Just Saw My First Rabbit of Spring

Submers yapple nortoniously as

the nexilinessive trealop izzillently

expets the apererbacks.

Tranians surrow with

vampilluntion;

guisities ponessing in

conscipatheon eggmode.

Will ferras refurn the reptom?

Craccurrelss.

Unless infusidicienes

has already signitined.

Then the eferbarn ariterg

will modisres until

all is imstreockt.

A while back I asked the Random Fake Word Generator to give me 25 words. I've been staring at the list of them since, until the other day I managed to do this. Now that I've given the words context and assigned them their parts of speech, all that's left is to define them.

I mean, I'm really curious to know what a trealop is.

This post contains a lot of randomness. Some of it comes from that website's other options, like random questions and facts and sentences. Even one paragraph. Some of it comes from my head or snippets of conversation or things I've been reading. I've kept these collections of words because they interest me, so I'm going to hang onto them here to periodically revisit and see if they provoke some kind of inspiration. Poetry is often characterized by unexpected yet delightful juxtaposition. Maybe future writing will emerge from some of them.

The first computer virus ever created was called Creeper, back in 1971. Shortly after this virus was created, Reaper was created as the world’s first anti-virus.

Creeper and Reaper are my age, as I was also created in 1971.

Today's photos are all from a quick walk around my "home office" on a day I'm working from home. This pandemic started just about a year ago. Infections started before that and some places were drastically impacted before then, but it really started making a difference in the U.S. last March. My first post documenting it, May You Live in Interesting Times, was March 24 last year. That's when schools and businesses closed and life really changed. My posts on this blog have generally been pretty random, just about whatever thoughts bubble to the surface of my interest at a given moment, but for the past year I've made a more conscious effort to chronicle this event. Still very sporadic and spotty, mixed in with the rest, but it's been there. The pictures have a touch of that: masks around the house, the haphazard nature of my corner chair "office," Christmas decorations still lingering because dealing with things is just too much right now, that kind of thing.

It's been a few posts since I've mentioned the pandemic. Here's an update:

A Simple Rule of Thumb for Knowing When the Pandemic Is Over

At some point—maybe even some point relatively soon—the remaining emergency measures that were introduced in March 2020 will come to an end. But when, exactly, should that happen?

The problem is that the “end of the pandemic” means different things in different contexts. . . .

“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control? “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths.

That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza. . . .

The “flu test” proposed here is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. . . .

In any case, we are nowhere near 100 COVID-19 deaths a day. Since last spring, states have not reported fewer than 474 deaths a day, as measured by a rolling seven-day average at the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Right now, the country as a whole is still reporting close to 2,000 deaths a day, and just two weeks ago that number was more than 3,000. So, if we’re going by the flu test, we still have a very long way to go. . . .

While every proposed threshold remains far below what we’re seeing right now, the researchers I spoke with believe that if vaccine uptake is high enough, those numbers can be reached. Watson suggested a target of 80 percent coverage for populations older than 65, and 70 to 80 percent for everyone else. For the latter, “perhaps 60 percent is more realistic,” she said.

My library will most likely be returning to full hours in a couple of months. Hints of normalcy are beginning to return; full normal is still a long way off.

He watched the dancing piglets with panda bear tummies in the swimming pool.

The old apple revels in its authority.

The father died during childbirth.

Andy loved to sleep on a bed of nails.

It didn't make sense unless you had the power to eat colors.

If you could change the color of one thing, what would it be and why?

Porcupines are all the rage.

The tree fell unexpectedly short.

The elephant didn't want to talk about the person in the room.

What does the person represent?

What's the worst that could happen if we adopted a zombie pig?

Where are the swimming pools?

For dinner, shall we have an octopus inside a roast pig or a roast pig inside an octopus?

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9g!+5Wi'pSnj\,>z

NiO!K+4M)6uT^VW_

urX9a}8/j+InOw`h

+'*;a>E:U[I=%Op)

Zq{|A,!^yO`_5(i-

1gD{ZpT38?=7a$N,

No one comes from Rome or Samarkand to see brown flowers.

Spirals of sadness

What's the most uncomfortable situation you've ever found yourself in?

