May 2006

you really think you’re in control?

    A front yard walkway lined with brightly colored bowling balls half-buried in the ground.

    a pileup of six or seven La-Z-Boys at the curb.

    four crows circling in wide beautiful arcs.

    thirty-six wind chimes on a tiny front porch.

    five puppies crowded around a tray of water, tails wagging so hard they keep losing their balance.

    a wire hoop hanging on a bush.

    a 50-something barber sitting in his beat-up brown datsun in front of the shop, hot-boxing a joint.

    a shriveled spent condom laying on the ground.

    a bloody bit of gauze.

    a man on the bus leaning in to tell me my knee-highs are sexy and ask me if i’m “one of them, you know, schoolgirls.”

    Shugaland Cafe.

    a cracked fish tank full of rain water.

    sixty-eight satellite dishes.

    a dog house on stilts in a flooded back yard.

    the video to gnarls barkley’s crazy whilst sitting in the DSC eating a sammich.

jyyVlUfy19c

[watch closely for all the birds]

what i saw today

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avoiding the wall

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): “Race car drivers say that if you’re heading toward a wall,” writes philosopher Jonathan Zap, “don’t look at it. Instead, look at where you want to go.” That’s good advice for you in the coming week, Capricorn. It would be crazy for you to concentrate all your
attention on what you don’t like and don’t need and don’t agree with. Rather, you should briefly acknowledge the undesirable possibilities, but then turn the full force of your focus to the most interesting and fulfilling option.

Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

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bells ringing in my ears
[the three-day weekend edition]

    CAUTION ASBESTOS HAZARD.

    two yellow and red flower bouquets strapped to a utility pole on the median of the road.

    an old, noble yellow lab seeing-eye dog escorting a lady into an Arby’s. he raised his head, licked his nose hungrily at the faux-beef aroma, but calmly sat his ground like a professional.

    a bench made of green pine sweating beads of sap in the oppressive heat.

    an empty cicada husk clutching the trunk of a tree.

    pale and delicate green-veined leaves slowly unfurling from purple sleeves.

    two crows hot on the trail of a fleeing hawk (again).

    two alumni (alumnus?) escorted around campus in a courtesy golf cart.

    the fountain spray lifted by gusting breeze.

    ONE OF 31,000.

    the bus driver eyeing my cleavage via the rearview mirror.

    NOW IS THE TIME (FOR JESUS).

    a little white plastic horse on big red wheels.

    a red shopping cart full of dead leaves.

    JOSEPH ROSSI MEMORIAL CEMETERY.

    a beat-up pink car covered by a pristine blue plastic sheet.

    a small brown and orange butterfly slowly pumping its wings while resting on the corner of my house.

    my boss pulling up in front of my house to deliver the new kitten.

    an abandoned baby bottle at the bus stop.

    a bird disappearing into a gap in the slats on the attic level of the murder house.

    a small golden brown and yellow bird laying dead after crashing into the grocery store window.

    a mockingbird standing in a well-groomed yard, working its wings slowly like an air-traffic controller.

    amhad walking purposefully in his delirium.

    a tabby cat being dive-bombed by a (different) mockingbird.

    an opossum smeared across the gutter of the road.

    what appeared to be a gravestone (’JACKSON’) displayed in front of someone’s house.

    a ball cap abandoned on a step.

    a large noisy dragonfly flashing a green belly.

    one itty-bitty peach on a huge blooming tree.

    The Mims House.

    a punk girl wearing a bandana, driving her mercedes into the car wash.

    powerade slush.

    www.mosestucker.com.

    Plants For Sale Or Rent.

    a maze of roofless concrete walls on an abandoned plot.

    a whole mess of birds fighting over a slice of watermelon.

    a wobbly baby blackbird perched between its parents on a wire.

    a tiny blue star laying on the ground.

    a slew of freshly-bloomed plum day lilies.

    sadie climbing my stockings while they’re on my legs.

    5 beer bottle tops (Bud Dry) arranged and pressed into the dirt like the 5 points of a star.

    a yellow raindrop landing on my white shirt.

    a prissy lady driving a range rover eating a sloppy egg mcmuffin.

    an abandoned popsicle stick bejeweled with tiny red ants.

