"telephone's ringin, it's your second cousin"

madeleine peyroux - looking for the heart of saturday night

so pick your risk and take it la la

from :11-:12.5, the look on her face ["What the?!"; "Wow that was quick."; "Welp, at least it was quick."; "I'll take the lil' bundle of dopamine, you can have the assholic personality."; "Do Over!!" . . . ]

"The Body's Only Rental," Katie Dill- like this

At New Years "best songs of the year" lists get posted all over. An upside to the crap cold time of year, I spose. Another selection: Jesse Malin - NY Nights (high rec, I'm listening to this again, it's catchy)

the day after christmas is when winter becomes pointless. from this day forward, I will Want spring with Mounting Disquiet

Justin Nozuka - Down in a Cold Dirty Well

In July, the sale on Lego Bionicle castles with a buttgillion pieces looked like a really fantastic deal. I swear there must be some douchenozzle in China who’s in charge of leaving out 3 crucial pieces per box.

for virgo this week: The desert-dwelling creosote bush can survive for centuries on little water. In the Mohave Desert there is a ring of creosote, named "King Clone," whose age has been carbon-dated at 11,700 years. The hardiness of this low-maintenance wonder reminds me of you, Virgo. You sometimes entertain the fantasy that the less you need, the stronger you'll be. The downside of this attitude is that you may unwittingly make it hard for people to give you their gifts. The upside is that you've learned many secrets about how to nurture and take care of yourself. But in 2008, I foresee you making a shift away from the creosote bush metaphor. You're more likely to resemble a tomato bush that gets watered regularly. (o brother)

[Bush: 1. The only presendent of the United States of America to be all most assassinated by a pretzil. see dumbass
Oh my god he must be a dumb fuck!!!
Tomato: 1. A term used to describe someone who is denial of his homosexuality...because even though you think a tomato is a vegetable, it's really a "fruit" 2. A sexy curvacious woman, usually dressed in a manner that invites men to try and fuck her]

self help reading + [more] music

"You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how."
- Gone With the Wind [Rhett Butler]

for virgo today: There is a huge amount of Earth energy in the air today and you will spend this Christmas Day feeling content, secure and positively grounded. That special person in your life will be only too happy to enhance your mood. A very romantic surprise should be in store!

jose gonzalez - fold
a voice you can curl against, sleepless - love this guy
feist - the park

meg baird – do what you gotta do
sue foley – make me a pallet on your floor
joy denalane – be real

"he asked for a discharge without conviction"

"I Must Be In A Good Place Now," Bobby Charles. We got a tree, a little blue spruce that my small spot in the world makes appear larger - you could see its self-esteem rising as we lit it up. The neighborhood birds have just found Doug's feeder, which I hung outside the window in back of where the tree sits. They're swirling around, looking through the window at the purple ornaments, and gold lights, and one black ribbon. I could win the lottery without batting an eyelash I am very certain, but this ounce of sweetness stuff takes my breath away.

La la la La la la . I can’t help it playliiist:

Tony Bennett: Chestnuts Roasting

Dean Martin: Baby It’s Cold Outside (w Doris Day)

Dean again: Let it Snow Let it Snow la la la

Bing Crosby – Dreaming of a White Christmas

Marilyn Monroe – Santa Baby (link removed)

Frank Sinatra – Have Yourself a Merry Little Xmas (next year all our troubles will be miles awayyyy la la la)

for virgo this week: "Life is a punishment," wrote poet Robert Frost. "All we can contribute to it is gracefulness in taking the punishment." That's the opposite of my philosophy. I say life is a miraculous gift, and the best way to express our gratitude is to be fountains of generosity. Where do you stand on the issue, Virgo? Even if you've had a view like Frost's up to this point in your journey, I think you'll have good reasons to convert to my perspective in 2008. You will, of course, have to be open to that possibility in order for it to happen. If you're addicted to believing that life is punishment, you'll miss a flood of clues contradicting that quaint notion.

from bro-in-law this trip: arshkavey, which is German for "tramp stamp" and translates literally as "butt antler" for its customary shape, plus douchenozzle (as an insult, like dickhead [only better, obviously])

+ life's a punishment - are there any of double-amputees trying to jerk-off (?) I wonder, cz it seems like there are plenty enough douchenozzles in the world slated for unfortunate reincarnations to make such a category logical enough ; that dog looks like a guy who took his lover for granted in his last life, no?

