Welcome to my web, my capturing device, my frayed asterisk at the corner. Not complete but drawing your attention, marking out a space. It is violent, strategic, and imprisoning. It is beautiful, vulnerable, and strong.
I connect you to the words that connect you to yourself.
But do I have to write a blog?
Some words feature their ugly with a sound and mouth feel that lingers after the word is gone (sludge, gusset, fetid, moist). Like acid colors and triangle patterns in nature, they warn you to stay away.
Others engage the sickly boniness of their aristocratic inbreeding (pulchritude, bucolic, effulgence) to simply scare you off & save them from doing work. And some are linguistic carrion flowers that lure you in with their liquid sibilance before springing their deadly denotations (acquiesce, hirsute, silverfish).
But a word like blog doesn’t threaten or disdain or tease. It doesn’t do anything but sit, like a tepid lump of beige (not even griege)—unformed, flabby, & tired.
Blog is the sole-surviving syllable of a shantytown portmanteau: weblog. Blog has survivor’s guilt. It’s a purposely ugly word, blog. There has to be something better.
So today, and probably tomorrow, I will explore other words to denote and connote this weblog of musings, missives, and meanderings. This confluence of ephemera, this commonplace, this capturing device.
Ideas are cutting instruments
Lakoff points out, “metaphors are more than mere language and literary devices, they are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain.” In other words, words take form through our bodies and are expressed as metaphors in our minds.
It’s not you, it’s my allostatic load
I have a mental image of myself standing at the window—it’s a clear morning and the sun is just rising. I’m holding the day’s first coffee, and the steam is rising from the small white cup as I bring it to my lips for that first bright and bitter sip.
You Were Never (pandemic) Me, 2022
Like everything post-covid, I am starting over. Nothing seems sure; nothing seems clear. Assignments that I taught for years no longer make sense.
Now that I, like Hamlet, have been released from the responsibility of studies, and can manage my own sleeping and waking times for the summer, I may allow myself to follow a practice of segmented sleep.