First, allow me to contextualize:  I am not a small person.  I stand around 6′4″ and usually weigh in at about 245 pounds.  I do not blot out the sun, but were you to run me over with your Prius, few courts would believe you did not see me.  Accordingly, while I am willing to concede that contemporary science has not yet embraced the Wandlessocentric model of the universe, I generally expect the common courtesies one extends to a noticeable human.   In return, I will try not to squash those smaller than me.

This morning, during my visit to the coffee shoppe, I placed my order and stood to the side.  Two women entered the shoppe shortly thereafter, placed their orders, and stood directly in front of me.  (Allow me to note that they actually stood directly in front of the coffee dispensers and also dispensed with most socially responsible “please” and “thank you” responses in their exchange with the cashier.  I do not like these women–no, not at all.)  Moments later, when my order was ready, one of the two claimed it and began to prepare it, fussing over the fact that it did not at all resemble her order.  I politely stepped in to claim it, and the woman seemed utterly flabbergasted that the barista might have made the drinks in the order they were requested, much less that a tallish bald man was standing right behind her and had apparently been standing there all along. 

That sort of stuff really sticks in my craw, if only because inattention seems to be the handmaiden to inconsiderate behavior.  A person who actually insults me is much less likely to annoy me than a young man who stretches his legs the moment I am passing by (as happened yesterday) or a young woman who parks her bicycle next to my car in such a way that I cannot open the door without moving it (which happens daily).  The line between carelessness and discourtesy gets a little blurry.  By the same token, this kind of thoughtlessness rankles even more when performed as a matter of practice or policy.  When I arrived at the gym this morning, for example, the door was locked; a notice on the door indicated that the gym would be closed from 8:00-12:00 for staff training.  The gym administrators should probably realize that the folks who really need to know that information will usually arrive between the hours of 8:00-12:00, yet the notice in question was not posted at 8:00 yesterday.  The CMU gym boasts that it has been voted the best fitness center in mid-Michigan for several years in a row, but I cannot help but think most non-student members would go anywhere else were there somewhere else to go.

While I’m discharging all this black bile, special kudos to the woman who wrote me last Friday to ask a special favor of me.  I responded in the affirmative perhaps four hours after I received her message and waited for the follow-up note that would allow me to perform the favor in question.  That note did not arrive until last night at about 9:30PM.  The reason for the delay?  A cold, apparently the most debilitating cold in recorded American history.  As it turns out, my desire to perform the favor has waned since then.  I am the protagonist in my own story, and I shan’t be trifled with by walk-ons.  Behold my rampant egotism!

To turn this to some useful end, I can’t help but think that one of the characteristics that separates real poets (read:  poets that are not me) from normal folk is the keenness of their attention, their penetration into the essence of things.  I recall with great vividness, for example, a poem by one of my colleagues during my short tenure at Auburn, a fellow named Gale Acuff.  It was nothing more than a meditation on a sheet of yellow lined paper, and I reckon the first few bits of imagery were well within anyone’s perceptual compass.  After the first several lines, however, Gale began evoking all sorts of tactile, visual, and sensual impressions–the angle of his handwriting on the page, the way he had crowded margins, the fine gaps left in the ink as the nib of the pen skipped over the dents left by writing on prior pages.  Every image struck me (a person who uses such yellow notepads regularly) as unmistakably accurate, no matter that I had never before attended to the details he had committed to the page.  It was a genuinely surprising piece in that way, one that revealed new dimensions of an object I thought I knew well.  Part of the reason I so admire the work of Carl Dennis is that he regularly pushes just past the expected level of readerly attention:  he delivers exactly what you’d anticipate, and then he goes it one (or two, or three) better.

So today, as I try not to squash the wee, I’m going to try and look deeply into things.  If that causes me to trip over extended legs or knock over a bicycle, I hope the owners will forgive me.

One of the many treats associated with WordPress is the login process, if only because the two entry pages oblige me to surf past two sets of items:  “News Departments” and “Top Posts from around WordPress.”  The former is a principal tributary of the latter, unsurprisingly, since folks coasting past the first page might just click one of those tantalizing links that leads to a provocatively-titled news flash.  The remainder of the “Top Posts,” however, are pretty grim indices of human affairs:  lots of unsubstantiated rumors about celebrities, a few shocking paparazzi pictures, a few scandals in the private sector, and soccer news.  Any grouping that makes me feel sorry for soccer news must be pretty sordid indeed.

