"I'll never leave your pizza burnin'...."

Mona and I were chilling on the way to school yesterday, listening to Avril Lavigne on the radio, when--

--Disclaimer: we are no special fans of Lavigne, but we go for female pop vocalists in a big way,* and I am working to rescue my youngest child from the simpering stylings of the Disney-hyped Hilary Duff et al.--

Where was I?

Oh: So we are listening to Lavigne's "Complicated," and these lines come on:

"Honestly, you promised me
I'm never gonna find you fake it"

and Mona goes, "Did she just say 'Honestly, promise me you're never gonna find your blanket'?"

I about fell out.

It's just human nature, is it not? Who of my generation can forget the famous Creedance Clearwater Revival Song "There's a Bathroom on the Right"? Or the mutation, in Van Morrison's "Crazy Love," of "You make me righteous" to "You make me write checks"?

Which kinda does describe the love and marriage thing, come to think of it. But never mind.

Go to kissthisguy.com, where you can find, or add to, specimens of that most distinguished popular art form, the misheard lyric.

* To wit: We think Sheryl Crow ROCKS. Also Lucinda. And Margo. And Eartha. And P.J. And Chrissie. And Grace. And Annie.

(And probably the Goddess Ani, if I ever listened to her stuff long enough to know).

(Plus don't get me started on the undersung Tina, who played a mean bass for Talking Heads all the way through her pregnancy. You go grrrl!)

TGIF, WTF?

I know, I know.

It's Friday, and I'm behind my posting time.

Chill already. I got good stuff, and no time to write. Later much.

Say about noon, if you're penciling me in.

Ciao.

Poetry Thursday: Alberto Rios

The Cities Inside Us

by Alberto Rios

We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.

We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.

They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.

You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us

There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people

We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are

But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.

We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.

It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speak
In the outside world

We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm

Not reach out
In place of the tongue.

[via the Academy of American Poets]

Do Do That Doo Doo That You Do So Well

I really don't know how to introduce this next subject without venting my personal feelings as regards my own cat, age 18 now. In recent years she has developed an enormous sense of entitlement as to where she poops.

I know you don't want me to go into this. But I am developing a proportional approach to my postings, in that roughly two-thirds need to be uplifting, educational, or inspiring. That is, those are for you.

The other third is mine.

'Nuff said. All I really really had to do was direct you to this site right here: LitterBoxcam.com.

Last we checked, nothing much was, uh, doing. But maybe that's just our time zone.

Stuart says if there's no action on the backside front soon, there's gonna be a dust-up.

He also says we should be understanding at this late hour. And I quote: "Those cats must be pretty pooped."

Bah-dum-chaaaa.

We got a million of 'em.

Okay, so anyway, as regards the title of this post...

Do you think that Cole Porter was in his right mind when he came up with that inspired piece of rhetorical flourish? In case you're wondering where it's from, it's from "You Do Something to Me" and the correct middle term is Voodoo, thank you very much.

(Actually, it's Vodoun, but that's a lecture for another day).

[tasteful cat voyeurism via bookofjoe]

This just in

Game over.

Check it out.

[via Rarity et al.]

Irving Penn

It's hard to know just where to begin, when we try to capture what Irving Penn has captured in his long--and ongoing--career.

The man is 89 and still at work in New York City. In his time, he has been a fashion photographer, ethnographer, documentary photographer, found-art aesthetique, portraitist, social critic, and one of the century's great students of both the still life and the nude.

Oh, and did I mention collage?

Possibly the only thing he hasn't covered is landscape, and I bet I'm wrong about that.

He executed a fine, relentless portrait of my erstwhile heroine of letters and love, French author Colette. But more about that anon.

So take a look at the current exhibit at the National Gallery--and let's look fast, because it closes October 2.

While we're at it, let's remember our place, behave with some comportment, and above all, STEP AWAY from the photographs.

