lapsedmodernist | Jun. 9th, 2008

Summer has raged in, as reverberations of violent sun-storms create a malevolent, almost sentient shimmer and mad particles of heat rotate around their own orbits, and each bottle cap, blinding from the sidewalk, each flintstone shooting from under the tires of the passing car, are just waiting for a quick flick of the wrist, to ignite millions of fires, here, there, sub-celestial constellations of flaming orbs.

Seeking refuge in the bedroom yesterday, I lay down for a catnap, on the bed where some of the sunlight pooled into an inlet, and, as is always the case, strange creatures flourish in inlets, in this case the creatures of my dreams. My textual dreams gave way to musical dreams this week, probably because the insects of letters that line the pages of my dream-books got charred through someone's cruel-careless magnifying glass in this heat. So my catnap dream was about sliding, in the shape of a dust particle, along the sunbeam, which is straight out of a Vladimir Vysotsky song--Лучше голову песне своей откручу, Но не буду скользить словно пыль по лучу!, and it felt unbearably light, in the Kundera sense of usage (Vade retro, Satana!). Then last night I was listening to a radio in a dandelion field, and the song playing was a re-working of my favorite Tom Waits song, with the lyrics all telling a story that was about me (and, oddly, leapfrog!).

Pnts and I took Fionn to the neighborhood park yesterday, which is still as littered with trash as it was last summer. We departed after Fionn almost ate a cigarette butt. I know I sound like such an asshole, but now that I have a baby I am so mad at everyone who litters cigarette butts without a second thought, and I deeply regret all the cigarette butts I thoughtlessly flicked into the universe in the years that I was a smoker. "Don't they think of the children?" I raged, unironically, despite the fact that it's just as hard to deliver that line non-referentially as it is to say "can you hear me now?" without being interpollated into the horrible semiosis of that Verizon bugman commercial (the dude wasn't actually a bugman, but he certainly looked like the bugman on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," although it's possible that the inevitible process that follows my revelation that Tila Tequila is, in fact, Jean Baudrillard, and that We Are All Robert Paulson is the compression and fusion of all television characters ever into a limited-seating pantheon of archetypes populating my symbolic universe)

Fionn overheated, and refused to walk back, instead sobbing and clinging to my skirt. I carried him back (in my new Ergo carrier, best carrier ever! Thank you again, my dearest Anya), and then he fell into a lethargic sleep. My limp little kittenish froglet, alseep, as if on a lilypad.

Then there was a kiddie pool and a breeze and a delicious dinner of sweet yams! and fresh spinach! and sumptuous mac-and-cheese at

beginnersmind's house, then later beer and coffee ice-cream and too-hot sleep, and today pnts left for the stars of North Carolina, and the biscuits and ice-tea of Bojangles.

Another prolegomenous season; as stressful as packing is, it is also soothing, it feels like I can compress my life to the bare essentials, like I can feel light, like in the end, everything imprints, but nothing entwines me in roots (it's funny, the English phrases about having roots somewhere, I always envisioned as ancient trees with twisted, gnarled roots, twisting the roots through your limps, until symbiosis, and you make your life in the shade of that tree, and the amount of choice involved in this transition to a sedentary existence is dramatically variable...), and even if I am somewhere for a thousand years, I can vanish into the horizon line with two suitcases and a backpack...like in the Russian children's poem--"картина, корзина, картонка и маленькая собачонка"--a painting, a woven basket, a cardboard box, and a tiny dog.