oh hell yes.

the weather became more pleasant all of a sudden, and this time of year is pregnant with excitement and the still-fresh experiences of just a year ago. though much of what had such effect then no longer factors in-- that once-in-a-lifetime starting college moving away feeling has passed, some of the people are gone, some new people have come forward-- the memories remain vivid, colourful, and almost overwhelming at times. that life must be lived multiple times over in realms of recollection in order to fully appreciate what was happening, the accompanying distortion of a "big picture" view making these thoughts bittersweet. almost enough to forget that there's also more importantly a now, a present, a current state informed and coloured by all that came before.

and what days those were: in october the longest day; september, the longest month. 2005. seriously, what a year. i could say that about almost any point of it but right about now (then) is when Everything Changed. the balance of 2006 already tips towards the end and i'm just now thinking fondly of the previous year. and the coming autumn is the best, the "lull between two punishing seasons," as haven kimmel wrote.

all of this conscious reminding, forced memories and sensations, trying to pick up a thread of what was, but it's all subtext. it's re-reading a book so loved at a previous time (some of that this summer for me) and finding, whether via delusion or providence, that you recognise circumstances and characters and sentiments you had interpreted differently the first time in your reading, and, further, that some of these things prefigured what happened to you afterwards. the temporary cult of the asterisk, dreams of a stadium, new orleans, kafka quotations, belle. so you get to thinking: is that just one of those awesome to realise but otherwise fruitless day-to-day coincidences, or did what now seems like a burning red flag once appear as just another string of words and subconsciously affect thought processes and decisions in that grand theatre of real life?

i'm moving into central a day early. monday. week from today. nervous anticipation of preparation abounds, but that's what it's all about. something actually happening.

ashley: yes you can. or, at least, you should be able to.


...


alright, fine, you can't, okay? i admit it. i suppose "persephone" (or proserpina) would work. or maybe not. no, you know what? i hope they somehow run out of names or otherwise cave in and use xena, because it's just that awesome.

poor pluto. we still love you. almost as much as we love your fellow trans-neptunian object "xena," otherwise known as 2003 ub313. we love pluto because it used to be part of the club, and we love xena because (in the words of those who found it) "we have always wanted to name something xena."

(if you're actually interested in astronomical nomenclature and other such happenings, there's this from before the decision and this from today.)

also: cbc's suggest a new mnemonic device spectacular. i'm partial to "my vibrant excited magpie joyfully sings until nightfall," but i'm sure there are better ones. isn't ashley good at these?

courtesy tim's camera phone and the place in chinatown which supplied christine's cake.

definite fin de siècle feeling in the air, decaying end of summer, late august and cooler days. stood out on the deck with patty talking to the guy next door about this and that: sectarian violence in iraq, "just let them kill each other," he says. cars and computers, paedophilia and trampolines. his house alarm went off the other day, but the speaker faces down the hill so we all assumed it was coming from down there, aurally deceived and hotter in the sunlight than in the shade. nothing had actually happened.

looked down after the conversation had faded and he'd returned to his dying truck, oversecured home, and ignorance of foreign policy. some years ago my father sunk pinkish brickish steps into the ground that stick up just enough to mark a little path that doesn't really go anywhere and is by all accounts quite useless. i looked at that path for a few minutes and thought about that yard in the past, when the rocks seemed bigger and the fences and deck were not yet erected. there was a tree there at one point, a big one. i think we used to play around it as children. cut it down years ago. the summer resolves itself in two more weeks of anticipation and consolidation of myriad emotional highs and lows, soundtracked by last year's formidable musical selections and full of cinematic skyward glances. and all this domesticity.

i feel like 1947.

my sister takes pictures of the sunsets almost daily from our back yard. she takes several because her camera is not very good and many of them do not come out very well. then she goes back inside and waits, returning to the outside periodically over a length of time for as long as light lingers. preserving those moments-- i've been taking pictures like that for a while now, not on that set a schedule, and i think/hope she picked up the habit from me. such regularity. i admit that the trees out there and the light shining through them create an aesthetic grace this time or any time of the year, but i like to think she's trying to slow down this temporally accelerated torrent of august before it overtakes us all and we wake up under september skies.

abandonment, a theme i do not want to beat to death as much as certain others, but also a feeling that thrusts in an acute stabbing motion in my general direction in these waning days. driving home last night, for example, in the dusky fading sun of the days of late summer; driving past some people that i know (or maybe i should start saying knew, the past tense as an acknowledgment of the future being now), aware of their lives and motions completely independent of my own. a gentle solipsism devoid of ego, i swear: how real are those experiences of theirs if i am not there to witness them, though their lives are shaped by the grinding erosion of living daily, their lives on the occasions of intersect with my life influenced by everything they did before they knew me and all the people that they know that i do not. and vice versa. what about me is real to them and would they care or think or consider or become consumed by interest as i do?