(You can buy a book on this aspect of Penn's work, Irving Penn: Platinum Prints, at a price even the hoi-polloi can afford. Just go here. )

Is it true that Pepto-Bismol is essentially flavored clay?

I couldn't make that title up. I can only long to.

No, that's from the fervid mind of one of my all-time idols, David Byrne.

Stop making sense, right now, wherever you are, and check out his blog.

It's like ours, only better.

Byrne is working all over the damn place, of course. In the art world he has teamed with Danielle Spencer to execute some inordinately clever installations, including a 2003 series of corporate signs that speak volumes, such as "Trust IBM," which didn't reproduce well here. But it's good. trust me.

All this I found while not even looking! I was Googling Irving Penn, actually, whose splendid exhibit we just saw on Sunday, despite our children's protests and the forbidding guards at the National Gallery of Art. (Step AWAY from the paintings! Step AWAY from the paintings!).

I always have at least one spitting fit while I'm in that elitist temple.

Still. I like the art there.

The Electric Jacket Koolaid Test

From various reputable news sources on September 16, 2005:

Fire officials evacuated a building in southern Australia after a man triggered a massive shock of static electricity that caused burn marks in the carpet, a media report said Friday.

Fire officials in southern Victoria state said the man, Frank Clewer, had built up at least 30,000 volts of static electricity in his jacket simply by walking around the western city of Warrnambool, according to a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

He received his first shock when he walked into a local business Thursday afternoon. "It sounded almost like a firecracker or something like that," Clewer told the ABC. "Within say around five minutes the carpet started to erupt."

Burns about 0.79 inches in diameter were left on the carpet where he had been standing, the report said. ABC did not mention if Clewer was injured.

The Country Fire Authority evacuated the building, fearing the incident might trigger electrical problems in the building, but let Clewer go, the report said.

But when he got in his car, Clewer's problems continued.

"I actually scorched a piece of plastic I had on the floor of the car," he said. Fire officials took Clewer's jacket and said it continued to give off voltage, the report said.

Calls to the Country Fire Authority rang unanswered Friday evening.

The report from Reuters was more enlightening, but not to be found anymore online as far as I can tell (I have a hard copy; remember those?)

In that report, fire official Henry Barton stated that Clewer's clothing gave off some 40,000 volts, "which," said Barton, "is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have ignited."

Firefighters also apparently took possession of Clewer's jacket and put it in a closet, where it continued to give off a strong electrical current.

Could that have been the Futility Closet?

Ya think?

Takes One to Know One

Here are some things you ought to know about Chris Keeley:

He lives in Washington, D.C.

He is a licensed clinical social worker who works with the D.C. Child and Family Social Services Agency.

He is a phenomenal photographer, a gritty realist who is also a graceful surrealist.

And a bit DaDa.

He is dedicated to helping addicts get clean and to helping those who are clean to tell the world.

He does all this under the umbrella of Intervention Organization.

He has a kickass CV and a blog I can't quite figure out.

But give me time.

Poetry Thursday: Jane Hirshfield

Poem Holding Its Heart in One Fist

by Jane Hirshfield

Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.

Certain words--these, for instance--
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover's you
or the solipsist's I.
Perhaps the philosopher's willowy it.

The concealment plainly delights.

Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.

Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the
tongue.

Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.

And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.

[image: Jim Dine, Mask and Heart. Poem via poetseers]

Coping with a Reading Problem: You Don't Have to Do It Alone

Do you have a reading problem? Take this simple test to find out.

1. When you wake up in the morning, do you need something to read to get going?

2. Do you read alone?

3. Do you hide your reading from others?

4. Do you read in the bathroom?

5. Do you make excuses for your reading to others, like, "I didn't really like that book, but I finished it because I always have to finish books," or "I only buy Playboy for the nude photos."

6. Has your spouse threatened to leave you unless you give some of your books away?

7. Has your spouse left you already?

8. Are you now wondering whether your spouse left you, and you just may not have noticed?

If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you are at serious risk for a reading problem. If you answered yes to most or all of these questions, your only course of action is to publish a minor novel and become a professor at a community college.

