8.27.  prompt: use the sentence ’sand!’ someone shouted. ‘get some sand!’ at some point.

her pockets are filled with lima beans and grand intentions to smuggle them into the afternoon showing of annie get your gun. there’s really no reason to disallow the carrying of lima beans in ones’ pockets to a matinee,  though sally was sure someone would like to make a fuss of such a thing and defiant actions like this lima bean scheme are what keep her bobbing about in this crowd of tophats and not-too-cared for bees nest hairdos. is that what they call hair like that? no. beehive. bees make hives not nests and would certainly be pretty keen on these lima beans jangling about in sally’s pocket. she slips a couple of fingers in and pinches a bean at a time, letting the outer glossy layer bump one bean into the next. with each bean she thinks of a different sunset. no just thinking of a different sunset doesn’t quite do it. with each pinch of lima bean she becomes a different sunset as the crowd around her shuffles in line, slipping like quicksand through the theater doors.
sally was that one sunset back in college when she half-drunkenly scaled the old parking garage, reaching the peak just as the sun touched down and in that moment there were no stuffy noses or runny eggs or decisions or indecisions. and not just because this was a lima bean memory. it’s easy to become an old sunset and pretend it was perfect. but even the first time, long before the lima bean, that sundrop instant had no end.
sally is this sunset as she reaches the ticket booth and skiddles one lima bean under the ticket window and he tears her off an ‘admit one.’
‘admit what?’
‘all of it.’ he replies.
‘super. i’ve got nothing to hide.’ she says and feels boring and means: i’d like to keep finding these things i don’t know i’ve hidden and maybe you could help me out with that but i know that wanting you to help me out with that means that you can’t.
‘sand!’ someone shouts. ‘get some sand! this butter will clog in arteries but not theater isles!’
he sprints out the back door, thankful for the real life flood which will be much easier to contain the one he nearly unleashed. he grabs a sandbag on the way out and hefts it over his shoulder; the weight wobbles only a couple of his steps before he again finds balance.

that drip which made her stop a step after she walked under the icicle, turn in time to watch it, feel it, slice through the tuft of air in front of her nose and impale an unsuspecting caterpillar.

that caterpillar had been lucky enough to survive two days of icicle weather and was lucky enough to not be stepped on by the girl. it was in that moment that his luck ran out and the caterpillar squirmed his last squirm on either side of his icy intruder.

that look in the caterpillar’s eyes as he squirmed his last squirm was what did it. a look from a caterpillar.

that this was all it took to make her insides uncocoon around the feeling she’d kept stashed in hibernation since the last time it was icicle weather was nearly enough to raise her temperature past the melting point of caterpillars.
but not quite.

that would have been too much to fit into a single day.
let alone a single moment.
though all of this fits into a single [this] moment.
or so she’s heard.

that this is too much to fit into a single moment might not make any more sense than watching an icicle zip past her nose and impale a formerly lucky caterpillar. but. who’s counting?

she’s not too keen on counting.
counting is 1 sure method of removing the life from any moment.
she’s found it takes 2. maybe 3 seconds.
‘quality, not quantity,’ she says.

that is what she says, but that’s not always what she lives.
there’s just so much.
she has a hard time deciding. ‘focus.’ she hears. usually from the inside. when it’s from the inside, it’s harder not to listen.
but it’s also hard to listen to ‘focus’ when there are thirty other words happening that are not ‘focus.’ she has to hear ‘focus’ before she has the ability to focus on that single word and ignore the other thirty words. which makes about as much sense as that caterpillar thing.

…

i liked to imagine i was forcing couples into some sort of awkward ultimatum.

reference::  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b8zDn9QCok

i decided to do a little experiment.

i find a lot of fourleaf clovers.

sometimes i randomly stick these clovers into books on my shelf.

tonight i flipped through the books and pulled out the ones i found clovers in.

then i opened to the clover page and typed the words that were either close to the clover or otherwise marked.

some books had more than one clover.

each book is separated with [  ].

here’s what happened::

[bonus points if you should care to guess any of the books]

[“Keeps the INKlings away for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”“You mean the paperclips?” I asked.“Yessir, paperclips are ideal. Cheap, don’t rust, magnetize in a jiff, loop them t’hang ‘round your neck. All things said, I’ll take paperclips.   I reached into my windbreaker pocket, pulled out a handful of paperclips, and handed them to the Professor.“Will these be enough?”“My, oh my,” exclaimed the Professor with surprise. “Just what the doctor ordered. I was actually a bit concerned. I scattered a few too many on the way here and I was thinkin’ I might not have enough. You really are a sharp one.” ]

[Several years ago, writer and former literary escort Naomi Epel published a small paperback book and companion card set called The Observation Deck.. Epel’s package is a wonderful trove of writing tips assembled from authors she shepherded on book tours. One of those tips is also a fine way to develop greater powers of Empathy: Eavesdrop.]

