I'm not dead yet
This year will be hard. I'm not going to have any of my own time, and I'll have to be very clever to have enough time for the stuff I've committed to do. I think next year I'll go hollow out a boulder and live in hermitage, enjoying only the simple burdens and absences of a contemplative life, like crickets chirping, hunger, the inability to have odd bumps diagnosed or cuts properly treated, and the sense that those facelike imaginary patterns in foliage are actual people.
July 22, 2007
Prior thoughts revisited upon me unexpectedly
It is really unfair how I seize on the small recognizable things. I do it with you, all, I know no other way to know a person than to catch them with one of their own. And I work as hard to do it as to not realize that as soon as they don't show me their own, I won't know what's with no-one.
So this is an education?
This poem was in my head (no man is an island entire...bell tolls)
This poem was in my head (and light and labor past)
This poem was in my head (your cloud words...amoeba, sigh, divide, begin; So sorry I can barely say to be full of invisible words).
A great deal was up around me. I have been digging a while—depth equating with extent of knowledge, familiarity, commitment even, in a football-teamspeak. Being that it is impossible to dig across the entire surface of ground (without blasting the excavated earth into space), depth means high walls. Tempting to say I've dug an island, in light of the first poem, but an analogy is an analogy is an analogy and like us they only go so far before they give out.
I've not dug a moat around a little patch of ground. There, only, was air filling the cleared space between matters I have not disturbed. Is a hole the air or the walls, is a house the inside or the structure, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Yeah. What is the sound of one dumb question? Dumb meaning mute, is it the same as one dumb answer? If these walls could'a talked...
But a great deal has come down, and the thing to do isn't to frame statements, which will only come out asinine no matter how they sound on the inside; the thing is only to pick through the new-broken chunks and pockets and inspect, decide what what is, and where I want to put all this dirt.
Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
It is really unfair how I seize on the small recognizable things. I do it with you, all, I know no other way to know a person than to catch them with one of their own. And I work as hard to do it as to not realize that as soon as they don't show me their own, I won't know what's with no-one.
So this is an education?
This poem was in my head (no man is an island entire...bell tolls)
This poem was in my head (and light and labor past)
This poem was in my head (your cloud words...amoeba, sigh, divide, begin; So sorry I can barely say to be full of invisible words).
A great deal was up around me. I have been digging a while—depth equating with extent of knowledge, familiarity, commitment even, in a football-teamspeak. Being that it is impossible to dig across the entire surface of ground (without blasting the excavated earth into space), depth means high walls. Tempting to say I've dug an island, in light of the first poem, but an analogy is an analogy is an analogy and like us they only go so far before they give out.
I've not dug a moat around a little patch of ground. There, only, was air filling the cleared space between matters I have not disturbed. Is a hole the air or the walls, is a house the inside or the structure, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Yeah. What is the sound of one dumb question? Dumb meaning mute, is it the same as one dumb answer? If these walls could'a talked...
But a great deal has come down, and the thing to do isn't to frame statements, which will only come out asinine no matter how they sound on the inside; the thing is only to pick through the new-broken chunks and pockets and inspect, decide what what is, and where I want to put all this dirt.
Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
July 19, 2007
Well that was frightening
I don't know how to feel about not being able to confidently say that that was the scariest few minutes of my life. The steam main explosion happened right outside the building I'm working in. What we saw out the window was a huge shower of rubble and dust, while the floors shook and the roar just got louder. Yeah, what do you think was the first possiblity we thought of? You think you are going to be skeptical when an explosion is underway in your very immediate vicinty, possibily in your building? No. The in-charge part of your brain astutely notes that it's so unlikely for you to be on the seventh storey of an office building, which is shaking, as a solid wall of debris pelts all the windows and something near and BIG roars, that—hey—who knows? All bets are off, and speculation that the deafening sound could come from a falling building, or an exploded plane, ain't so much of a stretch as to not be worth taking into account.
