In Xanadu did Khubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man-
Down to a sunless sea.
Hi, hi. I was trying to find information on Pliny the Younger’s garden yesterday, and one description made me feel that Coleridge must surely have visited. Maybe he took a jaunt up to Tuscany while he was acting as a British spy for his Majesty on the island of Malta. (true)
Poets- you read a poet you really like, they’re sort of a messed up lot. It’s weird how a person can act as a divining rod for universal truth, and put that down for posterity with such boldness and authority, but then be such a doofus in their personal life.
Well, look at them. Shakespeare- Shakespeare married a woman much older than him and essentially left her to go play theater, and- (speculatively) paw young men.
Emily Dickinson could not entice herself, most days, to leave the house.
Richard Brautigan got fried 12 times (’electroconvulsive therapy’) essentially for throwing a rock through a police station window. He tried marriage a couple times, but it didn’t take. He ended up living alone for a time, and then shooting himself in the head. No one discovered his body for over a month.
Samuel Coleridge? His portrait belies a certain weakness in the mouth. The Albatross was probably an apt personal metaphor. He early married a woman he didn’t love, and seemed to spend a lifetime disappointing the family they created together. He took turns trying to make good and send support to his family, and lapsing into laudanum soaked reveries of scholarly exploration, poverty and retreat. His appearance was so haggard on one occasion, that Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy actually mentioned how shocked she was in one of her letters to William, who was a poet/friend (temporarily) to Coleridge.
Why do so many writers, poets especially, seem to struggle so much with basic, everyday life: Marriage, work, and personal relationships? It seems that sensitivity which can inform amazing poetry doesn’t serve a person positively in other arenas. Taken through this lens, Thoreau’s Walden is one big, beautiful excuse written by a man who really couldn’t handle the daily tow.
I don’t really want to focus on the suicidal ones. Just the overall trend of botchedness- does it say something profound about human nature that those individuals most able to discern and translate it with clarity are the least likely to be able to tolerate it?
These are just mumblings and musings. I found a little passage in one of Barbara Kingsolver’s essays which I will leave off with, because the perfection of her metaphor caught my fancy:
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the race,” Percy Shelley said. They are also its margin of safety, like the canaries that used to be carried into mines because of their sensitivity to toxic gases; their silence can be taken as a sign of imminent danger. -Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Today was a day of sun.
The sorrow was on me, bigger than the shadow of a thunderhead, but I wasn’t hunkering down for it. Sometimes when your heart’s being chased around your chest like a wild-thing, it requires pure, unnecessary action.
It’s always the same manner of pain, and it takes all these iterations, blasts itself on different faces through the last decade. Always him, always her. Always wanting, and being forced to stand still. To push and shove and know that just as physics follows particular laws, the pendulum swings up and comes down again.
I cannot have what I want.
The fineness of trying to reject that premise is a funny thing. I know what David looked like aiming his stone at Goliath. The hope part puts the hurt on you.
Today, I drove through it.
Not away, through. Tears blinding me on the south country road, but traffic was spare, and it wasn’t necessary to stay in my lane every moment.
It’s peculiar. No, it’s sad, actually, the persistence of certain things- the right and proper consistency, certain manners, certain acts you fulfill even when it seems like the future is yawning at you like a big nothingness.
I persist. I persist, and with the strength of my sorrow push the pendulum higher and higher, forestalling the eventual fall.
I could bust this shit up if I kept driving, maybe.
….
I saved a bee.
That’s how people always tell it. It was fifty miles per hour or so, and the thing hit my windshield. I headed blind, deaf, dumb to the last place I went where I felt like something different. High up to Tidewater, the pinch inside so acute, there really were vision problems- actual function delays.
So it’s more accurate to say: The bee saved me.
It was the fuzzy kind, and I swear I felt a reverberation of its shock upon hitting a windshield at how-many-ever miles an hour when it was just flying along, doing its bee things.
