On paper the system seems to be without fault, but because I’ve employed it for upwards of seven years now, it hardly ever works.  Usually I’ll either lay for an hour with alarm sounding [it becomes unnoticeable after 5 minutes of the pattern] or I’ll rise to turn it off and immediately return to beneath my mintgreen quilt.

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This morning after the my phone sounded its guitar jingle, I rolled over to the wall and split open my eyelids.  Some sunorange was breaking in through the gridscreen across my open window, and the air was markedlhy more gelid than it has been any other morning this Fall.  I could hear single leaves scratching rhythms across the ashpalt, performing some serious gymnastics before ultimately meeting their fate in the pile at my apartment’s backdoor.

Since moving to Vickery I’d not heard the wind fill the trees as loudly as it did this morning, though I suppose that’s because I’ve not lived here when the leaves have been so crisp. And though I know this quick weather change to not be the latest installment by that elusive phenomenon El Niño, the Chris Farley quote would not leave my mind.  I shifted my focus to breakfast, hoping a task would keep the line clear from my thoughts.

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Walking into the kitchen, I took to the task I always do first upon waking: Turn on the stove to ‘5′ beneath my treasured Bialetti™, and prepare a demitasse with a little steamed milk before adding the brewed beverage moments later.

The rate at which the espresso brews depends heavily on how frequently I deep-clean my Bialetti™.  I’ve had a few servings since I last gave it a vigorous scrub, so this morning it was taking especially long to bubble up and through the valve.

I pretend multitasking is a forté of mine, so as I waited for the brew I split open and dropped two eggs into a skillet on the neighboring burner.  The number of omelettes I’ve made in my lifetime is larger than the population of Arkansas, so the task of timing and concocting the dish seems something not too difficult.

Finishing the omelette, I flipped it, inserted some sautéed vegetables from a few mornings ago, folded it, and slid it onto a lime-green chinaplate I inherited from my uncle Mark.  Still a bit asleep but now very focused on consuming my breakfast, I tread the cold cedar floor into my living room, and decided to start up a small project promoting the sale of my iMac™.

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The window bordering the right side of my desk stays open the majority of the time I sit here [which is actually the majority of my Time], unless it is above 95º [one must have some boundaries].  As a result, I have an opportunity to catch most of the conversations of my neighbors – the self-proclaimed Mexican Mafia – who often sip Coronas in their backyard just north of my apartment.

Setting down the omelette on the desk in front of my computer, I felt the chilly breeze on my bare shoulders. I flipped on the space heater that remains in my desk-depths, available to heat my shins during the few days when it actually grows cold in Texas.  The current through the open window brought with it a smell of cigarette from outside, which I found peculiar since it was 7:15 am, and, well, none of my neighbors smoke.

Focused on my project and almost ready to place it before the public eye, I noticed the cigarette smell becoming stronger and more pungent, as if the unidentified morning tobaccoist was approaching my window.  A bit curious, I looked around down the side of the building and saw nothing.  Suddenly, I heard some screeching noise from my kitchen immediately thereafter, and then some ferocious banging and clanging.  Violent, violent sounds!

I rushed into the kitchen to find my Bialetti™ laying down on the open flame of my stove, espresso spewing everywhere, and some of it aflame below.   I rushed to turn off the stove before anything else, trying to install some prioritization or hierarchy to my thoughts in the midst of the madness.

Having neither a fire blanket handy nor a pair of oven mitts or, well, anything that would have been helpful in this situation, I instinctively I reached down for the rug below my refrigerator door and threw it on the fire, across the side-spun espresso maker and the coffee spewing from its spout.

When the flame finally died, I took the rug into the bathroom, left it strung out arcross the side of the bathtub and returned to the kitchen and filled the Bialetti with another batch of Peruvian single-origin, determined to have my demitasse full.

Tuesdays are monastic nights. Nights for silence, for solitude, and for simplicity of mind. Really the only night among the entire weekspan I have freedom for the same disciplines.

