There are an infinite number of ways . . .

More things in life ought to be made of Play-Doh. If you disagree, then you are wrong. Look at these tools! They are made to resemble octopus arms. They cut, they roll, they impress patterns in the soft clay. Unfortunately, once a multicolored amalgation of different Play-Dohs has been created, the colors are impossible to separate.

Three-dimensional shapes are both a challenge and a delight! Imagine a green Stonehenge. Imagine a purple cityscape, complete with cellular towers. Imagine neon-blue palm trees on a dinosaur-infested beach.

And, in case you missed seeing it, here is the snow.

Jimmy-Brains

Lack of sleep. Sleeplessness. Wakefulness, restlessness, jimmy-brains. Sometimes known as Restless Muse Syndrome, or RMS. A condition in which the writer (or other artist) stays up and awake many hours into the night, well beyond any reasonable or healthy bedtime, in order to further develop a work-in-progress, or to read. Not quite insomnia, but neither is it a stubbornness, like that of a child who thinks he’s going to miss something. Symptoms of RMS float in an ether between two extremes. Creation, composition, intuition, and most other cognitive functions remain active and focused during periods of intense RMS activity.

Buy This Book Here

There is a hardback copy of Sherman Alexie's Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven at the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Mankato. I encourage someone to go and buy it. I hope someone buys it.

How does one store nothing?

Of all the items on the "Year in Review" of the Harper's magazine website, these are perhaps at once the most absurd and the most fascinating:

"New York researchers used carbon nanotubes to create the darkest material known to man. Two teams of physicists, one in Calgary and the other in Tokyo, successfully stored nothing within a gas in the form of squeezed vacuum composed of uncertainty."

I wish I could get away with that kind of abstraction.

Neue Jahr

Crappy Old Year, Happy New Year.

A Word I Needed To Look Up, To Satisfy My Curiosity

clusterfuck: n. coarse slang (chiefly U.S.). 1. A sexual orgy. Also Mongolian cluster fuck. 2.orig. Mil. A bungled or botched undertaking; (also) a situation, state of affairs, or gathering (esp. a military operation) that is disorganized or chaotic.

cluster: n. 1. A collection of things of the same kind, as fruits or flowers, growing closely together; a bunch. a. Originally of grapes (in which sense bunch is now the usual term.) b. Of other fruits, or of flowers; also of other natural growths, as the eggs of reptiles, the air-cells of the lungs, etc. 2. A rounded mass or conglomeration; a clot, a ‘clutter’, Obs. 3.a. A number of persons, animals, or things gathered or situated close together; an assemblage, group, swarm, crowd. b.fig. Of immaterial things. c. A group of faints stars forming a relatively dense mass, appearing as a nebula to the naked eye; a star-cluster; also applied to larger coherent groups of stars, nebulæ, and galaxies. Also attrib. d.Linguistics. A group of successive consonants.

fuck: v., n., adj. Too numerous are the definitions, phrases, constructions, and mysterious etymological origins for me to repeat them all here. We all know what this word means, don’t we?

---

Good. Now my curiosity is satisfied, to some extent. So don't go and fuck up your holiday.

Spikes and Crashes

Blood sugar is an economy like the commodities market. But unlike the commodities market, blood sugar trades only in two commodities: glucose and insulin.

Spikes make you sick. Your face flushes and burns red. Ears especially. So can your fingers, hands, toes, and soles. There are headaches sometimes. Your eyes might scratch as though dried out, dessicated. These symptoms combine and exacerbate each other. Ride them for too long, they are destructive.

Crashes don’t necessarily make you sick. Rather, they threaten your life. After you experience crashes too many times, the symptoms lose some of their effect. What a crash at first causes is shakiness. The shakes, the jitters. This is your brain telling you that your blood is not providing it enough glucose. (The brain feeds on glucose alone. The brain dies without glucose.) Other symptoms can alert you to a blood sugar crash: cold sweat; seeing shapeless electric-blue spots and lines; mental confusion; distraction. But experiencing these symptoms too often leads to a sort of tolerance of them, fatigue. Blood sugar crashes without the usual symptoms, or crashes to a lower level before symptoms manifest.

This happened last night around 3:30. I had been reading Faulkner, and was now trying to sleep. I could not. So I got up and took my glucometer out to the living room and tested my blood sugar. The glucometer read: 22.

The blood sugar low that is considered imminently life-threatening is <21.

What happened? I accidentally overdosed on insulin. Recovery was swift: I ate a vanilla caramel Drumstick and an apple. I was fine by 4:00. I went back to bed.

Good night.

[Last Post Tonight, Guaranteed] Something Guided Me Toward Random Images

(From a file in which I jot things in order to clear the hot, wet stew out of my head.)