It didn’t die. I was so surprised, surprised at my recognition of ‘a bee’, and all it meant in my nerdy article reading neuron pathways: Bees. Endangered, disappearing, literally the dying hope of the natural world. Bee.
I stopped.
Somehow, I don’t remember (I was shocked, or echo-shocked or something) part of its body ended up tucked under the bar of the windshield wiper, the way a thrill-seeker looks on an amusement park ride when they lower the safety bar across your lap.
The shoulder was narrow, but I leaned my body across the windshield to have a look at the little creature whose fate had become unexpectedly intertwined with the aimlessness of my journey.
One antenna gone for sure. Some sort of moisture where it had struggled up on the metal. Not good. I can’t imagine what sort of internal injuries would be sustained by a creature that tiny, hurtling into a huge object at that speed. My only hope was a vague memory of how hardy insects are purported to be. Ants can sustain incredible pressure, and lift things hundreds of times their body weight. Mosquitos survive attacks with rolled newspapers. It takes a spider longer to die of poisoning than your average dog.
Maybe a bee’s ability to survive impacts is superhuman, too.
I used a leaf to help it gain purchase on the wiper, and found myself crooning in a soft ,low voice that it would be okay, it would. You just can’t die- There are so many flowers.
Bee comfort?
The trouble, which freaked me the fuck out, is that something whitish green seemed to be oozing from the back portion of the bee. I got a little sick, imagining for a moment that it trailed it’s own viscera behind it in a long rope, an intestinal bride’s train. Then I decided that couldn’t be right. What probably happened was the bee released its stinger, maybe as an instinct upon impact, a blind response to the incredible crush of being knocked off its leisurely course.
What might have been coming out of the bee was venom.
I’m not a bee doctor. These are educated guesses, but the bees hind leg was working to free the stuff from its body, and, as I said, it was basically exiting from the place where the stinger ought to have been.
I found a paper-towel in my glovebox and lowered it down in hopes of putting the bee somewhere more beneficial to its future than a windshield. And he came right onto the towel, like he recognized the gesture.
In fact, though he didn’t fly, he started walking all over the towel, heading toward my fingers on the corner, like they were old friends of his. He buzzed. Once. A brief, friendly sound, but I’m anthropomorphizing, and also remembering, achingly, how my dad’s cat, Max, persisted in a rusty, troubled purr when we found him after he’d swallowed poison. The vet said it was stress induced. It’s hard to let go of a creature that is purring its little, fading heart out while you hold it; hard to understand a world where you’re required to do that.
I lowered the bee to the grass and walked away.
I know it’s selfish, but I’m grateful, cus I couldn’t stand to watch it die. In my head, maybe it lived. Maybe other bees came to it and knew what to do for it, or at least gave it the bee brand of company. I hope it didn’t just have a prolonged death out there in the grass. Maybe I did something bad with my ‘rescue’.
I don’t know.
You do the best you can. And that’s what brought me home again, that’s why I stopped crying. A little bee bomb, the friendliest of creatures crawled- maybe grateful, maybe agonizing,- in the palm of my hand.
I let the pendulum drop. Let’s see whose standing in the aftermath.
I’m just doin’ the best I can.
I really wanted to use the word ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, but unfortunately, it’s a specific term describing a specific political movement which went against the proposal to discontinue the Church of England as the State Church of Ireland and Wales.
Try as I may to flex my writer’s prowess, I can’t make that term relevant to what I’m thinking I want to write about. And that’s a pity, cus I really wanted to use that word in context, but oh well.
Instead, I’ve coined my own nonsense in the interest of relevance. The institution in my term refers to the institution of marriage. By a baffling twist of double negatives, the anti-diss bit means that my mind-set is against the dissing of marriage- rather unexpectedly.
It’s not a major revelation that an individual’s personal situation can influence their outlook on something.
For example, a child of devout Catholics likely harbors a different view regarding organized religion than a child raised to approach devotion with an atheistic, intellectual bent.
Fair enough.
