Mentioning the *unmentionable*…

#1  So you think you’re a butterball.  Come here, baby, sit on my lap and let me baste you properly.

#2  I am a creature of the Sun: a solar entity am I.  Shoot me full of moonshine and I’ll surely go insane.

#3  I stumble through days, I rumble through months, and tumble through years.  I pay as little attention to time as possible.  I refuse to let it meter me.

#4  Sex is an engagement of genetically combative significance, a battleground of contending genomes stealing participatory prurient pleasure, coupled, despite the Linnaean outcome.  Yet know this: I am your battlefield general.  And you’re the reason that I’m waging war.

#5  If between every paragraph I post here, I drink 4 ounces of beer (as, at the moment, in the Barking Spider Tavern I am doing) , I’ll be drunk by #10 (paragraphwise) .  (note to self: be ye as prolific as all the unwitnessed starshine cast intrepidly into space.)

#6  ‘SuperBowl Sunday’ is not ‘Sun’day.  The Sun doesn’t really give a shit.  Who was the greatest athlete in the year 1004?  Right,  And in the year 3004, this SuperBowl will probably come to the threshold of consciousness of no one at all, barring improbably some geeky de-hormoned historian.  Tomorrow, make Feb 1 a special day for you.    Take notice of the SuperBowl, but only as you should the phase of the moon.

#7  I’ve never licked anybody else’s fingers without knowing exactly where they’ve been.

#8  Somewhere right now a creature is freezing to death somewhere in America in a forsakenly frigid back-alley.  I care.  I really care. 

#9  I want to salt you.  May I pillar you?  I love you so much.  Some even say a ‘Lot”.

#10   Given the currently known gamut of the human condition, indefatigueable eroticism is as curiously rare as an unconquerably cascading intellect.  Strangely enough, I personally believe they are mutually reinforcing correlates.

in front of Shirley's Temple,
after a 4 mile jaunt.

Today's my last day on the 'old job'.  Here are some things that I found hidden away in my old office area (in boxes, bottoms of drawers, etc.). 

The clip-bound underlying title page is to my 90-page Master's thesis entitled "A View of the Future: A Multiple Discriminant Analysis Approach Assessing Moody's Investor Service's Visionary Prowess In Rating Municipal Bonds". ha! (repeats to self:  *i'm not a prophet, i'm not a prophet* )

The clipped article reads:

6-year-old leaves game to make heroic catch  
                                                  New Haven, Conn.     

  Javon Saucier was playing football when he made a 30-yard dash to complete the greatest reception of his life: catching a 3-year-old neighbor falling from a window.
  "I knew I could catch him," 6-year-old Javon said.  "People were calling me, 'Javon, the hero.'"
  Brandon Ellison missed a lower window ledge by inches as he fell from a second-floor window, about 15 feet off the ground, into Javon's arms.  Neither boy was injured in the incident Thursday evening.

That article is at least 10 years old and it still gives me goosebumps and I get all choked-up whenever I reread it.  It is, no doubt, one of the greatest football receptions of all time!

statuary and moon

huddled in death

how does it survive?

or, rather, thrive?

Little-heard winter navigation tip: If you know how to run, running on
ice or slippery snow is much safer than walking on it.  Unless you
have to stop suddenly.

I've been running on icy surfaces, even hillsides, all winter so far
and haven't slipped or fell yet.  But while walking, especially
during the past couple of 'freezing rain' days, I've slipped around
several times while trudging along.

I think that the difference can best be explained by the fact that
while running your feet *pittypat* *pat* *pat* without significant
opportunity for untoward torque, whereas while walking feet
*squish*  *squish* *squish* it out more  in longer contact
with the slippery surface thus allowing for slippage to develop.

However, in all matters, it helps to have a 'light foot'.

~click on pics for larger views~

Sunday, after running 5 miles in Dreamland, I became entranced in exploring some Egyptian symbolism. 

The falcon perched upon the angel obelisk (middle) suggested to me the legend of Horus.  His name means "he who is above" and "he who is distant". The falcon had been worshipped from earliest times as a cosmic deity whose body represents the heavens and whose eyes represent the sun and the moon.  The pic is somewhat grainy since it was taken at 'quite a distance' from the 50 ft. tall obelisk. (Another, fuller view and history of the obelisk is here.)

