? No idea. No masked men from the CDC have busted feet first through our windows, no giant plastic bubble has been blown up around our house... yet.

I love this woman.

2009-08-19T14:01:00.002-05:00

From an article in the NY Times on women in the developing world:

"On assuming the presidency of Heifer International in 1992, the activist Jo Luck traveled to Africa, where one day she found herself sitting on the ground with a group of young women in a Zimbabwean village. One of them was Tererai Trent.

Tererai is a long-faced woman with high cheekbones and a medium brown complexion; she has a high forehead and tight cornrows. Like many women around the world, she doesn’t know when she was born and has no documentation of her birth. As a child, Tererai didn’t get much formal education, partly because she was a girl and was expected to do household chores. She herded cattle and looked after her younger siblings. Her father would say, Let’s send our sons to school, because they will be the breadwinners. Tererai’s brother, Tinashe, was forced to go to school, where he was an indifferent student. Tererai pleaded to be allowed to attend but wasn’t permitted to do so. Tinashe brought his books home each afternoon, and Tererai pored over them and taught herself to read and write. Soon she was doing her brother’s homework every evening.

The teacher grew puzzled, for Tinashe was a poor student in class but always handed in exemplary homework. Finally, the teacher noticed that the handwriting was different for homework and for class assignments and whipped Tinashe until he confessed the truth. Then the teacher went to the father, told him that Tererai was a prodigy and begged that she be allowed to attend school. After much argument, the father allowed Tererai to attend school for a couple of terms, but then married her off at about age 11.

Tererai’s husband barred her from attending school, resented her literacy and beat her whenever she tried to practice her reading by looking at a scrap of old newspaper. Indeed, he beat her for plenty more as well. She hated her marriage but had no way out. “If you’re a woman and you are not educated, what else?” she asks.

Yet when Jo Luck came and talked to Tererai and other young women in her village, Luck kept insisting that things did not have to be this way. She kept saying that they could achieve their goals, repeatedly using the word “achievable.” The women caught the repetition and asked the interpreter to explain in detail what “achievable” meant. That gave Luck a chance to push forward. “What are your hopes?” she asked the women, through the interpreter. Tererai and the others were puzzled by the question, because they didn’t really have any hopes. But Luck pushed them to think about their dreams, and reluctantly, they began to think about what they wanted.

Tererai timidly voiced hope of getting an education. Luck pounced and told her that she could do it, that she should write down her goals and methodically pursue them. After Luck and her entourage disappeared, Tererai began to study on her own, in hiding from her husband, while raising her five children. Painstakingly, with the help of friends, she wrote down her goals on a piece of paper: “One day I will go to the United States of America,” she began, for Goal 1. She added that she would earn a college degree, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. — all exquisitely absurd dreams for a married cattle herder in Zimbabwe who had less than one year’s formal education. But Tererai took the piece of paper and folded it inside three layers of plastic to protect it, and then placed it in an old can. She buried the can under a rock where she herded cattle.

Then Tererai took correspondence classes and began saving money. Her self-confidence grew as she did brilliantly in her studies, and she became a community organizer for Heifer. She stunned everyone with superb schoolwork, and the Heifer aid workers encouraged her to think that she could study in America. One day in 1998, she received notice that she had been admitted to Oklahoma State University.

Some of the neighbors thought that a woman should focus on educating her children, not herself. “I can’t talk about my children’s education when I’m not educated myself,” Tererai responded. “If I educate myself, then I can educate my children.” So she climbed into an airplane and flew to America.

At Oklahoma State, Tererai took every credit she could and worked nights to make money. She earned her undergraduate degree, brought her five children to America and started her master’s, then returned to her village. She dug up the tin can under the rock and took out the paper on which she had scribbled her goals. She put check marks beside the goals she had fulfilled and buried the tin can again.

In Arkansas, she took a job working for Heifer — while simultaneously earning a master’s degree part time. When she had her M.A., Tererai again returned to her village. After embracing her mother and sister, she dug up her tin can and checked off her next goal. Now she is working on her Ph.D. at Western Michigan University.

Tererai has completed her course work and is completing a dissertation about AIDS programs among the poor in Africa. She will become a productive economic asset for Africa and a significant figure in the battle against AIDS. And when she has her doctorate, Tererai will go back to her village, go out to the field, and dig up her can again."

From "Financial Roulette with SallieMae"

2009-08-19T13:08:00.003-05:00

"Moving to a federally designated disaster area is an excellent option. One former student happened to be living in Portland, Ore., during severe winter flooding, and even though she was perfectly able to take the bus to her waitressing job every day, her loan company informed her that she'd won a few months forbearance courtesy of the federal government. Granted, a few months isn't much, but with a little planning and the help of the FEMA, you could make disaster chasing a way of life. Think about it: spring in the Mississippi Valley, summer on the Gulf Coast, winter on the Great Plains. All you need is a hardy constitution and few possessions and family ties, and you're in business.'

'In the United States today, romantic notions about education and self-improvement are the provenance of the very rich or the very naive. If you have a sneaking suspicion that you'd rather be debt-free than read "Ulysses," learn to program computers or go to trade school -- and get a library card."

2009-08-09T21:28:00.007-05:00

A surprising article in the NY Times:

Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

The answer, as many of us are well aware, is yes. Food Not Bombs even gets some coverage.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."

