My dogs are cooling their paws over at the folks’ place, while (not nearly enough) potential buyers (do not) tromp through my house. Although it’s easier to keep things pristine without the exuberant attentions of claw and tongue, I really miss the little mutts. Luckily, the interwebs have thrown up some intriguing examples of caninity lately.

Check out this flounder-like hound from Eric Yahnker:

Or this brilliant Calgary Zoo ad, found by my pal Andy:

And doesn’t this fucker just steal your heart?:

Here’s another bandito with his posse:

Goyaesque proof that puppies are edible:

This fine fellow’s not worried about being nommed, though:

Finally, here’s a little bliss, for a hot, hot summer day:

I spent part of the day at the folks’ house, jacked into their wireless and sneaking snurfles with my 4-month old nephew. At one point, I was online in the kitchen while the neph was napping in the next room. My gah, I thought to myself, Ford snores as loudly as The Subtle Boyfriend a grown man!

The kid missed Mardi Gras by months and Gay Pride by a day, but he has the rainbow beads for next year (by which time they will be well-chewed):

But the neph was not sawing logs solo. I’m hiding the other napper behind a link, out of concern for adult proprieties (and also to keep me out of trouble). So who else was in the chorus of snorers?? (more…)

It’s also where MJ should have stopped messing with his face. His nose is thinner, but he’s just all kinds of ferocious-pretty here:

I can identify this song in one slink-thud, it’s that much a part of my pelvis.

From the “Motown 25″ show, 1983.

h/t

I’m afraid we’re in for a Diana-style death orgy, now that Michael Jackson’s gone. We seem to need the sacrifice of a gifted freak every so often, to appease some restive culture god, or our own own gut-gnawing hunger for blood and a cleansing collective cry. Well, stand back, smooth criminals. Forget faithless govs and politicized persians and even fallen angels—we’ll be awash in tears and tributes for the foreseeable future.

And I’ll start mine here, with the part that makes me saddest of all. Watch this:

Oh, that voice.

This was back when Jackson was a young beautiful black boy; you can see hints of the man he’d become, but none of us had any idea how far past that he’d go. He’s not a kid in this, he’s got that lanky gangle going that would turn into the MJ we all remember, moonwalking into destiny.

I loved this song from Free to Be You and Me, and I remember feeling comforted by its message, as seventies-saccharine as it was. I wish Michael had been. Maybe we don’t have to change at all, but sometimes life changes us.

Shamon, moonwalker.

Just rest now.

All that’s missing is a “Here Be Monsters” symbol along the edge. The idea for making a mental map comes from this blog, which would, I suppose, make this a meme. I’m usually meme-averse (being lazy and somewhat shy), but this one’s not just navel-gazing, it also involves kindergarten activities: drawing! cutting! gluing!

Plus, I love maps. And the best thing about mapping your brain is that the terrain changes all the time. No sooner have you got yourself all figured out, when whole huge sections of worry or obsession get crowded out by new preoccupations. For instance, the Political Seething lobe that took up vast swathes of brainscape over the past eight years has shrunk to a small Obama Pleasure Center that didn’t even make the cut this time.

If I do this again in a few months, we could all hope that my house has sold and that all that space is taken up with good works, loving gestures, and an enlargement of my saving-for-a-rainy-day vessel. But why should I have all the fun? C’mon, get out your sharpies and your gluestick, and map your inner landscape. Then post a link to your cranial scans in the comments section.

PS: The above image is too small to really read my serial-killer scrawl. Go here if you want to see the larger version.

I think my cursor’s trying to tell me something:

So is my computer crazy? Or is it me?

And does it count as a vision if it’s on YouTube?

It’s 99 degrees today and I’m draped across my office chair, feeling like a stunned mullet. And that’s inside, where the air is conditioned to an arctic degree. But the heat has a hold on us all; it pierces walls, dews brows, saps drive. I haven’t recovered from my trip out for lunch and Stella, oh Stella! The poor pup is stretched out on the hardwood looking like someone shot her dead:

It was the sun, y’all.

What’s the temperature where you are?

Thanks for stopping by. Please buy my damn house!

People must have come to yesterday’s open house, because there are dirt and pebbles on the floor of every room. Usually, I wouldn’t notice, but the place has never been so clean and believe me, I CSI’d the shit out of the crap people left behind. My realtor said it had been slow at his other showings, and that the only people looking at houses on father’s day were “fatherless bastards.” So maybe the mud hitched a ride in on his lonely soles.

Whatever. It’s done. Or begun. Getting the house ready is the hardest I’ve worked on anything, and now it has to stay this way. I can’t leave any fingerprints, no signs of my messy work-at-home-with-dogs existence. It’s a little like the kids who ran away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basic E. Frankweiler, only there are no janitors here, and no priceless art. Instead of suits of armor and the Temple of Dendur, we have the engagingly grannyfied wicker chairs on the porch, on loan from my parents’ neighbors:

And the ugly, but appropriately-sized fake fern arrangement on the landing (my mom is great at proportions; she knew what it would take to fill the space without distracting potential buyers from the leaded glass windows):

Speaking of mom, I nearly broke her in the process of preparing the house. She was in charge of staging, since she’s got the eye, the skills, and the backlog of accessories from which to pull. Mom went on a high-stakes strafing run for decorative items and greenery on Saturday, bent on beautifying the back porch and several other not-so-hot spots. She arrived back at my place with sacks of treasures, then promptly went into atrial fibrillation at my kitchen table, as she was sticking candlesticks into holders. Hobby Lobby will do that to a girl. I enlisted dad to make her go take her medicine, but she refused to go home until her porch vision was realized:

Cute, no?

