no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes no major gaffes

 

 

oh and hey, i have a new story up at lone star stories called "the ninth arrest."

 

 

aside to john kerry:

 

george w bush's bizarre mutant power is a tricky one. his charisma actually goes up when he's allowed to act like an idiot. WARNING! under no circumstances are you to treat this vicious mutant as an idiot! he's a cunning, urban predator who has snaked his way into the highest seat of power. so do not underestimate him, ever.

 

to deal with a camoflauged predator of this stripe, you have to point at him and scream out what you see, senator. george w bush is not bubba! he's not a blue collar worker! he's not one of you! you have to shatter his texan twang and expose him for what he is or people will fall under his spell like cobras swaying in front of a flute. and if that happens, you're dead.

 

remember, like you, this man went to yale. he's a total blue-blood. he comes from old, old money. that's not a crime (unless you deal with the NAZIs in war time, of course), but when he starts in on this bubba routine, you have to call him on it. you have to convince people that this man is not what he appears to be. "how many west texas cowboys do you know who make a couple million a year? how many cowboys have the royal saudi family on speed dial? how many cowboys get 6-digit tax rebates?"

 

bush says he's the war president and we all know that's a load of shit. "when this man had the opportunity to serve in war, while others were drafted or volunteered, he got special priveleges to keep him far from battle (don't mention "vietnam" for the love of god, senator!). that's the way it works for the elite. in war, there's one set of rules for them, and another set of rules for the common folk. and he's sending the kids of common folks off to war. what a hypocrite. what a total and complete hypocrite this man is."

 

bush never worked a day in his life. "the economy and iraq are both in the tank, becuase this president never worked a day in his life and doesn't care about paying bills the way regular people do. he's probably never had to pay a bill in his life. check the deficit his administration is ringing up - he's not the kind of person who thinks he has to stoop to something as common as a 'budget'."

 

attack him at all times and take away his mutant bubba powers, kerry. you aren't credible on foreign policy because you voted for the war. your plan for iraq is vague and troubling, because you don't see that the war itself was the problem, and not the WAY it was fought. 

 

so stop yakking about prosecuting the war differently and start ripping the bubba mask off this bastard. and keep trying until people begin to see what a camoflauged viper he is.

 

if you don't, you're candidacy is sunk.

 

 

 

 

there was a dowser working the land around the house across the street, which is disconcerting because (a) alan was just blogging about dowsing and (b) dowsing frightens me. it's irrational, i know, don't try to reason with me. tarot? sure. oija? who knows? but the guy had these two long metal L-shaped rods and he just kept walking back and forth, back and forth, slow and steady steps, rod ends swaying portentously. i'm watching him, and of course, my mind leaps back to its age-old zombie fear so for a flash i wonder if i'll look out here tonight, under the harvest moon, and see this guy walking back and forth with his dowsing rods, bood dripping from his slack mouth.

 

back to reality my neighbor yells out, "hey, are you dowsing?" with a clear note of ridicule in the question.

 

honest to god, the dowser gets all burt lancaster in the rainmaker. he smiles up at amy who is frowning down at him from her window, like she's waiting for an explanation and it better be good. "why yes ma'am." shy smile."yes i am. it always works - with a little faith." winning smile. "If you understand me."

 

i was really curious how he thought dowsing worked, but more, i wanted to plunge a screwdriver into his zombie skull. 

 

funny, the conversation died there. amy and i just sort of stared at him until he realized the pause was getting uncomfortable, and then he went away.

 

 

getting a kid to sleep can sometimes be like building a bomb. last night was like that. isaiah was wound tight, and frankly, when he gets in that mood, i don't even want him to go to sleep, he's so much fun. but dutifully, i took my turn rocking him and singing to him, and man i almost had him. his eyelids got heavy and i could feel the weight of his head against my arm. i was icing the deal by singing his sure-fire lullabye, the star-spangled banner, which careful readers recall works like a sleep spell on him. i was just through the "gave-proof-through-the-night" bit, and singing it pretty well i might add, when iko unleashed a sharp, wet raspberry. i tried not to laugh but the timing was just too exquisite. was it intentional? i looked down at him to see, and he was grinning up at me with this look of sheer delight, like, "wasn't that fucking hilarious?"