And not only am I proud to say that despite starting from the seventh floor far from the stairwell, I was the fourth person out. Nothing you can say can change that. I would'a lived. And I wasn't pushing or cattle-driving—in fact, it was impressive to see that even people on the edge of hysteria were being decent. Not helping each other really, everyone was more or less panicked, but not hindering or anything.
I, and the editor-in-chief, and two other people with their heads screwed on, however, were far too busy getting the living hell out of there. Let me be clear: when our canoe got caught in a deadly storm, six miles from the middle of nowhere, with Andra in front and me steering, I was rowing for her at least as much as for me. That was sketchy, and awful, and I never want to be in a prolonged life-or-death situation like that again. Or even a short one. The point is, this time, I was alone and running for me. I don't know how or whether that's better or worse, and like I said, I'm good not knowing.
This was not a life or death situation, as became clear once outside. The street was ripped open and out of the three-lane-wide gash was blasting what in the fraction of a second I saw it looked like an avalanche in rewind. What from my vantage looked like the entire guts of Manhattan were erupting through the street. The steam pipe rupture happened at the crossroads of 41st Street and Lexington Ave, which is to say, at the northeast corner of my building, half a block from where I was standing at the fire exit. That initial geyser, I'm now told, was taller than the Chrysler building (easy to judge, since they were almost side-by-side). I saw a wall of rubble coming out of the ground and thought, as I turned to run in the correct direction (I still didn't have my bearings but that one point of reference was all anyone needed) "up from the ground is good." And it is: Whatever's blasting out must be getting forced, which limits it and makes it controllable. It's localized, the mere fact that I've seen it is reassuring even if at that instant I've no idea what could cause it, and, more to the point, monstrous plumes of rubble shooting out of the ground just doesn't scream "terrorist").
Of course, I didn't stop to look back till I was two blocks away, and then only for a moment, and by that point I was already running upwind, knowing full well that demolition debris can have a ton of bad pollutants that are nothing to be cavalier about. One thing I can say of every Bovee and Begun I've met is that we are not damned fools. Someone was very kind to lend me her phone so I could call my uncle, who works in the building next door, and my aunt at home, and from there it was just a long walk to the next train station, after I picked up a 72 cent notebook at the first drugstore I decided was far enough away. Different people have different ways of dealing with shit. It was not, as it turns out, a disaster. It was maybe a travesty, but only if they should've done something about the known risk. Which in my opinion they damn well should have. Certainly it was more than a SNAFU.
But for about a minute, it was really bad: everything was shaking, everyone was thinking, and not without reason, that the floors might come down—imagine, a combined earthquake and rockslide hitting out of nowhere when you're in a high building, and try to think a comforting thing. We didn't even know if the exit was safe. It didn't "feel hot," but so what? Just before we opened the door someone shouted "Nonononono NO!" It's a bad feeling to think you're (maybe) trapped in a building in mid-disaster(?!). Buildings, being generally designed as static, should not be mid-anything, ever. Midwestern, maybe. Maybe.
In case you're inquisitive and don't already know, I've assembled a few lessons in convenient sentence form, that they may be taken into your heads for consideration through reading, rather than direct experience, or that they may be taken out of my head and massaged around into something I like better:
The silence of concentration is common and seldom noticed; that of disbelief, unsettlingly different. José Saramago said silence has nothing to do with noise, silence is when birds turn and fly away.
Panic starts with the sound of silent disbelief and someone saying "um."
In a situation so very bad-seeming that you want to wake up, a big chaw of your brain fixates on the elephant (or explosion) in the middle of the room. Possibly it's yelling "NO!", that one syllable stretched from one end to the other of everything you know, possibly that's just the light tubes humming, who has time to wonder?
Meanwhile, the talented tenth of your brain, the clever strip stapled but not talking to the bulky panicky muppet brain, is a master of ignorance and displacement, seeing not the elephant but the directest course of action leading away from it. Meanwhile it very wisely chooses not to notice how fucking frightened you are.
Five minutes later, everything is okay. Five minutes after that, everything really is okay. Standards change over time. Then suddenly ten minutes later you realize you're having trouble tying your shoes.
