Weightings/Weigh Tings

“I picked up my bag and went looking for a place to hide

When I saw Carmen and the Devil walking side by side.

I said, Hey, Carmen, come on, let’s go downtown.

She said, I got to go, but my friend can stick around.”

–Robbie Robertson, “The Weight”

As mentioned above, there was a man with a full gallon jug affixed to a chain walking the Phoenix streets earlier today. As he walked he lifted and lowered the jug.

When a glaze kiln is first cracked open there is sometimes a noise, a ting, like that made by a flicking fingernail on rose glass. It is caused by unequal shrinking of clay and glaze and the micro seismic shift thereunto appertaining.

As long as the Earth is in free fall around the Sun, its weight is exactly zero. Nor may you weigh tings.

“So on we go.

His welfare is my concern.

No burden is he

To bear–

We’ll get there.”

The Hollies and/or Neil Diamond, “He ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”

eclipse calypso

Today Greater Phoenix became the Valley of the Partially Eclipsed Sun. I poked a pencil-hole in a sketchbook page and viewed the eclipse indirectly, sketching the nonshadowed part of the page. The time was 10:38 AM, which according to an online source was close to the ideal viewing time.

After calligraphing the double acrostic, which seems sexist but is double-straitjacketed by the acrostic format and my notion of Calypso-esque lyrics, I had the left third of the page to fill. It occurred to me that the Jackson Browne song “Linda Paloma” refers to the corona of the Sun, which is viewable at totality sometimes. This yielded the image-notion of a white dove against the disk of moonshadow.

Words to the acrostic:

Erin go braless all to C

Cali go kitnish at high tea

Lolly go pop! at sound of bell

Iris go eyeroll and send us to hell

Please pretty Ladies I love you–don’t stop

Send me to heaven and then call the cops

Ever so often effacement will go/Wit’ an eclipse and Calypso like so

JA Jure: Sojourner

She says to pronounce her first name Jay. She tells me her life took a turn in New Mexico. She lays five bucks on a kid soliciting for his youth group, and he tells her a joke. She speaks of life casts she made at the former arts venue Paper Heart. Phrases like “trying to impress the Universe” and “never drive faster than your angels can fly” come easily to her. She went from taste-testing soup to test-driving cars. She is a broiler chef, a mother, a force of nature, an outlaw, and a hell of a woman.

Words to the double acrostic:

Jaunting through a lifelong Hajj

Juxtaposng wound and badge–U

Are the Broth–no soup du jour

And have the instinct to be sure

Roscoe Turner serendipity

My girlfriend, Melony Terry, is a hair stylist par excellence. Many call her Mel. I started to do her portrait today, using the double acrostic “Stylin’ Mel,” which refers obliquely to comic-strip character Smilin’ Jack, about whom I knew little. I found his image online, drew him for Melony’s page, then called her to ask for a photo of her with her styling shears. Alas, she cannot accommodate me till she goes to work tomorrow, so my page on her skidded to a halt.

Meanwhile, I learned that the real-life physical model for Smilin’ Jack was Roscoe Turner, who was a colorful character indeed, being perhaps the first human being to take his pet lion (Gilmore, named after a sponsor) into the sky with him.

Today is also the birthday shared by two of my closest friends, Steve Boyle and Tom Sing. My post “Two Finest Friends” has more information on these gentlemen.

Honesty & Decency Honored

It is the first day of the month. It is my personal superstition that it is important to do things on the first day of the month that I want to, or ought to, do every day. It has been a long time since I did a blog post. This First of August ends the drought.

The United States of America, personified by the incompetent, incoherent President Who Would Be King, Donald Trump, has lost its honest, decent way. Incompetent and incoherent as this illustrated sonnet may be, the acrostic of it has its heart in the right place: Let us honor Honesty and Decency.

Words:

Have Love and Care, should Uh-Oh morph to Oh.

Horse fed and curried–curry on, O Pooh.

Omit!! and disregard downed Jericho:

Omniscience and egocentrists do.

 

No Hands on deck means mutiny anon

Nor strand induces cries of oui, c’est bon

Etceteras and gestures à la Bono

Etch handiworks pegged by both Pegg and Ono.

 

Since candied snow does not exist,and deer

See thousands of near misses, the affair

That grandees of Compulsion make cohere

Tell sandy waves of crazies not to stare.

 

Yet fake and zany posts unstay the staid

Yield fine fandangos for the Chambermaid.

My thanks to my marvelous new Girlfriend, Melony, for providing on request a word to get me going on this post. The word she gave me was “Honesty.”