last fish he ever caught

I dragged ass bouncing through Detroit home – I hate that trip, 6 hours just to take two 40-minute flights, stinky airplane air bluck—wondering how mourning works exactly. I mean, I get grief. But that's not the same thing. And I'm not sure what the difference is. My grandfather was one of those "greatest generation" guys who, thus, got the honor guard, the flag thing, the soldier salute part, the (free!- God, my people do love anything that's free) tombstone from the government, and this seemed to help a lot. It was as if the whole world stopped with us for a minute and also noticed that he had died. And the baby, she helps - funny stories about my boys, the new puppy-maybe, etc etc etc helped turn my mother's mind "to the living" as she put it. Even my grandmother, she went down the hall to have dinner in the dining room for the first time (they stayed alone together ALWAYS in their room) and took a seat amidst the ladies - she chews shyly, looking with poised hostility left and right lest one of the other widows says something stupid or starts talking about tatting or something that'll make her head pop off annoyed. She looks a hell of a lot like TJ in kindergarten, big time.

In the end, it was just as my sister said, they were instructed to tell him it was okay to go, and they sooo couldn't, not one of them - my mother HOWLED no no NO! (Santa is an asshole, NO!) by her own description. When they bundled g-ma up and "hauled her ass over there", she did it. She told him (not unkindly, but certainly not howling), "Go on Doug, I'll be along in a little bit", and he nodded like O Okay and then went to sleep.

The hospice people also told my mother to cut his hair off, bc often people want that later. My mom tells me this, sitting at my sis's this morning, we're drinking tea and I ask, "What's in this envelope?" on the table, and she tells me it's his hair and I can't help it, I say "Why the hell would anyone want that?!" She says, "That's exactly what your grandmother said." (lol) Well?? People who were Victorians kept lockets of hair, she says. (pause) (LOL) Are you a Victorian?? We start laughing and she's crying but we can't stop laughing. I laugh until I'm snorting, THAT IS SO GROSS!! Then we sober up and she says, Well you might want that sort of thing ya never know. (LOL) And we're off again giggling like hell, Geod No mom I will never want to pet your corpse hair -Do you want me to pet your head NOW?, cz that'd be okay I guess. (I pet her.) Laughing and laughing, while she cries off and on. And I think hmmmm: Mourning. I suspect that mourning will be one of those things that will turn out I had no clue how to do in any normal way, so I'll have to wing it totally.

Now I’m home, and feel like I am walking travel-crud. I’m gonna take a long hot bath in my deep old tub with one of those ugly oatmeal deals, water the plants, make a shopping list, wrap some presents, hope FPH can show up as planned and haul an xmas tree or maybe just lay around whatever, and as I think about that I’ll imagine(smell) a pine tree and I’m going to feel relatively glad to not be dead at all. So far, mourning feels very specific to the person who is missing, who in this case was the happiest person to catch a fish or to see a cardinal on a birdfeeder (every time) ever. Like a dream you wake from and can't remember except that it was good. Like a sentence fragment. An evocative inherently incomplete thought.

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," Charlie Haden, Hank Jones

she's at the separation anxiety stage (who isn't!? [no seriously]), and since I'm the only person who leaves for weeks at a time, when I leave the room she goes bonkerinos WAAA! - if she could email me a buttgillion times a day, she totally would

For Virgo this week: At Free Will Astrology, we love to turn things upside-down and inside-out every now and then. It keeps our mental hygiene sparkling clean, and yours, too. This week, in order to incite a purifying ruckus, we're offering you a challenge from psychologist James Hillman. Please suck the following thoughts into the deepest recesses of your understanding, and enjoy the brainstorms they detonate: "By accepting the idea that you are the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, you reduce yourself to a result. The more your life is accounted for by what already occurred in your chromosomes, by what your parents did or didn't do, and by your early years now long past, the more your biography is the story of a victim." What I'm trying to tell you, Virgo, is that it's a fine time to rebel against your genetic heritage, your upbringing, and your conditioning. Imagine a life for yourself in which you don't believe that those factors control what you're capable of.

Sometimes they are the only [right] choice, but I’m not fond of upheavals at all – they’re a Big Wedgie. It has been a hell of a week. Burst into tears like a kid who very much does not want to sit on Santa’s lap, no no NO get offa me.

The person who is writing this is sheltering another person who thinks Santa looks like some kind of weird scary asshole (NO!) and who sleeps with one eye open so that she can keep hold of her pet hamster at the same time (ALL NIGHT - and they're nocturnal, so that's no easy feat lemme tell ya) etc. . . . . I keep telling her "everything is OKAY” but when she's shaken she stares back at me, suspicious and skittish, clutching her psychic hamster close. I just have to wait her out.

