squibbidy bop dop blam

My program at Tufts seems to directly impact and address my life issues. Whether this is because I see the issues as I study them or because I choose to study issues close to home, I have spent a semester learning about creativity and motivation, and why I can't seem to lasso either of them into my personal existential corral. If there is one take-home message I've gotten from the whole thing, it is this: creativity does not come from moments of spontaneous inspiration. Waiting around for that inspiration that will lead you to write your bestselling novel and quit your shitty job at the office will not actually do either.

Which is not to say that inspiration never strikes. But like other things that strike (bowling balls; lightning; labor unions), ideas are more likely to hit you in a land where they normally dwell (bowling alleys; open fields; sandwich shops). If you want to be savaged by a pack of grizzlies, you should probably go to a grizzly den. If you want creative inspiration, you should probably spend time working and thinking in the same domain where you want inspiration.

Actually, if you want to be savaged by a pack of grizzlies, you probably shouldn't go to a grizzly den. You should probably come over here, so I can make you a sandwich and talk about why you want to be savaged by a pack of grizzlies.

They might not even come in packs.

But what DOES come in packs (segue, bam) is Five-Hour Energy. Packs of 12. Of which I bought two, platoons armed and ready to push the beachheads of academia and keep me functional. As with everything else I bring into my life, these inevitably got combined with alcohol, and I can tell you there is nothing good about this union. Chaining 5-hour energies and whiskey is the only way I've ever managed a hangover that lasted for three full days. It's good to know I have talents.

The picture accompanying was drawn for MeghanTwitch, who picked "leopard" when I asked her to pick an animal because she was folding leopard print undies at the mall at the time. Meghan has the distinction of being the only human in the world who can play the little spoon for an entire night without putting the big spoon's arm to sleep. This one's a keeper, ladies and gents.

new things

I have poured grad school into the pot and turned on the burner. Within a few weeks hopefully there will be bubbling, and then I can pour it into a bowl and keep myself alive with it for a little while longer.

Grad school is apparently canned soup.

To switch metaphors and help me along the way, I've bought myself a sleek and sexy technological companion to strut around campus on my arm: an iPad. Like any good trophy wife, it constantly wants to go shopping and wears a lot of leather. The shopping is for apps to turn what is essentially a device meant for consumer-whoring and looking at kitties into a useful academic tool for data organization; the leather is so it will survive the inevitable bike accident that's going to happen as I bike the serious business commercial roads to and from Tufts.

I drew the accompanying drawing with my finger on the iPad. There is potential here, but I wish potential meant "a larger canvas size."

Aside from the academic, there's one major new situation: with Ashlyn moved to London I've fallen off the good ship Cohabitation into the salty, sultry waters of singledom. The singles pool? Does existing metaphor say it's a pool, not a sea? I guess it doesn't matter; kids pee in both. Which is gross.

I haven't had real experience with hunting, dating, and sexing outside the college bubble of "I'm going to stick my head in the sand and pretend STDs don't exist because I (foolishly) trust the people in my circles to be intelligent and take care of themselves." So now I need to do that thing where you're intelligent and responsible. Fortunately I seem to be getting better at that.

Fish oil, biking, rigorous academics, and whiskey. These four things are keeping me consistently happy, and consistent happiness is new for me. Things Are Going Well.

holy mother of what

the fun.

First a note from real life, as a tip of the hat to the idea of "keeping a blog" as updates on one's actual doings: I am, in fact, going back to school in the fall. They have my money, I have a student ID number, and it's all very official and ivoried. In Celtic mysticism and the Tarot, fire is the element of inspiration, the start of the journey of an idea. I am now literally putting the fire behind me and moving on to the next stage. If the tarot is to be believed, I'm in for heavy rainstorms and will probably end up pregnant. Let's hope that's metaphorical.

And now, while I am on a watery note... a stream of consciousness. Pun! Pun! KaCHOW!

