Politics
We see, for the first time in memory in the small town on the main island,
posters for political candidates. When are the elections?, inquires
Helen of the man who sells guavaberry jelly in salvaged jars. June,
he replies. Or July. Sometime.
Something About This Place
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There is something about this place that causes me to write. Not makes
me write - I do not feel compelled, or obliged. But, minutes after we settled
into our little pink cottage on the beach - minutes after the clocks are
hidden, the food is stuffed into the propane fridge, the sun tea is brewing
on the wooden rail - I am writing.
Writing is somehow as natural here as sleeping fourteen hours a day,
or naming the hermit crabs, or putting out bowls of fresh water for the
banana quits. |
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Parmalat
Rainfall
It rains here rarely, but when it does, as it did this morning, it rains
all
at once, not pitters or patters but a great waterfall, dozens of miles
across, with such swiftness and violence that even the roof's wide gutters
fail to contain the torrent.
Entertainment
The
roof leaks, and we compete for who can call the shots. Left nipple,
I cry, jutting my chest upwards, then, Ohhh, as the drop splashes
down my belly instead.
Nose!, she calls from the other side of the porch, and spits
when it lands in her mouth.
Warning to Stupid People
Super Powers
Today I wore Helen's superhero suit, mine having become tattered over
the years, and I experienced, albeit briefly, her incomparable, infallible
sense of direction.
Patrick Swayze
In the dream, they had rewritten Road House as a ballet and, because
the lead dancer broke his ankle at the last minute, I was about to open
in Carnegie Hall in the Patrick Swayze role.
And honey, those kick turns are murder.
Friday
We sleep late today, eat lightly, then nap again in the afternoon, filling
the few remaining hours with nothing more exhausting than watching endless
streamers of rain through louvered windows.
Crab/Art
On
the beach today, Helen finds a cartoon crab, as tiny as your little fingernail,
on the white carapace of which are painted minuscule orange shapes, each
carefully outlined in the black pen of some microscopic Peter Max.
Gibson
I finally read Pattern Recognition, William Gibson's latest.
If you haven't yet, you must. Gibson is a brilliant writer, and the last
two chapters, as understated as they were, floored me with their unexpected
power. 
Those
of you who think of Gibson as an SF writer will be puzzled, as this story
occurs in the present, and posits absolutely no new tech, There is, in
fact, less tech in Pattern Recognition than in any random Tom Clancy novel,
which are, by comparison, very random indeed. Clancy's military machinations
pale next to Gibson's larger view of the tectonics of global culture. Gibson
writes about social change, the cusps of revolutions in the way the world
conceives of itself, and tech is only one of the levers in his grasp.
Oh, and Gibson is very slyly self-referential here. Very, very tasty.
Read it.
Goat Rodeo
The baby whose agonized screams woke us at dawn turned out to be a young
goat that had wedged its hoof between twin trunks of a tree on the steep,
crumbling hill above our cottage. It proved impossible to ignore and, against
my better judgment, we set out to extricate it, scaling a precarious fence
and maneuvering around thorn trees and cactus on the sliding, gravely slope.
Once freed, the goat collapsed into a heap beneath the tree in terror and
shock. An hour later it stood, noisily, though its leg was likely useless.
An hour after that, it vanished.
Pencil Cactus
Not the small green fingers in your kitchen pot, but behemoth forests
rising fractally some twenty feet into the sky, with trunks larger around
than your leg. They owe their abundance to their goat-poisonous sap.
Goat Trouble
Later, half the goat cheese fell on the floor, and an attempt to catapult
it into the crab garden resulted instead in a handful of goat cheese on
the eve of the porch.
Chorus
Honey, you smell like taxes,
Like empty nests, and Sunday tambourines.
A toothache's wider than a hen held high,
And together we will live in submarines.
Vengeance
Few things satisfy like the sudden slap of flesh and the tiny smear
of blood on your hand.
Subject: i'm back again!
hi all! sorry i havn't posted for a couple of sdays bt things have been
crazy since the meteor shower. one of them hit the tucker place up the
hill from me, no kidding! blasted the whole place and set fire to most
of the hill. might have killed all the tucker's, coming like it did around
midnite. nobody quite knows yet.
police and fire trucks from the next county, all over th e place, and
the sky kept lighting up with brite streaks.reminded me of watching some
meteors hit jupiter when i was a little kid,dad said some of those were
as big as our whole town. guess we got off lucky! at first i thought it
was just us but i guess everybody had metoers that night. some worse than
us. everybody. that's so weird!
so they put us all in jackson elementary until they decide everything
was ok. we got back yesterday, but of course thye power was out and so
were the phones. we got the generator going but the phones still crappy.
plus the water tastes funny.
mom & paul went to the lake fishing. their still not back so i'm
worried. sometimes they stay out, you know, but not without saying.
i dont understand a lot of the posts in the last few days. are you guys
having problems posting too? what's wrong with the tv stations? what did
bostonbarbra mean about the rivers turning muddy? and what are nanobots?
meganp
lanak, mo
meganp1989@aol.com