My perspective toward marriage derives from being a child of divorced parents, one of whom stayed single, the other who entered, almost immediately, into another dysfunctional though long-lasting union.
My adult experiences have had the ‘other side of the coin’ slant to them as well. A pie-graph of my past relationships would depict a visual wedge of married men, as well as divorced, disenfranchised, and custody-battered veterans incapable of attachment.
Given both the verbal and observational information, it would be kind of easy to see marriage as ‘AVeryBadThing’, a tool for manipulation, power and misery, not to mention a good means of preserving the status quo, an illusion to provide fools with a sense of safey and security, and another means of creating categories and divisions for people. (How many of us have observed a husband or wife eliminating the single friends from their spouse’s roster in order to preserve that perception of safety?)
There’s a lot of negatives possible in the marriage equation. And personally, I have never benefitted much from the positive aspects, so they can seem as alien as foreign soil.
However…
:)
However: I really don’t like it when I’m watching a comedian on t.v., or listening to a radio show, and they say something negative and cynical about the state of marriage.
There is something so base and unimaginative about an outlook that calculates the quality of a mystery based on the visible parts.
And love- long lasting love, is a mystery. The institution which symbolizes that love is likely as flawed as the beings that design and utilize it, but we continue to run willy-nilly toward the precipice of legally expressing that union for reasons that cannot be explained (though easily hijacked) by moral convention, economic need, or a deep strain of species specific masochism.
Much like religion, the institution of marriage is the best and the worst of human endeavor. It symbolizes something deeply vulnerable to cynicism and cultural undermining. Like religion, the interpretation and execution of a marital union can go horrifically, irrevocably wrong.
Marriage is basically as strong and true and good intentioned as its participants. I think it can bolster loyalty and forgiveness by providing a framework where two people, hanging on by a thread, actually have a thread to hang onto.
And while i don’t desire 99.9% of the marriages I’ve witnessed as a personal destiny, a little part of me wants a marriage that I haven’t seen before: My own ideal of a loving and committed relationship.
Maybe it wasn’t so strange that my past didn’t offer up that vision, because it certainly didn’t offer up the partner to that vision- and it’s hard to design a beneficial give-and-take all on your own.
So I’ve kind of made a choice to reject the cynicism that so easily surrounds the institution of love. It’s kind of cute, actually, that people- no matter how wise and informed and apprised of the statistics- will still make that leap, over and over to love and to cherish; to honor and obey.
Wouldn’t it be cool if no one ever knew failure or weakness? Wouldn’t it be cool if willingness to promise life-long devotion was always rewarded with a warm and loving outcome?
I think that would be really cool. So when it comes to married and hopeful friends, all I really have to say is, “Congratulations. May you bring each other joy.”
Ideas haven’t exactly been coursing and sparking through my brain, lately. I often feel that I should be putting energy and effort (even creative effort) to some better use. Blogging feels like a trap-door, because that writing urge should be applied to a more practical medium.
*I hate practical mediums.*
At any rate, the one entity in my world that screams ‘Write me’ right now is Mr. Spider.
Mr. Spider (recently deceased) found near ceiling. Milk jug added for effect.
Mr. Spider is my omnipresent fear. This should be self-evident by the very use of the name ‘Mr. Spider’. I think it’s pretty stupid to anthropomorphize non-human things by calling them ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’, thus rendering them cutesy and folksy, and also (oddly) legally wed.
But Mr. Spider skitters in a way that makes my blood turn to icicles, so cutesifying him is both bizarre and necessary.
Most of my fears are more distant, conceptual terrors, not actual physical realities. In every day life, I hardly ever have to face werewolves, deadly hemorrhagic pathogens or a disgruntled tiger who talks like Jeremy Irons. These things exist only in dreams and movies and the depths of Africa. (The last referring to hemorrhagic pathogens, not talking tigers. As far as I’m aware, Africa doesn’t harbor tigers, and if it does, they sound closer to Walter Cronkite than Jeremy Irons, which really isn’t so terrifying.)
