calculations

every person,
a variable,
must
be stripped
of its value, assigned
instead
some vague descriptor--
say x,
then plugged
into society,
a formula.

.supermarket.spiders.

I like to wonder about couples in supermarkets and stores.
I like to wonder about couples that are together, and couples that simply share space.

"Can I help you?
or are you with them?"

As people flutter about searching for cereal and towels, dog food and bed sheets, I like to wonder about the paths that they wander. If we could tie a ball of yarn to everyone's ankles and see a web weave itself, with the strange spider of discontent sitting in the center.

"No, I'm just with them."

I like to look at the people looking for little flies and insects to keep themselves afloat with their daily lives: little buzzing gadgets and sheer gossamer sheets; feeding their public and private wanderings.

And just once, I happened to see
two strangers, with matching socks,
staring into a freezer display case
beyond the icy, glassy door
not at the frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
but at their reflections
standing and staring
searching and grasping
for a quick fix to their hunger

"Are you with them?"
"No. Can I help you?"

.vagina.stargate.

"Consider: a vagina stargate.
The future of transportation.

It's simple! Enter one vagina and exit immediately through another.
Regardless of distance.
Yes, the vagina stargate ushers in a new era of transportation, inspired by countless hours of science fiction and pornography.

The plan is foolproof.
We have already succeeded.

[Images of travel brochure to be included]*"



*editor's note: I don't think the world is quite ready for images of such revolutionary innovation.

bad dream

last night I dreamed that I married Chad Kroger (yes, the ratty lead of Nickelback) just because he bought me a beautiful necklace.

I feel that this dream speaks volumes about my character and suddenly, my day is ruined. I honestly can't think of a worse way to begin or end a day. Nickelback, for chrissakes.

at the concert

tonight, some towering man, skunk drunk
will harass you because you are pretty
or because he doesn't believe
you're really from Tennessee.
he will spill his beer on you
and call it flirting.
you will pretend
you are not intimidated, not
uncomfortable in this sticky cloth, your skin.

.reservations.discoveries.

So let me tell you. Remember that one girl that works at the library near my house?
No, not that library. I'm talking about the public library. And not exactly near, you know, but relatively speaking, it's, well, I mean, still probably about ten blocks.
But anyway, I'm talking about the girl and not the library.
The one that works there.
Pay attention.

Well, I showed up, right and ready to return some books, and check some out. The usual library business, sure. The usual library day and all. And actually, I was a day late today, not in my due date, but rather my weekly library schedule. I try to go every Wednesday, see?
But in any case, so I returned my books a day late, not in loan time. And yeah, so maybe it was fate, right, that I was a day late?

I don't believe in fate.
Stick with me here.

I had put some books on reserve and, truth be told, that's actually why I was a day late in showing up. I had decided that I'd give the library folk an extra day, see, to get all the books I reserved in at once. That way I wouldn't have to make multiple trips.
Yeah, I know I go every week anyway, but wouldn't you think that that is even more reason to not want to make extra trips?
But look: if I waited that extra day, then all the books coming from further away would have time to come in, and I could pick everything up in one fell swoop. And drop off too. Same swoop.

But back to the girl.
She was working.
Specifically, which I guess I didn't even notice right away, since I shot straight to the back to look for some other books first - just a Margaret Atwood novel or two, ok? Lay off.
Specifically, she was shelving reserve books, and so yeah, I guess I was going to wind up over on that shelf eventually anyway.

I reserved some poetry books. Now stop interrupting.

So I did find the Atwood book I was looking for, and that was all fine and dandy, and I thought maybe I should go try to find that Grace Paley book too, since those are hardly ever at that specific library. My reasoning, you see, was that my reserved books weren't going anywhere, so I should try to find all the non-reserved ones first.
Granted, those don't normally go anywhere fast anyway (you have to remember that most of the kids I see in there are playing afterschool video games on the computers).

But anyway.
It was time, so I headed over to the shelf. And actually, that's when I first saw the girl. She works there, like I said, and I've seen her before.
Yeah, she's pretty cute.
Why else would I be telling you this, eh?

But anyway, so the girl - the cute girl - is shelving those reserve books, and I was heading over to the same shelf to find my reserves. Mind you, I wasn't doing anything obvious, right, just trying to catch a glance at her from the corner of my eye, keeping the other corner on the look out for my name, printed out on some receipt crammed between the pages of my reserves.
So I'm getting closer to finding my name, and I start to notice that it's most likely going to be - yep, it's the same shelf the cute girl is shelving right now.

