Time Travel

In case you pop by this blog every now and then, and are currently rubbing your eyes wondering where all the new posts came from, I’ll explain. Over the last two weeks, my wife and I have been in China, adopting our first child. Of course, I wanted to share all this with family and close friends, but at the same time didn’t want to advertise too loudly where we were at any given moment — or more specifically, where we weren’t, which is to say, home. So I hid it all behind a secret invisible magic wall.

But now that we are home, I figured I’d open it back up for general viewing. Feel free to follow along with our adventures.

I’d write more but my body still thinks it’s five in the morning. I’ll have more coherent thoughts soon…ish.

Social

Shut up.

Now that that’s out of the way, I wanted to let you know I’m now on Google Plus. This is me. And now that I’ve synced G+ with Twitter and Facebook I’ll probably use that as my main social network, at least for stuff I want to share publicly.

By the way, in case you’re wondering how I did it, I have this article by PC Magazine to thank. After some back and forth with a variety of different options, this seemed like the simplest and most painless method. I’d love to see links and photos get formatted properly at Facebook, but that’s probably being unrealistic.

And now I’m off to crawl back under the rock from whence I came.

Passion

[I have no idea where this came from, and I don’t really know what it is. A poem? The skeleton of a song? Not really sure. But I thought I’d share it anyway.]

Sponge the dryness from these lips.
Sour disinfectant burns
the rips and cracks and tears,
the gnawing fears,
the hollow absolutions.

For they do know what they do,
and no pious platitude
can save the unrepentant thief,
or shake belief in unbelief.

See: the needle-dicks of rich men
prick the temple-cloth
of civilization,
and rend us all.
Three hours of night?
A day? A year? A century?

(Their camels balk
and sweat holier waters.)

And history repeats
again,
again,
again,
raised from the dead
to shamble down fear-shrouded streets
in deathless search of spongy treats.

Who bears a spear with edge enough
to pierce those bullshit-swollen guts
and spill that reeking discharge?

(We will know the unfit candidates:
they’ll be the ones raising their hands.)

Behold the science of our time,
a secular faith whose communion wine
is spiked with Rohypnol:
Its apostles spread the call
to put faith only in one creed:

Misology.
Misology.
Misology.

A Toast to the Healers

On the occasion of my wife’s graduation from nursing school…

A toast to you, the healers:
you fixers of men,
and women, and children;
you soothers of the aged.

You body mechanics,
you protectors of life,
you guardians of spirit.

You shepherds of the bowel.

You ushers of the soul
(coming in,
and going out)
and of nourishment
(going in,
and coming out).

May you wear your pins with pride.
May you sleep soundly in daylight.
May your skin glow under fluorescent light.
And may you never need to take
the peerless service that you give.

Na zdrowie! To your health.

Repost: And to All, a Good Night

I know I’ve been neglecting you terribly, friends. And I hope to remedy that soon, even if it means posting whatever comes off the top of my head in snippets barely longer than a Twitter post.

But until then, I’d like to once again share this story about Christmas in my house. Here’s hoping your holidays are every bit as wonderful as they can be.


 

christmas-W540

I grew up in a very large family: I’m the youngest of ten kids. Yeah, you read that right. I have five older sisters and four older brothers — an even 5/5 split. To make things even more surreal, there was an eight-year gap between my youngest sister and my youngest brother, so most of my siblings are at least ten years older than me, with the difference in age between me and my oldest brother clocking in at ten days short of an even twenty years. So even in my earliest memories, my siblings had significant others, and very shortly thereafter, kids. (I now have a niece and two nephews who are married. But I’m not a great-uncle, yet.)

In addition to that, my dad’s biological mother died shortly after he was born, and his father got remarried, which made for five separate and distinct branches of the family tree just two generations back, counting the families of my maternal grandmother and grandfather, paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, and paternal step-grandmother. And many of them came from big families. (We’re talking about turn-of-the-century reproduction statistics here, mostly for recent immigrants to the country; this was not at all abnormal.)

Anyway, to sum up: we’re a big family. So the holidays were always a fairly substantial production. Continue reading “Repost: And to All, a Good Night”