Atop, is the back window of a mausoleum of pure dynastic design.  Though Anubis, the jackal god, was considered the Egyptian deity of the dead, the entity here depicted seems too humanlike to be so considered.  Perhaps having jackals running around a cemetery is just too outrageous for Dreamland?

At bottom is the front-top plate of the same mausoleum depicting a winged solar disk. This is a form that the god Horus Behudety (Horus of Edfu) takes in his battles with Seth. The god Thoth used his magic to turn Horus into a sun-disk with splendid outstretched wings. The goddesses Nekhbet and Uazet in the form of uraeus snakes joined him at his side.  However, if you look at the right wing of the solar disk, there has appeared, through mere weathering I'd suppose, yet another Horus-falcon depiction fading in.  An otherworld manifestation?!  (For those interested in the origins of such symbols, this site offers an interesting explanation claiming an association between the Horus sun-disk and the bennu-bird (mythical phoenix) and linking both to the total eclipse of the sun!)

(By the way, I got so absorbed in taking pics that I barely emerged from the cemetery before the gates swung shut for the night.)

I used to harbor revulsion for people who’d complain about it being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. In the summer, they’d cry: “I need air conditioning!” And I’d reply, “Why condition the air?  Condition yourself to the heat and you’ll be alright.”   In the winter, they’d bewail: “I’m freezing my ass off!”  And then I’d think, even if I didn’t always blurt: “Just another thing you’ll no longer need to wipe.”  Besides, given the obesity of Americans today, freezing one’s ass off , for many, would constitute a significant uplift in their health.

I’m more tolerant now:  I understand others’ intolerance for what they perceive as nature’s ‘extremes’ even if I don’t share their attitudes.  It’s all about comfort for them, all about creaturing into a softly warm covey of  white-noised, undisturbed mellowness in all affairs during the larger sentencing period of their lives.  At some point in lovemaking, I crave that covey, too.  At some point.  But given my rather sparse historical participation in that particular arena, it’s anything but a repetitively patterned aspect of my mindset.  Typically, my cast-into-the-world, life-in-the-streets odyssey mentality seeks anything but comfort as I roam under the sun, slide as a shadow under the moon, and tour the world feeling ever-born and dangerously indecisive.  I’ve always been so bent.  The difference now is that I leave “the others” alone.

I often just ache with my own insatiable need to do battle in the universe.  I like to turn over stones, get just far enough out of the range of poisonous snakes so they can’t strike, take one less step by leaping, acknowledge only death as life’s safekeeping, and yet keep it remotely a safekeeping I abhor.  In some ways, I see myself as the embodiment of worldly fluxes, novel infusions of strangeness, and never-before-been-done’s that come knocking at the forest door.  But the energy that is me, in me,  I also acknowledge a process tamer, an ordering principle proselytizing for lesser entropy, and a plower of such highways that are abandoned now even by highwaymen.   So be it then: Let me plow the star-traced highways and make it more of a creature comfort for those who follow to roll on down them.  But I disdain the traffic, so don’t expect me to stick around.  Today’s an adventure and tomorrow’s a discovery unfathomed.

A cook in my work cafeteria just asserted that soups, like chili, are always better served as leftovers on the second day after cooking.  Is that true?

I’m looking at a book entitled “Statistics with a Sense of Humor”.  I think you have to be truly warped to attempt to juxtapose those unrelated arenas of mind and belly.

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is still trying to explain his frenzied speech (now infamous for his god-awfully gutteral ‘yee-haw-urggg’ exclamation) following his third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses:

" …I have all kinds of warts. I wear cheap suits sometimes, I say things that I probably ought not to say…. Was it over the top? Sure, it was over the top. Do I do things that are a little nutty? Sure, I do things that are a little nutty. But the truth is, I was having a great time."

