"Doctor Leibniz mentioned to me long ago that there are two sorts of intellectual labyrinths into which all thinking people are sooner or later drawn," said Caroline. "One is the composition of the continuum, which is to say, what is matter made of, what's the nature of space, et cetera. The other is the problem of free will: Do we have a choice in what we do? Which is like saying, do we have souls?"
- Neal Stephenson, The System of the World, p. 678-9
i.
there must be more than this.
it's not brilliant, not even close,
not even close to the domino thought
he'd like to think is teetering
inside my mind
somewhere
and is not.
it is not about to fall, it is not a domino
at all,
just a slight feeling of
sleepiness.
this is description more than emotion,
no color, only phrase, no depth, only
wit,
or the lack of it.
and punctuated, why?
ii.
she is not impressed,
sitting there, wearing
a great scarf, aquamarine,
beautiful, reading then
looking up, eyes bending,
a slight smile, a laugh -
i wish.
The Good Shepherd is good, but too much whispering. too long, and with a lot of hats.
yesterday i injured my big toe playing basketball, bent the nail back, bled on my bedsheets. bandaged it (too late) today, hadn't thought it was all that bad.
hence, had to do laundry, limping.
so it goes, the day after Kurt Vonnegut died. here's a great bit from Slaughterhouse-Five:
Billy got out of bed in the moonlight. He felt spooky and luminous, felt as though he were wrapped in cool fur that was full of static electricity. He looked down at his bare feet. They were ivory and blue.i just love that -- "he felt spooky and luminous..."
Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table. Somebody had stoppered it again. "Drink me," it seemed to say.Vonnegut was one of my first real heroes, the only person i've ever sent fan mail to. sent him a story i wrote in high school that was basically a copy of his writing style and the plot from Cat's Cradle, but populated with my English classmates, all acting in an imagined future extrapolation of their personalities. for instance, class president Oleg was a mad scientist. most of these friends and classmates of mine are all part of the same karass, but unknowingly, and in ways that only become revealed during the course of the story. and in the end, the world ends.
So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.
....and then it was time to go out into his backyard to meet the flying saucer. Out he went, his blue and ivory feet crushing the wet salad of the lawn. He stopped, took a swig of the dead champagne. It was like 7-Up. He would not raise his eyes to the sky, though he knew there was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore up there. He would see it soon enough, inside and out, and he would see, too, where it came from soon enough -- soon enough.
Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn't a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore, navigating in both space and time, therefore seeming to Billy Pilgrim to have come from nowhere all at once. Somewhere a big dog barked.
---
first there was unguent, then there were no bad experiences.
now there's this. my thirdest blog ever. until because.
