AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

hot boxes

foto by smith

If every woman would wear refrigerating underwear to cool down their little vaginas, it would help global warming. All these little hot vulvas are just radiating heat into outer space. Plus, probably a whole lot of pheromones, too. There’re probably aliens out there just sniffing around, trying to find out where this is coming from. 

Plus if all these women cooled down their little hot boxes, there’d be less heated men trying to procreate. So there’d be fewer babies born. Fewer babies means fewer dead beefs to feed them. Fewer dead beefs means fewer Amazon forests cut down. So you can see, warm vulvas are a major cause of global warming. ‘Course, that still leaves the hot air produced by politicians and TV talking heads. They should be locked into a room. Let them eat each other. 

I should have a kindergarten, and a grade school, and a high school science course. I’d have a college course, but by that time everybody’d be concentrating too much on the hot vulvas to pay attention. 

Of course, hot vulvas do make nice foot warmers on cold winter days. Other things that are going to have to go are hot wheels, a “hot time in the old town tonight”, hot jazz, people saying, “You’re getting warm,” hot prospects, baseball teams getting hot… But mainly, hot sex. I think this is a hot idea. You can call me Mr. Science… 

One thing we are going to have to keep though, which cannot be touched, is hot coffee. There are some things which are sacred. 

This refrigerating underwear, wouldn’t it take fuel? No, it’d be chemical. Like those little sticks you snap and they mix the chemicals and make cool green fluorescent light at concerts. And there’re other sticks you snap to make heat for ice fishermen. It’s all chemical mixtures. So what I propose is that with the two chemicals we need to make cold, we put one on the panties that are manufactured. And then women can just paint their vaginas after showers with the other chemical. So when they put on the panties, the two chemicals will meet, and voila! We’ll have refrigerated vulvas. Kind of like Swedish Vulvas in the winter. 

We also got to change our terminology. We can’t have “hot” babes anymore. We have to have “cool” babes. For women who can’t afford panties, they can insert ice cubes. Of course they’d have to have little drip pans for catching water. Which can be used of course for making tea. 

Or we could harness this vaginal heat. We could heat brothels with it. Get enough of these women together, you could probably heat hot water. This could, of course, always contribute to heated discussions. Just trying to cover all the angles, or in this case, curves. 

We could also try spraying vaginas with liquid insulation. Which could also be made self-absorbing, so it could serve as a monthly menstrual pad as well. Once a month, the insulation would be cracked off, a new application applied, and the broken red pieces assembled into modern art paintings for the museums. Or bagged, and sold as candy. Artistically, this would be known as the “red” period… 

 – Kathy Ireland Smith & Steven B. Smith, December 27, 2006

unwords worth

foto by smith 

christmas poem from kathy’s 80 yr old cleveland grandmother…

Writ by hand! / To those I love – Oh the bleak Midwinter / Softly falls the snow / God’s gift of beauty / For us it doth glow / Feel the wind, it gently cheers us / Adding pleasure to our hearts / Feel it now, e’er it departs us / Comes the Spring, then Summer starts

foto by smith

when kathy’s granny first heard my gravelly voice on the phone, the first thing she asked when kathy got on was if i were black… when the age thing came up, kathy told her i was in my fifties – which was technically true cuz i was still 5 months from 60. i’m 20 years younger than granny, 27 years older than kathy. maybe i should ask grandma out – this all resembles some sorta symbiosis of lolita and john waters’ polyester.

foto of liznjan by smith

end of december, yet here in croatia they’re still plowing, planting, growing and harvesting crops.

so far the first 200 pages of wuthering heights is more interesting than all 4 volumes of the alexandria quartet combined.  not one boring page. hard to put down.

we’re not going to thailand this february – their hot season starts then.  probably rent a place in southern france instead from the folks we house-sat for in london.  that way we can jot across to barcelona spain and up to paris france (i see paris i see france i see kathy’s underpants). after the hot months in thailand comes the rainy season – in november the cool months start when it only gets up in the 90s… go then.

foto by smith

her morning run is loose dog day aborted jog day imported god day assorted odd way all commodity say common oddity play a clay nay may but we won’t listen to that cuz today is sunshine fat per soaring fun

foto by smith

OFFWORLD

storyoffworld.jpg

OFFWORLD

You can grow crystals, pure crystals off world because there’s no gravity. You can also get alloys you can’t get on this world, offworld, because of no gravity. Things mix differently. Some of the intricate belt and sock pattern weaving would be easier offworld because of: lack of gravity.

