Lennie’s on the verge of saying “da da.” A couple of months ago, we thought she was going to be an early talker. When I’d bend over her while changing her diaper and coo “hello,” she would often coo back without proper pronunciation but with just about the right intonation. She also had started exploring the real estate of her mouth. I was sure she’d have a word or two by now. In just the last couple of days, she’s started articulating a lot more in her babbling. She warms up with some bah bah bahs and then rolls her tongue back a little to add in a hint of ell. As her tongue rolls further back, her lips come apart and she articulates a sound sort of between a bah and a dah with an ell still tucked in there. Sometimes it sounds very much as if she’s saying da da. I know better than to think she’s really trying to call me by the name I recite to her a few hundred times a day, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Hands down, I’m the beatbox champion of the Learn Houston household. We haven’t had a showdown or anything (yet), but I find that the sputtery skills I cultivated as a boy serve me well in adulthood. Sometimes, you see, there is simply nothing that will make Lennie happy but being beatboxed to. Strange but true. At times, no amount of belly-getting, silly-song-singing, cooing, or airplaning will quiet her down. When all of these things have failed, we know there’s nothing left to do but to beatbox. Mleeka has to do this pretty frequently in the car, when she’s riding in the back with an upset Lennie whose belly is inaccessible, who can’t be airplaned at the moment, and who isn’t responding to any vocal pacifiers.

Mleeka’s beatboxing, for all the good it actually does for Lennie (it often quiets her down), is all frontal and thus lacks depth. That is, she fills her mouth with air and spits out roughly uniform little splats of air until she runs out. Having made somewhat of a study of beatboxing as an adolescent, I happen to know that better technique is required of a beatbox master. True and proper beatboxing requires frequent inhalation of air, some use of the vocal chords, and strict attention to rhythm, lip position and firmness, and modulation of airflow. And while I am by no means a beatbox master, I believe I have a more polished beatbox presentation than Mleeka.

Sadly, I also have stage fright and so have performed only private shows for Lennie. These few shows have been my first beatbox performances in easily 15 years, and so it stands to reason that I’d be a little rusty. But my little family shouldn’t be too surprised if, one day, I come home from work a free man, having quit my job to don multifarious gold chains and dental prosthetics, a puffy jacket, and a hip-hop toboggan to fulfill my calling as a human beatbox.

Tcchh bbwwpppp bbwwppp bbwwooowp
Tcchh bbwwpppp bbwwppp bbwwooowp
Tcchh bwpp bwpp tcchh bwpp bwwp bbwwooowp

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about why one writes poetry. It’s a question that’s been with me for a decade or so now, peaking during the period beginning maybe 8 years ago and ending about 6 years ago. This was the period during which my formal studies of poetry were at their most vigorous and during which I struggled a good bit with why one writes poems the way one does, especially today. In centuries and decades past, poets used formal conventions such as rhyme and meter as a canvas for their ideas, and so there was a pretty clear distinction between poetry and prose. In the 20th century, poems using no discernible convention became more and more common, and poems often seemed rather like prose chopped into lines. This being the case, why would anyone bother to write poems instead of just writing the prose without bothering to add carriage returns every few lines? Naturally, some poets whose work seemed on the surface to be arbitrarily broken into lines had some useful or at least loosely measurable metric by which they chose to mete out their lines. It’s nevertheless tempting to wonder why they even bother to do so, if it’s so difficult to divine what’s behind their line breaks.

Perhaps it’s simply the craft of it that matters to these poets. By writing lines that feel right to themselves, whether or not there’s a clear rubric used for breaking lines, and by taking great pains to get to that final draft with all its editorial bloodshed, the poet has labored to create an artifact he or she feels pleased to have created. This raises the question of whether some sorts of poetry are (or should be) a private or a public art form. I could labor for weeks on a piece of nonsense doggerel that I’m proud of because the process of making it took much craft, but if it’s not something that others could appreciate in some way without my having to explain that I fasted for six weeks while painstakingly etching my drafts into yak skin using my own blood a pinpoint at a time, maybe it’s something I ought to be privately proud of, and perhaps I should consider becoming a performance artist rather than a poet.