I need to learn the email addresses of the rest of my family.
I don't know how to feel about not being able to confidently say that that was the scariest few minutes of my life. The steam main explosion happened right outside the building I'm working in. What we saw out the window was a huge shower of rubble and dust, while the floors shook and the roar just got louder. Yeah, what do you think was the first possiblity we thought of? You think you are going to be skeptical when an explosion is underway in your very immediate vicinty, possibily in your building? No. The in-charge part of your brain astutely notes that it's so unlikely for you to be on the seventh storey of an office building, which is shaking, as a solid wall of debris pelts all the windows and something near and BIG roars, that—hey—who knows? All bets are off, and speculation that the deafening sound could come from a falling building, or an exploded plane, ain't so much of a stretch as to not be worth taking into account.
And not only am I proud to say that despite starting from the seventh floor far from the stairwell, I was the fourth person out. Nothing you can say can change that. I would'a lived. And I wasn't pushing or cattle-driving—in fact, it was impressive to see that even people on the edge of hysteria were being decent. Not helping each other really, everyone was more or less panicked, but not hindering or anything.
I, and the editor-in-chief, and two other people with their heads screwed on, however, were far too busy getting the living hell out of there. Let me be clear: when our canoe got caught in a deadly storm, six miles from the middle of nowhere, with Andra in front and me steering, I was rowing for her at least as much as for me. That was sketchy, and awful, and I never want to be in a prolonged life-or-death situation like that again. Or even a short one. The point is, this time, I was alone and running for me. I don't know how or whether that's better or worse, and like I said, I'm good not knowing.
This was not a life or death situation, as became clear once outside. The street was ripped open and out of the three-lane-wide gash was blasting what in the fraction of a second I saw it looked like an avalanche in rewind. What from my vantage looked like the entire guts of Manhattan were erupting through the street. The steam pipe rupture happened at the crossroads of 41st Street and Lexington Ave, which is to say, at the northeast corner of my building, half a block from where I was standing at the fire exit. That initial geyser, I'm now told, was taller than the Chrysler building (easy to judge, since they were almost side-by-side). I saw a wall of rubble coming out of the ground and thought, as I turned to run in the correct direction (I still didn't have my bearings but that one point of reference was all anyone needed) "up from the ground is good." And it is: Whatever's blasting out must be getting forced, which limits it and makes it controllable. It's localized, the mere fact that I've seen it is reassuring even if at that instant I've no idea what could cause it, and, more to the point, monstrous plumes of rubble shooting out of the ground just doesn't scream "terrorist").
Of course, I didn't stop to look back till I was two blocks away, and then only for a moment, and by that point I was already running upwind, knowing full well that demolition debris can have a ton of bad pollutants that are nothing to be cavalier about. One thing I can say of every Bovee and Begun I've met is that we are not damned fools. Someone was very kind to lend me her phone so I could call my uncle, who works in the building next door, and my aunt at home, and from there it was just a long walk to the next train station, after I picked up a 72 cent notebook at the first drugstore I decided was far enough away. Different people have different ways of dealing with shit. It was not, as it turns out, a disaster. It was maybe a travesty, but only if they should've done something about the known risk. Which in my opinion they damn well should have. Certainly it was more than a SNAFU.
But for about a minute, it was really bad: everything was shaking, everyone was thinking, and not without reason, that the floors might come down—imagine, a combined earthquake and rockslide hitting out of nowhere when you're in a high building, and try to think a comforting thing. We didn't even know if the exit was safe. It didn't "feel hot," but so what? Just before we opened the door someone shouted "Nonononono NO!" It's a bad feeling to think you're (maybe) trapped in a building in mid-disaster(?!). Buildings, being generally designed as static, should not be mid-anything, ever. Midwestern, maybe. Maybe.
