End of Season

There hasn't been much activity here because of tennis travels, 8 or 10 trips. The last tournament was one of the best, but not without sweat, today's results, which change from week to week are, 58 in the nation, RPI 37, head to head 68. He is a recruit at NAU, to study forest biology, be involved in their seven wood fired kilns on the mountain, a dream for a ceramicist, and snowfall aplenty. The record and accounts of many trips is at Lasty's Doll Shop and also there a preview of DI tennis.

Native Texans. Teachings of the Plants for Carroll Abbott

"If you were to take one plant with your immortal soul into the afterlife, then Hedeoma (Hedeoma Drummondii) would meet Amaranth. Medina County is starting a Hedeoma Dude Ranch. Aristophanes wanted thyme planted on his grave, but if you can get yourself planted in some Hill Country field you can have the superior Hedeoma. Albertus Magus claims drowned bees can be revived by the fragrance of the inferior pennyroyal, M. Pulegium, and that if you rub it on the "belly of any beast it shall be with birth." The use of Hedeoma in this way would shortly make so many beekeepers and mothers of us all that we would soon be drowned in milk and honey." LIVE

New Release at AERFilms

"The Obama McCain Green Campaign," Youtube Ticket

Under Ben Bulben

These are two "versions " of Yeat's afterlife in this poem about his poem, a homage and a love, but two shapes of one. We who have visited Wordsworth and Sterne and Swift make our way, stand with arms behind our backs HERE .
HERE is another look at it. Does the gyre run on? And on. You have faith for that? Whether Yeats lived more than one, its simulacrums were virtuous or its cartoons, if you want another life you need a son.

Jack

Elsie Marley the Cat, which could have been written by Lasty, is live now at Jack.

Old Hereford Cemetery

Henry S. Mack. Old Hereford Mennonite Cemetery. Record of Tombstone Inscriptions: Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites. Bally, Berks County, PA, 1934. In progress here

Christmas Eve Mennonite

Christmas Eve: A Simple Life of Mennonite Theatre if you wish a simpler life.

Pushcart

"Herbal Cures of Orc Tongue" nominated by Ghoti Mag.

Theory of Paragory

Paragory joins a known to an un,
what we're doing in biology,
splicing one gene after another,
not just for effect,
but to create some good,
union of the disparate,
opposites, unlikes,
not random matched,
part of a solution,
emergence out of work,
not the goal , the result.
The good of paragory
is insight to either part.

Beulah

We came to Beulah Bula-bula land, the East Bluff stared down at the sea. Call it the bay. We left early that day, yesterday, to make up for the lost hour. That tells you how things are. We arrived two hours early. The lower altitude sea air, rough resurfaced courts suggest a clay court style, an approach that takes the opponent off with top spin as sweat pours down and it is only 60 degrees. This is not my last trip as you see. I have been to the mountain.

Flight

I want to account the history of living beings and natural life, the qualities of the elements I see symbolically everywhere. Jimmy is an artist too, I saw his portraits of himself stuck in the ground mire of being, as if he doesn't know the difference between that and air. The water must
cleanse him. He will say you don't have to read it. I reply you cannot fly and be mired. I want to fly toward the sun and be consumed.

White Mountains Deeper

It might be the sky but it might be the wind, leaving the tent at night in the cold and then not for long. You don't get up or have to to hear the coyotes.

They are howling in the range of cross riffs and minor notes. But the stars are interminable. I wade through the night like it's chest deep. Turn, restless, turn again. Left side, right side, back, hope to get escape with dreams, wake minutes later, there is no watch, but if you can get beneath it all, like the covers, the sleeping bag, the red Hudson's Bay blanket, the shirts over feet frozen at the bottom of the tent, then the wind can dance its pile drives, strokes of mountains leeward and that can be the dream.