After exiting my office on Madison and walking to Washington Mutual for a quick check of available funds [usually few funds are available], I board the train at 33rd Street and Park Avenue. One of the PS primaries lets out around 6PM, along with the majority of businessmen suitclad and resolute. We all board the train at the same time, hope being that we can all actually squeeze in before the unidentified electronic voice from somewhere overhead lets forth its stern demand: “STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS, PLEASE.”

Today I’ve made it on the train. And I’ve actually scored a great spot near a hefty Jamaican woman and her three shouting kids, just near the doors on the train-side opposite where people board. Spots near the wall on the peak-hour-6-train are treasures, and it is especially rare to board and immediately after find such a spot. Usually you can expect to spend at least a few stops next to a guy with body odor stretching his arms to the ceiling handrail.

Quite content I’d spend 55 blocks of travel time in this prized location, I put in my ear monitors and started Sufjan Stevens’ Songs for Christmas.

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Growing up, I possessed a strong aversion to Falling Backward from Saving Daylight in October each year. For a child whose curfew was Dark [followed immediately by the resounding confidence of my father's whistle], a pre-6PM sunset meant my time to play was cut short [and much shorter by December]. But what Winter did do was allow me to cultivate the imagination I so much loosed when sports became a central focus. Winter as a child was a time to build model airplanes, to learn to play the guitar, and when I first began to write.

Here in Manhattan’s November, the sun sets sometime around 4:45 pm. For one, New York is much closer the Arctic Circle than is my Texas homeland, and for another, Manhattan’s collection of scrapingsky building sblock out the light from the city below at least an hour earlier than, say, somewhere just across the Hudson. In my older young years, I’ve grown to deeply love the early nightfalls, for I find my thinking to be much more fruitful when the sky hangs the moon.

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On Tuesdays, I get off a stop early at 86th Street which follows Union Square, Grand Central, and 59th Street as one of the East Side’s major hubs. The area surrounding the 86th street stop is an interesting fusion of the Old World and the consumeristic, lust-heavy culture of the 21st century West. Here, preserved pre-war brownstones are overshadowed by gigantic neon signs, and chains by the likes of Best Buy, Taco Bell, and Starbucks, run local Upper East business into bankruptcy.

There is, however, one small market with vast variety of freshly baked bread, rare fruits from the East, cheese, olives and other fine pickled vegetables, and, most impressive of all, an entire wall-full of the most rare and cosmos-spanning selection of fine ale one could imagine. The storage case is divided into the regions of the Earth, each with a wide variety of styles within [although often Region determines a Style -- but I'll save that for a discussion on semantics]. A stop in this market is something I’ve drawn into the architecture of Tuesday nights since I first arrived to the City in June.

The year’s drifted into November now, and that means my little sundry fine-food nook has put away the Märzens to make space for the Winter Warmers. And in my Tuesday night rhythm, I’d come here to find one most suited for an evening in the Hours.

To my great surprise, they carried Anchor Our Special Ale 2006 [the freshest release of this rare type to be sure], so the decision was easy. Forking over $14 for six bottles clad with the Christmas colors and tree, I tied tight my scarves, fastened the breast-buttons of my peacoat, and set out into the frigid Manhattan dusk.

Eleven blocks to walk. Up Carnegie Hill on Park Avenue all the way to where Metro North emerges from the ground in a loud, angry vigor, I take a left on 97th and walk halfway to Madison Ave. In the distance under orange streetlights I can see some people in their winter running attire are coming in from the Park just a block away.

I face right at 57 E 97th, unlock the front door, check for mail in tenant post box [another night empty-handed], and ascend the five flights of stairs before reaching tiny apartment. I notice my calves don’t burn anymore, which must mean my body’s grown accustomed to life here.

