I'm right now thinking that a really radical thing for a Missoulian to do on the weekend is NOTHING. Yeah just sit at home.

Why, you ask?

This weekend there are like 900 events going on. there are so many events that all the people who like to go to events are holding events of their own. This is no exaggeration. For instance, the entire writing and bibliphillic community will be trying to attend at least some portion of the MOntana Festival of the Book. That cuts out a huge portion of go-doers right there. But then a really cool sounding community dance group is having their big performance this weekend, the Peas Farm is also holding their annual pumpkin carving, The Free Cycles place is throwing some kind of bike bash, AND some kind of Green something or other is having a Green Homes Tour. No, I am not going to bother getting the names of these events correct, nor am i going to link them to their various websites or news mentions. There are dozens of websites and mailing lists and facebook pages doing this already. Oh and if that's not enough, there's a night where there's going to be all night typing at a bar with DJs. Wait, i forgot about Take Back the Night. Theyre doing something at a park.

You could work out some insane schedule so that you could spend maybe 10 minutes at each thing ( most of this stuff is on Saturday---DONT MISS IT! ) or, you could lay in bed and read a book, carve a pumpkin with your family, use energy efficient bulbs and recycle, and ride your bike around the block. After the kids are in bed, you can crank up some music and type all night. That sounds kind of like a typical Saturday in Missoula, only quieter.

And I have a proposition for you.
I am accepting submissions for a new zine called : Cubicle Life. Submissions must be written while you are sitting in a cubicle. I accept comics, saved Instant Messages i.e. desperate attempts at human connection, black and white photos, and just the right kind of terrible poetry. Deadline, end of august, 2008. I don't care if you actually work in a cubicle right now. In fact, wish someone would get a job in a cubicle for one day just to make a submission for my zine.

For all other matters and curiosity, visit www.slumgullion.org to see what i am up to.

so this is where i am at. my blog was switched to a different server and the font is terrible and it is bothering me. I am experiencing lots of things in the meantime that are probably blog worthy yet i never blog.

but here is a little something or other i wrote tonight. for the sake of self-publishing i will put it here:

the wavelength. it’s the distance between, and it’s the measurement guide for. the wavelength is longer than your eyelashes and sadder than when. pads down the alley like a cautious rabbit. in its valleys, why is it still winter? in its peaks, skimming though the wires, I see the tail of the song and my legs are covered in grass.


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post. beaver tail get out. post. each thing i stopped believing. post. spill the gearparts. post. junkyard ridgeline is even closer. post. the distance to the road equals heartache. post. not a duck at all. no, not a duck at all.

my computer battery is about to die, and i was thinking " oh well i guess i cant actually post anything in the blog, once again." but that stupid little voice inside my head that makes me do things took that as a challange. So i have less than eight minutes to get something posted here. so far i have wasted time explaining my aims and intentions instead of giving you some kind of actual information or fodder or somesuch.

all i can think of to say offhand are the recent obsessions. Namely, eyebrows and age. These are separate obsessions, so i will take my remaining 6 minutes to try to at least fill you in about the eyebrows, the most important.

ok so all it really entails is that every face i see has some eyebrows pretty much, i mean except for the ones that dont. so maybe we could say the eybrow obsession is actually a che3cking for eyebrows obsession? no need to be picky, all i am saying is on each of these faces, i take note of the shape, color, and ...for lack of a better term with 5 minutes left... consistancy of said eyebrows. I have very vague preferences about eyebrows but honestly its not even a matter of quality of preference. Its just that there are eyebrows. And people do or do not pluck them. And, my more recent observations have lead me to understand that some people may or may not trim thier eyebrows as well. I am not judging these situations or trying to register a complaint. I just want to announce the eyebrow observations. It's a part of my inner, daily existance, and i dont usually have the wherewithal to share it. it rarely comes up. people dont often talk about the state or condition of eyebrows.

I woke up this morning, and had the luxury of nodding back off several times to the sound of my son tearing open gifts from Santa and waking again to his intermittent requests to release toys from insanely child-proof plastic packaging. This ironic packaging reminds me of the way Shel Silverstein's "the Missing Piece' purports to be a children's book, but when you examine it thoughtfully, the message actually comes across as so hopeless, the only conclusion is that Silverstein actually hates children. Wrestling with plastic toy packaging that requires a flame-thrower to open when you don't own a flame-thrower, is kind of like that.

When I later stumbled out to the pile of wrapping paper and my first glorious cup of coffee in two days I had a realization. (By the way, one of my early Christmas gifts was a case of food poisoning that practically tore me asunder, so you can see why this cup of joe was particularly wonderful).

The realization is sort of cheesy, but its something like this: Today, some people are being forced to cram together for family time, and since I live far from my family, I get envious of that chance that everyone in the world always whines about. I tend to spend weeks ahead of this holiday imagining how alone I will feel on the fateful day. There are many reasons why this is stupid, including the fact that I would only join the chorus of whiners, also including the fact that I was raised a Jew (with some degree-of Christmas-like celebration, but still!) But the primary reason it is stupid to worry about Christmas is because its actually a chance to do nothing. You don't get any bills in the mail. No one even really e-mails. It's a nation-wide agreement to leave each other alone.