Tobie Bobbin had always suspected there was more to the toaster than met the eye. With two brothers dead in the war and his parents under a spectral, ever-present weepiness as a consequence, Tobie often found himself confined to the kitchen. The living room contained the uncomfortable silence of his parents' staring and sniffling, and his bedroom contained his brothers' ghosts, whose generally nasty dispositions had not been improved by traumatic, violent death. Tobie had tried to explain the situation to his parents after Compley, the eldest, had broken Tobie's model of the Empire State Building using ghostly telekinesis, but it only earned him five weeks of grief counseling and Compley's ghost ethereally peeing on him as he slept. This situation left the kitchen, with its mysterious toaster, as the main focus for Tobie Bobbin's hours and attentions. As the third day of continuous toaster contemplation drew to a close, Tobie was overcome with a sudden surge of understanding. He climbed inside, and played the saxophone So Hard.

The End. Suptacular, clopdandies. Which is a Shetland pony with a cravat. That is what a clopdandy is. Right now, on the other hand, is what bedtime is. Put that in your clop and dandy it.

image may be forthcoming, but I pray it isn't related.

It's been a while (a whole three posts) since I discussed gross things. So let me tell you about the trash can. The northeast has been flooded with a three-day deluge. Here in Brighton we have gotten at least ten inches of rain. I can say this confidently because there were at least ten inches of water in the garbage can that Tim and I just had to carry down our rickety back steps. Sharing the garbage can with the days-old water were two full bags of household refuse, which sent their olfactory essence brazenly out to explore the surrounding filth like tiny stink-particle Vikings. We walked it the half block to a storm drain and emptied the bilge water, wondering how anything could smell so bad.

If you took twelve pounds of shredded cabbage and packed it into the unclean anus of some sort of enormous hyena, starved that hyena for ten days before gorging it on a bowl of extra-meaty chili and prune purée, then caught the resulting rear-end explosion head-on, I suspect you might recreate that smell.

And that's the exciting news for the day. Also, Tufts didn't give me enough money, so I'm asking them for a deferment. We'll see how that goes.

rabbits from hats!

I just finished the only full-time work I've done since the beginning of the summer, working a week at a local arts center instructing YOUTHS! Or, as I have been known to say on camera for national television, YOOFS! I'm sure all my toys and equipment are now covered in a putrescent slime in which all manner of microtic biological transactions are taking place, a veritable United Nations of pediatric germs who are learning and advancing from this bounty of exchanged culture, in every sense of the word. I'm going to take a bottle of Lysol and empty it into the prop bag. Millions of voices will cry out in terror and be suddenly silenced.

In other news, I got into grad school. Depending on professional prospects and financial aid, I may be going to Tufts in the Fall. More on this story as it emerges. Also, yesterday I witnessed a goose fight, something I've never seen before. Three male geese were Having it Out with one another, roaring and hissing and honking and swelling up and tearing one another rather apart.

I have lost track of time and need to go make pancakes for a Circus Guild potluck. Time management, like so many other things, is not a skill I have.

disgusting vocabulary, science, and dogs

A new scientific theory of observed human anatomy, based on personal experience while on a night-time run in late Boston January without the forethought of bringing along tissues:

the philtrum (the little ridge under your nose) acts as a remarkably effective and remarkably gross snot channel. In much the same fashion as some historians -and SCA members- postulate fullers on the blades of stabbing weapons to have functioned with regard to the lifeblood of a skewered foe, the ridge-and-dimple structure on our faces seems to flow nasal offerings right down into our mouth, where they can be conveniently spit out on the street. If that image didn't gross you out, hopefully the grammar of that last sentence did. But grossness aside, it gave me an excuse to use TWO vocabulary words: philtrum and fuller. Both things that people occasionally talk about but whose proper names are almost never known! The moral of the story is, bring a tissue when you go out in the cold.

