Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

Here’s a shameless plug, but I’m also spreading the Internet love, right?

This site is fun, for seeing the strange bits we all doodle during our days.

http://www.doodlerblog.com/

And here’s my contribution, taken from this very blog by the kind editors at Doodle Blog.

http://www.doodlerblog.com/2009/05/vampire-potato-doodle/

Thanks for the shout-out, you Doodle loving world.

Less than a week later edit: OK, so it doesn’t take Google a week to get back to you. Now I just have to play around with their ad options.

Afternoon edit: OK, so the first thing I have learned is that it takes a week for Google to approve me to host their ads. We’ll see… check back in a week if you’re desperate to see an ad in a blog.

META BORING BLOG STUFF

This Blog, in case I have been too subtle (Ha, I kill me*), is partially a bit of my life as related to my schooling at the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Now that I work for VCU, I have gone from being a full time student in the Media Art and Text Ph.D. program, to being a part-time student in same.

As part of my part timeness, I consider my entire web presence to be divided between my personal life, my public life, my school life and my teaching life.

Thus, I am trying an experiment. WordPress informs me that the most popular plug-in for WordPress is Google’s Ad-Sense.

While I am now of the not at all original feeling that Amazon and Google were at one time SOOOO cool, but are now The Man. Or is that Men? I still want to try out things in case my students want to try out things so that I can perhaps save them the trouble or make a million dollars, whichever comes first.

And hey, if you’re not seeing any ads, that probably means I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to set Google’s Ad-Sense up, or Google didn’t deem me worthy. Either result is fine with me.

Now, if I can only find a way to make Amazon also my best friend. Anyone have its number?

* Oh, and I wanted to give props to Scott Adams of Dilbert Fame for the line: “I kill me”, when referring to a joke told by oneself that isn’t really funny, but does make one laugh. In this case, the one is me. I suppose it’s always me when one is saying one, but that also sounds weird. Mr. Adams (soooooo my hero for the creation of Wally, all that is right in the attitude department), used that line in the introduction to one of his books. I hesitate to even mention his name here. I’m not worthy.

OK.
I’ve decided to try and give myself a bit of a kick to start writing my small ambient musical themes.
I’m terrible at picking band names. Famously terrible. At least among my friends and bandmates.
Ask anyone.
But that’s beside the point, what’s done is done, right?
I found a scrap of paper that had written on it: mybeautyofwickedness.com.
Which I think is just one of those random site names I think up, and then check to see if they’re available, and that one still is available, but I thought it was too long for a band name.

But I liked the word wicked, both sarcastically, in a silly way, and in a more serious but at the same time how can I possibly take myself seriously with a name like that, sort of way.

Then I started looking for words to go with it. I settled on deep. To me, it sounds like a band that would consist of a bunch of guys with really long greasy hair wearing tight leather pants and screeching about the devil. That image makes me laugh, so I’m going with it.

When I do finally manage to post some music there, instead of the screeching, you’ll find ambient music of various types. Sadly, I don’t screech very well, but I can make a guitar make some sounds that you might find screech like.

I’ll work on it. In the meantime, like all good mySpace people, I want friends.
So, please look for: www.myspace.com/thedeepwicked
And I’ll befriend you faster than you can The Deep Wicked. Hee. It makes me smile every time.

Today I managed to get up the guts again to get on stage. This time I was helped by four other guys, who kindly offered to let me be in their group, even though the groups were at first limited to four.

Today’s exercise was, I’m given to understand, a classic improv exercise. Yes, it’s true, I’ve been living under a rock that didn’t allow comedy to penetrate. Then again, I guess nothing gets through a rock. Dang.

To wit:

We stood on the bare stage. Black stage. Black walls. A few odds and ends of flats, today painted black with silver streaks that were perhaps clouds or something.

The class, or audience, if you will, yelled out a word. Each person of the group was in charge of one word, for example, my word was ‘cannibalism,’ yelled out by my teacher.

