aria / her

I knew he wouldn't hurt me. I can tell. But I had the knife anyway, the knife he didn't know about, and still doesn't. His hands. A piano player's, not a plumber's. The long skinny fingers, the veins spidered. His soft palms. How could such delicate masterpieces brutalize? Right. Don't go there. From the second he got in the car, I knew he'd be a sensual kisser, not so much the curvature or fleshiness, more the blend of pout and promise. To be truthful, that's the reason I stopped for him. I'm good at spotting shit like that. Good eyes, better intuition. The roughness surpised me a little, not that I minded. It didn't hurt because I was ready. And I made him wait. God, I love torturing him. I made him a beggar, a hungry vulture. A pauper and a prince on a stallion. Squeezing shut my eyes in the well-lighted room, I became a tawdry cliche in a cheap novel: scouring my memory for a forgetten vocabulary, saying fuckit: stir fry lavender musk mint saliva sweat an unnamed deodorant faintly feminine unisex deaf almost deaf for a second faint-fear full fuller deep deeper more coriander Clorox bang bang over for him but not for me, no not me. 

Still. 

But I should've paid attention to those eyes.

 

increasingly disappearing

oxymoron of love or whatever you call it Leonard Cohen called it room service to disappear increasingly meaning the apex of detachment the antithesis of attachment currying favor with the healthy self opposite the poisonous spice of obsequious pandering apposite the embrace of fullness of time other side of waning decrease withering wallowing Joyce is dead nobody does this crap anymore this fancy tapdance this diamond studded diversion increasingly disappearing into equanimity tempered balance buoyant serenity unfathomable steadiness floating oceans of oh-my-this  

beauteous Bloomsday blogaversary

Me started this blather storm of laden words in 2006 on Bloomsday, so carry on, keep calm or be qualmed, knickers in pocket, knickknack paddywhack, give the dog a bone.

Bloomsday blogaversary

Either by coincidence or by providence, I began this blog on June 16, Bloomsday, in 2006, not pretending to be a pedestrian protagonist of a digital age, a reblossomed Leopold Bloom, nor an associate of Ulysses or Joyce or Dickens or Cohen or an inchoate echo of Ecco, but rather a solipsistic spinster of spindrift syllables in Syracuse, no more, no less, chasing punctuation marks off the screen, nudging meaning to the margins, mumbling along the half-desserted streets of summery scoopers of Gannon's ice cream.

Harpyhappy bloomin' Bloomsday!

Harvests of harpy happy blooms of bloomer bombast as we walk the Dublin streets with Leopold Bloom again in our mind in our eyes in our words, avoiding stumbling on the curb the cobblestone of too many consonants, mate.

Today appropriately enough is also the anniversary of the start of this august (no, it's June) and sometimes jejune blog.

Happy 5th Blogger Anniversary to The Laughorist and my nom de web, Pawlie Kokonuts.

Bloomsday warmup sentence

Turtle-head popping out of his (hers, really) auto-mobile, Pawlie sniffed honey locust blossoms impersonating fecund cat piss unperfuming the Plum Street corner of Franklin Square, the smearedsmudged petals slipperating the sidewalk, cat pee it stung like, but no felines incite, only the humankind (and not so kind claws bared) just past noon, no priestly bellsballs clanging.

Bloomsday

Bloomsday's a-coming, and it's the anniversary of this blog, fittingly fit and fiddle faddle filial familially.

ties that bind, or loosen...

...around the collar, that is.

For eight weekdays in a row now, I've worn a tie, a different tie each day. Jaunty ties, dressy ties, sober ties. No bow ties yet, though I have a very fine, handmade collection of bow ties.

Why this sartorial binge?

I'm not entirely sure of why I embarked on this experiment. I didn't see myself embarking on anything, really; it just happened into a habit. So far.

Perhaps I was inspired by the mother of my daughter's friend, who wore a different dress for 30 straight days. And then created a blog to tell about it. But this is different. I work at home. I could theoretically stay in my pajamas till noon, or later. And I won't publicly say whether I have accomplished that feat (speaking of feet, don't you just love pajamas with feet? No, I don't have those). I also often work on weekends, during which I don't shave or wear a tie, except for church. Episcopalian.

It is simply too facile to say I did it (or am doing it) to be more "professional," to exemplify the thinking that says: If you are making sales calls or telemarketing, wear a suit. I don't know if I've ever bought into that, whether it is empirically fruitful or as productive as making calls with a tin-can-and-string phone.

But I have had a good week or so. 

So who knows?

Another tie tomorrow, for a meeting in the morning. Who knows, maybe even a second tie for another meeting in the afternoon. You may call that "tying one on," but if I were to tie one on in the sense of abdicating an abstinence of many years, one day at a time, I'd be truly tie-died, tied-dead, three sheets to the wind, in my winding sheet -- to put it in jejune Joycean terms.