Pigs get fat; hogs get butchered.

2009-08-07T21:04:00.016-05:00

On this particular day, the first friday of the month, you needn't even live in a punkhouse to know that in any major metropolitan area, you may simply put on your loudest thrift store gear and place your chin on your fist in front of some heinous canvas to get as much posh food as you can eat without embarrassing yourself. (It surprises me that art gallery folks don't seem to have noticed that, at least with the young people I know, the art gallery has followed the theatre into death, and so these colorful, earnest-looking youths are in fact present for the basest of reasons.) Colorful? Check. Hungry? Hell yes. Washed? Meh. No need to knock myself out.

To understand what came next, you must know that it requires some amount of effort to get downtown from where I live. The hills take a steep toll on any bike travel. So I had to make the trip worth it, calorically speaking. The first stop was a gallery on the river. I saw the refreshment table in my periphery vision, but I avoided it strictly for some time despite my intense thirst and grumbling belly, and focused on the paintings. "Garish. Good heavens. Does everyone have to rip off Dia de los Muertos?" Emboldened by my lengthy homage, I firmly stepped up to the refreshment table to see what I had caught. Hawaiian Punch. I skipped it, though I was thirsty as hell. I put a log of funfetti bread on my plate, then the topping... cream cheese? With pimentos... meat chunks?... and... is that -- marshmallows? What the hell. This is an art gallery. Where's the pineapple and goat cheese? Where's the wine? Then, like Gulliver stirring on the beach, I realized: I'm in the Appalachians. I could spend the rest of the night choking down spam on saltines. I continued to feign interest in the paintings, but I was concerned, to say the least. Someone yelled. It was a huge boy. Huge. "THAT'S THE ROCKET MAN I SAW!" He was pointing at the painting. The man he had approached cringed and nodded, "Oh, really?" "YEAH!!! MY ROCKET MAN!!!" That was the artist. I left quickly.

It took me a while to find the other galleries. They were further up in the hills. I followed the sound of drums to an extremely well-attended drum circle. I counted about fifty drummers, whaling away as only Euro-Americans can on various Africanesque percussion instruments. Another couple dozen people danced the expiatory dance of the Euro-American left. A few darker faces observed with expressions of mild concern.

The second gallery had wine. I chugged a glass. The art wasn't so bad. Chugged another. The sprinkle bread-cream cheese-meat goo revolted. Unfortunately I have Sancho Panza's belly. So I drowned my agony in more food. It pretty much worked. *Sparkling* mineral water and chocolate cookies. Cheese and crackers. Hummus. (And there I was getting down on Appalachia. Shame on me.)

By the time I went home, the drum circle had swelled to include all of downtown Asheville. Some very sad mariachis were playing all alone outside the circle. I felt a little homesick for them, and me... or maybe just sick.

Doesn't that just say it all?

2009-08-03T19:40:00.014-05:00

Emily, the other apprentice at BBH: "It's like one of those... those... fuck. What's the word? And I was an English major. Every year after college, a few more of those big words get replaced by 'fuck'."

Prickly Pear Jelly

2009-08-02T11:52:00.012-05:00

Late every summer, the prickly pears in south Texas turn a deep purple. And every summer since I was a little kid, I've tried to eat them. Usually I would just peel back a corner and lick the juice. They're sweet, gooey, but not quite palatable. And just about every summer I would ask my grandma if we could do something with all those pears, fat and inviting like purple balloons. And she always, always says, "One summer we made prickly pear jelly, but you don't want to do that. It's too much trouble." This summer, all of these things happened, but, being a big girl now, I decided that the trouble was worth taking. And this morning, in far-off NC with the rain pouring down, I had a bit of bread with my prickly pear jelly on it. It is so worth the trouble. If you live in prickly pear country, I cannot recommend it too highly. And it isn't much trouble. It only took me a few hours. The recipe follows.

First, collect about a gallon of the pears. They must be almost black.
Burn the prickles off. I used a pear-burner, but any flame will do.
Rubber gloves are kind of important, but I guess not utterly necessary if you're careful. At this point, scrub the remaining prickles off in water, wearing gloves, and peel. If you've burned 'em good, the skin comes off pretty easily.
Quarter and throw in a pot. Add some water... enough that you can see it through the pears, but not enough to cover them.
Simmer for an hour.
Strain through cheesecloth or thick papertowel to get 3 1/2 cups of juice.
Put juice back in the pot. Add a package of no sugar needed gelatin. Not just any gelatin, no sugar needed gelatin. If you add the regular kind, you have to use too much sugar.
Add one cup of sugar. Raw sugar is best because it doesn't leave that bleach taste.
Dissolve.
Taste it; if it's too sour for you, add some stevia powder or leaves.
Add half a cup of lemon juice. This is important. Don't leave it out.
Stir it all up.
Put in it hot jars, seal, and leave to congeal.

Prickly pear regulates blood sugar. Whether this holds true when it's combined with a cup of sugar is anyone's guess. Nonetheless, I'm sure there are health benefits. The natives used to eat tons of them, I'm told. The flavor is... unique, something like cranberry sauce.

No Town for Fixies.

