Caveat Emptor Entry 1.

It's the nearly the last day of August and this morning while walking to work, I smelled the beach for the first time in more than a year. It was like Proust's episode with the madlines, except less French by nature. More than just the beach, which is an olfactory amalgam of salt and seaweed and beach-roses and beachgrass, fish, and sunlight (which has a scent, I'm convinced), it smelled of the sand, of pressing your face into hot sand on a hot-as-balls day in July. However, it is August and I am very 900 some miles or so, 934 miles to be more exact) far away from the beach, which really should be Beach with a capital B because there are, technically, other beaches, but no other beach that has the home feeling or home scent of Bonnet Shores. So I was kind of thrown by that. Right now I'm in the bookstore and transcribing entries into the Irish folklore database https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4921577/4881205
Just did this one, which there are probably errors on, but, that's what I get for not taking Irish at Notre Dame. I tried, to be fair, just not very hard...it's hard to learn a language that uses the Roman alphabet but has everything make different sounds because fuck the sounds they usually make for English speakers. I mean, German does that for some letters, yeah, but it's kind of predictable, Irish is just like, well, do we really want to use our own typeface (in which it makes marginally more sense)? No, fine then, we'll just use this one, but...everything should sound different, because fuck it.
Anyhow, it's kind of a fun website if you're interested in folkore studies and things like that...which I am. Not enough to get a degree in Folkloristics, I think (though this is also because I completely fucked up my attempt at an MA in English, which fucked my GPA pretty hard, so grad school would be...difficult at this juncture)...but...anyway, I should probably pretend to work and sweep up the place.

A year and a two weeks and some three-ish days from the last post. (written 8/14)

It's been that kind of year (and two weeks, and some three-ish days, but, honestly, recently, things have been a hell of a lot more wonderful than they could be, so, there's that)...and it keeps becoming a larger and larger avalanche of sucking and shit (granted, I'm not in, say, Haiti or Chechnya or Somalia or a number of other places or Detroit, and granted I have it a lot easier than probably 95% of the world because I'm white, American, male, and tall. Still, things can turn into a shitstorm, and, in fact, have. Several shitstorms, a front of shitstorms, a gust front of fuckery and fell doings (not by me, but, well, pretty much, towards me, by the cabal that is apparently trying to through wrenches into the admittedly rather naive plans I'd sketched out for the next few years. It isn't a conspiracy, it's just the roaring, fast train of reality and I picking flowers that grow in the slag and rock between each of the railroad ties, assuming that noise is the wind or something, nothing to worry about.....
and then I'm flattened and splattered all over the landscape. Because it's really my own fault, and I shouldn't be writing this, I should be doing things that will help me get better instead of bitching instead of burning through two years of my thesis and then, fuckall, finding out that I ran out of time to submit it...three months after it was apparently due (I swear, I thought I had five years from the start of the program...and I was close to finishing it when I got that letter (Thursday last), and since then I've just been in a sort of constantly compounding shellshock about managing to fuck up getting an MA in a ridiculously easy program with very accommodating professors, I mean, it looks like I must have tried really hard to fuck up this fantastically, or, not tried at all, been too afraid of failure that I just shut the possibility of doing something that might then fail out of my mind and lived day to day to day, sometimes in almost total seclusion from the world, sometimes not, ending up with an apartment full of books, somehow, (me, that's how), and a lover I'd driven insane with those books, because of the piles and simple fucking obstacles they left for us (just moving around the apartment, moving-moving made my bibliomania (book-hoarding, OCD related to books, whatever) even more apparent...and yet, I'm self sabotaging, I'm undermining my brain by not sleeping, ever, really, at night, and by eating just the bare minimum of calories to keep me running and shit like that. It's damned unhealthy and damned near insane.
(Added to, 6/10/2016)
So, lots of shit has happened since I started writing this post two years ago. It's just sat as a draft waiting and gathering electronic dust.
First off:
I'm sans gallbladder.
Not the source of all my health problems by a long shot, but...it has made stuff slightly less unpleasant, regarding dietary aggravations, pain, etc.
Plus, now that I'm on my Comrade-Lover's insurance...I can get my prostate fixed, which is good...
though the more I look into it with an actual doctor, the more it looks like I was right and that there is actually no real way of fixing it because it is a brain-gut axis problem just like...everything else going wrong with me is. I'm sure LSD would fix all my troubles brainwise, but since I don't know any good chemists making reliable safe batches, I'm shit out of luck on that front.
Since August of 2014, I burned out of grad school, which...is my own fault because I shouldn't have been there to begin with, but...live, learn, and get massively in debt for no reason at all in the end, is the lesson there.
It's terrifying to think that I'm almost thirty and unemployed, even as I look for work of any sort, even the non-paying volunteer kind just to keep me occupied and not insane. Not as insane.

