State of Affairs; Affairs of State; State Fairs

And only six days until everything unwinds a bit. or maybe a bit more. How can’t the election have us on pins and needles? and then more needles still. Some acupuncture of the body politic.

I know one thing certain, I am sick of polls. I polled myself today on this very question and found that 47.5% of myself was thoroughly sick of polling. But with the 3% margin of error, I suppose it’s a “statistical dead heat.” (What kind of term is this?)
...................................statistics. death. heat.................................
I’m definitely sick of this. If you aren’t however, I highly recommend a site, not for the information so much as for the presentation: electoral-vote.com gives a animated map of just how the polls have predicted what state is going which-whenever way over the last six months. It is like watching the flashing bulbs of a troubled Christmas tree. it is like the oracle of our collective knowledge of knowing nothing very much at all. About ourselves, sure. And most of all, about the electoral college.

...
But thankfully one can move from Affairs of State ----> to State Fairs. And the North Carolina State Fair more specifically. Cousin K., L., and I headed out on the historically busiest day—the Saturday before the gig is up. I was glad to find L. was as excited about seeing the fancy poultry as I was. Usually B. has been the one to share this enthusiasm with me. The fact that my cousin’s girlfriend also couldn’t wait to look at the guinea hens could only warm me to her.

and then the goats...


and then the hogs...


..and then the sense of peaceable kingdom if ever a kingdom might exist. If ever the sense to be peaceable might build a kingdom of its own (let’s break the ground right here, shall we...)

…
And there was so much to take in down the Midway. I saw the biggest pumpkin in the state (740.56 lbs.) and a selection of the award winning pickled beans.


As for the food, the “Bloomin’ Onion” was a little too raw this year, but the fries were right-on. They fell off the small gingham paper dish like fat petals off a finishing flower. it was perfect. Maybe their heavy calories contributed to the Professional Guesser guessing cousin K’s weight 15 pounds short? Either way, it got him an inflatable “Finding Nemo” doll. Missing 2 out of three at the pitching game on the Midway got me, however, nothing at all. But remember the Marine chin-up bar I mentioned from the Greeley fair in July many posts ago? (Passing time in a thinner air). Well the Marines were at the NC fair as well. Semper Fi - do or die, L. hung for 70 seconds and won that CD carrying case for Cousin K’s car.


Most importantly, the rides all shone bright. the Zipper zipped. It is a giant YKK on speed.


The roller coasters coasted as if on cresting waves of black air, even if the thin rails were there as pretense.


…
And finally, what of the "State of Affairs"?
I report Decidedly Autumn.
In my room, it is orange. In my room I was changing. but I’m always changing. but I mean colors changing. not of the season so much as of the day. I was changing, you see. my clothes. and at 6pm this means a corner of this room might catch fire with fall sunset. By chance one sock on; one off; and there is conflagration.

On my body the light was burning hotter than the heat. no statistics. no death. just heat. good old equinox heat. And this light cast shadows off from random wire figures. Piled in a chinese take-out box on the shelf. Faces and hands warmed themselves.

...
So what the hell can be worried for? Affairs of State. changes of state. whatever. Whatever end comes to our emerald votes and this state of affairs, fellow citizens, there is always Sublimation. As a matter of last resort, if this chunk of ice finally gets too cold, please don’t simply melt. rather V a p o r i z e.

Floating underwater from above

Sometimes driving down the highway at the end of Saturday feels like snorkeling into a reef of sky. There is plenty of water, just vaporized. Forming corals of cloud.


...
There are large jellies that float and shine with preternatural halos. Bioluminescence...?


No. Simply luminosity.

. . .
You might come across strange reef structures, iterated and colorful. Corals are colonial creatures and build little modular cubicles of individuality<>communality. This particular coral looks a lot like the old Heart of Durham hotel, abandoned for years and now in being demolished...


With a wall torn away, the antics of the inside walls can be seen in full spectrum. It is like a ripe piece of fruit sliced in half. psychedelic pomerganate. seeds piling out. Look more closely and some anemones and morays can be seen among the old doorways (They can be a bit cryptic).


...
But time to surface. time to get a dose of breath.

Feeling Froogle

Google is useful. It is the Magic Eight-Ball of this culture that can be called upon to answer any question posed. No matter how unanswerable it may in fact be.

The other day I noticed the "Froogle" link. Ha. Clever! (pun).
I clicked to see what online buying, goooooogling style, might be like.

Going to the page automatically generates a short sampling list of the 25 items "recently found with Froogle" that are for sale. In some ways I thought the selection wasn't dissimiliar to the sort of things for sale at our house yard sale a month back. (Some things I thought would go didn't --handmade craft wooden yo-yo $.50, while other things were bought, I know not why --used phone that has broken #2 and #4 buttons).