And the title of the post tells me I should write something about dogs. They have wet noses. Which, now that I typed it and think about it, is remarkably relevant. Gross.

you must constrict additional pythons

Ashlyn and I started playing Starcraft over the weekend. It didn't last long, though it would be fun to play some multiplayer, even though that would mean buying the game again to be able to play on Battle.net. I just looked, and it can be downloaded for $15. Right under the download button, Blizzard has posted a quote from the New York Times: "The game has become practically the national sport for South Koreans under 40". I wonder how effective that is as an advertisement for North Americans who might be considering buying it. To me, it just brings back the memories of trying to play the game online and being handily buttrumbled by Korean hordes.

It's sort of funny to me that both this drawing and the last feature very unhappy looking people. This pixel-lass is Clariet, who is a very unhappy girl. She was supposed to be the heiress to a badass magical family, but has discovered that she has no magical spark whatsoever. Though she had tutors, textbooks, and a castle full of magical apparatuses to learn from, she can't magic her way past a graham cracker. Which is fine, since should one ever be presented with a graham cracker as an obstacle, there are probably more efficient ways of getting past than magic.

Summer has remembered that it's supposed to be hot. I wish it hadn't.

Break out the combover and black spidey suit

because it's EMO TIME. It's actually not emo time, but it IS stream of consciousness time, and this stream has a current like a hot cross bun. Which evokes an image of trying to swim through a river of piping hot currants, which I imagine would be agonizing. And sticky, and dark. You would emerge on the opposite bank discolored from sticky fruity napalm juice and your own burned flesh.

And with that, we take a cliche metaphor and an antiquated pastry, and turn it into an image suitable for nightmare. Somehow whenever I start typing into the blogobox this is the result.

I don't imagine many people still check our tiny cross-linked blogosphere of Vassar expatriates and Boston folks, especially now that we've all more or less stopped updating, but I'd love to know who is out there. Aside from the tigers. Tigers... I know you're out there, and I'm watching you.

So life update, because that's what blogs are for. I'm adjusting to cohabitation, living with Ashlyn living in the same room. It's a very different existence. Anyone who knows me at all probably suspects -correctly- that I do some fairly strange things when I'm alone. Now, "strange" does not mean "twisted and obscene," just odd little irrational nonsense. The state of "being alone" is something that is gone now, and that fact has changed my existence profoundly. One of the side effects has been that this blog has fallen by the wayside. It's not a bad thing, and I can certainly still find ways to be alone, but it is a big change for me.

I've got ten million (actually around eight) projects that I'm working on, everything from a young adult fantasy romp in the style of the Lioness Quartet, to a wordless solo street performance routine that would ideally, theoretically, allow me to travel to foreign countries where my vocabulary consists of "thank you" "bathroom?"and "please remove the handcuffs, I did not kill those people" ("Kérjük, vegye ki a bilincs, nem én öltem meg azokat az embereket" in Hungarian, according to Google). I will try to use this blog to post progress on these projects, as a way of forcing myself to work on them. Comments, encouragement, and harassment are all highly encouraged.

The lad on the right is named Oswald. He is a doctor's assistant who had the grave (har har) misfortune of digging up an infamous thief while on a routine search for cadavers in the name of medical science. He tried on one of the thief's perfectly preserved gloves out of curiosity, and has discovered that it has a mind of its own, often leading him to pilfer things when he's not looking, and filling his mind with all sorts of burglarly knowledge. What's more, no matter how he tries, he has found that the thing is utterly impossible to take off. Oswald was originally one of the illegitimate children hatched by myself and Sally Slade, but he's had a major overhaul since then. Next up you will meet Clariet.

Don't fuck with me now man, I am Ahab!

