(Preramble: Give me thoughtful conversation, personal narrative, intellectual play, juxtapositional humor. These are the things I'm made of, and these are the things I hope we can share. Thinking reed seeks sympathetic resonance, you know? The rest of this profile is assembled from various roiling undercurrents and confessional episodes of the past.)

We were somewhere along the Oort cloud of Epsilon Eridani when the drugs began to take hold.

        Contemporary ornithologists
        compete to chat with offbeat modern birds.
        For each some complex countercall exists;
        they survey with binoculars and words.

Yes, I know that's not quite how this thing works — it's all about the rapport, not some secret heart-unlocking code; no magic word bullets. But the conceit is harmless when contained playfully, right? Anyway, blah blah blah, sensitivity, poetry, etc, I HOPE YOU BITCHES LIKE IAMBIC PENTAMETER

We sold a Valentine's-Day-themed "conversation beans" package of Jelly Bellies at the store, and I was disappointed to see that (apparently in keeping with the similarly monikered candy hearts, which I always thought were just called "candy hearts") the supposed conversations consisted entirely of barely literate come-ons: "baby," "u & me," and so on. What a shame. I was hoping for a jelly bean with the words "categorical imperative" imprinted on the side ("discuss!"), or maybe "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," although that would probably entail an unconventionally oversized bean or an in-package magnifying glass, neither of which is particularly economical or inviting.

"Why does my bean say 'Swampman'?"

Critique of pure marshmallow.

Love in the time of MK-ULTRA.

I HOPE YOU B — oh, I already said that. I also do origami. Photos here.

"I write descriptions of natural forms on the walls, scratching them on the tile surface with a diamond." — Donald Barthelme, "Game"

Every so often we get these hipster couples in the store, him with his too-tight sweater and her with colorful ironic jewelry and raccoon eyes. I see them and I daydream, I imagine separating them somehow and luring him into the music section, interesting him in a CD on a lower shelf and then CLUBBING him in the head CLUB CLUB CLUB with a spindle of CD-Rs. Then I'd put on his outfit, the sweater and the Buddy Holly glasses and the Converse and walk off with the girl, her chipped but candy-colored nails nestling around the crook of my arm as we skip-walk down the street, sun setting beyond the retail corridor.

It's a nice dream. But those Converse don't fit. I tried them for a while, they chafed, and now I'm back to the generic knockoffs.

And how long could it last anyway? We'd be talking hipster music, Godspeed You Black Emperor or something, and I'd be like, yeah, this is like that Yes album, Tales from Topographic Oceans. And everyone would stare. Or I'd mention Electric Light Orchestra on its own merits, not as an insulated and delightful influence on this or that myspaceable friendmaking band, and eyebrows would quirk among gathered subculture epicureans, quirk in an unfriendly way.

I am attracted to the women of the hipster tribe, but I am forever an anthropologist, never an inductee.

Breath control and reflective orb-casting — small soapy jars, bold-colored canisters from the dollar store. I work in film.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life for Dummies

There's a brand of depressed red-and-white striped peppermints that I really like. They only sell them in these huge bulky bags, but, if you like that kind of thing, I can assure you that it's really a good buy, Cruel Whorled.

Keith Urban Planning

"The little ants (known as minims) tend the gardens, and they can also be found riding atop the leaves being brought home by the big ants."

I should have gone with "nattering nabobs of nougativity."

undetached rabbit parts

liquid mirror telescope

• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Their Eyes Were Watching Doug
• Their Ice Were Washing Dogs
• The Rice Where Washing Dough
• They Rise We Are Watch Ingot
• Ocular Organs Which Belonged to Them Tracked Everywhere a Visage a Shadow an Imprint Half-Masked in Corporeality by the Imprimatur of and the Image of Their Deity
• Audobon's Field Guide to Demiurges and Intercessory Apparitions
• THEIR EYES
• 9_9
• Their eyes will put on and above Gott-passten auf carefully thinks, made attention to the God, its eyes, eyes have an attention to the god have been formed.
• thryswrwtchnggd
• WATCHING
• theory sower wit chain egged
• There I swear what's ink odd.