[image via Chris Keeley, photographer, social worker, artist, activist]

Like a Hole in the Head

That's how much I need another book.

Yet every few weeks I find myself in a bookstore. Again.

What happens next is not pretty.

I buy more books, of course, thus wantonly ignoring the stacks of books I've already bought that sit waiting at home for me to read them.

Sitting. Waiting. In all the usual places.

By my bed. On the coffee table. By the back door. By the front door.

Do I need to have my head examined?

Ah well.

What did I go and buy this time?

I am so glad you asked.

Because next to the pleasure of reading books and buying books, there is the pleasure of talking about books.

Well. For starters, I went to Politics and Prose, which in case anyone is curious is right here.

I limited my perusal to their justly famous and very generous sale/remaindered aisle. It's right next to their coffee shop, so it's convenient to segue to my other addiction.

I always begin by saying to myself, "no more books now, we're just looking." I say this as many times as it takes for the words to start to mean very little and then next to nothing and then--poof!--nothing at all.

That's a nice moment.

Then comes the time to stack books up my arm until there are little red marks all in a row.

(you know, this is getting pretty graphic. What is my problem this week?)

Of the loot I brought home last week, I've already read (and been somewhat disappointed in) the wonderfully titled Mortal City, a slim book of essays edited by Peter Lang and published by Princeton Architectural Press. The back cover was what gripped me: "A heightened perception of urban violence increasingly dominates public discourse...The very definitions of the city and of violence are constantly being redefined: the site of the city shifts across real and imagined space..."

I think in fairness that my disappointment stems from my having read lots and LOTS of essays of this nature. So I'm jaded.

Peter Lang's other work intrigues me, though; particularly Superstudio: Life Without Objects.

I also picked up a copy of James Howard Kunstler's The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition. Kunstler, a self-trained and self-appointed architectural critic (the best kind, I'm convinced) and gentle-hearted curmudgeon of the landscape, is a past master at sentences like these, with that wonderful new-minted coining of the adverb "immersively:"

One of the most popular beliefs of the computer era has been that virtual places are every bit as okay as real places. This idea gained popularity in direct proportion to the spread of immersively ugly, monotonous, dysfunctional suburban environments through the 1980s and 90s. The more our nation came to be composed of crappy housing subdivisions, highway strips, Big Box fiefdoms, and parking wastelands, the more appealing the idea of virtual reality became ("Virtual Is No Refuge from the Real").

Probably the book I am most looking forward to is Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the Visible City by Mike Davis. Anyone who follows the rapidly shifting demographics of the U.S. or was amused at the controversy over acclaimed author Sandra Cisneros's periwinkle purple house in San Antonio's King William District should get a kick out of this book.

Also on my list of recent acquisitions: The Courtesans by Joanna Richardson; The Gate by Francois Bizot; Kinship: A Family's Journey in Africa and America by Phillippe Wamba; and, in honor of my brother, The Birth of the Chess Queen: A History by Marilyn Yalom, and Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities, edited by A. James Arnold.

Happy reading.

Hoe-ly Mow-ly

Well.

I guess I know how to cultivate more traffic to my site in a hurry.

By 8:00 a.m. this morning I had a bumper crop of newcomers--though I don't think many will return.

They came--though not at my site--from all over the world. They were Googling, all right, but not for beauty or truth.

Well, who am I to say? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And truth, like pornography, is hard to define but easy to recognize.

Or is it?

categories: garden life thought

Monday Garden Porn

Good MORNING EVERYONE!

I did warn you at least once that you would have to hear about my garden, didn't I?

Didn't I?

So now you do.

But I will make it worth your while.

I will tell you a story that will curl your chest hair, if you have any, and will give you chest hair if you don't.

See, it started innocently enough.

I was just looking around in a little-known Internet chat room.

You know the kind I mean. Intimate. Cozy. Just a few lonely strangers with the same exotic interests.

