Stamp Wars

Vote for the StampMaster of the Galaxy

star wars stamps

who is the wanker who wrote the copy?

i wish they had these in time for our wedding invitations. that would have been tight. geeky, but tight.

there should be an ewok stamp! quick, someone start a useless petition.

did you secretly register to become a Jedi Shipping & Mailing Master?
Dork.

how did i know about the registry? weo, it's called responsible investigative blog fact-checking. ahem.

timefiller

i'm one of those people who like lists. list of groceries; things to do; desired appliances, hardware tools, and housewares; favorite things; resolutions; lists of wishes. on random scraps of ephemera that inevitably disappear prompting me to begin anew in journals, on blogs. etc. mind you, i don't often stick to them, the lists. i don't take direction well, even from myself.

so this is an enumeration list of sorts. while i've been here in san diego for the last three weeks, not counting things read in lobbies & waiting rooms, i've read nine magazines--two trashy, seven "lifestyle" (two of which were ecological consumerism), 1 shopping, one city--and eight point seven five books (5 .25 fantasy, one novel, one allegory, point five self-help, one nature, and two childbirth). and am working on 3.25 more.

oh, and i've learned to knit babyhats with five doublepoint needles. working on the booties. much harder. maybe i should stick with rectangles and cones.

of all those offerings, these are the ones that i'd recommend:

The Wizard of the Crow by Ngui~gi~ wa Thiong'o
A satirical magical allegory of postcolonial African history/State. It's like Wretched of the Earth (Franz Fanon), How Europe Colonized Africa and Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dengaremba) mashup told with the cadence and nuance of a traditional African storytale.

Treasure at the Heart of Tanglewood by Meredith Ann Pierce
My love of fantasy arose because they were like fairytales with complex female heroines. This simple one naturalizes the sacred feminine. Her Darkangel Trilogy is also great.

and of the random movies i've watched too fragmented to list:

Stranger than Fiction
"this may sound like gibberish to you, but i think my life is a tragedy." Damn good movie. Quirky, literary/philosophical, great witty dialogue, in spite of Will Ferrell--whose "i want you" is childish, plaintative and pathetic rather than sexy, disarming and charming. but he is suitably awkward for the rest of the movie to work, "If I was [staring at your tits], i can assure you it was only as a representative of the United States Government." I Heart Huckabees-Office Space-and i can only assume Adaptation genre. only numerical not existential vs. nihilist. and bonus, Jude Law isn't in it. that's always a good thing. Dustin Hoffman is great in a supporting role "dramatic irony. it'll fuck you every time." and "aren't you relieved to know you're not a golem?" as is Maggie Gyllenhaal, "Get bent, TAXMAN! Taxmaaaaaaan!" and the classic "Actually... it's my weekly evil-conspiracy and needlepoint group." Emma Thompson rocks. as always. "Well, Penny, like anything worth writing...it came inexplicably and without method."

on grief

anyone who thinks that grief gets easier with time is a liar, a fool, or an innocent. a little bit of each, i suppose.

we bereaved, we go on living. grief lives below the surface of our skin, circulating in our heart's blood, coiled in our viscera, where we draw breath, guileless, wordless, bereft, desolate.

grief ebbs and it flows.

grief is inconsolable.

yes, with time's passage, it diminishes, worndown by the exigencies of surviving/living. the infinite healing wisdom of the body only allows us to remember only as much pain as we can bear and no more; for the remembering of the vast depths of intensity would surely destroy us in the process. those who do ptsd flashback to cyclically re-live the trauma are forevermore broken by its intensity, ambling about existence crippled by chasmic despair. they are damaged souls mired in the past. and society, the living, abandon them to their suffering in the mental institutions and streets.

for we who survive with grief intact, what never fades, what shadows all life experiences is that very loss. the loss haunts us. the palpable lack of our loved one. all of life's meaningful passages and blessings incomplete without her/his tangible presence. we bereaved are presented with the prospect of our lives gaping before us and forevermore, our loved one will not share it with us. all of life's joy is that much sharper for it, tinged with a keening, lifelong heartache.

we grieve for a vanished future.

last year, we sat all three of us--melinh, tuyen and me--sharing a mortuary pew, sisters in sorrow, connected by our grief, disconsolate, fatherless daughters, mourning for a bittersweet morrow without them. time will not ease our loss; it will only bring more granular days without them.

and little annabelle grace. she would be 20 days old today. never to draw her first startled breath. never to suckle at her mother's breast. never to coo in delight. grow chubby, and make up her own gurgling language. never to have her woes comforted. never to learn mischief from and confide in aunty lani. never to bask in love's growth. no verbose ointments of sentiment and good intentions can salve this.

we mourn for ourselves.

it doesnt get easier. it never gets better. we just go on.

of innocence and dogshit: A Parable

when i was a kid, i would jackrabbit and cavort everywhere with sheer innocence and delight in life. out of the car. across the yard. on the sidewalk. on the playground. y'know, human kid places.

