Posts tagged ‘ramble’

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January 1, 2011

the 1st, after bed and now, against my will, awake

by jhon baker

holy shit – it’s Saturday. I truly believed it was Monday and I was prepared to go to the doctors. got my coat, hat and new gloves – poured a to-go cup of joe and hugged my son goodbye – then my wife asked where I was going.
okay, she laughs beautifully, even when it is at my expense. I love her laugh so I can’t be mad, only confused. Also a little peeved as the appointment was the only reason I got out of bed at all.

The great advantage of using cell phones is that I can turn it off when I want to not be bothered. The unfortunate side of that is I forget I shut it off or I just allow it to wane its battery until death and forget all about the fact that I have the bugger. It never occurs to me that no one calls, it never occurs to me that I should call other people.

I’ll never forget the furling flags
above fire escapes
outside the walk-ups
     of downtown Chicago

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December 26, 2010

Sunday

by jhon baker

I was hoping to make it to at least three-hundred posts this year – I feel as though that this goal is unattainable at this point without posting around forty posts that would normally have been one.

Just having come in from snow throwing the drive and having my two stage 44″ thrower break it’s second stage, I am fit for a nap. I didn’t wake up all that early today but also didn’t sleep well at all last night. Such as it is and this is normal.

I ran out of cigarettes last night and this was nothing – Kara had some and dutifully went out after we finished the drive to procure some more for me.

My desk is piled with crap that I am not sure what to do with – except for the property tax bills. Those I have to pay. The other bills I wait for them to send about three notices with at least one stamped in red before I can be bothered to write the check. Then I pay using the stub from the first bill they sent. Especially if there is a late fee attached. There is, however, a new computer mouse which isn’t a mouse at all but the Apple track pad. Considering the state of my desk – I think have a mouse that doesn’t need to move around is going to enable my lack of desire for a cleaner and orderly desk.

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eating dinner by
two candle power
light
& glasses of water like

goblets of wine
between us,
we eat slowly,

laugh heartily
and are only drowning

in concern

               under
clean skin, made
beautiful by artificial
means.

 – Hoc Scripsi 
it has been recommended to me that I post a bit about why I sign my poetry with the “Hoc Scripsi” – I think I will do this soon. 
If you have any other posting suggestions I would love to hear them – I may ignore them until I don’t or all together but you never know. 
now to…
drink some OJ right out of the bottle,
step outside to smoke and turn my lungs a shade darker,
lay down in bed and nap badly until I am rustled awake,
dream of once again dancing a jig…
By the way – I never changed any names… 

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December 19, 2010

Sunday from the fantastic world of – I haven’t made the second pot of coffee yet and this may well be the result. I think I need a smoke…

by jhon baker

I awoke from a dream to the scent of K making Lasagna for a Christmas party dinner. It is a departure from the Roast that she usually makes. I like both and understand that they both take a lot of effort, I don’t cook anymore. I wasn’t very good at it in comparison to K and I think that she enjoys it most days – on the days she doesn’t I take her out. Simple, I think, but I may be fooled.
This year I think the three of us all wanted lasagna, bread and salad. Such a good meal.

I don’t recall the dream – it was inconsequential which is odd for it to not have been either a nightmare or a night terror.

We made perfect love and I slept great.

Today is our first celebratory day of Christmas – is it wrong that I am looking forward to the end of it? I want to see everyone but I don’t care for the stress of it – the whole house becomes a little more tense and preferably these walls are a sanctuary. Is it tacky if next year I rent out a small hall, make it a themed costume party and write up a bunch of trivia? Mind you this is a party for my parents, brother and his family, also my sister if she was in town but she isn’t and it is more her loss than ours, not saying it wouldn’t be nice to have her here, most certainly it would be but we’ve all grown used to our current customs and damn the earlier ones that involved me leaving on Christmas day.
I am looking forward to seeing my nephews – awkward teenagers always make me laugh.

I’ve made the coffee and now it is all about waiting.

I think I may start listing Coffee and Cigarettes under the medications heading in the form fill box on insurance applications. With the list filled with other meds they may not notice and they have medicinal value to me.
I don’t think it’ll be appreciated with the low cost/high value insurance I want.

I was going to put a poem up but I have to go clean something now. They are my parents coming after all. I’ll throw one up later, probably something old, potentially already posted much earlier in my blogs life which most of you are probably unfamiliar with anyway, so we all win.
I think starting tomorrow I am going to start putting up excerpts from a long poem of mine that has yet to see any publishing or attempts at publishing. Still a long work in progress but we will have to wait and see.

don’t forget my birthday is coming up and I expect a lot of really expensive gifts.

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November 27, 2010

It’s about four in the morning or so

by jhon baker

well fuck it, I’m staying awake tonight to see if I can pull this insomnia at night thing into the more normal ‘trouble falling asleep but doing so eventually anyway’ and away from the ‘I watch the sunrise and then get sleepy’ category.
I am currently digesting Paradise Lost by Milton and am going to go through the epics before I return to normal reading. As I am not a Christian or Catholic I get to read this from a pure poetical standpoint and dig deep into his word and line – which are beyond measure beautiful and striking. Interesting is how words have changed meaning over the years, i.e. reeking – now it refers to something with foul and unappealing odor and when he wrote it it meant more of vaporizing or disintegrating.
While not as cool as Beethoven being deaf or Monet being nearly blind  – Milton was totally blind when he wrote all 12 books of Paradise Lost. being unable to see what needs to be worked and writing in iambic pentameter is astounding to me not to mention being able to keep the complicated narrative of Paradise Lost in mind while doing the aforementioned composition. oh, and he was also hated at that point in history by the powers that be so he did this in hiding and was jailed at some point around then as well, not for being a bad guy but for saying the wrong things about the powerful.
This is not to be taken for better perusal of his history and selected from my memory of a blurb I read somewhere – probably the preface to the tome I am reading.
I feel ashamed for waiting this long to read it and can only admit that I have skimmed the other epics (Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid, Metamorphosis, Beowulf) some fairly heavy skimming but still. I am correcting this oversight presently.

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