one of the best things about being famous would be how embarrassing my dreams would become. one of the best things about being famous is how embarrassing my dreams have become. barack obama stole a bike and grazed throughout a young Hawaiian neighborhood, where it was night and a carnival and a world was probably ending, and he gripped and blanched and escaped the city and crossed the depression of a fence and slid inside a dark barn, where hillary clinton was perched in a loft, cooing and fluttering and casting a long shadow that reached the tip of his bike’s own shadow. barack obama just walked right into a town bordering the ocean, and he knew that something was wrong, though he stepped down onto the sand anyway, dipping his head into the water and worrying, finally rounding to take a seat near the grass, where the beach began. hillary clinton moved closer to him. she took his hand, and they watched as the waves began to elaborate, finding and replacing everything. 'don’t worry,' she said, 'i’ve been dealing with this for thirty-five years.' and now whenever he sees her it’s only gratitude, and when anyone asks he doesn’t know what to say, and he wants to show her how the carnival hides the gas station, how his hands bend against the curl of the water, and the barn she provided.

here are some election jokes:

1. Barack Obama (after winning a primary and greeting his overwhelmed crowd, as the roar finally dies down): You know, I’ve been through some rough shit, but tonight is all about me.

2. Also some kind of joke about voting the issues. I already know how I'm voting this year; I'm voting the issues.

FACE JOKES


While passing your priest after mass and shaking his hand:

You: Father Lou, welcome to my face.

While ordering at a restaurant:

Server/Lady Server: Okay, and for you?
You: Let's see, I think this evening I'd like to welcome the meat loaf to my face.

While looking into the distance:

You: Hey what's that!
(Someone turns, you move in closer, they turn back)
You: Welcome to my face.





BUS JOKES


Just after entering the bus, while standing and looking around:

You: Welcome to my face.

Just after entering the bus, while standing and looking around:

You: It's been a long journey.

Just after finding a seat in the bus, while looking around:

You: I call this bus closeness.

I had a dream that rumors of a New Egypt were spreading throughout the Ozarks. This summer I'd like to talk about it and look for it.

Ever since tentbox and I solved that murder mystery my right leg has been poisoned and last night I couldn't feel my right ankle bone but I don't even care; I hope this same thing happens to my right leg a million times. Several days after I solved the mystery I did a lot of things like high kick in front of the mirror and play wiffle ball and talk about my religious views before I even realized that my right leg was poisoned. I'm really glad I can attach a "case closed" tag to this mystery, even though it was so hot and my left foot ended up bleeding and my right leg was poisoned and we were briefly detained on suspicion of trespassing and murder.

I went to Austria for about a week and I guess we were supposed to go to some health care conference so my mom could talk about pregnant teenagers but all I ended up doing was listening to Toby Keith and going to T.G.I. Friday's. I don't know anything about country music but I know that I would like to think about hailstorms taking a toll on my family and giving directions back to the interstate and never complaining and never asking why. Something about the way country music bubbles and mortifies and gurgles all over your skin makes me feel like I'm nine years old and at the bottom of a pool or river, so while I was in Vienna I liked to imagine myself squinching my eyes and sinking to the bottom of the Danube while hearing 'You Ain't Much Fun Since I Quit Drinkin', then suddenly elevating out of the water and slamming into the grass just next to that clearing in America where Brad Paisley is exploring the crevices of a bar fly under the moonlight. It's kind of like that Pablo Neruda line, "Tyranny cuts off the singer's head/but the voice from the bottom of the well/returns to the secret streams of the earth/and rises out of nowhere through the mouths of the people," except in this case the tyrant is Europe and the voice is Toby Keith's. My godmother's husband used to play drums for Toby Keith. My grandfather knew Spanky McFarland I met Meadowlark Lemon my ancestors fought General Cornwallis in the Revolution I e-mailed Al Roker Adam Duritz hit on my mom I called a munchkin on the telephone Mr. Rogers wrote me a letter Warwick Davis and I lodged a complaint with eBay Bob Dylan gave me his guitar pick MaCaulay Culkin read me his poetry.

Oops I hit the median. Apparently you're not supposed to call it the median, but that's what I call it. It was snowing and freezing and I had been thinking a lot about the name Karen, and the person Karen. Do you know someone named Karen? I hope not; no one does. Your mom doesn't count. Before I hit the median I walked into the backyard and looked at my Dad's dead tomatoes and dead...turnips, and in the ice his plants were both dead and a neighborhood of spiders. The chomp when I walked said Karen and the tomatoes were named Karen and this picture is named Karen.

There are about a hundred different things going on and most of them have to do with dead malls. I've been thinking a lot about places that still exist even though no one sees them anymore, and at the top of my list is dead malls.

( dead malls dead malls dead malls )

For the past year I've been dropping the phrase self-realization crisis in all kinds of expansive and inappropriate situations. Sorry I gasped and touched your knee cap; I was having a self-realization crisis. Sorry I was unresponsive in your stack of newspapers last night; I was too self-realized to stay awake, and consequently unable to drive home. A few weeks ago I decided to live in a hermitage near the Abbey of Gethsemani for about a week after the semester, and I scattered some not-so-subtle hints throughout my circle of family and friends that a crisis of self-realization might be imminent during this period. At the hermitage there were a lot of raspberry-smelling books left in the cabinet by the bed, and a lot of them were by Thomas Merton, an international monk rock star of the mid-twentieth century and Gethsemani alum who died in Thailand when a poorly grounded fan electrocuted his heart. He wrote a book called No Man is an Island, and it's all about selfless love but in a good, interesting way. It was so good that I thought maybe I was about to puncture the veil, but later I fell asleep and dreamt that I went to the movie theater with my best friend, an Asian nonetheless named Ghostface Killah, who was arrested in the lobby. When I awoke the dream had soured me on selfless love, and so I left the house and moped through the first light on the Gethsemani grounds. Here are some pictures I took that morning on a hill and in a low chair, in a sequence of after, before and during:

here is something interesting. read this poem and please don't assume that it's supposed to be a good poem:


Elegy for the Native Guards

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . .
—Allen Tate

We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare—
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass a lee—
half reminder of the men who served there—
a weathered monument to some of the dead.

Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.

The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance—
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?

All the grave markers, all the crude headstones—
water—lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high
round, unfinished, half-open to the sky,
the elements—wind, rain—God's deliberate eye.

am i and everyone i know a lot better at poetry than i ever realized? should I start writing "eracism" poems myself? anyway what I'm getting at, if you don't already know, is that this is the title poem from the book that just won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

also the don ho RIP glossy 8x10 signed in beautiful silver sharpie that i placed on ebay only sold for 9.50, so i'm going to have to find another way to recoup my debt after losing my wallet. according to my secret hits counter, this means that approx. 50 people looked at and then decided against bidding on this glossy signed 8x10 photo.