 

my laughter meant he couldn't take me seriously after that so he won that round and got to stay up to hear green eggs and ham one more time.

 

in other news, my article on monsanto's plans to scrap its GMO wheat is up at the mix. however, my by-line reads like an ominous farewell...

 

 

we saw the fat ol' harvest moon tonight. lisa, isaiah, and i were walking through the park and when we got to the high-ground, we found the full moon bloating up just over the treetops. it took a second to get iko to focus on it. but when he realized what it was, he pointed at the moon and lifted his chin, like "go and bring that to us at once." we couldn't, so he just stared at it for a pretty long time.

 

 

 

the other night i was putting the house to bed by myself. lisa had fallen asleep with iko, and i was up late reading a horror zine (Fusing Horizons), when the doorbell rang. it was after 11pm. i couldn't quite make sense of it, because when you have a one-year-old, your childless friends stop popping by after 9pm. that, and our upstairs co-owners wouldn't ring that late. hmmm. i was just enough on edge from the damn zine that my brain derailed and sped off in the most hysterical direction: there are several of them out there; they won't all be in view; stop them: before they eat your child. your brain does this to you when you have a kid. and you even buy it for that flash while your sanity reboots. finally i got all superdad and went to the door, peeking out through the high glass window and trying not to look like a terrified barney fife.

 

there was this fine looking black woman leaning on the porch. she was bored. she was pissed that no one was answering. i tried to catch her eye without banging on the door and frightening her, but she didn't see me. finally she was about to ring the doorbell in exasperration, but i waved at her not to. she jumped back, totally surprised. hard to blame her. here she is expecting a woman named shana (as she soon told me) but instead there's a scary little bald, white, science fiction writer peering out at her in the dead of night. i told her i didn't know shana and then waved good-night. she got the idea and moved on.

 

 

 

weird. and i was just about to email jed hartman and ask if strange horizons ever got submissions from Great Big Grownup Writers - like nancy kress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i'm not a computer game guy - not for lack of interest, but the tech curve threw me off that ride years ago - but the tv commercial for the new star wars' "battlefront" game really grabs me by the medula oblongata. i mean, come on, footage of a first-person shooter blasting an ewok? i screamed and jumped at the screen like a parrot pecking at itself in the mirror. i was eighteen when empire came out, so i'm of the age that loves the original trio but hates the ewoks.

 

that commercial might as well be a first-person shooter with madison avenue's crosshairs drifting right over my forehead.

 

 

obviously.

 

 

(gakked from nalo)

 

 

this one's for greggy. from uberbubba michael moore:

 

 

and to answer the very last question in mike's article: yes. we can choose not to eat the shit-pie being served to us.

 

 

 

to paraphrase winona laduke, i don't want a bigger share of the democratic/republican pie. i want a whole new damn pie.

here's my problem with the "two-viable-candidates" approach to democracy.
democracy is negotiation (or should be), so no one can get everything they
want, especially from a national election. i see that. but the democratic party starts dumping its priorities before it ever gets to the negotiating table. instead of starting the bargaining at the core of what the democratic party has been historically (advocating a strong federal government to insure equality for all citizens - the tradition of jefferson), clinton taught the democrats to trump the republicans by taking conservative issues and adopting them as part of the democratic platform. this strategy says, "winning is more important than our core political meaning." worse, pair this with the democrats traditional identity as "the Big Tent," and you have a party that's willing to say or do anything to
appease potential voters. as a result you have a freaking democratic candidate for president who is simultaneously pro-iraq war and anti-iraq war, pro-worker and pro-corporation, pro-deregulation and pro-environment - etc etc etc.

