Every once in a while a spam makes me smile. Today it was one that addressed me in the first line as Lary Knochenmus.

Lary WISHES he were me.

But my most recent favorite is one I received the other day. Short. Sweet. Sincere. Almost touching, one might say:

-----Original Message-----
From: Marian Nickerson [mailto:noumtan@123box.net]
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 8:00 PM
To: Lindy Loo
Subject: brine

culbertson

I can think of no better (and yet worthless) word choice to use in a spam mail than these two words. They are actually kick-ass words the both of them, and they roll off the tongue with a punch and a kick, yet I never would've thought to let the two nestle together to create this powerhouse of writing they have become.

Marian Nickerson, you are truly a poet.

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I have not written much lately.

Mostly just because I have better things to do. Like fucking and drinking and drugs and rock n' roll and more fucking and a bit of cleaning but only while listening to rock and roll and drinking and doing drugs and fucking (which takes a lot of skill, lemme tell you).

In fact, right now I'm doing all five things while typing you this little note of love.

That is how goddamn fantastically awesome I am.

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UNPARDONABLE POEM CRIMES

• Writing a poem where if you string together the 3rd letter of each line, it spells out the name of a fellow you had a crush on. (UPDATE: Even worse, I just realized that you wrote the poem so the third letters spelled out not only his name but "I LOVE [INSERT HIS NAME].") (High school)


• Any poems about darkness or blood or tears or dark bloody tears. (High school)


• Ripping off a line from a Soul Coughing song and using it as the climactic line in your poem and then not having anyone even fricking notice because apparently no one is cool enough to like Mike Doughty. For shame. (College)


• Hansel and Gretel incest poem. (College)


• Using the first name of a fellow you had a thing for as the name of a character in your poem, just as a tip of the hat to him. (Grad school)

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Movie-Craving

I am in the mood to watch a movie that feels both like autumn and like the song "3rd Planet" by Modest Mouse, but I'm not quite sure what movie would scratch this itch.

If you figure out which movie would do so, I will totally make out with you.

Or maybe just give you a dollar.

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Things I DId This Weekend

1. Managed to get a splinter on the roof of my mouth.

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I've officially added Steve Carell to my harem-list.

Laugh all you want. I'll have the last laugh when I'm laughing my way to the bank*!

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*Not really a relevant burn, but I've always wanted to shout that at someone.

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My life has been insanely (and excitingly) busy and jam-packed as of late. So much so that I've decided not to write even one sentence about it.

Take that!

Instead, I offer you up daily doses of randomnesses and minutae to love and cherish (til death do you part--*sighs and kisses*).

For example, I sometimes wish I was my cat Zooey, simply because she cannot run up the stairs and/or jump up onto something without making a strange strangled squeaking noise while doing so.

If I felt compelled to do the same whenever I ran up stairs or hopped up onto something, it'd make life much more exciting.

Also, when I returned home at 10:30pm last night, I found a very large mailed box sitting on my steps, which of course got me all excited that someone had surprised me with an exciting gift of some sort or another.

But inside it was just a gratuitously large power drill.

Like sands through an hourglass, so are the days of our lives...

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WAYS I WOULDN'T MIND KICKING THE BUCKET

• Being run over by a car full of fluffy puppies.



• Turning into a large piece of semi-sweet chocolate and eating myself to death.

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The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart

I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart's
regular struggle against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though no twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don't want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child's fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don't want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.

- Margaret Atwood

(My siztah posted this a short while back, but I thought I'd share as well, just because it is good, and just because it is the state of my heart and my frizzling end-ropes and eye twitches these past couple weeks. Perhaps not precisely, but precisely perhaps. *Sizzle*)

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BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT <-- The Sound of a 3000 Watt Lightbulb

I have never been as exhausted in my whole life as I have been in the past few weeks. It is astounding.

My eye (and its newly-acquired twitch) has turned into some sort of weird sleeplessness/stress barometer--yesterday was cloudy with lack of sleep gusting in from the East at about 60 mph. Everything has taken on this weird lucidity (except for actual coherent thoughts), burning crisp and bright like the filament of a 3000 watt lightbulb. I've spent at least a few minutes the last couple of nights watching my pudgy cat chase bugs in a strange ballet in the dark on my roof perfectly in time with Johnny Cash and then, the next night, MIA. My body feels like the humming, chattering end of an exposed nerve, like a transistor radio that's not quite tuned in. I've been wanting to rub up against everything (and everyone) I see. I keep rubbing my hands over everything I walk by, just to feel it. I wanna have torrid love affairs that make me wanna weep and scream. I feel hypersensitive, hyperaware. Music tastes like food. I wanna bottle up those initial wild moments of falling in love and then guzzle them down while dancing with someone under the moon in the middle of a street somewhere. I wanna walk around and grin and shout HURRAY at everything because it's all glorious in this big trembly web of living.

Last night I came home and downed two beers in the space of 1/2 an hour, all in the hope of quieting all this.

Instead it just resulted in me sitting out on my roof, singing obnoxiously to myself, and then staying up late making a mix instead of going to bed.

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Dear Jesus,

Please let there be a land where all the misfit songs that get rejected from mixes go to live out their days peacefully with one another.

Thank you.

PS. Also, world peace would be good.

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My Airshow Dilemma

I am torn between being all about peace and being completely in awe of anything ridiculously large and metal that can defy gravity so awesomely.

I don't pay to go to the airshow, nor do I spend money on parking downtown or on vendors or on airshow paraphernalia.

But I sure as shit do enjoy sitting out on my roof or at a park and gawking at them each time one explodes the air into noise or arcs gracefully through the blue.

Why?

Because I like planes.

Nothing more complicated than that.

I like 'em the way kids like 'em. They are awesome. And they make me point and go OOOOOH.

I still don't like George W. though. And I don't shave my pits.

That's un-American enough, right?

*Sheepishly waving sparklers and making my red-white-and-blue pasties spin*

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Bananas would be way cooler if they were called fananas.

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