Refracted Neurons

I was talking to my mother on the phone yesterday and she mentioned that she found a Trash 80 in the attic.  Well, she didn't call it that, but that's what it is. Robots will take over the world! It is a surprisingly cute little thing that does absolutely nothing.  I'm not sure if it's broken or if it just needs a long, hard charge.  But who doesn't need that? I think the thing that surprised me the most was that it actually was portable.  It was smaller and lighter than my current laptop.  I used to have a "portable" C64 when I was a little girl and it weighed 23 lbs.  It lurked on my desk, providing endless entertainment through its tiny colored screen with games like Below the Root . Excuse me while I go fix my shuba.   Source I absolutely adored Below the Root.   I've even played through it again as an adult (someone made an emulated version).  It's needlessly complicated and resulted in a series of books about a utopia g

My two-year-old's favorite book at the moment is a Dr. Seuss story titled  I Wish that I Had Duck Feet.  Maybe I've been writing waaaaaaay too much dystopian fiction.  Or, maybe this is the 1984 of children's literature. The story starts off well enough, like all dystopias do, with a boy experimenting with extreme body modifications.    He weighs the pros and cons of ear lobe stretching, facial tattoos, scarification, and branding   duck feet, an elephant trunk, a whale spout, and a tiger tail, among other things, and finally decides that everything at once is reasonable decision. And that's when things go bad. Really bad. Because, you know, being different is a crime. That's just dark for a children's book. Possibly the worst part of this book is that our protagonist doesn't continue the fight.  Just like 1984, he emerges, his will broken to Big Brother's. The yellow on this page creeps me out. But I might just be reading

The fog didn’t come in on little cat feet. It didn’t rub its back against rain pipes. No, the fog stomped its way across town, it was a giant made of cement, pressing down on plants and trees, three-story walk-ups, and you. (I forgot to mention you were in this story, not as the poet, but as the muse.) And this humidity, this grey blanket pushes me face down into the soil, until drowning in my own inability to swim, my only sensation is breathlessness. _____________________________________ I worked 11.5 hours yesterday and I'm feeling a little foggy . . . Oh, and I should mention.  The cat feet are a Carl Sandburg thing and that whole rubbing on things business is from T.S. Elliot.

Every time I walk to the bus stop, I see this: You see it?  It's not the greatest picture, since I was trying to take it on the sly, but this is what is hanging on their tree: It's a guinea pig water bottle! So, let me get this straight . . . there's a guinea pig living in your tree.  A guinea pig, that can climb a tree. And don't give me any nonsense about that being for a squirrel. Somehow this week has been torrentially busy and I've been struggling to squeeze in time to write.  When I have, I've been working on a new project I'm calling Egregious.   Here's a little excerpt: He pressed the strings on the fingerboard without bowing, humming the melody to himself.  Feeling the tug of song in his chest, he allowed his right hand to bow the strings. Though it was his hands that did the work of playing, he felt as though the music poured straight out of his center, each note filled with a longing he had no other way to express.  When

No, I'm not running around looking for random dead people anymore.  I don't care if they show up on my doorstep, the answer is "no." Dead people I know, on the other hand, sure. I'm in Arizona this week, but before I left Seattle, I went to visit a friend who had passed away.  It's not too hard to find people with  Findagrave.com  . . . they even have an ap, you know, it case you need to haunt people's graves on the go.  This friend was at Evergreen-Washelli, which is really close to my house.  It's a lovely cemetery, but it's HUGE.  It also is bisected by Highway 99, so you want to make sure you are on the right side of the highway to begin with. Fortunately, Findagrave gives GPS coordinates.  I looked at the coordinates and was like, "Huh, he appears to be buried in a residential neighborhood."  After everything that happened with Comet Lodge, I wasn't too surprised or alarmed by this.  Instead, I started browsing the Evergr

Also, to be frank, I like dense cities best and care about them most.-Jane Jacobs The thrum of traffic sways you down, lays you gentle on concrete.  Look, the stars are scattered, in street lamps, the glow of signs, our moon a puddle; and that openness inside you rests, sated with the longings of thousands. ________________________ I am reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs right now.  I haven't even made it past the introduction and I'm already wowed. Like, check this shit out: So even though I'm in suburban Arizona right now, here's a poem about the city.