We need to find each other, people like us. And thank goodness the Internet makes it possible.

I'll never forget when I first walked into GardenWeb's Garden Exchange. That's where I first met...

....her.

She was looking for clematis, and I had some. Oh, did I ever. I was craving a little purple iris, and she had it. She had loads of it.

So, we traded. It seemed innocent enough, at the time. And I got my iris, all right. I got it good. It came a few days later, after painful anticipation.

I slowly unwrapped the box, savoring the odor of the moist, soil-laden plants as I lifted them eagerly from their bed of damp newspaper and I...and I...

I planted them.

And it felt so good.

After that, I went back to the Exchange. A lot. I never found her again, but by then it didn't matter. Faceless strangers came and went in a blur, offering their cuttings in exchange for my divisions and we...and I...we gardened together.

Names were seldom exchanged.

Today I am but a shadow of the woman I once was.

But my garden looks freakin' awesome.

(skewed perspective on garden is courtesy of my eight-year-old publicity agent)

categories: home garden life

Googling for No Good Again

You know, I don't think I want to go looking for the truth anymore, if this is the best I can do.

Life Among the Royals

I normally don't post on Saturdays. My lame attempt to observe Shabbos (yeah, I observe it all right, from afar).

Anyways. I couldn't let the weekend go by without documenting my close associate Mona's latest bon mot.

It carries implications that are eerily parallel to the recent undertakings of Sir Quentin of Madison. Sets me to wondering if it is too early in the proceeds to make a little shidech with the Lady Shawn.

(Would they marry Jewish, d'ya think? Chances are they already have somewhere along the line, and just didn't know it.)

Okay. What was my point? Ah:

In the car, with Mona in the back, driving along with my brother's fiancee Lara, who is here for tomorrow's 3o-day memorial (Sh'loshim, it's called, in case you're tracking). And we're talking about princesses and fairy tales.

And Mona says, "I don't like princesses so much anymore. I only like princesses who take action."

That's my grrrrl!!

Shameless Blogrolling With a Heart

It's my brother's birthday.

We have this curious thing in my family. September 8 is my sister, September 12 is me, and September 16 is my brother.

Do the math.

Only my brother, he's not getting any older. In comparison to the rest of us now, he's actually getting younger.

sigh.

Anyways, a few days ago Shawn posted this on her blog, and it got me to thinking about how big a kick my bro would have gotten out of it.

See, he once won a family contest to come up with a slogan for cheap wine, and this was his winning entry:

"One sniff of the screwtop cap and you know this wine kicks ass."

To fully appreciate how funny it was, you'd kind of have to hear his delivery. He had this way of telling a joke and then totally cracking himself up. He didn't step on the punchline or anything. He just delighted in a good one-liner or stupid shaggy-dog story.

"Pardon me sir, is that the cat that ate your new shoe?"

or,

"Window viper!"

or,

"Tarzan's stripes forever."

I guess you kinda have to be there.

Wish he could.

Shameless Blogrolling

In case you want to know how wide the Statue of Liberty's mouth is or who holds the record for balancing the most teacups on his head while riding a unicycle, you can go to Just Some Stupid Stuff, my favorite new place to waste time. The author is actually collecting stuff for his new web site, thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameeveratlast, but I like his blog better.
(No offense, Roman).

And while I'm at it, I need to shout out to riannan, whose blog In The Headlights is really working up a full head of heady steam. She rocks, and as soon as I have time to cook again, I'm going to her for menu suggestions.

Hold the haggis, though.

[image by Jenny Holzer]

Poetry Thursday: Gregory Corso

I Held a Shelley Manuscript

by Gregory Corso

My hands did numb to beauty
as they reached into Death and tightened!

O sovereign was my touch
upon the tan-inks's fragile page!

Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!

I would have taken the page
breathing in the crime!
For no evidence have I wrung from dreams--
yet what triumph is there in private credence?