But spiders… spiders exist. Boy, do they. Spiders waltz across my ceiling, lie in wait in the bathtub. They bite these legs/arms at least twice a year. And once, terrifyingly, I woke to a huge, hairy nightmare inches from my face on the pillow. Gak!
So immediate are the little monsters, that I’ve made an odd alliance with a spidery creature in order to limit the chances of ever repeating that pillow encounter.
Enter Pholcidae, the common house spider. If you live in North America, you probably identify this creature as ‘Daddy Long Legs’. Mr. Daddy Long-legs, while fantastically disinterested in human beings except as the occasional jungle gym, is pretty interested in our mites, our lice, our ants, our mosquitos, and best of all, those big, hairy bitey spiders that snack on our flesh.
To my mind, it is a talisman against the brown recluse and the hobo spider to have a nice, gangly pholcidae in the corner of every room. (We have two in the bathroom right now. It’s rather hard to keep two of them in one place though, cus if they get hungry, they eat each other up.)
It isn’t that I’m not afraid of the common house spider, but I’m not terrified all to hell. The wispy, leggy look of it, and that tiny wedge shaped body are possible to tolerate in light of its wonderful diet.
Unfortunately, despite many discussions regarding the cost/benefit analysis of harboring Mr. Pholcidae in order to counteract Mr. Big, Black and Bulbous, my daughter, who has inherited every ounce of my arachnaphobia magnified ten-fold, does not make the distinction. If there is a daddy long legs hanging out next to the shower, she will very happily go dirty. If one has crawled its way to the no-spider-land outpost of her bedroom ceiling, it is generally understood that neither she nor I, nor anyone in a 5 mile radius will be getting any sleep.
Sierra wants Mr. House Spider dead. And though I see the error in that view, that doesn’t mean I necessarily want to deal with the capture and transport of one of our little spider-eating legion.
For while Mr. Daddy Long-legs is an ally, he still moves. And in my arachnid fearing mind, the skitter is much worse than the bite.
So we generally have a stand off that ends with me swiping the spider with a towell, and when it attaches I run, howling and blind, out of the room and throw the towell (with or without the spider attached) at whatever distant wall I can find that isn’t in her immediate living space.
Does the spider survive this exercise?
I. don’t. know.
Does the spider ever manage to run it’s way up the towell and attach to my clothing before I can propel it into a corner?
I fervently do not wish to know. The whole exercise is a little humiliating, so if I see a house spider in the bathroom, or hanging in Sierra’s room, I become engaged in a game of mental keepaway, trying to distract my darling from the knowledge of her little friend, until such a time as she discovers it, and then I’m so surprised, of course, to see it there, and with much unfelt enthusiasm I describe how lucky she is to have a spider protector in her corner, and she puts on that face that says ‘I’m not buying it’, and very shortly after that I’m once more looking for a towel.
Alas, fears are hard to reason with, but let’s look on the bright side:
The removal of a werewolf or a Jeremy-Irons-voiced-talking-tiger would probably require more than fortitude and a hand towel.
So I guess things turned out relatively well.
I was sitting on the toilet the other day,
(shouldn’t more pieces begin that way?) and suddenly realized the toilet paper was actually on the little toilet roll dispenser thingy.
This in and of itself is not a huge epiphany. The part where it gets weird is that I hadn’t put it there.
Nope. It was my daughter. She did what I forget to do more often than not, what I don’t bother with most of the time. To me, the one in two hundred rolls that comes to grief by getting knocked into the sink or toilet is worth the tradeoff of not having to be tuned in beyond making sure there’s something in there to wipe with.
That bit feels like a major achievement.
And here’s this little person under my roof, assessing the situation, taking the time and effort out of her eleven year old life to put the thing on the thingy.
And while, to me, that is two parts bizarre to one part “Woah, dude.”, it’s also a bit of a relief in a broader sense: See, she’s mine, but she sure ain’t me.