    Acts 1:24-25

    BRAID IT UP: Braids & Fades.

    a battalion of purple onion puffballs in a backyard garden.

    an open manhole, cover nowhere in sight.

    a bouncy co-ed in pink rubber clogs.

what i saw today

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life is good


tiny closeup

Originally uploaded by dreamattack.

a lazy sunday afternoon with the yet-unnamed kitten.

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and your earth moves beneath your own dream landscape…

    The grey kitty from the other day sprawled casually across the top of one of those fake plastic boulders looking like king of the mountain.

    FOUND PUPPY MUST IDENTIFY.

    a vivid red cardinal pooping on the head of a stone child playing a stone double flute.

    a house fly sitting on my arm for a good five minutes rubbing his various pairs of legs together like the villain in a silent movie.

    a man sitting beside me in the bus shelter alternating staring at my face & craning his neck to see what i am keying into my phone.

    the flat-top convex heads of wild mushrooms nestled in the grass.

    the shadows of my hair blowing around my shadow head.

    Habibi’s Durable Medical Equipment - NO LOITERING.

    a milk crate nailed to the side of a tree.

    a clothesline sagging under the weight of many, many pairs of ginormous white granny panties.

    GET OFF YOUR CAN!

    a stone hummingbird sipping from a stone flower.

    pure white hydrangeas exploding in a side yard.

    a bevy of well-fed squirrels, doves & other birds dining side-by-side on the ground of a courtyard.

    a mental picture of what i looked like dancing alone in the elevator this morning to the crescendo point of coil’s first dark ride throbbing loudly between my headphones. if only the elevator ride was a little longer.

    my boss’s stubby fingernails painted turquoise, then gold, then turquoise, then gold again, alternating across both hands. she’s cool.

    the dessicated corpses of ladybugs strewn along the windowsills.

    Watson Industries Division: Afro-Lecon Qualitity Engineered & Quality Inspected.

    Disturbed Exceptional Children: An Integrated Approach, 1981.

    FIRE HOS#.

    a gaggle of two to five-year-olds running alongside the bus waving gleefully at the driver after he let them off.

    the chirpy, flashing, ADA-compliant crosswalk.

    the upside down ‘U’ of sweat on the back of my new work shirt.

    a baby squirrel struggling to climb the vines embracing a massive tree trunk.

    two luminent halves of a broken robin’s egg on the sidewalk (and subsequently carried home cradled gently in my cupped palm.)

    the lightning, out-of-synch, whir of only the second hummingbird i’ve ever seen.

    hundreds of fireflies spreading across the neighborhood in a pulsating, morse-coded choreography.

what i saw today

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to be and to not-be

Things and Concepts

    The principle of Non-Identity brings to light that enormous chasm that opens between things and the concept we have of them. Things are dynamic and living, while our concepts of them are static and poor. Look, for example, at a table. We see the table; we have the impression that the table in itself and the concept of the table that is in our mind are identical. In reality, what we believe to be a table is nothing other than our concept of the table, while the table in itself is something else entirely. Some scant notions - wood, of brown color, hard, being three feet high, old, etc. - bring about this concept of a table in us. The table in itself is not so scanty in reality. For exmple, a nuclear physicist would tell us that the table is not a piece of static matter, that it is constituted of a multitude of atoms whose electrons move like a swarm of bees, and that if we could put these atoms next to each other, we would have a mass of matter smaller than a finger. This table, in reality, is always in transformation; in time as well as in space it is connected to other things that we might call non-table. It depends upon them so closely that if we should take from the table all that which is non-table, the table itself would no longer exist.

    The forest, the tree, the saw, the hammer, the cabinetmaker, for example, are part of this non-table, and there are still more elements that are in relation to this non-table, such as the parents of the cabinetmaker, the bread that they eat, the blacksmith who makes the hammer, and so on. if we know how to look at the table in its relationship with all this non-table, we can see in it the presence of all the non-table. We can say that the existence of the table implies, or demonstrates, the existence of that which is non-table; that is to say, of the entire universe. This idea is expressed in the Avatamsaka system of Buddhism by the notion of the “multi-inter-origin” of things. A notion in which the one is equal to the all, and the all equal to the one.

    excerpt from Zen Keys by Thích Nhât Hanh

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i wear this chaos well

    The sun rising over the murder house, its eaves clotted with mourning doves.

    a small tabby cat drinking from a bird bath while a frumpy grey bird watched disgruntled from an electric wire overhead.

    a spider web blocking the back slot of a drive up mailbox.

    a small half-moon blister raising on my left middle knuckle where i nicked myself using an iron for the first time in many years.

    magnolia blossoms raining their sex bits down on my head as i passed beneath the tree.

    the silver thistle arrows of airplanes taking off.

    two large black ants arguing over the corpse of a smaller red ant.

    dew lining up along the edges of a blade of crabgrass.

    a little sod bug that curled up tightly when i carefully tapped it with a pine needle.

    a trailer serving BBQ from someone’s back yard.

