i'm not painting the stairs tonight

this will be one of those blog posts i hate. one that totally belongs in a journal, rather than posted publically--the kind of post that romantic, depressed teenagers love to create.

* * *

i'm wonderfully depressed.

i'm the kind of depressed that happens when, alone in the house on a chilly night, you walk up the stairs to your bedroom and change into the most comfortable clothes you own, and you sit next to a heating vent in the dark in a snug thrift store easy chair that is shaped perfectly to wrap itself around you.

it's the kind of depressed you get when the list of things to do is so long that it becomes almost mythical, too impossible to be true--and therefore unncessary to complete. you can resign yourself to not doing the stuff on the list and instead you can write about it.

i feel tired and listless without also feeling guilty. i feel full and satisfied and healthy despite having had a lousy dinner.

for once writing seems like the most important and most fulfilling way i could possibly spend the next hour, until it makes me so sleepy that i will float myself to bed, knowing i will sleep contentedly and wake refreshed and satisfied in the morning. satisfied because nothing will matter so much as having awoken refreshed.

it's kind of like the feeling i might have had when i was a teenager if someone had come to my house one evening to tell me how not to feel angst. the secret would not have been to get rid of the things that cause angst. the stranger would have told me how to get rid of the angst itself. and after i did that, all those wants and needs and hormones would continue on, but only as another big, mythical, impossible pile--they would become completely other, something objective that i could look at and choose whether or not i wanted to believe in. and if i decided it was real, i could pick some other time to actually care about it.

i'm minding parts of myself lately that have gone unminded for many long years. i knew they would eventually push to the surface. i could feel them trying to get out. from time to time, i tentatively tried to coax or pull or prod them. but they wanted to come out on their own. i had this feeling that if i let them work their way out, like a caterpillar works its way out of a cocoon, they would emerge the stronger for having had to fight their way into the light. i've heard that caterpillars that are cut out of their cocoons cannot fly, because their wings remain atrophied, never having been forced to push and pull and grasp and tear their way into a world infintiely large.

the way i feel tonight, i think, comes from resigning myself to the power of what is coming alive. i can't live by lists and chores and responsibilities and degrees of authority anymore. i can respect and choose to follow them from time to time. but i can't live by them anymore. my choices are becoming those of an artist.

this here...this is crappy art. it's a rough draft of a piece of writing that probably should never be brought into the light of day even if it were polished. but its power doesn't lie so much in its public form. its power showed up in the way it changed me as i made it. this is what it's like to create something that in turn recreates you. it's like what god feels when a theologian is born.

so this is art for the artist's sake, which is dangerous as a public statement. and, frankly, i usually hate having to see it. but it's probably ok once in a while--i think there might be a little bit of value in sharing it.

i heart google

because:














search: "flag pants"
source

the front hall is blue

it used to be white. a dirty, stark, sun-killing white. now it's blue. startling, unusual, non-matching blue. will we come to like it? will we paint the rest of the rooms to compliment it? will we paint over it in two weeks? only time will tell.

giraffes in the air

this is a little off-color, but when i found it by accident the other day i was eating lunch--it made me squirt yogurt out my nose. now that you've been warned, enjoy!
http://giraffesintheair.ytmnd.com/

(by the way, this is unfortunately one of those things that seems to work best when viewed in explorer. ytmnd.com is a wildly popular website. if you're like me and you generally avoid using explorer for security reasons, this is probably a safe exception. it hasn't infected me with any malicious code that i'm aware of. besides, how could someone who created something so funny also be a devious, scumbag hacker?)

weiner dog

there are a bunch of kids in the neighborhood who play basketball and football on our street because there's not much trafdfic here and because none of the neighbors here are bothered by it.

they have met susie several times. all summer they asked me a rotation of questions when we passed them on our walks: what kind of dog is that? is that a labrador? what's its name? how old is it? what kind of dog is that? is that a labrador? and on and on.

i was suprised on so many of our walks that the same kids who met her a day ago or a week ago seemed to have absolutely no memory of her at all. we'd walk by the perpetual basketball game and someone would ask "is that a lab?"

susie is half labrador retriever and half schipperke. schipperkes are long, low-to-the-ground dogs that no one has ever heard of. because of that, some people, most notably kara's mother, are convinced that susie is half dachsund or even basset hound since she is so short and long. but they're wrong. how the combination of schipperke and lab came about has generated a lot of fascinating conversation, but however it happened, our dog is the unmistakable result. at first glance, you think she's a labrador puppy. but then if you look closer, you see she's really long, really short, and her face is really pointy. and after you live with her for a while, you can't miss the schipperke personality. wikipedia says, "consistent, positive training is a must or life can become a contest of wills." yep.

so anyway, by the end of the summer, most of the kids finally knew susie by sight, and remembered they had seen her before. and every once in a while they'd yell out, "hi susie!" it's the middle of winter now, but we had this freakish 60 degree day yesterday and basketball was in full swing. susie and i walked by, and as i waited for a familiar hello, i heard one of the kids say, "that is a short dog" and another answering, "that's a weiner dog."

oh well.

i heart google

because:






















search: "virginia slims"
source

calvin

i started writing a capiton to this picture in which calvin was saying something like, "damn straight you're gonna pet me."

then i felt guilty about saying "damn" on the internet and for covering it up by foisting the words onto my cat who, if he could speak, would not need to say the word to make the same point.

of all the places to feel guilty for saying "damn," the internet is probably the last one i need to worry about. but i feel a little guilty anyway. probably because of my mother.

a long time ago, my mother and i decided we weren't going to swear anymore. i was a first child, and i don't think my parents realized how much i wanted to be just like them in every way. for example, i'm told that one saturday i spent the day watching my father working on some tough house project. the next morning i passed the time in mass by showing what a quick learner i was. over and over.

so, now that my verbal genius was getting embarrassing, my mother decided we weren't going to swear anymore. and i, wanting to be like her, went along with it. i checked in every day: "i still didn't swear!" "that's good david." "did you swear?" "nope. i didn't swear either." we were reformed.

we were.as i was starting to type this post, my mother e-mailed me asking for the address of the blog. the address i had given her was spelled wrong and she needed the right one because she wanted to take a look. so it won't be long before she knows i finally dropped my end of the deal. but i happen to know that she dropped the ball, too, a long time ago.

so we pretty much ended up on the same page, which is what i wanted all along.

sleep tight

this is the third time i have posted a picture of this house (first time; second time). it's set back a little bit, just down the road from my parents' house, and for as long as i can remember--even when people lived in it--it's been gray and old. it has a long story, but the parts i know are not very interesting to tell. the house was new long before i was born, at a time when small farms were the backbone of the country. the farmer who lived next door to us, who was old even in my earliest memories, was born in there.

somewhere inside it there may still be the bedframes that my brother and i slept on when we shared a bedroom. twin beds with tall metal headboards and footboards. when we got hand-me-down bunkbeds, my father gave those metal beds to the migrant workers who lived in the house.

i would dearly love to explore the house and look for those beds. but the building is rotted through and open to the elements. before long it will be gone the way of the family that built it and the farm that grew around it.

i heart google

because:



search: "giant tennis racket [sic]"
source

welder

- i want to be a welder. i'm totally in the wrong trade

- why do you want to be a welder?

- because you get to wear the helmet. and you use the zappy zapper.