Many Trophies Show Us Frozen

Yes, this is the second consecutive Meerkat Thursday, as long as Ken keeps posting meerkat gifs on his Wednesday morning radio show there will be Meercat Thursdays. So we didn't go to the US Open Cup game. One of Planet's uncles woke up with a grippe and bagged, logistics from work would have made making it by game-time iffy (fucking United even starts these games at 7:00, Germantown Maryland, a 7:00 start, cause there's no rush hour traffic in Montgomery County, like there aren't just two two-lane roads into SoccerPlex), and wicked thunderstorms were predicted to start by late game (as it turned out, that was a false concern). Fine metaphors abound, where once I wouldn't miss a United game in Germantown because United, the whole point of the evening was a family reunion. And United won, there will another game in Germantown in two weeks, though of course no one saw that coming when we decided not to go.

• I'm not going to do the research, but I'm certain that the need for Sun Kil Moon cascades are often followed by the need of Mazzy Star cascades.
• Story about a relative (a panopticon technician) who is thoroughly disgusted with me re: Manning/Snowden, I could tell you the story but won't because it's private .
• Story about a friend (whose wife is a upper tier panopticon poobah) who is thoroughly disgusted with me re: Manning/Snowden, I could tell you the story but won't because it's private.
• Overheard conversations about Snowden and fucking peasants by professors at work who couldn't give a flying fuck what I think,  they are influential motherfucking Grand Poobahs of the Royal Order of Buffalos (identify that allusion!) I could tell you what they said but won't because I'm just the hired help and I've two years left in the commitment I made 25 years ago. 
• Fine metaphors abound.

• Red room with spooks.
• Living in a virtual panopticon.
• The five stages of living in a national panopticon.
• Fed up with all the bullshit.
• Insubordination and the surveillance state.
• The banality of condemnation.
• One in three.
• BroadSnark's things you might have missed.
• Own to rent.
• At least one David Thomas song each day for June

• Tomorrow his birthday. Requests solicited.
• Ten Mile Creek!
• Meditations of an oaf.
• Gaddis, for those of you who do.
• Rachel Kushner interview. I'm halfway through Flamethrowers, it started fast, is slowing down, I have no idea if it's the book or if it's me.
• Love triptych.

DANGERS

Rodney Jones

From the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs,   

Happy to linger in shallows while others jackknifed from cliffs, wrong

To exact perfection from a sad piece or add notes to a proven tune;   

But ever the classicist:

                                     in swimming lessons, slowest to learn;

In fights, tentative, preferring the hammerlock to the jab and hook; cautious

In the earliest romances, choking in the clutch, fumbling the caress; or shy

Among the crew-cut Cupids bristling at the armory’s weekend dances;   

But shifty in every game, keeping it close. Always holding still   

And adjuring others to go slow

                                              until we leapt forward that night out of control

And pinned to the seats of Tyler Wilson’s outlandishly unstock Ford   

While, from the opposite side of the valley, scalding in each curve, came the black din

And brunt of Sonny Walker’s highjacker Chevrolet, everyone screaming   

And bearing down to be first across the bridge at Hurricane Creek.

Many trophies show us frozen: a leg poised for the hurdle, an arm cocked for the unanswerable spike.

What I remember through the windshield’s splintering lens is time, a mailbox

Rushing by, the letters TURRENTINE,

                                                      then darkness rolling inside;

Though memory, at best, retrieves maybe six percent in studio light,   

So even now I think we might have turned:

                                                               smart with his hands,

There is a kind of savior who blusters through the South, good with animals and machines,

Who surely somehow would have found a gap, through an open gate   

Into a marshy cornfield

                                    or up a logging road into a hillside wood.   

At any rate, there is just a little while, shy of any bridge, just as judgment

Balances its two blind alternatives and a third accelerates head-on.   

I’ve made a careful study: things that can only be accomplished in deep space,

In another language, in far history, at an almost incalculable speed. Courage is not included, or much foolishness.

They spin the purest glass, they split the atom, they speak with God.

They make a sort of Teflon hip and attach it with metal screws,   

Only the threads upbone keep stripping

                                                          so they have to operate

Again and again, and what she’s accomplished is more of a gait, really,

Than a walk, so when she moves toward me, across any room,   

I think too much of my own will

                                                implicated in that dragging brace.   

Each step is obviously trained, and the whole earned motion full   

Of muscle, plastic, and bone

                                           is coordinated by nerves even the   

Strictest dance does not require. She has said there is no fault,   

But even in such talk,

                                  grace occurs as an accident someone caused.   

If what I require is a thing too certain, braided from probabilities,

There is another thing

                                  articulated in the scars that saved her face—   

And no right now in that night we were shaken and rolled like dice, no right to

Say this guilt to be alive is love, or the opposite of lucky is wrong.