but it's this pro-corporate mentality most damages the dems. no longer the farm-labor party, the dems have thrown in with clinton's "new democrats" whose main mission is to appease big business at the expense of the party's own traditional role as watchdog of big business. that's the true negotiation going on, between the "lefty" (really, there's no left left in the american left) democrats and powerful corporate interests, as the democrats seek to appease any fears that they're going to oppose Big Money. this is no clearer than in the first 100 days of the clinton presidency when clinton went from potential populist to eisenhauer republican on the first tax vote (that's his description of himself, by the way, from woodward's the agenda). cut to four years later when clinton (a "democrat"!) torpedoed welfare. 

cut to 2004: kerry's campaign has made two very telling decisions (even
beyond his endorsement of the bush doctrine saying that we can attack who we want, whenever we want). first, kerry's greatest strength as a senator has
been his voting record on the environment, but he's not running on it with
any verve, because he doesn't want to offend the coal industry in west
virginia and other battle ground states. second, the traditional base-constituency of the democratic party, the black vote, is intentionally being
ignored. when black voter turn-out is high, the democrats win. but the kerry
campaign isn't sinking much money into black voter registration or
recruitment. why? because they're more concerned with getting the so-called
"NASCAR dad" vote (read, white man with earning power). with this action,
the democrats have officially turned away from their core as its existed the
last fifty years.

so here's the message: screw the blacks, screw the workers, screw the poor,
screw the environment, screw the liberals. which party does that sound like
to you?

think about the first organic farmers who took the risk and jumped ship from
petrochemical pesticide farming. in 1970, there was no natural foods market, no financial safety net waiting to catch them. and they weren't
trying to "save the family farm," either. they did it because they believed
it was morally right not to poison their land and the water table. the minars who run cedar summit dairy here in minnesota were told by their farming neighbors, back in 1978, that they'd go out of business in 3 years if they stopped using pesticides. cedar summit is now a national model of organic dairy farming, and all the minars' neighbors of 30 years ago have gone bankrupt or quit farming. 

i think of this when democrats tell me "we're the only game in town. you're
throwing your vote away and putting bush in power if you vote for anyone else." that's the nearsighted view, and it isn't true, either. minneapolis is shutting down schools due to lack of decent funding (and, to be fair, to declining rolls), our libraries are only open 50% of the the time, and wealthy-suburb edina has successfully acquired homeland security money for an armored truck with a gun turret on it. meanwhile, congressional democrats have voted to extend the bush tax cuts, and their presidential ticket is pro war, pro patriot act, and pro bush doctrine. with enemies like this, bush doesn't even need his republican friends. and you're telling me that i'm throwing my vote away?

 

if even a very small fraction of americans voted their values and stopped self-censoring their own votes out of fear of reagan/bush1/dole/bush2, the left wouldn't be on life-support right now. it's the lefties who vote for democrats-in-liberal-clothing (me included - i foolishly voted for clinton the first time around) who've buried the left in this country - not the republicans.

 

as for changing the party itself, and working within the system to drag the democrats back to supporting a sane and strong central government that stands up to big biz on our behalf, i'd love to see more people try. but (a) most lefties are only lefties once every fours years and (b) such moves will be greeted with major resistance from moneyed power within the party. look what happened to howard dean. he reports in his new book that elected democrats set up a multimillion dollar fund to keep him from getting the party's nomination, and judging from gephardt's behavior as kamakazi candidate in the iowa primary, i don't doubt his claim for a second.

 

i don't know if i'm going to vote green this time around or not. i probably will. nader (whom i voted for in '96) would get my vote if he weren't running on the perot/ventura/wingnut ticket, so as it is, it seems like the greens, who have a pretty good grass-roots base here in MN, might get me this time around.

 

 

i put on a kettle of tea the other day and then joined wife and child in the sunroom. i was sitting in one corner and the wife wa seated in the other. suddenly, the lil baby starts WALKING BETWEEN THE TWO OF US!! not only that, but as he unmoored himself from our hands, he did his little wrist-twisting gesture signifying all gone, as in, no hands, you guys, no hands! he'd make it halfway across the sunroom and then start belly laughing at what he was doing, eyes blazing, mouth wide in his party-boy smile. down the block, the catholic church's bells started bonging. a second later, the tea kettle screamed. and isaiah kept on walking and laughing and walking and laughing - for about 45 minutes.