A while ago in one of those "lets talk about game development and virtual worlds" conversations I have with other people and myself every now and then, I proposed that if someone ever succeeded in making an MMO game that managed to draw in the facebook and bejewelled casual webophile crowd, that person would rule the world. Apparently Sony Online Entertainment is trying to do it. They've just come out with a game, creatively entitled "Free Realms" where you can make a character straight out of a Lisa Frank sticker sheet and run around playing mini-games, beating monsters, and questioning your personal life decisions. I've only played it for about 20 minutes, but so far I've trained as a Brawler, doing standard MMO button mashing to beat up hobgoblins, and trained as a cook, playing a hybrid Bejewelled/Cooking Mama set of silliness to create stews and porridges. It apparently has video integration with youtube, and has a real-life trading card game that has in-game benefits and vice versa on top of all the pet-training and go-kart racing and ninja roleplaying you could ever imagine, so all the little boys and girls can get all their favorite hobbies amalgamated into one game. Basically I think it's interesting that someone is making a super-casual MMO game, and blurring even further the line between "gamer" and "kid who spends all his time online looking at facebook". Technology is weird, and it's doing strange things to the chilluns.

The attached image is the character I made to explore this online debacle- there is absolutely no way to make a dignified avatar in this universe, so I opted to shoot the moon. I'm trying to pretend I'm just dabbling in the game as an observer watching an interesting development in the sociological phenomenon of Online Worlds... but it's entirely possible that I just want pixie wings.

hamfists. Fists of ham. Pheasantfists. Fists of absolute nonsense.

Good morning fiends and bestiaries. I am once again in Atlanta, this time to receive money instead of spending it. We did a flawless show at Georgia Perimeter College, and are getting fully paid not only for the show, but also for the transportation costs there and back again, the rental car, all the fuel, the hotel, and all our other expenses. Our clients are flying us across the country. We're making it.

I also got to catch up and hang out with most of my old Atlanta friendfolks in the wee hours of this morning, roving from a four-tiered Irish pub to the basement apartment of Admiral Nicholas Turbo Benson and Victor B. Bicycle. Bless their hearts, one and all. There's a part of me that is uniquely Atlantan. And it's been a while.

I still don't have a real computer. This is being written in the glamorous environs of the Sheraton Atlanta hotel lounge, and up in Boston, 1300 miles away, I still have the darling little piece of shit that Wildfire Chad is lending me. I ran a time test for it- I measured the time it takes the laptop to open Firefox against the time than it takes our toaster oven to toast a bagel. The laptop won this contest by exactly twelve seconds. Truly technology is amazing. Truly I miss having Photoshop to draw some poorly-conceived ostrich-hammock to accompany this post.

How the words Ostrich and Hammock might possibly interact is something I'll leave up to your sultry little wonderminds. Release ballast, Mr. Hannibal! We float easterly!

I am adorable.

I decided it was blog post time, because there are a few things that have come up that I want to yell about from my tiny soap box. First and foremost, I bought Ashlyn a tarot deck so she can start playing with all fun hobbies a tarot set allows: spiritual reassurance that it's okay to have another cupcake, and turning over the Death card at small children while saying "booga booga" are the big ones. To commemorate the event I also drew an aww-thats-precious picture in Vaguely Amazing style. You can see it off to your left. Yes, it's precious. I also think it's Neat, which is why it is here instead of back in my private life where it belongs.

(I realized after posting this that "Vaguely Amazing style" might be meaningless to some of you -how many of you are there?- who only met me recently. Vaguely Amazing was a factually-impeccable autobiographical account of Ricky and my Vassar years in web comic form. That adventure can be begun here if you're curious.)

Secondly, on the A Different Spin front, we have decided that our America's Got Talent audition will consist of the four of us going on a diet of nothing but food coloring (one color for each of us) for the 24 hours preceding the audition, and then urinating a full-color map of the United States of America all over the floor of the studio. We'll show them variety talent. Even if this act doesn't get us a spot on America's Got Talent, I'm pretty sure Stephen Colbert would give us a luxurious all-American yacht fleet in appreciation of our art.

