A Post That Says Something, But Boringly

Why I don’t mark pages of passages that strike me when I find them, I’ll never know. I’m reading Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief,” and I can’t find the passage where she says, in effect, how jealous she is of people who find an overwhelming obsession in life. How it may make no sense on the outside, but that it’s a way, for the ones who find it, to pass the time.

Pass the time…how horrific and perfectly sensible.

I was going to post a photo of her infamous ghost orchid, but the ones I found, they scare the crap out of me.

Words of Mza

Mid-IM, Mza produces my most favoritely modified thought of the day. In stages:

Mza: I was thinking tho: life is good.

Mza: Kind of.

Mza: Even though it's bad.

Somebody Take Away My Vicodin

Does it ever strike you that you didn’t know you’d stopped moving/growing/outward-expanding and suddenly you find yourself, your mind, your heart, whatever else there is, stretching like a microscopic creature with shifting arms/legs/appendages that move in gooey ways and seem not to have clear edges, but at the same time they are bounded by a light plant-like cellulose structure that holds them all together, attached to the central animal, a core creature that is now able to reach farther than it had before?

If you pay attention to how those reaching arms and untangling legs feel, I wonder if you'd feel, as I do, a glowy warmth, an ease, a kind of excitement, but not excitement in the electric sense—more in the way a flower might feel as it blooms. Subtle but intense. Soft.

In Pain, 7:02 a.m.

I am awake, briefly I hope, while the sky intensifies with navy and the last narcotic has worn down while the next pill digests inside my stomach.

In yesterday’s midafternoon, a surgeon lay me down on my side and surrounded my back with blue papery sheets. He cut into me around my shoulder blade, which I registered as an unsettling unfeeling after prick after prick of lidocaine had made me numb, mostly. I felt the tearing and what often seemed like ripping, imagined the thick of skin he had pulled away to cut beneath it, but it was the wandering drip of what I knew must be blood down under my armpit, curling onto my breast, that made me deeply uneasy, acutely attended to my mortality.

When the doctor was done, a nurse wiped away my upper back and allowed me to turn over a bit. I saw a C of dried brown blood matching the curve of my upper breast. Another nurse pointed to it for the first to wipe, and after he’d removed the arc without deleting its end point—a blackish drop—I felt repulsed and triumphant, both at once.

ZKDVC

This is an illuminated eye test. It hangs in a local Brooklyn bar.

It reminds me of Soviet-era Hungary, but that could also be because I am reading Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog:

“Gyuri was trying to enjoy his sojourn at the hindquarters' headquarters with extracts from these books, but although the idea had been highly pleasing, the reality wasn't as satisfactory. The Communists couldn't even hack it as toilet paper.”

Maybe it’s the “HVORK” line, maybe it’s all the “Z”s, but maybe it’s the font itself, Stalinist and steady, hunkered-down but fading. A little too steely to work well as toilet paper.