Happy Bloomsday!

Celebrate the splendor of this ordinary day with its shining artifacts and web of words and motions and emotions.

Yes, Happy Bloomsday.

A fine Bloomsday-related remembrance by Colum McCann here.

Blogalicious Bloomsday Bonanza

Happy Bloomsday.

Today commemorates the day in 1904 that Leopold Bloom spent in Dublin, in James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

I remember that "Poldy" carried in his pocket the panties of his wife, Molly.

Today is also the anniversary of the start of this blog, in 2006.

Figures.

Fragment From The Book of Uncommon Prayer

Theological anthropologistical historians/herstorians report finding this fragment from The Book of Uncommon Prayer:






63. For a Person Afflicted with Woozy Wordsmithery:

O merciful Father Mother Creator, vouchsafe to guide and safeguard all logorrheic wanderers wiggling their winding way through wordly thickets of Joycean or Proustian prose posing as ponderous Pelagianism (but is in reality pontificating piffle) so that such would-be wordsmiths may find solace in your eternal Silence. Amen.

Bloomsday Blogsday 1, and Counting

Today is my first blogiversary. Or is that blogaversary? Maybe it's even a bit of blogslavery, shackled by semantics and the art and craft (and obsession) of saying (saying anything, anything at all, in almost any manner). (Incidentally and fittingly, June 16, is also Bloomsday, the day in 1904 when the fictional events in James Joyce's Ulysses take place, in Dublin.)

It started on a Thursday night and into Friday morning, wandering around the steamy back alleys of the World Wide Web (without the editor's choice of "Worldwide," which would have forever branded us with WW), teasing out the scene not far from Seattle, tempting my tendency toward the tawdry, when I should've been sleeping.

And so, the nom de plume Pawlie Kokonuts was hatched, with hats off to Paulie Walnuts.

The title of The Laughorist was a natural, since I had already started a store revolving around the concept of so-called laughorisms. And my first post, on solipsism, was indicative of a suspicion I harbored, and harvest, for this talking tour.

Looking back, I notice I received no Comments for a week; not until my 11th post (did I care? was I more pure then? less self-conscious?). The first Comment was from the blogger at Kierkegaard Lives. Thank you. (I see, he's still posting; we share similar layouts.) Most likely, I stopped at his blog and teased him into stopping by at my place, with a word or two on Soren Kierkegaard thrown in.

I confess I've not been the perfect blog community member or neighbor. By that, I mean I don't reciprocate Comments faithfully or even read other blogs consistently. And that is because it's hard enough for me just to keep this going, being of meager discipline and possessing little perseverance. Don't take it personally, or impersonally.

Thanks for stopping by. Then and now. I've met all those people you see linked n this page, as well as many others, and more who need to be linked. Or will be. Deo volente.

It's been a journey of linking, connecting, conversing, and cavorting. I've gotten more from all of you than I've put into it. Thank you.


Spotlight on Year 1

One Slice, With Legs

Testing Testosterone

Water You Know

We the People, We the Ephemerists

(which evoked the most Comments).

One easy discovery was, I can't be funny all the time, nor do I want to be (witness several posts on the deaths of loved ones, or on la petite mort, or on the death of deception or illusion).

And who would've guessed that I would get the most hits, so far, owing to my post on the serial comma, with chitchat coming from Vanity Fair and The New Yorker?

Again, thanks to all of you -- first-timers, late-comers, new-comers, toll-takers, big-talkers, and silent-partners (even if all those hyphens aren't truly needed).

Carry on.

Excelsior.

Age quod agis.

Lent-ills, and Other Beens

A deliciously ascetic season, Lent was characterized by an iconic "giving up" of some treat, typically food, announced to family and friends. Such as, "I'm giving up Wise potato chips this year," which was a common refrain of my brothers and me over the years. We loved potato chips (called "crisps," I believe, abroad), addictively and rapturously and unhealthily. (Still do.) This addiction was anointed at any early age when my older brother and I, in the 1950s, would have an evening snack of potato chips in a little imitation copper bowl, which, emptied of chips, we irreverently placed on our heads, like a prelate's skullcap, as our parents watched the television sermons of fierce-eyed Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. One year, we learned that Sundays, as "little Easters," did not count as part of the forty days apportioned to Lent, so we felt that gave us a tremendous loophole. And so we binged on chips galore on Sundays. (Was Chips Galore the once and future husband of Pussy, the siren in the James Bond movies?) But, to be honest, that took some of the fun (if that's the word) out of it all; it was kind of wimpy; not up to the challenge. Exercising the loophole induced a guilt for not being guilty enough, if that makes any sense at all (as if this makes any sense at all to the postmodern mind).

