Shit my FB friends say sometimes, when they're not posting political dreck

My friend Robin wrote:

I met my best friend Heidi at Bennington college. Upon first visiting her dorm room, I was surprised to find a black velvet dress hanging on her wall. It was not the black velvet that surprised me, although it actually was, for I had never before seen such a dress, but the fact of her hanging a dress on her wall at all.

When I asked her about it, she asked back, but isn’t it beautiful? And it was. It had tiny opalescent buttons down the back, the whole length of it, to the calf, and in front, three buttons centered midway between the neck and waist, on each side of which was ruching which relaxed into loose velvet folds where one imagined breasts would neatly fit, breasts just the size of hers. The waist was tapered and then the dress almost flared. It’s not even fair to say it flared for it didn’t commit, but I say so because on her it seemed to, so that when she turned in it, almost imperceptibly it did, the way shoulder length hair, bobbed and cut on the bias in an A-line, flares with the turn of a head.

The first time she took the dress down I asked, with alarm, what are you doing? Why are you taking it down?
I can’t wear it if it’s on the wall, she said, raising one eyebrow, which was her specialty. The occasion was a picnic for which she’d packed an actual picnic basket, something else I’d never seen.

We trekked far beyond the edge of campus past the ledge that’s called the end of the world, she in the black velvet dress and I, in a black rayon crepe we found at the local thrift store that she said looked so noir. Barefoot, we tiptoed over rocks and sunk our feet into the soft pile of spring grass.

She found the tree under which we spread her favorite scarf, the same one we’d someday bury her bird in, under the same tree, a different spring. From the basket, she took out jars of jam, tins with olives, wedges of cheese, clusters of cherry tomatoes on the vine, and a bundle of green grapes. Out of the basket, came a long bread and a bottle of wine with two tiny pewter goblets, borrowed, she said, from her Omi, the same Omi who would one day frighten me with a cautionary tale about blood poisoning when a red thread dangled from my socks as we danced in the grass outside her house.

With her hair, a gold bundle that a smitten professor would come to refer to as a Van Gogh haystack, tousled, and her dress flared as she turned, she recited Marvell’s “The Garden,” not all of it, just her favorite verse, the one that I would one day recite over pieces smaller than the parts of a hayrick, in a vessel of her bigger than her Omi’s goblets.

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Into my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

She recited this often, and whenever she said curious peach, she would raise her eyebrows, her speciality. At the end, she would fall on grass, also a specialty, though often not on purpose.

When, in another spring, her bird died, we returned to the spot, dressed formally, she in black velvet and I in crepe, and buried it under the same tree. I had a feeling, so distinct I can remember everything about it but what it was. I did not love the bird we buried, but I loved the burial we gave it. The feeling is as present in me now as if I were standing there still, reciting Marvell in unison with her, over the lifeless bird wrapped in silk, and that memory is conflated with the one in which I stand at her gravestone with a bird carved on it, reciting Marvell in unison with no one.

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I may already have a thread for this… If so I’ll merge it. @Starling, hope you see it.

Dominic wrote: (posting this for @Bigdukesix)

