fire in the fishtank

in your living room, what arrangements have you made? I know sometimes the couches and chairs face a coffee table, sometimes they face the big TV or they just face each other. how about your furniture? that’s mainly what I’m wondering.

front-loading washer, Victrola, flypaper; these have all been possibilities. we’ve got a computer in our front room and when we're playing with little Ash, sometimes the screensaver-slideshow comes on and she gets distracted and starts smiling at all the pictures.

a couple months ago someone’s stucco burned down. this was in New Mexico and they had left their fish tank running in the house. you know how the big ones have electric lights and heaters and pumps and things to keep everything going. well, it turns out that’s where it started.

oh! and then there’s the flat screen fish tank which is also electric.

so in the interest of glowing screens and a long cold month in the middle of winter I was thinking how it would really be something to do a series of photos on fire. these will all be fires from the east end of my living room.
sorry if this is a bit jumpy; I keep turning around, distracted. we’re getting chickadees again at our feeder for the first time in like 3 years. finally!

Baffled

Last month, it was football players
Robbed the malt shop and set fire
To the Splish Splash carwash “between 3 and 5:30 am.”
A roommate brought a sackfull of quarters
To the bank and sang, they say, like a canary
In a courthouse.

There’s a mantle of sweet apples on the ground,
Under the tree and under the snow,
Rotting here and there between freeze and thaw.
This brings in a few hungry deer most nights,
Thumping, munching, scraping up what they can.
This, I think, I can understand.

But this arson, I know, has been an occasion
for improved business across my street.
The House of Suds brings in all characters.
Like the guy there right now, just began
Spraying down a red Mustang with foam at 5:30am
In the frozen darkness.

I want the big brefes

this morning I wore a baseball hat to breakfast. I could get used to this: getting out of bed, putting on some pants and just starting my day.

it was the Lunds’ annual Christmas breakfast, which they host over at the senior center, the same place we go to vote. we’ve been hearing about this for a few years but finally had a chance to go. sausage, eggs, hashbrowns. french toast on home-baked bread. not bad.

and Brother MacA had left several boxes of old free books out on a table. you may remember Bro. MacA’s free books from last year’s ward Christmas party. anyway whenever you bring up Bro. MacA’s free books later to thank him, he says something like “oh, some of them weren’t supposed to be out there,” that he didn’t intend to get rid of those particular ones and that he would probably like them back. Bro. MacA is senile and doddering and gets around with either a walker or a small electric motor.

Here are the books we took:


The Art of Walt Disney
The Essene Gospel of Peace
Great Basin Kingdom – Leonard Arrington
New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community
and
There’s No Such Place as Far Away - Richard Bach
in which Kelly found this loose and cryptic recipe card of a footnote, apparently referencing someone’s itinerant religious library.
this method of citation struck us a pretty inventive, although a nightmare, I’m sure, for librarians and those looking for primary sources.

when I told Bro. MacA how glad I was to find Great Basin Kingdom in his piles and “thanks,” he said that the ragged paperback was worth like $35 and that he hadn’t meant to put it out.

living with machines, trouble with machines