Thank you Emma for putting the daily words off to the right. I’m finally whipping up word furrows directly in wordpress, and from the comfort of the chair in my room, with laptop atop lap.

I ended up with a few family heirlooms from my grandma Dickinson. A pair of opera glasses, brass, with mother-of-pearl inlay. I don’t know what became of those. I have a feeling my Dad absconded with them.

I also have a cameo.  I think it’s of a young girl looking out over a pastoral landscape. Can’t remember because I haven’t taken it out in years. In high school I used to wear it all the time. I thought it was realy cool.  Then somehow, or someone, put the notion in my head that it would be utterly tragic to lose such an heirloom. Such an heirloom must be guarded carefully.  So I’ve kept it ever since in a safe place.

My safe place is this little book I bought in a hardware store. The center of the book has been hollowed out, to make a rectangular space for valuables. I keep credit cards in their that i’m not using, the cameo, a gold watch from grandma Dickinson, and some cash.

Today, I hid a twenty dollar bill in my car, and then I wondered why I had never hidden a twenty in my car. Here’s why I hid the twenty in my car. I left the house to go to the burger ville — the city of burgers about 5 blocks from my house. At the city of burgers, they sell the Tillamook cheeseburger. This is a means of satsifying hunger for three bucks.

Only, I raced off to the city of the burger with no money. So I came back and grabbed my wallet, and then stashed a twenty in the car. For some emergency.

Now, it does cross my mind that I may have invited an emergency to happen in my life. By visualizing it, by preparing for it, I have paved the way for a reason to use that twenty. We’ll see. for, if I were to follow that logic, I’d never get my teeth cleaned. Getting near all that drilling equipment would just invite dental disaster, n’est-ce pas?

Grandma Dickinson didn’t really endow me with much more than  gold watch and a cameo, stored in a book. O–she sent me a poem that she wrote one time–and she also sent me a few books of poetry. She did, however, teach me about the care and cleaning of a cameo. Cameos, she said, are best maintained with hair oil. Don’t wash your hair for three or four days. Let the oil build up. Then rub your hair on the cameo.

But come to think of it, I’ve never washed my cameo.

I am thinking now of letting the cameo out of the book.  I must find a way of having it set, or a means of hanging it around my neck.

This dirty old man named Manny (har har) who used to have all of us high school girls over to get stoned — he gave me this beautiful necklace one time.

I used to love the necklace. A gold setting. 6 tiny rubies. In the center, a 7th stone, a tiny diamond. I loved the necklace–as long as I didn’t let it remind me of Manny. Then one time, when wrestling Pam Seltzer (who later changed her name to Pam Shepherd), I lost the necklace. We were in Roosevelt Park. I returned to the park a few times hopeing to find it, but never did.

I remember I used to let my midriff show in those days. And there’s a picture of me on the last day of 11th grade. My midriff is resplendent. The lock, which I had removed from my locker that day, was hitched to one of my belt loops. I have a hippie bandana tied over my head, and my hippie braids hang down almost to my waist.

I hope this amphigory has not left pockmarks or pits in your cecum, nor that you’ve felt cheated out of the gulag which was your rightful due when sitting down to examine the furrow.

Today’s Words:
catty
Valium
rancid
gravel
unsinkable
approximate
jellyfish

One day Emily and I were at the beach and there was a jellyfish washed up. It was dead, of course, but the degree to which I was eager to dig into it disturbed me. It was like silicone or some other inert substance. It was fascinating, but still, it was a corpse. But I dug my fingers into its mangled body anyway. Why not – how often do you get to play with dead bodies? Probably, you are thinking, not nearly enough. 

One time in college I brought some roadkill home. A rabbit. My best friend, who I was walking with when I found it, thought it was absurd, but she had long since gotten used to my antics so when I said I wanted to skin and tan the hide she nodded with that biting-my-tongue look and  quietly pointed out that wouldn’t my apartment start smelling, you know, fetid, and wouldn’t my roommate mind? Well obviously I’ll clean it, hello! And I started to, but then there were the maggots. I hadn’t really thought through the whole idea very well. I thought roadkill would only need cleaning from, say, gravel. Not squirmy flesh-eating larva. I ended up tossing it in the dumpster and crossing my fingers that there wasn’t a law against that.

Why woud I do this? I was in a phase of trying to approximate an uber-hippy. While I was vegan, roadkill, being already dead and a fellow victim of “the man”, needed to be reclaimed and used for something purposeful. This is the unsinkable logic of uber-vegan-hood. Luckily I didn’t get so far as to have to figure out what to do with my rabbit hide, since just processing the body was far above my disgust threshold. Carrying it home in a plastic Safeway bag was, however, not. So while I had a threshold, it was somewhat higher than most sane people. I attribute this, of course, to growing up on a farm.

Speaking of disgust, I am tickled with the Word Spittoon and am delighted to get into the guts of WordPress and find it shiny and pure. Code can be many things – clean, orderly, and robust or fragile, rancid, and so completely fubar that it requires Valium to stomach. WordPress, the engine that runs wordlush, is beauteous and bright. It makes me happy.

I also accidentally on my home machine pulled the bleeding edge v. 2.4 from subversion and it looks like they are redesigning the look of the admin, which is pretty snappy and about time. Not to be catty, but the admin right now looks a little boxy, like an 80′ Volvo. I love shiny guts, but I also love shiny outsides.