Now, at this point, I'm wondering mostly something along the lines of am I going to try to just cruise in next to her, try to hawk eye out my name from behind her, waddle in squatting or what. Choices. And in my head, I'm trying to figure this all out, when suddenly, it's more or less solved for me.

"Can I help you find something?"

So I have no idea what I said, or squeaked really, but I guess I must have told her that I'm looking for my reserves. The obviousness of the situation, right?
So I tell her my name too. Maybe she can help me find it, she says.
Somebody pay these public servants more money.

Ok, yeah, you guessed it though: lo and behold, she was in the process of shelving my reserves as soon as I approached her. What are the odds, eh? But I mean, I guess a library being a temple of books and all, it all starts to figure somehow.

And as she's checking titles and tags to hand me my books, my brain is trying to rev up something to make some conversation, but all I can hear in my head is the scraping sound of people picking snow and ice off their cars.
Time's running out. She has all four of my reserves in her hand and is shifting her gaze from our illustrious written language to my panicked brow.
I blurt out something involving phone numbers, specifically hers, but maybe mine to call her from, or if email is better, that's cool too, and I mean, maybe texts and messages are better anyway seeing as she's a librarian and all HAHHAHA, not that she is necessarily going to be reading emails at the library while she's at work and all.

She gives me a bit of a strained look, clearly trying to parse together the string of words I uttered, words that probably shouldn't ever be documented, and are probably something of a blasphemy in such a building.

And then - wouldn't you believe it -
"Oh, I already gave you my number..."

She opens the topmost book and I realized she's circled the page numbers of her favourite poems.

So maybe I believe in fate a bit.

equalizer

the house was boarded up with snow, only margins of light
showing through the cracks. ice wrapped our cars in glass.
from my window, the backyard was white drapery, not
what I remembered yesterday, not mine.
and snow is like that--
God's way of reclaiming territory, taking back
or erasing what was yours. Snow,
an equalizer, everyone's pest.

.deep.frier.party.

Take stock of tonight's spread:

Shawn and Lacey over. +//
Brought deep frier. +//
Results: +//

jelly filled glazed donuts +++//
cream filled chocolate frosted donuts +++//
seitan chick'n wings with bbq hot sauce +++//
fried pickles +++//
chilli on fried potato slices with "cheese" +++//
Lacey's homemade vegan ranch +++//

Jackie Chan's Police Story +//
Scattergories +//
Skate 2 +//

And so, on this snowed-in day, our house is not unlike a deep frier itself, as we all grow a little fatter and warmer.

the playground

The first time I was ever called "fat" and subsequently saw myself as such was in kindergarten. I climbed the steps up the schoolyard slide, my friend following behind me, and she smacked my sweat-pant clad ass cheek and said, "Hurry up, big butt."

I spun around, "I don't have a big butt."

"Yes you do, Big Butt."

And suddenly, it seemed my body swelled, expanding and expanding like heated atoms. My booty, a universe of its own. I looked at my sausage-cased thighs all the way down the slide. When my feet hit the mulch, I was a different girl.

.non.euclidean.geometries.

A boy, Lucien, receives new boots for Christmas.
Subsequently, he's thrilled.

There's a certain invincible feeling associated with boots, he thinks: an impunity to trample the world as he sees fit, knowing all the time that his toes will remain warm and dry.
And to top it off, they are his first pair with laces.

Today, Lucien has to give present his report on cobras to his class.
The odds are overwhelmingly in his favor, given his new lucky boots, coupled with the best pair of his rocket ship underpants (he after all has 2 pairs in reversed color palettes, the other being worn through by fate and fortune).

Meanwhile, at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN in Switzerland, a team of elite particle physicists searching for the Higgs Boson simultaneously propel themselves into both fame and infamy, finding not only their elusive scalar elementary particle, but creating a microscopic black hole that is steadily accruing mass more rapidly than Hawking Radiation can cause it to evaporate into elementary particles.
Conservative estimates give approximately five months before the Earth is consumed.

As Lucien finishes the laborious task of lacing up his boots for the first time, he rehearses his facts about snakes, and is eager to enlighten and impress his classmates with his report.

After all, he thinks to himself, it won't be long before science will tie the four corners of the globe together.

the yellow bathing suit

she wore it to the Y, unaware of herself, how
obnoxious the innocuous colour stretched
out and over the flesh. those puckered kisses
of fat on her elbows and knees. she smiled up
at her father's camera, its Cyclops
eye swallowing her whole.

