I am far from home, the houseguest of a dear friend. I am not scan-capable now, but my phone camera works all right. I like the ancient-manuscript feel of this image, and the notion that modern archeologists like you will peruse it for clues.
Last November I participated in National Novel Writing Month. I wrote over fifty thousand words under the title AULD LANG SYNAPSE, which was about the creation and use of nanotechnologized dust that made it possible for people to switch bodies via wireless synaptic exchange. The novel is still a disorganized, unfocused mess, but I liked a minor character who called himself the Mighty Eater of Food, and here I make a superhero out of him. (EATING as a superpower? You think that’s ridiculous? I invite you to do an internet search on Matter-Eater Lad, late of the Legion of Super-Heroes.)
Lately I’ve been dwelling on my own struggles with weight control (“Belly-Worshipper!” I trash-talk myself with scornful “stinkin thinkin”), and recently wrote a mock children’s song called “Gobble Gobble Gobble.” This is part of that tapestry.
I threw in an additional challenge to my triple-acrosticization, and demanded that each line contain a pun on a color. Why? Well, it’s my contention that many art innovations are arbitrary and/or newness for the sake of newness. But once you decide to do it, do it as best you can.
The words:
EH! Don’t want to con-fuschia
EW! I’ll TEAL ya–let’s climb
Now! Rosed Tuckling is crucial
NEXT: to Beiging–sub-Lime
In the Quantum Multiverse, some of me have done some of these. A minuscule percentage have done all of them. But I only have so much lifetime, and the most I can say for sure about the me who is talking now, in this universe, is that ONE of these will be done by midnight Friday.
Which one? Please tell me, because I really don’t know…
Here’s a Threefer Wall:
Joined Shapes
Juxtapositioning makes strange bedfellows
Outcomes often are Hobson’s choicish
Inferences drawn in Freehandia
Never seem to reflect Reality’s grip
Edentate is the lower jaw of Time
Delivering a superfluity of bones
Meteoric Messages
Making contact may not seem
Either metaphor or meme
Till it leads to warm embraces
Expeditious tracks & traces
Or a bite from fly or flea
Rousing more’n Golly G
It’s so easy to confuse
Crankiness with front page news
Self Poor Trait
Soapbox pour esprit de mort
Endocrines do bar the door
Let us cellophane the Sea
First inquiring: Que vous dit
Two posted self-portraits in less than a week. All is vanity. The Poor Trait of the acrostic is an annoying tendency, similar to James Joyce’s, to obfuscate via private language and joke.
They fly and crawl and jump, sting and bite and pinch, buzz and chirp and hum. They are a nuisance and a test. We have much to learn from them.
The words:
Wayfaring without a brain to speak of is so stark
Hum & chirp & whine & buzz & swarm till heavens darken
Ants & hornets, EARWIGS, gnats–survivors go go go
There’s a subtle wisdom in the chase avoid & sow
My last post invited readers to e-mail me if they wanted the words to the poem behind the eponymous Love Birds. I sat back and waited, eager to respond to the flood of requests. Alas, I got not a one, not even from–sob–my Girlfriend. [sad face]
Humbling experiences build character. I am perhaps too puffed up/showoffy, or too much, to use my daughter’s charming locution, the Attention Whore. But it drives my creativity, and creativity is just about all I have to offer to civilization and posterity.
So, folks, as you never requested, here is the cheat sheet on the strict-character acrostic poem I wrote as backdrop:
This also reveals acrostic methodology. FIRST, decide on the acrostic; SECOND, decide on the rhyming (or near-rhyming, as in this case) words at the ends of the lines. THEN write one of the lines of poetry, and do a character grid that exactly maps that line. (It doesn’t have to be the first line, and truth is, it’s often easier to acrosticize if you don’t.) Then write the rest of the poem, and have your eraser handy.
Bonus (?) feature: here’s an example of my sign-making layout skills, with my workplace and the cause we evented de-identified:
Not all modern folk know that turning over a new leaf means turning a page of a book. Many sayings are rooted in the archaic, and we’ll know what they mean metaphorically even while we’ve forgotten how they came to be. “A stitch in time saves nine,” but who stitch-sews or darns any more, darn it?
In this age of controversy about genetic modification of plants, though, a “new leaf” could mean anything from ganja to a more efficient oxygenator. Both? The mind boggles.
This page was done under conditions of extreme sleep deprivation and sporadic retail sales. Looking at it, I don’t know exactly why I went semicolon crazy. I do know that my hero Kurt V had scorn for semicolons, thinking them hermaphroditic.
Words:
Abs; traction may well; be a Pal
NeoReal may boost; morale
Evangelics wax; aloof–a
Way; fair; err; a; semi; goof
I also debit SleepDep for the sloppiness of illustrative execution. That top right leaf certainly could use some makeover…
Here is a subject more serious than a heart attack–and I speak as one whose father died at 49 of a massive myocardial infarction. Since it is so serious I consulted with my exceedingly wise Girlfriend, Denise. The heart of the matter seems to be that trust does not pay for women nowadays, in a world with date-rape drugs and such atrocities as are described in THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES.
I’m a little ashamed that my effort here is so clumsy. Perhaps in a few years, with more mastery of form and worldly experience, I’ll revisit the subject. Meanwhile, this is the best I can do.
Words:
Dances with the devil bring a sorrow unsurpassed
And a smile is nothing more nor less than what it is
Maladjusted yearnings leave forensics teams aghast
Seeing HARM inflicted on a wife or niece or sister
Evil forcers vain and lustful go back clear to Zeus
Let us pray evolving souls bring no such thugs to roost
I want a new Arms race. Let us invent protection, and let us disinvent harmseeking. The Taser is a step in the right direction, but it is easily abused. The technology imagined in Damon Knight’s “Rule Golden” SEEMS impossible, but much less impossible than when Knight dreamed it up, around the time I was born. I hope he will prove to be prescient on that score.
Then there are branches, the arms of trees. They take away the Cee from Cee-Oh-Two, and we continue breathing. Plant Earth, Friends! Race you the world round!
Words:
Perhaps it is correct to hug a tree
Lay down our arms or drop them in the sea
And grow a hateless horde with hearts that soar
Now let us uninvent the col de mort
‘Tis tantamount to Lazarus, Come Forth
My poor and darling Denise has sustained a spiral fracture of her leftmost metatarsal. Earlier this week I tried giving her some relief by supporting the weight of her lower leg with mine. It was not all that successful, relief-wise, but proved usable fodder for journal-paging, especially since I occasionally update my Facebook status with “Further Adventures of Denise and Gary.”
Words:
brace for impact fragile lamb
Ouch is YES and Ah is no
keen with pain & shout with Damn
Now there’s bruising toe to toe
Note that there’s a bit of poetic license here. Denise does not “keen with pain.” She is quite the trouper, bearing great pain with little outward reaction. I on the other hand am a Big Baby. I yelp, holler, whine, scream, and cry at the slightest provocation.
What did I mean by “ten-A-cious”? Look carefully at the lettering descriptive of our extremities and you will find a column of the letter A, ten deep.