 

 

ok. so. first i read this at common dreams. ("Global warming is creating conditions that are more favorable for hurricanes to develop and be more severe.")

 

then i read about global warming over at ptarmigan.

 

then i read this over at JPL, about the Larsen B ice shelf.

 

all within an hour.

 

the hell? does this mean locally grown, organic, minnesota atuolfo mangos are closer to a reality than i ever imagined??

 

 

 

 

boots on the ground. boots on the ground. boots on the ground.

 

i don't have many good mutant powers. for some reason, i lost the parallel-parking mutant power, which served me well for years and years. it vanished inexplicably about a year ago. i do have the mutant power to put you to sleep guaranteed (as long as you weigh under 25 pounds and have been recently breastfed), and i have a preternatural instinct for buying shirts. but other than that, i'm pretty useless to the x-men.

 

my one redeeming mutant power for which the x-men should really consider me is my ability to make kick-ass chili. my chili is pretty damn phenomenal, and i say this with complete humility, because i really don't know what i'm doing. i spend a day in the kitchen, i throw whatever's available from the fridge into the pot, and frankly, i'm as amazed as everyone else when it turns out so well.

 

i will tell you, though, the three things i do control, so that you, too, may cultivate a kick-ass chili-mutancy:

 

overheard in the produce department a couple days ago:

 

 

(the consensus seemed to be spock, but before i could find out, they lapsed into talking about ST:NG, so i split.)

 

isaiah is still pretty fevery, but he's doing better and better each day. last night, when i came to bed, he was mumbling "da da da" in his sleep. (ka-pow! right in the heart...)

 

 

 

 

 

in regards to the CBS national guard memos that might be forgeries, more telling than a superscripted "TH" are laura bush's comments from monday, in which she tilts her hand rather obviously:

"You know, they probably are altered, and they probably are forgeries, and I think that's terrible, really," Laura Bush told Radio Iowa. 

if she knew for certain her husband had reported for duty and served his full time, the first lady would say, "of course these are forgeries," not they "probably are altered." by using the word "probably" she's telling us not only that she doesn't have a clue if he really showed up, but that she has doubts about her husband's service too.

but all the forgery crap aside, it's beyond me why the dems aren't making hay of the fact that the right-wing rich boy dodged the nam while the lefty rich boy actually went.

let's see. what else can i dither about? i got comp issues of alchemy #2 in which my story "sand dollars and apple halves" appears. it's a bang-up issue - the incomprable dora goss, holly phillips, sarah monette, amber van dyk, and dale bailey all have stories, and the cover is nicely appointed with a james c. christensen painting. i read the first paragraph of the amber van dyk story last night and it's now stuck in my head like a jingle. "pennies..." she's really become one of my favorite writers of late.

i couldn't find an online source for alchemy, which is very frustrating, but check here and see if it shows up in the next few days maybe? i dunno.

on the home front, iko's come down with a fever, and his mama was up, off and on, all night nursing him. so they're sleeping in, and we may not make it to WI this weekend. pout.

 

 

i'm heading into my migraine season this winter. that means i have to abandon my old allies, caffeine and alcohol, in an effort to minimize the amount of confusing mixed messages i keep sending to the blood vessels in my skull (expand! no, contract! now, expand! i said contract!).

 

luckily in my last migraine season, two years ago, my doc prescribed something that actually worked - maxalt. maxalt is a form of triptan that's fast-dissolving in the mouth (you don't even need water), and it kills migraine-demons faster than the other leading brand. it's quite a relief knowing i've got a weapon this go around. i've tried everything under the sun (i wrote about it, sort of, in a story called "season of the beasts," which you can buy here), and all i can say is, these headaches are not something with which to fuck.

 

i'm heading to wisconsin this weekend to my brother, his wife, new baby and new house. i'm looking forward to the time out of town.

