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.

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.

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

A Post Called Untitled

Lo, I live, and my hunger is unfathomable.

My mind is a diving board. A little goblin is springing up and down on it Make of this what you will.




-----
It's a terrible cartoon. You know who you are.

Hey Skeezix, You Ain't Cool.

Another what now? Mostly these days I'm trying to mollify Lucas. Seriously, an unmollied Luke is a slimy force to be reckoned with. A force of nurture. He comes over and starts imparting his customs and social cues to me, with a vengeance, like an angry mother chimp. Precisely like that, in fact. I'm still cleaning up from last time (I forgot to check under the couch).

The day our vacuum cleaner died a raccoon cub charged headlong into my bedroom window. It split the outside mesh from top to bottom when it bashed its head into it and almost tumbled off the roof. Now I think the ancient machine was the only thing keeping them out.

Maybe it threw off a supersonic carnivore-repellant hum. Possibly the raccoons carry a primeval awe akin to religion, focused by the totemic Hoover. I sealed all the windows and pushed a dresser in front of mine. I think I might board them up. Fools that we were to question those who came before us and left that vacuum behind. Too late I find faith in a bitter catechism of their scrabbling claws and the harpyish trill their frenzied cubs loose at the insane moon.

A Mind Like That

I need to get my hands on yesterday's Sunday Globe, to see for myself the banner headline "Kim Jong-Il: Crazy or Crazy Like A Fox?"

Yesterday was my first night as Copy Editor for the Varsity. Basically, it was awesome. The work was fun, everyone there was into -- hell, obsessed with -- honest-to-god print culture, peripheral at best in the rest of the places I spend my time. And I like that obsession. The work was fun, I'll be on the masthead, and I can point to any page of The Varsity and say I helped do that. Also, there was pizza. For those who are counting, that's three points out of a possible four.

The fourth point is for psychic powers, lightsabers, miracles, achieving enlightenment, or robots. So three is still very good.

The catch is that work started late afternoon and went on for 9 hours. So I got home at 2 a.m., and now I'm tired and seething with the deadly rage, always so closely underlying my cool millionaire-playboy facade, that takes over when my carefully cultivated restraint starts to waver. Tired, angry I am, and a little insulted over a religious matter involving a Brahmin, an endangered tiger, 47 lbs of cinnamon and a potato blight. I may respond with passive resistance. I may just go my own way. He assumed too much. I just knew too much.

Does that make me crazy? Like a fox.

Actual writing to follow when I can, you know, string words together to make sentences that develop and convey ideas . . . since you're all so into that sort of thing.