.

www.poetryfoundation.org/archi...m.html : About My Very Tortured Friend, Peter -- Charles Bukowski

Howling again.

No, dammit! No time to howl today.
An assignment to finish
and a meeting with a client that might pay some bills.
Howling takes time I can't afford
and then there's the time it takes to return from there
and the possibility of no return
and the
and the
and the shimmering silver lure
of crisp cold air on bared skin
when I throw back my head
and expose my throat
and

No! No howling today!
Today is for doing what needs to be done;
being who I need to be
is on tomorrow's list.

No time for howling today.
I'll just explain why that is so,
turn my back
swallow the song
bow my head
sit on my hands
cross my ankles
and pray that the seams will hold.

Bigger cages! Longer chains!

... want ...

I like dyeing

Combines my kitchen witch and textile addict propensities very nicely. I like using natural dyes, but I'm not a stickler for it. I like using natural fabrics (which is good because synthetics don't dye easily). And I enjoy experimenting with a general idea in mind of what sort of effect I'm looking for, but no set finished product I'm aiming for :-)

Today's main project was "tea-dying" stuff with potential for costuming to be worn this weekend, only using coffee instead of tea. I noticed the results were a touch pinker than I'd like, so I decide to add just a pinch of yellow to the mix. Just a pinch, I swear! But it bit like a rabid rat. I don't like my chances of convincing anyone I know that a nice shade of sunshine would make a good costume. (Though, having said that, I do know people who are planning a Gleek "Halo / Walking on Sunshine" number... hmmm... wonder if their costuming's already organised?)

Some pieces have worked out a lot better :-)

Can William carry his razor in his knapsack?

jubal.westnet.com/hyperdisc...psack.html

[ no image for now - somehow, when I search for images of "razor" "knapsack", google thinks I'm interested in pubic hair styling ]

P is for perverse

I feel grateful for every moment that has brought me to this present one; but that doesn't stop me from disliking the painful parts.

Sometimes I think I'm too puny - that just being human makes one too puny - to contain both of those attitudes at once, but I notice that I just do, whether I believe I can or not.

The other day, in the shower, I tried to pat my head and rub my stomach. I noticed my right hand moved up to my head and my left hand to my stomach and I was doing it. It made me smile. Then I tried changing hands. It was funny to be running mental instructions to pat head, rub stomach, and notice that my hands were doing rub head, pat stomach. And I tried to concentrate hard and make it go right, until I decided that it couldn't be done, but I let my hands keep moving and at the very moment I was telling myself it was impossible, it started working.

Some people speak of sympathetic magic. I think I believe more in perverse magic.

Or paradox. Or some sublime multiplicity.

Mother tongue

www.youtube.com/watch

Barnsley is a few miles south of the area my parents were raised in, and a few miles makes a big difference in dialect, I'm told. Still, I didn't grow up IN the culture so much as with parents who constantly referenced it. That makes a significant difference to the way your ear is trained (or not trained) to recognise the finer nuances, and to me, this just sounds amazingly and weirdly familiar.

My mother recently visited family in the UK. I've never felt any great interest - it's not as if I know any of them. But she brought back copies of old photos. She's seen a photo of her mother for the first time. One of her brothers died a couple of years ago, and left a small box of photos with another brother. One of the photos was of their mother, who'd died when my mother was five. Until then, no-one else in the family even knew a photo existed. And at that moment at Mum's kitchen table with the family all looking at that only known photo, when everyone turned their heads to look at me and declared me the spitting image of my maternal grandmother... a sense of what it might be to have a family history... one that reaches back before my personal memory... it started... and it's been growing since.

I don't really know what to do with it. I've never had one before. Does it *do* anything? I wonder...

oh, frack...

5am, and I've been wakeful.

My (old, but don't tell her I said that) cat requested a night-time feast, then to go outside. So I left the door open a few inches for her - it's bitterly cold out there and I figured she'd want to be back in shortly. And I was right - but the first I knew of her return was hearing her "lost prey" vocalisation from the kitchen. *sheeeeeeeeeeee* I had a cursory look around in the area she was prowling/fixing her gaze, but it's still dark, and I didn't want to flood the room with bright light or start moving things around to check possible hiding places. There wasn't anything that looked like a mouse cowering in plain sight, though.

Then she had a spell of kittenish racing up and down the length of the house, culminating in her pouncing on a sewing project on the living room floor and batting it about making playing-with-small-rodent noises. There is no small rodent in the sewing project, so now I'm wondering if her earlier cries were feigned/hallucinatory, too... or if there was a real critter, and now that she's completely lost track of it she's making up the remainder of the hunt. *sigh*

I suppose I'll find out sometime in the next day or so...

But for now, I think I've had enough excitement to tire me out and I'm heading back to bed to grab another hour or two of sleep. Seems like that's what she's decided to do, too.

*yowzers!*

Chance Conversations: An Interview with Merce Cunningham and John Cage (half an hour)
www.youtube.com/watch

YouTube sucks!

They've actually done something good. But their timing is dreadful. Over the past couple of years they've degraded users' ability to post videos privately. Last time I needed to do that, I surmised it was an entrenched policy to keep content as public as possible. And that's their platform, so that's ok - I switched to Vimeo for hosting stuff I wanted to control the distribution of.

Today, I see: youtubeaublog.blogspot.com/2010....html - *aaarrrggghhh*

I think I'll stick with Vimeo now i've set up an account there. At least until yt have had time to demonstrate some stability with this option. But I wish they'd offered it a few weeks ago and saved me all that trouble...

In other news - I have my car back! *yippee*!

And there was something else I was planning to tell you, but I've forgotten so you'll have to wait until the memory patterns line up properly again.