The “News Department,” however, must be stopped.  There are goodly sections, to be sure:  the HowTo blog offers tech tips I do not fully understand, and the food blog selections are pretty innocuous (if not always appetizing).  The rest, however–from family to religion to politics to science to health–have precious little to do with anything that resembles news.  Most are perspective pieces, if by “perspective pieces” one meant to imply irresponsible diatribes, rhetorical train wrecks, vitriolic free-for-alls, and soapbox sermons.  I’m generalizing, of course (the “family page” right now leads to a whimsical reflection regarding domestic budgeting, policy predicated on the possibility a wee lad might stuff a peanut up his nose), but there’s a lot of really ugly stuff out there, the kind of dreck only the anonymous, democratic magic of the internet makes possible.

In good sooth, I’m a fairly harmless little man, and that’s especially true here.  A few folks have remarked lately that my new blogs tend to be a smidgen impersonal and (perhaps consequently) bland, and I fear that’s the result of lots of active self-monitoring and -censorship.  I try to remain on task, more or less, writing about speculative fiction and/or verse when I sit down to the keyboard, and I try to imagine a variety of audiences, some of which only know of me from writing they’ve chanced across.  As a result I try to stick to reflective and pragmatic modes of expression, veering away from the more combustible topics that cross my mind and speaking neutrally when my meanderings oblige me to touch on them.  I aim for useful, if not compelling, and I freely admit that the results don’t always satisfy me.  Even so, I’d rather be a jejune than incendiary, regaling the blogosphere with my none-too-useful thoughts on the upcoming election, economic affairs, and academic culture.  The world could use a little less of that sort of dreck.

For the sake of readability, however, I think I might aspire to something a little more personal, a little more intimate.  I figure the blog might be the best place for it, especially since I seem to veer away from the autobiographical (except in the most cursory terms) in almost all of my writing.  Mine is admittedly a quiet life–you won’t read too many posts about Sonoran Desert Toad-licking benders or Arctic expeditions–but I reckon I can drum up a little interest in the everyday.  I’m not the finest storyteller in the world, but I can be adorably folksy when I try.

Ergo, consider this a promissory note.  In the coming weeks I’ll open the gates a little wider and see what squeezes through.

I’ve attempted to be a diligent critter for the past several days, reading ahead and scripting lesson plans for next week so I’d have time enough this weekend to grade exams and essays.  Along the way, however, tension mounted:  there were many volatile topics I wanted to blog about, but I couldn’t find time to put pixels to page.  As a result I’ve got all sorts of nettlesome notions careening around my noggin, some of which have been colorized by the Wachowski brothers, all of which I suspect are unhealthy.  Accordingly, today we purge.  Feel my (yellow) bile!

*Democrats:  I don’t know where to begin.  Maybe with the superdelegates, who could have made all of today’s ridiculous haggling totally moot but would rather sit on the fence until either Clinton or Obama promises them milk and cookies?  The folks who now shrilly proclaim that Michigan and Florida primary votes must be counted as-is, else voters will feel disenfranchised and cry on the inside like clowns do…never mind that counting them as-is will disenfranchise a bunch of other folks?  All the folks threatening to vote McCain and/or take their ball and go home if the decision doesn’t go their way?  Seriously, I expect to hear circus music playing every time I see Nancy Pelosi on the teevee.

*The NBA:  If you would really like all the talk of conspiracies, set-ups, and preferred outcomes to secure better ratings to die down, perhaps you could stage a game that looks like it was called fairly. On a related note, demanding to talk to Tim Donaghy, the dirty referee, after he’s been sentenced?  Where I come from, we call prison a “disincentive.”  Our dictionaries are notoriously ambiguous.

*Yard sale critters:  Pull your minivans off the road.  Off the road.  The opposite of “on.”  That off.

*Farmers:  You are not always on the farm.  You will be able to tell because cars will be behind you, in front of you, and sometimes to the side.  You accordingly cannot pull over to talk to interesting pedestrians as you might in your own driveway, nor can you wave people past you into oncoming traffic.  You just don’t have that kind of juice.

*Dunkin Donuts:  Seriously?

*Pfleger, Wright, Parsley, Hagee, et al: What part of “spiritual leader” don’t you understand?

*Catholic church:  Female priests?  Excommunicated.  Pedophiles?  Reassigned.  I do not feel the need to expand on this.

*Gay marriage advocates:  This really puts the kibosh on my plans to marry Portia de Rossi.  You are off my Christmas card list.

*Reviewers of Sex and the City:  There are many things you may do, but you may not praise the film for its “gritty realism.”  It is not The Wire.  And Entertainment Weekly guy who likes watching the show for its insight into the feminine psyche?  You’d be better off watching Flava of Love for dating advice.

*My cohort:  Despite all indications to the contrary, this is not a reenactment of And Then There Were None (see here for details).  You are creeping me out, and not in the good way.

*Lucy van Pelt:  She knows what she did.  Love the hair, though.