E-ri-e Canal by Burl Ives

I have been listening to this song on repeat.

If you can make me rich, do not hesitate.

The felt absence of gainful employment is almost, perhaps, as bad as its felt presence. The principal, infuriating bother of a job, had or not had, is having to pay any attention to it. Jobs, like driving, are to be condemned because they make a chore of one's mental life.

There is probably nothing I cherish so much as my own free-wheeling thoughts, left to themselves--but it is precisely these which the duty to scrape for hourly pay and the nuisance of changing lanes aim to destroy. And they tend to succeed in their aims. It is not the strain on my body or my time that I cannot tolerate, but the taxing of my mind, my whole mind.

But, as I say: not having a job does no work to solve the problem. After two weeks of delightful, idling indigence, I am obligated by threat of insolvency and the nagging nags of loved ones to fill out my share of applications, and make my personal contribution to the working force. He does not want it, but in addition to my man-hours, the man shall take, free of charge, my very soul.

I am not surprised that so many refuse the life of the mind. I cast no contempt upon one who retreats from thought to television, when thought consists of solicitude over one's credit score.

What could you do for a million dollars?

A week ago I asked my brother if he thought he could make himself to believe that a given ordinary object were in a sealed box simply upon my asking him to, and he said he could: he would trust my testimony. So, if I said "Jeff, believe that there are scissors in this box", he thinks he could believe it, just like that. So he claims.

Then I asked him if he thought he could make himself to believe, for a million-dollar reward, that a given ordinary object were in a box, after my having opened the box, clearly showing him that nothing whatsoever was in the box, and then sealing the box in his presence. A million dollars to believe that scissors are in a box he had plainly seen moments before to be empty. He thought he could do it.

He said he would have to really lie to himself--deceive himself into discrediting the evidence that I'd just presented him with.

Then I asked, "what if you had to shake the box up and down?" That got him.

A reply to Dillard.

Read this bit from Dillard today:

Once, when the pond was younger and the algae had not yet taken over, I saw an amazing creature. At first all I saw was a slender motion. Then I saw that it was a wormlike creature swimming in the water with a strong, whiplike thrust, and it was two feet long. It was also slender as a thread. It looked like an inked line someone was nervously drawing over and over. Later I learned that it was a horsehair worm. The larvae of horsehair worms live as parasites in land insects; the aquatic adults can get to be a yard long. I don't know how it gets from the insect to the pond, or from the pond to the insect, for that matter, or why on earth it needs such an extreme shape. If the one I saw had been so much as an inch longer or a shave thinner, I doubt if I would ever have come back.

How do such parasites get to the pond, you ask? Let me help you out, Dillard. The internet has an answer: they turn their insect hosts into zombies.

Read all about parasites turning insects into zombies here, courtesy of Scientific American.
Watch a video of hairworms going all 'Dawn of the Dead' on crickets here, courtesy of the French internet.
Play a cartoony video game based on this biological premise here, courtesy of Nitrome.

Here's another little passage from Dillard that I dog-eared because it made me laugh aloud, not because it also mentions hairworms (but it does mention hairworms for those of you waiting to read any and all sentences about them).

Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings. Look again at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through the duck pond, or tangled with others of its kind in a slithering Gordian knot. Look at an overwintering ball of buzzing bees, or a turtle under ice breathing through its pumping cloaca. Look at the fruit of the Osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, green, convoluted as any human brain. Or look at a rotifer's translucent gut: something orange and powerful is surging up and down like a piston, and something small and round is spinning in place like a flywheel. Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing.

Hello and Jon, on the floor.