Often, in some steep ancestral book,
when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples
and torched-skin mushrooms,
my cypressean skein outreaches the recorded age
and I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk,
pour secrecy upon the dying page.

Chapter the Second: In which I stop the whining...

The birthday was a-okay after all.

Got the car started.

It was outta gas, and being fuel-injected, it didn't like that. To my credit, I diagnosed the problem correctly and handled it all by myself. Not to my credit, I have a bad habit of running engines dry like that.

I just hate gas stations. With a passion. The way some people hate grocery stores and others hate dry cleaners.

I am not making excuses. I am just saying.

When I picked up Mona, she had made me a lovely, crowded, abundant, rainbow-covered card.

When I got home, presents and messages were waiting. Stuart brought home a really decadent cake, and a card from him and one for Mona to sign, from her.

After bedtime, we draw a tasteful shade down over the rest of the evening's proceedings...

And then, today, all my vriends from all over the country and the world leave me birthday wishes! And one lovely one of them even fell for my shameless bid for presents!

Best of all, my vacuum cleaner bags arrived yesterday! I have to order them special 'cause my vacuum is so old. Now I can vacuum the dog-furry carpet.

O joy!

touched by a minimalist

I made a new friend yesterday.

As with another close friend I've made in recent months, he lives very far away indeed.

All the way in Warsaw.

He (I have proof that he's a he) is a gentle soul whose cybername is afp763389.

My guess is that was randomly assigned, and suits his purposes--whatever they may be--perfectly.

I don't think his purposes can be articulated, exactly, but he comes in peace.

He seems to slip through the rank and file on our mutual blogging host, Blogger, and whether he stops with a purpose, at random, or sequentially is not to be known.

What he does, though, generally, is leave a little tiny greeting.

Like this.

Or this.

To which he gets a range of responses.

From this:

ahhh..
you annoy me!

And this:

Hey, what ´s this? when I click on any number always appears the same map and when I click on map I am back on letters. You are weird!

To this:

seems to me from the look of all of these comments that this blogger must be a guru, because all I'm readin is a reflection of the people who left the comments. some selfish (write because i want you to) some adventurous and open, and others simply confused! haha. then there are those of us that are amused! write on! or don't!
i think this might be the blog of a zen master. ;^)

And this:

i smell genius.

Sometimes he leaves slightly longer messages, as he did the first time he came to see me. I could tell the speaker was a non-native, and when I went to his site I didn't know precisely what to do.

So I did nothing.

I neither responded to nor deleted the comment.

I felt a little edgy, though.

This morning I was having a look at the stats. You can't see much from these--nothing very personal--but you can see how many computers have been used to visit you, where they are, what time the visit was made, and how the visitor found you. The latter is what interests me, especially the Google and Yahoo and MSN and other searches.

This visitor, it turns out, was searching for afp763389. And the search originated in Poland.

I looked at the pattern--a poster "named" afp763389 making curious brief visits to other blogs, and for some reason I remembered my mystery visitor.

This time when I went to his blog, I did look around. Go ahead, do some clicking.

You'll be nervous. I know I have been. That imposing black map, the lack of answers. Surely this was--what? A hacker? An evil-doing cyberbusiness? A surveillance operation?

Nothing good.

Then I began to read comment after comment after comment. As usual, community opinion swayed me.

I am after all human.

But is afp763389?

I invited him to stop by again, and his most recent comment indicates he is.

Human. Like us.

And maybe he just likes this particular black-background design for a blog, because he seems to reserve his most human answers for those of us who chose this template. Here's what he posted on sister site My Weird Philosophical Moments:

as for 'human nature' I think that we are the most advanced dominant specie on planet earth
so not know much of evolution but every overpopulation gets its fall because of losing stability of ecosystem thus the value most importrant for Us is to look for more space to live
instead of fighting against each other if the agression and fear would win than we may allways say that we made as much as possible to live with self esteem or minimum human dignity
so often being not within swarm fight looking for peace and nice place to work or spent the time I find myself lonely or some bunker shelter the net makes me know and feel like we are on the concert of darkness each one keeps the shining little flame of the lighter not long not much bright but without any here we soon will join the spiritual space of OverSoul or something like that :)

I might just have to post some of afp763389's wisdom on my next Poetry Thursday. He's brilliant:

"we are on the concert
of darkness each one
keeps the shining little flame
of the lighter not long
not much bright"

nice, huh?