Okay, that does it.  There’s no way Dean will ever be President now.  Honesty is refreshing, but who wants a nutty, poorly-dressed, ill-spoken, alien-like yelping President with warts who has a great time during a period of loss?  Can you imagine Dean in the position that Saddam was in a little while back—at the bottom of a spider hiding hole, being taken prisoner by enemy forces, …and then yelping like that?  Ha—they would have shot him on the spot!

Caesar once said: “Veni, vidi, vici.”  Very un-Deanish.  I say: I like sexy, I crave sexy, please be my sexy! (Okay, I blog even more impulsively than Dean yelps )

I just tried my first sip of Diet Coke with LIME and I’m hooked.  It’s now, by far, my favorite soft drink, unless you consider beer a soft drink (well, it is as opposed to hard liquor).

I wasn’t even aware there were two Wind Chill indexes!  The old one would have pegged the wind chill as I trudged to wok today at -27 F (16 degrees F actual with 40 mph winds).  The new one, which took effect officially during the 2002/2002 winter, proclaimed the wind chill to be only -6 F.  Damn, I feel warmer already!

I only got 2 hours of sleep last night—from 3 AM until 5 AM—and now I feel like the poster child for the amorphous emotion I call ‘fuzzy’.  I am fuzzy!  And my logic is multivalent, too.

For me, the natural length of my fingernails (barring accidental loss or breakage) has always been a fairly reliable index of my mental health.  Currently, my nails are longer than they’ve been for a year!  Shortly, if I don’t cut them soon, they’ll cut me.  Except my thumb and index finger on my left hand--they look totally psychotic.

I am your pharaoh

But, like a sparrow

with broken wings,

I’ve faltered to set

upon my pharaonic flight.

So instead I now slither,

low and wet

like a snake, to deliver

my taboo love to you,

my lustful sprite.

I had a 'vacation day' from my regular corporate job today.  Hurray--right?

Well, I spent 13 hours of it doing 'other assorted jobs'.  ha

But the good news is that I got the chance to run for an hour around the snowy ruins of Dreamland, too.

But blogging was not to be. Except for this. Snuck in just before 'today' yestered into history.  Residual riddance.

"Work is done and then forgotten, this is the way of heaven."  -Tao Te Ching

"Work is done and then the paycheck is awaited, this is the way I stay alive." -nfp

I could not imagine myself ever participating in the likes of an ‘Iowa Caucus’.  It was more than a circus: it was a raucous pretense as the Nemo-Demos postured to rut, strut, and cock us.  I would have preferred that they had shocked us.Tell us that America is absolutely doomed and that they want to be its last President.  Assure me that terrorists will totally stop their terror after Bush is gone because he is all they really, really hate.  Promise to move up Inauguration Day to New Years 2005 because “the killer asteroid is coming” and any later will be too late.  Pledge to give all dead space aliens in U.S. military possession a proper space burial and declare the Summer Solstice “Roswell Day”, a day for far-reaching cosmic reflection.  Devote themselves to making Mickey Mouse ‘glow-in-the-dark’ watches out of all America’s nuclear stockpile.   Scream “Elate, elate, elate!” when asked about the extreme trade imbalance with China.  Author an “Undeclaration of Dependence”, redesign the White House with a total Eskimo motif, make prostitution in D.C. legal ( “all forms of whoring will thus allowed”).  Establish an internet domain by name for every new citizen born (“every child shall have a cribsite!”).  Make Daylight Savings Time obsolete by establishing a project to place Earth in a chonosynchonous orbit where North America will always face the Sun.  Outlaw the depiction of Dead Presidents on currency; instead mandate a ‘blank space’ intended for graffiti.  Hold a currency graffiti contest; winner wins a Senate seat.  Build a “SuperBowl City” in the dead geographic center of America where every playoff for every sport at any level of competition would be required to meet.  Eliminate the fascism of “green cards” by allowing immigrants to select the precise color of card that they prefer.  Enrich the vocabulary by banning all bureaucracies from ever coining any new acronyms or designer words.  Strive for more openness in government by establishing a daily noonday media announcement entitled “Official Secret of the Day”.  Pass a law that prevents TV news organizations from hiring just “pretty people” and requires at least one slot (lead, anchor, weather, sports) filled by someone even uglier than the rest of us. And on…and on…and on….

