Friday Fun

Clancy asks, “Why aren’t you making your own comics? You could really do some cool, creative ones, I bet.” To which I might offer the sincere (albeit smart-alecky) response: well, why aren’t you writing fiction, Clancy? You could come up with some cool, creative stories, I bet. And I’d enjoy reading them.

That’s only part of an answer, though. Another part is that I’m a rotten and contrary bastard, stubbornly opposed to doing stuff I see other folks doing, whether it be quizzes or comics.

But, well, Clancy, I’m grateful, and you’re too kind: that was a generous comment. Here’s page 1 of what might turn into a six-page (or longer?) response.

I have my mom’s pair of wing chairs: fine things, with much history. She was proud of them. She was a librarian, a county government employee, who excelled and earned herself substantial recognition in her field — her Library Journal reviews are likely among the first you’ll read at Amazon for many books — and those chairs, reupholstered many times, are a part of the geography of my childhood. So, yes, I inherited them, and with some of the money from the will, I had them reupholstered again. (In their last incarnation, they were baby blue. Sorry, Mom — but really: baby blue?) I’d had no idea that reupholstering was such an expensive thing to do. And of course, the very minute that the chairs are in the apartment again, what does the little fartling Zeugma do? She sharpens her claws on them. I’ve got cardboard scratch-pads set out for the girls throughout the apartment. I’ve got hemp-tied boards nailed up for them. For cryin out loud, I carpentered them a cat tree. But no: we like to sharpen our claws on the furniture. (Not Tink, who knows better: no, it’s just Zeugma, my little queen of destruction, when she wants attention.) I mean, I caught her tonight actually hanging by her front claws, two feet off the floor, from the back of the chair. And giving me a look like, what?

Mmm, new upholstery.

A longer story about the peacetime Army, circa 1995. This one’s still got a whole host of problems — huge clich

Tink and Zeugma are past the screaming freak-outs they were having a while back, which is an immense relief. Still, Tink’s very protective of her individual space, to the point where she’ll growl or hiss if she spots Zeugma creeping too close. And the word is, yes, ‘creeping,’ because Zeugma’s figured out — bless her poisonous little feline heart — she likes yanking Tink’s chain. So she’ll wait for Tink to get settled down in that prime early-morning sunbeam spot and then get hunkered down low to the ground a few yards from Tink and — in full view of Tink — start waggling her hind end like she’s fixing to pounce. And of course Tink will wail and hop up and go run and hide at the top of the cat tree, leaving the sunbeam spot for Zeugma.

Which isn’t to say that Tink’s a complete chicken. I was typing up some notes on Booth’s Rhetoric of Rhetoric last night, with Zeugma curled up near my chair, when Tink dashes into my office, cuffs Zeugma twice on the head, and dashes out.

And so yeah, all this has a point, said point being why I went into campus with one soggy foot today. The girls have figured out what time my alarm goes off in the morning, and Tink is usually quick to sit on my chest if I’m not out of bed fast enough, and I’m usually half-awake before it goes off anyway, listening to the morning business of the restaurant downstairs (now that Bob Edwards is gone, NPR’s Morning Edition ain’t got nothin on the six-o’clock smell of home fries), and listening to the girls on their morning apartment prowlings. This morning it was cat-tag, and before my alarm goes off, Zeugma comes tearing across the bed in hot pursuit of Tink, a quick circuit around the bedroom, and then Tink’s skidding across my chest in the other direction and taking a header off the nightstand. The nightstand atop which the glass of water I’d gone to bed with rested, and on the far side of which — knowing today would be a cold day — I’d placed my boots.

You got it. Glass and water, thirty inches and one hundred and eighty degrees into the right boot: nothin but net, sports fans. I don’t think she spilled a single drop on the carpet. Like, I had to search for it, I mean I knew there’d been a spill, but where was the glass? Right there, upside-down and intact, its base barely below the top of my boot. Which is why, for most of the morning, I was in a pissy mood, and making a squishing sound with every other step.

Across the horizon’s desert shimmer, the train station alone. Weathered yellow brick and smooth dark glass, set back a half-mile from the eight-lane freeway, surrounded on the other three sides by arid wasteland, dunes of dead sand that stretched to the horizon. On the side opposite the highway, three train-sized portals yawned dark and high. Three corresponding quarter-mile lengths of track had been set forty feet past these openings, six parallel streaks of bright steel, too hot to touch. Beyond them, rough tar-covered ties slick and sticky in the heat stacked some distance away, and heaps of gravel. From the adjacent side, facing southward, a platform stretched to the sand, from which a wide set of concrete steps — bordered on either side by an iron railing, and divided down the middle by a third — descended the face of a long, steep dune.

There were no trains.

The station was abandoned, unscathed by the bombings, scorpions and kangaroo mice its first and primary denizens. They fed on the garbage of long-gone laborers, building nests of blue-printed wiring diagrams, hiding in the cool stone halls from wind-blown styrofoam cups. Water dripped. Dust drifted. Sometimes, the ground shook, and there came a muted rumble from far away.

And black smoke rose from the highway. An ambulance convoy burned, sixty-two vehicles the target of an airstrike. The only survivors were wounded, but — further — the wounded had been the only survivors: the ones whose maiming had been a preexisting condition, the litter and stretcher patients. A trail of the dead led from the scorched and twisted vehicles to the train station.

Those who were conscious and ambulatory raided the first-aid lockers: no medics to guard the caches of morphine, Ringer

I hope you might have noticed that the characters in these Army stories overlap; that a character from one story will show up in another. It felt like an important thing to do, like a way to give these people a depth for you that I already know.

Anyway. For this weekend, a story about mothers seems appropriate. Enjoy.
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Last year, the brilliant miniaturist Michael Barrish wrote an entry titled “C0cksucker” that begins, “So it

Making up for lost time here: I’ve been uneven about posting. I hope you’ll forgive.

Here’s a winter / anti-winter poem.
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In my dissertating work (which, yes, has been uneven lately), I’m looking at an intersection, a nexus: the wired writing classroom as a place where rhetorics meet students meet communities meet technologies meet economies meet teachers meet classes meet writings meet publics. The nexus, itself, imagined as a single space comprising multiple elements, and each of those elements multivariate: publics are as diverse and diversely defined as economies, economies as diverse and diversely defined as rhetorics, and so too for classes, students, and the rest.

This intersection — singular in its abstracted space, in the way I try to hold its relations, it is legion — scares me. I can’t take all this on, I say.

But I am, I want to say back. If it was easy, somebody’d already have done it. If it was just a thing, a single and separable thing, you’d hardly do a dissertation on it.
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