Plus you could glue things together more easily. Why? Because there’s no gravity. Just stick a little bit of adhesive to something. Attach something else to it, and let it hang there in space. There’s no tension.

The other good thing about offworld is you have endless supplies out there. Asteroid belts and things like that. Machines would work differently, because once again there’s no gravity. So all you’d be working with is tension and friction. Course with the machine, you’d have to have a platform to attach things to.

Another thing you have to worry about though, is whatever you’re manufacturing, you have to give preference to lighter weight products because you have to overcome the gravity well to import them to Earth. It’s easy to get down to Earth but it’s hard to stop. So that’s why they do a lot of socks, and belts, because they’re lightweight.

Another manufacturing concern is employees. Because there’s bone density loss the longer you stay in space. I think the bones lose calcium, I’m not sure. And muscles, of course, atrophy. So you’d either have to employ aliens who’ve adapted to space, or bioforms genetically engineered to work in space, or humans who you would not let come back to Earth, because once they’ve been in space long enough they could not go back to Earth. Their bones would snap. Their muscles would fail.

So quite possibly that’s where all these children are disappearing to. Everybody thinks it’s sex rings, but they’re probably kidnapping all these kids, taking them into space, surgically and genetically modifying them, and then training them to run the machinery. And of course the failures are still used for nefarious purposes.

You’d live longer in space, because again, no gravity. No gravity pulling down your cells. So there’s less cellular stress. And certain sediment deposits inside your body would not occur, because gravity wouldn’t force them to pool in low-lying areas. The heart would beat longer, because it wouldn’t have to pump all the blood UP and around, just AROUND. And sleep would be more restful, because there would be no mattress pushing against you or stress of gravity impacting you. All this keeps coming back to gravity.

So the gravity of the situation in space is less grave.

You wouldn’t have to use hair gels, just comb your hair the way you want, wet. Let it dry. It would tend to stay there.

And technically, by an undiscernible factor, you would age more slowly compared to Earth. Because the faster you go, the slower you age. Even though it would be an undiscernible difference at that height.

Also there’d be psychological problems, because not everybody could adapt to limited space and terrain. And since size does matter, they prefer to take younger children so they can stunt their growth, because there’s space limitations in space. In fact, all these stunted workers in the workshop is probably where the myth of Santa’s Elves came from, because we’ve been manufacturing offworld for millenia.

The original products they made were conceptual. A lot of myth making, Gods, fables, legends. Because originally they were observing their new workers when they started off, and they found out what worked to keep these people in line. They then codified these discovered precepts into worldwide religions and political philosophies. Other products they introduced from space were butterflies and jellyfish and marzipan. Whipped cream also comes from space. And aerosol sprays. And they first discovered microwaves in space when they didn’t shield against the radiation and they accidentally cooked a couple kids. In fact, most people don’t realize the flying saucer crash at Roswell was actually a delivery ship from offworld factories. That’s how Earth technology got transistors and laser theory, which offworld was trying to keep for themselves.

The theory of the laser came up way before they could actually do it. But when they finally got the technology to do it, it turned out to be right. And they got the theory from offworld. There’ve been multiple offworld delivery crashes. That’s how most technological advances have seeped into the Earth culture.

It’s also important to realize there’re two factions of offworld factories. The good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys try to keep the arm sales going and the Rolex watches selling. The good guys keep trying to slip in messages of hope. One of the better good guy’s psychological campaigns to make humans nicer was the Bugs Bunny cartoons. They were trying to counter the bad guy’s Old Testicle. The snake in the Garden of Eden was another attempt to slip a better way into humanity. They were trying to get the Knowledge of Good And Evil to us, whereas the bad guys just merchandised evil and more Rolex watches.

Only the inner components of Rolex are made off world. A lot of the merchandise is actually too heavy to ship down. They just manufacture the crucial lightweight core. For example, computers are made on Earth, but the chips and the programming come from offworld. A lot of really good fiction and poetry is produced offworld, but printed on Earth.