Who are these Chinese people I’ve stumbled across? Why are two of them girls who are kissing? Not "why", as in, "This is morally wrong, I demand an explanation"; but "why", as in, "Why am I seeing this of all things?"

Photos of babies on a train, with Santa Claus, then a white woman.

Last: a series of ethnically diverse cheerleaders.

It means nothing to me. More bizarre images are there to be had, certainly. But it's not the superlative that reigns here. Not even the comparative has much say or sway. That image which appears before you, and holds you captivated regardless of how you feel about it or what you think of it, is the image that reigns.

Some Shit I've Learned Recently

1. The "Marriages and Births" section of the newspaper is a good place to find contemporary names (albeit many of them are a tad too trendy to be convincing)
2. The "Obituaries" section of the newspaper is a good place to find names which old people have and young people never seem to have.
3. The rapture is almost upon us, though there is no way to confirm this news until it happens.
4. The vacuum cleaner needs a new belt, as the worn-out belt, when the vacuum runs, produces a smell like burning plastic.
5. Writing is not as difficult as it used to be, but it still presents a formidable challenge.
6. The music of crickets in the middle of winter is continually, continually enchanting.
7. Insulin prices have risen by five dollars.
8. _______________. (What have we learned?)

Something as beautiful as snow that falls in a major intersection...

Part of the trick to observation, to honing the writer's eye, is to look at things with the same amazement and wonder as a young child. Look at things as though you were once again your four-year-old self, and the mystery of the world opens up to you. Look at things in this way, things like Christmas lights, and then imagine your four-year-old self trying to convince an adult how wonderful and beautiful those Christmas lights are. Back away from the sense of things. Look through reasons. Look past your adult understanding. Watch as your carbondated soft drink becomes a magical potion. Tremble and shiver when you hear the sound of a locomotive's air horn carrying across miles and miles of land, because the child in you is hearing something else, something unnatural, something monstrous, a horn--yes--a horn, and a call to war.

The End is Nigh!

Of the semester, I mean. . . .

Everywhere you go, people act out their holiday-induced neuroses through public spectacles. In stores children are screaming. At Wal-Mart the air is rife with burning indifference for your fellow man. But enough about that.

One of my purposes in life, I've discovered, is to understand what bizarre energy is at work in the fiction of Joy Williams. I have read each of her three story collections (Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest) and two of her novels (The Changeling and The Quick and the Dead). I cannot say I dislike any of it. Not one story would I qualify in a negative light. And I won't comment on The Changeling here (I don't think I could). But The Quick and the Dead merits further attention. What on earth is this novel doing? It seems to lack any plot. Or it has just enough plot to move. Enough plot, as John Edgar Wideman says, "to hang the meat from." I have read nothing else that is so utterly bizarre yet so completely engrossing.

My mind slipped. I forgot where I was going with this. More later.

Point of View Violations

The headline alone has an intimidating quality to it, but I wonder: perhaps this is the way to demonstrate point of view and perspective to undergrad writers.

Drei Katzen

Since folks enjoy pictures of cats so much, here are my three ingrates posing as if they care.

I have no title

A girl in Florida recently underwent a heart transplant. Before the operation, she survived for two months without a heart inside her body. The doctors kept her alive. Despite all the problems with the health and medical professions in this country (chiefly, the problems of for-profit service industry and insurance middlemen), the determination of those doctors to keep the girl alive, aware, conscious, with no heartbeat in her chest, while waiting for a viable donor heart, is nothing short of a gift.

***

Characters in stories are real, as real as movie actors, as real as commercial actors, as real as you and I in our day-to-day lives. Characters in stories suffer for a reason: so we can observe and say, "I'm glad my life's not that bad." By necessity, characters in stories suffer. They embody all aspects of our own actual existence so that we can experience our own flaws, failures, shortcomings, our own tiny moments of light, hope, success, and triumph through another's experience of them. In that way story characters are sacrificial, whether they are aware of it or not. By writing them, we give them life. By witnessing them, we share in the experience of that life.

Denken um denken

Think about thinking about this: research suggests that rats are capable of metacognition. I'd put money on cats having this ability too, but they're so calculating I'd probably lose.

Brilliance

Yes:

"The power of [writing] exercises depends on recognition of the value of teaching form, not 'expression.' I believe that unless and until reading and writing are taught together--and are taught together with discussion--there will be little chance that English departments will survive as anything but outposts of sociology. But teaching writing as a way of learning to read and reading closely as a model for careful writing is to guide students to the discovery of the powers of language: should that not be the chief mission of any and all English departments? . . . . Anyone we read with pleasure can help us to teach others to read with pleasure. If we do not aim for instruction and delight, those Horatian values will forever elude us."
(Ann E. Berthoff)

And this one, what brilliance:

"Read it as if it made sense and perhaps it will."
(I.A. Richards)

Process IV

Have you ever watched a cat play with a suction cup? Have you ever taken a shower with someone who had been mauled by a tiger? Have you ever felt exceedingly jealous of a person many years dead? [Albert Einstein watches over my office from the door and from the posterboard. Is it possible for a person alive today to feel jealousy toward Albert Einstein, for whatever reason, even though he has been dead since April 18, 1955?]
---
Some gems from the book Forming / Thinking / Writing: The Composing Imagination by Ann E. Berthoff.

