If you hit him when you aim it will just be luck.

I am reading today, in the sun, and the woman says to her friend abruptly, "When my water broke." I left soon, misunderstanding rising like steam. I learned to skip a brick on the edge of Lake Michigan, I remember hearing stained-glass icebergs breaking with the waves. Words are hesitant and sly as all of art and commerce. When I talk to the dogs my voice sounds badly dubbed. I am reminded of Aristotle's Ethics: Loving seems like making. Wonder rises in the morning, lightly walking on top of my feet. We are nestled, going slowly, not falling.

"'Well, anyhow I said there was going to be an earthquake and there was one,' said Margaret.
That was what Emily was waiting for! So it really had been an Earthquake (she had not liked to ask, it seemed so ignorant, but now Margaret had said in so many words that it was one).
With that certainty, her soused excitement began to revive. For there was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it. Realize that if she had suddenly found she could fly it would not have seemed more miraculous to her. Heaven had played its last, most terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed.
Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen to her anything so dangerous and sublime.
Meanwhile, Margaret and Jimmie were still arguing:
'Well, there's one thing, there'll be plenty of eggs tomorrow,' said Jimmie. 'There's nothing like an earthquake for making them lay.'

The next morning, Sunday, they went home. Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies. The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered. But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able to see anything, or realize that any one else pretended to even a self-delusive fiction of existence."

Mr. Smith goes to Washington

Russian Pooh Bear

Sing a song of your soul.

In my head I dance just like MC.

US Patent Office Afternoon

Method for making a chocolate-coated pig skin product

Document Type and Number:

United States Patent 20060182854

Kind Code: A1

Abstract:

The present invention is addressed to a method for making a chocolate-coated pig skin product. The method commences by deep frying cured pig skins to form fried pig skins having a moisture content of between about 10 to about 15 percent. Next, the fried pig skins are tempered and coated with lukewarm chocolate to form chocolate-coated pig skins. Finally, the chocolate-coated pig skins are tempered to form a chocolate-coated pig skin product.

Obsessive Eye

Vermeer's Letters

Missed Connections in Alabama are Goddamn Depressing

Everything is Green by Mr. DFW

She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying. When it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I feel like I know.
She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette in light through a wet window, and I can not feel what to say.
I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more. But there is things I know. I know I am older and you are not. And I give you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart both. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you. I have been keeping it together and working steady every day. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do. I have tried to make a home to give to you, for you to be in, and for it to be nice.
I light up myself and I throw the match in the sink with other matches and dishes and a sponge and such things.
I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty-eight years old. It is time I have got to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try to make everything feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to. In me there is needs which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs in you at are in the way.
She does not say any thing and I look at her window and I can feel that she knows I know about it, and she shifts her self on my sofa lounger. She brings her legs up underneath her in some shorts.
I say it really does not matter what I seen or what I think I seen. That is not it any more. I know I am older and you are not. But now I am feeling like there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more.
Her hair is up with a barret and pins and her chin is in her hand, it's early, she looks like she is dreaming out at the clean light through the wet window over my sofa lounger.
Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel when everything outside is green like it is.
The window over the sink of my kitchenet is cleaned off from the hard rain last night and it is a morning with a sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But everything is not green. The other trailers are not green and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ash trays is not green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the big wheel toy that is on its side under a clothes line without clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.
Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.
I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.
She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.

"had been this little flower of southern gentility"

Ole Miss' graduation weekend, and I think of the U.S. Army marching in. I remember the state ratifying the abolition of slavery in 1995, but the ratification is still not official because the paper was not sent to the U.S. government. 1984, the year my dear, matriculating sister was born, was when Mississippi ratified the amendment which gave women the vote.

In a nightgown I had been using as a dress I took a long walk into a thunderstorm, lightning with five starred points. Halfway to the little wooden house the tornado sirens started up and we hid in a car wash. When we got to his house, my best childhood friend gave me red long johns and he danced with his dog, Wyatt.

One of these mornings you're going to rise up singing.

My mother used to sing this in the kitchen before she came to get us up. If operatic singing doesn't lift your tail feathers, best avoid.

Ole Worm's Museum

"As an example, in a very modern, empirical mode, Worm determined that the unicorn did not exist and that purported unicorn horns were really simply from the narwhal. At the same time, however, he then wondered if the anti-poison properties associated with a unicorn's horn still held true, and undertook primitive experiments in poisoning pets and then serving them ground up narwhal horn (his poisoning must have been relatively mild because he reported that they did recover).

His other empirical investigations included providing convincing evidence that lemmings were rodents and not, as some thought, spontaneously generated by the air (Worm 1655, p. 327), and also by providing the first detailed drawing of a bird of paradise proving that they did, despite much popular speculation to the opposite, indeed have feet like regular birds."

From Frances Godwin "Man in the Moon" 1638

It was now the season that these Birds were wont to take their flight away, as our Cuckoes and swallowes doe in Spaine towards the Autumne. They (as after I perceived) mindfull of their usuall voyage, even as I began to settle my selfe for the taking of them in, as it were with one consent, rose up, and having no other place higher to make toward, to my unspeakeable feare and amazement strooke bolt upright, and never did linne towring upward, and still upward, for the space, as I might guesse, of one whole hower, toward the end of which time, mee thought I might perceive them to labour lesse and lesse; till at length, O incredible thing, they forbare moving any thing at al ! and yet remained unmoveable, as stedfastly, as if they had beene upon so many perches; the Lines slacked; neither I, nor the Engine moved at all, but abode still as having no manner of weight.