.cut.time.

He feels his father's gaze on his increasingly clumsy hands. Hands which have traced out the time of his own life. He no longer has the wind to rewind himself.

And of what worth are 5, sometimes 10, lines furrowing their grooves on a sheet of paper?
What are they worth when there is a hopelessly entangled mess of nerves and veins, crisscrossing one over each other, scrambling and encoding every which way the delicate signals of blood and intent.

As his toe taps, his father would count out his disappointments to the rhythm of heartbeats and sighing breaths.
And when the switch came down on him, he cried for his fragile hands to be spared.

What is it worth to flutter through school, sight reading nothing beyond the measures of quarters and rests?

It is to amputate his life before it has even grown, his father had counselled, with a face that, over the years, had become nothing more than two collapsing fermatas perched upon the ledgers of his cheek bones.

He thinks of his father as his old fingers finish their task. He thinks of how he could never stitch together the paternal hopes into a burial shroud, but could only offer the flittering, intangible notes that evaporated into the cemetery air.

And as he closes the guitar case, he makes sure to remind himself that he did not succeed in bringing his patient to life, but

by god,

he'd make her sing.

the study of final causes

found a mound. left here for good.

.dressed.for.success.

microcosm

my sister took me to the aquarium today. we watched the fish flit by: fire anemonefish, bird wrasse, batfish, baby hammerheads. trails of fishshit dispersed like pollen. the backdrop, a rainbow of reef.

our eyes moved left to right, left to right, and it was me behind the glass, finding an end and another end but no way out.

.road.trip.to.amsterdam.

I'm invited to a party in frosty Quebec tonight, a party I won't be party to.
It's a party to bid a temporary farewell and godspeed to a friend that I hardly see anyway. There is a certain irony entangled in there somewhere.

Ok, let's be honest. I have no interest in tumbling down a stairway of bars, breaking all arms and legs of common sense until all that's left standing is self-deceit. Enmeshed in the social network of strangers' ship, trawling for happiness in the Sea of Dionysus.

The taste of sour grapes fills my mouth.

I read a T.S. Eliot quote today:

"what we call the beginning is often
the end, and to make an end
is to make a beginning: The
end is where we start from."

So, perhaps I am to give a far off toast tonight, because as fellow walkers and wanderers, the further we drift away from home, the more we will travel hand in hand.

ohio weather, schizophrenic

my body learns how to be cold just in time for the temperature to rise. the snow from earlier recedes from the sidewalks like hair from the heads of balding men. every dip in the pavement, two cupped hands collecting a puddle.

the day ends in a fury of premature heat. winter is swept away like cobwebs from our attic. every layer of earth sweats and rejects us and the poison it was fed.

.a.series.of.non.congruent.boxes.

Start with a sheet of paper, presumably blank, but if not, flip it over. Should you have something double-sided, or, even worse, a Möbius strip, then you will have to begin again.

Use a straight edge of any variety excluding self-righteous teenagers - although, it is perfectly valid to steal their markers from under their noses for the next step - and draw yourself 8 parallel lines, intersected perpendicularly by 6 more parallel lines.
Now ignore the lines and concentrate on the space between; you should have a 7x5 grid.

Start with today's date and count off the rest of the month, beginning anew with the head of the next.
Throw some letters above your columns.

Don't worry if it's all blurry. You can infer what you wrote later.

If you want, trace a coloured box around the weekend.

Fill in your boxes with your goals and plans, and see for yourself how you are pushing the emptiness out from your numbered days.

instead

when Jon comes home, I wear my unhappiness like a new blouse and he notices first thing. only this time, he will not ask why. he will instead pick up his suitcase and go back into the cold from where he came.

i will sit and count my memories like change in my pockets.

.all.the.world's.a.kitchen. .all.the.men.and.women.merely.ingredients.

Wouldn't it be nice, you might not have thought to yourself, if Jews were made of nothing more than sugar and flour, cinnamon and vanilla.

As they were lined up in the oven, one asks the other,
אחותי, את חושבת שאולי קצת חם מדי?

An image of Hitler forms in the rising smoke, with a milk moustache whitewashing his face and an umlaut over his head, pushing forward his backmost vows.

And if he starts to feel queasy and sick about the whole affair, he remembers that he's nothing more than rotten cabbage on the inside, the most productive crop per acreage in terms of mass.
He remembers he will be shredded and pickled and, in time, be nothing more than a small bowl of kimchi.

