- We might not buy thirteen acres of land near Dexter Michigan
- What arrives yesterday but a Home Owners' Association contract to sign and fuck that my first thought
- I've never been in a Home Owners' Association and every association I have in my head about HOAs says fuck that
- but a week ago we got to Gaithersburg earlier than expected because of light traffic so we drove through Washington Grove to kill ten minutes
- Washington Grove still looks like it did fifty years ago
- because of its notoriously strict Home Owners' Association, people can vouch
- The contract for this still farmland's HOA
- (no one has bought anything much less built)
- says dogs, cats, fowl, and horses OK
- no other kind of animal
- specifically in Earthgirl's case, goats and alpaca
- (I've let Earthgirl know this isn't a deal-breaker for me)
- We did get easement rights to build a driveway over a gasline and permission to tap into that gasline so we can contribute to climate change with natural gas instead of propane or heating oil
- My daughter's father-in-law told me, when Earthgirl and I were just starting to gauge what future housing prices and where in Michigan, be careful of HOAs, especially lakefront HOAs, but all HOA's, though good luck finding anyplace in Michigan without an HOA
- We've since voiced our concern to the real estate agent who, in expressing our concerns to the seller, impressed me to a confidence in her I hadn't
- the seller wrote a thoughtful and friendly email back, maybe this isn't as skeevy as it seemed of a sudden
- Nap is old for his years, nothing is imminent and his kidneys are good
- he has heart disease
- which of the two most prevalent in cats only a cat cardiologist can determine
- BUT xrays revealed advanced arthritis in both his hips
- he is in constant pain I'm told, we have drugs for that now
- <iinsert> nap photo
- Vet said, how many cats have you in your life, I said lots, he said, even though it happens the same way each time each time you miss the slow day by day signs
- Imagine how shocking it will be how people we remember from often contact but haven't seen in months and months will look in real life when you ever see them again and then imagine *their* look at *you* when they do same
- I had a 930 appointment today for a regular check-up for Fleabus, no, no thank you, can we do next Saturday?
- I would rather live in HOA Washington Grove times infinity over non-HOA Michigan
- another reason all posts but two a year are tagged My Complicity
- both of them the reason I'm moving to Michigan under our HOA contract
- <iinserft>fleabus photo
- Cult of America
- American justice
- Liberalism, class, and the politics of austerity
- Incrementally challenged
- How easy is it to build a robot assassin?
- Economics, the profession, is a disgrace (with reminder, Jeff, not to talk about work here, though I can say, I vouch about the assholes)
- Obamasshole (not me) is only one of the words I use
- Point and counterpoint
- Incrementally challenged
- The restaurant sucked but it was a Moco landmark
- Sentences (not me)
- Poets (not me)
- Nobody (not me)
- On my newly acquired New York Review of Books edition of Gaddis' The Recognitions: my eyes, what time? Now with The Recognitions and JR and The Sotweed Factor and George Mills and both Brunists (though I still think about the second one, Wrath, daily since reading it for the second time in 2018 when in Maine, daily) and GV and M&D and AtD and all the others but especially the killing whales novel I just pick up and open and read where I landed until eyes hurt and I have to be elsewhere, that elsewhere almost always sleep, and what about all the other things I want to read?
- I vouch for Gnod
TOILET PAPER INVECTIVE WITH SELF-FLAGELLATION
Marcus Wicker
Toilet paper takes center stage amid coronavirus outbreak. Be thankful we no longer use corncobs and rope ends.
—Washington Post
Some of you future motherfuckers oughta be
ashamed about the state of your ply count.
Ol’ hologram square, skid tread-
bare, pressed-dandelion-dust-on-a-roll-having
jokers. Bet you’re allowed to have company over.
For shit’s sake, fam. What you know about Chanel
Cottonelle? Perfumed & powdered
as your Great Aunt Merle. Sounding like a Sunday
summer trolley unspooling, yawning along Prairieside.
More than any well-armed spice rack or herb garden,
elite TP soothes ennui. Scoff if you want
but it worked for me. Way back, before the virus.
Perhaps, secure in your weekly haul of oatmeal
& toilet bowl cleaner, dear reader, you will see this
& feel like 2020 Twitter user
Ant_the_Champ3:16, who famously wrote:
& for everyone who missed the toilet paper rush;
cannot one just jump thine fonky ass in the shower
right quick?! Valid question. Latecomer,
during the recession of ’08, dad’s nest egg
crashed, mom’s job went. Vanished
without warning. No notice. I was comfy
as you, off to grad school. Insulated
from worry & blame. Subsisting on
Slurpees, popcorn, licorice rope. Writing
important things about Flava Flav.