The wind shakes the tent, shakes the aspen high up, descends. I wait to be lifted off the ground, figure to figure out something in the event, but then it blows off, new meaning to zephyr, Hermes, blow wind, crack, new meaning to the wind of Pentecost shaking the house. It shakes the mountain now, the elk feel it, don't cry, or can't be heard. The wind extinguishes everything but itself. I know the power of fire and flood, but air is not benign. It blows the elk, coyotes and bear to shelter. It doesn't blow the stars. Under the tree I play them back on the closed eye screen. They are bright now. Orion rises late in fall. I count on it to bring the dawn, figure it is maybe three AM, which gives hope with an air mattress and a foot warming wife who accepts them into her thighs.

"What does the foot that gets to Nirvana say to the one behind? Just one more step."
"What does the foot in Nirvana say to the one behind? There's no pain hereafter."
"What does the cold foot say to the hot? Remember me."
"What does the hand say to the foot when the cold foot hotfoots it into the warmth?"
This goes on through the middle of the night. The stars, red Antares stares at the mountain. The meadow to be alive in gold is dark. All is light. All is come, all is bright. The shadows of dawn, the chow's ears, the smoke of the fire, coyote song, elk breaking notes over their knees for the fire of dry aspen, even the lonely lone men in their pickups who patrol the back forest deep, where we have gone to escape the pipe lines and blasting, are asleep. They can't see an elk in the wood but our boys track them, manage not to get gored by the climacteric of want. The want. The eye patch. The meaning of cold. The burned savage trunklessness that lies fallen from fires a decade ago.

Connect and Disconnect

Silence of the disconnect. They used to say turn on, tune in. Pierced by the piercing of streets, days strayed, slept in this tune. Tuned in to what? The instant thought that says look, the handheld array. Then comes the boom, a wreck of tons of steel. Cars collide inept. Silence is not quiet. There are two. The one above the boom and the one within the thoughts that deafen. Then there is a silence that makes three.

When you lay upon your roof at night and hear the roar, see the aura of lights, it sounds like a savage celebration just far enough away. You know the two states, yourself on the roof and the maelstrom below. Descend and you will not remember the one you left. Boom, the two are one, the roof disappears. The disconnect makes separate states appear only from afar, separate from the flare. It is Las Vegas, Vanity Fair vs Solitude, Silent Thought. Thoughts are noisy enough as it is. Drown them without noise.

The two states are like the soul come to communion, come with cares, sounds, thoughts, at the best, the highest part of the connect, dreams, plans, intentions, not that the worst are left, they come too but why give place to them, they're the same as hopes and fears. This is the state of the connect.

Only disconnect! Disconnect from sound and dreaming, wondering, staring, surely by now the cell is off, Ipod still. While Beethoven is playing his Opus in A and VanGogh tramping down daisies in a blue field with a yellow sky, disconnect. While the UN is streaming live video, forests are burning, ER's are teeming, what's in front of your eyes? They are closed. The ears cannot hear. You forget yourself.

"Into the Wild" : Review of the Parent-Child Crisis

In Into the Wild director Penn has a moment occur before our eyes as the boy's eyes in death cut to an imaginative reunion with his father and mother with the imagined query "whether if this reunion happened would they see the same thing I do (as he dies)?" This is all ironic, since Penn shows that the boy poisoned himself from ignorance and weakness because he couldn't cure a moose he had killed, these together cause his dementia.

Ignorance and weakness describe the young, which is all the more ironic since the body was discovered in the middle of August by moose hunters, adults who knew what they were doing, two weeks after the boy died. Keeping the boy alive is a history of parenting, it is being in the right place at the right time. He was not. Penn says in his interview that this victim of himself had reached the wisdom of middle age, that is, the level of Sean Penn one supposes, but it is all talk that he learned that happiness is sharing with another person. Learning is changed behaviour. He didn't learn it. These are just words, no realization of being. He died alone.

To make us feel better about it, that all is not sacrifice and depravation, the film is also about twirling: the boy raises his arms at least four times, twice on top of the bus. It looks like a substitute for praise. He is worshipping the universe? Con trails show in the sky, again and again, his answer to "prayer?" But the repeated images of the gold wristwatch on his arm are saying, "I may be a hippie, but I'm holding on to my watch." Time and material are not wisdom. Wisdom is knowing you don't know. Who said that?