    Nearly 100,000 People Are Waiting For An Organ Transplant.

    a velvet painting of three black girls praying, heads bowed toward each other in a semi-circle.

    DIP.

    infinite tiny holes letting the world in thru the inner surface of the bus windows.

    THE MEAT STORE.

    two men picking thru a liquor store dumpster with a stick.

    GOOD AS NEW!

    shaky red graffiti tags on a white garage door.

    surprise lilies ringing the yard of a boarded-up house.

    the top eight feet of a tree laying beside its recently divorced trunk

    In Memory of Virginia McGehee.

    a black needle-waisted wasp flitting around the fountain edge, reminding me that i need to start carrying my Epi-pen, as this campus is practically a forest preserve.

    one lonely discarded work glove on the ground.

    a legion of 30-something teachers garbed in khaki & white marching in step with their matching binders and haircuts.

    Our Turbulent Sun, 1982.

    sitting on my desk: Swampland Flowers: The Letters and Lectures of Zen Master Ta Hui, 1977.

    the lovely Bosnian student worker sipping her bottled starbucks frappuchino and typing out titles on the sleeves of new microfiche inbetween discussing the virtues and faults of various soda concoctions.

what i saw today

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No.

Contemplating “No”

    A monk asked Chao Chou, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?” Chao Chou said, “No.” This one word “no” is a knife to sunder the doubting mind of birth and death. The handle of this knife is in one’s own hand alone. You can’t have anyone else wield it for you: to succeed you must take hold of it yourself. You consent to take hold of it yourself only if you can abandon your life. If you cannot abandon your life, just keep to where your doubt remains unbroken for a while: suddenly you’ll consent to abandon your life, and then you’ll be done. Only then will you believe that when quiet it’s the same as when noisy, when noisy it’s the same as when quiet, when speaking it’s the same as when silent, and when silent it’s the same as when speaking. You won’t have to ask anyone else, and naturally you won’t accept the confusing talk of false teachers.

    During your daily activities twenty-four hours a day, you shouldn’t hold to birth and death and the Buddha Path as existent, nor should you deny them as nonexistent. Just contemplate this: A monk asked Chao Chou, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?” Chao Chou said, “No.”

randomly paperclipped excerpt from Swampland Flowers: The Letters and Lectures of Zen Master Ta Hui

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all watched over by spinny helicopter seedpods of loving grace

    A greying yellow lab with a pot belly grinning at me. seemed proud to have escaped whatever yard he belonged to. followed me for half a block before he went back to wait for his owners to discover his prison break.

    a juvenile squirrel not yet grown into his tail, skittering around the side of a tree trunk as his mother chattered at me nervously.

    the ends of bushes zipped up tight in webworm tangles.

    the ass end of a beetle sticking out of a discarded dr. pepper can.

    the early morning sun peeking thru the branches of a tree, said branches diffusing the light into rays that evoked a william blake painting.

    three middle-aged ladies in an oldsmobile stopping to offer me religious tracts while i waited for the bus. i smiled politely and said ‘no thank you’.

    an old man riding a lavender girl’s bike, white basket still retaining a few worn plastic flowers. tipped his hat as he rode past me.

    an ancient skeleton of a matriarch of a lady wearing st. louis cardinals pajamas, sitting on a porch swing, dangling her legs like a 5-year-old.

    QQ.

    a lady sitting in the back of the bus yelling into her cellphone, a child on either side collapsed against her.