 

 

 

woke up at 430am, wide awake, and wrote for about 3 hours this morning, until lisa had to work. then upstairs neighbor amy took iko for 2 hours late morning, a prearranged deal to buy me some writing time. thank you, neighbor! so i feel sated with creative juiciness today. damn, it's like finally being able to sneeze, getting the time. i nearly finished the first draft of a story that's been percolating in my brain for weeks, so i feel pretty confident that the next time i get some hours, i can finish the draft.

 

also, iko said fan today, while raising his bill clinton thumb to the ceiling fan.

 

 

 

 

isaiah's recent vocabulary additions: ice, on, off, in, out, bop (i think it means "walk"), and Hank, our neighbor's baby and the coolest person in iko's life.

 

i've mentioned before that we've taught isaiah the sign for nurse in baby sign language, right? well, now he's coming up with his own, which is great because most of the signs in the baby sing language books, like "cat" or "house," are useful only in a parlor-trick sort of way ("now show gramma your sign for 'wombat'!"). "nurse" is good because he can tell us when he's hungry. but now he bites his forearm if his teeth are hurting (he picked it up from  a picture of a girl with a hurting mouth in one of his board books), which is an awesome sign since it's so hard to determine what's upsetting him. and somehow, he also picked up the universal, shrugging hand gesture for "all gone." he's so adept with that one, in fact, that when i was on the phone with greggy the other day and said something like "there's no money in that," i looked over and saw iko watching me and making the "all gone" sign.

 

isaiah has also dicovered green eggs and ham, and i love that he loves it. i have an MP3 of jesse jackson reading it on SNL as dr. seuss' eulogy. so i do my imiation of brother jesse for isaiah, but he shows no sign of being amused. alas.

 

 

a produce worker on the phone with a customer:

 

"so it's yellow and bumpy with ridges, hairy, and about eight inches long??" [long pause] "no, i don't know what kind of squash that is."

 

 

busy day yesterday. the two families in our our co-owned duplex banded together to dig up two new flower beds and transplant about 50-60 perennials. the city is about to chop down our elm, so we didn't want enormous chunks of wood destroying the day lilies, hostas, and peonies growing in the elm's shade. it was fun, with our two kids (theirs is about 21 months) digging in the sandbox while we dug up bulbs and grass turf.

 

the two new beds will yield flowers visible from the street. that's so much better than hiding them in the backyard.

 

compost update. i thought our compost pile was in crisis but it turns out that it's devouring itself in fine fashion. we turned the heap yesterday and found lovely, dry, crumbly humus at the bottom. yippee! we didn't put any of it in the flower beds, though. we're saving it for the vegetable beds next year: tomatoes as big as your head!

 

in sadder news, lisa's kitty karintha has disappeared. it's been almost two weeks now and lisa is heart-broken. i've been more hopeful than lisa, but it seems that karintha is gone. karintha always had one paw in the world as a wild predator, so every year, she'd take off on a walkabout/killing-spree for a couple days. but she's never been gone this long. we've checked the humane society and animal shelter routinely since she split, but nothing. i figure something must have happened to her. there's no way karintha wouldn't return to lisa if she was able.

 

very sad to lose a member of the household.

 

"Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,
"O cant you see it, O cant you see it
"Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon
. . . When the sun goes down."  - Cane, Jean Toomer on Karintha

 

 

 

 

iko says "ant" now whenever he sees one outside. how he says it though is not really transcribeable. it's sort of like: *squeek* [t sound]. very similar to the way he says "hand" which is more germanic sounding, like: handt! this he yells when he's ready for me to hold his fingers so he can walk around the apartment.

 

remember the part where i said that writing and fatherhood were not incompatible? tell me, was i smoking a big fatty when i said that? maybe. because these elements of my life are seeming pretty incompatible right now. it will change again and again - and, really, i do stand by everything i said in that previous post - but wow. once the kid starts moving with purpose, parenting is a whole different game. and any body-change has an impact. isaiah has been getting up earlier and earlier as the summer has gone by, so that now the writing time i've counted on for years (pre-dawn is mine, damn you!) has pretty much vanished.