In this romance he wants to cross the creek to go home again, but it has become a river that traps him "in the wold"(Anglo-Saxon). Survival instincts need health and strength, prudence and a care for detail not the high skepticism of Hollywood. So many are blamed for our misery. Why not blame yourself? "No," the class said, "it was my dad."

Maelstroms come with a context and change of scene, these children found dead in their rooms at night OD'd, boys siphoning gasoline with a vacuum cleaner who receive third degree burns over 40% of their bodies, rear ending cars in front of them in the right hand lane when they check their cell phones. The noise in their heads, the bottom-deafening depth charges that steal their consciousness as they turn from those who love them, deadly rejection for the gifts given don't have silence, but noise. It is media generated. One goes to China, buys a dress, is kidnapped through a door in the dressing room and has her kidney stolen. It is the noise. They are unaware, ignorant and weak.

Another drives downtown with a friend, listening to Itunes from the garden of Eden on the box. All is one. We are safe. Two "immigrants" approach at a light, guns drawn, pistol whip them. These are the true events happening around the boy I protect. Med techs inoculate for bacterial meningitis from shared spit, but not for late night texts in bed, vid games, emails and photos of the flesh. Listen to baseball a radio or read, but make your bed offline, silent.

Here is a postscript on parenting. We have pretended we didn't know how. But we do. Compare it to a neighbor who runs a limo company and fills your parking lot with his overflow. Your lot is not posted. It has never been. One wants to operate on a neighborly basis. So go over to communicate this, but met with calumny, put up signs real fast, contract a towing company and see to it cars get towed. Guess what? They don't park there anymore. That's respect. The way to demand respect for boundaries works in the real world and in families. Idiots run the psychology department. They are afraid you will “alienate” your children but only because if they are injured and die the psychology department gets more money. Stand up. If the children don't like it they can let you know. You can be tested. After all, mortgage rates won't rise. You can make thousands, millions on your home so don't hold back. Buy now, save later means die now pay later.

Knowing

When it comes necessary to know big things and small, that rich and poor are of their own and that that is the nature of knowing, which knowledge proceeds to loving, barrierlessness allowing, it sounds like a poem, space in the beginning and at end incompleteness complete with work achieves the gift.

Creosote

There is a question without words beyond the edge of an egg, what can happen, what is the worst? The worst is not to live. The worst is not smell creosote outside Vegas, not build a fire from pine sticks at 8000 feet, cook hamburger and egg, argue loudly about chicken nerds on video tape, question every word wordlessly.

Art and Life

I assume everybody is consumed with questions of art, line, rhythm, image, color, flow. I also ask the nature of sun, parabolas, a passionate clean strike of a ball, life on your toes.

Breathe the Wind

X's and O's, the X is a box and the circle an O. Who can't see that circles surround us, "a woman shall compass a man." Did you ever look into an O? The head crowns and is surrounded by the loving arms.

To escape the circles, make new ones to replace mom, is more than self-definition. Does the self exist? Consider what is known, the person known to the parents does not exist. They remember it with wonder, the child remembers everything wrong they did. So who is the child, what it remembers, the sum of itself created? It cannot remember itself truly as the parents know. We say that escape from the circles is the only way to go. That does not mean escape to a box. It means go outside town and breathe the wind.

Circles

Draw a circle around yourself devoutly to identify, like and accept. Go from high school to Hollywood, kiss circles for financial gain. Go outside the circles, see light on dirt, bear the click of light, the human compact for what it is.

Fiction Darling

When I worried about the meaning of nonfiction, how to tell, to prevent fiction from creeping, that fiction was a nonfiction. You cannot say the opposite, that nonfiction is a fact. This weighs. Can a pseudonym be non, tired of the same image day to day? When we mirror shaving, a fiction, makeup, clothing all fictions, how do you know what you are writing? Does it call up and say: Fiction darling. Or do you decide?