In cases in which the poem itself is fairly accessible if not obviously ruled by some formal convention, why, again, should one bother to write it in verse? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’ve written my own healthy share of formal verse but have also written much free verse. And while the lineation and the diction tend to make sense to me on some level and while the primary action or description of my poems can usually be extracted pretty easily, I do wonder why I’m nevertheless compelled to write in anything but prose.

One of the only remotely satisfying answers I’ve come up with to date is that prose often feels as if it should be longer. Writing in prose something as compressed as what many write in poetry seems rather like driving your car a few yards down the driveway to get the mail. Writing poetry gives us permission to compress what we’re writing. Labeling something as poetry — whether it be by whacking prose into lines or writing a book of short prose and calling the pieces prose poems — is like announcing that the driveway is short enough that cranking up the car for a drive to the mailbox would be absurd. Which is not to say that poetry is insignificant or useless, for the end result, whether your mailbox is at the end of a 15-yard driveway or of a two-mile driveway, is that you wind up retrieving the mail. The intellectual payload of poetry and prose, in other words, may be very similar in spite of the different mindsets they may require. There is much of great emotional and intellectual value that can be said best — or at least very well — in a short burst of highly-charged language.

I’ve been reviewing some of the things I’ve written over the past five or ten years in preparation for a brief visit I’ll be paying a college writing teacher/mentor in a couple of weeks. I haven’t had much of an inclination to write original creative work since graduating, though there have been a few short stories, two or three half-earnest attempts at novels, and a few dozen stilted efforts at poetry (my specialty while in school). Of the short things I’ve written during this time, it just occurred to me, many of them have to do with cruelty to animals. I knew many of them were animal poems, most of them bird poems, but I hadn’t really noticed that most of them deal in some way with cruelty to or in any case the suffering of animals. Take these instances:

• The old woman who gets pigeons drunk in order to catch them to wring their necks.
• The birds found burned by creosote in a chimney.
• The hummingbird killed inadvertently by an ornithologist.
• The headless dragonfly that seemed still to be alive.
• The run-over cat left to suffer a slow death in the road.
• The hunted hawk.
• The Legend of the Crossbill (after a poem by Longfellow)
• The sand flea with its shell ripped off.

It seems as if there are more already written, and I know I’ve got some more to write (at least three more spring to mind immediately). There are others that don’t deal directly with the suffering or recent deaths of animals but that pertain to animals in some way:

• The bit about deveining shrimp.
• A flamingo piece.
• One about a snowy owl.

Again, there are probably more that simply don’t spring instantly to mind. I was thinking that a good book or section title might be “Cruelty to Animals.” Naturally, as human beings are animals too, some of the things one tends to write about human suffering could fit into such a book or section as well.

I don’t harbor any real notions that I’ll write enough more decent new work or manage to cobble these and other pieces together into a book, but thinking about the organization of the things one has written and at times, where possible, writing in the direction of an organizing principle are just things one does. And I wanted to get this idea down because, well, the bad memory and all.

1. On snack machines that have snacks nestled between loops of a coil, the coil is adjusted differently for candy bars than for snack cakes and potato chips. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the coil is rotated further around for candy bars so that there’s more of the coil’s end looped around to hold the candy in place. Because potato chips and snack cackes have more bulk, there’s less likelihood that they’ll slip out and become inadvertently free snacks.
2. You can read a bit about the history of vending machines here.
3. If MacGyver taught us nothing else, it was that it used to be possible to pour salt water into vending machines to get free drinks.
4. In Japan in 1993, school girls’ panties could be purchased from vending machines for the equivalent of US $50. I wonder what the coils in those machines are like.
5. According to one source, “Every 15 minutes, over 3.5 million coins are inserted in vending machines located in the United States alone.”