Actually, the aliens are in it for the energy. They’re rather like psychic vampires. Every time you do something bad, or get angry, you release a dark energy that upsets the Earth’s aura. The child stealing aliens harvest this energy, and they condense it, and they lie around at night and get high on it. Every tear and fear and shameful failure of humans gets these evil aliens high. Every good deed and thought and action produces a ray of light energy that actually reinforces the good aliens and damages the evil aliens. Cuz light always vanquishes darkness.

But darkness can kill light. That’s where that myth comes from. For every child who stops believing in fairies, a fairy dies. Fortunately, a very little light can negate a vast sea of darkness. And it takes a humungous amount of nothing to quench the light of very little something. Most fairy tales, good and bad, are produced offworld. And actually, most fairy tales are produced by the bad guys. I mean, most fairy tales are consistent: cheating, lying, stealing, misrepresenting. Outright trickery. Which is actually pretty good education for kids, for life.

The aliens are energy beings. And they can assume any shape required. They’re like psychic chameleons. If you saw an alien on Earth in its natural form, it looks like one of those heat mirages hovering over the road. Like you’re looking at reality through flawed glass. Sometimes you get enough of them together, they can look like fog. The good guys always appear as bright sunshine, or moonlight, or starlight, or the reflections on water. The original legends of fairies came from good guy sightings. And “guy” in this sense comes from “guide,” not male or female. Like “guy line.”

TV programs are the main mass medium for making sheep outta people. To deaden their brains, lower their sights, lessen their good. TV makes you want things that aren’t important. Want things that are bad for you and the planet. That’s the other thing, in addition to being psychic vampires who suck on the pain of bioforms, the evil aliens also use us to kill the planet. Killing the planet would release the largest psychic scream from Mother Earth. Getting high off human misery is like a drink of alcohol but the high of killing Mother Earth would be like a sustained mainline speed rush. Eternal psychic cocaine.

Oh yes, they move through the Universe, killing planets. They come to a young planet. They seed it with early life. Because it takes a long, long time to get consciousness going. And pain without consciousness is just a minor high. So they’ll slowly build up life systems, like the dinosaurs. Then they’ll wipe most of them out all at once, to get high. Then build up the next life system, then wipe it out to get high, all the while, developing consciousness in these ever more complex biosystems. Until finally, they get man and woman to do their work for them, killing and hurting each other. Killing and hurting each animal, each bird, each fish, each plant, each rock and stone and river. And they just harvest all this pain. Eventually they’ll kill the planet, or the light spirits will lead enough people to the right path, in which case the evil ones will flee to the next planet, and start over. It’s an eternal endless battle between light and darkness.

Earth can wipe man. Man can not wipe Earth. The only way to stop Earth would be literally to blow it to pieces. Actually, to turn it to rubble. You could set off every atomic bomb in the world. Wipe out man, poison the atmosphere. A million years from now though, things would still be growing. So even if the evil aliens get man to destroy life on Earth, after they harvest that high, evil moves on. It can’t afford to wait that long to re-seed the Earth and wait for consciousness again. So they move on to their next malfeasance.

– kathy ireland smith & steven b. smith, december 26, 2006

cleveland croatia contour

foto by smith

natalija (our host’s older daughter) and ognjen arrived from the states to visit their parents this week.  we’re talking to them more here than we ever had a chance to when we were all in cleveland.  intense, serious, thoughtful folk who live their life by a collaborative reasoned philosophy.  they write together, study together, live together, plan together, put out their collaborative literature http://www.admit2.net/ website together. like kathy and i, they’re together 24/7. don’t believe i’ve met another couple with such a thoughtful, thought out life path.  they grew up behind the iron curtain under socialism, matured during the birth of fledging croatian capitalism, and are now studying at case western university in cleveland’s decaying diseased unfree-for-all market capitalism.  how odd to travel around the world to get to know poets we met at a poetry reading in cleveland.
 
last week, sara holbrook and michael salinger visited from cleveland as well.  in echoes of synchronicity, they also are a collaborative poetic couple whom we talked to more and got to know better here in croatia than we ever did in cleveland.  irony lives, and i work in the irony mines.