Some of my best friends are Ediacara biota.

Eyeless

Sculpt facticities from your predilections, enjoy being the type of person who enjoys what you enjoy. Scaffolding within subculture, harmony within demography.

        Escalator Components

        It used to be their sound was forest-deep,
        with basso drones and treetop overtones.
        Now friction frames their discord; frayed, they weep
        and gnash and play postmodernist trombones.

Last night I dreamed about setting fire to swarms of bees.

• Curious George Assassinates the Archduke
• Curious George Stages an International Workers' Revolution
• The Berenstain Bears and the Insufficiently Regulated Pool of Credit Default Swaps
• Junie B. Jones and the Myriad Spacecraft that Resemble DC-8s
• If You Give a Mouse a Sufficient Dose of Isoflurane
• The Little Engine That Could Fucking Kill You
• The Very Hungry Celebrity

What's your favorite way to eat an orange?

1. If string theory is true and the world contains extra spatial dimensions, it may be possible to rotate the orange through one of these nonce-dimensions and thereby invert its spatial structure: peel on the inside, dripping sticky fruit on the outside.

2. Atoms disperse themselves throughout the world. As you bite that orange, you bite a meal of Caesar's. You bite Caesar, and Shakespeare, and Jesus.

3. The orange is a hybrid of ancient cultivated origin. The name is thought to ultimately derive from the Dravidian word for the orange tree, with its final form developing after passing through numerous intermediate languages. That is, there is only one "superspecies." Nevertheless, names have been given, considered because they are fleshy and soft and a single ovary which eventually led to worldwide popularity. An orange seed is called a pip. A single mutation in 1820 in a monastery in Brazil yielded a conjoined twin a set of smaller segments embedded within the larger. The only means available is to graft which continue to via cutting and grafting. The blood orange has streaks of red in the fruit, graft cuttings, produced via cutting and grafting, and the juice is often a dark burgundy colour. Zest is popular in cooking because oil glands and strong flavour similar to the fleshy inner part. The petals also delicately rosewater all can be considered to be the fruit of that single, over a century-old tree, a single ovary.

4. Month, silver, orange.

5. #FF8040

6. Banach and Tarski split an orange.

Back-cover plot description of Eberron: Sea of Death: Book 3 – Blade of the Flame:

"The Lich Nathifa has stolen the mystic Dragonwand and intends to use it to summon an army of weresharks to ravage the Lhazaar Principalities in the name of the Lich Queen Vol."

POLL: Of what is your summoned army constituted?

"A vivid, thought-provoking examination of both the immigrant, polyglot, taxi-driving community of New York City, and an equally striking meditation on what it means to be a cat who can drive a car."

Significant ontological drift overnight. Reversals and flips. Clocks backward now. Neighborhood subtly altered, street order different. Cargo rails differently arranged near the Metro station. Numerous symmetric fissures compared to memory.

Harper's Bezoar

Bury My Wound at Wounded Wound

At the Natural History Museum, thinking, WHY IS ALL THIS GOLD FROM AUSTRALIA?

1. Jethro Tull, Minstrel in the Gallery  (1975)
2. dEUS, In a Bar, Under the Sea  (1996)
3. The Beatles, Abbey Road  (1969)
4. Yes, Tales from Topographic Oceans  (1973)
5. The Orb, Orbus Terrarum  (1995)

Venetian Snares is playing at my house.

Skullside nanoradios hiss.

A shark so big it could eat a T-Rex.

DAY ONE. Envisage his coyly smiling mien, oversized, low and half-off-frame against white space, a non-space, a visionary plane, some elsewhere. There is a message to us in gray san-serifed font: "go humans go"

I find this incredibly unnerving.

DON'T LET THE QUAKERS CHAIN YOU TO A VOLCANO.

DAY THREE. His face again, scalded or ironed or otherwise affixed, however they do it, to the side of a bus, turning in front of me as I waited for the "walk" sign. Another drifted in the distance.

His smug, secret-keeping smile, his anachronistic ornamentation — out of time. That white non-place, that rhetorical elsewhere from which he bemusedly appraises us — out of place. From an undefined separation he watches. "Go humans go."