Tired of looking at what was supposed to be sort of a marble-like ephemeral image along the top of the blog, I spent a few minutes tweaking the design today. The original header graphic came from a black and white photo of the bouquet Mleeka made for when we got married. I zoomed in on a couple of the roses and applied a bunch of distortions and some color to make an abstract background for the image. Then I put two squares on the image and screwed with them to make them fuzzy. They looked sort of like an ell and sort of vaguely represented Lennie and me (her name is very close to being a complete subset of mine — she’s sort of a mini-me is the idea). I’m not trying to sound all deep or artistic about it. These are just the things I was doing as I fumbled my way through creating an abstract image, a task at which I’m the first to admit I profoundly suck. So then I changed the style sheets so that the colors more or less went with those in the header and so that the content was sufficiently blocked off, the nav separate from the blog entries and each of the blog entries clearly separated from the others (this last separation isn’t very good in the default template that ships with WordPress). The more I looked at it, though, the boxier and clunkier it seemed and the worse the header image seemed.

So today I worked on a new abstract image. As noted before, I really suck at this. I see designs that I like and I try to emulate them (not to copy, but to try to learn technique), but I’m just no good at it. I’m the graphic design equivalent of tone deaf. More specifically, I’m like one of those people who can hear a tune correctly but can’t carry one. Actually, that simile characterizes me pretty well in both design and music. So but I tried anyway. I started googling around for random images to base my abstract concept on. I didn’t really have anything in mind. What I finally found that struck me as pretty cool was the image pictured here (available for free download here). Something about the irregularity of the line the masts make — the fact that it was vaguely line-like but that it was irregular — struck my fancy. I’m not trying to be all high-fallutin’ and symbolic. I just liked the composition of the image.

So I downloaded it and immediately distorted its dimensions using the gimp to about 1645×160 (or thereabouts), screwing the aspect ratio all to pieces. Then I applied a few filters, including, if I remember correctly, a cubism filter, a wind filter, and maybe a slur. Next, I changed the brightness and contrast to darken the image and to accentuate the line made by the masts. Finally, I typed “two ells” in white and applied a canvas and a clothify filter to it to rough the text up a bit. It inadvertently looks almost as if the background is showing through the text, as if it’s chalked onto a window or something. Then I tweaked the style sheets. I was tired of the blue box containing the side bar, and the boxes around individual posts seemed a little clunky. I think I had originally put a box around the sidebar because a left border didn’t extend all the way down the page and it looked stupid. Only today did it occur to me to put a right border on the context box. Duh. I spent a few minutes tweaking colors, changing various borders around, and generally crisping things up a bit.

And I think the result is, well, crisper. I’m much happier with the design now, though it’s still not exactly A-plus work. Check out the before and after screen shots below to see the contrast. I document all of this primarily because I’m sure I’ll be curious one day what the site used to look like, and my memory’s just awful. I don’t really expect anybody else to care or anything.

U2’s newish single “Vertigo” begins with a count, a convention common to rock songs and certainly in place within this song. There’s much debate over what the numbers actually are, however. I had always heard “uno, dos, tres, catorce,” Spanish for “one, two, three, fourteen.” And of course I wondered why the big leap. Some people insist that he’s actually saing “once, doce, trece, catorce,” Spanish for “eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.” That doesn’t sound right to me. Initially, I wondered if Bono simply wasn’t up on his Spanish and this was just a blunder (one of a much less irritating sort than the tooth-grinding “say a little prayer for I” Paula Cole inflicted upon the English-speaking world). In an interview on BBC Radio, Bono apparently answered a question about the non-sequential lyric by saying “There may have been a little drink involved.” Apparently How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is U2’s fourteenth album, and so it doesn’t seem too great a stretch that they’re making note of that fact, combining a standard rock and roll count-off with an elliptical count of their albums. Further, the first, second, third, and fourteenth albums happen to have been produced by Steve Lillywhite, and so some fans take it as a tribute to him. I dug this information up from a discussion at songmeanings.net. I still don’t know for sure why Bono jumps up to catorce, but it was interesting to read about the different theories.

