9/5/10

Notes on failure

1. yesterday, I sliced my finger open on the blade of the food processor.
Cathy, our landlord/neighbor/boss/helpful Responsible Adult friend looked at it and said in no uncertain terms to go to the Emergency Room for Stitches. Jasmine raced me there and a man in blue scrubs glued it shut with Superglue. I feel like a cyborg. It continues to ooze blood if I happen to bang it on something. I had to go to work afterwards--at the yuppie farm stand-- and had a Paradigm Shift as my right hand-- my dominant hand-- refused to function in its normal way due to the incapacitation of the middle finger.

Thus, I challenge you to experience a subtraction to your body. Or fashion yourself a new limb, digit, appendage, appendix, etc. Share your experiences here.

2. I apologize for not having been here the past two days. We've experienced some bad weather and Wind Advisories-- on the West Coast of Michigan-- and our internet went down and the farm. It's still not back up -- I'm sitting at the one coffee shop with wi-fi for miles probably--

would anyone be interested in sharing where they are, geographically speaking?

5 comments:

  1. I am an hour from NYC, almost due north. I'm sorry about your finger, but I love what your writing challenge might bring for next writings (certainly such subtractions speak to my own you-are-here direction to date). Speedy recovery, D

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  2. I'm in Florida, as you can tell from my most recent post. Living in Orlando at moment, looking to relocate.

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  3. OK- I am sorry to hear about your digit and your other digit. It made me think about all of the writing experiments we all do. Erasure, formal poetry constraints, sticking to one topic for a project, etc. Your body now has constraints. This finger that must be coddled and protected from things like repetitive banging on keys. It would normally rest on a K. Now it must hover above the K. I am writing to you from Tucson, Arizona. The Sonoran Desert at the end of monsoon season, 96 degrees, drying up. It is the season of stripped mosquitos and dragon flies. There are bats at night and everything is blooming in every color.

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  4. I am in the kitchen of my sister-in-law's house, Firestone (Colorado), enjoying the quiet after putting three little ones to bed.

    I used to be a chef, both after and before I was a writer, and have many moments of losing little pieces of myself to remember. But the one element they all had in common was an exquisitely slow moment of realization that things did not hurt yet, but that they would hurt very badly and soon. And that was always the reality of a sharp blade or extremely hot sugar, grease, or fire.

    Feel better soon. If it helps, most of my parts have grown back.

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  5. hi Kristen, how is your finger today? I'm in New Jersey, not too far from Sandy Hook. Where are you?

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