[Making love with the engineer in the absence of love was what finally restored her soul’s sight. During her next visit to the sauna, she stood before the mirror again and, looking at herself, reviewed the scene of physical love that had taken place in the engineer’s flat. It was not her lover she remembered.

If for some women flirting is second nature, insignificant, routine, for Tereza it had developed into an important field of research with the goal of teaching her who she was and what she was capable of. But by making it important and serious, she deprived it of its lightness, and it became forced, labored, over-done. She disturbed the balance between promise and lack of guarantee (which, when maintained, is a sign of flirtistic virtuosity): she promised too ardently, and without making it clear that the promise involved no guarantee on her part.]

[ESTABLISHING EMPATHY

… “Now, on the topic of human relationships…what would you say is the most effective method or technique of connecting with others in a meaningful way and reducing conflict with others?”  He glared at me for a moment. It wasn’t an unkindly glare, but it made me feel as if I had just asked him to give me the precise chemical composition of moon dust.  After a brief pause, he responded, “Well, dealing with others is a very complex issue. There is no way that you can come up with one formula that could solve all problems.”]

[Each pair was hooked up to a mechanism that exerted pressure on their index fingers, and each participant was instructed to apply the same force on their partner’s finger that they had just felt. They could not do it fairly, although they tried hard to do so. Every time one partner felt the pressure, he retaliated with considerably greater force, thinking he was giving what he had gotten. The researchers concluded that the escalation of pain is “a natural by-product of neural processing"…

When we construct narratives that “make sense,” however, we do so in a self-serving way. Perpetrators are motivated to reduce their moral culpability; victims are motivated to maximize their moral blamelessness.]

[DYLAN: I’d say people will always believe in something if they feel it to be true. Just knowing that it’s true is not enough. If you feel it in your gut that it’s true, well, then, you can be pretty the much assured that it’s true…

It’s about the essence of man being alienated from himself and how, in order to free himself, to be reborn, he has to go outside himself. You can almost say that he dies in order to look at time and by strength of will can return to the same body…

From the demon within. [Pause] But what we all know is that you can’t hide on a dark street from the demon within.]

[THE TROUBLE WITH

POETRY]

[The explanation of life as a “migration of static patterns toward Dynamic Quality” not only fitted the known facts of evolution, it allowed new ways of interpreting them.  Biological evolution can be seen as a process by which weak Dynamic forces at a subatomic level discover stratagems for overcoming huge static inorganic forces at a superatomic level. They do this by selecting superatomic mechanisms in which a number of options are so evenly balanced that a weak Dynamic force can tip the balance one way or another.]

[..but it’s the armies of wild kangaroos, koalas, Tamar wallabies (nearly extinct on the mainland), and fairy penguins that astound.]

[As I stepped back from he kick I must have like trod on the tail of one of these dratsing creeching pusspots, because I slooshied a gromky yauuuuuuuuw and found that like fur and teeth and claws trying had like fastened themselves around my leg, and there I was cursing away and trying to shake it off holding this silver malenky statue in one rooker and trying to climb over this old ptitsa on the floor to reach the lovely Ludwig van in frowning like stone.

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that’s because they like it, and I wouldn’t ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop…More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning that the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?]

[so unite 10 people with a common cazlattix and the little bugger is suddenly 10 x's easier to handle.

humans tend to form some pretty sturdy bonds this way.]

[then they go in different directions

and s-t-r-e-t-c-h those connections.]

[and this happens again and again.

all over the place.]

[so eventually things end up looking sort of like this.]

[then the wind blows. and makes all of these --->
wiggle back and forth. so things start looking a little more like this:

an environment like this one doesn't tend to support many cazlattixes. it makes them very uncomfortable.]

Do you ever find words coming out of your mouth that you didn’t know were stashed up in your brain? And as they’re coming out it’s sort of impossible to tell whether or not they actually fit into your current sentence and so you sort of check your listeners for clues::
Are they snickering at my witty comment? Or because I’ve just made terrible use of –faux pas- ?

The other day my good friend Brian Moore* telephoned to tell me of a magazine he was planning to start [which looks as though it’s on the backburner now and thus I’m going to stick these words up here for the moment. the nerve of some people starting projects all willy nilly I’d never do such a thing just ask my evergrowing box o’ started projects that should be congealing into a wad of finished project anyday now] and would I care to contribute anything?