In case you're inquisitive and don't already know, I've assembled a few lessons in convenient sentence form, that they may be taken into your heads for consideration through reading, rather than direct experience, or that they may be taken out of my head and massaged around into something I like better:
The silence of concentration is common and seldom noticed; that of disbelief, unsettlingly different. José Saramago said silence has nothing to do with noise, silence is when birds turn and fly away.
Panic starts with the sound of silent disbelief and someone saying "um."
In a situation so very bad-seeming that you want to wake up, a big chaw of your brain fixates on the elephant (or explosion) in the middle of the room. Possibly it's yelling "NO!", that one syllable stretched from one end to the other of everything you know, possibly that's just the light tubes humming, who has time to wonder?
Meanwhile, the talented tenth of your brain, the clever strip stapled but not talking to the bulky panicky muppet brain, is a master of ignorance and displacement, seeing not the elephant but the directest course of action leading away from it. Meanwhile it very wisely chooses not to notice how fucking frightened you are.
Five minutes later, everything is okay. Five minutes after that, everything really is okay. Standards change over time. Then suddenly ten minutes later you realize you're having trouble tying your shoes.
I need to learn the email addresses of the rest of my family.
Katee Sackhoff is gay? Dammit!
Nope, she's not. We win again!
Nope, she's not. We win again!
July 07, 2007
May 14, 2007
Reflections on the First Newspaper Night
Holy fucking hell!
Where'd I go so damned wrong?
Stone hops on taut water.
Got a certain poetry to it, don't it, Captain? Aiya. There will be a reckoning. And by reckoning, I mean "the act or instance of estimation or computation, taking the relevant matters into consideration to settle accounts or regard something in reference to a fixed or accepted basis." Or else heads will roll. Well, mine, anyway. And I don't believe mine head was made for rolling.
Enough with poetry! It is time for prose and line breaks!
One of my dudes at The Varsity,
one of my associates, so it goes,
identifies himself as bangla.bhai@... in email addresses.
An infamous terrorist in Bangladesh, this Bangla Bhai,
with an Old West twist to his name. Bangla Bhai (the Bengali Brother
[See? English and Bengali: not actually so far apart])
of the JMJB, caught and hanged by Bangladesh not seven weeks ago—
but my associate stole his name long before that.
He almost went with itsthejews@... but reconsidered:
"someone would get offended," he said.
A very thin set of people finds it funny.
Not people who think "Jews," and not people who think "Muslims"
and not people who suck in greedy scowls whenever they hear the nouns
"TERRORISM" or "ZIONISM."
Not even a little bit funny at all.
And that is why I like it.
Holy fucking hell!
Where'd I go so damned wrong?
Stone hops on taut water.
Got a certain poetry to it, don't it, Captain? Aiya. There will be a reckoning. And by reckoning, I mean "the act or instance of estimation or computation, taking the relevant matters into consideration to settle accounts or regard something in reference to a fixed or accepted basis." Or else heads will roll. Well, mine, anyway. And I don't believe mine head was made for rolling.
Enough with poetry! It is time for prose and line breaks!
One of my dudes at The Varsity,
one of my associates, so it goes,
identifies himself as bangla.bhai@... in email addresses.
An infamous terrorist in Bangladesh, this Bangla Bhai,
with an Old West twist to his name. Bangla Bhai (the Bengali Brother
[See? English and Bengali: not actually so far apart])
of the JMJB, caught and hanged by Bangladesh not seven weeks ago—
but my associate stole his name long before that.
He almost went with itsthejews@... but reconsidered:
"someone would get offended," he said.
A very thin set of people finds it funny.
Not people who think "Jews," and not people who think "Muslims"
and not people who suck in greedy scowls whenever they hear the nouns
"TERRORISM" or "ZIONISM."
Not even a little bit funny at all.
And that is why I like it.
Schedules are everything. What's happening? Put it in a calendar, and put the calendar in a calendar, and set the alarms. Context first, then the text inside, and let the damn subtext figure itself out.
April 15, 2007
I do, I did.
I am still, be it said, getting hang of the four defenses against libel.
those being:
truth (this shouldn't be shaky)
consent (waiting for that one to come up)
fair comment (all the damn time--look it up)
privilege (?)