From an apocalyptic lens, I suppose
I have always been a little Icarus—
firstborn son who saw sun in his reflection.
As if, by studying light, inside an eclipse,
I might touch a magical push-button switch
that would handsomely reward my hubris.
It seems like every few years I’m moving
somewhere. Usually south, in pursuit of the
“next big test,” next job title, next for what?
A couple of bumps in my FICO score?
Another book, more air between us?
Maybe I could have helped, stuck around.
Maybe I should have kept slinging
Cadillac engines. Should have oiled the invisible
door hinge that swings uneasy, between me &
most of my loves. There’s a 6-foot gap
betwixt guilt & grief that’s viewable only by
forensics. You’ve got to scald it, shame.
Scour the stain with steel wool pads & a high-
power microscope. Everybody I know wants
to score a quick fix for the escalating problem
of closeness. Suddenly, everyone wants to leave
home owner associations
ReplyDeletei am part of one and have been from time to time advised to conform my property's appearance to community standards - i grumble some but i comply
i would be willing to enter another hoa in future - such associations are part of the legal landscape in my ancestral province, i have just learned, which is where i would prefer to move if the opportunity presents itself
toilet paper
during a recent trip to costco the only toilet paper available to purchase was made from bamboo - but not the kind that pandas eat, it was asserted on the package - imported from one of the u.s.'s top three trading partners
prophets
i was disappointed in ian welsh's blog on this topic - thanks for linking to duncan mitchel's reply
i looked up the 'toilet paper' epigraph from wicker's poem - it was published in march of this year, and the author was michael ruane - although not the poker player by that name
Deletei looked up other poems by wicker - some deal explicitly with race and religion and violence in a contemporary american context
then, through a series of semirandom events, i was reading about race and religion and violence in a middle eastern context a thousand years ago - peripatetic asian american writer linh dinh is now in lebanon and quoting accounts of the crusades - strong stuff
https://www.unz.com/ldinh/next-month-in-jerusalem/
[should i explicitly state here that when i suggest something is interesting to read, i am NOT saying 'you should not only read this, if it interests you, but agree with it completely'?
thirty years ago i got a book from liberty university's library by interlibrary loan, and it was stamped with a version of that disclaimer - later, one of my nieces graduated from that university - while falwell sr. was still in charge]
returning to wicker's poem here - not the first lines, but the last - Suddenly, everyone wants to leave & love & live like they’ve been paying attention - i was reminded of this when i read in linh dinh's piece something from dostoyevsky
“The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is "contemplating" something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It's true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it--why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both.
with regard to bast shoes, wikipedia tells us
Bast shoes are shoes made primarily from bast — fiber taken from the bark of trees such as linden. They are a kind of basket, woven and fitted to the shape of a foot. Bast shoes are an obsolete traditional footwear of the forest areas of Northern Europe, formerly worn by poorer members of the Finnic peoples, Balts, Russians and Belarussians. They were easy to manufacture, but not durable. Similar shoes have also been made of strings of birchbark in more northern areas where bast is not readily available.
Bast shoes have been worn since prehistoric times. Wooden foot-shaped blocks (lasts) for shaping them have been found in neolithic excavations, e.g. 4900 years old. Bast shoes were still worn in the Russian countryside at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today bast shoes are sold as souvenirs and sometimes worn by ethnographic music or dance troupes as part of their costume.
In Russian, they are called lapti (лапти, sing. лапоть, lapot); this word is used as a derogatory term for cheap and short-lived footwear and, in the form lapotnik (лапотник), also for an uneducated person, notionally one who is too poor to afford good shoes and wears bast shoes instead.
speaking of saving one's soul, as dostoyevski does -
DeleteThe Serenity Prayer is the common name for an originally untitled prayer by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prayer has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. The best known form asks for serenity, courage, and wisdom; the extended version is -
God, grant us the...
Serenity to accept things we cannot change,
Courage to change the things we can, and the
Wisdom to know the difference
Patience for the things that take time
Appreciation for all that we have, and
Tolerance for those with different struggles
Freedom to live beyond the limitations of our past ways, the
Ability to feel your love for us and our love for each other and the
Strength to get up and try again even when we feel it is hopeless.