-Anything?-
-Anything.-

Anything is sometimes a problem for me. [infinite possibilities, a blank page, how to choose all these choices and be satisfied when it is certain that at some point you could have made a -better- choice, blah blaah blaaaaah.] Unless it’s the opposite of a problem and then I’m a tiny child with a birthday budget in Toys R Us.
ANYTHING?!??
Anything!

So a choice. Where to start.
Now maybe? Is now good for you?

It’s currently 1.14 am. I just woke up from a dream [stick with me] in which two of my close friends and I died in a car crash…it’s foggy, really foggy. like quicksand fog, let your shoelace get too close and next thing you know you’re nose deep in the stuff. We’re on a curve that just keeps curving and shouldn’t this curve be finished curving by now yes it most definitely should we’ve come full circle at this point maybe stop cranking the wheel so–
HEADLIGHTS ouch.
Every time these dreams happen I wake up with that whole THIS IS IT mentality::
Alright. Let’s LIVE. Stop with the bad habits. Stop numbing yourself. THIS IS IT you’re awake and alive and a second ago you weren’t, had accepted the fact that it was all over [you didn’t accept it. not at all. liar. quite the opposite in fact. there’s just too MUCH to do and a car crash? really? didn’t you have a different plan? escape from a burning building, a fantastic escape, a dash from beneath the collapsing rubble, turn around to admire the scene and BONK. flattened by the ambulance on it’s way to save you. but you don’t die from the smushing. nope you’re good and banged up but recovering when a mixup at the hospital sends you to be cremated.  tragic irony (ironic tragedy?). beautiful. but no. instead fog, headlights. you’re checking out in a flaming cliché. maybe that suits you.]
And then there’s this little part of me. Nasty bugger.  Same part that thinks things like::
Ew. Black people. [yes i’m completely racist]
Or ::
Wouldn’t it be neat if they really did die? When I call Liz** tomorrow to make sure she’s alive, it’s her mom on the voicemail:: ‘I’m sorry. Liz is unavailable at the moment. And will likely remain in that state for every other moment as she died around 1.09 this morning. Car crash. How cliché. It was foggy, really foggy. Like quicksand fog, let your shoelace get too close and next thing you know you’re nose deep in the stuff. I guess they veered right into oncoming traffic. Headlights. Ouch. If you’d like to reach her, you’ll have to figure out some other means and since you already dreamt this, I bet you can come up with something.’

But then if they really did die I’d have to think of something else to write about.

So we’re going with the dream thing then? Think we can manage to make that interesting?
I tend to read interesting and/or funny [and/or inspiring and/or brain] and since I’m pretty self-centered that’s what I’d like to [attempt to] write because surely you like the same.
Interesting is much easier than funny.  Everything is interesting.  Even if it’s not interesting it’s interesting to figure out why it’s not interesting.
But writing funny. Much more difficult. Fail a joke out loud and everyone [even you. yes. laugh at yourself. you’re ridiculous.] can laugh at the failed joke, maybe even turn that failed joke into a joke itself if you’re good.
But fail a joke in text and not only are you unable to poke at it, spin it around a little, but it’s THERE. For good. Written proof of your faux pas.
[am i saying that right?]

[* love you. of course you can still use this if you'd like.]
[**Liz and Reed. i’m very glad you did not die. - love - ]

in the past two weeks i::

• slept along side the loneliest highway in america. without feeling lonely.
• fell in love. [woops]
• mind EXPLOSION [x32 or so. once or twice by pre-adolescents.]
• discovered some new homes i didn’t know i had.
• heard ‘once in a lifetime’ [that talking heads song] twice in two days.
• let go.
• met some new friends who instantly became old friends.
• met some old friends. [nice to have mutual assurance that we are in fact making progress.]
• spread the world around the country. [thank you paul]
• yoga-ed on the beach.
• climbed around on a mountain or two. [inside and outside m’brain]
• forgot.
• talked and listened and talked and listened and talked and listened……
• made peace with death. [in the form of a warm, glowing, golden orb.]
• had icecream for lunch. [x2 or 5]
• was chilly. outside. wearing sweatpants and a jacket.
• remembered.
• found my idea for the fuuuuuuture.
• bounced that idea off of some super minds.
• impromptu hottub-ed.
• visited nine states [the border kind and the no border kind]
• danced.
• felt almost every emotion i know of.
• learned and learned and learned and learned.
• dissolved some shadows.
• was a rock for a beautiful tree.
• went to a goat farm in portland.
• made friends with a google-eyed firesquirt.
• had many glimpses of all the work there is to do. and always will be.

–working on the details—