All this just leaving work. His likenesses must be legion, snaking throughout the city, this most influential of cities, on moving platforms and still.

Nixon was a Quaker, but as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, even Richard Nixon has got soul. This new manifestation, soulless.

(THIS NEXT PART IS PROBABLY THE BIGGEST MISTAKE ON MY PROFILE RIGHT NOW BUT I THINK IT'S KIND OF FUNNY MAYBE?)

Selected Blurbs from Richard Preston's The Hot Zone with Random Snippets Replaced by the Word "Cock":

A highly infectious, deadly cock from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" cock. The Cock Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal cocks and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Cock Zone proves that cock really is scarier than fiction.

"ONE OF THE MOST HORRIFYING COCKS I'VE EVER READ. WHAT A REMARKABLE PIECE OF COCK."

                — STEPHEN KING

"One of the years ten best cocks"

                — PEOPLE

"A riveting nonfiction cock . . . swashbuckling cocking"

                — NEW YORK TIMES

"No movie will match the real-life horror described in Richard Preston's cock."

                — TIME

"A bone-chilling account of a close encounter with a lethal cock . . . a totally convincing page-turner, proving that cock is stranger than fiction."

                — KIRKUS REVIEWS

"Preston's great skill is in turning interviews and scientific data into a compelling human cock."

                — SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

"This cock is more terrifying than any sci-fi nightmare."

                — USA TODAY

"Horrifying and riveting . . . Preston exposes a real-life cock potentially as lethal as the fictive cocks in Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Cock."

                — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"A fast-paced, gripping medical cock."

                — NEWSDAY

"Riveting from page one . . . [an] infectious cock."

                — WIRED

"A medical cockhanger."

                — BOSTON GLOBE

"Cockmerizing."

                — LOS ANGELES TIMES

I spend a lot of time thinking period. Contemplation over sensation. Spend too much time living as if I were a brain in a jar. Unlikely to change.

"Who needs action when you've got words?"

Pluck those ancient broadcasts from the atmosphere.

Hey, did you know they're making a spinoff to this? It's a show about a bunch of dentists who are on a flight, they're on their way to a convention, and then their plane crashes and they end up stranded on an island. It's called ... Flossed.

"Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order"

I left a note for my coworkers atop a golf book, Dave Pelz's Putting Bible, which a customer had decided not to buy. "WHERE ARE THE RECIPE'S???"

The chill pill is not effective birth control.

About three things I was absolutely positive.

First, Alan Greenspan was a vampire.

Second there was a part of him — and I didn't know how dominant that part might be — that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

From The Dream Songs, by John Berryman
16

        Henry's pelt was put on sundry walls
        where it did much resemble Henry and
        them persons was delighted.
        Especially his long & glowing tail
        by all them was admired, and visitors.
        They whistled: This is it!

        Golden, whilst your frozen daiquiris
        whir at midnight, gleams on you his fur
        & silky & black.
        Mission accomplished, pal.
        My molten yellow & moonless bag,
        drained, hangs at rest.

        Collect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay,
        in Sealdah Station some possessionless
        children survive to die.
        The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris
        withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room
        and one told the other a lie.

"The Necessary Characters of the Men of the Remote Future Deduced from the Existing Stream of Tendency"

• A young couple adopt a mischievous dog who, in a surprising third-act twist, turns out to be a shark.

• An old man, isolated by his willful accretion of power, regrets the loss of his innocence, symbolized by his childhood shark.

• A man is pursued across an empty countryside by a plane dropping sharks.

I summoned my army of robot vacuum cleaners.

• pottery
• photography
• Bird in Space
• The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly
• The Dream Songs by John Berryman
• Pacific Northwest Native American art, animals as lozenges inside lozenges

"Would you like to see my— " her words came out knotted, and instead of the term for her type of home, she kept blurting instead "apartness." I knew then we were perfect for each other.

Seriously, message me if you'd like to trade words at all. If you think we could make sense — or nonsense — together, or explore the intricate boundary thereof, I'd love to hear from you.