Parasite Love

Currently the housemates and I are top-to-end cleaning out a very big old house that has generations of old biology graduate student stuff layered into every possible corner of space; the egg shells and old feathers of birds that hopefully have flown to a place they like more.

This morning K. came across this piece of old yellowed notebook paper with the following sketch of a song (I think for gee-tar). The influence of a bioloigcal frame of mind isn't *too* subtle, is it? hm.

Was it ever performed? In the presence of the "parasitoid" in question perhaps? Ouch, what a crusher that'd be.



--Am----------G-----------------Em----
out of the light and into the darkness
--G---------------------D----------------Am--------
what I thought was a fire, turned out to be a flame,

( Am------G---------Am-----------Em)

------G--------------D------------------Am------
which blows out so easily when it starts to rain

like a parasitoid, you eat me from the inside,

dependency bred through intimacy

Food for too much thought

There was one egg left in the refrigerator. I felt groggy, but despite this drew upon some (for me) remarkable inner resources,and decisively grabbed the egg. I cracked it in the fry pan and closed my eyes to the warm image of a fried egg on toast filling my mind with a sort of serene joy.

looking down into the pan (see below) I yelped.

hmm


Holy mother-of-nothing, my egg was purple magenta around its edge. I swear, these days things go wrong in the smallest and absurdist of ways frequently enough I’m wondering where the camera is, and this was just another example. I mean…wha? My housemates were very impressed/amused/incredulous until Kyle mentioned maybe that was the pan he cooked ginger and garlic curry in last night. It’s jar stuff, and kinda bright, but I still was suspicious. I mean, if it was the curry paste, what does magenta have to do with “ginger,” “garlic” or “curry” anyway?

I ate the egg. It was my best fried egg in months.

...

Later in the day I went to the hospital cafeteria on campus to meet my friend Y. for lunch. The lady in the back was cooking about four gallons of canned green peas on a griddle. hm. something new. New techniques for a new millennium, I'm guessing.

Sitting down finally with Y. we got to eating, him a salad too (new to the States, he seems to like the salad bar). Lifting something curiously on his fork he asks, “What is this?” A wet, purple-magenta disk hung in his tines....

a slice of pickled beet.

ok, so maybe not all magenta food is so bad after all.

Orange

I lived in a beautiful house for the last two years and now that house is being sold by my landlords. Certain inevitabilities follow from such events, including the moving of hundreds of books, various tchotchkes, clumsy furniture, and innumerable scraps of paper with details that I can’t bring myself to discard: words to look up in the dictionary (“caesura”,”caducous”), things to do (“see if check is still cashable”) and observations of moments who’s original time, place and full contexture are now lost (“blue & coral cotton shirt; lisp”). Moving such things at once and en masse shakes the memory and other stable notions. It is that can of orange soda you were carrying in your backpack that bubble fizzes with some agitation when you finally snap the tab to take a sip.

The room I’ve moved into in the new house is painted orange in a couple bright and varied ways. So much so that even with my eyes closed I sense its solar color penetrating my eyelids and making the darkness bright.

And maybe this is auspicious.
I was stacking a set of photobooks I bought on Japan, each one in the series premised on a color and also a mood or sensibility that color is thought to manifest. Coming across the book on Orange I noticed its Title – “Orange: When you feel something has just begun.” Considering this undecided and liminal space of post-school/pre-Next Step I am presently in, orange might be the sense of things that I need. The words accompanying the picture on page five read, “It could be a bandana, socks, a coat; it could be a pin. Orange has come to change the gears of your mind.” Let us see.

And while I rankle a little at moving house and feel suddenly as if someone has switched the right and left lenses of my eyeglasses in a prank, thank god whole peoples & traditions thrive particularly from such itinerancy. If it weren’t for the Roma/Gypsies and their never ending migrations from India to Iberia, there would be no Flamenco, and so no Flamenco guitarists and dancers to be found just by chance in Sven’s dining room last Saturday night.


I have to be honest, I have had a crush on Flamenco for many years now. There at the party I could flirt with it openly as it filled the air all around me, wine in one hand, my heart in the other. A girl at the party even happened to be from Spain and impromptu sang a Jorge Luis Borges poem from a book she pulled from the shelf. Are we everywhere like this? dancers, guitarists and divas? As hopefully so, as certainly so.

"Free-Speech-Zone"

What more need be said? Sure, I had heard about the free speech zone (or "FSZ") absurdity at the Democratic National Convention up in Boston and other places. But then I just saw the photos (exhibits A & B) of the space and it completely flipped my lid. A small area enclosed with razor wire under a bridge?! Is it me, or did the Boston Police and Secret Service simply go on the cheap and buy the old set from Mad Max's "Thunderdome"? (note unruly protesters with crazy hair waiting to enter the FSZ)

and of course, more nuttiness.

photo log #'s 534,568 – 534,571

In support for the thesis that meaning is contextual rather intrinsic; sometimes words in another language completely hit the mark regardless and by the blessing of not knowing their actual native meaning (in this case "hair salon"). Fris-E-ur, indeed.




In Vienna they have a nice summer tradition called a “Hueringer” where, out of the ebullient impatience of the grape, they drink the wine not fully yet fermented and mixed with soda water. It’s better than half bad, though, and I don’t even like white wine that much to start. Catch some Hueringer-ers mid-evening and they may give you this kind of look. They may also give you the finger (lower left), and maybe that’s fair enough.




Don’t be afraid, airbrush your BMW, ‘cause you only live once, but the Goddess of the Ocean Storm lives 4eva!




Finally, what would Vienna be without the Boys Choir?

Working notions

Visiting Dachau Concentration Camp outside of Munich is sobering and quiets you down quickly. When there recently I saw had the horribly cynical and false phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” – Work Will Make You Free – welded into the iron of the gate, as it was in the camp gates throughout Eastern Europe . And shouldn't it be to the contrary; if we are free, we can pursue livelihoods as makes sense to us. But then, the Nazis weren’t known for their exploration of the finer points of emancipation, or dignity.

...........

Today in my in-box I received my bi-annual note from the “Iwate Prefecture Ambassadors Association.” They are always hoping to hear about –or alternatively generate— news about what is probably the most sparsely populated prefecture in all of Japan. Of course, when you get attention, it isn’t always the preferred kind…. This time it looks like my former home was curious (and somewhat worried) to know whether any of us saw the article in the Wall Street Journal a couple months back about using the “Ganbaranai” slogan to promote their northern province.

To “Ganbaru” is to try hard and give it your utmost effort – a phrase as “Japanese” as you could get that embodies a sense of cultural identity not matched by our own slogans like “Be all you can be” etc. To “Ganbaranai,” however, is to precisely NOT “Ganbaru.” (!) Shocking for country like Japan, that like other first world cultures, often enforces hyperized notions of how working constantly and at haste will provide freedom (above all, freedom to go into debt buying shrink-wrapped Stuf. It seems that the mountain air gives the people of Iwate that little clarity to see somewhat differently.