The Subject May Hoard His or Her Bubbles

That's the trail to top of South Bubble -  we climbed both South and North Bubbles yesterday. Ascents in Acadia are rarely more than 1200 feet - South Bubble is only 800 - but the sense of accomplishment - and the reward at the top - is kaboom. We've been fortunate, by the way: quite by luck (guidebooks are for shit, the online trail descriptions are for shit) we've encountered the difficult, the hoisting ass over boulders, shimmying through crevices, hunching under tunnels, hauling 56 year old bodies upward on metal wrungs hammered into purchase-less granite, going uphill: doing these downhill would scare the fuck out of me. Maybe today.

The bubbles - here's Earthgirl yesterday eating breakfast on one yesterday - are huge boulders that are glacial erratics - rocks carried by glaciers far from their place of origin and deposited as the glaciers retreated and melted. Here they are pink granite - the natural granite here is white.

Also, I found the local disc golf course yesterday late afternoon, playing later today or tomorrow.

Also, I could get very used to not going to work.

Also, I could get very used to this, the view, right now as I type this, to start every morning:

• There is a reason all posts but two a year tagged My Complicity.
• Living it all over again only backwards.
• Trump and the founding myth of a movement.
• It's depressingly unsurprising that anti-Trumpism consists mostly in vigorous affirmation of neoliberal fuckery.
• The American Spectacle. Debord and POTUS.
• Today's useful Duh: The thicket of unreality that is American politics has now become all-enveloping.  The problem is not Trump and Clinton, per se.  It’s an identifiable set of arrangements  -- laws, habits, cultural predispositions -- that have evolved over time and promoted the rot that now pervades American politics.  As a direct consequence, the very concept of self-government is increasingly a fantasy, even if surprisingly few Americans seem to mind.
• In a house besieged. 
• Some thoughts on voting for the newly disillusioned.
• Maybe he should have twitter, or not.
• Reading Karamazov and Dick Gibson Show on vacation. Mitya has just been arrested in the first, Gibson has just killed the last dodo in the second.
• No one writes set pieces like Stanley Elkin. I wrote my masters thesis on Elkin twenty years ago and read so much to write the thesis I've read so little since. It's coming back to me.
• Hah, I wrote that first paragraph this morning - sit down, sip coffee, tap tap tap the keyboard - after a night of reading Elkin, I'm such a fucking mynah bird.
• This is the second time in last month I've encountered the name of poet Alejandra Pizarnik, so once I again have access to a university library's interlibrary loan service....
• Hymn to Life.
• Yesterday in the car on the drive-arounds:

PITY THE BATHTUB ITS FORCED EMBRACE OF THE HUMAN FORM

Matthea Harvey

1.  

  

Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet

Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen

A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through

Where the marble is worn away with industrious

Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say

Because the queen does not want room for splashing

The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king

Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are

Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys

Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only

Support then is what she gets in the bathtub she floats

Never holds her nose and goes under not because

She might sink but because she knows to keep her ears

Above water she smiles at the circle of courtiers below

Her feet are kicking against walls which cannot give

Satisfaction at best is to manage to stay clean

2.

 

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the whims of

One man loves but is not loved in return by the object

Of his affection there is little to tell of his profession

There is more for it is because he works with glass

That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable

(she does not love) he knows how to take something

Small and hard and hot and make room for

His breath quickens at night as he dreams of her he wants

To create a present unlike any other and because he cannot

Hold her he designs something that can a bathtub of

Glass shimmers red when it is hot he pours it into the mold

In a rush of passion only as it begins to cool does it reflect

His foolishness enrages him he throws off his clothes meaning

To jump in and lie there but it is still too hot and his feet propel

Him forward he runs from one end to the other then falls

To the floor blisters begin to swell on his soft feet he watches

His pain harden into a pretty pattern on the bottom of the bath

3.

 

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human

Form may define external appearance but there is room

For improvement within try a soap dish that allows for

Slippage is inevitable as is difference in the size of

The subject may hoard his or her bubbles at different

Ends of the bathtub may grasp the sponge tightly or

Loosely it may be assumed that eventually everyone gets in

The bath has a place in our lives and our place is

Within it we have control of how much hot how much cold

What to pour in how long we want to stay when to

Return is inevitable because we need something

To define ourselves against even if we know that

Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out

Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement

Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too