meaning is a shaky edifice

"But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death."

--Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

Found notes from a recent Saturday morning yard sale––I cannot help but get wrapped up in the romance of an old soul's lost ephemera. Forever, I will be a collector...watch Jessica Helfand discuss the hatred and histories and beauty of the scrapbook here.

of remembering

I attempted to recreate a moment from my childhood in a symbolic effort to remember the moment better. An old photograph was broken down into 862 pixels, and I then set forth to recreate the image, pixel by pixel, in three sections, using only my memory of the original photograph as a guide. The inaccuracies of the final outcome are a reminder that time forever marches on, clocks continue to tick, and those carefree days of my childhood will continue to overlap and distort, until the day when they all blow away...I cannot dwell in my past, yet the dwelling seems important now as my days get older and darker, for these memories serve as souvenirs of what was once happy and carefree. 

After being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, the artist William Utermohlen attempted to understand the losing of his mind through a series of self portraits. "The paintings starkly reveal the artist's descent into dementia, as his world began to tilt, perspectives flattened, and details melted away." Read and see the series here. 

of loss

Dusty spines, basemented and boxed away, are rediscovered by their owner, And suddenly the memories come like the tides, A flood of pastimes now idealized, The driftwood of childhoods lost to the cruelty of time... 

I long for a time that was never there, As my ear melts into carpet, listening for the tiniest voice, Of my lost little self, of any hope for the present, So that I may rise above this torrential stagnation, And actually believe that the strings of a tin-can telephone still work.

But I cling to these inanimates because often humans are inadequate. And when weathered bones start to crumble, I'll reach for the void of a chicken soup human, But instead end up buried, Drowning in spines.

Life is of loss and let-downs...I guess this is growing up.

a toast to martha & friends

Ah, Martha, how I do admire your khaki safari outfits and your unwillingness to accept anything less than perfection. Special thanks to DJ Manwich for making off with these amazing VHS's for me. This thanks is long overdue.
Oh! And on the subject of toast & friends, Miss Ellie Reynolds is blogging! Check it out, yo. Good Things are sure to be a-brewing in the Toaster Oven.