2009-07-29T09:26:00.019-05:00

I have already burned through my pie and fried chicken reserves, and it isn't even August. Oh, the lovely mountains, wreathed in mist and viny things and blackberry brambles, zigzagged with bike lane-less hairpin-ridden roads that defy my bike's lowest gears. My ass grows firmer than I ever wanted it to be. No, wait... that's just a solid lump of cramp.

It rains almost daily. Every locale seems to have its own shocks to adjust to. In south Texas, it's the heat. In Denver, the cold and general desiccation. In Prague, the Czechs. Here, it is decidedly rain. I have never seen so much rain. I have never seen a lamb's-quarter, the tiny, ankle-high sprouts we picked in Denver for salad, twice my height, nor daisies as big around as my hand with the fingers stretched out, nor a whole field of blackberries growing wild without any encouragement at all, and so densely that no one will ever get to the berries in the middle but the birds. I like it. I am awe-struck. Still, it took me two Denver winters to internalize the relatively simple concept of LAYERING. Who knows what the equivalent to that is here. Rubber boots? Ponchos?

Today I started at the letterpress shop, first packing orders, which was more entertaining than might be imagined since I got to read all the cards for the first time. Later my job was to assemble these very interesting tripartite folding book covers from a single large, letterpressed sheet of heavy cardstock. BBH is in charge of publishing this interactive literary text, and my own hands made the covers! Which was extremely novel the first, oh, two hours, and still fun the next two, but a tad exhausting beyond that. The big machines were clanking and whizzing behind me, and I couldn't resist the occasional open-mouthed observation; soon I'll get to do that.

I guess it is necessary to say that I will not be doing the permaculture internship after all. Common sense does indeed catch up with even the silliest of us. I was getting pretty frantic about the situation, and something had to give. I decided I wanted to put my energy into what I came here for, to learn letterpressing. The perma-boss was pissed at me, reasonably so, but she was almost laughably passive-aggressive about it, accusing me of deceiving her in the most cryptic, roundabout way imaginable. I had not deceived her. I had merely neglected to create an honest budget for myself until that time. I felt bad, because she genuinely wanted me to work with them, and offered a half-time internship, but I had to tell her like my granddad told it: "That's quite an offer. But lack of money knocks a lot of good deals in the head." So she tersely wished me a good day and we parted ways.

My old Betsies will be glad to hear that I have come to live with a collective in an old, quiet, stone house with a big, jungle yard (surely the opposite of our doomed Betsy yard), and peopled with the kindest folks. The uniqueness of people is always so surprising. One could never have guessed them, dreamed them up, or prepared for them. In this new house, I'm wishing I had the talent of making friends in a flash. But, alas, I am a social tortoise, so I will continue as best I can, hope for the forbearance of my new housemates, and remember the good times with the old ones.

Two. Yes, two.

2009-07-18T10:48:00.006-05:00

Internships. I will work 40 hours a week, 24 of them here: www.ashevillage.org and 16 here: www.bluebarnhouse.org, (how could I resist, I ask you?) and starve. Well, probably not starve until the first snow, seeing as one of the internships is with a permaculture institute, but Olivetti may have to get a lot better at catching mice, or learn to enjoy beet greens.

How, exactly, is this arrangement going to provide me with the necessities of life? Because there is only one necessity of life, knowledge! (she crows from between bites of grandma's pie and fried chicken). The plan is to eat so much in the next week that I will not have to eat again until October. And beyond that, to inspire such pity in my overlords that they will feel obligated to scrape together a stipend.

Thought of the Day: The Penis and... that other thing

2009-07-15T09:00:00.023-05:00

So you know how Freud (and consequently everyone else) talks about this penis envy, how women are messed up because they feel a "lack," and they'd better admit it or else it's a repressed lack, which is like keeping a crocodile in your bathtub. And you know how every feminist worth her salt has chafed and howled and mauled that poor sap to pieces ever since. Well, I was thinking. Everyone spends twelve years getting ideas put into their heads; if we're lucky we get another four to pull them out, and then the rest of our lives to put new ones together, but throughout it a creative mind can look at any situation or idea and tug from it the phenomenological experience. If there's anything that's been hemmed in by external forces and demands, it's human genitalia. But they're right there, part of us, and so anytime we feel like trying to think of them in a new way, as we experience it, we can.

Anyway, I was thinking in this particular, phenomenological way. And I recalled the first time it really struck me (though I knew it as "fact" long before) that men do not have an interior. Which is to say, they don't have an interior experientially because they can't get to it. No one can. They are sealed off. And I thought, "How sad!" and I had felt a twinge of envy, because it seemed safer, as well as a little disgust, because it seemed like a primitive thing to be just a one-way conduit from beginning to end, like a roundworm, and also a trifle unhealthy to be so closed that no one could get inside but with a knife (anus aside; but someone else would have to discuss that possibility).

I didn't grow up with brothers. I peed outdoors. I sometimes wished I were a boy because then people would not tell me how little blonde girls are sold as sex slaves across the border, and that I had better stay away from highways, roads, and public places in general. But it never occurred to me to want an extra, external little homunculus, the aspect of maleness with the least benefits. It seemed like it would get caught in things.