in time, as i segued to adolescence, i began to notice a pattern and a certain mmm je ne sais quoi, shall we say, capricious humor from the Heavens Above. because it seemed everywhere i would jackrabbit and cavort with innocence and delight, my waterbuffalo-ish peds would land squarely in a pile of DogShit. now this may be cosmic retribution for our childish games inflicted on the string of dogs we had that all seemed to mysteriously disappear. but that is another scooby story for another day.

now DogCrap, as it is well known, is nigh impossible to remove from the treads of one's shoes. wiping the soles of one's sneakers on grass or concrete does not suffice and point of fact only serves to streak the shit and work it in deeper. grinding your shoe soles in a puddle while hoping you don't backsplash any sludge on yourself is equally ineffective.

while the labyrinthine tread of your shoes is great for say running on asphalt and skidmarking wood floors, it is the cu chi tunnels for doggy doo. the festering substance is well and good squished up in the intricate crevices requiring a toothpick or some such to diligently furrow it out while freaking out about having to be millimeters away from bane fecal matter expurgated from the anus of a foul omnivorous slavering beastie, gagging from the offensive malodorous goo, and wretchedly indignant from the whole experience and now everyone's looking at my feet and knows i wear pro-wings. if the free lunch pass hadnt already given it away. damn. entire psychotherapy sessions could be based on such a thing.

while divested of my innocent delight and seeking preventative measures, i prevailed upon myself to develop my own defensive strategy which entailed diligent observance of where i set foot since the sneaks had to last til my next growth spurt. this preoccupation-from-necessity of mine in time became a subconscious habit of mine like a virus software unobtrusively scanning one's hardware for imminent threat. having this in the startup files of my operating system efficiently diverted me (and my companions) from further crapulent contamination. and the fortuitous incidental side effect of shit-radar is finding wadded up money in random places where some foolish wallet-luddite had creased their hip pocket just so like manna falling from heaven into my deprived little hands thus rectifying adolescent cosmic imbalance.

ah, but a lifetime of looking out for shit is just that. a lifetime of seeing shit. i literally see (and avoid) shit everywhere i go, because dogs, being dogs, shit everywhere their cussed owners let them. ("walking the dog" really just means befouling someone else's yard/public space. a selfish transference of responsibility. it is the American Way.) i oftimes don't notice the wildflowers or breathtaking horizon because i'm holding my breath scrupulously avoiding the fetid mound despoiling the earth (because when you smell something you are actually ingesting particulate molecules of that substance. shudder.) and simultaneously derailing my companion from meeting that fate with a luchador-worthy fullbody check. and if its not Feces, then it's its nasty cousin Vomit or Gum or anything Undesirable to get on One's Sole.

so here we come to the Moral of the Parable:

• if you look for Shit, inevitably, you will find it.

• concurrently, if you traipse about Life Unaware, you will step in Shit and defile yourself.

• penultimately, Shit Happens.

• and lastly, i'm a great person to walk with when you have Shiny New Kicks.

Choose-Your-Own-Moral (CYOM)™. multiple contradictory truths coexisting simultaneously. thus spake feralnative.

weo, this aint jonathan livingston seagull's blog.

shrimpy says "truuue story."

recycled scribblings on Katrina

the nice thing about being self-published is that you can always plagiarize yourself with impunity.

December 2005

i mused on this as i flew homeward from volunteering in the Gulf Coast post-Hurricane Katrina.

i love flying at night. the clusters of lights like a galaxy, milky way, a whole universe twinkling in the inky black landscape. being with the community in New Orleans was so important to me, like coming home more so than even going to Viet Nam in some ways. that spiritual connection and well-being that i recognized as i was leaving nourishess my soul i hope for a very very long time to come. and like the constellations in the skies above, our kindred souls destinies--duyên chúng ta--are forever linked...

across the gulf (tentative title)

soaring through the infinite universe on silvery wings
Hằng Nga lim dim
reflecting on starlight galaxies of humanity below and
ancestors clustered in indigo heavens above.
true umbra depths where heaven and earth cleave
to bear divine witness to human oaths.
Trời Thẳm Đất Dày.
Trời Đất ơi.

luminescent diasporas,
myriad constellations...
what binds one to the other across the cosmos
what is written in the stars with gossamer and stardust
duyên hải duyên kiếp duyên nợ duyên cớ
immaterial webs of Destiny, Affinity, Imagination,
Desire, Intention, Definition, and Love.
the cosmic connection of Life in those moments.

