*
Though I promise myself I’ll be patient, I find myself visiting my blog ten or twelve times a day, tracing with my echoing footsteps the boundaries of its magnificence, wondering when I’ll know — or if I’ll know — when another sensibility has sensed its noble call, the siren or lighthouse of my mind beckoning to theirs, and come to the doorway of my blog, entered and roamed and learned that they are not alone out here on the fringe of the real but that others have come before them and blogged so that they might feel less lonely. But I myself am not lonely. It is enough to have my blog.
*
I Sing My Blog Electric!
I made my blog in the shape of a tesseract.
I made a blog and it is good.
A small blog, of clay and wattles made. Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, and I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, and I will hear the ocean water lapping with low sounds around the pilings, while I stand in the foyer of my blog, within the exoskeleton of its architecture, feeling myself to be its deep heart’s core.
My blog is as big and small as my desiring.
I tried counting my blog’s rooms and found myself retracing my steps.
It has many doors and yet there is only one way to enter it.
I tried painting my blog in oils and ran out of canvas.
I shall follow mine blog wherever mine blog shall lead.
I offer this, my blog, to the world, but I do not require the world to need it or accept it, for it is my very very own blog.
*
I made my blog strong, I made it with my hands, fitted the joists and the beams and the floorboards neat, planed the crooked surfaces, sanded the knots where there were knots and varnished the sanded knots until a blind man couldn’t tell you their location. It was a fine labor of many days and it stands, my blog, by the salty beseeching sea, a stone’s throw from where the searching tidal claws at their highest point mark the sand. My blog is an outpost on forever.
*
I have had a lovely inspiration: a blog at the ocean’s edge, a blog-by-the-sea. I think I shall call it The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear!
Pending Vegan
Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at SeaWorld. He wondered only what form cataclysm would take. Espeseth had tried to veto this trip, making his case to his wife with a paraphrase of a cable-television exposé of the ocean theme park, one that neither he nor his wife had seen. Instead, his wife had performed judo on his argument, saying, “The girls should see these things they love before they vanish from the earth entirely.”
So here he was. The first step, it seemed, involved flamingos. After he had hustled his four-year-old twins through the turnstiles and past the souvenirs, the stuffed-animal versions of the species they’d come to confront in fleshly actuality, his family followed the park’s contours and were met with the birds. Their red-black cipher heads bobbed on pink, tight-feathered stalks, floating above the heads of a crowd of fresh entrants.
“Wait your turn, girls,” his wife said. Yet, seeing that no turns were being taken, Espeseth led Chloe and Deirdre by the hands and together they jostled forward into the mob to find a vantage on the birds. His wife stayed back, tending the double stroller draped with their junk. Closer, Espeseth saw that the birds were trapped on an island, a neat-mowed mound of grass ringed with a small fence and signs saying PLEASE DO NOT FEED.
“Can you see them?” he stage-whispered down at the girls, as if the clump of exotic birds were something wild spotted in the distance, a flock that could bolt and depart. In reality, they’d had some crucial feather clipped, rendering them flightless, the equivalent of crippling an opponent in a fight by slicing his Achilles tendon. The birds had no prospect of retreat from the barrage of screaming families pushing their youngest near enough for a cell-phone pic.
“I’m scared,” Deirdre said.
“They’re scared, too,” he told her. As am I. The flamingos were the first thing for which nothing could have prepared him. Having already watched with his girls a hundred YouTube videos of orcas, having already scissored magazine pictures of orcas and cuddled his children to sleep in beds full of stuffed orcas, Paul Espeseth had hardened his soul in readiness for orcas — their muscular poignancy, their mute drama, the chance that they might in full view and to a sound track of inspirational music disarticulate one of their neoprene-suited trainers at the elbow or the neck. But the designers of the park had outsmarted him, softened him up with flamingos, like a casual round of cigarette burns to the rib cage preceding a waterboarding.
The girls found their boldness and pushed up to the front, then relented, and were supplanted in turn by other eager, deprived children, presenting their faces in what he imagined was for the birds a wave of florid psychosis. In the context of their species, these flamingos were like space voyagers, those who’d return with tales beyond telling. Except that they’d never return. You might as well have immersed the birds in a bathysphere and introduced them to the orcas, or dosed their food with lysergic acid.
“Let’s go,” he said, tugging the twins away. Their morsel hands had begun to sweat in his, or he’d begun to sweat onto them. “There’s a lot … else.”
“Orca show!” both girls yelped. It was what they’d come for.
“The show starts at eleven,” he told them. “We’ve got a little time. And there’s stuff on the way. Sharks.” He’d gathered the implications of the map at a glance: Short of parachuting in, you couldn’t get to Shamu Stadium without first passing other enticements. He steered for sharks and giant tortoises, if only as a gambit for skirting the Sesame Street Bay of Play and a roller coaster called Manta. He had standards. SeaWorld should keep the promise of its name: close encounters with fathoms-deep fauna, not birds, not Elmo, not Princess Leia or Cap’n Crunch. He hardly felt in command of his family’s progress here, as they curved on the pathways. He felt squeezed into grooves of expertly predicted responses and behavior, of expenditures of sweat and hilarity and currency from his wallet and also his soul. He was as helpless as a pinball coursing in a tabletop machine. Not one of those simple and friendly, gently decaying machines he’d known in Minneapolis arcades in the seventies, either, but a raging, pulsing nineties-type of pinball machine, half a dozen neon paddles slapping at his brain.
It seemed too much to hope for another Legoland miracle. Two months earlier, Espeseth and his wife and their twin daughters had gone south to visit Legoland. Legoland had been tolerable. Legoland had had variations, textures, edges. It featured some bad zones, including, outstandingly, the bogus municipality called Fun Town, but others were okay, better than okay, like the clutch of restaurants on Castle Hill. There, while the twins got their picture taken with the Queen, and jousted on Lego horses riveted to a train track, he’d been able to sneak off to Castle Ice Cream and obtain a double espresso. That had been something. Hidden with his espresso in a shady quadrant of the castle courtyard, he’d silently toasted his daughters as they’d one after the other rounded the rail. Though he supposed he had Legoland to blame: Its tolerability had led him too easily into agreeing to SeaWorld, which even on Celexa, he now saw, would have been another prospect entirely.