Only a braided, broken consciousness stream is this: don’t read anything into, or if you must, don’t read.

They idiocy with their broccoli, leaves that fall to brown and turn to tea.

The beat of her wing is not as fast as the flicker of my eye, though it excels the velocity of the tear that drops to the floor.

There’s soup in the dungeon, if you’re hungry.  But you must put on the shackles to eat with the crackers.

Explore the vectors of the branches sprawling outwards before the tree becomes your table.

If I’m a little furry thing, I may kill or make love to another little furry thing—depending on its species and its gender.

Words, be kind to me, I’m only trying to exhaust your unprimped, hidden exorbitance.

Every night, before every President goes to bed, he’s given a shot of an anti-suicide drug to rest his shaken head.

Embrace who you are, embrace the world.  Lean unto the stream and kiss Narcissus.  And then let drown.

If all the world were palatably edible, what in the world would you try first that you’ve never tasted before?

Everything’s happening somewhere all the time.  Humanity’s a great simultaneity.  It’s just a matter of intend, effect, and choose.  If you don’t, you lose.

Global warming is ominous, but who ever suspected it might fracture skulls?  Great balls of ice!  

Or...have you hugged your megacryometeor today ?

Work is pinning me down too finely today.  I’m feeling like Gulliver constrained under the foul fingerings of a runt-load of Lilliputians.

memo from my soon-to-be ex-boss:

In case you haven't already heard, I just wanted to let you know that Steve has accepted a position in the xxx Department.  Despite his move to "the Dark Side", please wish Steve good luck in his new position.

Susan, Tom, Joe and I would like to thank Steve for all his fine support over many years.  Steve came to the yyy department after having supported zzz in Research for many years.  Steve has been a strong contributor to the success of yyy and we will miss his expertise as well as his often unique, philosophical way of looking at life and its many situations.  While we will miss him, it is good to know that the XYZ will continue to benefit from his extensive knowledge and expertise.  xxx will be better off because of his presence.

Good luck Steve, and thanks for the memories!

Dave

PS -  Steve has requested that henceforth he be addressed as "Darth nfp", apprentice to the evil emperor ("Mike").

Indisputable proof that I’m not just a fair-weather cemetery runner: semi-whiteout at sunset just after a jaunt-around.

Important winter-running tip (from a hard, cold lesson just gleaned), especially for guys: never-ever run in frigid temps with silk under-sportswear ( only, beneath your lower running attire) unless you want to experience what it feels like to be a popsicle-making machine.

Japan unable to find source of bird flu outbreak
Forbes - 5 hours ago
TOKYO,
Jan 14 (Reuters) - Japanese officials, striving to halt the spread of
bird flu, said on Wednesday they had so far been unable to discover how
the outbreak occurred.

Sars theory 'needs work'
The Times, UK (subscription) - 1 hour ago
AS
A 35-year-old businessman became the third suspected victim in southern
China of the deadly lung disease Sars, specialists meeting at the Royal
Society in London called for more research into diseases that spread
from animals to man.

How Now, Mad Cow?
BusinessWeek - 7 hours ago
Just before Christmas, US consumers and the country's $38 billion beef industry
got a glimpse of the damage caused by mad cow disease, the brain-destroying ...

Isn’t it time yet for a new Hollywood blockbuster depicting this concerted attack upon mankind by animaldom ?  Perhaps, a sequel to Animal Farm called “Revenge of The Beasts” ?!

“(yes, the search bar actually does something now - try it out!)”  -Marc, on the new Real Xanga Search

But what does it do?

Well, first, you’re either in or out:  “For our beta launch of search, we've indexed about half of the users on the site, with all of their posts (my emphasis) as of late December.”  -Marc

Well, it appears, I’m “in” since I do show up on some hits.  But…

I have my own blog search on the side, and have had it for some time, sponsored by Atomz.  I just searched my blog with it for the term ‘xangods’ and got 26 hits, 17 of which are unique (my search had 9 duplicates).

