my yin v. Amanda Palmer (redux)

One of these women is my wife:

The other, my pretend girlfriend from October 2004 - June 2008:

And this time last year, while writing a research paper on Amanda Palmer, I learned that she and my yin share the same birthday:

tomorrow.

The idea started looping around in my head as I went deeper into the project, and I began thinking about how much time I was spending with Amanda late at night, how much time was spent looking at pictures of her, how much time was spent reading her words, how much time was spent writing about what she means... eventually my mind turned to the fight between my yin and Igor Stravinsky.

I started wondering what would happen if my yin and Palmer were to meet, and I remembered the time Jonathan "The Herring Wonder" Ames fought David "Impact Addict" Leslie in the Box Opera:

Ames and Leslie square off in 1999

I had driven non-stop from Lawrence, Kansas, to Manhattan trying to catch the fight, but by the time I arrived I was too tired and sleep-deprived to stay awake past 125th Street, much less all the way downtown. As fate would have it, my yin and I will actually be passing through Lawrence this time next month, perhaps even staying the night. I wonder, idly, if we might run into the ghost of Bill Burroughs.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that i remember Ames writing about the upcoming bout in the New York Press, attempting to assess his chances:

"Leslie is white, 42, stands 5-feet 10-inches and weighs 178 pounds. I’m white, 35, 5-11 and weigh 152. He has a lot more fight experience, but he’s a bit slow and has been known to wear himself out as a passionate denizen of the New York’s nightlife. I on the other hand have not smoked crack cocaine since 1994, but I do bleed easily from the nose. I’m not sure who has the advantage based on the above facts."

Inspired by Ames' example, here is an approximate breakdown of the difference between my yin and Ms. Palmer:

Palmer is white, 35, reasonably famous, and has no eyebrows. My yin is tan, 34, reasonably anonymous, and has eyebrows – although I do not know how this affects her chances. Both are now married: Palmer to a famous writer and my yin to an unknown writer, who read the comic books written by the famous writer when he wasn't quite so famous.

This comic is now more than twenty years old... time is a scam.

Both practice yoga, but my yin never does so while drinking beer, which has to give her an edge over Palmer. Also, to my knowledge, my yin has never smoked crack cocaine (undoubtedly a plus) and goes to bed earlier than Palmer, who is well-known to suffer simultaneously from jet lag and mania.

Amanda Palmer in vrksasana

my yin in virabhadrasana (three)

Not all the cards are stacked in my yin's favor, however, because unlike Ames (who ate herring in order to gain a psychological and aromatic advantage), I refuse to kiss her if she chooses to eat gifilte fish as part of her training regimen.Furthermore, if Ames' experience is any indicator, my yin's Jew(ish)ness may be a disadvantage, because he was pummeled by the goyim Leslie over the course of three rounds, like some twisted inversion of David and Goliath.

But these things may never come to pass.

Probably, I will eventually stop rehashing last year's posts and get back into a regular routine with this blog. I have been appalling (impressively) overtaxed for the past six months, but there only two dozen or so final exams left to grade. Then I am officially done with the semester and can start moving towards whatever the next chapter is in this fiction we call life. Until that time, however....

v.

Palmer better get ready to rumble.

thisness, thatness, lastness

Last paper, last class, last lesson... Will he ever teach again?
Will he ever learn again? Did he ever in the first place?
First place, last place, last place he thought he would ever be.

What about the road not taken? The paths unchosen?
The torn lederhosen of Nancy, lost in Avignon, before the fall.

Autumn ghosts of Burger King parking lots and nausea,
diarrhea and repetition, after Freud, before Lacan
invisible memories and broken plungers;
New Jersey, December and petty larceny.

Do you remember the beach in August or only the Light?
Forgotten spring times, fecund and profound:

Did it start as suddenly at it ended or was it always there?
Or was it here: fort, da, fort, da

clocks have a way of filling the room

fort, da, fort, da

I wondered
two days ago
what it would be like

fort, da, fort, da

if anything

fort, da, fort, da

Summer is her now; humidity and balm and summers gone
He once said he would trade them all for an extra day with her;
now it seems each day we spent was one I lost.

in praise of Townes Van Zandt (chronology of writer's block on a Saturday afternoon)

2009

There is still:

the editing
the bibliography
the footnotes.

There is still:

a sofa
an altar
a decade
of journals.

Some clothes; a bottle of tamari.