    FREE HOT FISH SANDWICH DINNERS.

    pink and blue and purple hydrangeas curled around a cremation repository.

    one of little rock’s finest picking his nose idly while sitting at a speed trap.

    a perplexed, long-legged, black puppy watching the bus pass.

    a man setting up orange cones around a road patching site.

    an ANDY MAYBERRY FOR CONGRESS campaign sign.

    a man wrapped in a blanket, curled up on his side on the porch of a house, his boots sitting upright beside him stuffed full of dandelions.

    PI BETA PHI

    < --G#EEKS (R scratched out by humorous vandal).

    "If You Can Read This Roll Me Over!" - printed upside down across the top of a jeep windshield.

    condensation rolling down the inside of the bus windows.

    a license plate: I-VAN.

    NO OUTLET CAMPUS DRIVE CLOSED.

    a fountain gushing foamy water onto stone platters.

    a fat, puffy, baby bluejay struggling to hide in a bush. i immediately scouted for its parents, as i've been dive-bombed by more than one urgent bluejay platoon over the years.

    14 different spider webs glistening in the sun.

    a young maple tree bursting with tiny red-blush, almost translucent, unripened spinny helicopter seedpods.

    ##ASS OF 1939 (more vandals, but i laughed anyway).

    the clouds and sky reflected in four stories of black plate glass windows.

    tiny red and purple flowers swallowing my clunky black shoes.

    3rd rennovation in progress MASK MAYBE NEED! [sic]

    Maternal Child Nursing Care, 2nd Ed.

    A Hundred Years of Chemistry, 3rd Rev. Ed.

    two crows wheeling in the treetops, as seen from my fifth floor panorama of windows.

what i saw today

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links for 2006-05-24

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contextual extropy

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Twice a year you enter a short-lived phase in your astrological cycle when tough challenges are the best gifts you can possibly receive. This is one of those times. To honor this richly disconcerting moment, I offer you three gems from sages who understood how to get the most out of their trials. Psychologist C.G. Jung: “We need difficulties; they are necessary for our health.” French diplomat Jean Monnet: “If you have a problem you cannot solve, enlarge the context.” Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

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the flytrap and the petal

    A friendly gray cat with a thick double coat, white bib, and a collar with an extra 3 or 4 inches hanging off the clasp. he miaowed hello then dropped to roll ecstatically in the dust.

    mommy and baby basketball hoop stands, side by side.

    the reaching six-foot tendrils of roseless rosebushes stretching across the sidewalk to catch me up in thorny nets.

    a shiny, fat, black ant wandering in circles around the head of a fencepost, tapping his legs cautiously like a white cane, searching for a way off that didn’t involve spider webs.

    a white GMC suburban with a four-foot antenna like a thick spiraled lightning rod.

    PATTON HOT SAUSAGE 4 SALE.

    many, many split halves of gum tree seedpods scattered on the ground.

    puffy grey doves jockeying for position on the drainage gutter of a recently restored house.

    1620.

    red pinwheels spinning in a backyard.

    BOOTH FOR RENT.

    FRESH CATFISH BUFFALO RAW & COOKED.

    the quiet storm social club.

    John 15: 17-19**

    a weight bench double-chained to a front porch.

    a tiny decrepit 4×4 building labeled FANTASY SHAK in faded purple script.

    a doll-sized stone angel leaning over the grave of a child.

    three plastic geese having a tea party at a table made of a large wooden spool.

    a partially deflated inflatable green wading pool, half-full of water.

    a black cat sitting zazen on pink barbie big wheel.

    a fat robin trying to squeeze into a miniature birdhouse.

    a hair salon named GOOD INTENTIONS BEAUTY PARLOR.

    a rusted dog cage overcome with white and cobalt morning glories.

    six men in various states of leglessness sitting in a circle of wheelchairs in someone’s side-yard.

    a front yard populated only by numerous jagged tree trunks, jutting forcefully from the lawn.

    CRYE-LEIKE REALTY.

    a tiny stained-glass panel of a peacock, hanging in the window of a partially demolished building.

    5024.

    ONE-WAY three times.