on their drive back, sara got me the tunnel dimensions i missed on the way back from zagreb.  there are 20 tunnels between pula and zagreb in croatia totaling 17,851 meters – that’s 11.1 miles underground.  the longest tunnel is 5,062 meters or 3.14 miles long, which is a long time to be inside a mountain.  all 20 tunnels are badly ventilated, so it’s also a long time to breathe brain damaging carbon monoxide.  if i go thru them often enough and kill enough brain cells, i’ll eventually be as smart as our current Predicament george w. bush (i believe the W stands for war crimes).

speaking of war, i believe all those mountains twixt here and the rest of croatia is one of the factors that kept the bosnian-serbian war away from istria (the triangle on the map jutting down into the adriatic sea just to the upper right of italy – where we are).  plus our hosts say istria has been ruled by so many different countries and nationalities and is composed of so many various peoples, they’re used to communicating rather than fighting.  they’ve been ruled by rome, venice, austrio-hungarians, communists, socialists, yugoslavian-serbs, etc.  pula is a 3,000 year old city, so they’ve had a lot of masters.

kathy turned 34 xmas eve.  we’ve been coupled 15.5 months, lived together 14.5 months, been 24/7 12 months, married 9 months, and escapees from america 5 months.

finally finished the alexandria quartet.  4th volume is even more boring than the first 3.  found a valid use for it tho – used it as a soporific when i couldn’t sleep.  there’s some fine scenes sprinkled throughout, but no one to care for or about. i wanted more of the characters pursewarden and clea, which i got in this last book.  but the more you get to know them, the smaller and more mundane they become.  sort of like life.  have to say much of the quartet mirrors the less pleasing aspects of life.  i would never recommend anyone read them.  now i’m reading emily bronte’s wuthering heights since i recently walked the very moors cathy and heathcliff wandered.

collage & foto by smith

finished my sea-worn wood collage… not my normal edgy assemblage… more like a sea shanty show piece.  i’m proud because i didn’t have a concept of the piece, just a hundred pieces of collected beach fragments i thot could become something – so for 6 days i sat down and forced myself to work without inspiration or vision, and an interesting decent piece appeared.  i could probably sell them in gift shops.

collage & foto by smith

christmas croatia 12.25.2006 – blue skies, light breeze, sun… t-shirt & light jacket weather.  you can keep your white christmas – i’ll take elvis’ blue christmas any ole time (blue in sky, not in heart).  elvis has some of the coolest xmas tunes around – especially the raunchy blues of ‘santa claus is back in town’, and the slow blues of ‘merry christmas baby’.  he also has some of the best gospel music i’ve ever heard from any era, any color, any combo.  tho if i could only choose 1 singer, it’d be bob dylan… i have more respect for folk who write their own songs – and no one out writes dylan.  leonard cohen comes close, but he’s produced only 1/10th of dylan’s output and stayed pretty much in one genre while dylan’s done em all.

collage & foto by smith

for xmas, kathy’s giving 3 of her new collages to our host family mom&dad, sister&husband, & sister… while i’m giving the new worn wood to the parents and a small 10 year old collage i brought along for us to the sister&husband to take back to cleveland.  kathy also gave sara&michael one of her new assemblages to take back to cleveland… now they have 2 cuz mike bought my large “the stranger within” piece at our after-poetry-reading-wedding party last march.  kathy’s new stuff is excellent – and anyone who knows me knows i do not say such things lightly.  she has her own art style and philosophy.  even tho we don’t exchange presents, for her birthday/xmas, i gave kathy the 2nd of the two collages i brought with us for us – “afterthought” with the real live dead baby bird in it (on top of a grandma moses print). this was always MY collage (along with runoff).  folks have tried to buy it thru the years and i always said no.  for my own present from me to me, i did 3 loads of wash this xmas day – now everything is clean except my soul and my bill of health.

two years ago i made $70,000… this year i made  $7,943 – all from unemployment.  next year i look to make $zero.  it’s the old no-money-in-much-money-out game.  think i’m going to have to find a new game to play.  my long-played fame game hasn’t panned out for me… but the outlaw game has been rather fun… as has the ganja game, tho it’s a hard game to play these past 8 weeks due to this pot-less present.