My cross the street buddy Bobby is really my good pal. “nah Dom the raccoons won’t bother with a bird feeder” he said. I do have to give him all the credit for building it, and all kinds of good help getting me stetted up, from renter to owner. All good, we do get along great. Well early today, I did have a minor flap with Flipper n Chipper the head rodents of the back yard squirrel mob. I did some more skullduggery tricks on the pole from keep em from shimmy up n eat the BIRD’S FOOD…minor skirmish, not note worthy small poem bout it not withstanding. HOWEVER…now it has gone from annoyance and draw up scenarios to combat said rodents. Or idle think bout the way I will preserve this splendor.ALL THAT CAME TO A FUCKING DOUBLE TIRES SCREECHING HALT. As I was sitting pool side enjoying my demi tasse and a good book called BLOOD STANDARD , to my utter amazement…THIS FUCKING RACCOON, the size of a medium dog, calm as you please…KNOCKS OVER THE BIRD FEEDER YANKS IT OFF THE POLE AND WITH IT IN HIS NO DOUBT RABID FROTHING RAZOR SHARP TEETH, takes the whole thing with him out the hole in the back fence. Another shout out to Bobby who put in these solar powered lights in the flower bed his dear partner Robin laid out like some tropic Fairchild garden. I would not have been able to see this ring tailed bandit mask wearing mother fucking son of another rabid ass wild vicious tricky steal it if it ain’t nailed down or eat it where it sits, GOTDAMMA 57lb Florida Raccoon. THIS MEANS WAR…I will not resort to arms or explosives (as tempted as I am to) but I will out wit out think and out fox these bastards. I will wit Bobby’s help re-build the feeder, that is for now just the yellow plate it was on, with more bird food for my morning visits of Cardinals Nut Hatches Flickers and Jays. As I probably gotta go to the garage, with the welder the lathe the drill press and make a raccoon proof feeder. FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE. (not saying I am willing to go toe to toe with no masked furry toothed claw and wild animal skills). But…if there is a better bird feeder I AM GONNA BUILD IT

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I got plenty of Raccoons - never saw one near the bird feeder - and the squirrels have totally given up depriving me of even the occasional laughing fit as the can lid tips

I am a prick thou

They used to jump from the roof and I moved it 8 inches more then they can jump

dat was evil

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Buy them some peanuts in the shell.

Anyway, don’t feel too bad, I think that most of them relocated to my back yard, I haven’t done the can lid thing yet.

Uncle Duggo, today…

FIRST COLD DAY

and the leaves have not yet turned.
I stand looking backward
at my life where there is a great city
jeweled with moments.
I made love in that house
that was torn down and is now
a parking lot.
I took her up the mountain
on the Kawasaki
and the vibration from the bike
made her come.
I felt her writhing against me
at seventy mph, chasms
on both sides of the road.
These things will not happen again.
My other face, my soul’s face,
looks ahead where there are
black clouds forming
and inside them crying birds.

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Wow. Just wow. That almost made me tear up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=Snhk-JqA3TA

Okay this is political, technically, but it’s not dreck. Also, he’s a friend of a friend so not technically MY friend.

“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing “Amazing Grace” in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. Watch him again, behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.”
– Charles Pierce

This is Uncle Duggo again. He’s helping do a fundraiser for Center for New Americans which assists immigrants, refugees etc. He and many other poets are contributing poems this month in hopes their fans will donate to the Center at https://cnam.org

Here’s his poem today.

I AM FROM AFRICA LIKE YOU

That’s where they trace us all back to.
Some trick of sun or water
made me this shade of human.
Then I was sent north and came
to the east shore of England in a boat full
of people with horned helmets.
After that, a wild Celt woman passed me
through her and I came out singing poems.
She came from what is now Spain
and brought the black hair of my grandmother
with her. They’d scarcely washed the vernix off me
when I wrote my first poem on my mother’s breast.
I shouted, “I can tame a dragon with a song!”
Then I danced and my eyes moved to the back
of my head and my knees came out
under my armpits and my teeth dropped out
into the skull rattle I shook.
Blue blood shot up from my fontanelle
and brightened the stars.
They brought me to old burnt nose
who was swatting rocks out to sea with his tail
and singeing everything around him
when he laughed. He’d dreamed I was coming.
I sweet talked him barbecuing some cows.
But this upset the high Druids and they shot me
with a catapult across the ocean
and I landed in Massachusetts. The time traveling
burnt all the hair off me and I was a babe again.
So here I am welcoming you. I open my heart to you.
Come in! There are these fools running around
without enough thumbs to plug all the holes in the dike.
There’s no way they’ll stop us.
We run on love. I love you. Welcome home.

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Most excellent!