And on it goes, he now says to you, with an immaculate posture of deference and defence: we chew up those who precede us and become nothing more than fuel for those to come.

So he rests easy, even if you may not, as the smell of golden brown snickerdoodles pump fatly through the kitchen into his tempestuous nostrils.

the art of being alone

I stood at the bus stop waiting
for you. A car with a flat tire
drove by, all scraping metal and withering
mechanics. The campus lights blinked
to songs stuck in their heads. I could
disappear and no one would notice.
I'd be another cloud of breath
clotting the stars.

?is.a.singing.girl.still.cute.if.nobody.is.there.to.hear.her?

Nataly Dawn's backyard infiltration tour

I believe she is booked for mine quite soon, come complete with an entourage of buzzing bee roadies, one for each fret.
Ticket sales for woodland critters on reserve now.

Don't be dissuaded by the snow.
A springtime voice that channels the collective warmth of a fleet of robins into a tight, focused laser beam for your ears, hearts and fingertips.

If you tip the badger merch girl, she might hook you up with a phone number.

the mythology of hope

Today I could hardly compose myself. Everyone around me brimming with abstraction, abstraction.

I sat on the vent when I got home to regain feeling in my numb toes. The hot air lifted around me like my lover's breath and I never felt so alone.

I found a penny beside the couch. Attached to it, every copper hope.

And I sent it by way of the furnace.

.smash.a.messaged.bottle.upon.this.keel.

Dear President Obama,

Forgive me for emulating so many current memes of letters to the president-elect-now-actual-for-real-president-of-this-country.
Also forgive my not voting for you.

But.

I didn't vote for the other guy. Actually, I voted for the other other guy, or one of them anyway. You might not have heard of him. or met him. I certainly haven't. But if you were to, I would hope that you have a fruitful discussion over an even more fruitful lunch. You would talk about many things, testing the waters of each other's pools of knowledge, and probing the finer points of pop culture inanity to break the ice.
I do it too.

But.

This isn't my confession, and I hope that your four long terms tied to the mast of this country isn't your confession. You will surely hear more than three siren songs beckoning you into the waters, as your crew paddles on with nothing but beeswax in their ears.
I can only venture a guess to what those melodies and harmonies will hold for you.

So before I mix my metaphors, you are not set asail for 10 years - merely a tenure - and that is remarkably little time to bail out this oversized rig. Let's not forget at least some of the finer points of your charter, and I'll forget that you still stand for the neo-colonial global hegemonic domination that I despise.

Let me just say that your ship runs a little to the center-right at the moment, and you should plot our path starward rather than further starboard.

I don't live under any illusions of your presidency, and don't really expect much from you.
Surprise me.
Take me to Serendib.

misstep

I've lost my knack somewhere along the hours of the day, and I fear I won't get it back.
Give me the words to say what I cannot.

.the.frost.less.taken.

a blinking light between your house and mine
a lost beacon
meekly whispering to wandering eyes
filtering the degrading white of snow
from the grey skin of the road exposed
by steel coffins careening through the night

Two thin tires, not unlike spoked pizza slicers, crunch and slide. A sharp intake of cold air as the rider does gimble and gyre, so to speak, not knowing whether he'll land on ground or figure of the icy, concretey lattice.
But rather, onto a fallen star, or at the very least, upon further observation, a silicon gelled body encasing 5 LED lights, serendipitously illuminating the way home.

move an inch

it's as though my mind and body are two opposing forces. i should shake loose this skin
and find another shelter.
find a home filled with winter. all at once the world feels beautiful.
it's more than i can bear.

.kid.naps.

A few hours have gone by, and I've run out of songs to hum to myself. Or rather, I'm at a junction of not knowing lyrics to sing, and having a monophonic - a perpetually off key one at that - voice incapable of achieving any song I would like to sing.

I think that the car has stopped moving, at least for the moment. My back aches from from bouncing over the poorly constructed, underfunded Michigan highways. Something collided with my right hand at some point, and I will have to remind myself to check for superficial injuries later.

I wait for the engine to start up again.

When was the last time I ate? Perhaps the peanut butter toast from this morning.
And last drink?
Water, I suppose.
That was all a good number of hours ago, and the exact number escapes me. I've always declined wearing watches, and my cell phone is, to borrow a phrase, lost in the sauce. At a loss for songs to hum, my mind drifts only half voluntarily towards food, and what supper might hold in store.
I might wind up improvising with Ramen packets and frozen vegetables again.