This morning I petted Hello, the cat my family feeds. I happened upon it as it lay lounging in the sunlight, like pagan royalty. Without explanation I flopped prone down next to it, and extended my hand. Hello took little notice, and continued to service the immediate needs of its back by rolling back and forth on the carpet. However, my hand, proving by its movements to be more in line with Hello's agenda of satisfying ever-present itch, established for itself a place of primacy among Hello's fund of nearby objects against which to rub an itchy body. I thought to myself how itchiness truly is ever-present for Hello. This cat's life is devoted to the stimulation of its fur, and it will be not be sated. Considered renaming cat Sisyphus. Or, I thought, if not a single physical craving, there is a small set of basic appetites--itchiness, hunger, horniness--that Hello will tend to for its feline lifetime. And there I was, stupidly stretched out on the floor, scratching the cat, helping it along merrily merrily merrily. I saw in Hello some reduction of myself: although I boast a chorus of (perhaps) subtler and more sophisticated iterations of desire, it is difficult not to think of the range of my behavior as at root an ongoing, elaborate, idiotic scratch.

These were my thoughts just before Hello started playing with my hand: biting it, holding it in its front paws, kicking at it with its back paws--behavior apparently gratuitous. And me, playing along, also without explanation.

Quotation of the Day.

"If you don't feel happy when you're reading or when you're writing, of if you don't feel greatly moved, then you are not really reading or writing. The whole thing is merely reading, I mean for examination marks, and that, of course--I won't say that way madness lies, but that's the way dullness lies." - Jorge Luis Borges, on William F. Buckley's Firing Line.

Methodology:

My method this morning of consuming my orange (grown 10 feet from where it is being ingested--little distance has it traveled), is to insert large portions of it (2 slices a time at least) into my mouth, to chew, letting the fruit's natural juices to trickle tranquilly down my throat, and then to open my mouth widely, facing downward over the trashcan, letting the orange remains plop down into the garbage.

You don't even want to know how I'm drinking my coffee.

A Valedictory Gift.

I have just received a letter from Coeur d'Alene Idaho, from my recent landlady. She has mailed me a check for around 2/3 of the deposit I put down on the beautiful apartment I loved and inhabited for 9 months. But this is not what the woman, Beatrice, has given me.

She signs her brief note, "As Ever, Bea". This valediction is her gift: whatever sentiment manages to be expressed in signing a letter "As Ever", something simple and quotidian, verging on tedium--maybe the sentiment of not working to express any particular sentiment. This valediction is a small stroke that, by its mere statement of fact, will serve me as an available ornament to adorn otherwise meaningful or important or good letters, imbuing them with a faint sense of hollowness, at least for myself; this is the wonderful, lifelong gift Beatrice has given me.

As Ever,
Jonathan

Poem, Discovered.

I wrote the following poem in the Coeur d'Alene Library some months ago. I just now stumbled upon it on my computer, and am both taken by it and doubtful as to its poetic merits.

Today, in the Library

I smiled at a reader,
who was frowning at a baby,
who was wailing inconsolably.

PPM--San Francisco Bay Blues

I have watched this dozens of times. I love it.

Grizzly Bear - Deep Blue Sea

This is a video of a band I've recently been enjoying, performing one of my favorite songs of theirs, live, on a beach, surrounded by some people.

Book Review I enjoyed.

A book review I enjoyed.

Happy Father's Day from Charles Dodgson, Sr.

In honor of Father's Day, I here reproduce a letter written to an 8-year old Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) from his father Charles Dodgson III.

My dearest Charles,
I am very sorry that I had not time to answer your nice little note before. You cannot think how pleased I was to receive something in your handwriting, and you may depend upon it I will not forget your commission. As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street, Ironmongers, Ironmongers. Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment -- fly, fly in all directions -- ring the bells, call the constables, set the Town on fire. I WILL have a file and a screw driver, and a ring, and if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds, I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole Town of Leeds, and I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it. Then what a bawling and a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs and babies, camels and butterflies, rolling in the gutter together -- old women rushing up the chimneys and cows after them -- ducks hiding themselves in coffee-cups, and fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases. At last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard, and stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the town. Oh! where is his wife? She is safe in her own pincushion with a bit of sticking plaster on the top to hide the hump in her back, and all her dear little children, seventy-eight poor little helpless infants crammed into her mouth, and hiding themselves behind her double teeth. Then comes a man hid in a teapot crying and roaring, "Oh, I have dropped my donkey. I put it up my nostril, and it has fallen out of the spout of the teapot into an old woman's thimble and she will squeeze it to death when she puts her thimble on."