So from that perspective, preceding Freud or anyone else, the penis seemed like a front porch, a fine thing to have in many situations, probably. But my own construction was the natural thing, the normative as they say in theory. I had the door to the house itself. Female anatomy goes somewhere. And even though it isn't as ostentatious as a front porch, it is tremendously useful, and has its own architecture, the door knob, little windows, trim and such. We don't say of our doors, "I am so fucked up because I have this, this -- what? A NOT-PORCH! That's what it is. A complete lack of porch." The door's point of reference is the interior. We go through doors, and we sit on porches, and they aren't really comparable. So this comparison thing should probably stop, because even though the parts do indeed work together, they are not two sides of the same thing, not a simple + and -. Men have a lack. They lack an accessible interior. Women have a lack. We lack a... whatever that thing is.

Revised Road Trip

2009-07-13T15:36:00.003-05:00

We are still going. The google map kept messing up, so I had to take the post down, but in cities, this is the route:

San Antonio --> Houston --> Baton Rouge --> New Orleans (!) --> Biloxi --> Mobile --> Montgomery --> Atlanta (MONICA!!!) --> Asheville.

If you've got any must-sees, please do tell.

2009-07-13T09:49:00.020-05:00

We took Kendra to Austin on Friday, for good. Austin is so cool it never fails to make me choke a little. She had a gift card to Whole Foods, so we went to the original on Lamar St. I remembered it from our state UIL trips, when it used to be across from the Waterloo music shop, but I'd never been inside. It was hopping. $36/lb. smoked chardonnay salt, Venus fly traps, marzipan in the shape of pregnant women, blueberry-sage breakfast sausages. It was all so absurd, and irresistible (just think of the dumpster!). And - oh! - the lovely people. I stared covetously at a slab of Indonesian ginger encrusted Norwegian salmon when a voice, velvety and deep, said, "Excuse me." I turned and stared covetously at this exceptionally fine human from his curly black hair to his sweet sunburnt feet, and shuffled out of the way as he eased his cart past. Then another caught my eye, fingering organic peaches, and a third beside the hummus cooler, glowing with what must be ahimsa, and my stomach contracted smaller and smaller, closing on its little love of strangers like an empty fist. God, what strangers. Devastatingly beautiful, shiny teeth and shinier intentions. Somehow Austin is just bursting with them, as though it's some designated youth&beauty zone. Pure-souled creatures, unblotted, besotted with hope, and I would jeer but somehow, miraculously, their futures are told secure in their middle-aged counterparts, the fit couples with a smile for all and sundry, doing what they love and loving what they do, shopping for organic pap with a planned, post-30 baby in a sling from their prenatal to India. I wanted to squeeze into the middle, be their beloved treat-stuffed pooch. I wanted to kiss those charming girls in their shabby summer dresses, with their hair cropped, field thistles in July heat, haven for thorn-bugs and hung with cocoons.
Everyone striving, believing, and it works...
I was a cicada creeping in its mud shell, Gregor Samsa loosed in the vegan pastries, something bent, mean, and cynical to the marrow, fiendish large capacity for happiness, but so blank, so furious and wondering and blasted, hideous like something deformed, and starving claws like crab's for power, power of determination, certainty, gladness, choice, justice, fortune.
Austin has always made me... wistful. I didn't go to school there, like I could have, because I was off chasing truth, love, and God in the frigid mountains. Now I couldn't polish myself to that special Austin gleam any more than I could become Japanese by wearing a kimono.
We left my sister there in that apartment building, buried like a seed. She'll grow into that town. She barely shed a tear. "No one stares at me here," she joked. Yeah, beauty loves company, don't it?

Fruitworks

2009-07-04T14:45:00.001-05:00

It's so goddamned hot that a watermelon blew up in the garden.
Happy Fourth.

Hey There, Stranger: Us and the Machines

2009-07-02T08:07:00.014-05:00

My cell phone is five years old this summer, and succumbing to senility. I resisted having it until my aunt bought it for me my senior year, and my sense of thrift won out over my entrenched backwardness. It was for safety reasons, the fam chorused. Leave it off if you like. But when I left it off, or forgot it somewhere, I payed double for the silence with a fiery torrent of familial hysteria: Where were you?! Why don't you answer our calls?! You could have been killed! So I started keeping it around. It became an accomplice to romance. I got used to it.

I can't say I saw it coming. Last Christmas I arrived home to find that my mother had developed an ingrown cell phone: the keypad and her thumbs were fixed together. If I wanted to have a conversation with her, I had to covertly turn it off or hide it so the infernal chime would not interrupt. My sister had it, too. It was like talking to someone with a severe video game addiction. I lost my temper a few times, and found myself parroting any parent of a fourteen-year-old social butterfly. Sometimes I lost my cool and simply slapped the damned machine out of their hands.

My own phone predates texting. The last classes in my History of the English Language course this spring were on the effect of texting on English. Previously unresponsive students sprang out of their zombie-like stupor to expound excitedly upon this revolution. Debates occurred on the finer points of the movement. I looked around at these spirited, rosy-cheeked prognosticators, and then down at my bag, wherein lay my tiny, bullet-shaped phone ("From back when smaller was cool," snickers my sister) which, like a DOS computer, has one passably-executed function. And I knew. The revolution had passed me by, and my obstinate stinginess kept me pinned in 2004.