I also just used the Xanga "Real" Search to search for ‘xangods’ and got back only 6 unique hits attributed to me (there are some for some other members also).  It seems that Xanga “Real” Search was only able to cough up 35% of my own actual occurrences of this term.   That’s terrible!

So are the other 11 hits I get on my Atomz search not indexed under Xanga’s “Real” Search?  Not necessarily not !  One of my hits on the Atomz search has the words ‘xangods’ and ‘edict’ adjacent to each other.  Xanga’s “Real” Search doesn’t provide this post as a hit when simply searching for the term ‘xangods’, but if you search it for ‘xangods edict’, it does.  Which means it is indexed, but doesn’t return it for a hit under the less restrictive condition.  That is totally unacceptable behavior for a search engine: it’s failingly non-exhaustive and unpredictably fickle.

A real, comprehensive, reliable, and up-to-date search on Xanga would be a great asset, especially to those, like frejaluna and others, who are concerned about some other unethical xangans plagiaristically reposting their work.

Here is part of my response to frejaluna’s post on a discovery of xangan plagiarism:

“I really thing Xanga needs to repair, reinvest, and revamp the Xanga search engine.  It's currently totally inoperative, but if it worked well (timely, accurately, comprehensively), at least we could all search all of Xanga for unique strings of our own text that would identify a thief beyond a doubt.”

The sad thing, given the outcome of my comparisons above, is that even for those who are already indexed (like myself and many others) the search furnishes incomplete, hence non-assuring, results.  It will only be truly useful if, besides covering all posts (inclusive—and they are promising this ), it works according to comprehensible, non-excluding (exhaustive) search rules—which, for now, it doesn’t ( and without any assurance that it ever will be fixed ).

Some things that strike me as significant (or worthy of consideration), every now and then…

The sun never simply
rises, never simply sets.  It is always rising, always setting
somewhere continuously.  Dawn and sunset are uninterrupted,
simultaneous phenomena that have persisted for billions of years. 
It is only mankind that blinks an eye and deems them a moment in time.

Sometimes when I see
a snapshot of a living person in the newspaper, I wonder, if when the
shot was taken, they were breathing in, breathing out, or merely
holding their breath.

Do lovers, even when
not making love, tend to inhale and exhale more in unison?  Do
their hearts tend to systole and diastole in more remarkable
synchronicity than just anyone you might meet?

When, in the cultural
mainstream, girls become more promiscuous than guys, will guys
culturally be compelled to wear dresses and cross their legs?  Is
such, perhaps, the unspoken origin of the Scottish kilt (those naughty
Scottish lasses ) ?!

Do buffalo really roam or is there a method to their meandering madness?

If you participate psychically in someone’s mysterious death are you an immaterial witness?

As the house of green
effect kicks in more significantly and the poles begin to liquefy more
profusely, middle latitude winters will actually become harsher as the polar moisture transports and deposits on your head.

If I were in love,
this very moment, with someone a million light years away, would not my
love touch with immediacy even though light would, by lapse of time,
fail?  Hence, if love is true piercing simultaneity, the
always-moment, it lacks both past and future.  More physically
law-defying than time travel, love is time’s uninvention, its unravel.

Round 2 - post-Work Rebound

It’s not the darkness that scatters itself across my path.

I’ve laughed and embraced the darkness for so long

That it’s sick of the sight of me—can’t stand the fight in me

And now does everything to stay out of my way.

Nor is the cold the perforation crashing my party.

The notion of diminished molecular motion in air, in space,

Fuels my imagination to leap beyond such stations of desolation

And tricks the flickers of my own inactivity into battle grace.

The haunt of death is not what causes me pause.

I’ve met that faerie numerous times on life’s path,

Sometimes itself impaired and discarded in the gutter,

I’ve nurtured it back to a vibrant upstart, oftentimes screaming “See ya later!”.

So what is it that’s got me jacked,

Turned upside into a make-me-neverminded state of whack?

My synchronicity-lover, splendidus igneus, sol muliebris,

Movens me atqui procul penitus.

I was awash in an imaginative river of romance last night.  I regret that I have to work this morning or I’d expound upon it.