day after xmas.  went to town to blog.  streets dead.  library closed.  town ghostly. only open cyber cafe had a single computer with an usb port, and it was being used by a smuck not using the usb port.  so no blog. strangeness in a strange land.

kathy asked me about offworld.  offworld first came up in cleveland when i bought an intricately woven belt and wondered how they machined such an item – kathy said they were manufactured offworld.  it’s been our joke line since.  today she asked for details how offworld worked, so i began explaining.  she kept asking more.  the result is offworld, which she’s blogging above.  her large assemblage is also titled offworld, so it all goes together.

day after day after xmas – ex-president gerarld r ford died… on the news, the consensus is he did a good thing for the nation by pardoning richard m nixon for watergate and other crimes.  all i know is ford lied to congress and lied to the american people because in his confirmation hearings, he promised he would not pardon nixon.  the powerful always lie, always take care of their own.  nixon should have been jailed for what he did.  news also said ford was the only american president never elected – they seem to forget that george w. bush has never been elected… he stole the presidency both times. if i ever come across an honest politician, i’d drop dead of shock.

foto by smith

james brown also died.  he may not have been the nicest person in the world, but he certainly made music move. hail thee, soul funk man.

past 2 days kathy & i’ve written 3 science essays: offworld, cosmology, and hot box.  think we’ve hit upon something here.  particularly like hot box, where i explain how women’s heat radiating vulvas are contributing to global warming and possible alien attack.  cosmology explains how the universe came about.  bungling boy bush should hire me to explain the good bush/bad bush theory of science.

and now, data from the downside…

The top 10 warmest years have all occurred in the last 12 years. – (Published on Thursday, December 14, 2006 by Reuters)

foto by smith

The world’s largest armies ( SOURCE: CSIS/DOD )
  China:             2,225,000 troops
  United States: 1,426,713
  India:              1,325,000
  North Korea:   1,106,000
  Russia:          1,037,000
  South Korea:     687,000
  Pakistan:          619,000
  Turkey:             514,850
  Vietnam:           484,000
  Egypt:              450,000

foto by smith

dead street ghost town

came in to a dead town to blog… library’s closed, as is most everything else (this the day after xmas) - the single cyber cafe we found open has but one computer with a usb port, and someone’s using it to surf the net.  kathy and i wrote a funny short piece this morning titled offword – but can’t blog it till we find usb access.  the old world and our new needs don’t always mesh well.  spose that’s what the journey’s all about, t’ain’t it.

Weirdness

I had a dream last night that Steve and a friend were smoking and Steve kept teasing me, saying that I couldn’t take a puff. Then I grabbed it and took a puff, and the weed sucked into my mouth and I was sorry, because it was all that we had.

Then I dreamt we were in Thailand and I was in a bathtub with my clothes on, much to my amazement. And all this rubble had fallen into a crevice adjacent to the bathtub but I thought that it didn’t bother me because no matter where I go, there I am. And then the bathroom turned into this huge room with me still in the tub, and a bunch of young handsome Asian men coming up into the room on an escalator, and I was looking at all of them and then they sat behind a long desk on the wall past the escalator as though at the U.N., all facing my bathtub. Weird!

Other news… my ex-boyfriend’s book is out. Michael Ceraolo’s ‘Euclid Creek’ is now available from Deep Cleveland Press:

euclid-creek.jpgThis 130-page epic poem traces the origins of Euclid Creek and proceeds to illuminate hundreds of years of Northeast Ohio history as it meanders like the flow of water through people, places and events that have shaped the destiny of the land that we call home. A must read for denizens of the Western Reserve.

130 pages, perfect bound, published 2006.

$10, plus $2 shipping & handling

purchase at http://deepcleveland.com/deepclevelandbooks.html

Here are some links to excerpts I published on thecitypoetry.com:

http://www.thecitypoetry.com/issue1/ceraolo1.shtml

http://www.thecitypoetry.com/issue2/ceraolo.shtml

slim pickings

foto by smith 

making love to the same woman day after day is deja vulva.