The bell toned and the students scrambled to their desks, not really quite ready to dive into their morning history lesson. “Everybody take out a sheet of paper and a pencil. It’s time to see how many of you did last night’s reading on the Bill of Rights,” Ms. Alexander said. The kids let out a collective groan and began rustling in their notebooks. Suddenly, the intercom crackled and Principal Hoggard announced that in accordance with a new statewide policy, the school would this very day begin taking the first five minutes of first period for a moment of prayer. “It is the hope of our wise leaders that by uniting our students spiritually, we might uplift your souls as well as your minds. Let us all thank God for our wise governors. All students are welcome to continue praying at their accustomed times and venues, of course.” The principal’s voice seemed still to be ringing in the speaker as the students began their unified prayers.

Windstar the pagan produced a small brass altar and placed it on her desk, facing north. She lit the Goddess candle mounted on the left side of the altar and poured a little pile of sand on the northern side, lit some incense on the eastern side, tumbled a fragment of lava from a straw bag into place on the southern side, and arranged a shell on the western side. Then she put her wand on the eastern side, a small Celtic blade to the south, an encrusted chalice to the west, and her boline to the north. “Oh wise Hera,” she began chanting, picking up the wand and the boline and waving them in opposing circular motions above the altar, “grant me the memory of Calliope and the luck of Felicitas in my quest to conquer the dread pop quiz…”

David patted his yarmulke gingerly and pulled out of his backpack a little Mezuzah fashioned of balsa wood and containing a rolled copy of the Shema that he had printed out on his computer. He took the thin box to the door and used masking tape to fix it to the frame, brushing it reverently with his fingertips. In the most uvular Hebrew he could manage, he began singing the prayer: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One. Blessed is His name, whose glorious kingdom is forever and ever. Love the Lord your G-d with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might…”

Ralph, whose parents had reared him in the Pentecostal Holiness tradition, left the room in a hurry without asking for permission.

Shilpa always carried in her pack a small statue of Shiva. Using the desktop as a makeshift altar, she bowed to the statue, annointing it from her water bottle and spilling water into her chair. She carefully unpacked her lunch from its brown paper bag and, spreading it about on the altar, began uttering a mantra unintelligible to anyone else.

Damien dug down the front of his shirt to grab a black and red medallion adorned with a bat-winged demon. This hung on a chain along with an upside-down crucifix whose Christ’s head was riddled with toothmarks. Damien removed a matchbox full of communion wafers from one of his pockets, plucked one of the wafers from the box, and rubbed it on his crotch until it crinkled and crumbled into a scattering of dust on the floor. All the while, he yelled the Lord’s prayer backward in his most gravelly voice, eyes bugging out and face reddening.

Diminutive Francis O’Toole, with his oily hair and wearing a bowtie and big dark-rimmed glasses, fingered his rosary and looked wistfully at the votive candles Windstar had begun to arrange around her altar. He too had a crucifix, which he held up in front of him as he moved toward Damien, alternating between mumbling the Hail Mary and bellowing “The power of Christ compels you,” baptizing his classmates with spittle as he made his solemn procession.

Dai Chi sat down peacefully on the floor with his legs crossed and gurgled as he practiced his throat singing. Meanwhile, he fluttered one of his arms in front of him, straining to hear the sound of one hand clapping.

