Nothing Is Plumb, Level, or Square

The blogroll reorg has been completed. I use the blogrolls as my bookmarking system. The primary (but not only) reason I moved from typepad fourteen months ago is I wanted the floating blogrolls Blooger provides, the self-updating function: I love it. Still, there are, for whatever reasons, blogs and sites that don't or can't feed the burners, and they sink to the bottom. Look! Over there in the left column, a new blogroll, just beneath the above photo of Fleabus, Feedless. All are worth your time.

Blegsylvania still in Giftmas slowdown, so yes, this is another mail-it-in post. As for Giftmas, I made out like a thief, especially thanks to SeatSix and Earthgirl - I now own my very first piece of Apple machinery. Tell me what apps I should download for the iPad, you fellow complicit capitalist stooges! And as much as I'd like to write about my MiL and BiL, you'll have to make do with songs, links, and poem.

• Imagine if the US media had covered Occupy like this.
• The trouble w/principles, or: how not to lose friends and alienate people while learning economics.
• Motherfucking cops.
• Law has no power.
• Occupy next year.
• The sustained crucifixion of Bradley Manning.
• E.J. Dionne is a profoundly stupid man.
• PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let Newt be cracker nominee for entertainment value alone.
• PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let Newt be cracker nominee for entertainment value alone.
• Two miles from where Earthgirl grew up (and where I was last night - her assclown brother still lives there). I drive by the old geospacial map campus all the time, it's still heavily guarded though no one comes or goes.
• The Shuffle.
• Have I ever mentioned I love Pere Ubu? Did you know this isn't the first morning I woke up with Pere Ubu in my head?

LOVE SONG: I AND THOU

Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:

     the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

     any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

     dance all over the surfacing

like maggots. By Christ

     I am no carpenter. I built

the roof for myself, the walls

     for myself, the floors

for myself, and got

     hung up in it myself. I

danced with a purple thumb

     at this house-warming, drunk

with my prime whiskey: rage.

     Oh I spat rage’s nails

into the frame-up of my work:

     it held. It settled plumb,

level, solid, square and true

     for that great moment. Then

it screamed and went on through,

     skewing as wrong the other way.

God damned it. This is hell,

     but I planned it. I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

     will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

     to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can’t do everything myself.

     I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.