Along the same vein of humor... an earlier discussion among the house regarding highways and sexual deviancy led to one of my patented Bad Idea google searches, and this gem came out in the wash.

There. Pissing all over public television and adolescent sex jokes about highway numbers. Is all the Adorable gone now? No? Alright, well then here's an alternate picture. You can just imagine I put it up instead of the tarot card.




My google ads are all about odor removal. The things that show up on that little side bar never cease to amaze. I really hope someone stumbles on this blog by accident while looking for "Septic Smells" or "Soup Recipes" or "Children's Sleep." A little befuddlement is good for the brain.

Hi-Ho Cherry-O was a great game.

It taught counting, and colors, and introduced the idea that birds and dogs can take away everything you've worked so hard to build, instantly. I've never trusted them since.

Last night at Spin Jam we had a serendipitous and surreal experience: some of the other performers there had responded to a Craigslist ad for America's Got Talent, and are going to audition this weekend. This prompted a conversation in which we wondered whether we might also Got Talent, and whether we should go in to audition too. Opinions were mixed. We probably would have decided not to, except that Mooch immediately got a phone call from America's Got Talent, asking us to come in and try out. Apparently Johnny Blazes had recommended us, and (s)he has some connection that makes hir opinion count over there. Neat. Maybe if all goes well, you can make fun of us on national television. You can even put on a Simon Cowell hat. And if you do, I can beat you to death with a golf cart.

And then I'd probably get arrested.

Anyway, we're apparently going to try to merge our literal circus of juggling and fire calamity with the metaphorical circus of the national media. This union, like that of Pasiphaë and the Cretan Bull, will probably spawn a monster that will consume entire generations of young Greeks. I'll make sure to bring a ball of yarn to the audition to make sure we can find our way back out again.

horrible adventures in the snake world

I've started a new part-time job at an after-school program for troubled yoofs. Helping kids with homework at the 2nd grade level sounds incredibly easy and as intellectually stimulating as stapling one's own finger to a turkey sandwich (challenging) but I'm actually having a lot of fun. Watching the concepts develop in their mind, and seeing the difference in rational thought and reasoning between an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old is something that my other work with kids has never shown me. Plus I get to spend 2 hours a day doing whatever I want, so naturally next week I'm running circus workshops, and after that we'll be populating islands with fantastical hodgepodge creatures. I'm sure it ultimately will get boring, as all "jobs" do, but for now it's a solid source of income, and something I'm happy to do every day.

For my next trick, I will mix slapdash art with meaningless photoshop layering, and excrete it into the public eye, off to the left. I will then ponder the fact that you already looked at it two minutes ago as soon as the page loaded, and I will point out that this "next trick" therefore must have involved time travel. Ta-DAaaaaa.

Another nail in Walt Whitman's coffin.

I've noticed that the great majority of my literative spew has moved toward the dreamy and hallucinogenic, and usually ends with, or involves, someone's death. There will be no more of that. With that in mind, here is a poem about a jackhammer:

O jackhammer, my jackhammer! our fearful task is done.
here stands a mighty mega-mall, complete with Cinnabon.
the I-beams came to make a frame, the plexi-glass surrounded.
built on the very concrete that we pulverized and pounded.
But heart! heart! heart!
Though the digging has been dug
My jackhammer has died this day
For someone pulled the plug.

Dammit, still got the death in there. I suppose it can't be helped.

I ordered three umbrella hats this evening, with pointy tops to spin plates on. We shall put them on the heads of unsuspecting audience volunteers, and I think they'll have a grand time. I've always wanted one of my own. An umbrella hat, that is. I'm pretty well set when it comes to grand times.