Books to Go

Due to reasons that have mostly to do with my bibliomania (now treating, in therapy and everything), I have a LOT of books. More than I need. Want some books? Say, a media-rate shipping box of them sent anywhere in the US? Free (cash donations/exchange accepted and welcomed)...
Let me know with a comment or a message or something and I'll do what I can to get you reading materials.
I have a few audiobooks, also.

Start with a quote, they said. Don't stare like that, they said. You'll go blind if you keep doing that, they said. They were right with the first one, but thankfully they were dead wrong on the other two. Though I do need glasses to see perfectly, if one can ever do that.

"Love, the forgiving hand of victory."
O'Sullivan Beare family motto, Edward Whittemore.

I want to spend the night reading Jerusalem Poker until I'm sobbing in unadulterated awe at the words E.W. uses to give unto history best book ever...

But a trip to Chicago is in the near future, and thus sleep before it is recommended by my lover, and even though her marvelous moonlit form isn't next to me, warming me and giving me that cliched but correct sense of perfect coolness that comes from a lover on a hot night...
I'll read her letters in my head until I wake up.

Goodnight folks.

Soon, expect actual posts to resume on this blog, as I've decided to get back into the fray of writing...

Prompted largely by the inspiration of marvelous folks around me, recent meetings with friends that have been friends so long neither of us can recall how we met, though we're pretty sure it was ten years ago that we first connected, and by remembering how much writing helps me stay mildly more sane...
and in the weeks, months, years to come...
I'm going to need all the sanity I can get, just to stagger forward at a geologic pace...
towards the glorious eventual ending in however many billions of years...

Iesu Christo, Pelecanus Mundi, as they used to say.

Jesus Christus Pelicanus.
Iesum Christum Pelicanus salvat mundi.
And all similar attempts to butcher Latin for my own ends.
It’s actually a very old (early Medieval, later Aquinian) thing in Catholic theology.
Called as such because it was believed the Pelican, to feed its young, pierced its breast and fed them on either blood or pieces of its own heart when no other food was available. Either that, or it killed its young and then resurrected them by stabbing itself in the breast and dripping its blood on their bodies, causing them to spring to life and continue right on growing up into good, moral, upstanding pelicans. This is…well, a direct allegorical link to the whole sacrifice of Christ on the Cross thing…also aided by how pelicans and cormorants dry their wings by spreading them out…in the shape of a cross…and generally looking all Jesus-like…for birds, that is.

Earthquake Weather

It's Monday.
It's the middle of July.
It's around 90 degrees, plus the humidity.
Bloomington is a nice place to spend the summer, especially if you don't mind the slow and torpid languor that seems unique to Indiana. I wish I could flee north, though.
North to the polar region, the land of ice, Amundsen, more ice, and the probable remains of Amundsen entombed in said ice until such time as the ice melts due to global warming and gives his body (plus Robert Falcon Scott, etc) unto the living again.
It'll be an exhumation of the dead, courtesy of greenhouse gases and people ignoring the Kyoto Protocol, which wouldn't have helped much anyway, but might have kept things back a few decades, given man the time he needs to thoroughly despoil the land before it is inundated, before Holland is a memory, before everyone who matters is watching Bangladesh sink into the Bay of Bengal from the Dyson sphere habitat that eventually replaces the International Space Station.
And it could be worse, that's the terrifying thing. Praise Johnson for the Clean Air Act.

Almost finished with my second semester of graduate school. Which means I get to start UPDATING THIS BLOG again really, really, really soon.

What I look like.

And now, a picture of me.

Whittemore.

If you haven't read Sinai Tapestry...might want to consider it. I really enjoy Whittemore's writing (but it isn't for everyone...so...keep that in mind). His writing is kinda out-there, but...well, it takes place in and around Jerusalem, and is really a fascinating look at the Levant as a historical-fictional....well...I can't really explain it, but it is wonderful.
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/whittemore/

Muse.

