"Oh! Why?"

Last week, I went to lunch with some friends, and some friends of friends, who I didn't know. When someone mentioned that they'd always been interested in Japan, I leaned over the table and said,
"Oh! Why?"

In the past, I've felt such resistance to asking questions, I came to believe I lacked natural curiosity.

I was relieved to experience otherwise.
My two-word response was entirely unpremeditated.

In my family, we don't know a lot about each other, like birthdays, or whether or not our father is in the country. It's a system that doesn't really encourage curiosity, or communication in general, so it makes sense that those muscles would be weak in me. But I'm un-exercised, not crippled.

Speedy Racer Life Uniforms

Speedy Racer SPACE


Speedy Racer RACE


Speedy Racer PLAY


Speedy Racer SLAY


Speedy Racer LORD BYRON

Great fun

[This happened over a year ago when I was working at a Taco Bell in the wilderness of Oregon. For no reason I haven't bothered posting it until now.]

A co-worker and I were talking about the State Fair.
A woman eating alone at a nearby table looked up and said,

"I ran away with the carnival for a year once. Came back pregnant. It was a lot of fun though. Great fun."

[Has Bruce Springsteen written a song about this?]

Photo by Diane Arbus

Bruce Springsteen (1)

“It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity.”
Mahatma Gandhi

I find it helpful to start with something I disagree with.
gGod likes ABUNDANCE! Which is---what?---the quality of Quantity?
And anyway, it's only gGod.
But I mention gGod because the feeling I get watching Bruce Springsteen is familiar only in a Religious context. Something like the Christian idea of Conviction, described to me as gGod's thumb on your heart, and the weight of it not having to do with guilt, but with the cloud of Definitely Wanting To Be More.
The gGod with the thumb would be the same gGod of Vito's Ordination Song (Sufjan Stevens), who says, "I have an idea of you placed in your mind".

Bruce Springsteen is abundant. If he has more to say than the beats allow, he crams it in at a faster blur, even to repeat a repeated idea, and it's all approximately I'M HUNGRY FEED ME WHOA. Or NEON LIGHTS MOTORCYCLE FUDGE-CYCLE, SUZY!
And he's disturbed me lately.
Like 22 seconds into "This Land is Your Land", before he even starts singing, I went rigid and began weeping. Then I had to go sit quietly at the nearest Laundromat, where I experienced actual physical paralysis and could only move my left thumb for an hour.

Here's the screencap of when it happened (I haven't watched the rest of the video, and wouldn't risk it at this point; I'm blogging in html so I don't have to look at this):





What pushed me into hysteria was the sweat - the willingness to spend yourself.

I tried to write this yesterday and gave up, but feeling squirrel-y at 4am, got up to try again.
I don't have Bruce Springsteen's energy, and in fact I'm going back to bed.

Kirk/Spock painting by Tommervik

Rollerblading

Looking at these pictures Frex took of me rollerblading, I was impressed by how much space I take up. I look the size of a fully grown adult human! If I were to charge at someone, they'd be alarmed.

INTRODUCTION TO CAKE

This is one of my favorite poems. It's about cake, which I've lately come to think of as very important to our Human Feelings. The outpouring in the poem is a little comical, but absolutely valid. A Virginia Woolf biographer once wrote, "The facts did not justify her emotions", but if you trace any fact enough, you find cake. Cake is an emotion. "I feel cake."

To Mrs K____, On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris

By Helen Maria Williams

What crowding thoughts around me wake,
What marvels in a Christmas-cake!
Ah say, what strange enchantment dwells
Enclosed within its odorous cells?
Is there no small magician bound
Encrusted in its snowy round?
For magic surely lurks in this,
A cake that tells of vanished bliss;
A cake that conjures up to view
The early scenes, when life was new;
When memory knew no sorrows past,
And hope believed in joys that last! —
Mysterious cake, whose folds contain
Life’s calendar of bliss and pain;
That speaks of friends for ever fled,
And wakes the tears I love to shed.
Oft shall I breathe her cherished name
From whose fair hand the offering came:
For she recalls the artless smile
Of nymphs that deck my native isle;
Of beauty that we love to trace,
Allied with tender, modest grace;
Of those who, while abroad they roam,
Retain each charm that gladdens home,
And whose dear friendships can impart
A Christmas banquet for the heart!