geographically challenged

I can't go anywhere without missing at least one turn in the directions, or going the wrong way, and I never, ever know which way is north, south, east or west. But! Big Brother has launched satellites, and Santa has given me a magic box, and now Big Brother and the magic box know where I am, how fast I am going, and how to get where I want to go! This is both genius and slightly terrifying, or at least paranoia-inducing.

I look forward to never being lost again. Truly.

Happy Holidays, yo!

outrageous

Just, I'm sputtering, this is so outrageous.



There is one organization fighting for women's reproductive health in Mississippi, and they are in need of an instant cash infusion. Please help if you can:

Planned Parenthood of Alabama (which also serves Mississippi)

Unearthed the sewing machine

...to make Morsbags, reusable shopping bags, which will serve as gift bags this xmas. My sewing skills, being unused for lo these many years, mean each bag takes more like an hour than 20 minutes, but mainly because every time I try to make a bobbin or thread the machine, it's like I'm reinventing the fucking wheel. Why can I not remember how to do it from one time to the next? I hope to bring down construction time with each new iteration. Perhaps one day, I will cross stitch witty sayings or initials or skulls-and-crossbones upon them, but for now, I'm lucky to turn 4 pieces of fabric and a mile of thread into something that holds other somethings. I'm also fortunate in that I inherited my Grandma's sewing supplies - ALL OF THEM - so not only do I have every sewing tool one could possibly need, I have at least three of them. Plus several bins of fabric. Take that, expensive gift bag industry! HaHA!

Herewith, Morsbag 1:



and Morsbag 2:

Bushco's Ugly Legacy

Part Eleventy Six Thousand:


From Black Mesa to the Western Shoshone's Mount Tenabo, the Bush extended corporation of thieves is seizing Indigenous lands in the final hours.

Upgrading the apparatus

People, I have made what I suspect is a life-changing home appliance purchase. First, the background. PoopMaster Ferris, the 9-year-old Siamese thug, has recently been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. As one might imagine, the weeks leading up to a diagnosis of feline IBS were fragrant in the extreme. Frankly, as a person not much inclined to cleaning, I was doing a lousy job of attending to the task at hand. Plus, my gag reflex is sensitive. Anyway. The recent regimen of antibiotics and steroids seemed to be working, until midday yesterday, when something apparently distressed his delicate GI system. This weekend's "pet messes" (as the cleaning industry so delicately refers to puddles of wretched stinking poop on my oriental rug) were absolutely soaked into the fibers. I dredged from my memory the recollection of an advertisement featuring a smiling blonde hausfrau in neatly pressed khakis (aren't they always?) happily toting around a Little Green Machine which appeared to suck up huge and horrific messes in an instant.

My friends, I hied myself to the Walmart, as I live in Buttcrack, Mississippi, and the only place one can find a vacuuming or cleaning device of any sort on a Sunday is the WalMart. I was determined to spend any amount of money up to and including the $200 currently in my checking account in order to avoid spending the evening on my knees trying to clean cat poop out of the carpet. I took a deep breath, plunged in, and purchased two - TWO - kinds of cat food in an effort to find one that does not cause the Beast's Bowel to be Irritable, and then I went to the vacuum aisle. Yes! Victory! A Bissell Little Green Machine, alleged to be "Green" as in eco-friendly, even. A bottle of pet-specific Bissell fluid was $20, but did I hesitate? I did not. The self-checkout revealed the $99.98 machine to, in fact, be on sale for $79.98, which I consider a sign that this, indeed, was the appliance for me.

I will pass over in silence the tedious details of cleaning, because, dear MAUDE, cleaning is boring, but I will summarize thus: in a short amount of time, with almost no effort on my part, my task was completed. The machine sits in the utility room, locked and loaded, ready for its next task. And I, my friends, will sleep a little easier tonight.

I love this barn.

Every time I drive past it, it cheers me up. Except for that one time, when it had a Haley Barbour sign on it. But then they took the sign down, and it is, again, a cheerful red barn.

thanks

thanks for the smallpox. thanks for the whiskey and the res. thanks for the boarding schools and the haircuts. thanks for forced relocations, the christianity, the dead languages. thanks for mount rushmore. thanks for the invisibility and the silence. thanks for erasing our grandmothers' names. thanks for the murder, rape, arson, and robbery. thanks for the lies. thanks for the genocide.

What I learned on Facebook this week

My friends are truly, madly, deeply nerdy. I knew this in a superficial way, but didn't see quite how nerdy they were until now.

