denial

Welcome, year of the ox. Be kind to snakes; we're tired.

i-ching: Your symbol is Hexagram 39, getting stopped. Inability to take the next step is delaying progress. Seek help from a wise person, then apply your own sincerity to the situation.

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reading
In process artist's book project: letterpress printed esoteric curses, with the goal of renewing the art of imprecation {available as a set, business-card sized}.

weather
A burnt hand, a sliced thumb, a bleeding finger, a snowed in car, now covered in a thick coat of solid ice, and the beginning of tax season. Tell me about the weather.

vignettes

Cause:
Rob bank, ineffectively: forget mask, drop gun, getaway car booted due to unpaid tickets.

Effect:
Go to jail.
In extraordinary circumstances, may be featured on News of the Weird or Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

Cause:
Refuse to wear a hat in winter.

Effect:
Catch cold and alienate people due to congestion and nasal drainage.

Cause:
Play with matches.

Effect:
Start fire. Burn down house.
In extraordinary circumstances, may be tried and convicted of arson; videos of fire may be featured on news sites and YouTube.

Cause:
Neglect to look both ways prior to crossing the street.

Effect:
Knocked down by bicycle messenger taking blueprints from architect to developer.
In extraordinary circumstances, then hit by passing bus, resulting in ambulance ride to hospital and meeting one's soul mate in the emergency room.

Cause:
Ingestion of fermented beverages beyond one's tolerances as predicted by body mass, gender, and experience.

Effect:
Waking in a strange apartment which reeks of patchouli next to a person whose collection of tattoos, piercings, and body art are of museum quality.
In extraordinary circumstances, then realizing that the appointment one had at 9 am with one's probation officer was thereby completely missed, and returning to the detention center for six to twelve months.

Cause:
Signing a petition to block expansion of a town dump into a water reservoir area.

Effect:
Being placed on an FBI Watch List for suspicious persons, agitators, and likely terrorist suspects. Arriving at the airport for a flight to Hawaii, being denied boarding, and retained for further questioning.
In extraordinary circumstances, the tickets were nonrefundable, and travel insurance refuses to cover police investigation as a valid reason for coverage.

Cause:
Skiing on the black diamond slopes the day after one's first lesson.

Effect:
Full body traction for six weeks, followed by six months of bedrest.

Cause:
Failure to wash hands following situations of questionable sanitation.

Effect:
Cholera, pink eye, hepatitis, the flu; the loss of the respect of one's friends.
In extraordinary circumstances, thereafter becoming the spokesperson for the International Red Cross Sanitation campaign, catching digestive troubles on the road, and wasting away in a tent in a foreign country.

Cause:
Finding a wallet on the sidewalk.

Effect:
Go on spending spree to replace old socks with worn-out heels and broken wristwatch and empty refrigerator.
In extraordinary circumstances, purchase plane ticket to Brazil, but in the actual name of the person on the driver's license. Mail airline tickets and license to rightful owner, along with Polaroids of new socks, watch, and groceries.

Cause:
Open umbrella inside house.

Effect:
Forty days and forty nights of rain.

Cause:
Leave household trash on back porch, intending to transfer to dumpster at earliest opportunity.

Effect:
Squirrels discover dinner, move into walls of house, and develop pot bellies.

Cause:
Attend dinner party whilst still in mourning for a companion.

Effect:
Enter into romantic involvement of a most unsuitable nature. In the heat of the fling, fly to Las Vegas for the New Year celebrations, and inadvertently become married without due consideration.
In extraordinary circumstances, discover that while new spouse is thoroughly unacceptable, that marriage provides access to health insurance. Have nervous breakdown due to difficultly of decision-making, and spend three months in a rehabilitation clinic.

Cause:
Receive a signed first edition of Edith Sitwell's poems for Christmas.

Effect:
Sell poems on eBay for $329.42, purchase marijuana before the civil penalties law becomes legal, and be arrested for possession.
In extraordinary circumstances, try to explain need for bail and lawyer to one's mother, who inherited the Sitwell poems from a favorite aunt. Become disinherited.

Cause:
Sailing in a protected cove without a life vest.

