everything in its place

the owner does like to tease me about my exceptional distaste for clutter. besides the tedium of having to dust it all (see second category of mockery, re: cleanliness, lol) i find it just visually tiring. one of the immediate appeals of my last home was its blank slate-ness. an empty box of industrial surfaces, wood, concrete and glass. once i took up residence, the downside was obvious: nowhere to put the odds and ends of daily life. no closet for coats. no shelves for bath towels and hygiene sundries. yes, i own a ridiculous amount of glassware and china for a single person, but nary a cabinet for even a small set of dishes.

for months and months, everything was stowed. even my clothes. i lived in a few sweaters and a couple pairs of pants. if i wanted something different, i had to dig through the moving boxes to find it. it sucked. eventually there were kitchen shelves and a clothing rack, but much else remained messily stored, years in the limbo of never-opened cartons. the boxes stacked high over the soffit, were an eyesore without option.

last week, i moved. closets, cabinets, drawers, armoires and a basement cage to boot. spacious capaciousness i could only have dreamed of a few short weeks ago. in just days, nearly everything has found a home. as i live and move through the place, objects and energy will change the arrangements and the patterns, but there will not be boxes in sight for lack of options, nor will anything go unused because it must remain stored. it feels an incredible luxury.

last week, i moved. the space soars with windows, skylights and rings with the industrial echoes of brick, wood and plaster from over a century ago. i am walking distance to the owner and the amenities of everyday life. much like my crystal glasses and over-coats, now tucked tidily away, i feel finally like this is the place for me. the last, now recognized as only a way-station while so much in both his life and mine got untangled and then knitted together.

i never have been so placed by a place. it's a profound and giddy feeling, full of potential and hope. it's been a long time since those angels came to visit me. i think now they might even stay.

massacres and the free market

this past weekend in a tucson shopping center, 6 people were killed, including a judge and a 9-year-old girl, and 14 people were left wounded, including a congresswoman married to an astronaut.

one-day sales of guns in arizona jumped 60% on january 10th vs. the same day least year.

this is a $500 gun that holds over 30 rounds of ammo. it was the same gun used by seung-hui cho at virginia tech, where 32 people were killed.

according to the brady campaign, arizona scores 2 out of 100 on its rating of state gun laws and its rate of gun deaths is 1- 1/2 times the national average. you do not need a special permit to carry a concealed weapon.

beyond the bipartisan discourse of which other partisan is responsible for a complete krazee going on a murder spree lies the empty cartoon conversation balloon of rational and reasonable gun ownership, the law and the lack of mental health safety net. a boy ejected from community college for nearly a dozen disruptive and dissociative episodes on campus and in class was able to buy a gun favored by cops and gangsters, virtually no questions asked.

when a lone krazee, who was, according to neighbors, quiet and kept to himself, natch, drives a panic of weapons fever, there is something fundamentally flawed with people's thinking. they knee-jerk convince themselves that somehow a gun in the house, or in a hip-holster at the safeway, will safeguard themselves and their families. do they really believe they have the lightning reflex and confidence to shoot first in the face of an intruder or gun-wielding loony whose world-view is absolutely unhinged? soldiers and cops train for this daily and don't always react in time, or on target.

after virginia tech, (gun sales went through the roof then too) i remember pols calling for all teachers to carry loaded weapons to class. that if other students had been armed, less people would have been killed. how do people take the leap that the threat of more violence will curb or cure violence?

states with the highest percentage of gun ownership have the highest rates of gun deaths. the states with the strictest laws have the lowest rate of death by firearm. this isn't liberal hoo-ha. gun ownership in places like alabama and louisana are at least triple what they are in places like hawaii and massachusetts. death by gun is as high as 7 times more. so, yeah, the answer is quite clearly that more people need easier access to loads more deadly weapons. fer sure. duh.

i do know real amuricanz understand that that is why we MUST fear that muslim terror (sic), because they wanna kill us and our flag and get to them heavenly virgins by destroying our liberty and way of life. so by all means let's stomp on over to the damn dessert and blow up their tents, caves and kids before they get to us first. i have yet to hear anybody discussing this as a profound act of home-grown white-faced domestic terrorism. killing someone over their ideas and beliefs. just like the 1995 oklahoma city bombing and the assassination of dr. george tiller in 2009, in wichita. it's terrorism, folks. and it is us.

southern science

“There was a lot of trauma in the breast tissue, blood clots in the body cavity and internal bleeding,” Stephens says. “So, it looks like maybe they got startled, they may have flown into each other, flown into a house, flown into a tree. They don’t have very good night vision,” he says, “and maybe they ran into each other, fell to the ground and died.”

yup. birds have been flying together, in formation, in all sorts of weather, for MILLIONS of years. these hapless guys just flew into each other. or a house. or a mouse. yeah. that's it. 5000 damn birds flew into the same house, at the same time, flew away, then all just dropped dead. yeah. that's it.

oh, and so obvz, all those dead fish? swam into each other! of course!!

phew. so much better now.

night.

aqua-pocalypse

poissons-mageddon.

the world must be ending and the beginning of the end is happening in arkansas. 100,000 or so dead drum fish bubbled to the surface in an arkansas river today.

oh, and the dead birds? now the estimate is 5,000.

i'd kill myself if i lived there too, but this is some shit.

happy new year 2011

1000 dead birds.

the year begins with what could be one of my worst nightmares. in arkansas 1000 blackbirds dropped dead, spontaneously falling from the sky over 1 square mile.

blackbird singing in the dead of night
take this broken wing and learn to...

"doh!"


this times ONE THOUSAND!!!!!!!