It's My Birthday...

WARNING: This is a self-pitying rant and a shameless bid for gifts. It is sure to--and designed to--drive Anonymous to new heights of self-righteous rage.

But f--- you, Anon. Cause it's my birthday.

(that's for you, Juana...)

Here's how this special day started.

Woke up at five or so. Stuart and I made a tactical error yesterday and started looking at houses in quieter, cleaner neighborhoods. So there we both were in our squalid, dark little bedroom, lying awake and calculating how long it would take us to finish the kitchen, refinish the floors, and paint the upstairs so we can sell this house.

Eventually I went downstairs to make coffee.

There was no coffee. I had forgotten to buy beans.

There were, however, three hungry children, gaping at the table like baby birds, requests and demands spilling out of their tiny beaks.

I set to work preparing my own birthday breakfast: pound cake, nectarines, and whipped cream.

Doesn't it just sound so wholesome?

But where was the f(*&ing coffee???????!!!!!!!

The sink was also spilling over, with dishes from last night. The counter was covered in crumbs. The rug in the living room was covered in dog fur. The trash can was brimming and stinky.

I go to the basement to get clean laundry. The cat, who has claimed the entire pathway from the basement steps to the washing machine as her personal addition to the litter box, has really laid on something special for me, in honor, perhaps, of my special day.

I come back upstairs, a paper towel full of cat poo in one hand, a handful of clean underwear in the other. To their credit, my sweet family is extra sweet to me at this sight.

"The basement floor is disgusting," I complain to Stuart. "I'm going to have to clean it tonight."
"Don't say you have to," my stepdaughter cautions me. "Nobody has to do anything. You want to."

The twins make it out the door with their father. I take Mona out the front door. We get in my recently deceased brother's Honda instead of my own car to trek to school, because the Honda has Virginia plates and I am tired of getting tickets on it.

It's my first day teaching a new class, a class I took over from a teacher who had to leave suddenly. I'm actually looking forward to it, but I have only just enough time to go from my daughter's school to my employer. I drop her off and hop in the car, which....

do I even have to finish that sentence?

I plop a big sign that says DISABLED VEHICLE, BACK AT NOON on it and hitch a ride with a sainted friend and fellow mom at Mona's school. We are stuck in gridlock traffic and I arrive at the class with a minute to spare and none of my materials copied.

(subliminal message subliminal message subliminal message subliminal message subliminal...)

The class I am teaching is, well, hey, it's great. It's a great class. Things begin to look up. I decide to go home and do a few things before dealing with the car. I open the front door.

Same old house. Same old dishes in the sink and dirty socks on the floor. But it's a nice house, actually. With nice people in it. Really nice people, and creatures. My husband and kids. His dog and my cat. I really think none of us is quiet or clean enough yet to live in a quieter, cleaner neighborhood. This is where we're at.

Which brings me to about now. Disabled vehicle is still sitting untended in front of my daughter's school, and I am typing this instead of doing any number of things I ought, as always, to do.

But I feel better. You know why?

Yeah, me neither. I was hoping you would.

The Ring, II

Spilled coffee is apparently the culprit in an early-morning incident August 30 on Washington, D.C.'s Metrorail system. On that day, the doors of a Metro train opened as it pulled out of the busy Metro Center Station.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority investigation led the agency to conclude that "the driver accidentally spilled coffee into the console, causing an electrical malfunction on the Orange Line train," according to an NBC news report.

No one was hurt.

What makes this ironic is Metro's stringent "Zero Tolerance" policy forbidding food or drink of any kind on Metro trains and buses. Even gum. Even water.