    **17 This I command you, that you love one another.

    18 If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you.

    19 If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.

what i saw today

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mouths everywhere

    A knot in the trunk of a tree, shaped like a howling mouth. i could almost hear it scream.

    the darkest man i’ve ever seen, marching down the opposite side of the street with his back to the bus. he wore army pants and a camoflauge hat, black tank top that nearly matched his skin. as the bus passed him he turned to glare. the cockatiel on his shoulder glared as well.

    the tapered climb of a chimney, choked with vines, three round stacks atop it, a frowning mouth perched dourly cut in the stone.

    an ancient tangle of uprooted fencing and branches and indecipherable garbage twisted together, resting in the lee was a small rubber doll with no arms, head spun around to face its back.

    the friendliest-looking dog i’ve seen in ages, lolling grinningly next to a BEWARE OF DOG sign.

    a gaggle of coffee-with-cream-skinned children herded out of the street by an ancient man waving a cane in the air like a shepherd’s crook.

    numerous cars driven by people talking on cellphones, no headsets, eyes glazed, attention otherwise diverted.

    one shiny red flower pot on the porch of a white house, empty.

    three PUSH BUTTON TO CROSS signs.

    lot 13.

    three vividly gray squirrels playing leapfrog amidst the pinecones and soda cans.

    a small pair of formerly pink bikini panties, laying discarded in the pine needles.

    a small purple child’s barette shaped like a butterfly, hinge broken, clasp intact.

    the unfortunate partially peeking gonads of a male human garbed in loose cutoff jeans, lounging seemingly unawares by the fountain.

    a red cardboard cutout of a chicken head.

    a two-by-two bit of cotton gauze covered with tiny black ants.

    23 individual exhaust ports on the roof of the science laboratories building.

    the words SUGAR BUNNY scrawled across the student flyer kiosk.

    a grumpy-looking black bird crouching in a rumpled way beneath a stone bench.

what i saw today

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tea and oranges

for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

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links for 2006-05-20

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shit into gold? where have i heard that before?

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): An old African proverb says that cattle are wealth, and there are no cattle without dung. This idea is applicable to you right now. The source of your greatest riches has produced some waste matter that needs to be cleaned up. Ironically, if you act expeditiously, the waste matter could be turned into more riches. Take a hint from the Masai people, who use cattle dung as plaster in building their homes. The scent helps repel lions, who dislike it, from venturing too
close.

Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

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my last day at the public library

minus nine months of medical leave, i’ve been here almost a decade. while i’ll miss the people and many of the patrons, i won’t miss the admino-sphere, and my ex- and soon-to-be-ex bosses.

i start my new job Monday, as a state employee at the university library (instuctional media services). i know i’m just trading one bloated, clueless administration for another, but i am really relishing the opportunity for a clean slate.

plus, the best part of the new job … scantily clad co-eds wandering the campus! mmm eye candy.

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the sleeper shall see what he has dreamed

Love is a Stranger

Heart came on solid footing with breath refined
to warn the best of communities.
Heart placed your head
like a pen on the page of love.

We are joyous pennants in your just wind.
Master, to where do you dance?

Toward the land of liberation,
toward the plain of non-existence.

Master, tell us which non-existence you mean.
The ear of eternity knows the letter of eternity.

Love is a stranger with a strange language,
like an Arab in Persia. I have brought a story;
it is strange, like the one who tells it.
Listen to your servent.

Joseph’s face enlightened the well in which he was suspended.
His imprisonment became a palace
with orchards and meadows, a paradise,
a royal hall, and a chamber of sanctity.

Just as you toss a stone into the water,
the water at that very moment parts to receive it.
Just as a cloudy night is dispelled by a clear dawn,
from his humiliation and loss he views high heaven.

Reason, do not envy my mouth.
God witnesses the blessings.
Though the tree drinks from hidden roots,
we see the display of its branches.
Whatever the earth took from heaven,
it yields up honestly in spring.

Whether you have stolen a bead or a jewel,
whether you have raised a flag or a pen,
the night is gone and the day has arrived,
and the sleeper shall see what he has dreamed.

– Rumi

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somehow i knew i’d have to sacrifice my panties eventually…

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro is so afraid of exotic assassination attempts that he has his aides burn his underwear after just one use. He apparently imagines that some dissident will find a way to saturate his unmentionables with poison during the laundering process. You’re currently in no danger of having your briefs rendered toxic, Capricorn, but I nevertheless suggest that like Castro you incinerate each fresh pair when you’re done wearing them–at least for the next few days. It will be a lyrically symbolic statement that you are ready to transform the way you express your sexual energy, and that will be in perfect alignment with the invitation the cosmos is offering you.

Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

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