 

what i need to do is carve out writing time for myself later in the day through schedule-juggling and childcare. getting the time to write in itself won't be a big deal, but it'll be a challenge nonetheless, since i'll have to write later in the day, when the dreaded sun is out and my brain is clouded with the ubiquitousness of reality, poisoned by the thoughts of other humans. ick.

 

anyway, it must be done, because i haven't been a graceful dad this week. iko needs a lot of hand-holding (quite literally), but meanwhile, i need time for myself or i'll go insane. writing deadlines and opportunities of all sorts are looming, and there's nothing like an award to get your heart pumping for the page. but man it's a shitty thing when your own selfishness bumps up against your kid's far purer needs and wants, like walking him down the street so he can sit on a freshly cut elm stump.

 

but there it is.

 

 

 

 

a farmer's story about running a stall in stanta cruz. from new farm:

 

Then there was the guy with the crystal. He'd show up every week dangling a quartz crystal from a fishing line over the produce display in a trance "reading" the vegetables for positive energy before making a purchase. “Bad energy,” he’d say, pointing to one cabbage. “Good energy,” he’d murmur, indicating another. When he tried to get a read on my head I invited him to take his shopping elsewhere.

 

we used to get flocks of crystal-wavers at the co-op i worked at in austin. but i haven't seen a crystal-waver at the wedge for many, many years. they gotta be a dying breed. i mean, the time it would take to buy bulk rice or kidney beans? forget about it.

 

what i love are the folks who wander into a co-op or other natural foods store and try to wrap their brains around the various food issues represented here. a couple of years back, an old texan found his way into wheatsville, the co-op i worked at in austin. he saw the bee pollen and asked me what it was for. being just a produce neophyte, i didn't really know musch about the rest of the store, let alone freaking bee pollen. the co-worker who told me about bee pollen was a vegan, so in an effort to say something useful, i made the grave error of saying that vegans didn't approve of using bee pollen.

 

"huh?" it was a demanding, sharp syllable, like a poke in the chest. "huh?? what's a vegan?"

 

by now i was just hoping he'd skip on down to the local H.E.B. grocery store. but i told him a vegan was someone who didn't eat any animal products or by-products - like bee pollen.

 

"huh?? why not??"

 

i told him, in an increasingly small and wavering voice, that they thought it was oppressive.

 

"what? are you kidding me? oppressive?" he shouted, his confusion morphing into open hostility. "why, son, the bees don't mind!"

 

(side story: then there's the hill country texas barbecue i went to with my date at the time, who was a vegetarian. while presenting her with a plate of chicken, the host assured her, "chicken aint meat.")

 

 

isaiah's expanding vocabulary: "eyes," "hot," and "hush" have all recently been added. he's also working on something that sounds like "ah b'n" or "ahp mm." a team of translators is working round the clock to figure it out.

 

on a similar note, i find myself lapsing into spanish when talking to iko. it's as if my brain casts about for whatever it can find to communicate with him. isaiah will start throwing an irrational fit over something, and all of a sudden i'm going, "calmate, senor. calmate!"

 

which in turn reminds me of our hellish stint in newborn ICU after isaiah was born, a story i never got around to blogging last year. the dictator of the unit who held our boy hostage for 5 days was the patrician and condescending dr.sifuentes. sifuentes would make his rounds with a bevy of sycophants every morning, and at one point he was examining isaiah's legs and hips, moving them about (they were fine). lisa joked, "he looks like a frog, when you move his legs like that." and dr. sifuentes literally looked down his nose at her, and in his snotty castillian accent said, "Ee-sigh-ah ees note a frog. Ee ees a little boy."  (to which lisa later replied, "dr sifuentes ees note a doctor. ee ees a big jerk.")

 

i'm telling you, man. before november 2, bush and kerry will be calling for strikes on syria. from the ny times:

 

Syria dismissed the Israeli threats and accusations, saying they lacked proof and credibility.