So Froogle. What was there to be had at my first moment of glimpsing into this flea market? The snapshot could reveal something interesting about this life we are living out. Or really maybe not.

THE LIST of 25:

The items appeared in the order below. as did the following thoughts(most = variously interchangeable; a number = quite sincere; too many = 'clever').

DeWalt Belt Sander
-- Ok. very useful.
USB CD Writer
-- Used computer electronics online...? No.
Swingline Stapler
-- Swingline does make the best stapler, but who is going to buy? Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems something akin to selling individual pencils online.
piano lamp
-- Very specific device. interesting...
Golf Bag
-- I understand our modern desires to both package and be mobile, but a bag for your Volkswagen? seems a bit excessive.
Leg Warmers
-- Hm. I wonder what color and pattern they are. I welcome a comeback.
Pregnancy Test
-- When you really need to know, is it best buy one from a stranger off the internet?
High Chair
-- I think someone got a little over enthusiastic after buying the aforementioned pregnancy test. Package deal.
Guitar Amp
-- Cool. I admire electric guitars, and Sonic Youth playing them.
Electric Razor
-- I once had one myself but sold it to a pawn shop upon moving abroad.
Mouth Guard
-- My hopes this isn't a "previously used" item.
Cigar Cutter
-- This is so mid 90's . I guess the seller realized this.
Eyelets
-- Are these just many tiny eyes? *this* could be very useful.
Eternity Cologne
-- Cologne that could last forever would be great. no need to buy a new bottle! definitely a thrifty and "froogle" find.
Arm Chair
-- I actually haven't found a good one in years. but the shipping?
vitamin E
-- Dietary supplement or skin revitalizer, it is unclear. could this be code for ecstatic "E"? Everything is considered a natural supplement these days.
Chalkboard
-- Does this signal the rising dominance of the "whiteboard?" or "dry-erase board"? No,no,no.
Pot Rack
-- Truly a flea market item.
Topiary
-- I really, really want to know what this is. perhaps a giraffe? a lion? teapot-shaped shrubs?
Little Black Dress
-- I n d e e d. succinct. mysterious. Poetry meets alluring advertising.
Autometer
-- Does this measure how automatic something is? If so, does it do it automatically?
Kiehl's Breadmaker
-- I know only one person who still uses their's. it makes great bread. I hope this isn't the one.
HP Deskjet
-- Everything is moving faster, why wouldn't desks.
Hulk Hands
-- Yes! As bizarre as they are, I love to see people with these things on. another excellent/virtual flea market item.

----

And something else on the online sell::
I noticed that CNN's website is using this "smart technology" that generates adds to go with articles based on the keywords it finds in them. As they write:

Content Match pairs its listings with related content on CNN.com article pages and section fronts. The listings are determined by the relevancy of keywords, which advertisers bid on, to the content of the specific CNN.com page."

Thus, an article about W. stumping in Wisconsin had accompanying ads for "Free Sheboygan County Foreclosure Search" and "Wisconsin Buyer 1st Realty - Excusive Buyer Broker" (Excusive? are they making excuses? if so, I'm not buying them. (thank god some other people's typos are worse than my chronic own)). The implication seems to be that "keywords" = "meanings," a notion that is no less lame-O for being so very popular and widely assumed. (Didn't Wittgenstein put a close to this matter? I think "Liberal Senator from Massachusetts" is a good example of a recent "keyword/codeword" travesty...)

After the 'W. in Wisconsin' article I clicked on another, this one on the Russian space capsule, Soyuz, and its tricky docking to the space station some days back: "Soyuz Docks with ISS After Fast Approach."

And the "Content Matched" ads embedded in this article?

Buy Cellular Docking Stations $129.99
The Dock-N-Talk allows you to dock your cell phone and use your normal corded or...www.cellamericas.com

USB 2.0 Docking Stations
Plug into your laptop/notebook to add USB 2.0, PS/2, Serial, Parallel, USB file...www.byterunner.com

Docking Station Items on eBay
Visit eBay Electronics for "docking station" items. Discover great deals on new...www.ebay.com

Hmm.

The ole Soyuz crew seem to do a better job matching this-to-a-that than advertisers can (and they aren't even floating weightless in space).


Keywords? ...amateurs.

Please mark clearly.

Today was the first day of early voting in Durham County. People down at the board of elections seemed buzzed. Can my vote wait the almost three weeks before all its friends are counted? It is a restless thing.


Ready, Steady, Go!
Change is coming, people.
uh huh. that's right.

