All Japanese Girl Rolls

Ok. Cheese Ravioli, but I mixed your standard red sauce with the gravy from the brisket I made a few days ago. Also let all that was left heat up in the skillet first, so it was a lovely steak-y sauce. Some lightly steamed broccoli, fresh whole wheat from the bakery:


Matt liked it, but not as much as he enjoyed the boob cake Arley made for his birthday a few weeks back:


That's a boob-cake. Still with me? Good.

In other news, the Pilcrow Lit Fest is coming together fast. Gonna get on the band wagon?

OH! oh. I got picked up my tank today. If you happen to be in Champaign, IL, and need to get your motorcycle tank worked on, bring it to Dave's on Hagen st. south of the Napa. I wanted to keep it cheap:picked a color he had sitting around the shop, forget the under-side, etc. I called him yesterday, and he was like "Yea. I got the little dings out too. Didn't see a reason not to." I told him because I wanted to keep it on the cheap. He said, "Oh. Well, it was not big deal. I'm not charging you more for it." How kick ass is that? Here it is:



I think it looks amazing. He says it looks decent. Apparently he could have made the surface much more glass-like. I'm cool with it. In fact, I feel like it's a little too nice. Doesn't mean I wanna mess it up, but really, I haven't had anything this nice since I first got my car back from the shop when I was 17--which wasn't even that cool considering I did most of that work myself, which also explains why it looks the way it does 10 years later.

Meanwhile, I've resolved to not take student papers on paper any more. From now on, all emails. It's way easier to comment on them, and I don't have to carry anything. Same formatting instructions from my syllabus apply, only they can skip the staples. And let's face it: they usually do that anyway. End up sit there dog-earing 'n stuff.

Here's a Dean Young Poem that we'll be going over tomorrow. It's from his latest, Primitive Mentor. It was originally published over at Bat City.

Sex with Strangers

I was having sex with a stranger
when I realized this was no stranger,
this was Eleanor Roosevelt,
wife of the 32nd president of the United States.
Of course I was shocked
but it seemed rude to stop having sex
so I went on having sex.
Her hair was getting rather deranged
and she was concentrating hard
like a person trying to move a paperclip
by force of mind alone
which brought out the equine qualities
of her facial structure not in a bad way.
One reason to have sex is to help a stranger
get in touch with his or her animal being
even if it's a crayfish.
In the kitchen the rotisserie was laboring,
either the chicken was too fat
or it was tuckering out. Oddly,
I didn't feel bad for Franklin Delano
even though he looked jaunty and vulnerable
in his wheelchair in the margin of the dictionary.
In general it's difficult to feel bad
about anything while having sex
which is why it's such a popular activity
and the church is against it
except in rare primarily utilitarian instances.
That pretty much covers the facts of my life.
I've never been in much of a car crash.
When I walk into the mirror of the high grass
under the tired suicide note of the setting sun,
I'm never gone long. Once I was struck
on an elevator, all of us strangers
gasping at once but there the resemblance
to having sex ended because it only took
35 seconds to get going again, each of us
off at a different floor: cardiology,
oncology, psychiatry, the burn unit,
the solarium.