Four keys are required to function in our Spanish Harlem brownstone – one for the front door into the mailroom, one for the door on the other side of the mailroom that leads into the stairwell, one for the mailbox, and one for the Apartment 19. Two hours after I left the office less than two miles away, I sift through the series of keys and find the one marked “19.”

One roommate is in the living room watching Nascar, and another will likely be working until Midnight. I place the Special Ale in the fridge, hoisting one out before I do, and pour it into a glass frosty from the freezer door. I head down the long, narrow hallway back into my room and close the door. And as I sit down to read, I can remember no earlier time when the concept of Home seemed so distant.

[RSSites, click here.]

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A few months ago, I was browsing the interwebs while having a conversation with Derrick [Oliver, not my car, who shares the name] about his experience in Philly and the community with whom he worked there.

I browsed my way on to the weblog of this not-for-profit who is doing Good Work to stir the public towards acts of mercy, compassion, and justice. It seems that their motive was to bring in the Right and New, so I thought it at least worthy of attention.

On the blog’s most recent post at the time, I’d read that they were compiling footage for a DVD and needed music donations from independent artists to fill the soundtrack. I’m not sure what it was other than boredom that prompted me to do it, but, as immediately as it happened, I submitted all three songs from a demo of my previous band, Harps.

I’d never thought anything would come of the submissions, and in fact, I’d forgotten that I’d even gone through the effort to prepare them for publishing. In fact, I’d done it so fast and without thought that I hadn’t even considered asking the other members of the band if they’d be okay with it.

Only yesterday a friend from Arkansas [we had renown in Arkansas] messaged me on Facebook, subject line exclaiming, “Harps lives!” Knowing that statement to be eternally true but also wondering about the specific context of her digital shout-out, I carefully opened the electronic letter. Apparently she had just finished watching the very DVD that was as little as an idea only months ago, and was enchanted to find “Seaweed and Kerosene” in the soundtrack to the movie.

I guess I didn’t think any fruit would come of it, and plus, whims are easy to follow when bored. So I think the excitement that’s led to the composition of this too-long-post is tied up in the possibility that the song will go toward putting flesh around the ideas of Healing, of Feeding, and the Reality of the One True Empire. Is not the act of incarnating testifying to the Program that’s become more fully tangible in the Incarnation?

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Now, back to working on a maybe-coming-soon-photoblog now. That is, if the hosting that I’ve paid for will start doing what I’ve paid for it to do.

Keep in touch! Good Tidings!

[This is the first in a series of microblogature I probably won't continue.] [Unless, perhaps, as excited.]

It might or might not be that the resolution of the question is a less complex to one who has not enjoyed that particular thread of creative process — consumed by countless hours behind a computer screen making minuscule adjustments to photographs. Even so, the question is no less important, especially considering one tiny touch-up has the potential to impact perception of millions and millions of people.

The recent Greenberg issue asks this very question, [by the way: I am of the persuasion that she was not operating outside of her volition as Artist, but it was neither professional nor photojournalistic - and that is the issue here], but even more timely, the most recent issue of Newsweek has some up in arms about the decision to publish a tight-crop portrait of Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin without any retouching.

In the words of Fox News anchor Megan Kelley, Newsweek’s selection of photograph and choice to not remove “the normal flaws human beings have,” is a “gross slap in the face to Sarah Palin.” Kelley went on to claim that avoiding such edits is simply not what they do in the magazine business, and that Governor Palin should be entitled to equal treatment of “gorgeous supermodels.”

Although all photographers will differ even if slightly as to which extent the practice of retouching should be applied to photographs, no one of us can escape the nature of our subject and what is to be communicated by him/her/them/it [and thus how much editing is to be done to express it]. It’s an issue of genre - Is the photograph telling a true story of an actual event? Is it narrating fantasy? Is it selling a product? Not that any of those are excluded from legitimate photography [yet only one is photojournalism], but there must be both an awareness of the subject, the audience, and the photograph’s social function in order to make a balanced, contextual ethical decision.

