amphichon

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. – Thomas Mann

Karma Repair Kit: Items 1 - 4, by Richard Brautigan
	
1.  Get enough food to eat,
           and eat it.

2.  Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
           and sleep there.

3.  Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
    until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
           and listen to it.

4.  

I do remember God’s love, that year in Ada’s when I was eight, and Liam was nine. I remember it very clearly. Sister Benedict told us to take Jesus ‘into our hearts’ and I did, no problem. I check my heart now, and I find that there is still a feeling there, of something hot and struggling. I roll my eyes back under my closed lids, and there is the sense of opening in the middle of my forehead. The chest thing is like fighting for words and the forehead thing is pure and empty, like after all the words have been said.

There now.

Belief. I have the biology of it. All I need is the stuff to put in there. All I need are the words.

so we go inside
and we gravely read the stones –
all those people, all those lives
where are they now?

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made – being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper –
Luxuriant song.

morrissey, yeats (on keats), thoreau

This is why I love the internet.

Unfortunately it was too late for me to call and request that someone come back to my house to rotate the pizzas and re-position my beef pellets.

I used to work in a bookstore, and spent my share of time in receiving, so I know that every good-sized bookstore has tons of cardboard boxes coming in every day. These book boxes are particularly good for packing your own books in, since they’re a slightly heavier gauge cardboard and they’re smaller than average, since books are heavy but you want to pack them into the box solidly to prevent shifting or crushing. Almost any bookstore has these in stacks by the dozens and will gladly give boxes away to folks who need them for moving or shipping their own books.

Almost any bookstore except for Oregon’s own Powell’s, sadly. They were my first call, since I figure the local-boy-makes-good hometown bookstore is likely to be friendliest to Portland natives, right? Unfortunately no.

Powell’s:   Powell’s, this is Ellipses.
Me:   Hi there Ellipses. I’m going to be packing kind of a large number of books shortly, and I wondered if I could stop by to pick up a few boxes from you.
Powell’s:   What?
Me:   Er. I’m moving, and packing a lot of books… I’m thinking you probably have a lot of boxes… I’d like to stop by and pick up some of your used boxes, if that’s at all doable…
Powell’s:   ...
Me:   ... I mean, most bookstores do, so I kind of assumed…
Powell’s:   ... I don’t think we do that.
Me:   ... er, okay…
Powell’s:   Hang on.

—bouncy hold salsa—

Powell’s:   Okay. No, we don’t sell boxes.
Me:   (slightly irritated) To be honest I hadn’t expected to buy them. Most bookstores give them away.
Powell’s:   ...
Me:   Most bookstores besides you, then, I take it.
Powell’s:   Sorry, we don’t do that.
Me:   Your books do arrive in boxes, right? Not dropped down the chimney wrapped in soft blankets?
Powell’s:   Hang on.

—more bouncy hold salsa—

Powell’s:   They do arrive in boxes. We don’t have a chimney.
Me:   I see. So, these boxes get emptied, and then…
Powell’s:   ...
Me:   ... you throw them away, do you?
Powell’s:   No.
Me:   No, of course not.
Powell’s:   ...
Me:   ...
Powell’s:   We recycle them.
Me:   ... right.

—five minutes later —

Borders on Third:   Hi, Borders on Third, how can I help you?
Me:   Hi there, Borders on Third. I’m going to be packing kind of a large number of books shortly, and I wondered if I could stop by to pick up a few boxes from you.
Borders on Third:   Of course, I’m sure we can help you. We’ve got tons of them. How many did you need?
Me:   Oh, I dunno. Ten? Fifteen, maybe twenty? Probably twentyish?
Borders on Third:   That’ll probably be fine, let me just check.

—slightly less bouncy salsa—

Borders on Third:   Yeah, that should be no problem. Stop by any time.
Me:   Awesome, thank you Borders on Third. Can you believe that Powell’s refused to give me any boxes?
Borders on Third:   Really? Wow, they must suck.
Me:   My thoughts exactly.

Journalist Alan Weisman has a new book called The World Without Us, which discusses what would happen to the earth if, one day, all humans just vanished. There’s a great infographic on his site which starts with the day after tomorrow and shows some of the repercussions of our absence over the coming years.

I really like this page. It’s soothing, in a way. I wish I could be there to see it (if that weren’t by definition impossible). Plus it gives me that same sense of satisfaction and closure you used to get at the end of those old movies with closing titles that explained what happened to the various characters after the movie ends. (You don’t see that so much these days… I think it was probably “9 to 5” that ruined it for everybody.)

One of my main issues with dying has always been not knowing how things end. I expect it’ll feel like walking out of a movie just when things are getting good. This kind of thing helps, though. On my death bed I’ll be able to say to myself, well, I’ll never know what happens tomorrow, but at least I’ve got a pretty good idea of how the whole story ends, right? The camera pans out as the dying sun envelops the earth, and somewhere light years away in the darkness we hear the echo of an old Honeymooners episode making its way past the faintest stars, bearing the last traces of humanity out into forever, fade to black, roll credits.

I can live (and die) with that, I think.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

- e. e. cummings

I’ve been texting more lately (thanks mostly to Heather, Alex and maybe a little Dawn) and was just looking through my cell phone’s custom dictionary, where it puts the words that I have to teach it how to spell. It made me realize that the “custom” words we use are a nice little snapshot of what makes us different (at least different from the demographic that the cell phone T9 dictionary guys are targetting, anyway). Also it’s fun looking at the odder entries and trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about when I used them.

Here’s my custom dictionary, with the personally identifiable stuff removed:

!!! AAHUAAHURRAAUGHUARGH¹ Callahan bbq basting Chai Charlton cheeriness ahok anime bollocks bomb Como Amour Costco BMV CSI appt Buttsechs Ecclesiastes² Damn Daywatch Edgefield deplane flaky Flexcar doable Doh doormat dorky estas ests Fuck fucked exes Gable Hah Heston Hertzfeldt hihi Igo IName Hola hooray Howabout Grr Huber’s Jaeger lameness larcenous Kk kk Koji nachos McFadden’s nah manatee³ Nemo Metroplex Mk OMG Np Osakaya Ouch NW Scapoose Paddy’s raincheck RAMA Scorsese pas? realz Shins singalongs Pourquoi spazzed Psh Prius probly sucky Suuuure VC Te Vonnegut Tuba Yamhill Yay Whereyat Whew yodeling Woohoo

I am amused that I have both ‘Kk’ and ‘kk’, and that it’s necessary to have both ‘fucked’ and ‘fuck’, and the proximity to ‘exes’ there is surely a coincidence. (?!) Also,

¹ See also Jerk City.

² There’s a pair of words you don’t see together nearly often enough.

³ I’m not sure what ‘manatee’ goes with. ‘Buttsechs’? ‘Scorsese’? ‘Yodeling’? No matter where you put it, it’s a little disturbing.

Inspired by sleepy Dawn and her birfday shoutout, I made a new page. It’s the Talkback page, linked to from the last tab in the header. If you just want to say hello, or have a general comment, here you go – this is the place to do it.