Never has been anyone but her from the very start. I suspected it early on when she showed both spatial orientation and time management skills. Those are some pretty mythical beasties to emerge from the fruits of my d.n.a, let me tell you. I suppose they exist in my family, but you’d no more expect a time conscious child to emerge from my body than you’d expect a lizard to emerge from a squirrel.
It’s a little wacky.
But there she is, and she’s going to be her, all her, for the rest of her life. So like, I can relax a little. I’m not ever going to understand this person well enough to be her all-knowing teacher, key guide or leader. There will be others in her life more insightful, more able to provide the missing puzzle pieces.
My job is to keep her safe and healthy, teach her to read, and help her to laugh.
*check
*check
& *check
so far we’re doin A-ok. Oh, and I need to make sure there’s some toilet paper in there…
I don’t want her to have to use pages out of our bathroom reading. (Calvin and Hobbes)
(I’ll double check that one, tomorrow.)
More Dominic Castillo (of Ravishers). ^
I woke with an odd yearning. Someone I’m acquainted with on the East Coast shared this interesting tidbit: They love those strawberry iced donuts from Shipleys.
I’ve never been to a place called Shipleys, and I’ve never had a strawberry iced donut, but now I have a hankering. You might even call it a yen. Whatever this strawberry iced Shipley stuff is about, it sounds good, and I want in on it. That’s ideally how I’d like to start my day today, actually.
The other part of the how-I-would-start-my-day-but-it-just-didn’t-happen was having a post all fresh and up and ready on this site. I wrote with that intention, last night. Another poem thing whatsit, but it turned out to be writing meant for me, not for the world in general.
That can happen.
So here we are. In my heart of hearts, I know it doesn’t really matter if or what I write. Engaging once again in weeble world and what’s going on with others would be more greatly appreciated than sharing my cryptic hankerings (a belly-dancer’s costume, an orgasm, a corned beef sandwich… yeah, probably in that order)
That’s something the object of my twitterpatedness is good at. It’s like part of his nature, the responsive thing. Anyone he meets feels bathed in the warmth of generous, good-natured attention. I’ve been trying it out in a way, and it’s not hard, If- you’re sincerely interested, or predisposed to like/admire the people you give that attention to. It can’t be faked, so the big and noticable difference between us is that he’s more likely to be open and optimistic about people, till they prove him wrong. My tendency is not really warm toward the human race. My default setting is to receive new people with a mixture of cautious interest and suspicion. Depending on how they come off, or what happens next, one or the other of those elements takes precedent.
The weird part is- who do you suppose is the better gage of human nature?
It ain’t me. For all my caution, I have gotten close several times to the wrong people. People whom, I suppose you could say are wired particularly to disarm, or fool the suspicious nature.
Whereas believing the best about people often brings out the best in them. Believing, in spite of everything, in their better nature almost seems to make them want to act on that.
I’m learning this stuff, but they are in the context of some things I already know. Everyone’s different. People will probably always scare me a little, so I’m never going to be a real ‘people person’, and that’s okay. I love the natural world, so loving people in a general sense would be a conflict of interest, anyway. I do really love that he is like that, and it pleases me that I’ve learned a little bit more about how to respond when I have that gut instinct that leans toward letting someone in.
He talked about this yesterday, in reference to something I had done, which made an impact on him (I kept these thoughts to myself for the meanwhile) but what he said is that part of love is getting to know someone who teaches you to see things in a new way.
Think about that: If you can see something over and over and have the same response, and then someone comes along who shows you the texture, the meaning, the beauty in that- it changes your world, subtly. And that’s a big part, too, cus our culture is so used to focusing on passion and sentimentality- but love is also about learning.
That’s a pretty cool part about love.
My heart wants out today,
out into the wild-
out among the great stone canyons
and waters falling down.
My chest will collapse if I
don’t fill it up with air;
catch the song and follow it
into the vast ‘out there’.