I found then by this Experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of, to wit, that those things which wee call heavie, do not sinke toward the Center of the Earth, as their naturall place, but as drawen by a secret property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather some thing within the same, in like sort as the Loadstone draweth Iron, being within the compass of the beames attractive.

While on the subject of Letters: Ancient Favorite Letter

O adelphae !

I fear this is an email that is fated to last years.
Da veniam meae, amabo te.

Being a classics major is plenty annoying
and I've decided to make it worse by dropping cliches, like:
"Well, when in Rome, do as the Romans do !" or
"That looks like Greek to me !"
Then follow that up with a chuckle self-deprecating enough to
give decent people chills.

Steam of conscience like an ant's walk down guitar strings
or all the ink since Gutenberg; including
notes in the margins.

+ I am LISTENING to the Mountaingoats
no I'm not.
I'm listen'n to the Microphones,
which is more apt for these tangling bull-branches of emotion.

The painful, powerful sky -
and my lack of dawn,
my one-sided warmth.

Ohhh, oh.

So, you Posh Prim Pink Lady,

Guh.

So, I broke up with Caleb. Monday, actually.
Very. Very good move.
However, I find myself struggling
to feel worthwhile when
everyone in my immediate environment treats me
like a sticky countertop.

I don't matter enough to warrant action,
but should be avoided when possible.

The Unfortunately Blonde and their negative indifference
wearing shirts with letters they do not understand -
but I do.

The black people
and their separate fraternities,
Or more accurately,
their lower-income housing
shoved at the back of campus.

What brilliance. Look, if we can convince
the monkeys they have their own social cluster,
they'll remove themselves from our sight
and think it's of their own accord.

I wake up early and walk around campus,
obsessed with trappings of grandeur.
Maintenance workers scurry everywhere, hundreds,
scrubbing the white columns and picking up empty beer bottles
from the night before.
I can accurately use the word grotesque.
I smile and wave as I pass; they swiftly avert their eyes and
an expression of shame floods their faces.
I drop something in the cafeteria and the
black woman with the horrible teeth at the door rushes
to pick it up for me. She must have been over 50,
perhaps older.

It is pervasive and insidious, and at first you think it's a
series of coincidences. But it's not.
It hangs, a silent stench in the air.

None of these things are that surprising
(appalling, yes, but not unexpected)
plus you already agree with me,
but I - I feel the need to yell them somewhere,
and it is too exhausting to yell them here.

And right now I'm trying to not think about the chemistry
I'm 'posed to be doing. Eh ?
But mostly it's just reassuring to know
a familiar set of eyes that smile easily
are willing to indulge my moments of ire.

OEIFjwiofapf.v.avjaweoi.

and so on.

Oh you - you molecule squad !
You multicultural nation
with a symphony orchestra and
chalk-angel graffiti !
You anti-weasel !

Thank you, I hope you are well.
I feel vaguely dissatisfied by
the visit
but super glad I came.
Ryan is nice. Truly.
You two are
complementary colors
tan+black
or a keyboard/drum solo.

To use the Marian assessment of worth:
Intellectual and physical
is yes.
A true rating of the emotional aspect is
more involved,
but in the short time I was there,
and especially based on your cheek-splitting
smile on Saturday eve,
I have quite a positive impression.

This email certainly doesn't really have a point.
Sorrae. I don't know where to get off.
Hahhahah.
Dad: "I am not pleased. I am not pleased."

Oh and um. Caleb thought your sweater and shoes
were mine, since our wardrobe stylin's are like
olives and pickles
so, don't toss and turn.

I have your lily-white sweater and
those damnfine, boss loafers.

And will mail them to you when I get money,
which unfortunately will have to be nexxx month.
Gasoline! You succubus.

But yeah,
let me know if that's just crazy and awful
and maybe I'll be able to
take out a loan or find a more
reasonable solution.

I've been meaning to call, but
somehow I hit a squall of seasonal depression
and there have been TWO roaches in my room since my arrival
and Kristin and Jessica haven't returned calls
and David posted new-wave pictures online of himself
with his eccentric, quirky girl-friend
and my eyes teared up when I got back my Latin test today and
made a 97 because I felt so dissappointed with myself,
so I deemed it unwise to call you for a chat.

Oh, and I got a phone call last night from
a 228 area code with someone crying on the other end
and yelling, "you fucking bitch, you made me cry, fuck you"
overandover.
They called back a lot.
Maybe a prank, but creepy nonetheless.

All this to say that I don't want to call you because I'm paranoid that
your friends (and/or (you)) dislike me,
aesthetically and philosophically,
and I feel that awkwardness right now would
give my heart pal-pi-ta-tions.

So right yeah.
about now.

-em

ps.
Oh, and I'm a bit fond of Kant lately.
Who knows?!

Grits for Breakfast

Walton Ford

Fancy Afternoon- Sonnet No. 60

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith, being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of natures truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow;
And yet, to times, in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.