life, the universe, and everything

liliales birthday countdown: 2005

This one is a bit of a cheat. I'm not sharing a blog link from this year only, because they were transferred here with a whole month on each page. You could go find them if you were compelled to. The picture links are broken, though. 

In 2005 our world changed a lot. It was awesome, then it was awful, then there was some awesomeness in the midst of the awfulness. Which was awful. Oh, and I turned 40. 

Here's me shoveling snow in early 2005: 

And here's all the poetry I got written that year, but also it was the first year I tried NaNoWriMo, so that was a neat thing. 

Sipping Gotham

New York Harbor
slice of lime

I walk differently on New York streets,
everything hums erotic vibrations 
through the soles of my feet. 

Carnival of Words

Looking at you in a funhouse mirror
It's shatter-proof, smear-proof
distorted nevertheless

On a carousel spinning,
Artificial breeze soothes
Ride over too soon.

Ferris Wheel stops at the top,
car rocks and I sway, 
unsteady and unnerved til you point out the view
It's wide and breath-taking
and I never want to come back down. 

Slave/spoils

Slave to your will, or mine?
I can lean back and close my eyes,
or grip your shoulders and draw a sharp path
straight through your pupils.

The shouts are all shut up in my head
and I do not force them out by throat and tongue,
rather with fingernails, teeth, taunting pressure
holding, locking you into position;

It's always at least a draw 
where the spoils are shared, exchanged,
given in love and taken by need—
like rain, or shelter from cold.

This is from the prologue of my first NaNoWriMo attempt. I say attempt because I can write 50k words in a month, but never seem to write a complete story...

I couldn't help myself. As she headed for the newsstand, I scribbled on the back of a receipt I found in my purse and then got up, walked past him quickly, dropping the receipt at his feet, and kept on going out of the park. My heart was racing, but I didn't look back.

The note said, "Meet me in front of Trump Tower in an hour." And he did.

He just walked right up to me and spoke, "She's visiting an old school friend, and we're getting back together for dinner at 7."

I said nothing, just pointed toward Central Park, smiled, and took off across the street, as he followed behind, jogging a little to keep up.

I had never before spoken to him in person, and just didn't know how to begin. It seemed so important to get the words exactly right, even if they were meaningless. So I remained silent until that began to feel absurd. We had a few hours, this one day out of forever, not to be wasted away on shyness.

"An eternity in one long breath. That's how the days seem right now. Like we're all exhaling, and when our lungs finally empty, and it's time for drawing in again, well."

I stopped, realizing I must sound a little crazy, speaking the truth hardly anyone dared voice aloud these days. That's me, from shy to overly vocal in one careless move.

 

 

liliales birthday countdown: 2003

From this point forward, a lot of my online presence is archived, and I thought it would be a good idea to share some thoughts I had each year. 2003 is the year I started keeping a blog. Before that I had a website on which I'd post ideas, pictures, lists of things that interested me, whatever I could think of. 

My first blog was homemade and very crude-looking. Over the years since then I've had them at Blogger, Vox, and TypePad, and I have several things going at Tumblr, but I've also got accounts at a few other places. You never know when you might need a new one. 

That year, I turned 38. I found a great deal of Bobby Darin music I'd never heard before, and downloaded it from Limewire. I feel no compunction about that. It wasn't as if this music was available for me to purchase. Me and Lars Ulrich, we'd have words if we ever met. I think that was also the year I discovered archive.org, which is still pretty much my favorite place on the web. I'm not linking, whatever. Go there if you never have, and find the Prelinger archives. Thank me later. 

I was not super well that year. The year before, I'd become ill and semi-bedridden for awhile, and was exposed to huge toxic amounts of mold. I developed asthma (the body sometimes gets confused about our need for defense mechanisms, eh?) and it's been a bother ever since. But in the summer of 2003, I was actually in terrific shape, and feeling pretty good about myself otherwise. In the autumn, I couldn't breathe again, and we prepared to move to a better house, a few miles farther inland. 

Here's the text of my first blog post. Please indulge me by reading it and the ones to follow in the other countdown posts. It was maybe more entertaining with photos, I dunno. The rest of these countdown posts will have photos, because they are archived back to 2004 on this particular computer. 