My feet need wild today
to roam and then to run;
this horizon’s grown too thin on me,
I need another one…
Heya.
This post is about who Bob Church was to me. I’ve been goin’ back and forth, in a way wanting to write about this, and in a way definitely not. For starters, when I initially learned that he passed away April 29th after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer, the feeling was- this isn’t my story, or my pain to share. And I hate that morbid feeling of being the one to pass on the news of death, especially when I haven’t given updates in this quarter about his joys and life stuff. That aspect of it, I didn’t want any part of. To my mind, it shouldn’t require death for someone to be newsworthy.
I really miss him, is the thing. And in a way, sometimes you may only know someone for a handful of months, but it’s more a relief than a sadness, like thank goodness I got the knowing in under the wire cus it would have sucked, totally, to have missed that opportunity.
I kind of recognized Bob early on as a kindred spirit when I saw a comment of his over at 1poet4man’s site. 1poet writes some really beautiful things, and they are often deep and thought provoking, and sometimes the comments on his poems have a rather grave and solemn air. In truth, sometimes the sanctified air after one of his poems tended to make everyone take themselves a little too seriously… do you know what I mean? It wasn’t 1poet’s fault, it’s just… some atmospheres make you feel so hushed and solemn, that things can get a little ludicrous.
It was one of those comment threads, and Bob bounced in and, with a rather apologetic nod to the author made an irreverent joke right in the middle of all that earnest hum-drum. I don’t know if he laughed but in my head he was chuckling at the discomfiture he created, and I pretty much stated my admiration, and followed him back to his blog to find out who this dude was.
Oh yeah. Goof. Total goof. Life wisdom was presented side by side with the raunchy, the nutty, the wild. Bob is someone who will dedicate hours of carefully crafted prose just to get you with the milk-up-your-nose twist at the end. His writing sometimes lays in wait like that, and other times the ridiculous parts are rife throughout the piece, with Bob carefully nurturing just that quality when he depicts human nature.
I was pretty thrilled. 1poet’s stuff was deep and awe-inspiring reading, but going to Bob’s site was like hitting Disneyland with your big, dysfunctional family after barely keeping it together for an hour in church.
And as the back and forth of ‘blog etiquette’ continued over weeks, he became a loyal reader and commenter over here. I came to sort of rely on the perspective behind his words. We had the kind of correspondence I’m infamous for, which is a little more frequent and reliable than shoving a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea, but not by very much. What I recall is key moments when I either was way off the track and Bob wrote to clarify, or help if he could with what seemed to be happening (that I wrote about on here), a few completely goofy shared jokes and observations, and a few times when I really needed a trusted male perspective and was feeling a little lost so I risked it and tried writing him, and received the attention and wisdom that this many times father and grandfather had at the ready.
I don’t go around looking for father figures, or considering people I meet as family members on a regular basis, but that idea kept coming back when it came to Bob- ‘I wonder what it would be like to be a member of that family?’ It’s pretty rare to see a parent/kid relationship where they actually share the same sense of humor, or have a certain shared expectation and understanding of what family relationships are supposed to look like. Usually there’s a good deal of angst just cus of the dynamic, so being aware of that, I figured I was kind of just romanticizing the idea of what it would be like to have him as a parent, but the perception persisted of Bob feeling like family.
So when I thought he was really gone, when it had been weeks of silence over there, it really sucked. I didn’t get a chance to talk, to say that right. I could have known him more, it just really sucked.
And then he came back. When they made the medical decision to quit the chemo because it was doing more harm than good, Bob felt well enough again to write, and he wrote. Not on the blog, but in e-mails to his writing friends, ‘journal entries’, that we could respond to.
I should have responded to more, but I did respond. I did talk. I felt guilty for taking time and energy sometimes, when on his end those were in such short supply, but he told me not to worry about that. And in one of those e-mails he verified, or validated what I was having trouble putting into words. A few phrases that stay with me. I won’t quote them here, but if you’ve experienced in some way a father expressing hopes for his daughter’s happiness, you know the gist.
