agony

lumbar vertebrae. architectural collapse. odious.

Andrena pruni

The first bees of the season are Andrena pruni, nesting in a huge suburban aggregation, under hedges, in garden soil, a little on the silty loam side, but nothing spectuacularly sandy, and certainly not mud banks. there must have been two or three hundred males, digging around for females to root out of the ground, to which they would apply their furious male copulatory energies. Live fast, little bees.

semesters

they come and go like waves washing some primordial beach. i am the beach, i suppose, as one semester after another comes crashing over me, i erode, pulverize, move in subtle fashion, but to all appearances, here i am as millions of gallons of water move northward, or downward, and on through the gill rakers of strange fish, over branching gorgonian polyps, through vast tropical adventure. this desk of me has been in this room since some time in the 1980's I think, or earlier, and was placed in this location, in part, because of a dream I had in 2000. it is the still center of a turning world here. few things change, but the steady stratification of grade files, like geological layers, progresses inevitably. buried like trilobite fossils are the grades of my friends who have taken the class and gone on to do other things. Little Hateful, there you are in an odd deposit taught by a visiting professor, My Clone, there you are twice, once as a student, second as a TA, and the rest of you, like paleozoic fish. one more wave crashes, and now is that strange moment where water begins to ebb rather than flow, small crustacea forage.

window plastic season is over

it is grey and pale and it excites me to no end. the puddles. the rainy-day recess of youth full of board games. the sudden encroachment of rivers, pooling wetlands under our tent, waking us from sound slumber. out there, somewere, there are still snakes, and anglerfish. in here, my coffee is mostly used up, and i play games with time till class begins. a bell. a beginning. suddenly, i feel it, like the tulip syllables and choruses of mighty cardinals.

Just a note

Just a note to decipher the subtext of the text...to reevaluate the coming of spring and the far from inevitable presence of tulips, to ruminate on the presence of golden-capped kinglets foraging among bits of straw and the smiles of a very small friend who kicks me in the stomach at night, loves Gravedigger, nestles gently into her mothers arms to stoner rock radio at night. A tail light is fixed, a baby is born, quiche is not made. Buttons are an anachronism. Dopamine is in short supply, for want of a beast to hunt or a damsel to save, but the sword is still sharp. Love remains. As does rain.

A Tale of Two Hot Dogs

A Tale of Two Hot Dog Stands

a Culinary Review by Psykko Butcher

There are those people in life who are so obsessed with the superficial images of things that they become enveloped in a mist of their own illusions.  These are the Sham Mirrors, to borrow from Arcturus, set up in the culinary landscape to sell a simulcrum of a thing.  They proliferate, in gentrified parts of town, and account for so many duplications of the primordial Irish Pub that I can scarcely look at a backlit plastic shamrock without retching

  Rockstar dogs, despite its wonderful location, and vintage edifice, bisected by decades past road expansion to mere sliverhood, is such a place.  the hot dogs are named after rock bands, yes, though nothing so adventurous as a plague bringer, or an anal cunt.  No matter, the staff is underpaid and consequently inefficient and unfriendly, and the dogs all taste the same.  True, the hot dog is a synthetic culinary life form known for its dubiousness.  Still, my Led Zepplein was the same crap I could get for much cheaper at a real fry pit llike Mr. G's, and be surrounded by actual grease, not kitsch grease.  The fries at Rockstar suck too.  Burned, from staff obliviousness, and probably supplied by the Aramark cesspool.

  I will gossip, dear reader, and mention that the owner, Dion Antic is a legendary charlatan, a kitschmaster par excellance, founder of such culinary dens of iniquity as Iggys and others too numerous to mention.  Iggys, in its day, was lovely though, for all the cocaine left over on the tables and the waitstaff, so buxxom and tatttooed as to ooze rockandroll.   there is no rock here, only crap food.  801 n Ashland and there is on on armitage, open late, but why go?

   By contrast, Hot Doug's is a shrine to the dark god of the Wiener.  Far off, in an unfashionable stretch of California, it draws culinary pilgrims from every distant planet.  the line is formidable here, my bandmates and I have never escaped waiting outside, often in the rain, for a hot dog.  But oh, what hot dogs.  Rabbit meat, Fois gras, Venison, authentic Cincinnati chili, Duck Fat Fries, and busy staff that somehow manage to be polite and funny.   They work in the halls of the gods, plain and simple.    3324 north california m-sa 10:30-4

The Nugget Grows

The nugget appears here decked out in her traffic cone dress.  Cutest cone on the lot, and able to comprehend a completely autonomous version of reality.  Last night, my birthday, her mom dressed her for Metal.  She loved the loud music and new faces.  Ruby, it is fun waking up near you, your optimism in the face of each new day is a lesson we will not forget.  

New vocalizations today, spent some time implementing surprised shouts, pique, infant pique.  So ephemerable, this person, who transfigures with each passing day, like a tulip, or a skunk cabbage, rising from black earth, much of its program preset by genes and previous development, but nothing in her biology prepares her for elevators, Blue Oyster Cult, the Green Line flowing over traffic.