They look like flying lobsters

There's nothing wrong with cockroaches, except their existence. When they first came crawling down our ceilings with their antennae waving like outer-spacemen with laser guns, it seemed that the only feasible way of retaining the physical integrity of our bodies was to simply show them the quickest way to the sugary treasures of our pantry.

They've been around for a few days now, usually demanding access to the booty at about 10 pm. We typically acquiesce.

But just last night I decided to watch "Where Eagles Dare," in which a young and distressingly Keanu Reeves-ish Clint Eastwood single-handedly slays half of the Nazi SS corps with only a jackknife and a portable stereo. So when the roaches came back for another onslaught in the evening, my wife made several diversionary maneuvers involving a Tupperware container and the Saran wrap, and I headed for my Estwing.

Never before in my life had I seen a Saran-wrapped cockroach lying in a Tupperware after being repeatedly assaulted with all 18 ounces of a construction-grade hammer. Take that, weird antenna flailers! Don't make me bring out the portable radio!

Meditation in one-dimension

Archimedes' latest devil sits torqued into my wall, its one-dimensioned brilliance clutching the plaster with all the friction necessary to grant my copy of Claude Monet the appearance of levitation. A brilliant Greek! that man, who, with force and turn and tourniquet wrenched a solid blade of steel into a single-sided screw.

They say he saved a sieged city, back then, by festering his brain until it created (ex nihilo, perhaps) some megolithic mechanism that (who knows?) blew oily flames all over Spartan invaders or catapulted dogs with ringworm into the enemy's tents until they had to go back home to resupply their stock of Preparation H.

Like Archimedes, Ben Folds has a fascination with Preparation H, which can only mean that he, too, is beginning to experience the toils of middle age, where the insides and outsides want to exchange relative positions. That sort of evisceration (people tell me that this isn't the real cause of the typical haemorrhoid, but what does WebMD know, anyway?) is unnatural, but is also to be expected, leaving us in the pickly spot of a "natural unnaturality."

This is an observation which will probably give us some "cognitive dissonance" at first (a term that teachers use when they want to justify the explosion of their students' worldviews), but, unfortunately, this is pretty much the condition of reality. After all, all of us expect to be surprised at some point in our lives, and even though this mindset is paradoxical at root, not too many people are altogether flummoxed by the logic-garbling fact that they're expecting the unexpected.

Chesterton (the real one, not that quibbling politician in the 1830s) has said something somewhere (Orthodoxy, to be precise) to the effect that people should really be utterly pessimistic and wildly optimistic simultaneously. For him, it's a functional paradox that we should do our utmost in the belief that Right will prevail, even while recognizing that everything we humans do will fall short, in the final analysis. The "natural unnaturality" here is that badness is not only unnatural, but entirely a matter of course.

Archimedes again to the rescue (we, too, are Greeks in a battered polis). Though wrapped round a hollow steel barrel, the screw itself has only one side. With each turn of the socket wrench or Phillips-head, the single-side cuts a single groove and slides itself inside it, slashing to support instead of cutting to destroy, and eventually ends ensconced and useful by virtue of the very thing that resisted its forward movement.

Moreover, this gnarl of steel driven into toughness belies my sense that a diasporic adventure-life brings color and vivacity. The logic of one-dimension means not that the screw remains flat and motionless, but instead that it progresses deeper and deeper without ending, its head forced ever closer and closer to its final home.

The only worry is that it finds a stud, so that sudden weight won't rip it from the plaster.

Feels Like I've Had a Stroke (of Genius!)

Half face-frozen,
as if I've chosen
to be shot up like this.

They said they aimed
with the Novacaine,
but I'm pretty sure they missed.

So when they drilled,
making my tooth filled,
it rather raised my ire.

But my tongue's so heavy
that I cannot levy
the lawsuit I desire.

A Husband's Duty

When the exo-skeleton splinters
in the space beneath my fingernails
and the entrails seep through the Kleenex to my palm--

When I chase the spider, writhing,
and crush legs off with each frantic blow
(five, three, two maimed stumps, and finally a denuded, clutching torso)--

Then I say, dear wife, that my duty is performed,
and I have fulfilled your urge to murder.

Chemical Dependencies

So there's this organic farmer who walks up to a regular farmer (discernible by his common sense and sturdy practicality), and he says, "Hey, man, didn't Nancy Reagan ever tell you not to fix your problems with a chemical solution?"

Paranoia

I'm also thinking about a book again. Seems to me that most of life is pretty much ringed with fear-- fashioned with fear, even. The welfare state comes to mind, as does the fact that I wear clothes. Moreover, the critical/skeptical epistemological mode seems to me as also a product of fear: Descartes' project, after all, is rooted in a test of his faculties so that he can be sure that no supremely bad devil dude is tricking him out. The fact that modern philosophy won't settle for anything less than 100% certainty is symptomatic of its paranoia--a grim, settled fear that post-modernity wafts out of like a rat from a garbage can.

That's all a rabbit trail, of course, but it dovetails nicely with the whole seatbelt/insurance/retirement/government/metal detector thing that keeps us all freaked out enough to sacrifice liberty for a comfortable death.

My proposal? An aesthetic of trust. Believe me; it's beautiful.

Even though rats don't waft.

Civilities

Visited Gettysburg last week and started reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" this morning. Tragic works, both. Actually, I'm shocked at how compassionate UTC is to the South and slaveholders. Much less so to the institution of slavery itself and the laws put into place to protect it. Guess she's practicing the old adage: hate the sin, love the sinner.

I'm sure there's a modern moral, here, but I'm not sure at what small crossroads town it'll all explode at.