Thu, 19 May 2005

cradled forever in my arms
The first proper snowfall came, and I went out to collect samples to send to friends isolated in places tormented by my enemy the sun. I do this for both the obvious reason, and for the unspoken but untimately threadbare reason that I am poor, and making a gift of snow is one of the things within my means when the holiday season arrives. Many of my old friends, the ones I cut away like so much chaff when I outgrew the idea of being friends with everyone, dismiss the holidays, dismiss the religious underpinings as something they have grown past, setting themselves as beacons for the masses to follow into the great golden age, free of the crippling crutches of supersition and ignorance. All my problems could be solved, they would whisper to me, if only I took on additional lovers, or swallowed some new jumble of letters and numbers, or bound myself to pseudophilosophical sophistries that catered to their every weakness, their every hatred. I have often fallen for faulty logic, but never from them, as the proof of their lives plays out in the endless drama and bickering they desperately nurse, the failed relationships, the endless focus on the fault of “the normals” for every imagined wrong thrust upon them. I hate them as I hate death, and happily build gifts for the people I love, even if those gifts amount only to snow.

I am not only giving snow this season, however; I have started work on a series of board games which both edify and distract. The first is built from a chess board, a series of magnets (placed beneath the board), and a series of pawns (whose heads are made from compases). The game is called Courting, and consists of two players attempting to move their pieces into the same square, so that they may smooch, only the magnets are laid out in such a manner as actual smoochery is imposible to achieve, and the winner is the first to realize the futility of the act. Potential gift-takers will be heartened to know that, as in all good games, there are a series of variations on the basic rule-set.

I am also learning to play Distance Piano, which consists of a prepared piano and a collection of lawn darts, but I am not certain performance recordings will be of high enough quality to make stocking-stuffers this year.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #