this week i

miss you motherfuckers.  look at these humans.  did wesley schultz or levon helm or jacopo sannazaro or frances macdonald sing ophelia best?

noticed "reasonably" in "they were all waiting reasonably for the train" in abortion pressure in the basque terminal bar in "hills like white elephants"

maintain convey.  and high quality word of the day.  negalomaniac next time.  irs estimates top one percent avoids $175 billion, audit rates decline

steamed crab, updated advertisements.  constellations the original connect the dots.  pretend to be the cool kids until you surprise depose them


read the brief and wondrous life of oscar wao by yunior, huascar, project oscar.  todopoderoso appears, omnisciente the more pertinent superpower

 so stupid he thought the moon was a stain that god had forgotten to clean

that's what she called him whenever she was feeling tender or wronged.  mister.  later she'd want to put that on his gravestone but no one would let her, not even me

he was nineteen and lived down at the jersey shore with his seventy-four-year-old father.  in the back of his oldsmobile on university i pulled my leather skirt up and my fishnet stockings down and the smell of me was everywhere

for about a month they scromfed in various isolated corners of the school until the day a teacher, acting on an anonymous tip from a member of the student body, surprised the undercover couple in flagrante delicto in a broom closet.  just imagine: beli butt naked, her vast scar like nothing anybody had seen before, and jack with his pants puddled around his ankles

there it was, the decision that changed everything.  or as she broke it down to lola in her last days: all i wanted was to dance.  what i got instead was esto, she said, opening her arms to encompass the hospital, her children, her cancer, america

one of the authors of the king james bible traveled the caribbean, and i often think that it was a place like samana that was on his mind when he sat down to pen the eden chapters

are you awake?
if it's about star trek-
it's not about star trek.  he coughed.  i have heard from a reliable source that no dominican male has ever died a virgin.  you who have experience in these matters-do you think this is true?
i sat up.  dude was peering at me in the dark, dead serious.
o, it's against the laws of nature for a dominicano to die without fucking at least once.
that, he sighed, is what worries me.

i didn't bother with the romance.  i let him take me to a love motel on our first "date."  he was one of those vain politicos, a peledista, had his own big air-conditioned jipeta.  when i pulled my pants down you never saw anybody so happy.
until i asked him for two thousand dollars.  american, i ephasized.
it's like abuela says: every snake always thinks it's biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose

each morning, before jackie started her studies, she wrote onto a clean piece of paper: tarde venientibus ossa

abelard had rehearsed a dozen answers to this question, but his response was pure reflex, came out of nowhere: yes, jefe, you are correct, i have two daughters.  but to tell you the truth, they're only beautiful if you have a taste for women with mustaches.
for an instant el jefe said nothing, and in that twisting silence abelard could see his daughter being violated in front of him while he was lowered with excruciating slowness into trujillo's infamous pool of sharks.  but then, miracle of miracles, el jefe crinkled his porcine face and laughed, abelard had laughed too, and el jefe moved on

his tio rudolfo, who was watching the game on the tv, took a moment to call out, in his best grandpa simpson voice: prostitutes ruined my life

in the dr they called a cop-divorce a bullet


this week i

rented creekside treehouse, tommy crocus bloom.  truck only to eat past eight, we stayed employed friday, built corrugated bonfire near bamboo, agreed exposed pipe a superior shower.  sheriff left post-its on window while at lancaster central market sampling the twin dental rinse cups of a passenger one and one.  no time for neighbor tandoor, nor cauliflower crust.  full of frosty fries, revised woody allen's chronicle of earl of sandwich


read scrimshaw by leslie linsley

add more engraved lines in areas where you will want a concentration of color.  if you engrave the lines close together, the color will appear darker.  do not paint the surface.  the color should only appear in the engraved lines

buff like mad

carol is british and began doing scrimshaw in england on a cow bone.  she told me that when she met dennis he told her about scrimshaw so she tried it on a cow bone.  she said that when she started it was most difficult to remove all the meat from the bone.  had she had her dog, luke, at the time, it would have been a lot easier, with luke providing most of the labor

raw umber or burnt sienna oil paint

"do you scrimshaw too?" i asked.  "nope, just scrimshelling"