An indulgence for myself in this one instead; three poems I wrote in 2003:

Chokecherry Beach

mussel shells, tiny in my palm
born on waves, 
borne to shore on a blanket of foam,
born to live and to die
all in an instant.

mapmaker

cartographer's hands, once an abstract notion, 
merely pixels on a screen; 
unreal evidence of tangible form, 
now trace a complex route
through barriers named yet unspoken,
radiating a slow-burning energy
from within their hesitant source

he traces this path with his mind, his voice,
his carefully measured speech, and sears
a dark trail deep into my fevered skin.

humbert's reasons to drink

dedicated to Lola, the showgirl

stupid frigging nazis
poems don't rhyme
stopped changing lightbulbs
takes too much time
lights in train car
flicker off and on
she gave him her phone number
three weeks he's gone

left hand shakes so
i'm using the right
milk's gone sour
thirsty at night
that movie was absurd
blue alien moron freaks
i'd cut my own eyes out
but irony still speaks

it never seems to end
the cliche won't die
keeps finding new shelter
rabbits getting high
spewing Nietzsche, Tolkein, Plant
basement ruminations
they arrested Adam Ant
fashion indignations

winking at boys
inviting them in
they watch as i sip
pineapple juice and gin.

 

Eight years of blather

I wrote my first real blog post on January 17, 2003. I set up my own pages, linked to new ones every few entries, and at first asked for email replies. A few months later I got a tag board, and a few friends and I would leave each other messages on it. That was really fun. Actually, I'd started doing a sort of online journal the year before at LiveJournal, but never got into it the same way.

Today I was reading through old entries from 2003-2006, and feeling so incredibly old. I went from just using Dreamweaver to Blogger to Vox to here, and in between I had a photo blog at WordPress, and messed around with just about every other free blogging platform. I love my Tumblr page, though haven't been able to do much with it this month.

But I most miss my original pages. They weren't reproducible at Blogger, but became too cumbersome as the web changed and blogging changed, after the first year or two. So the words remain, but the cheery colors and design are gone forever.

None of that is the point. The point is that I've changed dreadfully. I'm such an old sad person compared to the seemingly eternally optimistic young person I was at 37 or 38. Even though life wasn't all that terrific then, it always seemed on the verge of breaking open and breaking free. But it never did. And so, it became more and more difficult to sustain the floating happy bubble that carried me through all the worries, changes, uncertainty. There's no bubble anymore. 

In some ways, I like myself better now. But the me of eight years ago wouldn't. It's a funny thing. 

That summer I posted a poem by Pushkin, just after I turned 38, which is the age he was when he died of a pointless duel wound. I'm going to repost it here, plus a completely different translation of it. I don't know the literary story behind the two translations. I very much prefer the former, in terms of poetry... 

Elegy, by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin 1799-1837

Of my mad years the vanished mirth and laughter
Affect me like a fume-filled morning-after.
Not so past pain – like wine is it to me
That as the years go by gains potency.
Sad is the path before me: toil and sorrow
Lie on the restless seaways of the morrow.

And yet from thought of death, my friends, I shrink;
I want to live – to suffer and to think,
And amid care and grief and tribulation,
Taste of sweet rapture and exhilaration;
Be drunk with harmony; touch fancy's strings
And freely weep o'er its imaginings…
And love's last flash, its smile of farewell tender
My sad decline may yet less mournful render. 1830

 

    The vanished joy of my crazy years
Is as heavy as gloomy hang-over.
But, like wine, the sorrow of past days
Is stronger with time.
My path is sad. The waving sea of the future
Promises me only toil and sorrow.

    But, O my friends, I do not wish to die,
I want to live – to think and suffer.
I know, I’ll have some pleasures
Among woes, cares and troubles.
Sometimes I’ll be drunk with harmony again,
Or will weep over my visions,
And it’s possible, at my sorrowful decline,
Love will flash with a parting smile.

But the latter suits my nature a bit better just at the moment. 

Perhaps this does as well, but that's no different than before...

 

Still, the rest of me remains about as shallow as ever. Joe Cotten looked really swell in his naval uniform in Since You Went Away, which was on TV earlier, and which I never miss.

Enivrez-vous

A brief and very silly conversation on Twitter brought this poem to mind. As it happens, I was thinking that the expression, "la petite mort" is less apt for me personally than something like "enivré de l'amour." A really good parallel example if you can be natural and sensible and not easily offended, is the look on a baby's face just after he's finished nursing at his mother's breast. I've seen that exact look on a grown man's face. 

The translation is not my own; I'm thinking of working it over slightly, just for fun. But this is my favorite published one, from an old novel, name of which I do not recollect at the moment. It's not as literal as some translations, and therefore captures the original sentiment better.

(a. I'm still following along here, I promise and b. going to post some more silly lists later and this week.)

