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CHEYENNE
By catharchis on Sunday, December 18th, 2011
When we drove across the country we stopped in sparse Cheyenne, Wyoming for some room temperature pizza on sticky table cloth. We learned that Carl’s grandparents were married right there on a tumbleweed corner at the First Methodist Church. Later, Carl’s father sent us this photo of them as newlyweds. Her hopeful smile so stunning as she crosses the street with her new husband and her maid of honor - all the world before them. He died in the war just after his only child, Carl’s father, was born.
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jax
By catharchis on Monday, September 12th, 2011
over labor day weekend we went to jacksonville where we have an aunt who lives in a sandy bright house by ocean and we stay with her and her succulents and quiet cat and smooth floorboards and nooks and crannies. jacksonville has wretched strip malls, hot cracked pavement with leatherback pot bellied men who look like turtles stooping. also chain restaurants and terrifying political spit and your other myriad of swelter details. but there are corners and spanish moss breezeways and i think there is no finer way to find a god than to sit on a beach. it’s only after you leave really that you remember that the whole time you are with the ocean it fills your ear with its mightiness. ROARRRR. it reminded me of our childhood trips to south carolina where we would watch the sunrise over the swamps and everything smells like kelp. once we went out to fight the waves and a giant clapping thing made a commotion and big fish went hopping out of the water and i think it was a dolphin. i read a new yorker article once that described florida as the most bizarre accumulation of geography and ecosystems in the whole world….a murky, gladed, aligator alley where mosquitos the size of herons used to reign and it seems likely that all of evolution transpired right there where a Publix now stands.
we drove by little secrets like this underground apartment which has it’s backside split wide open with glass facing the sea. 
we had a terrific party thrown for us which allowed me to weave together generations of great aunts and grandmothers with red lipstick and WW2 babies who left their new york city rooftops for promises of orange groves…
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the marigold project
By catharchis on Sunday, August 28th, 2011
something carl and I are working on. yesterday we made our first garland.
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today
By catharchis on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
today i sat by the chicago river and a man who was almost 7 feet tall sauntered by. he had one of those bodies that seems screwed together at slightly wrong angles and like his hip sockets must be made of metal and glass and like his chest is hollowed out because space had to be added to him. he had a big smile on a disproportionately small head. he was smiling most likely because he made the grotesquely average polo-wearing corporate dudes with him seem like little chubby mice. anyway, it made me think of a woman i saw at my hair spot over the weekend. she was normal sized but slopped together with such offensive plastic surgery that she was like a puppet lady with a big paper mache head and i saw her big head bob past in the salon mirror and was quite taken with her strangeness. frightening.
now i’m not saying that the gentle giant man deserves the kind of hair-salon lady who would slop her face together, but my brain parsels them together as a marionette duo and in that hour of lunch i would have given almost anything to have seem them together. humans…
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DESIGN: Tony Lee Jr // As I Lay Dying reinterpreted
By catharchis on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
look at this beautiful thing this guy created!
http://www.tonyleejr.com/work/as_i_lay_dying.html
i have always loved faulkner but he does make your mind swim with fractured images and it’s terribly easy to get off track, so the idea of this visual-cliff-notes-beauty-thing makes me happy.
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goldfinch Big Man
By catharchis on Friday, August 12th, 2011
we have installed a new feeder catering to finch customers. the last few days there have been flurries of bright canary goldfinches dancing around it. they look like carl’s marigolds. they are small and I adore them particularly because I remember our childhood night-rambler-house-cat named Mike used to murder them and bring them to our door step and I have one of those forever imprint memories of brilliant gold tufts of feathers like pom pom balls on the cement porch. mike was misguided. we named these finches Clarence and Bruce because they arrived the day The Big Man Clarence Clemmons passed away.
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