One year, I forswore sugar in my daily tea. The habit was to have two heaping teaspoons of sugar in my morning tea, this from the earliest age I can recall. When Lent ended, I never went back to the sugar in my tea, and that's probably more than thirty years ago. What, if anything, does that tell me about human character (mine), and habits, and change? If anything, it tells me that the permanent change was barely intended, was almost imperceptible, almost accidental; mostly effortless; certainly not any result of rolled-up-sleeves willfulness. (Don't you just salivate over those semicolons? Could I ever abstain from employing semicolons, even if I tried? Not likely; not this year.)

The years of attempting to swear off booze, I guess I managed it, or nearly so. But by Easter it was off to the wild races (so, surely, I could not have opted for the loophole each week, because the brakes would not work by Monday morning) without a doubt.

Speaking of doubts, I doubt I ever gave up "impure thoughts" for Lent. How could I, or anyone else? After all, such thoughts invaded my brain unbidden, like gamma rays or rain or oxygen or incense; the charge was not to "indulge" them, though, alas, the glossy pages of porn or a lingerie ad in a Sears catalog (pre-Victoria's Secret), or a fellow teenager getting off the bus downtown in a plaid skirt galvanized my own charged-up psyche -- and made me look like a minor character in a James Joyce short story, call it "Portrait of the Hardest as a Young Man." (To you less innocent than me: yes, a Victorian term: impure thoughts. The actual deeds? You gotta be effin' kidding! [Speaking of "effin' I sort of promised myself I'd try to drop the F word during this year's practice. I can report I have not been successful even before evening. This practice is not as puritanical as it sounds; it makes for an intriguing self-auditory analysis, especially in traffic. My other goal is to avoid conversational interruptions. That may be more impossible than resisting so-called impure thoughts. As I've blogged before, I can't even stop myself from interrupting myself!]).

In later years, it's been toast without butter or some other things I can't even recall. In fact, recently it's been less and less of that youthful melodrama, a drama all about me. And why not? Who's youthful? Not moi.

Naturally, "giving up," or self-denial, has its place in the universe (though not particularly in the postmodern Western Hemisphere), but not if it's all about self.

No, not if it's all about the self, despite proud postures of solipsism proclaimed in one's blog banner.

The inventory of Lenten acts over the years is unfortunately not filled with visits to hospices, jails, or homeless shelters; such are the exception, not the rule.

So, forehead smudged with mortality-reminding ash this evening, I close with this commentary from my Zen Calendar for this day:


sin and evil

are not to be got rid of

just blindly.

look at the astringent persimmons!

they turn into the sweet dried ones.


P.S. After drafting the above post, and revising it several times, I went upstairs, got a washcloth, wet it, soaped it, and set about cleaning the ashes off my forehead. Successive rubbings did indeed clean my forehead, but a redness remained where the ashes were. Then I found that the icon of mortality stubbornly remained on the washcloth, the "human stain" (to use a Philip Roth phrase), which even more stubbornly clung to the sink, as one last black ember refused to be swallowed down the drain, finally yielding to my incessant pouring of water, as if I were some guilty murderer in an Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King story.

P.P.S. Annual visit to a certain type of medical specialist today. PSA results normal. This is one situation where The Laughorist likes to be "normal."

Mr. Wind-up Bird

Haruki Murakami's book The Wind-up Bird Chronicle features a "wind-up bird" as a significant character. It's a bird that makes a strange screech that sounds as if it were winding up the world. . . .whatever the heck that means.

The real-life Mr. Wind-up Bird is Barry Zito. He's the pitcher who shows up at spring training with a new team, a new $126-million contract, and, um, a completely new wind-up.

This is unsettling to Giants fans such as myself (since 1955, the year AFTER they won the World Series, which they have not won since). Mr. Wind-up Bird says it's because he wants to improve. Fine. But I must add he is a pitcher who's never missed a start in seven years, a pitcher who has won the Cy Young Award as recently as 2002. He says he's been working on this for last month and a half, unbeknownst of course to his new employers. Zito compares it to the fabulously successful Tiger Woods's adjustment of his fabulously successful swing in 1997. (Notice how I inserted that traditional [trad] apostrophe S, unlike most journalists.)

Maybe it will work out fine for Mr. Wind-up Bird. Maybe not.

It's akin to Ernest Hemingway switching to a new publisher and submitting a draft of James Joycean prose straight out of the likes of Finnegans Wake.

Or The Meloncutter changing stores and presenting himself as a meatpacker! (There's a word to mull over.)

Or a pole-dance teacher showing up to give instructions on trout fishing.

Or a failed entrepreneur-fratboy-politician trying his hand at U.S. president.