...on that midnight train to Georgia

Ahoy fellow space cadets,


Thank you for your sympathy regarding the loss of our canine friend. She had a busy and happy life. She got to see this continent's west and best coasts and chase ducks in both Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Now she's dog-paddling those celestial seas between the galaxies.


Other news: another member of the now-defunct super-group "The Maughams" is due to arrive this weekend! That's two months, two visits. 5ad1e must be making waves up there because it appears there has been some planetary re-alignment.
The Mann arrives June 3rd just in time for Pride day.

death

Our dear canine friend, 5ad1e, passed away peacefully yesterday, the twenty-fourth of May, 2012. She was twelve years old. She is missed terribly. There is an empty spot in our hearts and home.
Zmz

equal parts hello?

Things may be taken too seriously. Who can tell? But it is sad that the writing project falls to the wayside. The sadness encourages some part of me to make an end of it, to be final. That kind of thinking is probably due to the sickness. So let us not say goodbye just yet, "but as the French have it, au revoir."

goodbye

I will be going away for a while. Who can know when or if I will ever return? My mind is no longer functioning properly and I am unable to keep up the charade. My illness is becoming me. "We shall have to become philosophers, Mary." No more aesthetes. Enough vanity.

soul fire

We started a post concerning the celebration of Earth Day, but it sort of fizzled out. Maybe we will return to it at some later date. Earth day is for geophysicists and geologists, no? Why does the world need another pseudo-holiday? May-day, Easter, any Spring festival, all these already perform the function Earth day purports to. If we are celebrating the planet with Earth day, make it about the mantle, the crust, the unknown core, the physical nature of the world we have only begun to understand. How is it that life is sustained on this object floating through space? The life celebrates itself with other holidays. Let's make Earth day about the planet, on its own terms.

That was the thrust of it. So now it seems unnecessary to return to it at some later date.

Here is a link to a fantastic reggae contrivance by the master Lee Scratch Perry. Highly recommended listening. Most high. Happy belated 4:20 and rekkid store day!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMqs4rPuIAU

the ol' ragtime pianner

He took piano lessons as a child. Through no virtue of his own, he kept them up through puberty. He could slog his way through Scott Joplin's The Chrysanthemum and most of The Entertainer. The Easy Winners was his favourite, but the second and third chunks were a bit difficult. He practiced on a very old piano, possibly a German-made Steinman upright. It was in bad shape. There was a massive fissure running up the wood of the bass harp. Any note below G in the bass clef caused a thundering rumble of distortion. A neat effect, but not one with which to teach a young ear music. That same G, the first one flat of middle C, was forever becoming stuck. The key itself was fine, but the mechanism that returned the hammer from the string after the key was played was broken. Imagine a hot-blooded teenaged male losing his proverbial shit trying to get that note to sound. He knew what the chord was supposed to sound like, at least, the untuned noise he was used to, but the blasted  G was missing!

This would have been an excellent time for some parental guidance: an excellent teaching opportunity. But no, his parents were too busy for music. As his frustration grew, if he was not able on that particular day to see beyond the great injustice of mere nuisance, grow too would the frustration of his father. Frustration causing frustration leading to frustration. Pa needed to come through with a better solution. But he never quite came round to seeing this. Tuning the old beast would have cost a small fortune by their standards. Maybe if father and son had taken it upon themselves to attempt a more cool-headed approach, actually diagnosing the problem and maybe even playing with the mechanics of the machine, there could have been more music and less anger.

smudged and blurred

There is dirt, earth, in my mouth. I have just taken a nasty fall. The texture of the grains of rock and soil, the taste of the particles of feces and rotting vegetable matter all impress themselves upon the mind as unpleasant at first. But this is surely because they are unfamiliar and appear now suddenly, unexpectedly. Olfactory sense is heightened uncannily, and the mind becomes aware of the thousands of scents that make up this particular spring day. It is all too much at once, so observation and meditation have become necessary. The sorting of information and self-diagnosis occur as the adrenal glands spread their super-juices throughout the body. Too soon all that registers though, are the colour orange and the smell of the inside of nostrils. The hot shock of electric pain passes up to my brain from my knees and the palms of my hands. If I look there will be blood. Then the texture of the grit between teeth finds accordance with the gravel sticking into flesh. I believe I can feel the bits of earth with the blood that is seeping around them and out of me even as the taste of the same elements is in my saliva, on my tongue. I am reunited with the world outside as the tenuous line between it and what is inside me is smudged and blurred.