There is a bachelor party and a wedding

but neither of them are mine.

Somewhere in New Jersey a woman is dying.

There are still:

letters of recommendation
an application for a fellowship.

Still:

Al Green is singing.

My sister is writing.

Saylor called to tell me,
Mardou has absconded the city.

But all this is beside the point.

The point is that a girl once told me - in all seriousness - that she didn't know if she wanted to be an artist or a scientist, and therefore she was going to be a firefighter. Apparently the intervening two years have provided her with some clarity because, when I spoke to her yesterday, she told me that she was going to start studying polar animals.

My first thought?

You live in South Florida.

2010

Yesterday i woke up from a dream at 4:37am about swimming in a gray murky lake and being made fun of by a swimming instructor for not being able to swim.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I didn't fall asleep again until after 3:30 last night, and today feels like some odd combination of the last day of school (which it is) and the last day of summer (which it isn't). Part of me wants to sleep, part of me wants coffee. Part of me is already half-dreaming of what will happen tonight after I visit a real mental hospital and imaginary set of conjoined twins:

Evelyn Evelyn

suffice to say that yesterday i felt like i was coming down with writer's block and it didn't feel good and every word i wrote seemed to lead me in the wrong direction and i decided to get rid of all my punctuation and it wasn't until after i had locked myself in an empty classroom that i realized that the wrong direction was really the right direction in the wrong order

I proceeded to reorganize my thoughts and took the following note:

thoughts are memories in the present tense.

I do not know if this is foolish or wise or both, and in the end it does not matter because we are all going to die anyway and who can ever really know about what comes next?

lyres and prophets)

or

(liars and profits?

2011

Apparently I get writer's block this time every April, and I just watched a documentary on this dead Texan:

Townes Van Zandt

It was Mardou that told me about him. It seems years ago. It was years ago. It seems more years than that. I closed the curtains, I watched the film. I'm listening to him now:

I used to play the mouth harp pretty good
hustled up a little dough,
but I got drunk and I woke up rolled
a couple of months ago.

They got my harp and they got my dollar,
them low life so and so's.
Harps cost money and I ain't got it
it's my own fault I suppose.

I have one paper left to write.

I'm sick of words.

Tonight, music.

IKEA at last, IKEA at last, thank god almighty...

Two days ago my yin and I took our half-Canadian friends to the airport, in what has become an annual tradition of overstuffing my vehicle with their overstuffed luggage, then stuffing our faces with lunch. This year gorgonzola was involved.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that afterward we went to IKEA, about which I had once written but never seen. It made quite an impression, and although I have yet to decide whether to refer to the enormity of the enormousness of the place, I do know that we returned home three hours later with both a desk and bookshelf. My yin, in her typically insightful cleverness, was quick to point out the irony of purchasing a proper writing desk three days after I turned in my thesis.

This is also beside the point.

The point is that everything is put together now, and all of the books that have been trapped inside the closet have finally been restored to their proper place in the living room. There's something inspiring about a shelf full of books: some are read, some are unread, some contain that mystical quality that results in becoming "well-read."

There are worlds in those books, universes tucked away in their binding, tiny cosmoses lurking in the typeset: heaven in Helvetica, nirvana in New Roman, paradise in Sans-serif.

There are notes scribbled in the margins, tracks leading back to the people we thought we were when we read them before. A used book bears witness to our past curiosities and desires, our fears and predilections, our questions and the answers we once presumed to know.

And, for all of those who have ever lost a library, we know how books can mean more than words can ever say...

bli(n)tz

So yesterday, the day I turned in my thesis to the graduate college, I experienced my first real bout of scholastic panic. It had to do with a missing signature and lasted somewhere between two and twelve minutes. Then I realized: "Either I can solve this in an hour, or I can't solve it all."

(I solved it a half hour, but this is beside the point.)

The point is that I got sunburned on Sunday (ironic, no?), which made yesterday's half dozen treks back and forth across campus especially annoying. I think I might have even gotten a touch of sun poisoning because by the time the day was half-done I was feeling incredibly fatigued and medium headachy.

(This, too, is beside the point, but less so.)

The point, truly, (maybe), is that I arrived home to find my yin wearing an apron. "What's for dinner I asked?"

"A surprise."

The air smelled of egg and mystery.

The eggy air smelled of mystery.

The air was eggy and mysterious.

