exactly six years and eleven months later

lying in bed that night
my left elbow pinned under
enso's big black dog head 
and you sitting up and reading
your spare hand reached across
and open upon my sternum
i realized how much i needed
the dog head pressure 
and the wife hand pressure
to keep me from floating away

that which does not need to be reviewed

NOTE: This written thing was inspired by facebook postings of various objects that ended up in the lost and found box from BluesSHOUT! 2013, and will likely be only the first in a number of reviews of things which in actuality do not need to be reviewed.

Credit for this photograph goes to the lovely Dee McCord

(as does my everlasting gratitude for inspiring this latest venture)

after sleeping fitfully with images of this hat flitting through my mind, and then waking, i have finally understood the quiet power of this photograph. while the hat itself is quite lovely, it is but a vehicle for the artist's vision of the wearer, a statement of the true nature of community. the fitful aspect of my sleep was driven by the unconscious desire to understand who was wearing the hat, indeed "what" was underneath it, both metaphorically and literally, and in my dream-addled state i was able to bypass my analytical brain and directly harness the amphibian nature of my lizard brain, which directed me to imagine i had only primitive clawlike appendages and to explore the undercontents of the hat would need to slide my scaly komodo nose beneath its lower edge, gliding along the mystery surface upon which it rests, and as the scent waftingly entered my massive prehistoric nasal passages I would not only be able to explicate the many traits of its oft-wearer and those who were nearby this hat at many points in time, but indeed to enable my proboscis to leverage the hat over onto its back and expose the world to its hidden inner dimensions. upon imagining this process, though, i began to feel a vague unease, as if to flip the chapeau was an untoward "red light touch", an unwelcome advance for which i had not been granted permission. as i rested with this unease, i was able to deftly unpeel the last layer of the image and its metaphorical cargo, realizing that of course this was the only view of the hat that was needed, nay, the only view of the hat that was required to convey the true wearer to the world. the thing that the hat rests on (a table, perhaps a floor?) rests on something else and then that on something else yet, and then it is (as the native americans allegedly say) "it is turtles all the way down," but in this case, the turtles must be dancing, moving with an exquisite series of micro-adjustments perfectly in tune with the shifting contents keeping it all from toppling over.

what an angel needs to hear

when they look down at you
and say 
i love the look on your face

they need to hear
that you love the look on their face too
because you know they are an angel
and because the look on their face
is the look of an angel
looking down on someone they love

they need to hear
that the look on your face
that they are loving
is the look of someone who knows 
they are being looked upon 
with love
by an angel

introduction for a song that does not exist

(to be given at my performance of songs that don’t exist)

this next song is about love and loss and longing

and it comes from one morning

that was the morning after another morning 

where the same thing happened

but where the true depths of that thing 

were not realized until the second morning

it comes from me being in the shower 

and realizing my neutrogena oil-free acne wash soap

you know the orange kind that comes in a pump-bottle

and is the the truest male distillation of all that is neutrogena

in that it is the most utilitarian and functional and basic

of the ever-expanding universe of neutrogena products

was sitting out on the bathroom sink

so far out of reach that there was no consideration

about getting out of the shower 

and doing that small side arcing diagonal shuffle step 

with the bathmat under both of my feet

stuck out towards the edges 

so i wouldn’t need to take 

too many shuffle scooches over to the sink 

so i wouldn’t drip all over the bathroom floor

or lose too much of the shower warmth

i had fought so long and hard already to soak up

and so there it was

sitting there on the far right edge of the sink ledge

for the second day in a row

because we were both somehow able to struggle through 

the jarring reality of the initial separation on the first day

and its jarringness was so complete 

that any possible thought about some kind of remedy

to this situation

say like moving the soap back into the shower

onto the fourth tier of the simplehuman stainless showercaddy

was not even the remotest of possibilities

we found ourselves there again on that second day

having scraped by the first day without feeling its sweet caress

without its ephemeral texture and gentle cleansing action

without its purifying and preventative powers

and then to find ourselves in that same situation

knowing we should have known better

knowing somehow we should have found the strength

or the foresight to somehow do something

to avoid this groundhoggian reprise

and that we had failed

and our separation was a compounded sort of bitterness

with a garnish of regret and self-chastening

and as I saw my neutrogena face soap looking back at me

with as much ennui as a pump-dispenser of soap can muster

through its fatalistic anguish and defeat

i could see a small fragrance-free orange tear of soap forming at its spout

and my initial response was one of sweet kindredness

since i had just begin to weep as well

but just as the tear of soap had softened the edge of my despair 

that same despair turned from a rounded edge that once was sharp

into a vast and torrid whirlpool of infinite regress and regret

because in that moment i understood 

that though i knew we were both expressing our sadness

in exactly the same manner

at exactly the same moment

the neutrogena face soap was unable to distinguish my tears

from the water cascading over my face 

from the chrome moen rainfall five setting showerhead

and its currently wall-mounted but hand-wieldable counterpart

on the opposite wall of the shower with their mutual full-blastedness

and in that moment i lived and learned 

the true nature 

of what it means to love 

and what it means to long for the presence of another

and what it means to see their heart breaking

without them being able to witness my exquisitely

complementary anguish

that, my friends, is what this song is all about.

an admittedly perhaps premature (perhaps purposefully so) review of John Green's "The Fault in our Stars"