Again, though, all photographers will differ on exactly how much is too much, usually there is a sense [however abstract of the spectrum from Non-Fiction to Fantasy. Though even in the case of glamor magazines one must think on what extent of retouching lends itself to false advertising. Minor edits on a photograph, depending on breadth of circulation, can store up a very large social significance. After all, it wasn't outside of Joseph Stalin to take advantage of conniving photo manipulation techniques in war propaganda.

But this is over and against what anchor Megan Kelley said when making a reference to "the magazine business," by which she meant "the most gorgeous supermodels in the world." However, no serious news outlet uses a healing brush on the face of public figures, because, I think, the function of their photograph is not to provide [a mirage of] beauty, but rather to depict a real event, an actual happenstance, a person or thing that exists.

Therein is the issue with Kelley’s statement — that her criticism was out-of-genre. In the case of Palin, no product is being sold [though the consumer model does often seem to be the glue for the entire American political process], and it is Newsweek’s purpose to depict her as realistically as she is real. After all, is she not supposed to be “One of the Folks?” Surely normal folks have, as Kelley put it, “normal human flaws.”

Newsweek has even developed a language to navigate these waters, naming an unaltered image a Photo, and images which are retouched and edited Photo Illustrations. There is actually a growing body of literature on this subject, and, even the National Press Photographers Association has laid out a code of ethics on the very topic, warning of serious consequences for infringement of this and other bias-related offense.

As photography in whole continues to move in the Digital direction, this question — although nothing new — is one that must be considered now more than ever. Technology in its many new manifestations continues to append great ethical complexity to news media and its relationship to the public hermeneutic. It’s for this reason we must remain alert and committed to developing new language to maneuver the ever-morphing landscape of mass media and its purpose in society.

… .. … .. … .. … .. …

Editor’s Note: If you read all of it, well, thanksyou.

I’ve lived in a small variety of building-types and social settlings, which has brought under the Lamp to the vast assortment of Context, and, which ways specifically this tends to affect persons-in-community [though it's perhaps equally the converse] — all the Hows and the Whys and the Whens. Outside of Spanish Harlem, a house named Ellsworth was one of the most interesting permutations in the line of life-settings.

Home to a strew of upper middle-class Dallas property owners, Lakewood Heights is the broader setting of Ellsworth, actually a house on the street Ellsworth Avenue. Heights is the less successful little brother to Lakewood, a famous neighborhood in Dallas where Old Money lines the streets in the form of Mercedes and brass lion statues.¹

The demographic of Ellsworth Avenue was the most curious to me perhaps because I had no connection to the Situation of most of its people – family-growing by the throb of city-center. I hadn’t grown up in a family outside of the suburbs, and as a 23-year-old single guy there, I was definitely of the minority. Most of those families were wealthy homeowners, whereas Taylor and I moved in as a pair of twenty-something lessees, struggling each month to trust that Art would buy some bread.

Ellsworth’s make-up was largely outdoor dwellers, and for this one should blame the grand canopy of oaks above the street, and the neighborhood’s likeness to somesmall cottage in Northern England. When night’d fall, the firepits would be lit all along the street, and, insulated by St. Augustine’s thick grass, the rich laughter in all nuance from these little gatherings was preserved in a cloud of good-tidings, which traveled all the way down to the frontsteps where I silently sat.

I made a effort very often to find in these small moments of observation a thesis to their Story as a neighborhood and as individual families [and with some, as individuals]. The exercise was with purpose of ascertaining which ways people need and fit with one another, and the Shalom that makes the togetherness possible. Even when I didn’t imagine their situations realistically [surely I often didn't], it was productive to the point that I was able to Hope with them:

1. 6252: ποιmήν & ποίηmα

2. 6246

3. 6254

4. 6259

5. 6253

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When I moved into this space called Vickery – which is a wholly different beast from Ellsworth; a bit more bustling and urban – I anticipated at least the same of neighbors here. I was looking forward to coming to know them more than I did with the ones at Ellsworth, especially considering the proximity we’d share and our similarities in lifestage. I live in an antiquated, giant house that only in recent years has been converted into eight separate one-bedroom units.