--like i don't really live here anymore.

how i was driving last night in patty's car, afforded a degree of anonymity that i assume i would not have otherwise, the green of my own car being so apparently memorable. how i could drive almost anywhere in that darkish shroud and take it all in.

and worlds colliding: there doesn't seem to be much world left here in dracut. with each passing day, it seems to me that more and more of what once existed here for me is slipping away, patches in the sky; it seems also that i have little desire to fight to hold on if such a rebelliously and misguidedly nostalgic act were even possible. patches in the sky, i care not to explain the reference, but i mean that the dracut experience is not slipping away so much as it is undergoing a process of conversion to one specific facet of itself, that is, the part where i'm here, perhaps driving that familiar scenic long route to buy a book, driving past the houses of old friends-- the houses either vacated or the friends emotionally unavailable please check back in a few years if ever-- and a current of existence carries on without me. people come and go and love and lose and laugh and laugh harder and stir the cauldrons of local legend, they get drunk and fornicate in darkened rooms by night, contemplating brilliant sunrises by morning and not talking about it later; they have risen at an early hour with a sense of purpose for their day, and i'm the guy who rarely went anywhere and never made much of an impression.

then, of course, there's the other world. the world we're making for ourselves in a place that has brought me to such extremes, the world which i will cherish every day knowing that there is so little to return to here. a world which i entered not fully aware of my the two-worlds theory of living so close yet so far from home, a world in which i eventually became comfortable, a world which i made my own by some semblance of choice and maturity-- not simply being born there and forced to grow up and live with the manifest mistakenness of childhood and its later tragedies. at one point there was no alternative, but now that it's here, i choose the alternative.

maps, directons can i do this? books, snakes, planes, old tv shows for kids spelunking some fruity soaps let's talk till our throats are raw because there's too much to say can't say it all. or at least mine. meet this one and that one if it had been tomorrow it would have been hotter and it's so beautiful and all or most of you are there and finally yes. foxy gel and the flumes and lock up your ovens because we'll steal them and make muffins.

and later route 2 hardly everest a dirt road friendly cartography i can't accept that thanks goodnight the navigatrix like an old slasher movie claire at the door so helpful so friendly f.w. the saint and back on our way. the moon so beautiful i live for this why can't i ever. what friends and what times and what times to come and what times have passed and what would we have done otherwise? in case you were wondering. all like the sweetest of dreams made sweeter by knowing it was/is real.

life hangs by a thread. the momentous moments that seem so momentous later, the ones we see as vital links in the chain that affected us and changed us forever after. are they really so momentous or do they only seem so because the selves after can sit in a car together and talk about them? like killing the butterfly of the distant past in the typical sci-fi story what ifs. the snow falling just when. thin wisps of it on the ground there were. what ifs and you were theres and if not fors would we even be talking about it later. a bad first impression, a chance encounter, an unexpected knock and a hey what's your name again. a tell-all at face value. deeply philosophical for a ride home maybe see you friday. life a thread, weaving, a tapestry, the poetry of mortality and we never quite got metre.

smiths on a plane. smiths in the car. often it all comes together on the final foxy leg of the trip home, and it comes together like this: i am so happy. i can listen to a song about serial killers that prey on children but as long as the melody's good and it is i'm having a good time. driving through what always in all ways seemed like the center of town but it isn't and all the lights seem like they're always on but nothing open. light just to the left goes off as i drive by and formulate that thought will i remember that just as i remember everything else and remember the thought i'd been forming more because of it or at least write about it when i get home all signs point to yes. it's time that the tale were told. go to sleep go to sleep get to sleep.

the new, summer-infused edition of red skies just went up: better late than never. it includes the summer edition of my seasonal music column, which i rushed to finish during finals and haven't looked at since may-- information which should, i hope, excuse its sometimes-poor writing. there's also a special section dedicated to the spring 2006 literary journalism class and selected pieces of our writing, including my article on firefly that, interestingly enough, i rushed to finish during finals and haven't looked at since may. middle field's own laura is our special guest star in the second section.

i am in no way to blame for the various formatting issues.

nifty little wikipedia article i'd like to point out (emphasis mine):

"A toothbrush moustache, also known as a Hitler moustache or a Chaplin, is a bushy moustache shaved except for three to five centimetres in the centre of the lip. The sides of the moustache are vertical rather than tapered.