Effect:
A thoroughly unexpected and unseasonal typhoon descends upon the region, throwing one from the boat, destroying the coastline, and disturbing the nesting plovers.
In extraordinary circumstances, boat is turned into firewood, but manage to survive by clutching at one plank and miraculously landing in a tree. Convert to one of the world's four major religions out of gratitude, and spend the rest of one's life on a pilgrimage to holy sites for sailors.

Cause:
Dabble in online scrabble as a means of increasing one's skills against one's aunt and brother.

Effect:
Switch to high stakes Texas Hold 'Em for the thrill of the higher pay-offs, and retire from a job as an administrative secretary in a pharmaceutical company to live off one's earnings from the game.
In extraordinary circumstances, skip future family holidays to play at poker championships throughout the world.

Cause:
Wash dishes while talking on phone.

Effect:
Drop phone in dishwater, shorting out the phone. Receive minor electrocution damage when retrieving phone from submersion.
In extraordinary circumstances, lose important business contract as client believed they were intentionally hung up upon.

Cause:
Dye hair, in attempt to reinvent self and stave off evidence of aging.

Effect:
Renewed attention from the opposite sex, free drinks at the bar, and a promotion at work.
In extraordinary circumstances, realize that one's true path is to shave one's head and become a Buddhist monk, inhabiting a lonely mountain in Tibet.

Cause:
Determine to live deliberately.

Effect:
Sit fast. Stand slowly. Duck quickly. Lounge sedately. Rise leisurely. Jump immediately. Dodge imminently. Spin unceasingly. Saunter sporadically. Sleep uninterruptedly. Turn involuntarily. Weave drunkenly. Wave regally. Walk prancingly. Waltz unceasingly.

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reading
performance schedules for the area / sparse indeed in January

weather
When the weather man stated "lows around 5 or 6 above," what I heard was "5 or 6 above freezing;" it was only later that I realized it was "5 or 6 above zero." Ah, delusional optimism. Only four more months of winter!

Portus Cale

Why is she standing, thus, in the center of the frame, hands on hips, shoulders thrust back, head held high, a full grin competing with oversized glasses for domination of her face? Standing, proud, before a pomegranate red wall, coarsely painted, an abundance of stew pots hanging from nails. A crocheted gods-eye pattern pot holder, a sink surrounded in blue wave curtains.

The pride of possession, the pride of competence, the pride of a son just returned for a visit from the city, bringing with him a new camera, the most advanced seen in the village; bringing with him a new wife, a young grandson. Her pride is fired not by the possessions behind and around her, but mirrors a sense of relief, certitude, achievement, impressiveness situated not in the woman, the subject, but in the camera, the person behind the camera.

The son who went away to university in the city, never quite promising to return, but remaining dutiful through letters, phone calls, post cards; never quite visiting, but always a source of conjecture and conversation amongst the villagers. The engineering degree, the full time corporate job in the city, the new, beautiful wife, the cherished son, and finally, after so many years, the flashbulb illuminating the juncture between past and present, the joy of the visit, the dichotomy of the worlds.

Everything cleaned, pressed, cooked, prepared in readiness for this visit: a seafood stew, a watermelon salad, a roast pig, fresh sheep's cheese. Cakes and pastries and strong wines and stronger coffees and everyone crowded together in the tiny house in the village, the rooms filled with the town folk, the grocer, the teacher, the mothers, those who remained, everyone greeting the visiting son. Everyone tallying the car, the haircut, the manicure, the clothes, the manner of the wife, the baby, to compare.

To compare and embrace, or to compare and find wanting? Will the mother accept the wife, will the neighbors accept the son, will they be judged open-hearted, warm, still part of the family; or will they be relegated to the chiding due to those who left, or those who are now above the village.

The baby may coo, or the baby may cry. The wife may be car sick, have a headache, by overwhelmed by travelling through the mountains with an infant; or she may be disgusted, horrified, appalled at the petty grievances and the confined geography of the villagers; or she might be warm, polite, endearing to a group who remind her of her own extended family. No one has met the wife before; she looked impossibly beautiful in the wedding photograph, but they do not know whether to be proud that their young man married such a creature, or to be offended that he sought a partner not a part of his past, of their world.