Muse muse muse muse muse.
Want to really follow me?
See what words I'm tossing into this oblivion like flower petals on a lake of non-Newtonian fluid and marveling at what bounces and what remains suspended in this devilish and new substance.
Go to victusinveritas.tumblr.com
and maybe create a tumblr account yourself. Still, as I like blogspot, and...every other blogging website out there...I'll keep posting here whenever I have anything of note to write about. Peace, my Comrades, peace.

culture keeper: Peter Beard

Peter Beard

Peter Beard may be the most adventurous man in the world.

Perhaps he is also the most stylish.

His photography and collage work are phenomenal.

Posted by Jonathan Randall Grant at 6:45 AM

The True Subject

This poem
is brief.
Though not so brief
as to avoid
mentioning
the true subject.
I'm sure
Hafez is happy
in his rose garden.

Brain, entirely vacated. Vanished.
Gone in the panic mode of the evening.
A fear of eviction, dereliction, unkempt disharmony,
Eris waiting beside my boots
as my feet bleed through now stained socks.

-----
My mind is in such a shit place right now--not depression wise or anything, either, just...in that panicked state it gets from time to time, something no amount of drugs can help with--and that is probably a good thing, really, because...well, just getting through your life by hopping from pill bottle to pill bottle whenever a problem pops up just...seems kind of unpleasant, I recognize that I write this as I have forty milligrams of serotonin-filled candy in my system along with some other tailored poisons to the beasts that slowly eat at my brain. Such is life. My dog is snuggling in at my feet and suggesting huffily that I turn off this devil box and sleep too, so I'm going to do that. Peace

A poem for Eugene.

I wrote this for a poetry class, so there were requirements to be met—namely, that I had only ten minutes to compose the piece, and had to put some form of the word ‘shiver’ in, as well the words ‘raft’ and ‘ambulance’… The result turned out to be a memoriam of sorts to my maternal grandfather, a man who always carried a sort of quiet mythic air about him. And the doughnut shop in question is Alie’s, in case you were wondering—if you live on the East Coast…stop by there and devour some for me, will ya?

Lake Cha(rgoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungam)augg and the Mournful Doughnut.


Roiling mists on Lake Chaugg hide a raft
a springboard for naked flips into the water

the sweet, high laugh of a friend’s lover,
later, the sound of an ambulance, a banshee’s wail

someone in the family has died, will die,
the sídhe keens, my aunt insists she shows up before each death.

Now, all that exists is that lake, cloaked in the colors of dawn,
another ambulance behind us on the road in Middlesex, Mass.

Shivering, I ride shotgun, a box of doughnuts, best in Rhode Island, at my feet.
Jelly with powdered sugar, cake with white frosting and sprinkles.

I can’t eat the jellied ones anymore, too much sorrow in them,
memories of a dead, mourned, and never-really-known grandfather
linger in strawberry-red smears on a white shirt every Friday morning.

A surrealist tale. Brief.

She gently licked the strawberry, it liked it.