I then launched into an explanation of cannibalism, how it didn’t exist, as we understood it, but rather, like many notions of other cultures, was a creation of some white 19th century English aristocrats, who, on one of their many trips into the jungle, got hungry, and were forced to eat one of their own. Rather than admit what they had done, they blamed it on the indigenous people’s of wherever they happened to be.

“It all happened so fast, it was uncanny! And poor Al, if only we had a convenient -ism we could hang this on. Wait, Canny, AL, ism? Cannibalism. It’s perfect! And the name is sort of a tribute to our dear departed tasty friend Al.”

I wasn’t nearly so articulate when talking.

After I rambled about cannibalism for a while, I stood back, at which point, someone yelled, SCENE! and we had to do a scene with cannibalism as its source. Or some part of what I had said during my rambling as its source.

Due to the genius of my cohorts, I survived, and I think there was even some laughter out there, but the experience is so frightening on one level, and then in addition to do well it seems it’s best to have a blank mind, that I remember little of what happened while on stage.

I do remember pretending to use a dart gun to blow darts at my other stage partners.

Which turned out to be filled with sugar. Which meant that one person was even better to eat, except that person had diabetes.

During our time on stage we also dealt with the origins of gargling. Walruses, and had to deal with the word shenanigans. Which is a pain of a word for improv. Believe you me.

***

Which all brings me to the word of the day, also props out to David for talking to me while I mumbled this word into existence: sufferment.

(Of course, it’s already a word, but at the time, I didn’t know that.)

As in, the act of suffering, only more immediate.

And for some reason, a bit Southern in its reach.

“Oh Lord, that child is such a sufferment to me in my old age, whatever shall I do?”

Then we talked about peppermints, and David mentioned how he had always wondered about saltymints, and then I decided that the word of the day could also be a category of mints, suffer-mints. Suffermints?

“You look like a happy chap, care for a suffermint?”
“Why yes, I was feeling pretty good there for a minute.”
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?”
All laugh.

And there was a suggestion of sacra-mints.

The line of mints is endless.

By the time I arrived at Uncle Stephen’s it was clear that grandmother’s concerns about him burning down the back-forty were not going to come true.

He sat by his fire and burning at its center was the last of a hollow tree he had cut down.

I had seen the tree as a row of cut pieces behind his house for my entire life.

Now, the last piece burned.

“Pull up a seat,” Uncle Stephen said, and pointed at one of his cracking lawn chairs.

The remaining section of tree contained the fire and its center was bright red, the heat burning my face.

When I scooted the chair away from the fire, its legs grooved the soft ground. Grandmother’s concern about Uncle Stephen setting the property alight was needless, as it had been drizzling all day.

The misty rain fell down and met the rising smoke.

I sat down.

Uncle Stephen flipped opened the cooler, and inside, beside the usual cokes, was a bag of ice and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I took a coke.

We watched the fire.

Twilight crept on, the fire cooking our fronts, the night cooling our backs, and depending on the direction of the wind, the rain dampening our clothes, which then dried in the heat from the blaze.

Uncle Stephen had been told by his radiologist that he was dying. His neurosurgeon said the opposite.
The second opinion had had no helpful opinion.
The third opinion had had no helpful opinion.
Uncle Stephen was back to the first two, and was spending his days wondering.

I had never seen Uncle Stephen drink before, but he was using the same jelly jar he used for his cokes.
The rain fell on us, and we drank.

The fire popped, and in turn, that sound was broken by the drag of ice cubes against Uncle Stephen’s glass.

“Did you bring them?” Uncle Stephen said.

From my backpack, I pulled out the box of envelopes. One corner of the box had been repaired with masking tape.

The tape cracked off the box, but it left its stickiness behind. I thought, if I were Uncle Stephen, I would know what to do with that information, how the tape, the repairing agent, is gone, useless, but the failed attempt of the repair, the nasty stickiness, remains.

“You ready?” Uncle Stephen said.

“No,” I said.

He shook his glass, and made himself another drink. The moon had risen. Grandmother would be worried. She would be wondering whether or not to call the fire department.

“What you said about unconditional love,” I said.