The shoes had been there for as long as anyone could remember. In fact, it was difficult for anyone to come up with a date they had first appeared. It had seemed they'd always been there and yet they seemed so out of place. Why nobody had removed them was a question that had been asked time and again, but while they all thought it, nobody had ever found the energy to actually do it. So, the shoes remained on the steps, out of place in one sense, but perfectly normal in another.

What do you think people pretend to like when they really don't?

What is your favorite spice?

What's some small thing you recently noticed?

What do you secretly hoard?

Do you remember when you were a spider?

What's something that is common today that humans will be embarrassed about doing in 50 years?

How flammable are you?

You only fall if you stop; the faster you go, the safer you'll be.

Try to eat a block of cheese every day.

Relax your elbows.

Tomato seeds are annoying.

"Hey, slow down!" one guy hollered, and she could not decide whether he sounded angry or amused.

Incidental chaos

This has been my pandemic earworm recently, particularly the last couple of lines:

But we've run out of things to say

And we'll be happy anyway

Another First Kiss by They Might Be Giants.

Some have said it's TMBG's only non-ironic love song.

One of the experiences of a year of social distancing and much more sameness than normal has been the difficulty of casual conversation. Of any conversation, really. We want to keep in touch and stay connected to each other, but don't know what to say. At home, at work, with distant friends and family, on social media, all of it.

The kiss is just for my wife, though.

Only one anecdote about my kids this time. They've been peppered throughout the posts from the whole year.

Over the weekend [Uncle] was supervising the boys while they rode bikes in the driveway. [Younger] decided to hook their play shopping cart to the back of his bike. [Uncle] warned him that wasn't a safe idea. Without missing a beat, he said, "Don't worry, Uncle. Just because it's never been done before doesn't mean it can't be done."

That really captures the spirit of recklessness they bring to their every endeavor. Just because it's never been done before doesn't mean it can't be done. Let the incidental chaos follow.

One of the pages I follow on Facebook is Fake Library Statistics. Usually their updates are clearly fake and quite funny. There's nothing fake about this one.

49% of library science in saying, "I don't know, but I can find out." Parenting, too. Or, as I'm fond of saying, librarians don't know everything, they know how to find everything.

Another page I just started following recently is Rattle poetry magazine. I love this poem that came across my feed yesterday.

A.E. Stallings

LOCKDOWN PUZZLE: HOKUSAI’S GREAT WAVE OFF KANAGAWA

Even the border escapes me.

There are pieces of the sky

I cannot seem to put my finger on. 

The wave about to dash

The boats to pieces, is dashed

To pieces. The pieces are shaped

Like fractals of flying sea-foam.

The outside of the box

Offers what might be pieced together:

The wave lifts, white and Prussian blue,

While the sky lies flat and beige

As the raw cardboard inside the box.

The wave stands taller than a snow-topped mountain,

With three boats slung

Low in the troughs.

Rows of fat white dots

Like white dots of foam

Are the round tops of the heads of fishermen

Who are looking, not overhead at the crest about to crash,

But down into the lurch of the sea

Where they are likely to be drowned

Amidst a hissing mess of foam and wreckage.

The puzzle lies spilled, shipwrecked on the table,

All flotsam and jetsam,

A piece of boat here,

A mountaintop there,

Sky and wave all jumbled, the edge aligned

With the horizon of the tabletop’s

Steep drop.  

It comes over me in waves, 

This failure to put together the big picture.

I had thought the working of it would give me

A feeling of—what—peace?

A fitting way to pass the time, a sense

Of pleasure in the making sense of things?

The table is now no use as a surface;

For months now, it is all puzzle,

The white shapes of water shaped

Like random spindrift, spinning across the beige

Ground of the table, or the cardboard-colored sky,

Fragments of yellow boats, and blotches

That could be sea-foam, snowflakes, or bowed heads.

Maybe nothing finally locks

The surface into an illusion of its smoothness.

Even if I rhyme each shape with its absence,

Even if I finish this wave, 

Its monstrous gesture,

After, would not my giant hand be another

Crumbling the world about to crumble,

Sweeping the confusion back into its box?

—from Rattle #70, Winter 2020

Pandemic life is a jumble of pieces all out of place in a big, confusing pile.

