Hello, there #3

Hello, there, Egagropila,

We haven’t seen you for a while, but we are glad to see you have something in the works in here. Admittedly, we don’t understand it, but this blog has never made much sense to us. Hey, you never did explain, by the way, what—well, much of anything, actually.

Anyway, it’s getting cold here. This morning, when Elmer finally finished rocking out to his new Masters of the Universe alarm clock and made a rare foray out of bed, well, you should have heard him yelp when his feet hit the floor. Time to bring the plants in and as many stray kittens as we can round up. It’s going to be a hard, cruel season for anything that that moves that stays out of doors. If we’ve told each other once, we’ve said it a million times, “Keep your slippers under the bed, because you just never know when Old Man Winter will slip in and sprinkle freezing dust around, and while you’re at it bring me some cocoa from the kitchen, because it’s going to be an other long day of trying not to get out of bed.”

Well, we hope you’re well, Egagropila. And we hope you post what you’re working on soon, even if we don’t understand it. It seems like we’re all just full of hope these days, even those of us who perennially write in Clarence Darrow with Emma Goldman (absentee, of course). We always figured it’d be the GOP that’d get us there eventually, one way or the other through persistent tyranny or by embodying the true conservative spirit to its logical conclusion. Sadly, that dream of government fading into obsolescence and eventual dissolution seems to have been dashed and done away with in the second-to-most recent reburgeoning of the proscriptivist right. Tyranny sometimes gives way to better impulses, but it’d be nice to avoid all that hemming and hawing and hewing of heads. We’ve been there, done that. But if we could just build a community, and realize we already are a community, now that’s where our hope comes in.

Anyway, Egagropila, the point is, this here Blogosphere is a community effort. Elmer’s going to make fun of me for saying it, but he knows we’re both right about this. If you’re not spreading your creative juices in here, we do hope you’re spreading them out there. Ourselves, we’ve done our darnedest not to get out of bed more than necessity demanded pretty much since the Nixon administration, but don’t be surprised if you see Elmer and me out there doing good works again, and not just in an electronic sense. We were good Catholics once, too, you know. We may not read the Good Book too much, but we do know that the Kingdom of Heaven is among us.

Your friends as always,
Nancy and Elmer Kowallahachet

Hello, there #2

Hello, there, Egagropila,

Clearly you’re still around, or we wouldn’t be finding your comments on other people’s blogs. So why haven’t you posted anything on your own blog?

We wonder.

We’re also wondering why in the world you’re still getting hits. Who are these people?

Well, here are some bats to keep them company.

Your friends,
Nancy and Elmer Kowallahachet

Hello, there #1

Hello, there, Egagropila.

This is a very boring blog. And now that we’ve hacked it, we have to admit, we’re a little disappointed to find that you don’t even have any articles pending review. As intrepid explorers of the Blogosphere, we’re actually kind of miffed not to find more in here after we went to so much trouble. We just hacked your blogrollee St. Alex of the Knife, too, and that was a much more rewarding experience all around. In fact, you might be surprised by everything he’s up to in there.

What gives, man? Er, man? What the heck are you, anyway?

Yours very truly,
Nancy and Elmer Kowallahachet

5. fusion

Confounded, the word more closely considered the thing.

She recognized it. She knew it thoroughly. But it surprised her.

She tried making sense of it, first as a whole, and then in each of its constituent parts. There was no making sense of it, it seemed.

It was not without logic. The logic defied putting it in words.

She grasped the thing. It evaded her.

She sought to relay the thing. She sought to make the thing real and true. The thing became vague and a vapor. It dissolved in her hands and ran through her fingers.

She had thought she had mastered it. She knew none of the words she had known.

She went to bed.

4. second casting

The word wondered whether she had cousins of her own. Lately she had noticed how sidewalks in the big cities in this country smelled different in the mornings than the cities closer to home. The liquid matter that formed puddles did not gather in the same way, in pockets and depressions as she was used to, but spread out thinly and emitted not so much a smell of vegetation postprime but one of animal life and petroleum, a lonely smell.

She started to write the following postcard.

Querida mama:

Por favor, dulce

mami-dope,

estoy muy triste

aquí toda sola.

Deseo que tuviera

a alguien conmigo.

¿Soy la sola

solamente?

¿Dime si puedes,

tengo algunos

primos en el

mundo ancho?

Then she stopped. She had thought for a time that she might have a lake-dwelling cousin. But they had so little in common. Perhaps that was the problem with distant kin. You might meet them, but you might not feel less alone afterward. Or you might feel more so.

Anyway, she had no idea who her mother was. She was an orphan, as far as she could tell.

She left the postcard in a stack of free ones by the door of a cafe. She had a coffee and waited in the park for the city to wake.

3. kin

Knowingly, and king of the ignorant and the uncouth, the normal, and certain connoisseur gnomes, the cunning word noted cascades to the left, cataracts to the right, and he set his sights between, on the colgating bridge just ahead.

He hopped, he clattered, he glided between rope and greasing girder on the bottommost black thickness of his shoe, smearing the way as he came. Often the unknown is just as kithlike as another word’s nearest cousinage, he knew, though the undergirding garter kept more than just his knee up and his nose out of trouble this time.

2. yapo

On setting hem upon the skin, the word set foot upon the nose. Whereon he no more provided a barrier against light and cold, heat and darkness, but held himself deep within, a source of comfort not unlike the untouchable warmth inside the hearth or the mystery of smell itself.

He took the train out there and back again, back once more, tagging along everywhere, tagging, tagging, tagging.

He came into existence where he had not been brought. Once or twice in the midst of most unexpected and three times unsuspecting things. He was known only by his smell, a smell familiar and well loved.

Linen, not the smell of dust; hair in a wool hat on an unwashed head; a fragrant runner’s bloom, what is left when the night is warm and all that was rancid is runaway and gone. He is irreplaceable. He replaces himself countless hundreds of times.

The band is too tight and has rested there too long. He lifts it, inhales, replaces it.

1. casting

One day a word with few misadventures to her history struck out to apprehend her fortune wherever she might find it, on the road or off it. She was motoring along happily, not going anywhere much, when all of a sudden she found herself snatched out of her chosen vehicle and deposited in a disheveled state in spite of herself in the luggage compartment of a quite roomy coach. Whereupon she was forthwith lugged about to places too unfamiliar even to begin to describe.

Within a month, the word had committed arson no fewer than three times and her reputation for wantonness was met only by the difficulty of spelling her or of finding her in any dictionary in any language or any clue whatsoever as to her origin. And then, one day.

She had long-since fled country, continent, and hemisphere. And then, one day, in a bookstore for wildlife and veterinary medicine she found her meaning, her spelling, and her origin.