It is rare for a book to spawn a review before i have completed it, and vastly rarer still to initiate such said spawnage after only a few chapters. This rarity is further compounded when a book causes facial confusion to such an extent, as The Fault in our Stars (by John Green), and although that is perhaps only a circumstantial effect, it is worthy of at least a small and timid note, and perhaps as equally timorous of a note would be that i am not sure where it was that i was pointed toward this book, but the fact that Marcus Zuszak (author of The Book Thief, which is like the best book ever written (and i mean that in the sense of it (if not being the best book ever written) being at least roughly similar to the best book ever written) gave it high praise in his backcover blurbage, which allowed me to skip to the side of my slight (insecure?) discomfort caused by the tag on the spine of the book (applied by the library staff) reading loudly “HIGH SCHOOL” and proceed to first deem the book a capable solo accompaniment to my first-thing-in-the-morning platelet donation appointment, and then secondly to delve into its pages as my strong coffee and chocolate chip cookies were delivered  (as i lay in my prone position with the needle lodged painlessly in my right median-cubital vein).

Soon after the apheresis machine completed its second return cycle, the aforementioned facial confusion began (scarcely before the second chapter had initiated), and at this point perhaps the Tums were brought to me only seconds too late to prevent the tingling in my lips (being that the Tums mitigate the oft-experienced side-effect of the citrate (which is added to the returning blood to prevent clotting)), but it was late enough that i could not completely invalidate the possibility of the causal nature of the citrate and its involvement in the increasing strange sensations i was noticing in my face (which had by this point expanded curiously into territories outside of my greater oral-lipular boundary).  Even if i was able to ascribe my somewhat-numb-lippiness to the citrate, I became more and more convinced that the other uncontrollable facial affectations could have some basis in the words that were being absorbed into the cellular matter of my brain.

Given this partial certainty, it was required that i rest the book upside down on my prop pillow (on top of the half-body heating pad and blanket installed to maximize my comfort and speed of donation cycle) and consider at least every few pages, what exactly it might be in these words that could cause such distinct and decentralized sensations in my facial topography.  Was it that the characters were “real” to me in some innovative manner?  Was it the parallel overlappage intersectedness between the lighthearted (in the most respectful manner possible (which is actually quite respectful)) description of children with cancer and the fact that i was currently involved in a donation process that was destined to benefit actual (non-fictional-book-based humans) cancer patients? Was i simply experiencing a hitherto unnoticed hormonal fluctuation that made me unaccustomed to these particular facial sensations?

After pondering these hypotheses, and multitudes of other possible explanatory directions, i resigned myself to simply reading the book and maximizing my enjoyment of it by somehow monitoring and possibly managing to keep my concurrent brain chatter to a minimum.  All of this being said, there remains the possibility that ultimately this (so far quite fine and distinguished) book will disappoint me, but if i allow myself to examine even that small fear, i am rebounded by the myopically hopeful belief that even that disappointment will be exactly what it is i wanted.

In closing, i would also like to thank my long-suffering wife, the pulchritudinous and otherwise also amazing Melissa Fuller, for allowing me to convince her away from the good computer and (mostly for my particular requirements) keyboard.  I formally and publicly apologize for insisting the usage would be quickly resolved, when i (if forced to consider my excessively wordy proclivities) would have to admit that perhaps i was less than totally unmisleading in my characterization of the timeframe required for the completion of this venture.  I shall struggle to make this up to you (along with the thousands of other tiny things i am already struggling to make up to you) until the instant at which i perish.

thought of you yesterday...

(a birthular message to my amazing professional sculptor brother in law, Matt Babcock)

thought of you yesterday...

but failed to send you birthday greetings, so here they are today, after all the fanfare has died down and you are waking thinking that instead of the joyous day of celebration you experienced yesterday, with all of its fancy community-wide reverie and remembrances of the last year of your existence, complete with detailed exegeses of each of your trials, tribulations, and triumphs, that instead today would be more of a "back to the grindstone" type day where you trudged to your workshop and engaged in some revelatory creative endeavour that, at its root, contained a cryptic semaphore from your soul to the world at large, your metaphoric symbology cascading morse codified bits of your soul-beat and animalian spirit into the vast wilderness of humanity, perhaps muttering to yourself occasionally "consarned soul-beat and animalian spirit, and consarned too is this cursed endeavouring mythos and pathos and ethos I have been shackled with", but instead of making the sisyphistic, trudging trip to your workshop in such bleak and conflicted spirits, nay instead you have started your day with a small, concise, and tidy missive from your brother in law, who chose this time with such great care and tenderness, so that he might best establish a small and meaningful point of contact with your existence, and perhaps convey to your reactive mind a small token of non-particulate matter that suggests to you his (and his lovely wife's) egregious respect for you and your creations, and indeed if there were a word that conveyed great jealousy of your engagement in such overwhelmingly creative soulcraft, without that word having the pejorative sense of envy, but instead simply of sublimated esteem for both your character, the millions of tiny characters inhabiting your brains, and the beatific manner in which you so gracefully release those characters out into the world, allowing them the full Maslowian ability to actualize themselves and the selves of others in the parallel processes of our collective slouching towards some unknowable singularity, that would be the word he would use, and that word alone.

love, 
c&m

Note: if you want to see some of the amazing things Matt creates (and you should want to see these kinds of things indeed), check out his website