Now my grandparents text, and my aunts and uncles; my little cousins pound away with their nubby half-grown thumbs. My mother's entire relationship with a beefy Polish firefighter a few towns over has occured via text (what's the point of having a beefy firefighter boyfriend when you only text, I wonder?). That chime sounds everywhere, like a doorbell signalling more and more people trying to get inside, demanding a hearing. I don't want to listen. My phone is crapping out and burns my ear when I talk longer than fifteen minutes. Plus I'm paranoid and suspicious of technological miracles and therefore afraid of brain cancer. I don't have a purse to put it in and I don't want to irradiate my ovaries by keeping it in my pocket. So I don't carry it much anymore.

The other day, I went on a hunting expedition to a field which I mistakenly thought my grandpa leased. I drove about two hundred yards into the surprisingly lush, verdant grass, and then lost traction. The vehicle drifted across the mud for a moment, and stopped. Permanently. I spun the wheels to no avail. It was then I noticed the colossol fountain of irrigation water. Ahhh... And the voice of grandma came to me: "Just take your phone along to be safe. You never know what might happen."

You never know what might happen. I got out, surveyed the deserted field under a sweltering sun, mosquitoes already fixing themselves to my limbs, and squished through the marsh to a little clapboard house up the hill. A lady was sitting outside with a young boy, reading. I introduced myself and asked to use a phone. She gave me her cell. Then she pulled up a chair for me in the shade, poured me some ice water, and we talked. She had been a technician at the Toyota plant nearby, but was laid off two years ago, so she and her husband picked up and traveled the country, working here and there. One day they got tired. They wanted to go home. Toyota hired her back on in production, mostly a welding job. I told her about Denver; she told me about growing up in Detroit; we commiserated over the lack of work. She offered to help me find something at Toyota, and gave me her contact information. I was extremely touched by this.

Later my grandpa arrived and pulled me out. Back at the house, my grandma crowed triumphantly and no one believed me when I said I was glad I hadn't brought the phone.

I am social mainly in the sense in which one might say, "The human is a social animal, banding together for food and shelter." I'm not always very good at connecting to my fellow human. I might even be reclusive. I don't think of myself as a composite of the people who see my picture online or "text" me. This is the very reason why I leave the cell phone. I need to be surprised, forced to be resourceful, and compelled to trust. I have to forgo the easy way out, the speed dial that gets me who I need and cushions me from unlooked-for interaction. And despite all the inconvenience, I like people, real ones, and not their fine-tuned technological masks. I like strangers who offer me a glass of water, a seat in the shade, and an hour of conversation.

note on comments

2009-06-29T08:58:00.002-05:00

I have changed the settings so that anyone can post a comment, not just people who have blogs. Unbeknowst to me, the default was for people with accounts only. That is remedied.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Euphonia.

2009-06-29T08:26:00.025-05:00

My cousin found her clinging to a grating over a rushing river of lime water at the power sub-station where he works. He brought her to Bruces' School for Wayward Chicks. We named her Euphonia. As you will recall if you've ever had swallows nest on your porch, she sounds like a chronically squeaky hinge. Grasshopper is the only oil.

Puck thought she was something to eat, of course.

I found out that the Spanish word for roadrunner, paisano, means "fellow countryman."

He killed his first lizard yesterday, dancing, puffing his feathers, and throwing his wings out like a matador. He considered himself a very mighty bird after this, something in the order of a St. George, and climbed high into the oak tree at dusk. He refused to come down, and so roosted outside for the first time.

Sadly, this morning one of those shitty mutts that hang around here caught him by the tail and pulled all his feathers out but two. He was getting too chummy with those mongrels. It's a good lesson. Nonetheless I gathered up his feathers, soft and tipped with blood, and avenged him.

2009-06-25T10:39:00.001-05:00

One month old tomorrow. He has the sunset behind his eyes.

A Thousand Ducks

2009-06-25T09:44:00.003-05:00

For a while I was seeing a Chinese doctor, a lady from Beijing. Once, she asked about my family. I told her I am the eldest of four sisters.

"Four sisters!" she exclaimed. "No brothers?"

"Nope," I said.

"Oh, how happy! How lucky that is!" She couldn't get over it. "In China, they say, 'Two girls together sound like ten ducks,' so I think your house must be like a hundred ducks!"

The other night I was re-reading "A Room of One's Own." I was struck by Woolf's attention to our literary grandmothers. Without their words, we might not be writing ourselves. I don't usually think of literature in terms of its race-class-gender sources. Though I like literary criticism and traffic rather freely in theory, literature itself is different. There is something cheap about reading literature with an agenda; my own primary criteria are craftsmanship, creativity, and wisdom. Having said that, I think it is worthwhile to extrapolate from our literary heritage those authors who are our direct predecessors, in my case, women, and to put them together in a room of their own, to converse. Women writers are in a different lineage, lively, unique, and (as Woolf says) a bit warped, without any danger of running out of new things to say, neither isolated from the male literary heritage nor of it. There aren't that many (canonical) great women authors, comparatively, so the ones we do have merit special attention, and of those, many are not to my taste. These, though, are the ones whose voices I hear in my own mind -- close, urgent, and strangely familiar.

These are my grandmothers.

Gabriela Mistral

Flannery O'Connor

Zora Neale Hurston

Emily Bronte

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Julian of Norwich

Sandra Cisneros

Virginia Woolf

Simone de Beauvoir

Lady Murasaki Shikibu

Muriel Spark

Colette

Who are yours?