Quickly into my stay, I realized [to my Idealist's surprise] that the reason the other seven units of this old house are occupied by solo-dwellers is that they want to be solo. I’ve met a number of them, and have become fairly close to a few of them. But even to this day – five months after my move-in – I’ve still not seen two of them, knowing nothing of their presence besides the nametags above their mailboxes, and their cars, coming and going, mumbling of Michealangelo.

Marisa was one of my closest friends here. She’s since moved out, having met a man at a bar and looking back not at all since. Steven, the kickboxer, actually goes under the name Richard now, I’m assuming because it seems more suitable for one seeking lawyerhood, as he is. ²

Another guy named Buck lives in apartment 6, directly across the hall from where I’m sitting. I haven’t the opportunity to talk with Buck much, but I do like his name, and I do imagine it to embody a great wealth of Story. The central basis of our relationship is a competition over whose electricity bill will be lower by the end of the month.³ I am glad to say this last month I had the cheapest bill of the three of all the competitors.⁴

There’s also girl named Tara who lives in the first apartment of whom we all see very little, but Buck and Marisa have filled me in on some of the details of her Vickerian sojourn. She is well-tenured here, apparently senior to us all, though no one can gather what she does during daytimes or where she is when she isn’t Here. It only took a few days into my stay back in May to find that Tara was supreme over this property, when one afternoon I chose to park Derrick alongside the building in one of the two prized parking spots there. ⁵

New to the house and thus ignorant to this and similar habits of the tenants already living here, I took the spot. When I returned outside hours later to drive to dinner with a friend, I found a huge posterboard under my left windshield wiper that read “DO NOT PARK IN MY SPOT, EVER! -APT 2″ Tara – APT 2 in person – had blocked in my car from behind, and I was forced to drive over some of the lawn and the curb onto Matilda just to leave.

Since that day, I’ve only seen Tara once. We were both unlocking our apartment doors, and before I could get a good look at her, she’d slipped stealthily inside. It seems that Vickery is hermitage to her same as it is to so many of the others here. It made me all the more curious of Tara, though, and so I’d hoped we could share space sometime before one of us’d moved away.

Only four nights ago, I’d gone outside to read a bit under the streetlamp, sitting on the frontsteps where I often do to Think or to return phone calls. I’d my back against the front door, as it’s a very low-traffic exit for Vickerians and thus low-risk for being slammed in the spine.

After a few moments, I heard some pounding footsteps from down the hall, growing more intense and furious as they neared. I intended to get up and move, assuming they were leading right to the other side of the door upon which I leaned, but before I could, I felt the sharp impact of the cold metal door, and it thrust me forward into the front yard into a stumble.

Tara came storming through in tears over something, and, after regaining my balance, I quickly apologized for my poor choice of Seat. She too apologized, adding “So, so, so, so…” to her I am Sorry, and it was then that I knew our Concern for one another. She hurried off, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand, opened the driver’s side door of her chartreuse Acura [which was parked in The Spot! on the side], and left.

With the transience of city-life, people are constantly in and out of these sorts of buildings. Just last weekend, four new tenants replaced four of the original dwellers from when I moved in. Way I see it: more potential for Storywriting, and for Storytelling, and for elaborating on one another’s by Sharing. After all the larger Narrative is concerned with that, isn’t it?

Perhaps Marisa’s old idea of a frontlawn vegetarian barbecue will really catch on with Richard and Tara and Buck, and we’ll be able to show our new resident-aliens some Home.