-------

ADDENDUM: the papers reproted today "Durham leads NC in early voting."
Like I said: uh, huh, that's right.

International Apples

It's apple season. Where I grew up in Sterling, Massachusetts it's apple season. MacIntosh is the word on the lips of every pomme-eater and cider drinker. They are the Appaloosa of apples: mottled, dappled with green and red. Those apple farms are closing down by the year, but perhaps enough will also remain. I was gladdened when I heard my fellow Sterlingite, B.w., was returning this weekend to get the apple in the way you can't in the city. I trust that now many sit in bowl somewhere in Cambridge. quietly ripening.

You know the world you are living in is truly global when the following is true about tha apple juice you buy at a gas station on Columbus Day weekend in rural North Carolina:


Sip, sip, sip...four continents, ten countries.

...
In other tran-national fruit news, local rock band International Orange just won The Independent awards for best new band in the Triangle. Even if it is like comparing "apples to oranges," cheers to that.

At the Ocean, Tiny Action

Sad and strange fact: I haven’t been to the coast for a whole calendar year. So when B. said that a carload + dog were heading down, I had to go. To see sea. To taste salt in my mouth and eyes. To pay propers to the place where various horizontal expanses meet like layers of a perfect cake; sky, water and sand. On actually arriving, it was only better still.

You can lay out on the beach of Fort Fisher in Wilmington and swim, then fall asleep, then carve the likenesses of cats, crabs and large, somewhat trans-gendered, mermaids out of the miniscule bits of glass we know as sand (as J. here can attest to):



...
The surfers were out. As were the kite flyers. One caught our eye from a distance most particularly. It was kind of clunky. And black. “Is that a … truck?” said C. Oh yes, it was. This little kid was running down the length of the beach, trying to fly nothing other than a kite conjured in the form of a black monster truck, with the monsterish name “Destroyer” written across its side.

“Wow, I’ve never quite seen a kite like that,” I said. The boy cautiously agreed, maybe not knowing any more than I did whether that was a good or bad thing. But really it was neither. It was just a thing. A strangely funny thing.




<<<<\/\/>>>>
Walking along the foam edge of the incoming waves of tide, you can see bubbles and shifting roly-poly things squirming in the sand.


I’ve always seen tiny clams getting tossed around in this part of the water called the “swash” but never really understood what was going on till B. and H. pointed out how the clams were actually pushing themselves *out* of the sand as waves came, catching them, and surfing them higher up onto the beach. An expert on the matter (and former teacher of B. and H.), a Dr. Olaf Ellers writes:

To migrate, several times each tidal cycle, it [a clam] jumps out of the sand (pushing its shell upward by thrusting two to five times downward with its foot) and rides flow from waves. This method of locomotion has been named "swash-riding" (Ellers, 1987, 1988).

Not only that, but all along the beaches' swash you can see small clams lift up en masse, in patches along the beach. How and why? Apparently they can hear the big waves coming, and set themselves up into pole position to catch the next ride.

Another plentiful inhabitant is the Mole Crab, Emerita talpoida. On shore walks you may likely walk over their mysterious multitudes unknowingly. Little streamlined tank-pods, these crabs dig backward into the sand when uncovered by the wave water in the swash. I’m suspecting they may also be surfers, perhaps when we are not looking. Maybe you can note with affection the tiny yellow eyes at the end of the short eye-stalks of its small and pointy head.


The first time I’d ever come across mole crabs was on a visit to Assateague Island in 1992, finding some here and some there. Today there were thousands and upon thousands more. You could dig your hands into the soft and loose sand when the waves come up, and emerge with these smooth ellipsoids in your palm, in every conceivable size. I suppose if you are of a more technophilic persuasion, a certain analogy might come to mind.


It was hard not to crouch, dig and laugh in curious awe as the somewhat anxious crabs try to dig down between your fingers. So this is exactly what we did, watching out for the mole crabs, or what we now joyfully referred to as “Tiny Action.” C. seemed to find the smallest baby one, barely the size of the sharpest pencil tip, and so translucent as to almost be invisible.

Could I learn to be as both hidden and brave as a surfing clam or moling crab? Life no doubt is in the swash. If only the cycle of tides or the sense of the ocean were somewhat more obvious to me...

Still, one has to admire the waves. Even if they are about to soak you (and your camera).

Fear and Rage

I'm not sure what is easier for most people to read-- words or faces.

If our general ability to follow the programming directions from the VCR instruction booklet is any indication, I think faces. If you saw the the facial acrobatics of last week's presidential debates, again I think faces would be your likely answer.