Definitely coffee.

The incident was the first of two cases of subway doors opening when they shouldn't have in recent weeks. Metro blames a broken spring for another Orange Line incident last week.

Problem is, the coffee spill may be laughable but the broken spring isn't: Metro isn't getting any younger and the trains aren't getting much safer. Plus, there are design difficulties to begin with: the system was essentially created like "a two-lane country road" according to one source, with no wiggle room in case of breakdowns and back-ups.

Earlier this year, the Washington Post ran a four-part series on Metro's troubles, from poor results after $1 billion in system renovation to bad public relations and plagued services for people with disabilities.

So, any good news?

Well. Metro is improving its customer service (which for the record I generally have found to be fine, particularly on those unsung heroes of the fleet, the buses).

And the agency is changing how it handles difficult maneuvers, such as when a passenger falls ill and needs to deboard immediately.

After this most recent snafu, I'm hoping Metro will see the light and play a little reverse psychology. Maybe the train system's problem isn't too much coffee, but too little coffee.

Is it too much to hope for a little complimentary coffee bar at the escalators, at least on Mondays? Especially at DuPont Circle, with its splendid Krispy Kreme store?

sigh.

"...they welcomed a trespassing poet"

In 1974 a young French aerialist walked a tightrope between Towers 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center. He stayed suspended above lower Manhattan for 45 minutes.

There, he was almost free.

Police couldn't get to him.

Authorities stood helpless, waiting.

Citizens cheered him from below.

For nearly an hour, as Phillippe Petit later described it, the Twin Towers breathed quietly with him, "as they welcomed a trespassing poet determined to etch his destiny on the sky."

When he completed his performance to his own satisfaction, he calmly stepped off the tightwire and back into the world, offering his wrists to the waiting handcuffs.

He was taken to New York's Downtown hospital to be examined for mental illness. “The police thought he was crazy,” remembers John Flynn, M.D., who at 87 is still practicing at the same hospital. “I told them he wasn’t — that he was a trained aerialist. Then they took the handcuffs off him.” Petit remembered Flynn and later sent him a photo. “We hung it in our bedroom at home,” he said.

Two years after the Towers fell, Petit wrote a brief and moving essay about them, My Towers, Our Towers.

He also published a book about his walk in 2003, To Reach the Clouds: My Highwire Walk Between the Twin Towers.

One of the finest essays about Petit's walk is anthologized in Best American Essays 2002. It's by Rudolph Chelminski, and it's called "Turning Point."

I have found it a wonderful story to teach teenagers about the WTC tragedy: a new and healing way to remember the Towers.

For younger children, there is Mordecai Gerstein's magical The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

For the rest of us, the Sonic Memorial Project contains--and is still seeking--sounds and spoken memories of the World Trade Center. One of the most interesting of the Sonic Memorial's fully produced radio stories is Walking High Steel, an account of how a cadre of highly skilled Mohawk men--known for their ability to work in hazardously high locations--have contributed to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.

Wonder what, how, and when we will commemorate the great and terrible stories of Katrina?

As the sun sets on another week, I can't resist revisiting Area 404 for a final word of wisdom, extended to we the lost:

here.

G'night.

mariposas

This semester I am teaching my students all kinds of things with a few simple excerpts from Sue Halpern's exquisite Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly.

The book is so elegantly written yet so densely layered with information, I can teach almost any style of composition from its slender spine.

Personal narrative. Expository writing. Compare and contrast. Persuasive. Research and use of quotes. Dialogue. Process Analysis.

You name it, Halpern's got it.

Best of all, she has an absolutely fascinating set of stories to tell. First and foremost is the great migration of the Monarch butterfly itself, clouded by controversy between scientists trying to prove the migration occurs and those who claim other phenomena are responsible for patterns resembling migration.

Then there are the internecine battles within each camp, the fight to preserve frail egos and the unorthodox approaches to research that have called some