Uncle Stephen leaned back into his chair and stuck his legs out in front of himself.

His legs steamed in the heat.

He gestured up into the smoke.

“You can see the moon reflected in the smoke, as the smoke passes through the tree branches,” Uncle Stephen said.

I followed the smoke as it wound through the branches, and saw the moon, as if the smoke were a screen.

I watched the moon on thickened air.

“In that unconditional love, you’re doing all the sacrificing,” I said. I held the sides of box. I had been thinking about this all night.

At school my her and her boy were no longer sitting together at lunch. But that was all I knew. Maybe all I wanted to know.

Uncle Stephen picked up a stick and dragged it across the ground, manipulating one leaf into the fire.

“You’re not thinking it through,” Uncle Stephen said.

Of all the common ways he chided me, that one bugged me the most.

“Let’s say, one day while I’m away from home, she reads through my journals. These journals she knows are private. The past, whatever, it doesn’t matter, but she’s looking for something.” Uncle Stephen said.

I thought of computers. E-mail. No e-mail when Uncle Stephen was dating. Of what it would mean to read someone’s journal. The opening of a book. Handwriting. It seemed like everyone I knew had poked around in their person’s e-mails. Their Facebook sites, the mySpaces, the blogs. Searching for what? Is it OK to break trust to find broken trust? Is there a way to glue it all back together?

“Do I not love her because she broke my trust?” Uncle Stephen said.

“That would be fair,” I said.

“Honesty. Fairness,” Uncle Stephen said, “Great ideas.”

“If you forgave her,” I said, “then you’re doing the sacrificing and she still dumps you for whatever reason?”

“Slow down,” Uncle Stephen said.

“If I love her unconditionally, then that means I have to forgive her, true, but if she were loving me the same way, then she would forgive me. Whether for the same faults or different ones, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Everybody sacrifices?” I said.

Uncle Stephen nodded towards the box.

“Yeah,” Uncle Stephen said, “throw them in.”

I looked down at the box of envelopes, and then at the fire that was the heat of an entire tree. While I had been studying the constitution, Uncle Stephen had been out in the rain, rolling the logs into the fire.

Burning.

Uncle Stephen had told me to bring them, and I had known what he was going to do. Or ask me to do. Maybe he couldn’t do it alone.
One unknown on an M.R.I. One bright spot in the smoky heaven of his brain.

I thought I might screw it up, one of the few direct things that Uncle Stephen had ever asked of me, but no, I tossed the box and it landed in the center of the flames, and then it was burning.

We both followed a few of the ashes as they sailed into the tree, their edges searing red against the night sky. But they all faded before they had gone far. And the pieces were dime sized. We weren’t going to set the world on fire.

“She didn’t love you,” I said.

“Shit,” Uncle Stephen said, “of course she did.”

“How do you know?” I said, “if she wouldn’t look past, whatever.”

Uncle Stephen drained his jelly jar.

“There were a lot of whatevers,” Uncle Stephen said, “and besides, she told me she loved me.”

“She told you?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you believed her because you loved her unconditionally, so you had to trust her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Uncle Stephen said.

Then he changed the subject, and I let him.

On the way home, I thought of what it means to lie. How I had never lied to him before, as far as I knew.

Maybe he had been done with the letters, but I wasn’t. I had kept the rest of the I Miss You letters, filling the original box with a set of grandmother’s old tax returns stuffed into her envelopes.

I hoped that whatever had prompted him to give them to me in the first place, justified me, somehow.

I hoped that he was able to watch the ashes rise and feel some weight lift from him.

A weight wrapped in one of my old T-shirts and now hidden under my bed.

Each one of his letters to her a secret, now, of mine.

Between Uncle Stephen and myself. And whoever she was. Or had been.
Pages after pages of omissions. And secrets.

I couldn’t bare to destroy anything of his, even something that wasn’t for me, and by her rights, perhaps I should not have seen.

Who owns the words, once the letter is sealed?

The dot had gotten to me too, its shining where there should be no mark, where light was never meant to be.