If you think I haven't, by the end of typing this, proofread it sufficiently, you would be wrong.
Then, however, you also wouldn't be you.
So.
On cowardice, of those who know my name, Adom Jeffers alone was thus far cognizant that midway--I think it was midway, maybe somewhat more far--
through a cross-country race, I quit.
Walked. Walked for maybe a whole minute!
marking the slant, obv.
(To mon ami: sorry. He helped me out: 'comment ça va' or something like it, he asked)
And I started again so late--even at that level of competition, five second's rest is much.
Charitable, very, to call nothing else blunt. I once thought (I do still think, but in early age thought) very literally, cross-country The Race.
Across the country: was there any more race? No! Ocean, only! Splash! Choking on salt and tuggy undertow! Though even in first grade I rationalized: surely it was only a distance equivalent to the breadth of Canada, run (by the CC runners, so I'd fabricated) over the course of a year. Olympian, worth the singular article and capital R. But doable.
Why in god's name--?
But I certainly did, mon ami.
My two best long-distance races (oh, I am definitely a long-distance runner, even if one who made bad mistakes) ended in me throwing up.
actually, my very best, my medal-winner, did not (good for me, I brought home my lunch and a medal to boot)
but the other two...
Most unpleasant successes. Or, to borrow from First Year, [they] brought the inside out
(gross; uncalled for)
that is, unravelled, as evolution; or, the down- and up-side of natural selection
(so uncalled for. But I did win that medal).
Just so: embarrassing, that first editorial. But, dear God, how I'm ready to slather my brain, or heartblood, across a page, provided it's the right one (it hasn't). And on the other side--bread (why not!) in the sandwich (?! I ask) with my poor head as meat--one leaden, firing straight as fuck.
I do not want to be forward
I do not want to be straightforward I don't
want--sometimes, and too often--
I don't want to be.
'nite.
--
But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they
I am still, be it said, getting hang of the four defenses against libel.
those being:
truth (this shouldn't be shaky)
consent (waiting for that one to come up)
fair comment (all the damn time--look it up)
privilege (?)
If you think I haven't, by the end of typing this, proofread it sufficiently, you would be wrong.
Then, however, you also wouldn't be you.
So.
On cowardice, of those who know my name, Adom Jeffers alone was thus far cognizant that midway--I think it was midway, maybe somewhat more far--
through a cross-country race, I quit.
Walked. Walked for maybe a whole minute!
marking the slant, obv.
(To mon ami: sorry. He helped me out: 'comment ça va' or something like it, he asked)
And I started again so late--even at that level of competition, five second's rest is much.
Charitable, very, to call nothing else blunt. I once thought (I do still think, but in early age thought) very literally, cross-country The Race.
Across the country: was there any more race? No! Ocean, only! Splash! Choking on salt and tuggy undertow! Though even in first grade I rationalized: surely it was only a distance equivalent to the breadth of Canada, run (by the CC runners, so I'd fabricated) over the course of a year. Olympian, worth the singular article and capital R. But doable.
Why in god's name--?
But I certainly did, mon ami.
My two best long-distance races (oh, I am definitely a long-distance runner, even if one who made bad mistakes) ended in me throwing up.
actually, my very best, my medal-winner, did not (good for me, I brought home my lunch and a medal to boot)
but the other two...
Most unpleasant successes. Or, to borrow from First Year, [they] brought the inside out
(gross; uncalled for)
that is, unravelled, as evolution; or, the down- and up-side of natural selection
(so uncalled for. But I did win that medal).
Just so: embarrassing, that first editorial. But, dear God, how I'm ready to slather my brain, or heartblood, across a page, provided it's the right one (it hasn't). And on the other side--bread (why not!) in the sandwich (?! I ask) with my poor head as meat--one leaden, firing straight as fuck.
I do not want to be forward
I do not want to be straightforward I don't
want--sometimes, and too often--
I don't want to be.
'nite.
--
But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they
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