Chris Smithers - Killing the Blues
Allison Kraus & Robert Plant - Killing the Blues [I still like the Colvin best but I lost it along the way - always love that song, just about at "I am guilty"]

(?)

Anarchy is an expression of insupportable pain and/or Total Bullshit. [thus]Rule/Principle: I like what I Know (as long as it doesn’t Utterly Suck).


Last night my tv blew. Right in the middle of “House”, which the boys and I watch on Monday nights at 8 p.m. and they ask all sorts of questions about anatomical disease and at the commercial breaks assert “He’s Going To Figure It Out!!”, yes yes, and then kerplunk. We stare at the blankness. What the?? We press the buttons. We stare. We give up and wander away from the television as if it has died on the Trail of Tears and there’s nothing to do but move on.

We spent this evening pretending it has always been this way, reading books they got at the book fair this week at school and Doing Whatever.

Then Ears says, We could try whip cream.
Whip cream?
Yeah, I’ve never tried it.
You’ve never had whipped cream, seriously?
No, really – have you ever served me whipped cream on anything?
(I think about it)– Well no, I haven’t – what about like at the ice cream parlor?
I always get cones, don’t I?
Yes. Huh.
(So we go to Wilson Farms and buy whipped cream and I make Ovaltine and warm it up and spray it on there and we drink it.)
This isn’t so bad!, says Ears.



There is a Rule/Principle lying around here somewhere nearby, and I’m looking for it. Is it
[upgrade: . . . what I know, as long as it's Pretty Good/(undefined potential)] .? It's something about setting the bar higher than "Doesn't Utterly Suck" without tripping over into chaos (which Sucks).

Feist--"It's Cool to Love Your Family"

Baden Powell - Consolação

woe is me

FaintedInk posted that image on her blog and for some reason it totally cracked me up. So I decided to break silence, I spose: Doug’s gone. I don't have a soundtrack or anything to add.

I usually haven’t really gotten poetry at all
Not any one poem
The whole thing in general
I am supposed to understand it
I am supposed to like it
There are a lot of things I was supposed to have.
If you can’t get from one end of a sentence to the other then FUCK! is the place where it broke down, trying to make sense, and then I guess if you keep writing anyway you fill up the FUCK! hole with lettuce, and that’s poetry
Or there is a poem about a bluebird
Or whatever
In which case, why? As in leg warmers and breakfast sausage that takes like fish – WHY? Why do that?
If you don’t know where to put commas, then express yourself in some other way.
And stay out of language.
I preferred, in retrospect, his craggy hands smokey smell to anything he said, but
If I hadn’t been too stupid for too long, I would have
Asked him the secret before we ran out of time:
How were you always so happy?
Like to see me?

"Like You'll Never See Me Again," Alicia Keys

Nothing bad happened again today.

Kings of Convenience w/ Feist – Know How

Anybody got any talent at 3rd grade math? Because, um, I think I flunked that or scammed my way out of it or something:

My greatest digit is a 9, but I’m less than 900. I’m 1 more than a multiple of 10, and the sum of my digits is 12. What number am I?

[I have no fucking idea whatsoever.]

bruce springstein - pink cadillac
I love this song today for some reason, I dunno.

post-thanksgiving

Alls I did was run, nap, and vacuum out my laptop keyboard. This thing has seen a lot of wee morning toast, and it is nice to have the g and a keys back without bang-banging them, but it’s hard to really call that a WORKday.

Snow Patrol guy and Damien Rice girl :
Gary Lightbody and Lisa Hannigan: Some Surprise

Lenny Kravitz – Can’t Get You Off My Mind

Eddie Vedder - Hard Sun This is from the Into the Wild soundtrack (book by Jon Krakauer):

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal – that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. But they are the highest reality . . . The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indestructible as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of a rainbow which I have clutched. Thoreau-"Walden, or Life in the Woods"

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one—that my body might—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The SOLID earth! The ACTUAL world! The COMMON sense! Contact! Contact! WHO are we? WHERE are we? Thoreau-"Ktaadn"

bonus track from DmS : "Always Be My Baby," Mariah Carey [the mood-name you’re looking for is girly(?)]

over the rhine – trouble

Thievery Corporation - The State of the Union

xmas shopping

st. germain - sure thing

Nine Inch Nails - God Given (Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert)

"Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter," Nina Simone

don’t be a stranger – perfect problem repost

pearl jam - better man [acoustic]

jeff tweedy - simple twist of fate

"Sweetness," The Waifs

They save his life once an hour, she says. Jacking him w adrenalin and a breathing machine until the blood pressure hits the point at which it’s safe to give him more morphine. Repeat. He’s 89. I remember him solid like a little wall of a person, with hands like old growth root tangles. (Stop.)