I think we should all stop with the gifts, revert to handmade card-making, and spend the end of the year quietly staring at walls, sipping on coffee. The day should be primarily about letting our kids make huge messes of the house while we gaze at them through lazy, slitted eyelids.

1) My car meets a lamppost + a snowstorm causes an eighteen-hour black-out at my house = I give up on being gluten-free and have some pizza. It's okay, I usually eat healthier. And I already had french-fries for lunch, because I had not yet given up being gluten-free, and I work in the part of town that is 99% gluten. We call it the Gluten District. They do carry french-fries and iceburg lettuce, as compliments to the gluten.

2) Full pot of food + one power outage minus my ability to wash it out and make something else = pizza. Because if i wanted to make rice and beans to bring to work, I would have to wash my one pot. If I wanted to wash my one pot, I would have to dump out the leftovers that went bad during the 18-hour power outage. If I wanted to dump that food out, I would have to think about what a waste it was. Frozen pizza was not only readily available, but it helped me turn a blind eye to more painful things. Even though this is a subtraction equation, it still adds up to two slices of frozen pizza.

3) Day three. Thanksgiving + poor planning + a delightful-but-not-quite-expected-guest = pizza. I was gonna go to another friend's house. But my car wouldn't start. Luckily Peter came over, and we walked to Food Farm and got beverages. Unluckily, we did not think to buy more food provisions for later. After several grueling games of checkers, we got hungry. We knew the only answer was pizza, so we called every closed pizza place in town, mainly to rub in our folly. Then, realizing that holiday store closures mean only one thing, we bundled up and marched right over to the Holiday gas station. And got 2 frozen pizzas. I won't go into details about our incident at the closer, non-frozen-food-carrying gas station. All I can say is it was a huge misunderstanding. And, that reverse-juggling really is possible with just the right sandwiches.

p.s. in case you are keeping track--- you heard me right, the car wouldn't start. I have no idea why. I replaced the battery..... it was working fine all week. I can only hope it was just a fluke induced by the 0-degree weather. . .

4) Day 4. I am writing an article about some local artists. So I was interviewing one of them at a coffee shop. We got hungry. Nothing was really nearby that sounded any good---except for the pizza place. This, was by far the best pizza I had all week! I even had more just now, cuz i brought 2 slices home. I forgot to make this into a math equation. But you can check the figures. It's all there.

I am doing Slumgullion again, so I spend all my internet time working on that site right now. Its 1Am and I just finished the below flier. Here's what we are up to:

In other news...I crashed my car into a lamppost on Sunday. The same influential snow storm caused a really long power outage at my house on Monday. Good thing there are such things as bungee cords and sleepovers. Oh. And white duct tape almost blends in with my car's rugged ( okay, bland) exterior!

I just realized I could update "you" about my cats.


So, I moved again. For the last year I was living in a house the size of a postage stamp. I loved that house. We could barely fit, even when eating Alice-In-Wonderland cakes to get inside. But then it was infested with mice, or perhaps just one mouse ( the same who played with a bouncy ball in my kitchen one night, as reported here). And it wasn't just the mice, or the mice's poops everywhere. Nor was it that I had to throw out tons of art supplies. Thanks to the mice.

It was mainly my landlady who called me one morning at 6 AM implying i would get kicked out if i didn't mow the lawn. It was September. To me lawn mowing was not my priority for fall. But she said I was destroying her property. And so on. And I felt way too vulnerable at that point, having been worn down by the mouse ahead of time. I broke, and I got the heck out of Dodge, cramming all my many belongings ( which, incidentally, poured out of the mini-house like clowns in a Volkswagen, only not so easily, as these belongings were more angular, lacking legs, and not funny at all) into a truck, over and over and over again. Up and down the mountain. For days. But because I have integrity, I mowed the patch of lawn she was talking about, thus saving the property from impending destruction.

Anyway, now I am in a new house, back in town. Jaden and I can walk most places, and that's ironic seeing how we were living in a more rural-feeling, beautiful neighborhood, before. but it lacked a lot of sidewalks, honestly. To get anywhere from our house, we had to walk in the road, like squirrels and deer...and other animals prone to becoming roadkill. See where I am going with this? — Maybe I am just an urban woman. But, we are going for bike rides and walks a lot more, even though it is getting colder. So this is good. And , most importantly ( I almost forgot to tell you), I have my cats back. Unfortunatly Little Craze is really sick. But at least I can finally afford to take him to the vet, which I did. More on that later.

And we got a free organ ( not like a kidney ) that we played for 7 hours the first day we brought it home. Gage even played like 4 notes for an hour or so, in a hypnotic, slow, polka trance. I took a nap during this time, so it could have been longer. When I woke up from the nap, I played more organ.

Tonight, I made gluten-free peanut butter cookies although this is one of those weeks where I wonder if Gluten-Freedom is really doing anything for me. Its day 6 of a migraine, and I bacame frightened of this one when 3 Advil only put a dent in it. Now that I have insurance I need to go figure out if I can afford Imatrex. Ah health. Something the world should know about.

regardless, the cookies were damned good.

Why do they put specials about deadly, silent heart disease on PBS at nighttime when us hypochondriacs want to go to bed? Some strange, twisted individual set that programming up.