A world circumscribed by the market on Wednesdays, the fresh fish, the gossip at the butcher's, the attendance of Mass, a weekly afternoon ladies' tea, the calendar and the map formed by a host of small details, woven so tightly together that the outside world disappears. When some ambitious boy tears through the net, breaks free, the villagers are simultaneously impressed with his bravery, his ambition, while feeling rejected, discarded. When a girl departs, it is even more difficult to allow her to leave, to water her resolutely turn towards the city or a man and fall into the reach of the treacherous worldliness awaiting her.

But for the sons! The tears of heartbreak mixed with the swelling of appreciation, leading to this one point: the moment of return, for a week, for a month, for a year; for Christmas or to raise a family; the moment to judge the man who returned against the boy who went away.

And so the mother stands in her kitchen, the house scrubbed relentlessly over the past week, glimpsing the person her son has become, intimidated by the youth and grace of his wife, thrilling at the infant. In these first moments of the visit the ecstasy of the return has not yet become bittersweet; in the rush to greet and introduce there has not yet been time to sulk or cry or feel alienated or overwhelmed or disgusted: there is only recognition, and potential.

Tomorrow they will visit the cemetery, walk towards the sea; Sunday they will go to Mass and meet the village at the afternoon luncheon; but here, now, in the present, stretching out from the car, entering the kitchen, the same pomegranate red kitchen, and seeing the stockpots, the same dozen stockpots, and out of it all, there radiates welcome, a cup of coffee, anise seed cookies, a clean diaper.

The miseries of a too adventurous childhood, the demands of a too observing township, the brutal drain of projection and expectation are memories and fears that will keep, in the back of the closet, for now is the moment of arrival.

The light in the mountains has not changed: it is thin, crisp, clear, a golden hue washed out in the fading afternoon. The groves of trees have shrunk from the towering heights of memory, even though they have only grown in the intervening years. The addition to the Church has been completed, a new bell hung, a gift from the mayor, calling out crisply and echoing against the old bell's softer tone.

Everything seems smaller, dustier, like looking in a toy shop or a museum, and some of the buildings no longer match what they once were: either the memory has shifted or the town has shifted. The grocery story burned down from a wood fire left unattended, and was replaced by a modular concrete structure. The school still needs to be painted, the school yard still full of pebbles and unkempt weeds; but the school teacher, new, a replacement for the ancient school master, and now a woman from a city, not yet accepted.

The streets are narrower, the town smaller, the olive groves and grape arbors older and sweeter, the people shorter, the air sharper. Somewhere beneath the stucco and wood houses are the thousands of memories of being a boy, of adventures, of goals, of expectations, and around every corner, the anticipation of becoming eight years old on a July afternoon, and the mingled relief and disappointment of a wife, a child steady at the elbow, compatriots of a different type, chasing away the shadowy memories, echoes from the past in the empty footfalls on the town square.

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reading many Dover pattern books

weather cold cold cold

a homeless goldfish

The doors closed, sliding silently shut, followed by the percussive ding as the elevator progressed between floors. The elevator didn't stall; the cable didn't break; the room wasn't suddenly filled with smoke; power wasn't lost; a man in black didn't lower himself menacingly through a tile in the ceiling and take the occupants hostage.

The elevator simply descended, emptied the occupants, and began the sedately paced upward rise towards the top floors.

A woman entered on eight, exhausted, nervous, harried, joining the ascent suddenly and unexpectedly. Her conversation in the hallway had turned awkward before the elevator arrived, and she glimpsed the freedom offered in that enclosed space, escaping the hallway to rise to the tenth floor.

She hadn't any need to be on the tenth floor; she knew of no one nor any destination on the tenth floor; so she continued to enjoy the rhythmic click, whirr, beep of the elevator, to breathe the slightly stale, carbon dioxide heavy air, to rest against the metal arm rail as the elevator rose towards the upper floors.

