i've merged the other blog -- attention without a me -- into this delay blog. for now it's no frills but i'll get some frills going on soon. you know, links and images and dancing girls and dancing boys and dancing hermaphrodites.

also, ostention is the teaching of a word by pointing at the thing for that word. i got a book.

i got 3 books today, for me, in addition to the emily rodda book for iris that we had to return to the library:
* james gray's how animals move (c 1959) -- i'm reading chapter 4 "jumping and creeping" first
* adolf portmann's animal forms and patterns (c 1967) -- looks like it has some stuff about species differentiation in it
* george miller's the science of words (c 1991) -- that i learned about ostention in it.

it's hard to believe that wind is temperature differentials.
it behaves like a thing, like an animal. even when you see it dissipate you still think of it like a creature that came through.
understanding doesn't do much to that unlikelihood of belief.
scale would. if we had a huge eye that could look down on the continent, like a weather satellite eye in our heads.
wind doesn't really blow. it moves.
like how water boils. water doesn't produce its boiling, it suffers it. not to imply anything negative with the word suffer. an agent acts upon water to produce that behavior in the water. water is provoked to boil.
at first, water is not boiling. when heated sufficiently, it boils. as the water temperature approaches the boiling point, it appears to be on the verge of boiling. i got a new saucepan for christmas, as the water heats a kind of fur of tiny bubbles gathers on the bottom, then the bubbles swell and jump toward proximate bubbles while still clinging to the surface, forming larger and larger bubbles. and steam rises from the water surface. as the temperature increases, the steam has more organization and consistency visible in its rising, it becomes bodily. the water surface also agitates.
as the water temperature reaches and exceeds the boiling point, the water boils. i've been postponing reading about what's actually happening in the water, just watching it for a while before i get around to knowing it.
boiling water suffers such upward turbulence that it appears to be allowing the escape of a panicked agency. bubbles and steam do not so much appear as they rapidly fume in abundance, as if they were creatures escaping the water.
water and air are both considered fluid media. they differ so much in their density, of course, as to be entirely incongruent to us, but again that's a matter of scale and eyes.
wind is the movement of air from one location to another. a fluctuation or tendency in the medium. it even has to do with the velocity of the movement. think how we have words for degrees here -- whisper, breath, draft, breeze, etc.
all the air on the planet is one thing, one fluid thing.

a spruce, knurled in a gradual spiral, handmade candy

its evergreen painted on, clouding it, to coalesce

stone trunk, an inverted fluted column, its whiteness coming through the gray against the dark greens, the greens selecting whiteness

bright cigarette tip, neat bearded face, half rolled down window, passing car

as the sky brightens the squirrels appear in silhouette within the double willow oak

i should not be ashamed to be so literal

i should not be ashamed to be anything, if i'm anything

clouds head east but its hard to see their churn and roil from below

lamplit windows like butter for another maybe 15 minutes

four of the same rectangle, stacked to make the same rectangle

for a little bit i forgot all the feelings and just saw

bird tumbled like a leaf

old house sags around its chimneys

i wish i could see a tree growing and not in that time-lapse photography way

enough morning light now to banish silhouette, i see the squirrels' grayness and postures

the old man's mossy roof

sometimes i really hate the disposable, the end of the year

i'm not particularly good at perspective, but at description

perspective has spect, the visual, in it. description has script, the hand in it

when i look, i forget my hands. or my eyes are hands

This blog has been dormant for over a year but now I'm resuming it.

This blog has been dormant for over a year and now I'm resuming it.

Frayed clouds today, moving briskly like a landscape does out a car's side window. Yesterday I bought a globe for a dollar.