********

here is something i wrote to Bao P. about the aftermath of Katrina just the other day.

how does one weigh human tragedy and measure one against the other? Katrina in NoLa was napalm and Katrina in Biloxi (and other parts of Mississippi) was nuclear. and as little as we hear about the vinamese in NoLa, we hear not even whispers about Biloxi and the rural areas.

yes i genuinely sorrow for the viet community in Nola. the pulled-up-by-the-slipperstrap 3000sf suburban homes and once shiny status with suffering marked by floodlines and black mold. the trinity of fathers sheperding only their scattered flock (and one marmalade cat) for the third lifetime (1954, 1975, 2005) in the timeworn rituals of divine loving patriarchy and new mantles of social justice (for our people at least). and i can rejoice in how community survives again and again.

and i mourn for what remains in biloxi, the small cottages and thirdhand outfitted fleet of fisherfolk, obliterated. quan am in all her mercy could not shield them from the storm's wrath. the Sea delivered them to this country, and after 3 decades of providing sustenance, demanded its payment in human life. self-sufficient and meager lives give way to exploitative neon flashy casino jobs and cynicism. the temple crushed in the shadow of ancient pine. a grey monk, concussed and alone tends to all in need of help with ascetic laissez-faire. the monseigneur preaches god helps only those who help themselves and he for one is helping himself first above all. there is nothing there to mark the passage of time and suffering, there is only beached driftwood as far as the eye can see and the ants only rebuild far flashier casinos to take tithe from all. there, time stopped and life has not yet resumed. community scattered to the winds, up the mississippi river in search of low wage jobs without anchor nor oar.

katrina is the other face of the mother goddess, creation and destruction.

(self) important disclaimers

i'm a procrastinating and therefore frustrated storyteller/wordcrafter (elementary school teachers assessment in neat cursive penmanship still applies "Bright, But Does Not Apply Herself") and therefore i reserve the sole right to continually and arbitrarily (one might say compulsively) paraphrase pop culture zeitgeist, make obscure irreverent/irrelevant allusions to literary trash and treasures with gimpy metonymic or metaphoric intent, endlessly anthropologize, fanatically reference the sacred feminine, paren(pa)thetically editorialize, and whimsically edit historical posts thereby rendering temporal chronology into a flexible relative narrative raging rapid river of archaic adjectival alliteration, immigran onomatopoeia, involuted neologisms, vernacularistic grammar, consciousness & being, and run-on sentences, simply because meaning and authenticity are human constructs to interpret mere homo sapiens sapiens phenomena as phenomenological events. and philosophy itself is the Nation-State's B!tch. pardon my engulish.

and anyways, weo, i hate linearity. it's like, soooo phallogocentric. oh my goddess!

so in versimilitude to the epistolary novel, mixquiahuala letters, i posit to you, dear (non-existent) reader, nay i urge you to read this blogage as a Blogarary Choose-Your-Own-Adventure which series enticed us as oppressed/repressed/suppressed adolescents with the sucanat Fantacist Lie that there is such a thing as Free Will when met with the Glaring Reality of Parental Authority. this was a deceptive ruse because in actuality the CYOA series had a Moral about Consequences and the Righteous Path, which we all know is the conjuring Mythology of the Nation-State which has subjugated and exploited all of humanity these past two hundred and some score years. and so i compel you to Resist Authority. Read Non-Sequentially and Non-Sequitorally. this is what 4.5 years of grad school did to me, a sum total of 20.5 years of schooling, roughly 2/3rds of my life (the other third apparently having been spent in species anomalous regenerative sleep). Read at your own Peril.

she's a killer queen
gunpowder gelatine
dynamite with a laser beam
guaranteed to blow your mind
anytime--
and yes, yes i did quote Farouk "Freddy" Mercury. it's my soliloquy universe, i shall do as i please, savvy?

i hereby predict i shall get even less work accomplished on my days off--ahem, i mean when i "work from home" natch.

PORKAGE PROCLAMATION

i have lately been informed by Hun (fantacist inventor of such infamy and verbiage that could only be reasonably deemed HUN-isms such as "Wouldn't the world be better off if Stevie Wonder were dead?" and therefore deserving of only a one name moniker like Bono or Cher or Madonna or Pele or Homer. or at the very least, A Blog Of His Own. though not a woolf, doesn't a six foot over angsty krean otter yearn for as much?) that today is National Pork Day.

i have only this and more to say--GENIOSITY!

y'know today, this very afternoon, i did NOT know about this auspicious event and YET, unknowingly, in perfect cosmic harmony, i made a BACON sandwich on generic whole wheat with Grey Poupon. in the words of that 80s infomercial, one eyebrow cocked quizzically and shatneresque, "Co-incidence. OR. Super-Natural? YOU. Decide."

WHEREAS Pork is acknowledged for its contribution to Agricultural Ecology, enabling the building of the Egyptian Pyramids along with the invention of beer, elevating the science of Gastronomy, and verily inspiring Humanity itself,

WHEREAS Pork is delicious to eat with Green Eggs, on a box, or with a fox,

WHEREAS Pork is the Other White Meat,

FORTHWITH, We the People Proclaim that Today is a Good Day to eat Pork and furthermore shall it be declared that ever after Pork shall be eaten on this Day.

APPROVED on this day the First of March, Day of the Porcine, in the Year of Our Pork Two Thousand and Seven.

Sowheeeeeeeee.

Th-th-that's all Folks.