This moustache is most famous for having been worn by film star Charlie Chaplin and later by dictator Adolf Hitler. Chaplin took advantage of this unlikely similarity between the two men for his role in The Great Dictator. The style is now unpopular due to its strong association with Hitler."

no, you don't say.

--

Reggae Bob Dylan. You're fucking ruining "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." Why?

WHY??!

--

[...] sharing in an elf-off with the local LOTR fans.

--

I just want in before the whole house collapses. They're leaving it in disrepair and the keys are restricted to people who have been coming there for years.

--

[BONUS!] 3. It'll be just like that movie Equilibrium, where they killed defenseless puppies.

--

My fucking Laura Carter will run up to me and we'll live happily ever after.

--

New Mainicut Massawareyorkmont Island, D.C.-landshire.

--

I fell asleep listening to Sleep Station: I R O N Y !

--

"Light Warm a Such in Caught, Night Off an Was it Thought"

She always did have a distinctive voice. Maybe it's just because I already know what she sounds like.

--

What was that? That was Jr. High insanity in Minus Five tainted musical isolation. A Thousand Years Away.

--

"Vision: The art of seeing the invisible."
- Jon. Swift.

Just at the moment when my day is at its most boring, its most secular, its must mundane... just when life is in the most real of situations, just walking into the house, just when I know you must hate me again, or perhaps for the first time. You called. You said you were thinking of me. You made me tingle when all signs of life had subsided... You still call me. Maybe there's hope.

--

Join up today, Yankee boys. Let's go kick the former Confederacy's ass and save America.

--

Still a waste. You get unlimited calling. Ghost boy dance and eating the Slovak way. Lots of fashions. Big clocks, blue, things, guitar, April. Amy loved the movie.

--

So, I revise. Julia wasn't my Vietnam.

--

i have no idea what i was talking about in that "amy loved the movie" bit, and there's actually several pages of that, stream-of-consciousness to a point that outside that day's mental reference points, there's no significance to it. and that was before i'd read joyce. but it's all just craziness anyway.

it's been my habit (some would say unfortunate habit) over the past few years to point out to people who probably aren't interested in the same issues i am various bits of political, religious, and social news and controversy in order to generate some type of interest and generally raise to outrage level around me.

with that spirit shining at its finest and brightest potential, i bring you this article from the los angeles times, "baby, give me a kiss." it concerns joe francis, legally embattled and morally confused creator of the "'girls gone wild' soft-porn empire." i'm pretty thoroughly disgusted by him and you likely will be too, especially considering how successful he and his franchise have become. you can't watch tv after a certain hour without coming across a "girls gone wild" ad.

once you're sufficiently outraged, you'll want to check out this skillful feminist takedown of francis and the underlying psychological motivations of people who enjoy that type of "entertainment."

"who is he? an exile. which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. exile is a dream of glorious return. exile is a vision of revolution: elba, not st. helena. it is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. the exile is a ball hurled high into the air. he hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own."

-- salman rushdie, the satanic verses

if you ever get a chance, i highly recommend that you see the episode "a question of succession" from monarchy with david starkey, which i caught earlier on pbs. it's about henry VIII's children and their successive reigns, focusing on the religious turmoil that took place in england during that time. the actress they have portraying mary I in the documentary, even though she mostly just sits or stands there looking determined, strikes me as an excellent likeness. does anyone else actually go and compare portraits? i think there's something wrong with me.


i've been interested in mary tudor and her personal story ever since i read carolly erickson's novel-like biography, bloody mary. erickson's prose style and mary's own evident single-minded devotion to the roman catholic church are a combination that can make her long struggle with an uncertain place in royal succession and pathological need for the latin mass into a story that is one of the most fascinating things i've ever read.

catholic fanaticism is expected, though, just look at the childhood this woman had:

“From earliest infancy, he [the Spanish humanist Vives, who devised a plan of study for the young Mary] insisted, she should be kept away from the company of men, lest she become attached to the male sex. Since ‘a woman that thinketh alone, thinketh evil,’ she was to be surrounded at all times with ‘sad, pale, and untrimmed’ servants and taught to weave and spin when her lessons were over. Weaving Vives recommended as inducing a ‘love of sober sadness,’ an approved frame of consciousness likely to discourage the sensual musings native to all females. Of the ‘foul ribaldry’ of popular songs and books the young girl should know nothing, and should beware of romances ‘as serpents or snakes.’ Lest she trust herself too much, he advised, she should be encouraged to fear being alone; she should be trained to require the company of others and rely on them for everything. Vives’ recommendations amounted to a deliberate programming for helplessness, with the feelings of inferiority and depression that accompany it.” (Erickson 43)

but wait, that’s not all such godly folk had in store for their women:

“But his warnings against sensuality were even more harmful. The child’s movements should be watched, he noted, to prevent ‘uncomely gestures or moving of the body.’ Only the blandest food should be served, which would not ‘inflame the body.’ He recommended that as an adolescent Mary should fast to ‘bridle the body and press it down, and quench the heat of youth.’ Fasting, always a mark of the ascetic life, became in the early sixteenth century the special hallmark of young female saints. Popular pamphlets told of the prodigious fast of one young girl in the Netherlands, Eve Fliegen, who gave up all food and drink and subsisted for years entirely on the scent of roses. Weak wine was permissible, Vives thought, but water was best, since ‘it is better that the stomach ache than the mind.’ All adornment of the body was of course hazardous. Like the sight of men, perfumes and ointments ‘fire the maid with jeopardous heat’ and were to be avoided, and Mary’s guardians were to impress on her that an alluring woman is ‘a poisoner and sword’ to all who see her.

Mary’s education was intended to provide her with an intellectual chastity belt—a view of herself and of the spiritual dangers facing all women that would frighten her into an attitude of withdrawn virtue. For it was a vital corollary to this concept of self that it was only compatible with a life of domesticity. Public life in any form was impossible for women, for it meant loss of chastity and good repute. Vives’ model of female behavior envisioned a woman at home and silent, with ‘few to see her and none at all to hear her.’ Leaving the house was full of perils; it demanded that she ‘prepare her mind and stomach none otherwise than if she went to fight.’ In streets and public places ‘the darts of the Devil are flying on every side,’ Vives insisted, and her only defenses were the good examples she had been taught, her determination to remain chaste and ‘a mind ever bent toward Christ.’ To forestall prying eyes she should cover her neck and veil her face, leaving ‘scarcely an eye open to see the way.’

Vives’ educational doctrines called for claustration, cultivated prudery and an exaggerated horror of sensuality in every form. They were more the product of Spanish than English attitudes toward women, but Vives took many of his teachings directly from the works of St. Jerome, whose views on female education had been a respected part of Christian culture since antiquity. That women were morally inferior to men was a commonplace of theology, and the fathers and scholastics of the middle ages had elaborated dozens of antifeminist formulas. The traditional starting point of these arguments was the Christian story of creation itself, in which Adam was made directly by God but Eve was made only indirectly, by means of Adam’s flesh. Eve was thus not made in God’s image but in Adam’s, and was inferior to him. It was Eve, too, who tempted Adam to disobey God and was responsible for mankind’s fall. To these sins scholastic theologians added the Aristotelian teaching that all female creatures are “misbegotten males”—biological accidents and imperfections. Man was seen as the norm of humankind, woman as the abnormal exception, and some Christian writers wondered whether, at the last judgment, women would rise from the dead in female form or whether they would be resurrected in the perfect form of men.” (Erickson 43-44)

read that closely, and, though society has certainly come far, you'll see a lot of currents of thought that have ruling stakes in some strains of popular morality in major world religions. erickson goes on from there to elaborate on some more twisted biblical demonstrations of the rightness of male authority in all things. it's just been around for so long that most everyone has fallen into it on a cultural level, been raised into it, maybe baptised before you even knew what you were getting into like in my family, or just raised in a family that reinforced this type of thinking. patty's a strong woman and the anti-woman tides of catholicism (though all of this applies to any conservative religion) never got much play in my household growing up. we were catholics in name only, and now i'm not even that, though i constantly endeavour to find out how and why people stay with it when it seems so terrible to me. though this example is from so long ago, i think it illustrates that childhood has ever so much to do with it, and the fear of sin to a young christian is disabling. it becomes all-consuming, because so many elements of that morality seek to combat nature itself, the natural sensual urges of the body, as if they were something wicked.

that fear came at me so many times when i'd question an element of my birthright faith, and the fact that the religious education department at my church was so lax in making sure we actually knew things we were supposed to know before confirmation allowed my oft-related and off-putting brush with actual catholic dogma in book form to take place after confirmation, when i was at a more advanced and freethinking age and able to reject once and for all that which i'd only weeks earlier been officially initiated into.

katie from the neighbourhood of old came from a really religious family, and i remember her saying even when we were all in single-digit ages that she believed this life was only a practice life for whatever comes afterwards. but are we to spend our lives in a state of "practice" in avoiding what pleasures are allowed to mortal beings, immobilised by fear? does a higher being closely watch our bedrooms? i could go on, but nietzsche sums it up perfectly: "the christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." fundamentalist religion having the power it does these days, there is cause for concern. as the expression would have it, god help us.

as for myself, i'm going to stay up all night watching björk videos and hoping for thunderstorms in the early morning hours. hello, august.