Darling cuculid!

2009-06-19T10:46:00.001-05:00

Despite his mixed parentage, Puck is growing into a remarkably well-adjusted fellow. He has become affectionate, kindling a capacious maternal instinct I was heretofore unaware of. (I can't control my impulse to call him, "widdle Puckles" and bury my nose in his feathers, for example). Last night he climbed into my hands and then flew up onto my shoulder, where he gripped my flesh with his zygodactylic claws and checked my ears for mites. Oh, la. Puck wuv.

Sheer Stella 2009

2009-06-16T12:23:00.000-05:00

As I said, I have taken a shine to perfume reviews. They are decadent, pretentious, and shockingly overblown. Nevertheless. I recommend this one as a paragon of the genre.

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/scent-notes-sheer-stella-2009-by-stella-mccartney/

Excerpt: "It was a pale, dark beauty, a peony and rose that seemed in its initial moments a Romantic Keatsian figurine, a willowy girl smelling of dark flowers with the lovely tinge of blossoms just beginning to wilt..."

I know; it's cheesy. But I can't live on hot reptile blood alone. I need a touch of the fancy.

The Lords of Life

2009-06-15T09:17:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning I saw an anole on the trunk of a chinaberry tree. She saw me before I saw her, and she followed me with her eyes, not unkindly, not suspiciously. I put the bead between the sights, and the sights around her head. I pulled the trigger. She curled up as though I'd thrown her into fire. The front half of her head and one eye were gone; her clever feet still clung to the tree. She flashed black.

I took her by the tail and carried her to the table where Puck waited in his nest. I laid the body down. It marched slowly in a tight, perfect circle. I separated her parts, all of which continued their movements alone, out of step. Puck gobbled it all.

I prowl around with a gun again, like I did when I was nine, and I learn the needfulness of death again, which I knew before and forgot. The amount of death which goes into making even one life is vast. And what about me? How much death has gone into my life? In a moral universe, this can make you a little crazy. When I lived in an urban situation, all I consumed arrived abstracted and stylized to suit my taste; the red of any meat was stage blood, packaged in black styrofoam for class, and as long as I went vegetarian, I could forget that anything anywhere ever has to die.

Now I am always on the hunt for Puck's next meal, and I remember what I thought of as my own childish brutality in a different light. I remember that I got a gun for my ninth birthday, and after safety instructions, my father's only rule was that whatever I killed I would have to eat. Life is sacred, and must not be wasted, but death itself is no enemy of life.

When I was a kid, my parents warned us to "look out" for dangerous animals, especially snakes. But I rarely looked for animals with the intensity and attention I now do. I creep around in the brush. I turn over a stone, collect some grubs. I stand up and search the branches. My eyes meet those of a long, golden snake just above my head, observing. It shivers when it knows that I see it, too, and slowly withdraws, backwards, slipping its coils over itself in loose knots, and then it's gone. My hands are shaking. I turn around to leave, and nearly run into a second snake who watches me from behind. They have watched me all this time, and I think that all my "looking out" did nothing; it was by their forbearance that I made it to adulthood at all.

Back at the picnic table, our little roadrunner is bursting with feathers like slow fireworks. My grandpa tells us a story. Years ago, one of his neighbors asked him a favor. Kill every roadrunner he saw, and bring them back to him. He believed that roadrunner meat cured cancer. Did it? we ask. He doesn't know. The man eventually died anyway.

The next day, I find a spiky brown mesquite lizard. I duck under a branch and stand up inches from its back. It is already watching me, cautious but confident in its own strength. It has a spiny brow and golden eyes. I killed one just like it when my dad was working on the rig. I wanted the electric blue skin of its belly. But when I cut the skin away, the blue faded to gray, so I threw the whole thing to my peacock, who choked it down spines, guilt, and all. We both wait, perfectly still. There is a black crystal where its tail was. A close call. We watch each other for a long time. He is so close to me that I have to step back to raise the gun.

At first I buried the heads of these creatures at the corner of the house with some vague prayer. Now I break up the skulls, remove the teeth, and feed them to Puck with the rest. I am conflicted about this. Whose rules do I follow, mine or theirs, the human way, bowing to a constructed sacred, or their way, which is all entirely sacred, or not sacred at all? Could I be in that order even if I wanted to? Am I already in that order without knowing it? I love these creatures. They are beautiful and full of power. I try to thank them, or ask their permission, but one gets caught midway, somewhere between the need to honor the sacred and the absurdity of apology in a sinless realm. A snake would not apologize for biting me, nor would I think to ask for it.

If there is a sin, maybe it would be waste. But I de-legged a grasshopper, set it on the table, and before I could open the cage to feed it to Puck, a spider had pounced on it and dragged it away. I feel hot, breathless.

This world is so intimate. My coming to each living creature to take its life is so intimate. I am the cause. I am not the end. I am an alchemist, but the magic is in the matter. It is like making love, and my heart trembles the same. I love them each as I love myself, knowing that there are no records kept against me but this one which I carry in my person, deep as the place I carry my life, rooted near the box where I keep the parts to make new life, and the record reads death, theirs now, my own later. I love them because I will meet them again in some mysterious form they will have taken, and they will have the honor of coming for me, sudden, unrecognizable, and ready with a crushing love.