Be always drunken. 

Nothing else matters: 

that is the only question. 

If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time

weighing on your shoulders 

and crushing you to the earth, 

be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? 

With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. 

But be drunken.

And if sometimes, 

on the stairs of a palace, 

or on the green side of a ditch, 

or in the dreary solitude of your own room, 

you should awaken 

and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped

away from you, 

ask of the wind, 

or of the wave, 

or of the star,

or of the bird, 

or of the clock, 

or whatever flies, 

or sighs, 

or

rocks, 

or sings, 

or speaks, 

ask what hour it is; 

and the wind,

wave, 

star,

bird, 

clock, 

will answer you: 

"It is the hour to be drunken! 

Be drunken, 

if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; 

be drunken continually! 

With wine, with poetry, or with

virtue, as you will."

Enivrez-Vous 

Il faut 'tre toujours ivre.

Tout est l':

c'est l'unique question.

Pour ne pas sentir

l'horrible fardeau du Temps

qui brise vos 'paules

et vous penche vers la terre,

il faut vous enivrer sans tr've.

Mais de quoi?

De vin, de po'sie, ou de vertu, ' votre guise.

Mais enivrez-vous.

Et si quelquefois,

sur les marches d'un palais,

sur l'herbe verte d'un foss',

dans la solitude morne de votre chambre,

vous vous r'veillez,

l'ivresse d'j' diminu'e ou disparue,

demandez au vent,

' la vague,

' l'toile,

' l'oiseau,

' l'horloge,

' tout ce qui fuit,

' tout ce qui g'mit,

' tout ce qui roule,

' tout ce qui chante,

' tout ce qui parle,

demandez quelle heure il est;

et le vent,

la vague,

l''toile,

l'oiseau,

l'horloge,

vous r'pondront:

"Il est l'heure de s'enivrer!

Pour n're pas les esclaves martyriss du Temps,

enivrez-vous;

enivrez-vous sans cesse!

De vin, de po'sie ou de vertu, ' votre guise."

Charles Baudelaire

QotD: Reminiscing about the Internet

Do you remember the things you did when you first started using the Web and how it has changed your life?

Sponsored by Yahoo!

The things I first did on the web did change my life, mostly for the better. I only used it now and then from about 1993 to 1996, when we got our first home computer and a sponsored CompuServe account. That's when I became merbelle, a name I kept and used for all internet dealings until Yahoo literally screwed it up. But that's another story. 

I joined two forums at first, a poetry forum, and one that talked about old music. The music one, populated with radio djs and music collectors, taught me so much. First, it was encouraging that the people I spoke with online were just people; I never had any of that fear people developed about how the web was full of evil or whatever. And the people of that forum, mostly men, were kind and generous with their time and knowledge. I owe a great deal of my current music interest and rediscovery of good old music to them. I hope that they enjoyed speaking with me as well, though I did not have as much to contribute. 

The poetry forum, I owe so much to that! I still talk with a couple of those people now and then, and peer into the forum they started elsewhere when CompuServe began to change. 

The man joined it first. And at the time I thought he was more literary than me, and talented in a way that I was not, so I was afraid to join in. (There were other reasons, but not relevant to this post.) I wanted to share a poem I'd written, though, with people who might tell me whether it was interesting and worth continuing effort in the medium. 

This is that poem. Okay, it's not actually a poem, and I knew it then, but I also knew it had poetic devices, and wanted to learn more about that kind of writing. 

if you teach a man to fish, 

when will arthritis prevent him from reeling in a catch?

you never cut your hands slicing potatoes, but the slices are thick and uneven 

and some of them fry up brown and crisp while others still seem cold in the middle.

you’re so thin i could rock you as easily as i rock my own children, 

but you’d never admit you need my touch just as you’d never let me buy you some fish as long as you can still cast your rusty hook into the water.

you don’t think i know that you eat those potatoes with nothing but store-brand cola to wash them down because it’s cheaper than coffee and you have no bait for that rusty hook of yours.

you proudly display that laminated name badge pocket protector wherever you go. 

but it’s yellow with age, and your once stiff canvas shirt is soft and rumpled; worn through at the elbows.

your myopic eyes, large and faded through those thick goggle-like spectacles, 

sort out the change for the generic antacid that food stamps won’t provide for.

i imagine you carefully wiping your dish dry after your meal, 

and i think of calling my dad.