The image above with the text about octopus and pig for dinner is from The Daughters of Ys by M.T. Anderson, an intriguing graphic novel. A description from Goodreads:

An Atlantis-like city from Celtic legend is the setting of this mythical graphic novel fantasy re-imagining the classic Breton folktale of love, loss, and rebirth, revealing the secrets that lie beneath the surface.

Ys, city of wealth and wonder, has a history of dark secrets. Queen Malgven used magic to raise the great walls that keep Ys safe from the tumultuous sea. But after the queen's inexplicable death, her daughters drift apart. Rozenn, the heir to the throne, spends her time on the moors communing with wild animals, while Dahut, the youngest, enjoys the splendors of royal life and is eager to take part in palace intrigue.

I'm not familiar with the "ancient Breton folktale" this is based on, but it makes for an interesting story. Like legends of this sort, it has an impersonal, epic quality. Haunting and dark, with plenty of tragedy, and lessons for those who care to look deeply. Even with all that, Anderson manages to bring a good dose empathy to the telling and make the characters matter. One of the two sisters has inherited her mother's "love of wild things and lonely places," the other "her love of wonders and miracles." They will take vastly different paths; one will end well and one won't. The contents appear slight, yet they linger.

I was especially taken by this scene at an isolated spot by the sea at night. A dialogue between a princess and a hermit.

"It's a quieter feast here than the one in the Palace of Ys tonight. Every day the Lord gives me a fish to eat."

"That's kind."

"No, it isn't. It's always the same fish. . . . 

"Good evening, old friend. I'm sorry. I waited as long as I could. It's midnight; you had a full day this time. I try to eat as late as I can."

"It's really exactly the same fish? Every day?"

"That is what the Lord grants me. And the fish."

"Then he's almost like a pet! And you're going to eat him?"

"Every day I eat half of him. He will appear again tomorrow, whole and healthy. Until I catch him again and carve him up."

"How can you kill him? Every day?"

"We live by devouring those we love. How can we help it? They're the ones within closest reach."

"But you're a holy man!"

"And yet, here in the wilderness, I live out the dream of all the wealthy and the powerful: to be able to consume continually without depletion.

"There's a whole fish. Take away half, take away half, take away half, and he still is whole. Infinite replenishment . . . 

"Princess, how do you think the city of Ys stands against the sea? How does it acquire its fabulous wealth? There must be a price paid.

"Except for this miraculous fish, nothing in nature produces bounty for man forever. Wells dry up. Forests disappear. Fields turn gray and lifeless if sown too often. Sea walls decay with the battering of years. Cities die. Ys cannot forever sustain its luxuries."

"Not everyone has to kill and destroy!"

"Would to God that what you say is true, Princess.

"Good-by, my one true companion."

"You murder him every day!"

"For that reason, I have never been able to figure out whether this miraculous fish is truly a blessing upon me from my God or whether he is a curse . . . "

We live by devouring those we love. How can we help it? They're the ones within closest reach. I don't think that's the only option, but it certainly has some truth.

Speaking of Atlantis, here's a poem that includes it by Ted Kooser from his collection Delights and Shadows:

Tectonics

In only a few months

there begin to be fissures

in what we remember,

and within a year or two,

the facts break apart

one from another

and slowly begin to shift

and tum, grinding,

pushing up over each other

until their shapes

have been changed

and the past has become

a new world.

And after many years,

even a love affair,

one lush green island

all to itself,

perfectly detailed

with even a candle

softly lighting a smile,

may slide under the waves

like Atlantis.

scarcely rippling the heart

My life has had many phases, some of them particularly distinct, but I feel like the last ten years have been a whole second life. After divorce from my first wife of 15 years I met someone else, also recently divorced, and we started over together. A new house, new car, new pets, and two kids soon followed. Now, most of the time, it feels like this is the only life I've ever known. Everything that came before is a myth from long ago that I scarcely seem to remember. Atlantis.

Another from Kooser.

A Spiral Notebook

The bright wire rolls like a porpoise

in and out of the calm blue sea

of the cover, or perhaps like a sleeper

twisting in and out of his dreams,

for it could hold a record of dreams

if you wanted to buy it for that,

though it seems to be meant for

more serious work, with its

college-ruled lines and its cover

that states in emphatic white letters,

5 SUBJECT NOTEBOOK. It seems

a part of growing old is no longer

to have five subjects, each

demanding an equal share of attention,

set apart by brown cardboard dividers,

but instead to stand in a drugstore

and hang on to one subject

a little too long, like this notebook

you weigh in your hands, passing

your fingers over its surfaces

as if it were some kind of wonder.