I tell her I’ll send a box full of the jams he likes, and I do send it. Why not?

My sister says, Ma you should tell him everything is okay, that We Will All Be Okay. My mom hangs up on her.

And you feel like such a traitor, every time, bc he does come back and then you take the baby for a visit and he pets her fat arm and he knows enough to know he likes that a lot. And if they had stopped dragging him back, then he’d not have seen the baby. So you’re an asshole.

Still (I'll prolly eat my words but) it seems having oxygen blown down your throat and 20 drugs (AT LEAST omg) running through your system forcing your heart to beat with your children by your bedside sobbing DON’T GO!!!! is not a pleasant way to go. Absolutely nothing is more unnerving than your child in tears and in pain. That puts me in the highest state of distress that I ever get in. To die in that state seems like the exact opposite of what I’d hope for, i.e. I’d prefer not ever to be in a state of annoyed terror but especially not if I’m trying to concentrate on something as big as dying. (FYI, when I get ready to die, do not tell me THEN that you love me so much your eyeballs are gonna melt outa your head – speak now.)

My sister says hell maybe they’ll figure out how to taxidermy him with a heartbeat and we’ll see him at Christmas. (We laugh like assholes.)

Otherwise it was a really nice day. It was warm and rainy and I canceled class in the afternoon and did some xmas shopping online and felt good to be alive. I miss my grandparents. I wish they were still alive and not nothingbutsuffering, and that I could visit them and sew with my grandma while Doug fried eggs over hard. He was always laughing.

"The Way I Am," Ingrid Michaelson

riding to K-mart for an Icee

Everyone says a funeral in Chicago for Thanksgiving dinner is in the offing . . . we’ll see. I can’t, literally can’t, find a reaction . . . I used to think that you were alive a long time, then old (odd/annoying/amusing/inspiring/achey), then dead. But some people spend a long time at DYING, which is a very different thing than either old or dead. And it’s so absorbing in its way that it obliterates the aging process and it also makes death itself so remote that, really, it’s like planet death – you know it’s out there, maybe you should even be planning for it, but then again how could/would you anyway except to try in a general way not be an asshole cz life’s short(?)

I dunno how I’m gonna feel when it becomes a real fact. Some kind of really lousy. They, my grandma in particular, always thought I was fantastic, the wonderful one, most able and most blessed, as if all the others were good too but watered down kinda. My sister still resents it, and I don’t blame her. It was very important to me to have their expectations bolstering my own, otherwise I would have expected a whole lot less. Even when I was miserable, deep down I expected to be happy and was pissed that I wasn’t and kicked up dust making a fuss to get the story back on track. Then I’d visit them and tell them all about it and they’d say ‘That’a Girl!’ It’s not that they expected me to “be a doctor” or any specific thing, they just always said “that one will be blessed”, and so when I wasn’t I felt as if surely there must be some mistake(!) I’d get back in the line of life and foot-tap-tap, honing my re-application argument, armscrossy.

The Aliens - Robot Man (Hot Chip remix)

ANA CAROLINA E SEU JORGE - É ISSO AI

[who'll be my role model?]

"You Can Call Me Al," Jens Lekman

the dog got a bun. huh. what makes him think, I wonder, that marrying a dog wouldn't be as bad as stoning one? I mean, I don't mean to be crude whatever, but I have a feeling the bitch doesn't see the wedding night coming and might damn well curse him, eh?

(I really should be working, I am working, but grumpily and with stupidity thrown in outa spite.)

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper) -Six Figure Transatlantic

pissed (and pissed some more)

very long day. very tired. will sleep a bit then bounce arino.

Tom Waits — Straydog
Tom Waits — Walk Away

The studio owner emailed me. I went. He didn’t have insurance, lost everything. Like the Amish, they don’t believe in insurance. For the ones who can’t not, the practices will resume in his home, which turns out to be an artist loft one-room typa deal – the BMW I thought was his belongs to a doctor who rented space in the church too – that he shares with one of the instructors. We went to see alternative rental spaces for the new studio. I’m not sure what this will mean. I have the feeling it will mean something.