‘Mas Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first century: “One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being.” We make it up as we go, and we make it up by going.’ – from The Age of Mammals: Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century by Rebecca Solnit

foto by smith

like fats domino and bob dylan, we’re walkin’ and we’re talkin’.  we’re seeking our own path.  there’s the road most taken… the road less taken… and the road not a road at all until took. we’re on that last one, and i’m looking for my compass and flashlight when instead i need faith, suspicion of direction.  kathy’s found herself in art.  i lick myself in blogging.  blogging’s not enough.  if only i could live up to what i know, remember what i’ve learned.  maybe it’s enough that the journey’s begun. of course winter always brings doubt and discontent – both shakespeare and steinbeck knew that.  for me, my internal spirit dims in december, bottoms out early march.  perhaps my spirit’s solar powered.

foto by smith

short in the tooth

 foto by smith

experiment – sit down, take pulse, drink cup coffee, take pulse, drink second cup coffee, take pulse.  14 days without coffee is enough.  going to see if 2 cups a day is feasible.  my heart is much better now, but still arrhythmic. when i go too long without eating or sit around too long doing nothing, it gets down to the 5&skip or 15&skip range – but the skipped beats are after 30, 50, or 100 beats normally.  it likes exercise, so why not moderate coffee.  i’ve a secret suspicion it misses weed.  grass increases your heart rate and blood pressure. up until august 1st, 2006, i smoked daily for most the last 30 years… i think my heart’s used to the extra push and has gotten a little lazy.  in 4 weeks my 1st toke will have been 40 years ago – that’s 2/3’s of my life.  tho, i’m now in my 8th week of involuntary abstinance – that’s longer than any period since 1970. my heart misses its helpweed.

foto by smith

when i worked for the lawyers last year as a computer programmer analyst, in one meeting my 2 bosses announced anyone working on a certain bank’s accounts had to pass a drug test.  i said well that leaves me out cuz i’ve been smoking grass daily for decades.  boss1 looked at boss2 and said “we didn’t hear that.”

foto by smith

1 cup of coffee, i can feel its power moving thru me.  steady pulse.  coffee is definitely a strong drug.  cup 2.  more power.  still steady.  with this much power within, i can rule the world… bru-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaaa.

foto by smith

fixed the tooth today i broke 11 days ago. my filling and kathy’s cleaning totaled $53 usd.  since i seem to be breaking down, it’s cheaper fixing me behind the ex iron curtain than in that old capital of capitalism the u.s.of.a.

foto by smith

finished the 3rd volume of lawrence durrell’s alexandria quartet. it’s taken me 8 weeks to read 3 short novels.  normally would finish 3 this size in a week, but i’ve read 3-6 other books during each volume just to keep my brain awake.  when the 4 novels came out, the critics said “demands comparison with the very best novels of the century” (justine – 1957), “durrell is moving up to the highest levels of the novelist’s art” (balthazar – 1958), “one of the most interesting and memorable novels of this generation” (mountolive – 1959), “one of the most important works of our time” (clea – 1960).  i think this quartet was the last gasp of the flowery overwritten overwrought self indulgent look-how-smart-i-am novel, a style overthrown by the more immediate down to earth honest writing of on the road and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest which came out of the drug use of the beats and the hippies from 1945-1960.  there are marvelous bits of brilliance in each of the 3 i’ve read, but they’re smothered by endless pages of description, travelogue, adjectives, misused metaphors, stilted similes, quotes in foreign languages – books for the elite and effete.  the only 3 characters interesting are the adulteress justine, the male poet / novelist pursewarden, and the lady painter clea – all 3 have sparks of fire, but hardly appear… it’s mostly justine’s boring bland wimp of a lover in the 1st two, and the lackluster british foreign officer in #3 – both obsessively introspective even though they’ve little within.  i do have hopes for #4 because it should be about clea.  i have a hate-like-hate relationship with durrell’s quartet. each volume has some excellent plotlines and passages – seems the 4 books would make a fine single volume if all the dreck, dross and padding were removed. tho must admit i love the way he’s telling the same story in the first 3 volumes, with each book showing the previous book’s story to be a lie. rather like life.  and i spose the dreary big bits between all the delicious little bits is a bit like life as well.

foto by smith