I love all the meaning he finds in this mundane moment with this ordinary object.

One more.

Praying Hands

There is at least one pair

in every thrift shop in America,

molded in plastic or plaster of paris

and glued to a plaque,

or printed in church-pamphlet colors

and framed under glass.

Today I saw a pair made out of

lightweight wire stretched over a pattern

of finishing nails.

This is the way faith goes

from door to door

cast out of one and welcomed at another.

A butterfly presses its wings like that

as it rests between flowers.

That last one was an accident, but I guess it is part of what I see in my home office; looking down at my shirt.

A bit more randomness, this time from InspiroBot.

You may not be into clumsiness, but clumsiness is into you.

Your friends see you as sinister.

Stop hiding the fact that you are unbelievably pleasant.

Hats off to all goats.

Things are coming for you.

No matter what happens, you should always get rid of the dragon. Imagine that you are somebody you find great.

Being a librarian is a lot like being a village idiot . . . Not going anywhere.

Please don't eat inanimate objects. Inanimate objects have jobs.

I like this code of orphan street urchins struggling to survive in a remote, frozen village surrounded by a foreboding forest. From Otto Tattercoat and the Forest of Lost Things by Matilda Woods.

The Tattercode

Rule 1 - You must choose your own name.

Rule 2 - You must always help a tattercoat in need.

Rule 3 - You must steal only what you need, not what you want.

Rule 4 - You must not leave a trail, or else you will get caught.

Rule 5 - You must own only one coat at a time. You can get a new coat only when your old one has turned to tatters.

Okay. Let's see what I can come up with. I'm no linguist or lexicographer, so this will be clumsy and sketchy. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. But maybe I can give these new words a hint of sense.

• Aperback (noun) - a bird of moderate size known for its yellow stripes and social nature.
• Ariterg (noun) - a sense of coolness to the air unrelated to temperature; an atmospheric aura of chilliness.
• Conscipatheon (adjective) - observable; obvious.
• Craccarrelss (adverb) - dependent on circumstances; momentarily undetermined.
• Eferbarn (adjective) - recently materialized.
• Eggmode (noun) - unrestrained disorder; tumult or chaos.
• Expet (verb) - to watch with careful focus, often to the exclusion all other pursuits.
• Ferras (noun) - where wilderness meets development.
• Guisity (noun) - an insect related to crickets and grasshoppers.
• Imstreockt (adjective) - soothe; to have hurts healed.
• Infusideicienes (noun) - a noticeable quality to the wind, atmosphere, or air; "something in the air."
• Izzillently (adverb) - full of joy.
• Modisres (verb) - to have a material quality, to have substance.
• Nexilinessive (adjective) - in search of connection.
• Nortoniously (adverb) - having an unexpected, vaguely musical quality.
• Ponessing (verb) - to hop multiple times in rapid succession.
• Reptom (noun) - a moment in time set apart from surrounding circumstances.
• Refurn (verb) - to provide a place of rest; to create a space for respite.
• Signitine (verb) - to mark, leave an impression.
• Submer (noun) - a small bird notable for its digging capabilities and burrowed, subterranean nests.
• Surrow (verb) - to sway in a circular motion.
• Tranian (noun) - a purple flower.
• Trealop (noun) - a small, omnivorous marsupial characterized by large eyes, dexterous climbing, and far leaping.
• Vampilluntion (adverb) - rhythmic; characterized by temporal regularity.
• Yapple (verb) - to repeatedly give a sharp, shrill bark; related to yap.

So. There it is. A hint of sense, though still quite murky.

Submers yapple nortoniously as

the nexilinessive trealop izzillently

expets the apererbacks.

Tranians surrow with

vampilluntion;

guisities ponessing in

conscipatheon eggmode.

Will ferras refurn the reptom?

Craccurrelss.

Unless infusidicienes

has already signitined.

Then the eferbarn ariterg

will modisres until

all is imstreockt.