So I dove in and shared it. You had to do it in just the right way; there were sections for people with a lot of experience and knowledge about poetry, and others for chatter, and some for just sharing poetry you didn't want feedback on, and of course there were developing rules for giving and receiving praise, etc. 

It went over well, I mean, of course it isn't very good, but it does have a sense of balance to it, and it's kind of touching. A couple of the experts were kind, and told me what they thought was worthwhile about it. So that encouraged me to write more, and get to know the people, make some friends, watch so much romantic drama being played out onscreen, which sometimes fueled more writing, etc. There were three men there I'll never forget, all wonderfully talented, all British, though two of them lived in other parts of the world. They each taught me something about how to read and write poetry, and occasionally took a personal interest in my efforts. 

There was another man I met there with whom I had an ongoing online and occasional phone call friendship from that time nearly to this, though we haven't spoken now in over a year. I will always remember him with more fondness than most other people I've ever known. 

Most of the women seemed kind of like they were on the make. And there was less talent among them. I do not believe this is because women are less talented at poetry, merely that the ones in that area were probably less focused on it. So I didn't really connect with any of them. But I learned to take poetry seriously, and learned so much about myself and my talents, how to develop different styles of writing and communication, and how to engage people for conversation. 

I wrote a sonnet to share there, my first one, that I was just so proud of, and now it is lost somewhere in the ether of the web. I don't know why it's not saved in my poetry files with all the others. But wow, realizing that I could write one gave me a real sense of power that I've never forgotten, and that I do try to remember to apply to my ongoing efforts. 

I was 31 when I began using the web to learn about writing and other subjects, and to make friends. Thinking about it that way, it seems like a lifetime ago. These past 13 years have been filled with a great deal of extraordinary pain that is still not resolved. But I have an awful lot of fond memories mixed in with all that, and I can thank access to the web for many of them. 

homeschool emo death poetry

which is a phrase I can't imagine anyone else has typed before. 

I left in the misspellings because they're funny. 

11 year-old

Yesterday I walked in the kitchen and broke

A glass I yelled Oh Noes!

Mom said c'mon we're having sloppy joes

So when I walked outside

I triped and I died.

And then at my funeral

Urkel came and used the urinal

Then my brothers went to McDonald's

That reminded me that they're burgers were awful...

12 year-old

Death ain't painfull Death ain't Time

Death will happen once every time

When it happens it won't change me

Once you die they will see.

You can't stop it you can't stop the drum

It will keep going Bum Bum Bum Death.

Death I see you there up there

Without a care 

I see you in the soul of that little hare.

It will happen to you it will happen to me

and when it does you will see.

Death is unstopablle Death's in its prime

So it WILL happen every time.

Break!

15 year-old

What's the point of life? Why are we here?

Please lend your ear to my rhyme,

and make the shadows all go away...

When I touch your black heart, it makes my eyeballs shart,

And my cold ears hear everything your dark soul has to say...

I open up the door, my heart falls onto the floor,

I think that I just pooped inside my pants...

The skys are orange and black, it feels as though

my soul fell on a tack, had a heart attack, 

shatted out my ear holes then just died.

17 year-old

I clutched the Bible to my chest

in the corner

of my hotel room

and cried

as I readied myself

for the end.

Oh lord, how he has forsaken

me

in the deep

I shall die

for my own sins

at the strike

of the night...

and never

return.

I'm challenging you, calling you out!

Okay, I was looking for poems for my kids to memorize and went to a trash heap of emo cutter verse called poetry.com. I told my kids: Okay! Right now! Write a poem about death! Make it "better" than the one I just read you, and make it fast. And by better, I mean even more pretentious and whiny, if possible.

I admit it; I was the one who wrote my paper right before class in high school and got a good grade on it because I had a big vocabulary and could fake depth. I think the teachers couldn't tell if I was serious. 

This took me about 3 minutes. You write one now, a crappy poem about "death," and submit it to me. I bet you can fake it just as well. It has to suck but look like maybe it doesn't. If you don't belong to Vox, just sign up, silly OR stick it somewhere and give me the url. I DARE YOU. Because it's fun. 

Summer decays window breeze

sneezing acrid displeasure, I

shiver in the fading light

Pressing my hand onto cold glass

it shatters at my touch

In my head at least—frame intact

solid and clear, all that broke

is my will to live

Despair in hibernation dark

huddled against grey walls

cornered by Nature's calm repose

I wait in silence for life to return

In the next post, I'm going to type out my kids' attempts at making fun of emo poetry. 

drawing down the sun

I'm working on poetry in which the lines are largely interchangeable, causing subtle (or less than subtle) meaning changes, while retaining a specific overall focus. As usual, this is probably not the final version. brush strokes ignite ca...