At last they bring the things which I ordered, and then I spare the Town, and send off in fifty waggons, and under the protection of ten thousand soldiers, a file and a screw driver and a ring as a present to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, from

his affectionate Papa

May all our fathers profit by such a concatenation of generosity, ferocity, and an understanding of spatial relations.

This morning.

You want to know what it's like to be Jonathan Charles Wright?

It's like this:

You wake up and look for a pair of jeans to put on, but they are all dirty. You consider doing a load of laundry, but then just settle for some dirty jeans. In the middle of working from your apartment, while listening to your favorite band, on a gloomy North Idahoan summer day, a pair of brand spanking new jeans are literally delivered to your front door. You proceed with what you were doing, stopping only to blog about what it's like to be yourself by relating the aforementioned events.

Two wary enemies

I hope that the hornet in my dining room and I will be able to cohabitate like gentle-creatures, bearing towards one another due bodily respect. The arrangement is roughly this: the hornet does not sting my body, and I do not squash it into oblivion. Furthermore, penalty for the hornet's failing to uphold his end of the bargain extends to all of hornet-kind. Should the hornet fail to uphold its end of the arrangement, I shall swear vengeance on all of its hornet-kin and shall wreak insecticidal havoc throughout the hornet ranks.

Saturday morning bits.

I am sitting in my dining room with Louis. I am sitting next to the window, which is being propped open with a green hardbound volume of "Poetry of the Victorian Period". Knew those Victorian poets would come in handy for something.

My fingernails smell. They smell bad, I think. The smell reminds me of a moment when I was bussing a banquet at The Old Spaghetti Factory: as I was walking through the back-zone, I passed a server who smelled potently, and I began trying to place the smell.

Louis is now singing passionately, and badly, along with the music playing from my computer.

I love coffee.

I am now singing passionately, and badly, along with the music playing from my computer.

This coffee isn't really that good.

I am "liking" pictures on facebook. Louis is "organizing feeds".

Here's the conversation we just had:
J: [looking up from his computer] What are you doing right now?
L: [looking up from his computer] Organizing feeds.
[J begins typing with intent.]
[L chuckles uproariously.]

You, reader, might not like the description "chuckles uproariously". Can one chuckle uproariously? It seems like behavior of an uproarious kind requires a certain threshold of volume and/or intensity to be breached; and it seems further that chuckling stays well within the bounds of this threshold. Fine observations. But consider the laughing noise Louis in actuality made. It was not an uproarious laugh, per se, but it was not a mere chuckle. This chuckle had gusto. I want to say that the chuckle had attained maximal chuckle-capacity. Anything more would have transcended chuckle into full-bodied laughter. Hence, an uproarious chuckle. Think: as uproarious as a chuckle could be without sacrificing chuckle-dom.

We are each talking to ourselves simultaneously.
"Engagement announcement on Facebook, eh?"
"Why aren't these pages showing up together?"
"They cannot have been together long"
etc.

Now we're eating triple-decker PBJ's and drinking beer. He has a pyramid hefeweizen; I a Mighty Arrow pale ale. You can tell we are delving into my collection of beers rather than his, because mine don't taste like wood and aren't the texture of sludge.

I just watched this video:


Louis says, "peanut butter sticks to your ribs." and he insists on banging on my walls.

A Whale and Another Whale

If you haven't seen this video yet, behold:

"Churchyard"
by
A Whale and Another Whale
Churchyard

Quotation of the Day.

"There's nothing wrong with having a torrid love affair with a 16 year old girl" - My boss.