"Having the capacity to understand means having the capacity to misunderstand."

"Language is not a set of pigeon holes into which we put things, ideas, feelings. We discover meanings in the process of working (and playing) with the means language provides."

"The aim of composing is not to tolerate chaos for its own sake but to learn to put up with it while you discover ways of emerging."

And a quote, by Mary Shelley, that the author uses: "Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it."

Syringes II, section 2

After I dig through my papers-to-recycle, I find two different package inserts, each from a different box of syringes.

I use a lot of syringes. I've done the math. Out of curiosity.

I'll examine the package inserts when I need to.
---
It's these "Syringe" poems, actually multiple drafts of the same poem, that I have come back to. Five pieces spread across time: 03-21-06 to 12-04-07.
---
Needle or syringe? Needle is the pointed tube at one end. Syringe is the body cavity numbered for measurement of dosage. It is overall a poor, if not rudimentary imitation of an instrument perfected by nature. Mosquitos have them. Jellyfish have them. Pit vipers and cobras have them. Scorpions have them. Stonefish have them. The animal kingdom bears needles at every turn. Needles are wielded. Here, there are no dosing instructions or trademarks.
---
"Instructions for use:

1. Wash hands and gather supplies. To expose plunger, twist white cap to break seal, then pull off.

2. Wipe top of insulin bottle with a BD™ Alcohol Swab. If you are taking cloudy insulin, roll the bottle between your hands until it is uniformly cloudy. Never shake a bottle of insulin.

3. To expose needle, twist orange cap, then pull straight off, being careful not to bend the needle or let needle touch anything.

That is the interesting part. Steps four through eight are rather tedious, businesslike, accounting and number-management.

---

These poems obsessed over form and left nothing at stake. They feature missiles, phalluses, and a fog of abstraction. I thought about this poem again, this was on Thursday. All those silly revisions. Allow Syringes to become another form. [This is what Process told me.] It wants to take another form. [I nodded, it made sense.] Give to it another form. [Okay. I will.]

---

I imagine a gun that shoots syringes as ammunition. A belt-fed fully automatic gun that de-caps and fires syringes, needles-first. There is no turn. It always goes toward images of warfare and violence.

Syringes II

Syringes as passive things. They are. They do nothing on their own, they have no agency, no motive power. They have no will, no desire, no need, no want. They are.

The syringe body contains air: a sterile body when manufactured to that effect. Sterility. A syringe never contains nothing. It is impossible for a syringe to contain nothing. It must contain something.
---
I like to gaze at my books from time to time. Usually when I work. I pause to think or to reflect, and I gaze at my books. Many of them I have not read, not yet.
---
Pharmacies sell syringes by the box: "Insulin Syringes / with the BD Ultra-Fine™ needle / 100 sterile single use syringes (10 packs)". [I wonder why "single use" is not hyphenated.] This is and is not poetry. It is not poetry to me because syringes serve a utilitarian purpose. I use syringes to inject insulin into my body. My pancreas cannot make insulin for some reason I do not know and at which I shrug. Insulin syringes are the type commonly used by heroin addicts and methamphetamine junkies to inject those compounds intravenously. (This, the act of pushing a needletip through your skin into a bulging vein, could not seem any more unpleasant an act, even as an act of mere imagination. I shake my head and clench my face in disgust.) The box in which the syringes are packaged says nothing regarding the syringes' possible misuse at the hands of drug addicts. The box lid flap asks politely, "For safe disposal of insulin syringes, please see package insert."

Process III

derange (verb): 1. To remove cattle or other livestock from open rangeland. 2. To remove open rangeland from beneath cattle or other livestock. 3. To keep your pets indoors. 4. To keep your busy hands to yourself. 5. To siphon jet fuel, thus limiting the range, in miles, that a jet is able to fly before crashing.

Is this "deconstruction" or is it simple, old-fashioned imagination? How would we like to hone our sense of words to a fine edge capable of severing nerves and tendons? Has anyone ever seen that stupid TV show on Spike wherein absurd theories are tested for the benefit of a male audience? Does it really take an ample demonstration to prove that silicon breast implants don't float whereas breasts do? All you need is an imagination though some encouragement helps.