Wednesday, June 22, 2005
What did I do yesterday? That mattered? I don't know.
I guess I wrote about something I saw the day before, like a quick haiku:
a bird hops aboutThen I wrote it differently:
on a freshly cut tree stump
he wonders where the tree has gone
A bird hops aboutMaybe, I dunno. Maybe needs more interplay between the sounds of the words. Yeah, those words'll change quite a few times...
on the freshly cut stump of a tree
around and around in circles
on the circles of the tree's rings.
Many circles: young bird, old tree.
The bird wonders:
Where the hell did the tree go?
Did it leave?
I've never known a tree to move
except to sway in the wind.
The tree was here just yesterday…
Perhaps it was stolen.
The bird has never stolen a tree,
only small dead parts of trees
that a tree doesn't need,
dry twigs and leaves
to build himself a nest
high up in another tree.
The bird is not happy.
His tree is gone.
Who are these tree thieves?
Some poor soul working 13 & ½-hour night shifts posted about his sleep deprivation on MetaChat, said "...other people get much more sleep deprived than I do, and apparently hallucinate." He inquired about other people's tales, and I said something like
Oooooh, little running things, scampering shadows in my peripheral vision, seen out of the corner of my eye but disappearing whenever I look at them... blurry little cloaked, tiny-legged demons, maybe, taunting me with just the odd glimpse... skittering along the base of a wall the way a shadow glides over the ground when a hawk swoops just overhead... sometimes inverse shadows in dark corners, but always true dark shadows if I'm in a bright, white, fluorescent-lit place (...don't those places always feel like a hospital morgue?) ... and the scary feeling that I'm not hallucinating, but I'm in a special state where I can see things that normally can't be seen...I got paid to enter some data yesterday, during which time I learned that there really, truly is a place called Pleasantville, NJ. I bet the sun smiles in Pleasantville the way it does on the Teletubbies TV show... I want to live in Pleasantville, where everything is pleasant and everyone is always pleasant to everyone else. Doesn't everyone want to live there?
Oh, yes. Yes.
Then it's definitely time to sleep.
No. Everyone does not.
That is the scary part.
But Bob Ross, the quirky TV painting instructor (rest his soul) with his frizzy red 'fro, soft voice, and his landcapes in which he places "a happy little tree here" and "a happy little tree there"... surely he lives in Pleasantville. There are happy little trees everywhere. Maybe he paints them and then they just appear.
And while I love the whimsy of a a place called Pleasantville, I was somehow strangely frightened when I came across Piggly Wiggly store #262 in my data-entering. It just doesn't seem right that there should be over 260 stores in the U.S. named Piggly Wiggly, does it? Nope. That's just wrong.
There's a store in Lima, OH called "Meat City," too. That scares me. My imagination goes nuts just picturing it. Someone named Mike Strange installed a sign there. Oh yeah. That's a comic book, maybe even a film, inspired by Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen.
I bet there's a "Piggly Wiggly Meat City" somewhere too. They sell nothing but bacon, of course. Ugh.
Several Martin Luther King Boulevards I've seen, too, and they're always Boulevards. When a street named after someone famous is needed, who decides what kind of street that person rates? Is there a government advisory panel somewhere that determined that MLK commands boulevards (which seems perfectly respectable for a man of his status), while a much lesser figure might rate only a lane or a drive? And who the hell wants to be a cul-de-sac? It's a dead end, after all. Then again, the person it's named after is probably dead by now too... Whoever it is that staffs this panel, they like JFK... JFK can be anything he wants, a road or avenue or boulevard or park... Yup, they're JFK fans alright, these shadowy figures with cigars in a conference room somewhere, maybe in the Pentagon, deciding what type of street will be the stamp of a dead person's immortality...
BOB ROSS BOULEVARD!
...that's what I want to see. And all of I-90 in Cleveland should be "Harvey Pekar Way"...
But what have I done lately? I've watched fascinated as my cats stared out the window. They watched (fascinated) as cottonwood fluff snowed down from the trees. Their heads bobbed in unison, following a particular cottonball as it glided up and down and around like Tinkerbell before spiralling to the ground, resting for a moment, then rising back up into the air and flying away as snow rarely does...
The seed-husks of cottonwood fluff, their precious cargo discharged, litter the ground everywhere like discarded stars...
(Click to see full-size image.)
[Photo by me.]
Later the cats slept in funny positions and I sketched them. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw shadows moving. And I went to bed.
~
6/22/2005 10:48:00 PM
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Her Dolly Makes Her Happy, Alone in the Deep Dark
~
My entry into taz's latest "Emcee" collaboration on MetaChat. (Just a "sketch," really, done on the quick.) Fun stuff! Here's how it works.
6/18/2005 06:18:00 PM
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
After a long winter, the petals of snowball flowers survive as delicate butterflies...
~
(Click for larger images; photos by me. "Snowballs" = Hydrangea.)
6/14/2005 02:05:00 PM
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Click HERE & HERE to see where the images come from...
~
(Photos by me.)
6/12/2005 02:50:00 PM
Thursday, June 02, 2005
The Internet is a strange place. I have friends I've never met who are as close to me as people I've known personally for 25 years. Sometimes it feels as if a few of us are sitting in a circle, lounging on the floor, throwing ideas and jokes back and forth at a party or a grade-school sleepover. It's like a conversation sometimes, and you have to get in your say before the moment is past. Like improv. Think fast. Maybe even whip up a graphic to go with your joke. Then, an hour later, it's all history, gone just like spoken words, text passed away into the ephemeral cached past of the Internet....
Sometimes it's less conversation and more passing around a sketchbook, each person adding a piece to a communal doodle.
For example, "taz" (Teresa) starts a site called "Mataiku", where people who read MetaFilter play around with making haiku out of MetaFilter's headlines. Someone posts a question to AskMetaFilter:
How do you tell the sex of a cat? A strange cat came through the wall of my apartment this morning, and I'm wondering what gender it is.
...and I come back with this:
A strange cat came
through the wall
of my apartment this morning
(Pics are clickable for larger images.)
Okay, most haiku aren't illustrated, but I couldn't resist throwing in the cartoon doodle.
Then taz starts a communal art projuct called "emcee" over at another MetaFilter spinoff, MetaChat. I send taz my googly-eyes pic from two posts down, and taz throws in some colored mist, making it infinitely better:
Ehh, it's all fun. Just goofing around. And, like I said, it feels as if we're all sitting around in a circle together. And we are, really... if you picture computers in front of each of us. Then picture cubicle walls separating each from one another... the walls look thin, but they're hundreds, maybe thousands of miles thick... Ohio to Greece... Greece to England... England to Chicago... and so on.
Just kids sitting on the floor playing. That's all.
Come play with us.
(Of course [can't you tell?] I'm still wondering how that magical cat got through the apartment wall. But sometimes, with cats, it's best just not to wonder...)
~
6/02/2005 12:31:00 AM