~

i spent labor day getting new material on www.wedge.coop (say, who is that handsome young man on the home page??), then lisa, iko, and i went to see friends in their new house in west st paul. we had a bonfire, some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and talked late into the night. it turns out you can actually see the stars from west st paul.

 

 

remember last summer after the US invaded and occupied iraq? neocons and wardrum-beaters started saying that syria was next, with a note of ohboyohboy glee in their voices. this comes as no surprise, then, and indeed, we should all be ready for a third front in world war IV, and 4 more years of the everwar that kerry and bush condone.

 

but hey. at least we're seeking world approval before we put the crosshairs over our next target. oh. boy.

 

 

it's my favorite thing in the world when jason erik lundberg sends me email like this:

 

 

"congrats dude" to nalo hopkinson, too, whose novel the salt roads won the spectrum award for best long fiction, earning the glorious ms. hopkinson a gay sweep.

 

 

 

i love this kind of thing: lisa sent me an article from the toledo blade, about a little ohio library making a huge discovery in its archives.

 

Searching through a storage area in the tiny Schultz-Holmes Memorial Library this year, Mrs. Berryman, the library's director, unearthed her own dust-covered and long-overlooked wonders of ancient Egypt, wrapped neatly in a 19th century leather-and-paper package.

 

reminds me of my friend don who found an unannotated packet of hemingway letters in a boston library.

 

in iko news, i think he took his first steps yesterday! he's been doing that toddler-lunge for a few weeks, where he steadies himself and then lurches to another hand-hold. but yesterday saw actual hip-movement, weight-shifting, and two steps from the old wooden steamer trunk into my arms (after which, he congratulated himself with a round of finger-splayed clapping).

 

we had the last great sangria/fruit-salad of the summer last night. i let the colorado peaches steep in castle rock pinot noir for a couple hours before dinner, and then threw in some strawbs and blues and a little muskmelon from featherstone farm before serving. we might get another shot at a bowl of this hellish heaven, but probably not. organic peach season is almost in the tank, and there's just nothing like a wine-drenched colorado peach.

 

well there is, but this is not that kind of a website.

 

 

in a giant sop to california agribusiness, prez bush intends to yank the US out of the montreal protocol, which 183 countries have signed and promised to limit or ban use of methyl bromide. methyl bromide, as you may recall, is the one-time nerve-gas compound now used mainly as a strawberry pesticide. when folks like me squawk about rural america having higher incidences of cancer, we're often talking about methyl bromide, since the evidence is fairly clear that MB plays a role. check out this article in new farm:

 

 

(part of why i point this out, of course, is to note the horrible sentence construction which seems to say that the NCI is destroying the ozone layer. tee hee.)

 

elsewhere, i have good news, cool news, bad news, and isaiah news. the bad news: i spent last weekend in the wisconsin freaking dells, a place i never hoped to visit again after i bartended there many moons ago. at one point, trapped in the audience of a 50's "rock and roll" review (it's a long story how i got there - suffice to say: "family reunion"), i found myself praying, "won't someone sneak up behind me and please slit my throat?" after the odious buddy holly number, i slipped away and started drinking maker's mark.

 

good news: my brother robin, who is warring with the final stages of parkinson's disease, entrusted me with a short-story he wrote, asking me to make it pretty, write the cover letter, and send it out. in a shitty situation with little to pin a hope on, this feels like a big something. it is a big something. my whole life, i've idolized rob, his poetry, and highly acute sense of b-movie appreciation. i hope i can make him proud of his own story.

 

in cool news, i sent the outline of my next novel to my agents. Agent Kris and Agent Jesse seemed to like it, and they both pinpointed the problems i was having with it, which is something of a relief, since they didn't point out anything that surprised me. more on this story as it develops.

 

in isaiah news, my boy has four words now: mama, dada, home, and up. he's fallen in love with sunflowers, made the sign for "nurse" when he saw suckling piglets at the state fair, and a big fat butterfly landed on his head yesterday.