One thing the first Monday of each month means is that The New Yorker sends forth its publishable Poetry&Fiction into the interwebs for the enjoyment and evaluation of the masses. Excitement over the publication usually sees me staying up late first Sunday evenings to read through the new pieces [they are published at 12 AM ET], unable to wait a dawn later for new quixoticquerying.

The thing I noticed upon reading my very first Billy Collins poem [I guess over a year ago now] is that my written voice is not as gregarious as improvement might make it. Often here, the content of a piece determines its form [and yet most of the time the Form teaches me something of the Substance], but at least, I’ll hope I’ve made some sort of move from the abstract shroudiness my Xanga [that time of my life] embodied.

Anyway, opening the New Yorker RSS feed this morning I stumbled upon a piece by Albert Goldbarth – one from whom I hadn’t read previously – wherein he brings to light what Work’s to be done with Word [or our inability to complete it], while optimistically admitting that sometimes we must push a device invented especially for such a Project.

THE WAY

The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose

of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way

our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk

to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

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Heaven’s loft made low: spanfields of gold
laminate husks, and its whisp’ring penchant
of gusts through some ancient, jagged moors.
Picking apart the cherrypea and clementine
peel, the flame-hued pulp and squeeze is best
suited for mouths that won’t open too wide.

An azure coat hung about the shoulders,
watching a Géricault with an eye and me
with an other, somehow smiling at my youth –
at my incorrigibility – Past the haunted
bow of my ship. [Only now you are
before a tiny table of Sake and soy,
barricade to my nearness, but in a glance]
I can see the ten thousand years
of that month, sitting about a shoreline
within the humid gusts of a Willow tree,
laying skygazed, French horns made of grass

Teaching me to play again. Two swing-sets
later, a Mexican family’s fiesta, Christmas
lights strewn about the veranda above. Suddenly
The seal of my Olla split and burst so that
I’d be twenty-three forever, as if it isn’t itself
an impossibility! Slipping my sneakers
into the closet at the last 5AM, the soles
saw the graveldust to sparkle.

This corridor, as I see it, splits the center of some abandoned elementary school, backlit at its end by a persimmon streetlamp in Twilight, through a set of frowzy frosted glass doors. Looking down the hall from where I stand, the lockers at the perimeter of this passage have all been swung open — No. 2 pencils and Trapper Keepers strewn about the linoleum beneath layers of dust and greedy grime.

There are a few chairs here where I’ve chosen to stand, and the absence of dust on on their seat-tops meant someone else’s been here too recently. I’m not really sure why they’ve been situated here [or by whom], except for the sitting purpose, and so for a month I sat down to consider deeply whether or not I should or shouldn’t pass through the hallway and on through the frosted glass doors before the lamp-lit whatever. Since then I’ve stood again - ready to go somewhere. In which will the Ought be fulfilled?

If I were categorize, this is a spectral space, panning the distance between Consume[d][r] and Creat[ed][or] — between Take and Make — and I can hardly help, in my proclivity towards Extreme, to see something like a beguiling gap between the two, Systemitic critters creepcrawling up the walls and squriming out of every crack. And seeing so my mind my may never push my legs into their function, synapse sent from the intellect-center only to be quickly returned by the compassion-seat saying, “Yes, but, Andrew! You don’t believe that.”

It’s not a fear, it’s an Awareness of the Right, which always Illumines the wrong and the hurt it will cause. And with that, I see the flickering streetlamp outside the doors on the opposite end of the hall an icon of no more promise than security and comfort — which is in fact no Real Promise at all. For in that, the only thing to be built would be myself for the selfsake, and, contra-culture, I am left dissatisfied with with that “potential” for “satisfaction” — perhaps because it actually isn’t that at all.

So, though I’m still on one side of the hallway, but I’ve finally arrived at the realization there is not as much to question of that plight. For if Value is of any value, then I never will [my will never!], and within [Our] Person, that is ostensibly proper. It’s taken some sand-sifting to see it as such, but as soon as I’d realized that as fully as now, it only continues to compound, and I’ve found that by turning my body only an acute smidgenofasmidge, there is a wholly other directioned hallway, a wing of the building I knew, but had forgotten to look for. Upon the reorientation, the lions are quickly made to sound as kitten.