One of the most memorable things about my five-year-old trips into the Boston Museum of Science was not just the room with the mega-hella big Van de Graaf generator that throws blue bolts of electricity that crash into the oversized metal bird cage the exhibit guide sits in. No, the lightning bolt machine was cool, but in the room NEXT to that had something equally intriguing: a psychology exhibit.

All along this one exhibition wall hung a series of white masks of human faces, each contorted into a different expression: happy, sad, worried, frightened, angry, soothed, and ecetera, ecetera so. It was about the deep-seated and universal ability we apparently have to interpret different facial gestures of fellow humans as conveying specific emotions, from infancy on. Of course there are cultural differences and subtleties too, and they can cause trouble (as this author reports from once critically misreading a grimace as a grin).

And what of our ability to read it in other creatures?

The other day walking down the street I saw a fairly standard "Beware of Dog/ Stay the Hell Out" sign on someone's yard fence with a picture of a mean, snarling dog on it:


But wait, I thought, am I reading this right?

The sign reminded me of a facial gesture chart I'd seen by the great animal behaviorist, Nikolaas Tinbergen, supposedly illustrating the emotions underlying the facial expressions of dogs...
: : : Back home looking at the figure it seemed to me that according to Tinbergen the dog on the "Warning" sign was showing more "Fear" than "Rage," or really a fair mixture of both (circled):


...
Is it that most of us are too unawares and ignorant to know the difference? Would a "Dog Whisperer" simply look at the "Warning" sign and think they need to enter the yard and talk with this clearly anxious and frightened puppy?

Perhaps the thing is really that one should be just as scared of an animal that is fearful as much as one that is raging; as rage is the fist of a body in fear >>

>> If the current global politics and its various manifestations tell us anything, it would seem this much is certainly and tragically so...

Yar! Ahoy! (n a t u r e . . . )

It’s getting chilly in North Kackalack right now. yep, it is. Every next day is a day closer to the center of a distant Winter, and so every day I go outside there is some urgency. I feel like a pirate on the the ocean of the on-coming Fall season, jumping on the ship of any nice afternoon that I happen to come by and rummaging it, stealing dry gunpowder, grog, and just most importantly some sliver of what could be left of the sun's summer light.

Go now(!) and you can still find the juke-joint hopping in the forest. Walk around and all that jumping at your feet is as likely to be tiny frogs as it is the autumn crickets — both small, both likely to chirp-chirp-chirp in that loveable, OCD sort of way.

...


Crayfish, those small and crafty freshwater lobster-creatures, make these little sculptured volcano-homes by the streamsides. No joke. This thing may not be Mount St. Helens, but it’s as tall as my camera and goes deeper in the ground than I’d likely dare to reach (assuming my arm was like stick-thin).
Did you know Antonio Gaudi was a crayfish? It’s true.
...


frogs sing songs smaller than your fingernail.
...


wood berries catch fire.
poof! (just like that)
...


I wish I dressed as well as most beetles. It's always an 80's dance party with them; six-legs, six ways to get fun-ky.

Around the District

DC is a strange place. If for no other reason than for the men with shotguns, the long black motorcades, presidential helicopters, and elusive blimps. These things are all right there, like a fire hydrant might be in any other city.

And as for blimps,

This one seemed to be floating around me, at times almost alighting on my shoulder. Whenever I felt a creeping sensation up the inner edge of my inner spine I’d turn my head and this white ghost would be quietly (so quietly) sneaking behind a gingko tree or some building, pretending to be a cloud. A friend who works of “the Hill” later told me it was a new “security blimp” that does surveillance in the city and also takes air samples to test for biological warfare agents that evildoers might be releasing from above. Crikey.

...
As for air, what about water?
C. and I went to the fish market. It is a series of rafts floating on the murky, littered surface of the Potomac. But the seafood is abundant. We decided to buy a Red Snapper and cook it whole. Everything about this animal shines a beautiful red, somehow even its smell.

C. wanted to make it “Rwandan style” which involves hot peppers and tomatoes – and having never been to Africa I decided to take his word on it. Spicy was the way to go. So make it so. Neither of us had ever possessed the presumptuousness or skill to try to cook a eight pound creature like that ourselves, but together the possibility was there and real. With 4 hours marinate and labor(as well as cous-cous and asparagus) it came out on the better side of good...

...
And many things in a District shine. How can they not? Light is everywhere, its trying to get your attention. Like the longest escalator in the DC metro system, Dupont Circle; it vibrates laconically photonically at evening or noon (upper). And of course clubs, they like to have their own particular brooding atmospheric, as seen with the red lights of “Black Cat” and the blue glow of the “9:30.”


Can red be to blue as night is to day?
What the hell could that possibly mean anyway?
(Suggestions welcome)