First hand job experience

a dispatch from bewilderness

Words try to arrange themselves letter by letter, in the right order in the right subject in the right city and century.  They can’t.  This is called “semantic drift.” Concepts try to do the same.

They show me a picture and ask what it might be. It might be anything, anywhere. That’s not the answer they want, so they ask again what it might be. It might be yellow or shallow, hither and yon. A duck, a place to hide, a pond. It might be nectar, twig or seed, skein, spool, thread, weed.

painting by Judith Hannah Weiss

Someone gives me a notebook and says it’s my new best friend. My best friend is shiny red, so I can find it. My second new best friend arrives when my first one is filled. It is blue, and tells me things I used to know.  

We are called survivors, but that is just partly true. Who we were before is gone.  Except for a ray of resilience, a pinch of perseverance and a bit of sparkle, too. And so I start making news, not just “receiving” it like a punch to the gut. Or rather, I start making mashups like these:

*Actor sent to jail for not completing sentence

*Slowdown speeds up

*Students get first hand job experience

In other news, the Environmental Protection Agency keeps finding cancer-causing chemicals derived from fossil fuels—such as dioxins, benzene, and naphthalene—in the air, in our water, our food, our furniture, our clothing, our soaps and soups, our pots and pans, our forks and spoons.

These poisons are also in our bodies. In sperm, in eggs, in blood, in fins, in gills, in buds, in bugs, in leaves, in skin. They are even in the umbilical cords of babies just out of the womb. And in the womb.