What emerged from the kitchen, besides my yin, was a strange rolled-up concoction stuffed with cheese and covered with fig preserves. I have been afraid of figs ever since I learned (and immediately forgot) what percentage of rodent feces was considered "edible," but I decided to give it a shot anyway. For all I know, excrement is good for sun poisoning, and my earlier near-panic had devoured my lunch break.

"Is this a blintz?" I asked. (There had been rumors of blintzes earlier in the week.) I thought about telling my yin about the feces, but she must have heard me thinking:

"Just eat it." (A frequent refrain in our household.)

epilogue

Definition: blintz |blints| (also blintze |ˈblintsə|)

1. noun
orphaned child of crepe and omelette, left on the doorstep of the mouth.
ORIGIN from Yiddish blintse, from Russian blinets ‘little pancakes’.

weird.

Last night I was at a friend's house for our weekly meditation group. The half-Canadian that leads the group is leaving next week, and the night proceeded as it often does: hellos, satsang, and meditation.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that after we finished, I walked into the kitchen to set down my empty glass in the sink. I turned around, and that's when I saw it:

the Obama family

On the refrigerator was a picture of the president, the first lady, and their children. I was immediately fascinated, drawn to it, staring at it, and searching the image for what it was that I found so enthralling. I heard myself say:

"It's so weird... It's so weird... It's so weird..."

"Why is it weird?" my friend asked.

I had no answer and kept repeating, savant-like:

"It's so weird... It's so weird... It's so weird..."

One of my favorite experiences in life is when something, wholly and mysteriously, grabs my attention. Most of the time I'm drawn to ideas and images and sounds that already hold some resonance. I think most people are like me in this regard; we gravitate towards the types of experiences that have been shown pleasurable or rewarding in the past.

(Sukha, I think it's called.)

Everyone once in a while, though, I find myself enthralled by something that 'shouldn't' be. Whenever this happens, besides the initial easy pleasure of fascination, there comes a second pleasure – the joy of discovering why I enjoy. This is what I spent the ride home doing with my yin. The rant went, approximately, as follows:

The picture caught my attention because it embodies this bizarre mixing of the public and private realms, the intimate and the impersonal, the authentic and the contrived. Apparently my friend received it in a campaign email, and had she not posted it on her refrigerator, I would have never realized the complex set of relationships being embodied by the image.

The kitchen – and especially the refrigerator – stands at the heart of the private sphere. It is both the source of the family's sustenance as well as the gallery where finger-painting and school pictures and crudely drawn "I love mommy and daddy" cards are displayed. These are the most intimate and personal creations of our lives, the artifacts and art objects we surround ourselves with.

The Presidency, of course, has long been this strange mingling of personal and private, best exemplified by the bizarre status of the First Lady, who is either appointed to her post by her husband or indirectly elected by citizens depending on one's point-of-view. (I'm sure one of my civic-minded friends will clear this confusion up for me.)

This picture seemed different, however, and it took nearly twenty minutes for me to articulate it to myself. The staging of the photograph has the feel of a Christmas card – performative and sincere, saccharin and sweet, banal and unique. My yin asked how it was any different than having a picture of a rock star:

Andy Warhol

or movie star:

understood

or spirit star:

the nature of the image.

This image is different because it deploys the family in disturbingly novel and impersonal way, calling upon the aesthetics and sensibilities of the familial familiar (the Christmas photo sent to friends and loved ones) as a means to achieving the most impersonal and public of ends (Obama's upcoming re-election campaign).

A picture of the Obama family is not like a picture of Obama, or even a picture of Obama and his wife. The President and First Lady are public figures, first and foremost, whereas the family is held sacrosanct by the same mythologies and mythologizers who spin deficient libidos and surplus economies into the web we call the American Dream.

All this in a single image, and I would have never even realized it if not for my friend and her beautiful refrigerator...

Does the photograph look any different now?

two years later, one day late

i woke last night at 2:20am, two years ago, and wrote:

a dream, looping, of fragmentation and reunification. am i giving a lecture or is it all in my head? set to a music i know but do not remember.

i do not know
if this dream
was a result of

McLuhan's examination of phonetic literacy

or

Patanjali's examination of the mind

and i
suppose

it really
doesn't
matter.

but i do wonder about that lecture;
i wonder about that music.

what is the nature of
these wisdoms we dream

and forget upon waking?

how many Siddharthas pass in the night?
how many Buddhas are lost in the slumber?

(rabbit rabbit)