He was smiling. I thought that was kind of . . . I dunno, kind of mostly admirable and a bit nutso. He/they, the rest of “us”, really and truly believe the mantras: that one has nothing to lose because one came into the world with nothing. The only thing that is real to them is themselves, and the self is fleeting besides. Ultimately their own selves are their works of art, but sand art, not to be clung to [in fear]. (pause) Indifference is part of despondence which is hopelessness which is a NO NO for me too much to unclench. I can’t get to relinquishment of clinging to life and to things I love. I want to want to . . . but end up wanting to build a house more hahah :/

The Twilight Singers (w Mark Lanegan) - Live with me (Massive Attack cover)

good enough is not good enough

I don’t want to merely survive (a "survivor" is a bar-set-too-low category, hrrmph) - I want to thrive. In relationships that are solid, mindful and safe. In works that feel purposeful. In some way better than I started before each kick in the face. What really kicked me about the fire is the loss of those people. The owner, the ex-Marine with the PTSD body like a box of rocks he’s been re-mastering for years, and the instructor who went through the windshield of his car and at 24 years old has had to re-learn to walk already as one of his lifetimes . . . all those people who were concentrating too.

But. If I’m standing in shit, I don’t feel like sitting down much. So I went out to the bale site and made clay slip and then plaster all day long and practiced how to trowel and had coffee with Bale-D and the pastor, both of whom are on their 2^nd or 3^rd lives of what they expect to be a pile of them. Like the yoga people, they talk about their lives like they would about a house they’re building, and swear at it when something doesn’t work right and re-arrange it endlessly and grunt and shove at it. And like the work. Mostly. Or try to anyway.

I can’t say as I ended up “la la la if at first you don’t succeed” these last few days – I was and am pissed as hell that I have to sustain any more losses and get around another impasse as I try to get to some kinda HEA (Happily ever After). But when we couldn’t find the comb I scored plaster with my fingernails:

It's gotten another coat since this pic, and the corners are being built up to taper at the top, and those are pagoda-style trough gutters made of wood - I'm not sure how those carry the water properly, but I'm scheduled for carpentry this coming weekend so I guess I'll find out.

p.s. Doug's eating, not much but he can't resist KFC entirely.

janis joplin - maybe
(yee ha)

Raul Midón - Pick Somebody Up (high rec)
video: (Windows) (Quicktime) (Real)
World Within a World (buy) ; Web

state of mind:

yesterday I found out my grandpa is refusing to eat, a couple days now, and my high-strung mother is with him flipping out . . . so I got up early, thought about how endlessly cheerful my grandpa has always been, set my mind to hold steady, and dressed for church(s), i.e. the studio and then a candle - but when I got there, I found that the yoga studio burnt to the ground yesterday, taking the entire landmark Elmwood church that housed it down to ashes

self help reading + music

A world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering --This is surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief, and it is one that continually troubles religious believers. One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity. Interestingly, science is of some assistance in this regard. Its understanding of how the world works shows that natural processes are inextricably entangled with each other. They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal. For example, the process of genetic mutation produced new forms of life, but it has also resulted in malignancy. You cannot have the one without the other . . . Why are there not repeated divine interventions to avert evil consequences? Because such things could only happen in a magical world, and that kind of world is not this one, because its creator is not a capricious magician. Only a world with sufficient reliability for deeds to have foreseeable consequences could be one in which moral responsibility was exercised. These insights do not dispose of all the anguish and anger that we feel in the face of individual human suffering, but they suggest that it is not simply gratuitous, easily removed by a God who was a bit less callous.


-from “One of the Hosts”, John Polkinghorne

"If I Lie Down," Aloha
"If I Ain't Got You," Alicia Keys

(omg) – standing around making ‘do you want to touch my boobies?’ faces for a living is painful-looking, truly, as if someone should call in a humanitarian effort to put an end to the horror

davy jones - personal penguin (moo ba lalala)

long day

Benny Bentall - A Man Is (web)

I spent the day out at the bale house. So far I’ve learned about drain tiling and conduit wiring and two methods of wall construction (stud and bamboo, stud and string lattice) and practiced one of the methods on my own, the latter, in which you pack the bales overtight then lattice them into place then cut the cords and they expand the one inch or so to make a solid wall. And I learned how they make the rounded windowsills, which involves lathe around a curved particleboard frame stuffed with clay-tossed straw (I finished off three of those today). I’m starting to think of keeping closer track of all these details and if I wind up actually building one of these at some point some kinda way, or something something, I could add up the route I took and write about it.

