The Mushroom Umbrella: July 2007

"The entire Dog Park sits on a play mat and Dixie can walk and carry the babies and accessories using magnetic features on his back and tongue that extends when you push his tail in. "

07 July, 2007

G'night, Jim-Bob

Here we all are, watching the fog roll in together.

A tout a l'heures...

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.

Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.

For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

from The Outermost House , © 1928, 1956, Henry Beston

Bitter

I have become that woman. I called the cops last night and after being hung up on three times by their automated phone tree system (it is Oakland, after all) reported a group of teenagers "standing in the middle of the street, setting off firecrackers. It's scaring the crap out of my animals."

Actually, it was just interfering with my television volume.

Yep. I have become that woman.

06 July, 2007

Out to Pick up a Gross, Honey

Is there a gender corollary to the forty years of life during which a woman finds herself leaving the house only because she's completely out of Tampax?

Do those of you with male sigoths ever hear "Hey--just popping out to buy a urethra blotter," or "Be right back--discovered I'm completely out of vas deferens ointment?"

Perhaps the only thing in my life which truly can accept no substitute. Why don't they have Tampax stands on every corner? Like mailboxes, or FedEx deposit receptacles.

I mean.

Fungi: The Microbial World

Question. If you leave your blue cheese in the refrigerator for, say, a year or more, and it grows hairy: is that bad? Was there a necessary mold management or mold control step that went missing?

I guess what I'm saying really is, is moldy mold a de facto bad thing? Or can one actually promulgate fungal plethora with a clear conscience betimes? In your response, please cite references. Or examples from your personal life. Please, no examples from your professional life: I'm not sure that would be applicable.

This is obviously a theoretical question--I would never have, say, things that were a year old or more in my, say, vegetable compartment. But, I think, an important one. For us all.

Fungi. On everyone's minds.

www.bact.wisc.edu/themicrobialworld/Fungi.html

05 July, 2007

Syndication

"There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do."

--Bill Watterson

04 July, 2007

Divine Intervention

Today I have to write four pieces, then meet my advisor, then go to a writer's party.

I need help.

I do have my shorts on with the glow-in-the-dark cat faces.

I'm not sure that's enough. I may need popsicles as well.

It will be hot. I will not leave my house all day.

Perhaps in my religion, popsicles will be a communion host.

03 July, 2007

Salvacion Tipica

Trópico Verde

Verde lluvia, vertiene y territorio
Verde el especio, la luz verde.
El clima verde. Verdes las colinas.
Las hondonadas y los ríos verdes.
Un lago verde del valle. La montaña
verdeazul, verdemar, verdeprofundo.
Lo cerca y lo lejano en aire verde.
Verde lluvia, vertiene y territorio.

Roto temblor el verde de los plátanos.
Casi líquida lágrima, el verdor
del sauce. El verde
militar del café, el verdor húmedo
de junco, cana y lirio. Verde música
en el órgano, -- oh verde viento! del bambú.
La plata verde
del eucalípto. El verde silencioso
de los pastos, las malvas, las legumbres.

Verde lluvia, vertiene y territorio.
De mi sangre saltó una estrella verde.
Y verdin, verdinal y verdolaga,
mayo estira su lluvia hasta diciembre
en el trópico verde.

Bubbles

The NYT reported things today that I would not otherwise have ever known. Beverly married a man going through a divorce who fought for custody of his kids back in the fifties in Cleveland, and for that, she says, “Peter was ostracized by Cleveland’s rinky-dink version of high society.”

She had two children of her own, a girl Meredith, who was discovered to be profoundly deaf at 2 years old; and a boy Peter, born with severe mental retardation complicated by it is thought now, autism. She received these pieces of news within six weeks of each other. She went back to work, and sang for twenty more years.

"[Before the children's diagnoses] I was a combination of everyone else’s ideas: the director, the conductor, the tenor. After I came back, I talked back. I stopped caring what anyone else thought.

“I began to have a good time.”

Oh! Can I please remember this forever. What is this feeling called, reading stories like this--

Families

Street musician playing down the long corridor to the BART exit:

o/~ I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat/I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat
I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat
I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat
I gotta feed my dog,
I gotta feed my cat.
o/~

The Right Stuff

This picture was taken at Christmastime five years ago (wow). My parents invited me to tag along on a business trip to Santa Monica with the promise of a visit to the Getty the next day. After his client dinner, my dad came whooping back to the hotel room, opened up the minibar, pulled out a pack of peanut M&Ms and started jumping on my bed. My stepmother gave us a long look, turned her back to that side of the room, and opened her Joan Didion.

In this shot, I think he looks like a cross between Denny on "Boston Legal" and an astronaut from the sixties.

More striking for me, however, is how we've arrived at being exactly the same height.

And those gams! Sexy boy.

A Wait and See Attitude

Sometimes it's best to hide out in the pink cave and let a world go about its business without the benefit of your participation.

The Mushroom Umbrella

27 July, 2007

Nappers Without Borders

12 July, 2007

I want this. What does that mean?