A Different Spin has been invited to join the performer roster of Urban Circus, a Boston-based talent promotion company. We have a photo shoot with them on February 4th. The guy I talked to at the agency also said he was interested in bringing me on as a birthday entertainer and performer for their "pirate parties". Semi-regular gigs that I don't have to do any booking work for? Sounds pretty ideal to me. And of course ADS is going to the APCA conference in Atlanta in March, which is the big leagues. From what we've done so far in the show-writing and skill-development departments, we're actually ready for it. Our juggling and volunteer acts are legitimately hilarious. I'm proud of what we're doing here, and I hope it keeps going for a long time.

the land is doomed

I may at last have joined the ranks of the motivated. This might have something to do with the fact that I have definitely joined the ranks of the poor. I am a rank-joiner. Wikipedia informs me that "a joiner differs from a carpenter in that he cuts and fits joints in wood that do not use nails."

Free health clinics are a new and interesting experience: waiting for 5 hours in the waiting room of a clinic and finally being told that you can't be seen today, despite what they told you on the phone, is pretty awesome.

I've got a 3-month gift subscription to Netflix, courtesy of my family. This means I can stream any movie they have, any time I want. Unfortunately, the movies they have available for streaming are usually ancient, technicolor beasts that lurch their way to 2 and a half stars before their budget expires and they slurk back to their fetid back lot spawning pools. Amidst this metaphorical swamp, I found a neat little anime called Paprika, whose soundtrack has been going through my head nonstop ever since. I also watched Kevin Costner's The Postman, and found it quite satisfying.

There are no more unrelated paragraphs of irrelevant autobiographics. We are both free to go.

2:31 am counts as Christmas morning

I am really bad about giving presents. Really bad. I just don't think of it. Couple that with the fact that I don't have enough money to buy myself a pack of winterfresh gum, and I am in a bit of a holiday pickle. Fortunately I have excellent last-minute oh-shit abilities to pull something together that just barely fulfills the necessary requirements (see my Vassar transcript for details) and so on the evening of December 24th I managed to make things for my brother and sister that I'm actually pretty proud of.

For my sister, I made a goofy-looking comic-book cover of her musician self, Sticklips (who you can hear on MySpace, and is really quite good). For my brother, I made an expansion set to the board game Ashlyn and I made for him last year, in which you play an embattled team of elves trying to keep zombies out of Santa's workshop. I WOULD put up pictures, but I think that might cheapen it a bit since they were intended as gifts, not for me to show off.

Instead, you can have THIS little tidbit. I really can't imagine what these gentlemen could be talking about.

Christmas gift update: I got a box of chocolate liqueur cherries! Chocolate AND alcohol in tiny delicious packages. I am already delightfully allergically buzzed from just two. What a fantastic holiday.

where do you get a green bowtie?

I have three plastic bottles on my desk: a life water I stole from a pizza place, a diet coke I received free from a job interview at "TOMB" a sort of live-action Legends of the Hidden Temple dungeoncrawl in Boston, and a seltzer bottle I bought on the drive up from Vassar on Tuesday to mix with the leftover gin we salvaged from Port Ewen. There's some kind of symbolic trinity there if I want to look for it. Fortunately for you, I don't.

I recently picked up an "Employment Guide" from a free newspaper machine somewhere out and about in Boston, and its contents really confuse me. There were almost no actual job listings within. Rather, it was filled with opportunities for me to go back to school or receive specialized training to become a medical assistant, trucker, or nuclear inspector. My favorite is a colorful panel with the heading "Attention Shooting Sports Enthusiasts! Motivated telemarketers needed to fill immediate openings!"

What?

A note on the walrus above: I owed one to Sasha, but I figured I'd just make it public property. But it's technically Sasha's walrus, so if it gets up to anything unsavory, you can direct complaints over to our lady in Amsterdam.

It is, more or less, ok.

There is, in evolutionary theory, an idea that within a society, some genotypes may be selected not because of their ability to survive and reproduce but because their behavior, while individually detrimental, benefits the entire population and thus is worth keeping around. I believe the millions of people who are dumb enough to leave unsecured wireless networks named "Linksys" lying around fall under this category, and I love them for it. Without them, this post would not be possible.

