pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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CONE, ROD

My ex Tree loves a phrase I coined years ago: Cone, rod.

I was reading Nathaniel Hawthorne at the time and was struck by how perfect a choice it was to set Young Goodman Brown at twilight, when nothing in our visual plane is precise and our eyes can't decide how to peer out at this big world, switching as they do between cones and rods.

Noticed driving into work this morning that a sorority has a Dukes of Hazzard car on the front lawn. An interesting twist on southern antebellum charm (or whatever).

She was leaving early and I asked her why. Turns out she and her sorority sisters were having a White Trash Party and wanted to go to the Salvation Army en masse to purchase tacky polyester pants and moo-moos and then stock up on Pabst Blue Ribbon in cans.

They also chipped cement blocks and placed them by the sorority house as steps and littered the lawn with broken car parts and so on. And they blackened their teeth.

I had been working on a piece about poverty in the South all day and just looked at her for a minute before saying "so, tell me, what do you find most amusing about their poverty—their distended bellies, abject hunger, the two jobs they have that still leave them broke, or the way they want to kill you when they see you riding around in Daddy's BMW while mimicking their rotting teeth?"

Hrrrmmf.

Finally, and apropos to nothing at all, that emu is still loose downtown and has eluded capture for over a week—which just makes me happy.

Meanwhile, from today's Writer's Almanac:

GETTING THE MACHINE
by Joyce Sutphen

It was good to hear
my own voice again
when I called, after
being gone for weeks.
I sounded the same.
I hadn't changed my name;
didn't have a foreign accent.
I just said I couldn't
come to the phone right then,
exactly the way I'd been
saying it for years,
and so I left myself
a little message
saying how sorry
I was I wasn't there,
and that I'd be
home soon. I tried to
think of what I'd want
to hear myself saying
and say it right.

9:47 a.m. - 2005-04-27

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