That's all.

i'm going to, for some reason it occurs to me, blog on both this one and on the resuscitated delay blogs both. not that i've been making many blog posts.

just now a cashier was taking change from her register drawer with the same hand motion that my piano teacher when i was a child would try to get me to lift from the keys. a wave moving through wrist and fingers, most people would choose the word "graceful" for it but i've never been certain what "graceful" and "elegant" actually mean, they seem like conventions that shift severely over time and among place. but you probably know the conventional graceful and that's the hand motion the cashier used for the change. when i saw it i thought i should come home and resume the delay blog. so i've done that.

but this one will continue too. perhaps a difference between the two spaces will be evident after a while.

an advantage of scrub pines is light comes through them

i have been watching water come to a boil and boil

"If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
Alan Turing

what is the crystalline within structure of wax and does annealing have any impact upon it.

the way that a thick cylindrical white candle glows through itself.

i guess when youre looking at fall winter leaves with those colors what youre really looking at is slow death. strange that people immediately think that animals think like people and almost never do the same with trees and leaves and flowers. there are degrees of consciousness i guess, regardless of whether youre animate or not.
like that wall for instance. though what i'm really looking at is the paint on it. the paint is on the wall, it isn't the wall. you make a wall and then paint it. this might not be a worthwhile distinction. a sheet of paper is really 2dimensional not quintessentially.
writers should have to be mute and stay by themselves would help everybody.

spitty rain here.
how do you describe the streetlights. not amber. almost peach but too blasted out with white electricty. there's an origami paper that's pale salmon and you can see the other white side of the paper through it is close.
this place has drywall and the old place had plaster. but from how the drywall relates to the windowtrim level theres probably plaster under it. they just slapped it up overtop, it's easier.
water boils faster in the flatbottom saucepan than the rounded bottom.
an observation takes a little time. its like waking sleep.
clocks are round but calendars arent. strange headache like a stranger you kind of recognize sideways glancing at you a lot. that's two similes now. both chambers of a shotgun.
to wander off, walserian. are you still a spy if you never actually spy.
stare at a wall long enough and it becomes two images that simultaneous and looks like movement from the interference. then a blank gray tunnel comes up from the perimeter if you can resist glancing at it. meting out looking from seeing.
typed three pages then burned them in the doublesink. about lines and divisions and parts, borders. all imaginary, it turns out. but the wall is there. surfaces don't have surfaces though. only ornament.
gave the finger twice today driving. eavesdropped on moms picking up kids from school about whats on sale where. three times they said "in this economy." should have given them the finger to even it up.
all matter is energy but not at our level. it's just waste. flesh just bends and stretches when you poke it. a rock is the same thing all the way through. photographs of photographs.

i've not blogged in a while. truth is i havent had much to say. why talk to a wall. or yourself.
i moved. the walls are different here. every room's still a box though.
there's a roof over my head. there's that. i don't eat beans off a tray at least. all the limbs work. i'm cold but it's a choice to be so. i only wait for myself.
time damn crawls. there's a flicker. daily stuff has the flicker, if you look at it with this slowness, of a film projecting. the gate or interlocutor or whatever it's called. making a moment of darkness between the frames. everyone else looks in slow motion. i see what they do before they do it. not controlling, just a wonder. marveling, without pleasure. because i don't move at a speed relevant to theirs. or like watching a movie of everybody. wanting to flip off the channel but not doing it. all the same program on the channels, just different images.
don't think it's dreamlike, it's not. don't think i'm a surrealist. fuck surrealism. birds are birds. that bird is that bird. and if you make it something else or wrap something around it youre a worse liar than me. but its all equivalented anyway. we agree to that. it's a nice deal, square as the day box on the calendar, or this room.
i really responded recently to agnes martin grids. because theyr'e not horrible, not trapped. and not a pattern, just sure, there. her paintings are merely there. who else can say that? most of us are there and then gone, somewhere else. vectors. racking up the variables about ourselves. there's probably no variable really. that's an idea. like what a bird was before the word "bird" was stuck on it. you don't answer you just know. how do you read a grid, or make a mistake with it? you eithre go away from it or stop and keep looking at it.
surrealism rejects the idea that everything is ultimately toggles, atomically. just drop the mystery and the unknowable and unsayable and the vagueness especially. why revel in it. it's fun to roll around but not in your own filth.
evertyhgin i'm typing sounds like bumper stickers. i need more bumpers if i keep typing.