In fact, neither would any kind of internet access from our new Bostonian den, which is still mostly made of cardboard boxes and uncertain financial forecasting. Don't misunderstand, it's a very nice apartment. We just need to make the transition from "corrugated hairball hacked up by a U-Haul truck" to "legitimate residence".

For those who don't know or don't care, there is a new World of Warcraft expansion out. I haven't played much of it, but there's a very strong sense that if I want to keep playing WoW, I'll need to spend some very serious time with it very soon, since all our internet friends are already at level awesome and I'm still level... not. As Penny Arcade put it, "if I wait too long it'll be like going to high school with an older brother who refuses to recognize you in the hall." But maybe that's a good thing.

It is noon. It is now time to unpack the kitchen. Tally ho.

well hello again

So. I "dressed up" as the Corinthian for Halloween, a man with an excess of teeth. Ironically, I actually ended the night with fewer teeth than I'd set out with, thanks to a high-impact dental brawl with a candy apple whose shiny sugary coating would have challenged most bunker-buster warheads. But $250 and a pleasant half hour of drilling later, my tooth is back in business. Better yet it's artificial, which I've just realized qualifies me as a cyborg. You humans can go back to your smoking blue-soundstage hovels; I've got lasers to calibrate.

By this point we've all voted. Bully for us. Mother suggested this morning that it might be worth it to save Obama paraphernalia so we can later dig it out of our musty horrible old man attics and wave it at our uncaring grandchildren as they sit in their virtu-pods- so we can tell them We Were There. It's a neat idea to think that this might be a major historic event, but I think I'm too cynical to believe that the kind of change people predict will really happen. The issue to me is that Americans are still slothful, ignorant, religious wump-bugglers who don't know what they want, and the political system is designed to make change slow and gradual. I will not tirade here though: I am not well-enough informed to make my particular brand of wump-buggling stand out as anything special, so there's no reason to inflict it on my (future) self or anyone else. That said... I'm just as fingers-crossed hoping-with-bated-breath anxious about this election as everyone else. God dammit I hope he wins.

Tomorrow I will make a pretty picture. Today I will not. In its place, I give you permission to picture an alto sax wrestling Al Pacino on the inside of a tube sock.

coolant toobs inclooded

My computer's dead, I'll get it back in a week. Probably won't update before then. They're replacing literally everything except the monitor. The most exciting part is this: because of the sinister machine's overheating, some of the silver paint on the part where my wrist sits had rubbed off. I didn't think that was a big deal. Turns out, there is no paint on that part of the laptop, and the heat actually caused the aluminum to oxidize into my skin. I don't think that will have any ill effects, except apparently an overenthusiastic use of italics.

Also, I've added something to the "Collaborative Fiction Project" Tim started a few weeks ago. The theory here is to use a line from a poem Karen wrote as the first line and jumping-off-point for a poem of your own. So here is my offering, double-posted because I am too lazy to write something else here today. I think the poem works better in the semi-ironic context of everything else up on the other blog so far... but it is what it is. Not like we're getting paid for this shite. Mayhap I shall illustrate when I have my tablet back.

I've sewed my butterfly chest all together
with straps made entirely of soup-stewed shoe leather
butterfly patches and butterfly stitches
the scars are still burning, the rotten flesh itches

To creak my neck forward sends head-spinning pain
through cold coils of copper I've hooked in my brain
I look down my body through eyes dried and wired
and electrically flex muscles long since expired

One leg's from a dead man; one leg is a wheel.
I've a cranial disc made of thrice-folded steel.
I've no nose to speak of, but that's just as well,
since I'm made of cadavers I've no wish to smell.

A mortal no longer, I've shed my old skin
passed through death and returned, transcending my sins
the police, when they killed me, my spirit unfettered
and thus I return, all the stronger and better.

I lurch down the stairs, my sucking chest heaving
to wish all the village a... memorable evening.