Ps

Selections of spam email which I find difficult to delete because they’re actually rather awesome: I’m saving them here so I can empty my junk folder

An ongoing collection

In a beautiful pea-green boat / And everyone cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”

And the bomb will blow / When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar

Cutting my face on the doorframe / sneering grin

I shall not live in vain / And they fastened it down with a pin

And the hills of the Chankly Bore / I’m a-weary of my life

A fire crackled in the first room / At the strangeness of it all

Two bloodshot eyes / And the merchant could not resist

The first daughter wanted a brocade dress / But though he shouted!

And his horse could hardly make headway / Sat down to a hearty meal

Just like good old times / Image can’t be loaded from this server

So deep that the bottom could not be seen / And because I cried so.

He set off for home / But as on the evening before

You are the sunglight that brightens up my day / Very urgent

(Don’t Google them. It ruins the magic.)

The sneeze's reach

A student while presenting to the class last night sneezed explosively, catching part of it in a cupped hand. An immediate and silencing uneasiness froze the room, as though it really could have been H1N1 that had just flown through the air into our midst, but then the girl next to me started giggling. Others looked at her as though they wanted to join in but couldn’t quite make it. The professor took over and breezed through the incident, but a few minutes later she touched the doorknob to close the door on the singing coming from down the hall and realized too late that the sneeze had touched it. She held off the unimaginative, endlessly reiterated comments for long enough to rinse her hand under a splash from a bottle of water over the garbage can and made a show of not touching anything with that hand until she could leave at the break — through the other door which the sneeze had not reached, the one near which I sat — to wash them for twenty seconds with soap under warm running water, as we’re told.

This evening after class I went to the university library to borrow the first two of the seven volumes of the 1901 edition (copy no. 18 of only twelve hundred and thirty-two!) of Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Something today stirred my latent urge to write a screenplay for this novel (I know, stupidest thing in the world, but), or at least self-publish a second version of my own edition in two volumes this time include the synoptical table of contents from the 1901 edition (would such a thing be copyright protected?) and the index (I quote) historical and characteristical (?!) and of course in a larger font and improved margining (see also my first edition). I could not find the synopses of the letters anywhere online, so I decided to type them up directly from the books themselves. So far extends my enthusiasm.

When I pulled the books down from the shelf in the PR 3000s I was showered with alarmingly large flakes of dust and bits of old torn paper.

fireland:

“Walls of translucent white jelly-beings undulating around an unseen cameraman who we must assume never stops screaming. Vertically hovering whales gesturing a fin toward beams of light somehow shining up from the deep. And everywhere fish, terrible fish — they breathe liquid, they never blink. Accompanied by one or the other of the Aphex Twin discs, glacial swells and pulsings of evilly hushed machine-born flesh-creep music.”

— Scott David Herman listens to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 while watching Planet Earth on mute. I’m hard-pressed to think of something more up my alley than this.

A measure of lameness

How much with watering mouth I anticipate eating my Nature Valley Sweet & Salty Dark Chocolate Nut Chewy Nut Bar. Dipped in Nut Butter Coating! Made with 70% Cacao! The more I look forward to it in the afternoon the more I must suck, you know, as a human being. The sooner in the afternoon I have it the longer the rest of the day seems. The moment I take that last bite I ignore it for as long as I can, until I look down at the empty wrapper and weep.

Buses & ghosts

In a misguided attempt to catch a student-free, non-vacuum-packed bus back downtown after class tonight, I went to wait at a different stop for a non-university bus not far from my usual stop. While waiting, I read non-impatiently by the light of the ads on the bus shelter, and saw four — an insanely uncharacteristic FOUR — university buses go by my regular stop in the course of twenty minutes. So, half an hour later, no student-free bus in sight, I slunk dejectedly back to my usual stop.

If this were any kind of story, at this point I would say that a bus then arrived at the stop I had just left, that all night I went back and forth between the stops, that I never made it home, that sometime before dawn I died, my ghost doomed to roam back and forth between those two stops for eternity, wondering always if I should have just tried to walk it instead.

But in fact eventually I caught one of the regular buses, which soon became vacuum-packed with girls in short skirts shouting and squealing and adjusting their outfits and taking photos of each other, and with the boys who boarded just to watch them. Through most of the ride I felt like a ghost, or wished I were a ghost. The driver let me off a few dozen feet ahead of the stop a luxurious half-block from our building, because at the corner was one of the buses I had seen go by while I was waiting at the wrong stop, surrounded by trucks with flashing lights and watched over by men in neon vests, the door to the engine open, its insides exposed and smoking.

Vacation preparation

It was not so bad this time. Perhaps I am finally able to act in accordance with the rational understanding that a single day off is seriously not a big deal. No one will miss me. Nothing bad will happen. No one will call the cell number I left with them. In fact they will be enormously relieved to have me gone for the day. They will enjoy the bouncy castle without my foot tapping impatiently half on the sidewalk, half on the newly-laid sod. I will pick out a few short sleeve shirts & short pants, throw them in my duffel bag, and leave my laptop at home.

Tassie’s self-consciousness about the words that come out of her mouth in Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs is utterly familiar to me, except that my own experience of those feelings in my teen years was more acute and painful. I still remember very clearly with piercing regret of things that I said years ago, things that meant little to nothing and I have no doubt remain unremembered by those who heard them. The self-consciousness has never gone away, the fear in advance of opening my mouth remains, but the discomfort of regret has lessened as I’ve aged. This is a comfort, with hope for the future.

When giving and receiving cards and thank you notes, I always have a fearful vision of a never-ending cycle of politeness, thank-yous going back and forth eternally, each party too polite to let the last cheerful expression go by without a return.