The Eternal Question

“Were the eight coins worth my death?”

–me, after completing a timed objective and then biting it for the 400th time while playing the New Super Mario Brothers Wii

7:35 AM

“Ask me what anything in the world dreams about,” says Jack, mashing his face into the red pillowcase beside me.

“Beavers,” I mumble.  It’s still dark in the bedroom;  there’s very little ambient light scattering around the curtains, which means it’s grey and overcast outside.

“Um…  chewing wood.”

“Chewing wood?”  I don’t open my eyes.  “So, you’re saying beavers have no creative capacity.  They just spend all night dreaming about the same thing they do during the day.”

He rolls back and forth, twisting his small body up in the sheets and blankets.  “What do clocks dream about?”  he asks.

“Parties,” I tell him.

“Parties??!”

“Yah,” I say.  I open one eye and fix it on him.  “Clocks keep track of time, right?  And the date?  So they know when all the parties start.  And when they end.  But nobody ever invites them.”

He thinks it over.  “What do radios dream about?” he asks.

“Watching TV,” I say, sitting up.  “Because of the pictures.”

One Small Blessing

(image by Option8)

—

With the proliferation of IPods, IPhones, Blackberrys, Motorola cordless earpiece phones and other such contrivances these days, nobody realizes anymore that I’m just talking to myself!

Nine is Not Enough

I’m not sure what happened up there, but I’ll bet it was interesting.

Idle Speculation

At any given moment, how many gallons of coffee exist within the entirety of the City of Mists?

Yes, I Remember

Remember the 1340’s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790’s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

–“Nostalgia”, Billy Collins

Five Questions from Yoko

Here’s the five questions that Yoko asked me:

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Five Questions from Nickykaa

Yoko is running a meme on her LiveJournal account where you can either ping her to ask her five questions that she will answer, or you can ask her to ask you five questions, and then answer them on your own journal, offering the same conditions to your readers.  LiveJournal refuses to play right now, though, and their formatting sucks ass, so I’m cross-posting here, where I’d rather post anyway.

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Culture Shock

“In the Golden Realm, if you are walking down the street and smiling, people assume you are happy. In the City of Mists, if you are walking down the street and smiling, people assume you are insane.”

-Nickykaa, from a letter to me