The long sigh at the end of a weekend

No, the weekend isn't officially over until Sunday night at this time, or maybe Monday considering the holiday moved in order to avoid acknowledging the true Labor Day on the first of May, when the rest of the world's workers take out the red and black of the Internationale and organized workers as opposed to the black and red of Fascism (awkward, we really should make fascists use ridiculous uniforms...which, well, they usually do use semi-ridiculous uniforms, but they tend to take the niftiest colors...at least black, red, tan, grey--though there is something to be said for the Allied uniforms of the Second World War, the coloring of which, and the design, is that of victors, of peace of a sort) and parade down city streets, drunk on a mix of their own power and whatever the locals ferment, distill, or otherwise let sit in out of the way barrels for a while, maybe just some mare's milk if that is all they have to ferment, but maybe something less creative...like buffalo grass in Poland or barely in most of Britain and Ireland, still...it feels like it is starting to wind down, the sails left at an angle to catch the next breeze in the doldrums of impossibly hot September days. And that is how you write a run-on sentence which could have been even longer if I went into digressions about various uniforms or cuts of uniform. I woke up earlier than usual this morning, and after tossing myself in the shower, cursing the lack of a fresh razor, I devoured a bit of breakfast with the standard crew plus some guests, and struck out for downtown to meet Comrade Eric for tea. Tea actually consisted of tea for once, which was nice, because I'd been thinking about tea all morning, and having some in my system allowed me to at least pretend to function. Functioning, in fact, included a stroll over to the local (ish) Spanish market of El Paraiso, a wonderful little joint just south of the public library, for some ginger, a lemon, and a cactus fruit. Eric said I was one chicken foot short of a Voudon ritual. He wasn't far off, excepting the fact I try not to waste food on divinities. I offer them mindfulness of their existence, and figure that is pretty much the most valuable thing I can offer to any being, divine, mortal, or otherwise extant--mortals, these wonderful brain-machines going about in an armor of meat, bone, nerve, tendon, and skin are divine in their own way--anonymous though this divinity sometimes is, we look around us, especially when we are in the old and sacred places of the world, and remember that we are not the first people on this planet, that even before your named ancestors were making progeny in the fields of whatever land you come from, people were doing things other than just breeding--people took time out from the rather important act of perpetuating and providing for the human race just to build monuments to themselves or powerful enough folks within the bands, tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires of this world we attempt to call ours. It is much more and less than that--it belongs to the dead, and to the often touched on in Greenpeace advertisements 'future generations.' Memories sparked. Meeting a friend of my father's in a small cafe on a forgotten little street in San Fransisco, chocolate croissants passed around by this otherwise nameless, sort of faceless, and maybe female visitor. You must try these, they implore, they are to die for. Personally, I've never been a fan of dying for anything other than protecting those weaker than you, or perhaps those who are too busy doing things to make the world awesome to protect themselves from rather mundane deaths like getting hit by a bus or being kidnapped and sold into a life of torture, death, and rape, and if you are lucky, in that order, by Tajiks living near the Pamirs. Or maybe by Senderos down south in the Andes. Memories fade as quick as they materialize, reminding me of a need to take certain drugs to regulate chemicals going into my brain, alarm bells ring in my head, go, they say, walk, stagger, move.
So off I go.
Eventually...well, tomorrow my brain might function...so...I'll write something then. It is amazing the success, poetics wise, I'm having--not that I'm planning on doing anything with this poetry, it is just nice to know that my brain has not turned to dust in the last year of freedom from any sort of academic constraints.

Something brief and dark before I turn in

That October afternoon.
I still hate Octobers because of that day.
Without remorse, it stole upon me.
I was watching a vampire film set in Mexico,
heroine as tan and busty as they come,
a low-rent Salma Hayek, with about quarter of the allure
and none of the mystique.
And then, those words,
dread to the mind of any,
but especially from a loved one:
Cancer.

I keep another blog on blogspot...

http://brokemedievalist.blogspot.net

But that doesn't mean you should rush off to read it, because I rarely update it...because I'm pretty much a Luddite and...tumblr is so shiny, even if blogspot does have much more in the way of actual content.

We are still all amateurs compared to the wonderful madness and brilliance of Hieronymous Bosch.

Entry Primus

I have a concussion. I am dizzy as hell, my vision is still blurry when things move to fast, and I had my first day of classes and graduate school at IUSB today. All in all, classes can be counted as a solid win simply because I am IN the poetry class that I was wait-listed for, and that is really spiffy. For now, this is all I can write, because my brain is still leaking out through my ears. Thankfully I have tomorrow off to recover, which is probably necessary--hell, I really should have gone to the hospital last night, but the hallucinations stopped eventually, and Alex agreed that all they would have said was 'Yep, that thar's a concussion.'--not sure why the ER became southern all of a sudden, but maybe they just seceded for the evening. I'm just the writer, I blame my brain for any and all errors and infelicities. At present, I'm working on my latest art project, and will finish it off in the morning after I make a run to Michael's and pick up the required various odds and ends which I do not have lying around the house--only because someone made me get rid of all that perfectly good scrap leather and canvas...to be fair, this project has only recently taken root in the black earth of my mind, and the leather had been lying around for months, maybe years.
I've been fading in out and while I write this.
As such, I'll link this to my tumblr account (updated often compared to this).
http://www.victusinveritas.tumblr.com
This links you to what is a semi-personal blog detailing whatever it is I, your great tourguide to all things Robinson, see fit to write about. Check it out. I love new followers, and if you don't have a tumblr account, just ghost around for awhile and read some of what I hope to be things of interest.

Anyway...
Peace, Salaam, and otherwise Ciao.

"So you who hear the Navy's call, a warning take by me,
There's more in the clutch of a fair young wench than a life of gallantry."-'A Rambler's Life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlJnvu1NggI