New piece I am working on

This is a new piece I am working on. If you cant read the words they are disabled, feeble, gimp, lame, crippled, invalid, handicapped, decrepit, and leper. I have been reading this book called The Body Silent by Robert Murphy about Disability and society. It is really interesting. He talks lot about the concept of liminality which is the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage, during which the participant lacks social status or rank or remains anonymous. This term is more often used in the context of rites of passage associated with adolescence but he thinks that it applies to the disabled as well, but in a more permanent way. "The sick person lives in a state of social suspension until he or she gets better. The disabled person spends a lifetime in a similar suspended state... they exist in partial isolation from society as undefined, ambiguous people." Hence peoples tendency to act unkindly or inappropriately toward the disabled. Those with no defined place have no standard set of social rules associated with them and they may even arouse in us uncomfortable feelings about our own fragility and thus should be avoided or ignored.

Prose Poem (its just a story people)

As a child I was deathly afraid of the dark. The night air full of the angry shouts of owls and the dying gasps of their prey. Prey that I could feel crawling around inside of my skin like an injected infestation that comes in the needle of night. I was sick with it, perpetually sick with the fever of fright. It came slowly creeping from the tracks in my arm through delicate veins to engulf me.

There’s a good girl…

It was like the fabric of nightmares had descended around me and only in not fighting could I survive. If I could just lie still and fill my mind with pictures, sweet calm pictures. I would listen to the rain dribbling down the gutter and the sound of sputtering cars splashing through the large puddles that collected in the alley. But they turned to sickening horrors and erupted over my mind in a rash.

I’ll turn out the lights…

Pictures born of stories I’d heard of children being stolen from their beds at one o’clock in the morning. Young things that lived in houses just like mine, who slept in beds with four posters and lacy canopies and disappeared. Children that were later found in pieces in nearby rivers and dumpsters. Soft skin being lovingly prized apart by that sweet night. I was deathly afraid of that dark. I concentrated on the rain. Thunder and the momentary illumination of lighting were penicillin to the infection.

And you be nice and quiet…

I would stop and talk to the night, begging it, trying to convince it to be on my side, to please protect me from its lurking terrors. I jumped at silence, knowing that the deep quiet presaged that the monsters were close and they would even stop breathing if it meant getting their clawed hands on me.

Lay still…

Some nights the scratching came from below my headboard like hungry teeth. Closer and closer it would come bearing with it my racing heart and clenched fists. I couldn’t stand it. The night had dry pushy lips cracked and swollen from years of thirst. He swung a splintered baseball bat and the bed would lurch. The sheets clung like caked blood. I could feel the cold creeping up my back.

And spread you legs…

The world was fine when out of the night sky shot blaring anger. Anger like I had never seen, anger full of promise and resentment, the kind of feeling that wells up inside devouring your abdomen. I could hear the orchard of cherry trees across the road groaning under some new weight, a weight I was convinced would never let me breathe again. It bore down on my chest and choked my lungs.

Don’t pull away…

The old oak tree looming just outside smacked its branches against the frame of my window. I could almost see the red mark from my hideout, huddled there under the covers, like the outline of a palm and five sweaty fingers.

Its ok. Touch it…

The night pushed hard inside me. It dug inside me, drilling for oil in a body without so much as the land to carry it. I hid my face in the surrounding clouds of pillows to protect me from the attacking darkness. This scrawny child curled shaking in my bed was too weak to fend off the onslaught of fear. I was being ambushed.

I’ll bet you like it like that…

As a child I was deathly afraid of the dark.

The Ethiopian Food Conversation

He just walked in the door. He wants to go out somewhere and tear me away from my strangely addictive keyboard.

“ So Ethiopian food?”
“What?”
“E-th-io-p-ian f-oo-d?”
“I heard what you said smart ass.”
“Well do you want to go?”
“Never had it.”
“All the more reason– ”
“To get food poisoning from an unidentified flying restaurant.”
“Flying?” He smirks
“Well you get the point.”

Stanford

We went out to Stanford on Saturday, it was great. I honestly don't know if i could choose between them. We spent a lot of time in the library finding all kinds of nooks and cranny's. It was enormous. It has several different wings that were build at different times so the floors don't match up very well. There was so much information there that you could never get access to online. It has three million volumes. We happened upon this set of books about sun. They were filled with hundreds of different pictures and explanations of all of the suns different states and fluctuations. But it looked as though it had just been forgotten down there (Not by the librarians of course just by the rest of the wider world). And there were enitre floors filled with just government information. Rows and rows of laws and operations and census data and who knows what else. It was staggering to see it all laid out in front of you like that. The census data especially reminded me of our happy new warrant-less wire tapping laws. Outside there are fountains everywhere, even some with people swimming in them. and unlike Denver's campus bikes are aloud to go every where because it is such a huge campus, 8180 acres. Thats about 2 students per acre. One of there science buildings was donated by bill gates just to spite a teacher who works there who failed him in a computer science class while at Harvard. There is also this fantastically beautiful church.
This is what it looked like originally but after an earthquake pulled the spire down in to the church it had to be rebuilt.
This is what is looks like to day. The coolest thing about it is that the pictures on the front is a mosaic of Jesus blessing the people. The tour guide said that it contains 22,000 colors of tile, not 22,000 tiles mind you but colors of tiles.

if you want to see a map of campus I found a cool campus/google hybrid one here: http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/map/

The Garden

This is our little container. We have three tomato plants, a row of strawberries, a row of zucchini, a pepper plant, an eggplant, and a lemon basil plant that lived through a truck ride halfway across the country through two deserts with very little water. Our little concrete patio looks much better with some food growing out there.

This is our first red tomato, with its friend at the top quickly catching up. I don't know why i cant change it to verticle but blogger wont let me.

the zucchini are blooming