Brrrrr!   Cold!   Snow!  ::just perfect for a solitary afternoon run in the winter-desolate cemetery.  Then I’ll let my muses decide if such expounding as I ponder above fits into the mortal unfolding of a man seeking.

love.

Mars Space News

  Spirit, the Mars’ rover, is apparently inextricably entangled in its own condom-like airbags and currently unable to track the pristine Martian terrain.
  “ If it can’t freely rove the countryside, it will never be able to find the Weapons of Mass Destruction.”, said a joint statement released by the Defense Dept. and NASA.  
  Addressing this issue, President Bush will announce a manned rescue mission to Mars to take the Jaws of Life along to free the valiant Spirit rover.When questioned about his precise rationale for proposing this extraordinary undertaking, Bush was heard to mutter: “No child left behind, er, I mean, Black Hawk down…”

  Europe’s Mars Express Orbiter, meanwhile, is still not able to find any trace of Beagle (2), the retriever it deported to the surface.This tragic failure has led dog-lovers worldwide to erupt into spontaneous demonstrations questioning the wisdom of sending a dog to Mars in the first place.Many are comparing the European’s Space Agency’s decision to send a Beagle to crash on Mars to the Soviet empire’s heartless decision to sacrifice Laika, bitch and first living creature ever to be launched into space, on the fated Sputnik 2 mission at the outset of the Space Race. (The Russians, by the way, being sexists, chose only female dogs for sacrifice since they didn’t have to “stand and lift their legs to urinate”, thus avoiding the risk of shorting out electronic controls mounted on Sputnik’s walls).

  “Didn’t we learn from the tragic loss of Laika?”,one distraught Muscovite protesting outside the Kremlin was heard to remark. 
  Yet not all dog-lovers protesting shared this loss-of-life sentiment. Some small dog-loving factions were actually more distressed over the choice of breed to send to Mars rather than the choice itself: “They were stupid to send a tail-wagging Beagle in the first place,” commented one man.“They should have matched the breed to the planetary conditions more scientifically.Beagles are okay for the littler inmost planets like Mercury and Venus, but I think that a larger-bodied pointer or setter would have been a better match for middling planets like Mars.”

Okay, so my spoof is hokey!Here’s a better one …by far!

I'm currently wandering around in the Vault.

Just got done with Cows with Guns. (lyrics here ).

Trying to resist going retro-sketching.

Now if only I could find time to write.

And upon this birthday of mine , starting a new tradition, I’m going to treat myself by…

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Running in Dreamland (“the cemetery”)  mwuahahahaha

Actually, the treat was buying myself, during my lunch break today, warmer gloves and a warmer ski cap so that I can tolerate the jaunt in the 20 degree (3 F.,  windchill) weather.  On the average, I buy myself about 6 items of clothing a year.  Hence, I’m statistically 33% done with my yearly clothes shopping.  And that is such a great joy to me (statistically) as you might never ever imagine!

With a brilliant yet concentrated stream of glitter
extending from just under her chin, down her Modigliani neckline and deep into
the tempting recess of her bosom, I remarked to the temptress that had
approached my barstool: “What a wondrous canal your cleavage makes for that
gloriously-flowing glitter.”  “What
cleavage?” she responded teasingly.  
“Nice glitter track regardless,” I poignantly pointed out.

I’ve run 20+ miles since New Year’s Eve.  At this rate, I’ll complete my second virtual
circumnavigation of the globe (amassing miles equivalent to Earth’s
circumference) sometime in the year 2026. 
If, for this purpose, I hold to my current stomping grounds, that will
require about 16,000 more laps around the cemetery Dreamland.  Don’t freak out: that’s a conservative
estimate.  If I get really aggressive and
push myself into some marathon training, I might complete the tour by
2020.  *marks 2020 down on e-calendar*  Okay, party time!