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they used to call it ether

some invisible substance that held the universe together. I think that was coined by Descartes. Anyway. Then they figured out that what held the universe together was—the universe. Matter, you know. And the space between all the matter and molecules is actually space, with energy keeping stuff moving around inside it. It's all one and the same. Matter, space, energy, and therefore, dare I say it? Time itself. Cool, eh?

You'd think I could never stop being inspired by that but right now, nothing is really inspiring. We're in the final dregs of winter, and once again, just when I thought life was finally settling into something comfortable with lots to look forward to, things that had been put on hold, turns out I was wrong again. Another rug yanked, another bruise from my backside hitting the floor. Nothing was taken off hold. Instead it was put back on the rack again. NO. WE'RE NOT HAVING ANY DETAILS.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now. It's clear, though, that I never will be. So the thing to do for us Pollyanna types is "pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again." This might be masochistic for some people, but not for the intrepidly optimistic. How to do that, though?

You might say that if the pattern is interrupted over and over again that it's not the pattern you thought it was. But that's where physics comes into play. These patterns we think we see or established aren't even drops in a bucket. Did you know there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea?

But knowing and feeling are always, thankfully yet tiresomely, two different things. Right now my feelings are dark but my knowledge is as light as a fresh glass of Pellegrino. Okay, that's a sort of faith, really, the belief that I hold that knowledge. A person has to be able to go on something, to keep going.

Friday night I made fondue.

Fridayfondue

Saturday was a day of being comfortable in my home. First, though, I went to Panera for a mocha. It was odd doing that by myself, but it was a tasty mocha. I got two interesting-looking books from the library, and then Livvy and I watched all 200 minutes of the BBC series from the 80s called Have His Carcase. It's based on the second Lord Peter Wimsey book to feature Harriet Vane, and was pretty good. We kept the fire in the fireplace going all afternoon and evening.

 

I had two mixed drinks made with gin and Grand Marnier, one with sweet vermouth and one with dry, both with a touch of lemon juice, shaken and strained. After I made the kids their dinner, which was a baked breakfast casserole, I ordered myself some sushi online and had it delivered. Then I watched Torchwood and went to bed. Never touched the computer all day except to order the food.

Yesterday we were going to watch the next in that TV series, Gaudy Night, but I guess someone noticed another person had finally checked out some of that series at the library, and took it out ahead of me. That's irritating since they hadn't been checked out in forever. But hopefully they'll be returned on time. So instead I tried to organize some of my online life and had a bad job of it for most of the afternoon. I felt so low I thought I was going to have to sit in that chair and not move from it until a meteor came in through the window. But I managed to keep going anyway, and then in the evening, LP and I went to Marshall's to get some things to finish our TV wall. We have such similar taste we either naturally gravitate toward the same things, or else one of us will find something and the other will say, oh, yes, of course. It's a good thing.

Tvwall1

Tvwall2

Tvwall3

I think it looks pretty good. If you look at the pictures full-sized, you can see our light-hearted yet noble African princess in front of the vase next to the TV. And you'll note we chose rather peaceful-looking masks, rather than fierce ones.

 

Also last night I posted an old poem to my poetry page, which I've renamed. I did this because earlier in the day I was at the Wayback Machine, looking for a file I lost a long time ago, hoping it was on an old web page. I found the old page from 1999 that linked to it, but not the link itself. I did run across another series of poems I'd thought were gone, though, and was amused to reread them. A couple of you may find the one I posted amusing as well, or else disturbing. Or both, you know. Anyway, I renamed the poetry page and created a new banner for it in honor of my very first website, and also the mood I am taking up in order to conquer the external aspects of my current pain. We do what we have to do to keep going, like Dory the Blue Tang.

the morning in haiku

I have a poetry blog that I haven't had time for lately. I intended to do a couple of these as warm-up, then work on a piece of writing I've had sitting around for awhile, but they didn't go anywhere good, plus I got way off track. I thought you might enjoy them, though.

Haiku traditionally include a nature element, but laziness is more of a tradition for me.

Warm-up exercise
graceless scribblings in my book
fresh air not required

Flicker on my screen
I imagine you are here
nibbling at my ear

White shoes in summer
sipping iced tea on the lawn
time to play croquet

Liquid sharp and cold
a juniper infusion
gently bathes my lime

Living in a cave
all the world seems dark and cold
sunlight disappeared