a woman's coffin usurped by a man

In the afternoon she opens her arms as if to embrace him, all right angles and outlines, I cannot feel her. Children often breath against the glass and spell out her cartouche in the fog. It is always dissipating, but fingerprints remain. They tell how to survive in the afterlife; this too a vanishing fog. There are many kinds of fog to remember: from the morning by the river, the walk from the prison, beneath the foundations of the castle, I might have been considering my beheading, almost absently, or else that if I love her I should say so; from the dust of cigarettes and Chinese construction that settles in the countryside after having been carried there on cool winds, her lips are dry, my eyes stinging, the flavor of this fog catching on the sides of the tongue and flaking at the skin; from the eternal childhood of the mummy kept usually in Torino, occasionally loaned out, dark hands, thin, a woman's, weaving the death shroud for the boy's corpse, can we cry for forgotten mothers and small bodies, or must we remain scientific; from the obscurity of alphabets; from train stations; others' memories; buildings that obstruct sunrises; love. Things in which to lose yourself is better than to find it. Or at least more likely. She is painted on the wood. She cannot hold him. Isis is at our feet, rendered upside down so that only we may see her properly as we gaze at our shoes, unwilling to say what we know.

no turkey but subway... also, no subway

I had some sushi, bread, and nuts, and pretended it was turkey, yeast rolls, and nuts. Not even close to full.

There's a Subway somewhere in Sendai where you can get a turkey sub, and you can buy powdered gravy off of Amazon.

This will mark Thanksgiving number two where I didn't think my gut was going to burst. A little sad. And I hope everyone in the states is having a good day.

I couldn't be much happier than I am now, so no worries. Most of my students had never even heard of today, so I gave some of them little crash-courses in the traditional meals. Lots of food units, so it fit in nicely. No quiz, but that doesn't matter. This is Japan. If you tell them to learn something they just do it, without the threat of consequences... I know. But I'm not making this up. It's completely true.

My collaboration story with Lily, "Keys Let You Into Places," is apparently being published in Squid Quarterly. Which reminds me... I need to write something decent soon. I can feel myself becoming a poor schlub with no discernible talents or interests.

Okay, hadn't really checked in with mundane garbage for a while. Consider yourself updated.

peace

dongurichan

creepy magic tricks

the longest breakfast: getting gay with bears

horrible horrible awful

I am not trying to make a joke. When I heard the guy from Fort Hood talking about getting grief counseling for everybody, I just tried to imagine the added emotional confusion of having to visit a post-trauma specialist to try to deal with the fact that a post-trauma specialist did such an awful thing. It's some morbid shit. Anyway, I'm just dumbfounded by this whole thing. Not sure it should be quite so shocking anymore, but... well. I'm all the way over here so I don't think there's much of value to add except to hope for the best with families and such... Writing stupid now, I'll stop.

hopefully soon...

... I'll be back to my old self, or back to an even better new self, or I will become a beam of pure energy and require no such limiting descriptors as "self" or "old" or "new" or "my". Though I do hope to one day eat a decent taco again.

I have been sick on-and-off, it seems, for quite some time now. This time it is the swine flu. Or "H1N1"--I don't want to piss off the pork industry by calling the virus what it is. My sides ache from coughing. I am sick of being sick, and I am missing way too much work. I know there's nothing I can do about it, but I'm really worried about my school and me because of this. Maybe everything is ok, but I just lie in bed all day coughing and shivering and getting into fevered paranoia that everyone hates me because I'm sick. It's demented. Probably deep-seeded. Perhaps going back to elementary school, when I pretended to be sick to stay home from school... now when I am actually sick, I'm convinced I am also actually faking it.

A little window into my neuroses.



I'll be taking it easy for the remainder of the month, but hopefully I can get back out with my camera soon and take some shots. I've been growing lax there. There've been several instances where bringing my camera along would have been nice.