It’s that time of year when Christmas trees and holiday
decorations start to disappear from public places.  I love to watch the decorations come down: it
means things are getting back to normal and life is moving on.  A couple of years ago, I observed the ‘dismantling’
of a 45 foot artificial tree in a shopping mall late one night when the stores
had closed but the mall was still available for walk-through.  The ‘elves’ (yes, the dismantlers were still
dressed as elves) were elevated by cherry-pickers and picking the elaborate
ornaments off the upper limbs.  One ‘elf’
seemed particularly rambunctious, so I especially watched him.  He’d pluck the ornaments or strand of
ornaments off the tree with compulsive swipes, turn around, and then send them
crashing 40 feet to the floor where muffled bursts of exploding tree bulbs
could be heard.  Apparently, this was
standard operating procedure, more or less, premised upon the notion that
replacing the broken ornaments sometime over the summer before the next installation
seemed a cheaper strategy than handling them delicately with loving caress. But
funniest thing was the song he was singing: “Deck the floor with broken
Christmas, fa-la-la-la-la, I’m so stupid!”

fa-la-la-la-la, nice glitter track

I’m examining the
ingredients stated on the back of a 3 oz. Pepper Mill Classic Italian Dressing foil-guarded
packlet sitting on my desk at work.  Hrmm…’calcium
disodium EDTA to protect flavor’.  I
remember using EDTA to liquefy crushed mollusk shells in the laboratory for the
purpose of extracting their organic matrix.  I remember having to wear goggles to protect
my eyes from it.   I also think you’ll find EDTA in many hair
products, too.  I wonder if that’s to
protect the flavor of one’s hair? (Does red hair taste like strawberries, black
hair like currants, brown hair like chocolate, blonde hair like extract of
Britney?)…oh, and up above the EDTA listing it states ‘artificial flavor’.  So an unnatural chemical is being employed to
preserve the flavor of an artificial one! 
(That so works for the ‘extract
of Britney’.)

Hey, looking a
little deeper on the internet, maybe EDTA is a godsend after all.  Seems it’s being touted as the "Liquid-Plumr®"
of the cardiovascular system.  It’s even
an anti-venom! (Again, that so works for the ‘extract
of Britney’.)

Is running in circles what life’s all about?

(I do love you, you know.)

We run up hills.

(live for the thrill.)

And never stumble going down.

(gathering details all around.)

Yet after thousands of laps, it seems like we’ve done this all before.
.

(is déjà vu a chapter in the Kama Sutra?)

But if we break the circle pattern, which way to go?

(I want to gather you and love you wherever you stray.)

The finish line has always been anathema.

(don’t speak, just pant, and I’ll follow you anywhere.)

And sprints have never really seemed that challengely long.

(chase was never the measure of our affair.)

But I got to tell you I just love the way you kick and show me your stuff.

(our hearts pounding, our lungs bursting, never kisses enough.)

So stretch it out one more time, baby.

(collapse in embrace.)

And we’ll call it another timeless tie in our non-race.

I don't believe it's Winter,
           I don't believe it's Winter,
                      I don't believe it's Winter...

Dandelions in northern Ohio in January? 

Hydrangea (snowballs) readying to re-emerge?

Some fool running around in shorts?

It's almost midnight now and still 54 degrees F.
(and, no, i'm not still running around .)

A faerie whispered to me: “See, love’s a purpling juggernaut.”

“But I don’t know what a purpling juggernaut is,” I replied quite honestly.

“Neither does anyone else,” she said.  And then flew away.

There’s a larger stillness than one I’ve ever imagined.  Not in death does it commence but in a life foregone of hope.  Among the dead there’s (a sense of) some who were no more alive in life.  And so it follows, among the living, there are those already gone.  How sad.  Better to fly a kite or go fishing than to ever stop, stop wishing.

It’s not a heat wave here in Dreamland, but it’s dry enough and warm enough (40s).  So I’ve resumed perching against an obelisk, popping a few tops, pecking at the keyboard, and allowing the sky to be Sky.

What if, instead of your name on your gravestone when you died, there would be inscribed, magically and unmistakenly, the names of all who truly loved you once upon a time?  How small the print?  How large the rock?  How many would lie in unmarked graves?

I detest my restraints.  Okay, a joke’s a joke.  Now please return my wings.

I just finished the 'next stage' of labor in a house chore consisting of rehabilitating a severely beat-up stairwell.  It was so unthrilling that I now feel compelled to leave the house and find some excitement.

And if I can't find any, then I'll just make my own.