listened to episode 132 of the history of english podcast

the foods essentially served as was thought that every single item of food had a fundamental nature..and when different foods were combined in a recipe, they had to be balanced so the dish wouldn't disturb the humors and make people sick.  so an ingredient that was deemed hot and moist had to be balanced with an ingredient that was deemed to be cold and dry..the physicians had to be consulted when formulating these recipes.  we can still see vestiges of this old idea if we look around us, and if we know what we're looking at.  today, if you go to a pharmacy or a drug store or a chemist's shop, you'll probably encounter the symbol, rx, which is a standard symbol for a medical prescription.  but what you might not realize is that rx is really an abbreviation, and it's an abbreviation of the word recipe..the word recipe was often abbreviated with the letters rc.  but instead of writing the c as a separate letter, it became common to write the c as a little stroke across the leg of the letter r, which made it look like the letter x

asked laura how lincoln's 1864 union opponents printed 10,000 flyersstone cold lithography, with crayons

watched on location with george carlin (1977) and complaints and grievances (2001)

get on the plane.  get on the plane.
fuck you!  i'm getting in the plane

i also like otto because otto is toot inside out

you can prick your finger, just don't finger your prick

here are some more people who deserve an inoperable tumor at the base of their spines

i'll bet you anything that ten times out of ten nicky, vinny, and tony will beat the shit out of todd, kyle, and tucker


this week i

knew plato's republican treasure sunk in ship of fools lyrics, not till today satisfied with their tune.  beyond the louvre, justice for these words exists

learned mausoleum derives from tomb of mausolus - provincial governor of the first persian empire -  one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.  now buried amongst "stunter's rest" graves of niagara's oakwood cemetery, annie edson taylor pushed the limits of cooper technology early in the first of six roosevelt administrations, zoidberg resembles second-term vice president fairbanks.

watched federico fellini's seven-nighted la dolce vita, bacchanalia punctuated by drunken naps and abrupt curtain closings.  keaton's sherlock jr. plans recreation footstep by footstep, romans leave the schedule to the city and limit their preparation to pleading with one another to stay awake

remember the trees they felled to make room for her inside out botero sculptures on new york avenue, not only inspired by gaudi

read infant mortality eugene o'neill's long day's journey into night.  a drunken family brawl before prohibition, over money, morphine, measles

he could hide behind a corkscrew


with irish blarney


tyrone: sorry i'm late. captain turner stopped to talk and once he starts gabbing you can't get away from him

jamie (without turning-dryly): you mean once he starts listening

leave it to you to have some of the stuff hidden, and prescriptions for more! i hope you'll lay in a good stock ahead so we'll never have another night like the one when you screamed for it, and ran out of the house in your nightdress half crazy, to try and throw yourself off the dock!

i can't imagine you a holy nun, ma'am.  sure, you never darken the door of a church

he wears his pince-nez, and is playing solitare.  he has taken off his coat and has on an old brown dressing gown

tyrone (disgustedly): ach!  keep such sentiments to yourself.  i shouldn't have given you that drink.

edmund: it did pack a wallop, all right.  on you, too.  (he grins with affectionate teasing)  even if you've never missed a performance!  (aggressively)  well, what's wrong with being drunk?  it's what we're after, isn't it?  let's not kid each other, papa.  not tonight.  we know what we're trying to forget.  (hurriedly)  but let's not talk about it.  it's no use now.

tyrone (dully): no.  all we can do is try to be resigned-again.

edmund: or be so drunk you can forget.  (he recites, and recites well, with bitter, ironical passion, the symons' translation of baudelaire's prose poem)

"be always drunken.  nothing else matters: that is the only question.  if you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

drunken with what?  with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.  but be drunken.

and if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'it is the hour to be drunken!  be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of time; be drunken continually! with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.'"

(he grins at his father provocatively.)

tyrone (thickly humorous): i wouldn't worry about the virtue part of it, if i were you

i'm as drunk as a fiddler's bitch

i claim edwin booth never saw the day when he could give as good a performance as a trained seal.  seals are intelligent and honest.  they don't put up any bluffs about the art of acting.  they admit they're just hams earning their daily fish


this week i

found "why hadn't poor human eyesight selected out?" searches unsatisfying.  is a giraffe the original periscope?  the great war had the best hats

own roughly five hundred books, that's one book per week for the decade or one book per month till doom

receive ruffles selfies ad pawseam

hey revati, one argument against having an only child is anthony

what does zora think of all this

she's old enough to wonder why you're wearing a tie

 watched rashomon, a multiple-retelling of in a grove on the subjectivity of the truth

watched sunset boulevard, buster keaton plays pinochle

you're norma desmond, you used to be in silent pictures, you used to be big
i am big.  it's the pictures that got small
read the japanese photobook masterpiece ravens by masahisa fukase by torchlight, single-use tea candle, usb charging lamplight, corona coasters