Srsly. Nerds.

repetitive

i keep dating the same guy, over and over, and he is an emotional teenager. i've given up, quit cold turkey, but i keep being reminded of that guy. the guy with the bad habits, the dark hair, the jokes he tells over and over and over again, getting huffy if people don't think they're funny the thousandth time. the guy who reads a lot, isn't ambitious, in fact lacks anything resembling a career, he likes scifi and fantasy, he's liberal and non-religious but, alas, completely unaware of his male privilege. he, like me, has working class origins although a middle-class-ish childhood. have i mentioned his bad habits and his bad jokes? his narcissistic self-doubt? i don't know who he is but i dated versions of him for almost twenty years before i learned to spot him, and now i see him, my spidey-sense tingles and ah, yes, i say, here comes trouble. there's another one. that guy. i wish he'd grow up, give up his bad habits, because he and i, we'd get along like a house afire if only... if only he was a completely different person. one without bad habits and the emotional depth of a teaspoon. yeah. then he wouldn't be that guy any more.

summer's past: gladiola

What I will be doing this holiday weekend

Visiting as many of the Prospect.1 sites in New Orleans as I can manage.

More info here:

Prospect.1


And a review in the New Yorker here:

Peter Schjeldahl

migraine again today

Outdoor kitties plus painting in progress:



That would be Polished Silver, a Valspar color, color-matched in Benjamin Moore Aura paint, which is truly amazing and wonderful stuff, on the walls. It's low-VOC so it's not stinky, covers beautifully, and goes on like buttah. Seriously, painting with a nice creamy paint really does help. I'm in the process of painting the woodwork Cloud White, also in Aura.

The larger black cat (at right) is Nigel's littermate; the other three are Mama Kitty's younger litter. Mama Kitty kind of comes and goes, but she made sure to take off for a good long time when the babies were juuuuust young enough that I felt bad about not feeding them. Well, it was either feed them, or come home to a dead bird on the deck every day. So they line up in the window for breakfast.

fall window

random

Every time I check the email in my spam filter, I feel as though I am sexually harassing myself.

I woke up to a migraine today because I turned on the flourescent lights in my office yesterday.

disarray

since Gustav and the ceiling leak, the disarray has crept through-out the house, furniture moved out of the living room into study, dining room, then crept slowly back, a sofa, a tv, a recliner, a stepstool used as coffee table. baseboards and windows need painting, but i hate painting windows, blinds need replacing from kitten destruction. am i staying or moving? i lie in bed with lists, ever never ending lists running through my mind: paint molding, measure, buy, and hang blinds, clean wax off floor, move furniture, wonder where the mystery pisser has struck in the office, dishes to do, furniture to repair, rugs clean, hang curtains, sew buttons, dry cleaning, send transcripts, choose textbooks, shit I owe j. a phone call and need to call i. as well, check facebook, check forum, balance checkbook, repaint molding and clean windows, blinds in office, blinds in bedroom, all destroyed by cat claw chaos. mystery shitter leaving piles here and there, 2 or 3 days a week, is some feline or other ill or just angry at the disorder? i just want: i want to cook a meal, and sit at a table, with a placemat, and a napkin, and a glass of iced tea, and have a quiet meal. but the disarray is on the dining table too. and the last thing i want to do when i get home is change into painting clothes and have at a thousand little window cross-bars with the cutting-in brush, then do the dishes so i can wash the brush, then clean the catboxes - again, so i check email and myspace and facebook and apartment therapy (which, maude knows, i need desperately), and put out the trash and then lie in bed again at night thinking: tomorrow I will paint, and then the next day paint, and then move everything back into the living room, and the disorder will recede, and then i will be able to sleep at night.

disappointed

"promise not to tell anyone," i said, and he did. he promised. and then he told and what's worse, forgot to tell that the thing he was telling was a secret, and so it wasn't a secret any more. i don't want to lie to my friends but if they can't keep my confidence what then? are they not friends, or friends i lie to? neither suits me. neither pleases me. i'm disappointed by him, and not for the first time.

flew

to the middle of North Carolina on two small planes, fifty-seaters, the one to Memphis just fine but the one to Greensboro bumpy. turbulence is my kryptonite, adrenaline pumps open wide the nanosecond my stomach swoops in free fall. thankfully the klonopin shuts them back down after momentary panic, without it they stay wide open and i am virtually incapacitated the rest of the flight.

people in airports, they clutch their cell phones like lifelines: to email, voicemail, family, work, a ride home. nobody puts them away in pocket or bag, me included, I'm plugged into mine, listening to wilco's lament, sunglasses on, hiding in plain sight. half the riders open up their cells the minute we land and permission is given, all saying one thing: "we've landed, we're on the ground, see you soon."

yes we did

Loving these: Arthur Wesley Dow prints

I have got a giant case of WANT:




Arthur Wesley Dow
Snowy Peak, Los Angeles, about 1912
Color linocut
3 9/16 x 5 13/16 in. [462-1]

This is one of a whole series of fantastic little woodcuts and linocuts in a current Hirschl and Adler exhibition. Inspired by Japanese Edo period woodblock prints, but simplified, at a smaller scale, more intimate. More hand-made feeling, you know? Also, I love that this is Los Angeles. I mean, really: L.A.? Used to look like that? Who knew? It wasn't even all that terribly long ago. And the shrubberies, they kind of look like centipedes, so I get this kind of visual bounce back & forth from alien-looking wormy things meandering across the landscape to these homely little chubby shrubberies.

Go, look at all of them:


Along Ipswich River: Color-prints by Arthur Wesley Dow