I’m moving this site to lispservice.com soon, and after I do that (this weekend?) I will post the interviews with Stacey Levine and Lily Hoang, which are good, they both have things to say.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in a suburb where I’ll be working on election day, training for the work I’ll be doing, and where I walk around quite a bit between the election place and bus stops, and I have noticed this creepy decorative trend: statues of animals that probably once lived in this place before urban sprawl pushed them out. There are statues of black bears stranded between used car lots, in front of McDonald’s, their paws raised, claws and teeth bared. Maybe this is supposed to be ironic, these dark iron-looking statues, maybe this is suburban irony. These bears will be even creepier after the election if the election doesn’t go well and I pass them in the dark on the way to the bus back into the city.

A man who is coming erratically toward me carries a cane in each hand. The canes are a gold one and an aluminum one; a large bandage obscures his right eye. I am on his right side. He wears a coat with a high, spattered collar that covers his speech so I can’t understand it. The belt of his coat drags the ground behind him, accumulations of small things and their wrappers. He looks annoyed when I obviously try to avoid passing closely by him.

Later, I am again out walking and a car nearly strikes me. The car is two-toned, the color of the doors mismatching the color of the body. Also, its headlight on the side nearest me is missing, the metal a gash where the light had been, and its muffler drags on the ground, coiling exhaust.

I avoid my body being hit, and then I am struck realizing that I turned a man into a car.

Reduced to temping, by Matthew Rohrer, text copied from Jobless Bitch.

Some people are offensively timid.
When I stand near them, and if I
haven’t seen any other people for weeks,
I feel like a star’s bodyguard
and the timid person is an egg or worm.
Alone, I rush across
rainy sidewalks with no umbrella,
with my shoulders drawn in. My ribcage locked.
Something moves overhead at all times:
I am sometimes more, sometimes less, aware
of this looming constant. Lean your head back
and think about that for a few seconds:
you’re very tiny, you’re in outer space.
You see I’m right.

++

I finally understand what I’ve been writing for the last week, the intelligence of the narrator has logic now that causes things to happen, my thoughts feel clearer, I see tasks around me now that need completion, and I feel that I can complete them though it may take some time.

A poem by me, which I didn’t write, is included in the 3785 pages of pirated poetry anthology:

Scrutinizing Admiration

Withdrawn
At a simple Roman
Scrutinizing
Of admiration

I like ’scrutinizing of admiration.’ Good job, compiler or person who wrote this.

In the last few months I have tried to make this blog less personal, posting less frequently and changing the aesthetic so that white space dominates text. I like it better this way.

But now I’m going to say something personal. I like to smell like medicine. Which I realize is an impersonal odor, institutional, masking my body’s real odor, which I don’t think I can smell, it’s a kind of sensory blindness.

I would like to know the people around me well, to smell their apartments and to see how they store their silver ware. To know what they think about the way they perform banal tasks like adjusting broken mini-blinds. My silver ware, which is not silver, is all thrown into one drawer and I reach in and sometimes can’t locate a spoon. How else do people live, and how did they learn to live that way. What nervous ways do they move their feet during a job interview. I want to know people, anything about them.