At night my mother calls. The tenth rattlesnake shot, this one under the front steps of the house. A terrible stench erupted after the shot. They dragged it out with a hoe; the snake in its death throes squeezed from the blast-wound a putrid, crushed jackrabbit. Death nested in death like a matryoska doll. I tell them again and again to get out of there. My cousin brings home a kitten whose mother was killed by a dog. He bottlefeeds it. All the grandchildren staying over sleep together on a pallet in the living room, and the kitten sleeps there with us, mewing softly every few hours. In the morning it's stiff, the fur already matted. We bury it. The dogs dig it up. We bury it again. Another of my cousins rescues a tiny killdee from one of the dogs. It cries that call for the ocean. It sprints on its wave-running legs, and collapses. Blood drops from its beak. My grandma receives a phone call. One of our distant relatives, a twelve-year-old boy, was killed when a four-wheeler turned over on him.

All these deaths crowding closer... and how many deaths did I see in all the time I lived in the city? In two years, three: two pigeons, the other our cat Gideon. It is a lying world, a contrivance. I see more death in a day here.

I believe in God more than ever, God in the snake. You can look out all you want, but you might as well look for, because she is already there, and by her forbearance you live. You don't see her unless you look for her, and even though you look, you are afraid to see, and when you see, your heart jumps and you are at a loss, because she was always waiting for you. God is dangerous. Trust supposes a good thing will happen for your benefit, or a bad thing will happen, but still for your benefit. No one imagines trusting a snake; it is sacred; the benefit will come, because there is no waste, but the records are not kept. No one knows to whom the benefit will go. The snake floats above me in the tree, its wise, perturbed face cradled in the air, rocking, tipping me this way and that where I stand.

Puck the Gallant

2009-06-12T12:59:00.000-05:00

He's two weeks old today.

Puck

2009-06-12T09:53:00.000-05:00

2009-06-08T16:27:00.000-05:00

You're what happens when two substances collide, and by all accounts you really should have diiii-ied.

2009-06-07T09:32:00.000-05:00

Karissa + Kaleigh + Krystan = one very worn-out roadrunner momma

Day three begins with the little cockatrice having consumed about six grams of raw beef, a large green male anole (drawn and quartered), and somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 grasshoppers, back legs and mandibles excised, as these would reportedly punch holes in our little man's organs. And counting...

He's now toddling, fresh feathers poking through his weird skin, head bobbing on that skinny neck, yawning his prickly mouth, and following our faces and voices with his blue-black eyes.

I am strangely, intensely in love. He is my heart: black, wrinkly, and bristling with old man hairs.

2009-06-05T14:10:00.000-05:00

Does anyone know what this is?

Burnt Vegetables

2009-06-03T22:53:00.000-05:00

I like them, Terese.
Kale, cabbage, squash, collard greens.
A few seconds or degrees below black; that deep, near-charred brown.
It takes some skill. Maybe I will write a cookbook.

Bread and Snakes

2009-06-02T13:11:00.000-05:00

The day I came home, there was glass shattered all over the back porch.

What happened? I asked.
Wetbacks broke in.
Wetbacks?
Yes.
How do you know they were wetbacks?
Because they stole a loaf of bread.
A loaf of bread? That's it?
Yes.
That doesn't mean they were wetbacks.
Yes it does. Anyway, our neighbors saw four wetbacks in the brush the same day.
Hm. And they only took bread?
Yeah.

The night after that happened, my mom shot the ninth monthly rattlesnake under the house. Twice. Blew it to hell, then had to drag it out of there with a hoe. The smallest one so far, she said. Only four feet. It had some greasy yellow proto-snakeling sacks in it.

I keep telling them to get off that mesquite flat, a few hundred yards from the highway to Laredo, crawling with rattlers, mice, and apparently men. Funny to move from Five Points to the country, and feel less safe.
But at least there are people out there who only steal bread. I guess they know what it's like to be stuck better than anyone. Not so different from Five Points, probably.

Yucca Anything

2009-06-01T13:23:00.000-05:00

1 heap yucca blossoms
boiling water
ice water

Gather blossoms. Don't get stung or stabbed. The ones just opening are best. Pinch out the inward, smelly parts; these are bitter. Rinse the bugs out. Drop into boiling water for 30 seconds. Drain and dip into ice water until cool.
Add to anything: beans, breakfast tacos, tortilla soup.
Apache manna. Yum.

Parcelled Heart

2009-06-01T08:28:00.000-05:00

What I miss:
All Betsies, OBs especially, Terese, Sally, Tyler, Lydia, Evie...
Our collective library
Our bustling, smelly, chaotic kitchen
Sitting on the filthy kitchen floor with mason jars of wine and talking
Our front porch
Sitting on the ash-encrusted front porch with mason jars of wine and talking while listening to someone play the accordion, the guitar, sing
Beer worth drinking
Five Points
Seeing someone I know on every corner
Public transportation
Biking and bike lanes
Flying through downtown as fast as humanly possible, red lights, green, who cares
The smell of rain on the mountains
Potlucks with quirky punks
Intellectual conversation
Being unable to scandalize anyone, or at least having to work very hard at it
Tempeh, miso, curry, tamari, baba ghanoush, mochi... and other such foreign luxuries
Lavish pommes de dumpster: chocolate, kumquats, biscotti, bottomless boxes of cinnamon. You know.

