Jeremiah's School of Levitation

I had this dream about a demure British girl who prepared a wonderful meal of tea and crumpets for me and she spoke to me softly and smiled when I spoke and I fell right in love with her and remained in love with her even after I awoke. Beyond the moral issue of being in love with a woman who's not my wife, is the psychotic issue of being in love with a woman who, as far as I know, exists only in my head. (Okay, that's TWO sentences. Maybe I'm "developing". And, by the way, my wife knows about the dream girl, and she approves!)

So, I did the "procedure" and my diagnosis, with the heading, "Good News!" read, "I only found a polyp, which I removed, some internal hemorroids, and evidence of a past ulcer in your small intestine", which, of course, made me wonder what the hell the BAD news was....

...(there was none!).

Labels: body

Tomorrow I go in for a colonoscopy AND an esophagogastroduodenoscopy (I'm going to make my doctor pronounce that, and if he can't, I'm fleeing the procedure--being able to pronounce what you medically do to me is one of my unwavering requirements) which means, among other things, in order to prepare, I had to drink the phospho-soda to clear out my guts and, four hours into the "cleansing", I now have personal, graphic, confirmation that 60% of my body is most definitely water, or, at least, there USED to be 60% worth of water inside me.

Labels: body

The sunset made the clouds look like burnt orange staircases leading up to the moon.

We're temporarily without a driver's side sideview mirror, and in driving around without it yesterday, I found myself looking at the spot where it used to be as I attempted to change lanes and I, of course, couldn't see behind myself, but I still almost changed lanes, as if through the power of will, the way was made clear.

Okay, so here is how I plan to become a bettah bloggah. I got this idea--okay, COMPLETELY STOLE--this idea from a site called onesentence.org. All the entries on this site are simply ONE sentence long. All the contributors need to do, is to tell their stories "briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials."

I have tried this and it is a remarkable way to focus your thinking. If you can distill your day, your thoughts, your fleeting fantasies and your harsh realities into one sentence, then you've actually come a long way toward training yourself as a writer to only say the essential thing that your mind is trying to form, to only create a diamond from the coal of experience (wince). Of course, with this discipline mastered, you can then move on to two sentences, five sentences, a page, a story, all rendered in intense, probing sentences that could actually hurt (so good) to read in succession.

Not to say I'll come anywhere near delivering that sort of visceral experience, but I will write a sentence a day to, at least, keep myself in practice. Now, what the onesentence.org site doesn’t explore is the sentence itself. A sentence need only have a subject and a verb, like "Work sucks.", and, actually, it can just be a minor sentence, like "Hey!" or it can be some labyrinth of stream of consciousness thought process a la Virginia Woolf. Or, it can be some James Joyce-ian pastiche of literary, societal, and mythical reference that only makes sense to a handful of people. Whatever. Depending on my mood, my sentence may be any of those, or may be some style I completely make up (or STEAL).

So, yeah. A sentence a day is all I'm putting myself on the hook for. This ought to get me blogging more, so that I can again annoy you on a daily basis. All I will assure is that the sentence will be real, in that, it will actually apply to some experience I had during that day. And, it may be some cop-out like "Dude!" (I promise I won't do that too often) to today's initial (reach of a) sentence:

"My cat jumped from my second story window and landed in the clump of Jacob's Ladder flowers and not against the corner of the window boxes jutting from the first floor windows, thereby sparing her life and, when we retrieved her, we figured she'd go nowhere near that window again, however, the first thing she did when she came back in was to rush to the exact spot she had fallen from."

I was going to reveal my "post-a-day" strategy today, but, my heart is keeping me from it. I instead have to send whatever good will I have the spiritual ability to send out to the people in Minneapolis. I live in a city of bridges, a lot of them stretching over beautiful expanses, and I shudder at the horror the victims must have experienced as they were participating in a routine, and possibly calming, commute. Yet more proof that hell has the keys to everyone's life. I'm extremely affected by what happened and I hope the best for the survivors, and, at some point, some measure of peace for those who didn't survive, and their families.

I'll resume normal operations tomorrow...

Over the sporatic course of my blogging (by the way, I've come up with a great way to assure that I blog everyday--details tomorrow!) I often get caught in the trap of thinking that, to remain aloft, afloat, sidereal, frivolous, and irrelevant means to always present an air of cheeriness. But every now and then, in real life, when I glance at my face in the rear view mirror, I ain't smiling so big.

No worries, I tell myself, as I suddenly spot a freeway sign that reads: "Caution: Weaving traffic ahead" (So, does this sign mean that we are no longer denouncing drunk driving but, instead, are now just endorsing a practice of careful tolerance? Will we start seeing signs at airplane entrances that say "Caution: Pilot has not been subjected to a test of blood alcohol content"?) And, so, the smile returns to my eyes.

However, this doesn't absolve me from needing to acknowledge that, really, in order to stay celestial, I need to jettison the negative load every now and then. And, the way to do that, for me, is to go kick a cat. KIDDING!! See, that already felt better. No, what I need to do is kick the FIGURATIVE cat, that is, just give a wink to my dark side, write it a little serenade, and inveigle it to come out and see the light of day. Well, when ole DS complies, and comes out, it meets with the killing sunlight and that dark weight squeals pitifully in the revealing light of day and burns off like a lit fart, thereby lightening my load. I then use the gaseous remains of its flaming demise to provide lift for my umbrella.

I do this regularly, in my journal. It's often too incendiary to print (but, if you can wait until my posthumous biography, you can read them all!), but I'll cast out a few of my "Odes to the Dark Side" here in the blog, just so you too can feel my pain! Or, smell the lit fart! Ewww!

Here goes, unedited:

"I left the door open last night and so the trash got in. It came right up to the bed and got in with me. At first, I didn't notice, but the unmistakeable odors of eggshells still slimy from the yolk and orange peels reeking the spice of decaying citric acid and milk gone to seed all wrapped me and squeezed me awake. I turned and, with my nose in a bunch, I embraced the trash and pulled it close. A bit of old meat found my lips and I parted mine and wiped the bitter meat with a gentle swipe of the tip of my tongue. It was unresponsive, yet alive with putrification. I pulled the trash closer until I couldn't tell where trash ended, and I began. I like it when we love this way, trash and I."

Labels: dark side