All I know is that when this trunk is re-opened, and the brisk Canadian wind whips across my face, I'll be long gone from the land of the only people free enough, the home of the only people brave enough, to scheme up deep fried taco shells.

another end

In my past life I was an old woman.
I wore my skin like a rare linen. Human
cloth, not sewn but grown. My hair
frayed gray. And in my face, like a map
folded and folded over, I traced
every year I'd lived in the ground.

-----

maybe today this poem finds no audience, no resonance. it will be written off as quickly and quietly as it was written.

I will see god in every particle of snow that falls and melts in my open hand.

axioms

++\mission statement update! 20090118/++
So upon some discussion with Ruth, we've decided that we are going to collapse some of my ideas into a more eloquent form: we will both update this blog, one writing a jubilant ending, the other a tragic one. As it stands, it looks to be that I will be the former, and Ruth the latter. Hopefully we can make a point of updating on the same day for the sake of juxtaposition. I'm trying to work out a way to make our post formatting different, so we'll see what I come up with. I'll most likely fool around with justifications for now.
++\ /++


It seems that the first post, first letter, first words tend towards self-referential metanarratives. Perhaps, even more so, this is residual mental processing of one of my current reads, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.

I suppose this let's me at least explicate the intended goals of this project, in perhaps more direct speech.
I conceived of this project as an exercise in habit, concentrating mostly on writing on a consistent basis, but the further the idea developed itself, I realized there really are few constraints on content media. That is to say, why not update with a comic? a photo? a song?
Maybe that's copping out. Will that break up the consistency, or aesthetic nature of it all? Subvert the very intent of creative productivity I had going into this? Well, let's put a further constraint on it then: anything uploaded has to at least been a product of my own personal process (or, obviously, whoever the contributor is).

So what is the project then? beyond a ritualistic exercise.

happy endings

How very trite, sure, but I think that the simplicity of that triteness is what appealed to me in the first place. It would probably be reasonable to think that most of us have abandoned the notion of happy endings, and for sure, the very phrase comes off as scoffable and dismissive, a fancy that we grew out of, accumulating lint in the pockets of neon windbreakers and high-waisted pants.
What is that you say? Neon windbreakers and high-waisted pants have been spotted roaming the country and cityside? Feral youths discarding aesthetic evolution for abrasive anachronisms?

Now how about that.

So, why not indulge? At least for a few moments everyday - or truth be told, maybe not that often. Sartre presumes that we create meaningful purposes for ourselves, and that we are only the product of this creation and action, and nothing more. Let's not get into a discourse about essentialism here, but let's maybe see this blog as a project in teleological fantasy, eschatological indulgence.
I simply wish to start a project in which we can reimagine a happy conclusion to our daily lives, and straddle that fence between fiction and its precursor 'non', where the teeth sit hesitantly on the lower lip, neither biting nor releasing. A suspension of cynicism.

Structurally, this hopefully won't all occur within an epistle, or pedestrian rants of "This happened and made me happy". Rather, I hope it presents us an opportunity to explore narrative devices, framing the subtext of our happy endings in various ways: Borgesian invented texts, poetics, a logical mathematical proof for a puzzle Hofstadter presented me in his book to demonstrate logical formalism.

Words words words, and all metanarratives still. But bear with me for one more ambition.

As many times as the coin lands consecutively on one face (I believe it is tails) for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), there exists that other side, inextricably dependent in identity on its other. Likewise, as this idea of happy endings spawned, so did its intuitive twin.
Why not have a parallel blog of how life could take a turn for the worse? Too easy, I hear you say, and that was my initial reaction as well. But I think that if the sister project to this one manages to take off as well, it will provide an outlet for all the black humor and self-referential schadenfreude that blows in under the door cracks of our emotional composition.



In any case, this blog is the current project, and maybe I should keep my eyes focused on one step at a time.
Like Shakespeare's Ophelia, this blog will hopefully act as a prism to break apart the spectrum of ideologies and experiences that construct our representations of, in this case happiness, and in her case, women and madness.
And, in an expected rhetorical blow, can we separate those constructions anyway?

But as you may have seen, the latter association is a rather weak, and poorly formed connection, drawn teleological motivations upon my serendipitous discovery that the name of this blog, teleophilia, contains the name Ophelia. An accidental pun for sure, and a poor stretch even more certainly.



So, for today, let me pretend that I pulled off that pun, and not only was it funny, but profound. Let me rewrite the rest of this day off as having created a successful wordplay, and that you, the reader, are still reading this and are at least marginally amused and curious.