bye bye birdy

The cardinal is gone.  The nest is hanging upside-down from the trellis, and I hope it was only temporary housing while her mate built them a condo in (an) Aspen (tree).
In Summer 1989, I went to stay with my family in Buffalo, Mo.  It wasn't my first choice but that whole moving-to-England thing didn't work out.  Though I knew my mom & stepdad had their issues, I was happy to be spending time with my siblings, and the isolationist in me looked forward to being in the middle of nowhere.  It turned into five months of walking dirt roads, babysitting, reading Ray Bradbury books, cleaning up shrapnel from moonshine-fueled altercations, and waiting for various friends to break me out.
On one of those long weekends, Imma handed me a stack of comics and said, "This is Sandman.  You should read it."  Or something like that.  And she was so right.  Sandman lead me to Hellblazer, which lead me to Swamp Thing.  Somehow Animal Man & DP snuck in to the mix, and there has been no turning back.  I am often thankful that my gateway drug was that perfect because I had always thought superheroes were stupid, a bias that could have left me quite deprived.
A few years ago, most of the titles I read had ended and I started picking up some new stuff.  Wow, have I had some disappointments.  But there have also been some very pleasant surprises.  "The Unwritten" and "iZombie" are two that I almost avoided because the subject matter seemed so tired at first but they both quickly became favorites.  Grant Morrison drafted a different map of Metropolis and Gotham, which I'm still trying to traverse.
It has now been a year since the DC relaunch and I am subscribed to more comics than ever.  Some have been really good and some have been the kind of action-packed soap opera that bores me to death.  And now that I've been revisiting the holy grails of my collection, I'm amazed at the difference in quality.  There is so much more story packed in to these older titles, more detail to pick up on in the art, more to think about.  Some of these new books are all "bang!  splat!" & "pick up next month's confusing crossover with one of the comics you don't read!"
Anyway, thank you Imma for getting me hooked.  Thank you Ray Bradbury for bringing so much magic to my little world.

Bedroom Drum

Just before 6am, there was a spook house fog puddled around Pinckney Elementary.  And packs of ghost bunnies spinning their cotton tails.  Maybe you don't believe in ghosts, but you have to believe in bunnies.
At work, with arms itching from enzymatic foam & germicidal detergent, I was filling my ears with Amen Dunes - Through Donkey Jaw.  The album sounds like Animal Collective & Roy Montgomery at a seance, channeling Kendra Smith.  What, you say you've fallen for that line before?  Hmm.
Last night I finally finished re-reading Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol.  It's something I've been wanting to do before death or handicap prevented it.  Twenty years ago I probably thought it was the weirdest, funnest thing I'd ever read.  Now I see that the really cool stuff was happening behind the glare of all that strangeness.  At some point I may wade into the pool of internet obsessives who have ferretted out every symbol and reference, but for now--I just dug out a stack of Invisibles to start on.

pale sunday

The sky looked like dingy laundry all day, and two dandelions strobed into existence overnight on my scrappy front lawn.  A cardinal has built her nest in a rose bush by the door.  Somewhere, offstage, a dog is barking.

Got the tapewurrrrm!

So, I wrote a couple of pages lamenting the lack of wordflow in my life, charting the devolution of my sometimes awesome letter-writing to sporadic email to an almost tongue-tied standstill.  It all sounded very déjà vu and turned into a rant against F*ceb**k, which was nothing new and really not what I wanted to express.
This post starts back on Memorial Day when my FB status update was going to be "listening to Pigface & getting girl-drink drunk".  I decided against it.  On the surface, it was true, but what did it mean?  It didn't feel right, given that a good friend's father had just passed away.  But aside from that, I can't shake the feeling that FB is a type of Tourette's.  People type the darndest things, no matter who might read them.  In a way, it's a relief.  It gets tiring sequestering parts of your personality and muzzling your interests according to whom your interacting.  But without context, what kind of image are we really projecting?  I need to inhabit my words, and I'm more than a soundbite.  So I decided that if it's worth a status update, it's worth fleshing out.
I have a b&w subway poster of Ohgr covered in blood and strangling on his microphone cord.  I don't have it up at the moment but I'm considering it.  I don't think the dog will object.  My favorite thing about that poster is that my friend Matt S once told me he had a dream that Ohgr was coming out of the picture & trying to tickle him.
On January 29, 1990, I went with Beth T & Stacey P to Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa to see KMFDM and Ministry.  I've seen Ministry at least three times since, but that has got to be the most fish-out-of-water group of people I've ever been to a show with.  We danced our asses off and Stacey got hit in the head with a beer can.
It's funny how our memories get cross-referenced.  I can't listen to anything vaguely Wax Trax-related without recalling Imma owning the dance floor to Front Line Assembly's "Virus".  She was surrounded by people throwing devil horns & I was never prouder.
Anyway, these moments and more float to the surface when I hear the first gurgly, fuzzed-out, screechy seconds of "Gub".  It opens a doorway into J & L's apartment on North Byers.  A shadowy living room with a fan in the window. Chocolate chip pancakes.  Two people in a claw-foot bathtub.  Don't judge.
I always have music going.  So if there isn't something specific I'm wanting to hear, I'm following the alphabet to insure it all gets listened to.  I am currently in the P section.  This time around I'm incorporating Jason's cds into the mix.  I'm finding things unfamiliar to me that I like & things I won't listen to again, I'm finding things that were mine that somehow strayed into his, and things that we discovered together.  Those are the best.
The carousel moved cd by cd until it came to the Pixies.  "I remember your red dress, like a field full of poppies".  But that's another story.
As for the girl drink...that involves a trip to a flea market with Matt, which watered seeds sewn by Imma and an episode of the Brady Bunch, which blossomed into a book case full of tiki mugs, exploring the drink menu at Grand Fortuna and, later, an interest in SHAG art, an early Summer that teased out my rarely worn Hawaiian shirts, my first rum purchase in over four years (Cruzan's Black Strap is very nice)...
There's a lot behind that status update.