Author: foxtongue

bang bang, that awful sound

How Do You Know
Joe Mills

How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The difficulty
with love, I want to say, is sometimes
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived
or left. Love is the elephant and we
are the blind mice unable to understand
the whole. I want to say love is this
desire to help even when I know I can’t,
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars,
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes,
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things
she has asked about over the years, all
those phenomena whose daily existence
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head.
I don’t even know how to match my socks.
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says,
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(500x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5



Two doctors, Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier, from the Texas Heart Institute successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a device—proving that it is possible for your body to be kept alive without a heart, or a pulse.



Link.

all dressed up and unable to go

I spent almost all of yesterday trapped in my apartment, mincing about on broken limbs, missing out on everyone’s parties. I am so tired of chronic pain. Unbelievably, horribly tired. I need to get back to Seattle, settle in for an afternoon with a massage therapist friend who knows my case history, chat them up, offer them chocolate, and grit my teeth while my bones are re-placed, my flesh made malleable under their interesting hands. I’ve left it too long again, to the point where it’s affecting my quality of life and extending the healing process, two steps backward with every step forward.

Oh well. Maybe next weekend. As with everything else in my life, it all comes down to money. The lack of it. It does not help that my boots died, too. Stitching popped, soles peeling into pages of failed rubber, and the final straw – a zipper that snapped mid-step – all in three days about a month after purchase. I couldn’t afford new boots when I got them the same way I can’t afford new boots now, but they were a necessity, even if I didn’t like them, because everything else I own has a heel, which, given the current state of my injuries, grind the bones together in my ankle with almost an audible sound.

My back, too, I need to have looked at. The current theory is that I sprained my spine when my bicycle chain snapped under me in December, but the more I live with the damage and fall-out, the less I believe that to be what’s crippling me now.

sudden (un)employment

Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing — but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.

— C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Sarah, his godchild, on 3 April 1949

I gave notice at my job with the accountants yesterday in order to accept less reliable but potentially more interesting work. I don’t know if it was the right decision. Even though there’s a whiff of career about the whole thing, signing up to be the administrative assistant to a professional pyro, my track record of shockingly bad luck makes this move feel ominous, as if I’m getting back in line for another ride with disaster.

On the other hand, I just handed Sean my recently vacated job.

synesthesia, artificial and natural

deconcrete: Neil Harbisson’s third eye:

“Neil Harbisson introduces himself as the first cyborg ever legally recognized by any Government (2004). He was born colour-blind; so he can only see in black and white (Achromatopsia disorder). An electronic device implanted in his neck allows him to translate colours into sounds. The camera that hangs from his forehead 24/7 was accepted as part of his British passport photo. By that very fact, the camera became congenital and not prosthetic to his body anymore. Thanks to it, light frequencies are captured and translated into sound frequencies by the chip, which in turn sends them to his brain. He literally listens to colours with his electronic eye. A standard eye perceives light, tone and saturation. Harbisson’s organic eyes perceive light, but tone is converted into sound, and saturation into volume through his third eye.”

Tiny, mild hints of synesthesia have been slipping back into my life, like the waterproofed nylon pouches at work that smell like zippers running over my teeth or the barest trace of a taste being associated with a name, the way “Gavin” sometimes seems like a small white stone sitting on the center of my tongue. Though the experience is oddly natural, a far away corner of my brain fills with dread every time I notice it happening. To say I am concerned would be an understatement. Is this how it starts, the family madness? Are some six essential cells in my temporal lobe flickering in seizure? I do not know how to tell.