when your world is small, because you like small worlds, and you create small worlds, you run the risk of catching lightening in a bottle and then misplacing the bottle. or loaning it to someone who moves away before they can give you back your lightening. or the lightening just gets tired of flashing away in that little bottle, isolated from its chance to impact real danger on a golfer or a bell tower or a slow shuttered composition in thirds. the lightening just … burns out.

the field was all burned up this morning. it was fine yesterday, when i took lefty on his birthday walk, but today, when i took lefty on his day after his birthday walk, it was all burned up. well, not all of it. just a patch. but when i saw it, i immediately worried that the lovely old deaf man with the NRA stickers on his van would think i did it. that i started the fire. after all, i’m the only one he ever sees going into the field, when he yells at me across the driveway, ‘hey kevin, i’m sure glad you and your little dog love that field so much,’ and i say, ‘we sure do!’ leaving off the detail of his name because i forgot it. ‘i don’t even smoke!’ is what i rehearsed that i would say if he asked me about the burned up field, because it’s true, and he would believe me, and i would be off the hook and not in trouble cause i hate the hook and, well, i’m pretty much all talk and no trouble …

but all i would really need to tell him is that i don’t start fires. not any real ones, anyway. i’ve struck a match or two, i suppose. even let a few of them burn down to my fingers and give me that little hot pinch. but i’ve never felt a fire that had to consume beyond its borders. never felt the appetite of a life out of control. never felt loss or ash or sacrifice. nah, all i’d need to say is that i’m not the type who starts fires. i put them out. and i probably wouldn’t even need to tell him that. he could surely read it on my face. and i heard the deaf have some sort of extra-sensory powers in this regard, but, really, you’d have to be blind to not see it …

imagine that!

i found one today buried deep inside my cell phone is a place called messaging > saved items > templates.

can you believe it?

for mel:

I am late. I will be
there at

I’m in a meeting,
call me later at

I’m busy right
now. I’ll call you
later.

I will be arriving
at

Meeting is
canceled.

See you at
See you in

Please call

I love you too

Happy birthday

Thank you

i don’t think it’s reverse counterflow from katrina, either. that ship has already sailed, docked, dropped anchor, and grown barnacles. this town is shrinking more immediately.

the season’s are coming back around. when i got here in august, it was hot so hot. hot until the hurricane and then hot again for a good while longer. then the brief fall and a winter so real it snowed.

in the last few weeks, little scrubby bushes that don’t impress much most of the year have lost their minds and became big pink white red purple blankets of lust for life. i even reminded myself that while i’m here, alive, driving around louisiana, i should take notice of the spring foliage in between thinking about work and money and the rest of it.

i still am not 100% confident that i can get from one side of town to the other if navigating the lake is involved, but i’m trying to be more content with getting lost when it inevitably happens. the flowers help with this, too. while lost, like i was briefly this afternoon trying to take the back way to the golf course/dog park/tennis park/art gallery, i just pretend i’m there to look at the flowers. it’s so easy to trick me sometimes. i must be really gullible.

but the spring flowers will give way to the summer heat and the music festivals and the afternoon showers and increased mowing schedules, and one of these days not long from now i will have seen what one seasonal rotation looks like in these parts.

and all the unknown faces on the faculty board start to have stories attached to them, and you realize that you’re just telling the same old story in a not so new place listening to stories turn into the same old mistakes and accidents and explosions and not so mysterious mysteries.

and talk turns to another dozen or so potential story tellers that will (depression permitting) ride writing into this shrunken river town next fall, but you can’t help but wonder why there won’t be any carpenters or taxi drivers or chemists or stroke victims or professional jugglers or prize fighters or preachers or senators or revolutionaries amongst them.

and the sun sets a little later on a night so warm the dog sleeps under the bed and not on it and you think about lightening and shelter and wrong trees and yesterday and bad dreams and leaving.

the older i get, the softer i get when i’m sick. squishy, deflated, blue. chock full ‘o pity. no spine sick guy. curl up in the fetal position and wait impatiently for death sick guy. lonely.

pathetic.

no weekend parties. no beer. no stories. no drama. no guitars. no flirting. no dancing. no beer. no music. no driving. no laughing. no dog park. no drums. no jambalaya. no beer.

just gotta lay here and read john donne (it’s only divine right) and aristotle and grade papers and get woozy and drift off and wake up and read criticism on john donne and critiques of aristotle and take baths and walk the dog and wonder about when rhetoric becomes a discipline and not and tool and where science begins and god ends …

i feel like i’m missing something every second when i’m sick. is this normal? or am i missing something? and why can’t i just …

be?

and after all that god bless america and fly overs and generals doing the coin toss and hero flight crews taking bows and trillion dollar commercials and other such nationalistic melodrama that game better have been god damn good. (that’s two years in a row …)

a question for your prayers tonight: can kurt warner still mention jesus 200 times in every 30 second interview even though his team lost?

meditate on that one …

a quick list:

1. a few weeks ago my sirius radio in my car shit out. it wouldn’t turn all the way on. it would try to turn on and then turn off. try to turn on then turn off. try to … $70 and a $15 ‘service transfer fee’ later, i’m back up and running. now i can again listen to will the farter blast away in his mom’s face at 7 a.m. yes, this content is that important to me. did i mention i live alone with a 22 pound dachshund?

2. my laptop has started doing some weird thing where it crashes hard when it goes to sleep. i did a little searching around on the google for an answer. got something to do with ‘safe sleep’ and a faulty memory dump. i might have to involve todd henry. course i’d have to listen to him ridicule me for buying an overpriced computer in a plastic white case. anyway, this one seems like it’s not that bad (i just don’t put the computer to sleep anymore) but it kinda makes me nervous. probably not as much as it should …

3. my cell phone is fucked. i dropped it about 84, 85 times in the last year and it’s always been fine. barely a scratch. somewhere around the 86th time it bounced off the concrete it sort of split in half. now it turns off randomly, flickers, shocks me …

4. my car stereo is starting to randomly turn itself off as well. driving along and it just cuts out. so i’ve fixed the sirius radio only to have the in-dash unit take its cues from my phone. st. andrews, what did you do to make me deserve this?

hanging on by a thread here, people. if you don’t hear from me for awhile, it could obviously be any number of things. snail mail, please, or foot messengers until i kick this thing.

that is all.

got into my php ssh apache .ini fastcgi shell access ruby on rails sql .htaccess and what not.

told me to click a button that i had unclicked.

voila!

took him about seven minutes (most of that time was spent with me trying to remember passwords.)

amazing man, and we love him very much. thanks, todd.

mas photos:

[Show as slideshow]

added a new flash player on the sidebar over yonder >.

the developer of this fine widget was chinese (and so were the installation instructions).

hope they work.

some oldies and some funny ones on this playlist. i’ll switch the tunes up, you know, probably every six years or so.

i’m on it.

also upgraded the whole inner workings of the site which broke my ability to upload gallery-sized piles of images. waiting for unix man todd to shout out and edit my shit. he has all my passwords and combinations and keys and bolt cutters and he even has my signature down pat (which is too bad, cause i’ve always found him a bit shifty …). anyway, lots of photos to share once i get my shit outta this sling.

gonna paint my bedroom tonight unless sister morphine stops by.

can you hear me knockin’?