And look at how she transformed the small room at the top of the back stairs:

This used to be the kitchen when the place was a duplex, but you’d never know the curtain is hiding a junction box, and the Grandma Moses print is strategically placed to conceal two—TWO!—off-centered outlets in the middle of the wall. Shhh, don’t tell, Internet!

Mom’s an artist. She always has been, but she’s less shy about calling herself that lately, now that she’s got a studio of her own down in the basement. It’s been a long time coming, and I’m glad she finally has a place where she can make stuff (and store her great legions of artmaking stuff, as well). I’ll post some pictures, so we can all be jealous together. Her eager eye shaped and defined my own, which is one of the biggest gifts she could have given me.

Although her style is not easily defined, I can see an object or an artwork and immediately guess whether mom will love it:

Is it black and white, or perhaps the color pops?
Are there stripes, polkadots, or other stong geometries?
Does it have rhythm and texture and scale?
Is the shape pleasingly unique?
Is it strong and engaging?
Does it quirk and invite?
Can you see its maker’s hand, the wear of use, or the tidal actions of time?

And I know that whatever this thing is, she’d group it with others in a way that starts a conversation between the objects. Many people claim to be eclectic, but that’s my mother’s mother-tongue.

Thanks for the bringing the polish and flair, mom. Everyone who sees the place says it’s never looked better.

My house is on the market now and I’m alternating between snappishness and zenlike asskickery. Projects that long seemed daunting are now dispatched with grim efficiency, as I try to irradiate my cancerous to do list (of which there are many iterations, since I keep losing track of one version, then scribbling out another, which must be around here somewhere). The first showing’s on sunday from 4 to 5 PM, but I’ll be over at the folks, celebrating my father, reuniting with the mutts, and trying to breath like a regular person.

But that’s not why I’m blogging now. This post is about dad, who will be properly feted on Sunday, but who deserves a special shout out from me today. I can hear the mower going right now; dad’s out back making the lawn look nice for my showing. Before that, he wrangled the shopvac down into the cellar, so I could soak up the pond of despondence that formed when the condensation dealie in the upstairs heat pump developed a wee costly crack, now fixed (but not yet paid for). And before that, he spent a couple hours at the Home Despot, sourcing 1×4s and shelfboard, to transform the closet in the master bedroom from jankety-angled tour of torn and layered wallpaper into a sleek, white closet that will invite no particular comment and raise no dealkilling alarm in the minds of potential buyers. And all that was just today.

Dad’s been the engine of accomplishment in this house. He’s made it possible for me to live here without everything falling down around me, and he’s made it possible for me to leave here in what we all hope is a timely fashion. And even if he likes to spook me with dire money talk from Harry Dent, his horseman of financial apocalypse, while he spackles my ceiling or trues the walls of the garage, I know it all comes from love, and hope for better times and better judgment.

So thanks again, Quiver. If I could, I’d buy you some big expensive woodworking tool or a camera that takes pictures up so close, you can capture the traceries of insect wings or the dusting of pollen on stamen. But instead, I propose a roadtrip that involves some of our favorite things: 2-lane highways, weird geology and erosion, historical markers, interpretive centers, and best of all, prehistoric bones.

I remember a thousand adventures with you that involved some or all of those things: Morrill Hall, the prairie on my birthday, our drive to Atkinson when I first decided to move back. In honor of those memories, and with the goal of building new ones, let’s head to Ashfall soon, and have another adventure together among the rhinoceros bones.

I love you, Quiver. Happy father’s day. And thanks for everything. You rock.

Be sure to check out the skeleton map from the rhino barn. Click on the individual skeletons!

Are you a jotter downer? I am. My house and handbags are littered with scraps of everything from plans to poetry (much of it unreadable, even by me, thanks to my serial-killer scrawl). I wish I were the kind of person who carries a Shaker-simple notebook in which I inscribe all passing wisdoms and stray bedazzlements, and that I had a shelf’s worth of such journals stretching back over the years so I could trace my movements across time and preoccupations. But that’s just not me.

So I struggle what to do with all these notes, especially in times of paring back, of transformative purging. (I’m in a phase of real estate bulimia; I “stuff”ed myself to gorging, and now I’ve got my finger down my metaphorical throat.) Sorting through a laundry basket of oddments this morning in preparation for my upcoming move, I came across this sutra shard:

What if I sang till students knew I was free?
Of Vietnam, trousers, free of my own meat,
free to die in my thoughtful shivering throne
Freer than Nebraska,
Freer than America.

-Allen Ginsburg, from Wichita Vortex Sutra, 1966

I know why I copied it down; I was newly back in Nebraska, and really feeling its flat smallness, plus, we were seven years into the previous regime, and I was chafing under its bootheel, surrounded as I was by the blandly conservative, the sweetly sieg heil. I’m better now; poorer, yes, but feeling strangely free and unfettered, even though “mortgage” means “death pledge” and there’s no guarantee that someone will ever buy this dark barn and unyoke me from its great and costly burden.

At least now that I’ve captured this scribble here, I can throw the note away. That’s the real freedom—letting go.