So far two main things stand out about this experience: 1. the environmentalism implicit in every choice that would result in the construction methods, including the aspect of communal labor and 2. the communal aspect of communal labor. Social situations are not my strength. The only thing I’m good for in a social situation is observation. If what you want is an outsider on your insides, I’m your girl. Otherwise, the smallest exchanges can fill me with unease, and I mix my animal metaphors, and wind up looking like this right before I head for cover. But if there’s a TASK involved, that helps a lot, and if the task is PURPOSEFUL that’s even better. Plus this is a church not a bar we’re talking about, Church of Christ Something Liberal, and definitely NOT into proselytizing about anything other than environmental and social issues. They quietly added me to the “many hands make light labor” email list and left it at that. That all suits me very well. It’s like an Amish barn raising (ish).

[I like quiet work.]





Then it was Halloween of course. There was only one punkin, so the compromise was three eyes and two mouths.

I had one too many conversations with myself throwing my own voice for the other part, conversations in which I had shit-canned myself, and then I didn’t want to talk to any of you sons of bitches any more Playlist:

Nina Simone - Love Me Or Leave Me

Josh Ritter – Come and Find Me

Snow Patrol – You Could Be Happy

The Killers – My List

The Blow – True Affection

self-help reading + music

Spinoza conceives of “God or Nature” and its relations to the “finite modes” (that is, the ordinary finite things of everyday life, such as rocks, tables, trees, animals and human beings.) The first is the standard interpretation, according to which God-or-Nature is nothing less than the whole of reality, on which ordinary finite things (“finite modes”) depend as states of qualities that it produces in itself. . . Spinoza defined “religion” as “whatever we desire and do of which are he cause insofar as we have the idea of God, or insofar as we know God.” While not a person, not purposive, and not transcendent, his God is nevertheless the omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, blessed and necessarily existing cause of all things. There is indeed an appropriate attitude to hold towards God, in his view: not worshipful awe, but rather the pure “intellectual love of God” of which many theologians have written as the soul’s highest good. In Spinoza’s revisionary understanding of it, however, all knowledge is ultimately knowledge “of God”, and so intellectual love of God is the final affective result of any fully adequate rational understanding (of anything) whatsoever.

-from “All Necessarily So: Spinoza’s Ethics” Don Garret (TLS review)

"Wolf Among Wolves," Bonnie Prince Billy

self-help reading + music

A girl cries. Her father beats her, convinces her she’s dumb.
She’ll land back on that cave of herself again
And again for the rest of her life. So many are like mythical creatures
Blindly returning to tackle whatever invisible monsters
Brought them down so long ago in the Trauma Caves.
Maybe the greatest wonder of wonders
Of being alive – the lake like a glittering shield,
The leaves turning to tangerine, gold, ruby
And so infinitely on – is we have not, as yet, undone our world.

"The Wonder of Wonders", Greg Delanty

"100 Days, 100 Nights," Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings

dontcha wish you had patented this?

Cowboy Junkies - Cutting Board Blues

"They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That's a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok."

It was a beautiful day here, probably the last before my ass is cold til May. So I plucked the boys outa school and took them to the country out through Albion to Lake Ontario, apple picking and walking around the closed beach-front shops. The colors are a little over-ripe, but still good. They loved the picking part, especially Ears, who kept picking and picking and saying “I like quiet work, I like the quiet here, I like this because it’s quiet” until I had about 80 pounds of crispins, grannies, and idareds to find recipes for. Then maple ice cream before heading home. Through it all, I was inexplicably anxious – not so as you could tell, just under the ribcage like a mouse running around in a cabinet inside of a tidy-looking house, making little scratching noises. I wish I could tell the bouts of pointless anxiety from the bouts of intuition.

I think talking to my grandmother this morning [in hospital w pneumonia again], listening to her speak in short words with a suck on an oxygen machine between each one as she tried to get out “thank breath for breath the breath books breath I breath love breath you . . .”, and the ominous sounding horoscope got hooks into me that I just couldn’t wiggle entirely free from.

for virgo today : Now is the best time for you to check in with the powers that be. - After months or even years of going back and forth in a relationship, you will reach a major turning point, thanks to a revelation, today. Sometimes things come to an abrupt ending, while other times they just slowly fade away. Certain truths are starting to become too obvious to ignore -- so you will have to stop ignoring them. Until you see things as they truly are, you can't move forward and give your full attention to someone who is much more deserving of your time.



don’t be a stranger – perfect problem

the Harlem Experiment House Band - One for Jackie : The Harlem Experiment