Only a Dog Who Chews a Ragged Rawhide Chew Toy

While waiting for the graduation procession to begin on Tuesday, SeatSix and this guy were telling me how much this blog sucks, especially trying to read it on a phone the size of half a graham cracker - (use your imaginary whiny voice) the photos are too big, the youtubes take too long to download, the motherfucking blogroll scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, it takes forever for the fucking blog to load, and then there's that whole links won't open in another window piece of blooger shittiness (that was me). (Speaking of blooger shittiness, what the fuck is that +1 box next to a 0 box doing down at the bottom of every post? I didn't put it there.)

I agree completely, it takes too long to load, though know this: the too big photos and youtubes are non-negotiable: they stay, you go. But I've reduced the number of posts per page from ten to four and I've changed Because Left and Because Right blogrolls (which are stocked with new flavors, yo, and suggestions are always solicited) to only show the twenty-five most recently updated blogs. I have not disblogrolled you; you just haven't posted rapidly enough. Sometime, if I get around to it, I might create a sub-Because for those sites that don't feed the updating blogroller. Or not. And until blooger gives me a links open in separate window toggle switch, please right mouse; I'm not fucking with html.

It seems to make some small but good difference loading on my laptop. As always, thank you for the Kind; please nudge me if I'm not reciprocating.

• Clusterfuck.
• Perpetual war: The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.
• The accidental bombings will continue.... Here's what we're doing in Afghanistan: floating the ponzi, for one, you can figure out numbers 2 through X all on your own....
• Class and common sense.
• Zombie politics, democracy, authoritarianism.  
• B-movie.
• Conspiracies for you and me.
• Thick as thieves.
• Oinker.
• Oinker. Gov. Chris Christie arrived at his son's baseball game this afternoon aboard a State Police helicopter. Right before the lineup cards were being exchanged on the field, a noise from above distracted the spectators as the 55-foot long helicopter buzzed over trees in left field, circled the outfield and landed in an adjacent football field. Christie disembarked from the helicopter and got into a black car with tinted windows that drove him about a 100 yards to the baseball field. During the 5th inning, Christie and First Lady Mary Pat Christie got into the car, rode back to the helicopter and left the game. During a pitching change, play was stopped for a couple of minutes while the helicopter took off.

• I'm certain the media will focus on his budget-cutting credentials. And yes, I know he's not the first, the last, of either party, who's done, is doing, and will do this. The fucker.
• Sarah Palin is authentic. The issue isn't the fork, the image is the fork.
• Sarah the angry bear. 
• On Palin.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• On the above.
• Oinker.
• He likes girls. 
• Boatload of links.
• Things you might have missed.
• I wonder if Boorman knows about impending Captain and Tennille. 
• Worms from hell! 
• Of course. Since the first female boss.
• Little Bennett! Some decent hiking.
• My future hell. 
• Purple line.
• Where I and Landru and Elric went to high school!

• I'm not going to blog Gold Cup like I blogged WC10, though I'll post things like this if I see them. And yes, fuck Bob Bradley.
• New word marks for Maryland.
• Johnny Halladay.
• John Fowle's typewriter.
• Notes on the future of academia.
• HEY! Look what Irwin played yesterday!
• Followed by Amanda! Listen to Amanda. Both of them. And Joel Clark and Dan Tullis. Fuck it, listen to the entire show. Start to finish. Do it.
• Because you won't, after that song and Amanda and then scramble he played this. At least listen to it loud for me. No; for you.
• Pardon my heart.
• I know what I want and I want it right now.
• Finally we are no one.
• The same mistake. 
• Obscure Sound's best of May.
• Where I'd be if I could be (music, not the lectures).
• On Feldman.
• Crippled Symmetry.
• For John Cage.

SPACE STATION

Tom Sleigh

(Note: a space station generates gravity by revolving one way and then another. When it reverses direction to revolve the other way, there are several moments when gravity is suspended.)

My mother and I and the dog were floating
Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware
Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted
Just below the ceiling. The dead who had been crushed
By gravity were free to move about the room,
To take their place at supper, lift a fork, knife, spoon—
A spoon, knife, fork that, outside this moment's weightlessness,
Would have been immovable as mountains.

My mother and I and the dog were orbiting
In the void that follows after happiness
Of an intimate gesture: Her hand stroking the dog's head
And the dog looking up, expectant, into her eyes:
The beast gaze so direct and alienly concerned
To have its stare returned; the human gaze
That forgets, for a moment, that it sees
What it's seeing and simply, fervently, sees...

But only for a moment. Only for a moment were my mother
And the dog looking at each other not mother
Or dog but that look—I couldn't help but think,
If only I were a dog, or Mother was,
Then that intimate gesture, this happiness passing
Could last forever...such a vain, hopeless wish
I was wishing; I knew it and didn't know it
Just as my mother knew she was my mother

And didn't...and as for the dog, her large black pupils,
Fixed on my mother's faintly smiling face,
Seemed to contain a drop of the void
We were all suspended in; though only a dog
Who chews a ragged rawhide chew toy shaped
Into a bone, femur or cannonbone
Of the heavy body that we no longer labored
To lift against the miles-deep air pressing

Us to our chairs. The dog pricked her ears,
Sensing a dead one approaching. Crossing the kitchen,
My father was moving with the clumsy gestures
Of a man in a space suit—the strangeness of death
Moving among the living—though the world
Was floating with a lightness that made us
Feel we were phantoms: I don't know
If my mother saw him—he didn't look at her

When he too put his hand on the dog's head
And the dog turned its eyes from her stare to his...
And then the moment on its axis reversed,
The kitchen spun us the other way round
And pressed heavy hands down on our shoulders
So that my father sank into the carpet,
My mother rested her chin on her hand
And let her other hand slide off the dog's head,

Her knuckles bent in a kind of torment
Of moonscape erosion, ridging up into
Peaks giving way to seamed plains
With names like The Sea of Tranquility
—Though nothing but a metaphor for how
I saw her hand, her empty, still strong hand
Dangling all alone in the infinite space
Between the carpet and the neon-lit ceiling.