Recognition of family goes deeper than blood-lines. You maybe already knew that. I imagined it true in cases of adoption and marriage, but- in my experience this was a discovery.
So in some small part the story is mine to keep or to share, and I want to share the essentials. Bob lived. He still lives through a series of wonderful words. His life story is laid out in part, but you don’t have to read it all to know what he’s made of. He’s still laughing somewhere, I am sure. I just know he found a way to give St. Peter a hard time at the gate, and let him know what kind of jokes we tell around here. He was elbowing and grinning with a few guys, calling out ‘C’mon, we’re dying back here! What’s the hold up?’ like it wasn’t the gate of the hereafter but a line at Universal Studios. I’m not even interested in my version of heaven, it’s been highly informed by Bugs Bunny, but if Bob sent down an account of his impressions-
Boy, that would be something to read.
Bubba’s Thought For The Day:
It’s okay to tell a girl you like the way she walks, as long as you do it politely, and she’s not an amputee who uses those clip-on metal arm canes.
A favorite: Writing Outside the Box (especially if you like Brautigan)
(Bob really liked this song)
Dum Spiro, Spero
I recently returned from a joyous experience in a nether zone interspersed precariously between heaven and earth. During this time of reflection with family and dear friends, I re-learned my basic tenets of life and realized, once again, that all joy must be balanced against heartache, all revelry countered by piety, all beauty placed on our mantles be reflective of our understanding of the basest of human reality. No sooner had I started to sort my memories and categorize my blessings than a phone call reminded me that a friend now faced the grief of losing a loved one. In a flash, my perspective shifted and the halo I’d surrounded my family with suddenly seemed weak and penetrable as I groped for words of comfort.
Every day, every hour we teeter between nirvana and ruin, and no matter how smart, how accomplished, how esteemed our position or how deep our stores of wealth, we cannot escape our humanity. We can deny it, forestall it, or for a blessed few actually understand it, but we cannot prevail against it. All we can do is interpret it and enjoy it, whatever challenges it presents. It’s called life and those of us who still claim it should give as much of it as possible to others, because only by doing so will we ever hope to receive a richer version of it in return. It’s as close to immortality as any of us can ever hope to get.
-Bob Church, May 7, 2008
Lea Kelley tagged me for this, and I’m pretty happy about that because it looks like fun. I don’t think my explanation of how it works could measure up to what she posted, so in her words:
Sometimes you can learn more about a person by what they don’t tell you.
Sometimes you can learn a lot from the things they just make up.
If you are tagged with this Meme, lie to me.
Then tag 7 other folks (one for each deadly sin) and hope they can lie.
Pride
What is your biggest contribution to the world?
*modest smile* Well…some would say my invention of Macaroni & Cheese has had a lasting impact on the future of our citizens. But it was nothing, really nothing; a minor follow up to the creation of poetry, science and music. Yep, just a little something I threw together for the kids.
Envy
What do your coworkers have that you wish was yours?
If by ‘co-workers’ you’re referring to the other top secret agents in the underground intelligence organization I was involuntarily recruited to as a gifted teenager, I suppose the anonymity I just destroyed by posting this on the internet would be nice to have again.
Gluttony
What did you eat last night?
The better part of a moose.
Lust
What really lights your fire?
Losing at cards. I always imagine I’m digging myself into decades of sexual slavery.
Anger
What is the last thing that really pissed you off?
Some ho up in my bizz_ness.
Greed
Name something you hoard and keep from others:
I hoard designer perfume knock-offs. People always want to try them out and see if they smell anything close to the real thing. I’m not about to destroy that sort of naivete with experience.
Sloth
What’s the laziest thing you ever did?
I elected not to respond to a fire-alarm once, cus I was fairly comfortable at the time. Fortunately, the fire was contained before it reached the third floor.
Now it’s your turn:
