while outside birds building nests in drainpipes knew nothing of the coming rain

i have nothing to say, but some things to share that I was pondering while thinking about what I should say.


Mirror by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Priscilla Ahn » Benji Hughes from The Voice Project on Vimeo.

Rain by Naomi Shihab-Nye

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
“this year sumbody tutched me
on the sholder”
and turned the paper in.
Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.
The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of “o” and “d”
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

Remind me to write about how I feel in the morning. It'd be great if I could breathe out the things floating around and weighing down my heart right now, so you should probably remind me to place this somewhere in the morning. If you could remind me how important it feels, I'd appreciate it. I can be so forgetful, you know. But I'm sure once you mention it I'll remember and write for days and days.

fair and balanced my ass

For the past month or so I've kept my car radio tuned to the Fox News Radio Station because I wanted to hear some things "from the horse's mouth" so to speak. I wanted to get some insight into the voices of the mainstream republican party. And, honestly, I was hoping to hear something that would create a picture somehow different than the one I've had in my head through reading and watching left-ish oriented news sources.

And after over a month I have come to this conclusion: I genuinely feel bad for level-headed republicans if they have to endure the ravings of these fucking lunatics on a regular basis.

It's almost comical that this sort of thing passes for news. But mostly it's horrifying because millions of people listen to these personalities and believe their incomprehensible bullshit. It'd be unfair to say it's all bullshit, but even 90% is being generous.

That's all.

something my heart could not forget

My long-delayed move to Portland, OR is coming up soon. May 3rd. I genuinely considered moving it back another month after Pearl Jam's spring tour announcement in which there would have been at least three shows I'd gone to if I was still in the great northeast, but alas, I resisted such temptation. If their last album was any indication, they'll be around for a while, so I'll have other opportunities.

I've been dreaming lately of late-night bike rides through those city streets, surrounded by warm air and friendly strangers. I have a really good feeling about this. And hopefully Mr. Mauer will be joining me out there soon, right pal?

I was up late last night thinking about the aforementioned bike ride, listening to some tunes, and decided to make a mix for such an occasion... actually, first I was reading some Whitman, and the mix started off as a Whitman tribute, but I deviated... at any rate as I was choosing songs (which, by the way, takes an inordinate amount of time. It generally takes me about 3 hours to throw together a mix for something silly like 8tracks or an ipod playlist... if we're talking a mix for a person, jeez, days; there's just so many songs that need to be listened to in full in order to determine if they make the cut) I found myself choosing love songs and having absolutely no one in mind to attribute them to. That was a liberating discovery. I don't know if that makes any sense to anyone who reads this, but, for me, it was transcendent. I've loved many different women for many different reasons, in varying degrees of scope. You could deconstruct the word love for days (more than any other word in the English language, I think, save perhaps God) and list off the different forms it takes, but what's the point... what is the point? Ah, yes, the point is that though I have loved many women, in situations where that love has been said, or unsaid; constant, or fleeting; accepted, or rejected; requited, or unrequited; tangible, or abstract; it's always been beautiful, even when it was painful. And there's always associations: a color, a smell, that row of benches, those trees on the ridge, origami, a ticket stub, a wine cork, a folded note, a song. And even when you love someone new you'll cross paths with these associations someday, and maybe you'll cry, or grimace, but you should probably smile, because your heart needed that to get here. You don't have to be in love with that person anymore to be in love with that time, that rapture, and all those ruinations.

So I was thinking about that as I realized I had no associations in my song choices. And I felt liberated. I felt buoyant, and vital, and eager. And I realized that what I love most, right now, at this moment, is a question mark, or a series or question marks, that will eventually lead to a period.

my itunes is pretty (part 2)

I figured out how to post my itunes. Not that anyone really cares. But perhaps you could make suggestions as to something I'm missing... that'd be nice.

my itunes is pretty

I've finally finished the great itunes reorganization. Since the majority of my library came from imported CD's rather than from the itunes store, I spent hours and hours back in 2003 downloading and/or scanning images and importing them into the files. Yes, I know, I'm a dork. A few years later when itunes first offered the option to "get album artwork" I tried it out, since there were still several files without artwork. But the stupid thing switched out many of my already existing album artworks with incorrect ones. Everything was all F'd up. I was pissed. At any rate, I just finished fixing this problem, at the same time fixing inconsistencies in Genre and those pesky compilation albums where you need seperate fields for Artist and Album Artist for optimal organization. Again, yes, I know I'm a dork. Now I can use the Grid view and not be annoyed by the gaps in images.

I can't seem to post an image, because it's too large, but trust me, its a sight to behold.

take whatever you think of, while i go gas up the truck

(I don't write poetry; i wish i could. but after writing this i felt the need to place inappropriate line breaks and parenthesis... i guess that's kind of a poem)

i spent a little bit of time this evening
playing really sad songs for a friend,
for reasons that will go unmentioned.
i spent a lot of time tonight
listening to other friends' heartbreak.
and between the two circumstances which met
somewhere in the middle
(not always romantic love
and sometimes godly love)
i was at a loss for words.

and i could only murmur:
it's really all that matters.

i often wish you knew how much it meant to me.
sometimes i think you might.
most of the time i know it doesn't mean that much to you

(i mean just the way that you smile
and everything that it does to me)




(and here's one of the aforementioned songs...)