pc load letter ... WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?

better than a poke in the see-through head with a sharp stick.

he's squatch with horns.

ladies and gentleman, please welcome: squmble.

..he misses his first two dunks badly.


also keep an eye out for the varied clapping ability of the cheerleaders.

this is my current favorite shot of laura & me.

rowdy rachel ray vs. fightin' flayer flay.

up on the work blog, for unclear reasons, is a wee bit of cheftainment.

down with homework / up with hopework.

up on the work blog (newly invigorated and most-times serious and with other not-me posters but now w/ my scribbles 3x per week for the new aught-9 year): imagine a future with no homework.

how about a few things to hope for this year...hunts, you start and weep away.

right, weep away about some fucking hope. bitch about some goddam laughter. all aboard the night train and let's make ourselves a bit of sunshine. of course, weep -> hope isn't nearly as oppositional a juxtaposition as all that. if weeping is one pole, crying with joy must be the other; as one who has at least twice reached way, way down in search of good things, found nothing, then looked up with eyes shut tight and straight-out begged for a meaningful thread of hope--nothing more than help me, help me help me help me on my lips or in my beleaguered body--i know that the surrounding proximity of hope is weeping. gnashing of teeth. and our understanding of true joy is so tarnished, anyway, it's by nature ethereal, ephemeral, and (i believe) brought to you (oftentimes) by the holiest of spirits, and then when we're away from joy and its emotional zeitgeist, we yet again think of it more and more as happiness... maybe that's my whole problem. wait, watch, let's see if i can feel my way out of what i just said about which juxtapositions, now that i'm just a sentence or two removed from having paused and worked to call up the deepest desperation i ever felt--now that my intellectualism isn't the one with a hand on the wheel. let's find out. come quickly with me here to this place a few years back, not so far at all, really, to this precise moment when the withered me has found a petal of hope on which to rest. however i choose to look about me, things are ugly; the petal of hope, it's floating on a pond of despair, of blackness. nothing consequential has changed; only that i've found this lily green life raft on which to sit, to stave off my sinkingness for a moment or more--i've no way to tell how much life this hope's got in it, partly owing to its being the close to a passage from paul that's as near a cliche as a bible verse can be, what with all the weddings we've heard it at. 1 corinthians 13: paul writing about love. i memorized it as a kid and recited it and got a whole bag of fun-sized baby ruths, but now thank you god, now thank you, it's just the close that appears in my head. and then these three remain: faith, hope, love. and the greatest of these is love. that was my lily pad, my thread of hope: my faith had been supplanted by entitlement; my hope by a capacity to distract myself--my throat and nose and hands and cock--that began as a way to not think or feel and eventually more or less prevented those; but i knew i was loved. i did not, frankly, have much of an inclination to extend myself in any significantly loving manner; but i knew i was loved through and in spite of this shit-pile of my life, and i knew i could return love to those who loved me still. and then i could work my way back into it. i could remember to pay attention, maybe even to be the guy who notices when things aren't good for you--the guy people talk to for a while and feel better. the guy people want to hug when they're sad. i had a piece of hope just big enough to let me remember that hope is secondary to love, and joy started to spread down from below my ears and out to my shoulders, arms, fingers: i'll go love some people. i'll make it my thing, starting right now. so how about that. you want hope? here's some fucking hope: you are loved. humanly and deeply and hugely imperfectly. you are loved. fall into it, not back on it but into it; find your bearings, find ways to love people. the greatest of these.

what part of ___ do you not understand.

- some of google’s faves -

What part of Hamfatter do you not understand?

What part of "Internet Quote" do you not understand?

What part of Ben Kramer is coming home do you not understand?

What part of I COULD DIE IF I EAT MAYO do you not understand?

What Part of 'Do Justice and Love Mercy' Do You Not Understand?

What Part of We Don't Trust You Do You Not Understand?

Mexicans Want to Know "What part of illegal do you not understand?”

What Part of Representation by Population Do You Not Understand?

What Part of The Old Man is Dead Do You Not Understand?

What part of shall not be infringed do you not understand?

What part of fan forum do you not understand?

What part of whites only do you not understand?

What part of I WILL SHAKE THE WHOLE EARTH do you not understand?

ten of the day.

today on the website of my new favorite radio show, too beautiful to live, i made the cut: i'm the ten of the day. ha ha. i feel included and ain't that nice.

the significance of stop signs.

STOP, it said, and so I did, and now here I am. Stop: there wasn't a clear reason to, just the sign's declaration, a verbal command that I obeyed and figure to recover from, sooner or later. For now the word is alive in my mind, in the drastic slowness of the air and earth around me. Articulation begets understanding, and it's as simple a trick as that, isn't it? Speaking aloud—in this situation, speaking slowly, wordfully to myself—makes things more complicated; articulating a thought is its own task, then there's the hearing, and the comparing of the what you thought and what you heard. They say a picture is worth x-thousand words, and they say it a lot, often enough that their words to this effect live in the front of my lobe. Clichés have truth beneath them, and here the implicit but indisputable truth is that language is the base currency. Words are the money; an image can light up your visual cortex and get an immediate, powerful emotional response, but that response has to be translated into words if it's ever to be parsed. Or take this stop sign just off to the side here. It's a lonely road, this one, abutted on either side by narrow, yellowed horse pastures, scraggly, second-growth fir tree forests bordering them. There's hardly a reason to be up here, this time of year, and so this stop sign marks what is an intersection in only the barest sense, the crossing of a rarely used road with one that's never used, not in winter season. But the sign spoke to me, in plain, unguarded language: STOP, and so I did, and then Simone did, too—her gas gauge has given out, it seems—she just sputtered into silence, and here I am. I'd no reason to leave breakfast as I did, save for the look she was giving me. But the look—utter disdain painted over with a shabby coat of tolerance; rather than admit there was little left to say, it foretold the coming shitstorm of pitiless opinion—the look was plenty. So I dropped a bill, picked up my glass of red beer, and walked out, across the parking lot to my shabby brown car, completely alone in its shabbiness among the shiny suburban monstrosities. Simone, you sweet old bitch, I said, pulling open the door and sliding into the cracked vinyl cockpit, be with me, now. Get me outta here clean; you remove me from this parking lot without requiring a roll-start, I'll take you for a nice drive in the country. Right now. You deserve it. You've inspired some looks on her face that weren't far from the one I just got over pancakes. I've seen them—seen her look at you as though you were something my Neanderthal aesthetics led me to, now strapped me to. But you coughed to life, and I drove, just out of town, then splintered off on a silent, narrow road that slowly inclines through the pastures and eventually meets up with the 159 up on the ridge. Miles upon miles from here. Miles of silence in either direction. I've been here … a while. Not too long, but a while, long enough to now be thinking about the world and myself in plain terms, but, still, terms: I think in language, I hear as words the footfalls of my plodding ideas. Stop.