That other hallway allows volition to pan from self-denial for the self-affirmative, but with the discovery of this new hallway, such a silly decision is loosed! The choice is clear so much that the choice is not a choice at all! The glass-doors at the end of this new hallway are lit with a different hue and intensity than the flickering persimmon streetlamps at the end of that other one, and, in fact, categories of “Hue” and “Saturation” and “Lightness” fail to justly express what I’m seeing here. And I’m so excited about it all that I need to use exclamation points!

The only language I have here is the comparative kind – that this is something like the Sun, though it is surely something infinitely more than the Sun [if not more than more! Something like a supra-similie?] – and the Sun is perpetually rising, glowing in the most radiant of all Persimmon, incarnating a Hope to incarnate! And I am choosing, more and more and more, to move its direction, whatever is the cost. I do believe the Cost is All.

—–

P.S. Thanks Mom

Anyywhoo, yesterday, Austin took it upon himself to be my assistant [since he also knew the guy we were photographing], carrying a large volume of stuffs I didn’t end up using, and readying lens caps for the quick switch in a needing moment. We tested a bit of the Dallas light before the shoot, ’specially since I was a bit inspired by those near-Muttons.

Only one month after I signed that remarkably vague self-employment covenant, my hair is back already to its July length! I can’t help but conclude that the growth rate of my headhairs is some external Sign corresponding to an inner Becoming whose fast pace I haven’t before experienced.

Of course, the Fruit does/Will not grow without the Work of a Gardener, cultivating the soil of its tree and watering its roots. Add to that all the cow manure [skubula in some circles] and the pruning of rotten branches, and Hope is what we have to do.

Speaking of signs, where has my voice gone? Its absence is driving me completely loony, and, on certain days, bonkers.

Ciao.

Pnuematic shower of Self-ishness¹, in not
seeing ourSelf² as as You see [Us], or as we should
see You. Leaving things unDone, things of
the not-Ought. Kingdom subject? I won’t be-
lieve/have like I am any for All. But are
[We] in Your [pl.] Imago.

Domine, Deus Meus!
In te, Domine, speravi!

I believe in the communion of the Saints,
together, rising with [as] the Dawn.³

Among this troika of items the frequency at which I lose my keys is the highest. And keys are perhaps the most frustrating of the three to misplace because they are the most necessary to get from one place to the next in a car. I mean, I don’t need a phone to drive to the market, and, I suppose I could drive illegally without my wallet [it wouldn't be Right, but it would certainly be possible].

Even more frustrating is the moment when I actually do find my keys, since this is when my absent-mindedness is most illumined. Out of the many, many times I have misplaced them, the majority of times I’ve discovered them in a pocket of the very jeans I was wearing.

The location that second-most-oftly serves as a hiding place for my keys?

The refrigerator.

Here, linksys is always loyal, and the space is so large that I can easily slide into the corner by the window unseen by the baristas, and likewise unscathed by the rising price of caffeine.

Regardless of their juggernaut nature, I have always been keen on Starbucks’s branding and art direction. All of their pieces gently and maturely tread the balance of function-form to the point that one is nearly unidentifiable from the other [one of the goals of design, I think]. This is of course before mentioning how consistently well done is their color mixing, or the overall quality of the media used.

One of my favorite pieces currently in the store is a display for some of their fall line of coffee mugs and canisters. Hanging from a picnic table over near the counter is an ivory matte-canvas sheet, unpolluted by grunge textures, Gaussian blurs, or gradients. And all that marks its front is paragraph in one of my favorite [squatty] serif fonts of all, Nicholas Cochin, in what else besides a clean, contrasty black.

Cheers.