in which I quote Monty Python at unneccessary length

CART MASTER:
Bring out yer dead!
CUSTOMER:
Here's one.
CART MASTER:
Ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
What?
CUSTOMER:
Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
'Ere. He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:
Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not!
CART MASTER:
He isn't?
CUSTOMER:
Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER:
No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
CART MASTER:
Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON:
I don't want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER:
Oh, don't be such a baby.
CART MASTER:
I can't take him.
DEAD PERSON:
I feel fine!
CUSTOMER:
Well, do us a favour.
CART MASTER:
I can't.
CUSTOMER:
Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
CART MASTER:
No, I've got to go to the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER:
Well, when's your next round?
CART MASTER:
Thursday.
DEAD PERSON:
I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER:
You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: [singing]
I feel happy. I feel happy.
[whop]
CUSTOMER:
Ah, thanks very much.
CART MASTER:
Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER:
Right. All right.

So I'm not dead yet, and neither is my blogging career, as it happens. I've been invited to be a guest blogger at Feministe for a week, which I find totally thrilling, a little scary, and completely inexplicably. But what the hell! I'll let you all know further details later.

I am, however, going to move this party over to Wordpress, and I'm considering a name change. "Left Angles" (obscure Ani reference), "Sacrilicious", and "Deconstruction Worker" are a few ideas I've got at the moment. But if you've got any preferences and ideas, drop 'em in the comments. Also, whoever sent Feministe my way, you rock so hard.

in which my vocabulary degenerates

[interrupting blog identity crisis]

Like, OMIFRICKINGAWD, what kind of supremely pathetic dork do you have to be to wear a "Ronald Reagan Presidential Library" t-shirt? Seriously? How incredibly lame is that? To wear your loser Republican idiocy with such...such...gah! Ludicrousness. I had to wait on a Ronald Reagan fan today. I can only assume my karmic books are slightly more balanced now (you hear me, universe? That was just mean. It was like some cosmic Candid Camera episode. The gods mock me.)

If there's a word to describe a combination of appalled disgust and disbelief that results in mournful hilarity, insert it here.

[now resuming blog identity crisis]

identity crisis

so, I'm thinking of turning this back into a book blog, which is what it was originally, and switching it from Blogger, maybe to wordpress.

I just feel like I need a narrower focus; which doesn't mean I won't talk about the same old stuff, but it will be centered around reading and literature and comics and stuff. Would I change the name? I don't know. Maybe.

Thoughts? I just feel like I'm rambling all over the place with no regularity or consistency, I don't know how anyone finds it readable. And I feel like I've outgrown blogger, and the form of this blog.

Postcards from Hippietown

• My boss/the cook speaks Pidgin (her daughter had diaper rash and so now I have two new vocabulary words to name "down there") and writes poetry.
• Everybody is psychic here, and some of them actually are the real deal. My coworker "Martha" can tell anybody's birthday with a glance, and predicts what kind of day we'll have: "Slow and steady all morning, and then we'll get a big rush around 1:30". And she's never wrong either. One of our regulars is clairaudient (so, she hears voices but isn't schizophrenic).
• Which is why the local joke is that this is the only town with 50,000 channels and no TVs.
• Elrond's (my roommate) boss decided to take a vow of silence based on a dream he had. Also, his driveway is haunted by a 16 year old Apache warrior; he was very, very upset with the messiness of the yard, so they cleaned it up for him.
• Everybody-but-everybody has a Sanskrit name here--Dakshina, Divyo, Shanti, Sukhama--but none of them are Indian.
• A drum-circle, suffused with sage and pot smoke, is considered a wild night on the town.
• Impromptu May-pole dances.
• "You have really great energy; maybe we had a soul-connection in a past life" is a ordinary reaction upon meeting a new acquaintence.
• "Manifest" is a transitive verb used in everyday conversation, as in "I'm manifesting new professional opportunities."
• There are four kinds of people here: American Indians, Hispanics, transplanted Europeans, and refugees from Minnesota winters.
• A normal Tuesday afternoon will find me at home, Ravi Shankar on the stereo, Superhit burning in front of the kitchen Buddha, and Elrond making miso soup and chanting with his mala beads.
• I no longer find any of this all that unusual. It's alternately fascinating and irritating.

warning: this is a soppy girlfriend post.

Love rode 1500 miles on a grey
hound bus & climbed in my window
one night to surprise both of us.
the pleasure of that sleepy
shock has lasted a decade
now or more because she is
always still doing it and I am
always still pleased. I do indeed like
aggressive women
who come half a continent
just for me; I am not saying that patience
is virtuous, Love
like anybody else, comes to those who
wait actively
and leave their windows open.
Judy Grahn

So, I guess they do have poems about long-distance lesbian relationships. Who knew?

Yes, this is an Anniversary Post, for the record. Because I met Winter a year ago tomorrow and I've been living out my own poem ever since. I get a kick out of the fact that the day I met her just happens to coincide with a major pagan holiday that's all about sex (Happy Beltane, everybody!) Heh.

Meeting her was a lot of Alix Olsen

and I’m sorry if you’re thinking that I knew what I was doing
I guess what I do best is look like I am in control
but tonight, tonight, I am a soft and untamed thing
and I will wrap my breath around you til your exhale comes clean.
I am checking my pulse
I am checking my pulse.

And then I wandered around Ireland, reciting Yeats to myself (Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled/And paced upon the mountains overhead/And hid his face amid a crowd of stars) and drowning my sorrows in little pubs.

Going home was every forlorn love poem you can think of.

Deciding we wanted to be together provoked, inexplicably, the Beatles. Not a great Romantic poet, or a classic Second-Wave dyke poet, no, I walked around for a week with "She Loves You" stuck in my head.

The past several months have been endless Adrienne Rich:

You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing
air.

And now, when we do manage to snatch some time together from every-day reality, I think of Olga Broumas:

...your red
lips suspect, unspeakable
liberties as
we cross the street, kissing
against the light, singing, This
is the woman I woke
from sleep,
the woman that woke
me sleeping.

Happy anniversary, Winter.