What I am glad to have again:
The spontaneity and general disorderliness of my family. For example. Yesterday, my mom, uncle, and the seven kids between them decided by vote of cheering to take the fishing boat to Medina Lake. Kaleigh and Jason both have dogs that they wanted to take. But there wasn't room, highlighting the fact that, actually, there wasn't room on the boat for nine people in the first place, as it is only a four person boat. We all crammed into the pick-up and helped my grandfather mob some cattle into a trailer. Then we were hot and REALLY wanted a swim. So we drove to the Baptist Encampment on the Frio. When we arrived, despite (most of us) being Baptists, they wouldn't let us in. Maybe the screaming of the children. So we drove to Garner, but they wanted six dollars a person and no one had money. Finally we arrived at Utopia City Park around five. By chance our old friends the Hailes were also there for a swim. We caught up, swam together and played diving games until the light was gone, though the water was low and full of creepy weed things shivered by huge fish. Then we all went for buttermilk pie. I suspect this sort of thing is why we are not wealthy, and why we are so much fun, which is better anyway.
Animals and their irrepressible life: cows and calves, chickens and eggs, cats and kittens, dogs and puppies, birds and their songs, horses, snakes, bees, spiders, soodies, goldfish, perch, carp, ants, dragonflies, herons, crawdads
Knowing the names of trees: cypress, pomegranate, pecan, live oak, magnolia, mesquite, palm, acacia, peach, guajilla, sinisa, butterfly, chinaberry, ficus, hackberry
Garden I don't have to work years for: squash (I ate no less than three burly forearm-sized squash yesterday), sweet corn, blackberries, watermelon, peas, tomatoes, grapes, onions, sunflowers, dewberries
Kids and old folks (in equal parts and in moderation)
My grandpa: "What are you doing, grandpa?" "Just holdin' this chair down." To one of the kids, "Goddamnit! You could tear up a steel ball with a rubber hammer!" "Sure, and a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then, too." More of these to come.

Olivetti lives.

2009-05-29T11:16:00.001-05:00

The first fiery blast of Texas came at San Angelo. We had flown south down the plains, the blue tarp flapping itself to shreds, Olivetti screeching, and it was morning. The red earth coughed heat at us like a smoker. I opened the door, and there she was: Texas. I went into one of those miserable country grocery stores where, mysteriously, there are only foods manufactured beyond all recognition (i.e. Lunchables, Oreos, Chee-zits, Coke... the majuscules are a give-away). I could write a whole post on the troubling state of food in the country: the richest farmlands are coopted for use by corporate feedlots and monoculture farms, and the old farmers on their shrinking plots perish of cancer and diabetes from eating the returns via the mega Walmart, sole employer in the country town. But I will resist.

I bought a couple of peaches and a box of Saltines, then pulled up the tarp to check on Olivetti. Her fur stuck out all over, her pupils were slits, and the tip of her petal tongue was pinched between her teeth. She was panting, and clearly on the verge of insanity. It was about 11 am, 90 degrees and climbing. We traveled on and the heat clawed higher: Eden, Menard. In Junction under the limestone cliffs, I rolled down the window and the heat came in differently, familiar; it was the Llano River losing itself in the air, and the air lying on my skin so much like water. I drank it in like a toad in a puddle, through the flesh. I felt like one of those brown balls of prickle they sell in highway gift shops in the Southwest under the sublime name of "resurrection fern": drop it in water and it opens up green and fat.

At my mother's house, we unloaded the boxes, the trappings of my Denver life, lonely-looking now, big with meaning, but without reference. I would have to remember it all alone here, I thought. Even that red umbrella, just an umbrella, but I held it over my head at our Free Sale in the muddy yard of Betsy House; Abraham laughed next to me, and Julia held the blue one beside; the friends crowded on the porch; the irises held their tattered heads up in the rain. Then walking with Abraham downtown, his umbrella blowing out like a black flower with every gust, my stiff red one next to it. What does it mean now, that red umbrella, or any of it?

With the family all together for a few minutes, grandparents, sisters, mother, an argument broke out over the question of Mormonism as a branch of Christianity. Yes, really. Given our exhaustion, certain of us got out of temper pretty quickly and the conversation had to be suppressed. This is my family: passionate, irrational, passionately rational. I took Olivetti inside, imagining that I would have to nurse her back to life and sanity over the coming weeks, fully expecting to pay for my treason at her claws. I opened the cage and she stepped out like a lady from her carriage, neither hurried nor perturbed. She gave me a forgiving look, permitted me to stroke her head, and began exploring the house.

In the evening we drove to my great-grandma's and played a few games of pitch, a favorite card game of the Alsatians governed by bizarre, arbitrary rules about as comprehensible to me as whale migration. Kendra and I won. I don't know how. I told my great-grandma that I'm leaving for Asheville in September to apprentice at a letterpress studio. She was surprised these still existed, and even more surprised that I would be interested in learning this antiquated art. Later, I pointed out proudly that I had made the dress I was wearing myself. She expressed astonishment, tugged on the seams, and said, "Well! It's probably better than the ones they make in Mexico," and slapped my ass. Thanks, grandma.