Category Archives for art

toothsome

toothsome

the new dental hygenist – the spitting image and cheerful composition of sex and the city’s charlotte – laid me flat in the dentist’s chair, reclining me further back than i’ve been before at the dentist. this put me in the position of gazing straight up at the bright spotlight. while she was on my right, inserting sharp things into my skin, and i was gazing up into the light, i had another flashback, or imagined i had another flashback, to my surgery. to my left, dr grissom and my breast. above me, the bright spotlights. to my right, a man sticking sharp things into my skin. “you’ll feel just a little versed going in…” and that’s all she wrote.

memorial for the dog by the side of the road

memorial for the dog by the side of the road

it takes me longer than normal to shake the images of animals killed on the road. yesterday, along dolores, out of the corner of my eye i saw a rock but later realized this was a dog. this was a very much alive dog walking with its person in the dolores median, but i thought it was funny how something could look like one thing, but be another.

it was later during that same commute when i passed the real trouble. sometimes, it seems like animals are just sitting resting by the side of the road, or maybe sleeping, but in the end this image only makes it sadder, as if they were struck, hobbled over to the side, just couldn’t go on anymore, and simply lay down. that was yesterday. by today, this particular dog definitely wasn’t just resting or sleeping anymore, because it had obviously been struck and was less a dog anymore than something to clean up from the road. i am sorry to have to share it but i am compelled since i have thought it, and have wondered if there was a loneliness in those last moments of resting, that i could change, transform, or – i suppose oppositely – memorialize.

i come home and wanda yells at me and i am still thinking about the sparkling lightning on either side of the plane. still wondering how to assimilate the flashing insights of barb macleod:

so why is takeoff so awful? Is it simply the acceleration (it's very sensual...I love it!!) or is it the commitment, the no-turning-back that it represents? Or are you spitted on images of takeoff disasters--either imagined or historical??

am i taking notes, she wants to know. i am having nightmares or at least vivid dreams. the kind you get after a big meal; big food for thought.

leanne has brought peak-season juicy tomatoes home again and i can smell dinner, nearly done.

things regenerate, transform, i guess or i hope.

sparks

sparks

mary donovan and i careened into a laughing fit at the circus in moscow in 1985. way down on the stage, performers were smashing swords together, and every time metal hit metal, cool sparks would fly from the swords. when we saw this, we screamed “sparks” – at the very same time the music and the audience fell silent.

i don’t like to fly much. that is, i don’t like to feel like i will crash during takeoff (or any other time!). this is no secret. but the flight home from cleveland last night went as well as any other, and the turbulence was only as bad as a bad muni ride. the cool part, however, was watching the cloud-to-cloud lightning at 39,000 feet, something like the sparks flying all around at the circus. we were flying towards the glow of the long sunset, navigating through the tops of dark thunderheads, and the sky just kept blinking and sparking, blinking and sparking…

i saw my first fireflies over the weekend. i felt like a city fool. there we were, just after sunset on the back lawn of a big house in the middle of ohio, and suddenly i saw a spark rise up from the lawn. then, there were more. mostly under the trees. everyone around was talking about how there weren’t as many as there have been in previous years. i thought it was just so cool; they kept rising up, like ashes sparking up from flames. sparking and rising, sparking and rising …

appropriate, since leanne and i prepared for the trip last wednesday night (so long ago…) by dining at one of our favorites, firefly.

people fly. they seem to do it all the time. you can actually see some pretty cool things. and cleveland, well it was pretty neat, and the rivers don’t catch on fire any more.