She thought about the myriad ways to disappear without leaving the building. A walking tour of the women's restrooms on each and every floor, comparing floor plan to occupancy to number of operational lightbulbs, quantities of hand towels, cleanliness of soap dispenser, evidence of recent crises. The variables could be plotted dimensionally on a graph: did the upper floors offer an experience that was noticeably better than the lower?

Or she could stay on the elevator all day, riding between penultimate floors, so it would appear that she was always entering or exiting, none of the awkward explanations for why she was continuing a journey with no material benefit: a forgotten pen, the wrong file folder, the disk for Powerpoint left on the desk. She could start with floors two and thirty-nine, then work in multiples, thirty-nine to three to thirty to five to six to thirty-six to four to nine to eighteen to twenty-seven to seven to was there or was there not a floor thirteen?

Should she vary the mathematical perfection and machine efficiency and silent whirrs clicks and beeps with surreptitious flights of stairs, six, five, fifteen, sixteen, thirty-two, thirty-three, two, twenty, a benefit to her cardiovascular health, a day in the building becoming a day at the gym, without the necessity for spandex, sweat, showers of questionable sanitation.

She could compare photocopiers, with a variety of graphs, documents, maps, photographs, offering the explanation that she was considering purchasing that precise machine and wanted to examine features, in the unlikely event that her presence would be either notice or questioned.

At the end of the day, forty floors, at least five copiers per floor, two hundred sets of graphs, documents, maps, photographs later: she could hand them out, like free underground magazines, to commuters leaving train stations, the graphs, documents, maps, photographs becoming a part of the city, briefly elevated from the quagmire of the mundane, freed into momentary meaning before the utter vacuity of the data was realized by the reader.

Daily, weekly this project could recur, a new train station, a new set of commuters, destination reflecting openness to the random publications of strangers. Early career hipsters in the south, ironic about wearing a suit, eager to embrace the postmodern statement about the emptiness of business. Doctors in the west, harried, cynical, difficult to hand a publication. Everymen workmen on the east side, taking the papers out of habit, casually discarding them when it becomes apparent that the photographs are only landscapes or businessmen. To the north, the eager climbing young executives, mechanically handing a tip as they take the publication, shuffling it into their briefcase, later assuming it to be another report they are expected to have read by the next morning's meeting.

But she couldn't photocopy indefinitely; if no one noticed, the sheer administrative repetitiveness would equal the boredom of actually being in a cubicle or attending a meeting. She could climb stairs, ride the elevator, rate the restrooms, study fire escape plans, check contents of recycling bins for credit card numbers, file fake memos, and, in the end, at the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of three months from now, she would have become a statistician, a pamphleteer, be in incredible shape, and still be there, in the building, unable to escape.

She could learn the schedules and habits of the break rooms, the smoking room, the security guards. She could exchange the sugar for salt, short circuit the vending machines, shut down the photocopiers; she could never attend another meeting and still appear to be working harder than ever. Or she could return to her desk for another round of solitaire, a conversation of soul-numbing stupidity, a complaint about the coffee.

She was still in the elevator. Colleagues, strangers, interviewees entered, silencing their conversations when in groups, becoming intimate strangers for the duration of the one floor or five or ten that they ascended. They were unfailingly, exceedingly polite to other occupants, people they would avoid under any circumstances excepting the alternative reality of the elevator, where they would nod, and travel companionably between floors, joined in a moment of complete dependence upon the technology of transportation.

The interviewees, the new hires, stood straight, made room, were diffident without being actively servile. The middle managers jostled for position, made a game of punching buttons already illuminated.

The elevator certification for use featured the state seal, the unlikely math providing a maximum gross weight and occupancy equation that differed from any known population averages or statistics. The faux wood paneling offered the balm of professionalism, the mirrored surfaces brushed to prevent reflections of the shame of bad hair or chapped noses.

Still she lingered, the safety of eight feet by twelve feet, a contained space with a seemingly endless wall of options. Would floor twenty-three have the best coffee? Who would greet her at floor eleven? Until suddenly she realized she was back on eight, exited, and returned to her desk.

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reading The West Indies and the Spanish Main / by Anthony Trollope
weather four inches of frozen slush covered with a blanket of snow
{all disdainfully plowed, partially melted, and refrozen}