Ralph returned holding a freshly-trapped black snake and beginning to froth at the corners of his mouth, so invigorated was he with the spirit. Shaking his head from side to side rapidly and hopping from foot to foot, the unhappy snake held in both hands above him, he knocked over a desk, shouting “THANK you, THANK you, Jesus, for thy guidance. Help me in thy charity to triumph over this test as I triumph now over this very serpent. Make me strong in the face of adversity and faithful in the face dagobbledebleeblah hagabardoomamenaty…”

In the back corner, next to a replica of the Constitution that Ralph had inadvertently knocked askew so that it swung from the wall by a single fastener at one corner, First Baptist minister the Reverend Smith’s daughter cowered, thumbing the index of her Bible to see which of the signs of the second coming were being fulfilled before her eyes and looking for some prayer to get her out of the whole big promiscuous mess.

In their graves, the framers of that venerable swinging document spun like ferris wheels, and in their various heavens and nirvanas and hells on earth and in the ether, the gods couldn’t help but chuckle.

Last night, we were going to take a quick trip to the library. Lennie’s started wearing cloth diapers stuffed with all sorts of absorbent fabric that call to my mind the old joke about a guy trying to impress chicks by stuffing a potato down his pants, and they add just enough extra padding that her infant seat’s too small. Trying to put her in it for the last couple of weeks has been like trying to cram yourself into jeans that are a bit too small (something else I’ve become re-familiar with of late). When we tried to put her in the seat last night with what was apparently an absurdly padded diaper, she just wouldn’t go. I spent 45 minutes tugging and tangling the straps on her seat to try to get an extra inch out of them, but they were at their maximum length. So we put a streamlined disposable diaper on her, jammed her into the seat (it was still a pretty tight squeeze that I felt pretty bad about), and went out to buy a new seat for her.

It’s not the top-dollar seat, but boy is it a nice one. Would that my driver’s seat were as well-appointed. She’s got a cup-holder and memory foam, with lots of comfy padding. She sits a little more upright in this seat, which is big enough that I’ve had to push my seat forward a little bit to accommodate it. It’s a veritable throne from which she presides slobberingly over her queendom of toys and (our) discarded fast food containers.

My dreams started last night before I even got to sleep. During the twilight phase just a few minutes before I dropped off, a strange little vignette popped into my head. A guy who looked sort of like a cross between DUI-Nolte and Will Ferrell playing the cowbell guy in the classic Blue Oyster Cult skit was in a restaruant kitchen preparing a salad. Just tossing it, really. He doesn’t appear to be a chef or anything (I don’t remember what he’s wearing, but it’s not the typical white chef outfit), and it’s not clear that he’s even employed by the restaurant. He’s alone in the kitchen as far as I can tell (there’s not the clatter you’d expect), and he’s just tossing this salad. All of a sudden, he goes sort of berserk, spastically gesticulating and fluttering his hands in the salad greens and generally twitching, sending lettuce leaves flying. Then the vignette cuts over to somebody in the dining area being served what’s left of this salad and being told it’s a madman salad, which it’s clear by now, even though Nolte-Ferrell (he’s neither of these nor any combination in reality — it’s just a convenient moniker; I could just as well call him madman-salad-maker) isn’t a chef, is a pretty sought-after commodity. As whoever’s eating this salad (maybe it’s me — I’m not sure) chomps in, he finds a belt buckle among the greens. Just a simple one-prong belt buckle. At this point, I started chuckling uncontrollably (by that, I don’t mean that I was rolling around and guffawing but that I was unable to suppress my short quiet repetitive chuckles as I had hoped to, given how absurd what I was chuckling at was and that I didn’t want to have to explain why I was chuckling over something so stupid or to account for how something like this found its way into my head). And that was it. Shortly after describing this bizarre scene to Mleeka, I went to sleep.

And then I woke up at a little before 3:00 and took my shower. When I realized that it was only 3:00, I went back to bed, of course, only to be awakened several more times by the dog wanting to go outside. What’s weird about this (by itself, it’s not so weird — I’ve done this a few times before) is that just the other day, Mleeka was saying that she thought I had gotten up in the middle of the night to shower. I’m apparently pretty suggestible. I don’t recommend doing this. It’s bad for your eye-bags.