Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

merry christmas!

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Well, I guess it’s a little late to be yawping out Merry Christmas upon the Hoople-trodden thoroughfare, but I’ve been OBE.* My folks and I returned last night from our annual pilgrimage to the woody shire where my brother the Hobbit Prince dwells in a wee cottage with our kindly kin and a pack of three toothsome hoodoo cats.

I amuse myself. I tease because my Bro lives in a place with lots of real trees, while I live in a handsome condo complex with tall shrubbery; lollipop trees, misbegotten of some illconsidered coupling of Edward Scissorhands and The Knights Who Say Ni.

We had a lovely time. It rained through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with even a spattering of hail to keep it exciting. It was nice and cold, which makes it all more Christmasy to me. Good old Santa always comes through, since as a group and speaking very generally, we’ve been good. There were toys to play with and an Elfin Nephew to keep good charge of that. All the family furries got new woobies to gnaw and claw and chase. Our Happy loves to make her woobies squeak; oh, how they do suffer ‘tween her teeth.

We, some of us, came down with Christmas colds, which kinda sucked. But I’m feeling better today. My head is finally clearing, if not my winterslumbering mind. Last night was admittedly miserable. Slipping down off Tejon Pass into the Santa Clarita valley, my ears plugged up and my head felt like a football in a bench vice. So it goes. Should be all cleared up in a few more days, and at least I can stay off the I-5 for the foreseeable future.

I hope you and yours had a holly jolly Christmas too, this year, and got some pudding in your stocking or whatever you’re into. And if you were the host of this year’s Dickensian fete, you might need to know how to clean your toilet with a Coke.

Here’s a Thought For The Day.

Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.
– Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
preacher, journalist and activist (1802-1861)

*Overcome by Events or Out of Body Experience, your choice.

words not made

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Eyes are vocal, tears have tongues,
And there are words not made with lungs.
– Richard Crashaw, poet (1613-1649)

Well, Christmas is upon us, on the New Calendar. I always like to note that December 25 on the Julian Calendar – the Orthodox liturgical calendar – falls on January 6 on the Calendar used by most Westerners and their governments. So Christmas in my Church is still 2.5 weeks away. But I digressed before I never started to have a point. … Oh yeah, Christmas.

No. I don’t know what I want to say to you about Christmas yet. Maybe tomorrow. Tonight, the topic is words. I’ll be briefer.

I want to change the quote of the day to read this way:

Eyes are vocal tears,
have tongues,
And there are words not made,
with lungs.

Anybody mind? Richard probably doesn’t. He’s dead, presumably. And I’m off to bed, to dream about words not made.

So much of what I’ve written,
I haven’t.

In honor of the Solstice, let us remember the words of The Chink:

Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.

inspiration

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Inspiration, move me brightly.
Light the song with sense and color
Hold away despair.
More than this I will not ask.
Faced with mysteries dark and vast,
statements just seem vain at last.

– The Grateful Dead

People

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Some of us suffer terribly,

the grass a sea of needles,

the birds singing in bitter cries

that break our hearts;

the floors unstable, the chairs

brittle and hard, their dead

wood unlovable and lost.

Some of us are singing

happily into death or into

afternoons with children

naming the shapes of clouds

that lead the shadows of force

off the sea. There is tea

in the evening and the windows

shine the inner spaces back to us.

Some of us are looking for answers,

good and evil and the best road

home, and where to stop

for the night with a dog.

Then at the end, will God still love

us if we’re spent?

Some of us can jump, dance, melt

the snow with our bodies, call down

the rain for something to laugh at,

restless in the hastening wind

or in a night without wine, spending

the hours with our ghosts.

Some of us find ourselves

in little cups left here and there

about the house, cups

chipped and faded by washing,

stained by the joy of our parents.

We hear their voices all night

in the breeze over the shingles

and in the chimney, all night.

©J. Kyle Kimberlin

2nd Draft, 12.07.2008

on blogging

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This month, in The Atlantic, senior editor Andrew Sullivan expounds on blogging:

Why I Blog – The Atlantic (November 2008)

“For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.”

no religion too

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There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham.

– Anna Sewell, writer
(1820-1878)

Amen

on turning human

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My work as a poet and writer has occasionally been accused of trying to find some elusive, perhaps illusive, commonality between the lowest denominators of human life and the grim objects of our material lives. What essence does a man share with his coffee cup, his clock, or for that matter his pen? What does a woman share with her hairbrush, with the fog beyond the window, or the buttons of her husband’s shirts?

I maintain that everything participates in Being with us, and that we see ourselves in the furniture more readily than in the future. No poem of recent memory embodies this concept better than this spare and lovely piece about a cat which is not a cat, and neither is human nor is not.

save money, space, and sanity: thoughts on ink and printing

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Several months ago, I got a low ink warning from my Canon multifunction printer. So I got some new cartridges and put them in the drawer. There they still sit, waiting for the ink to actually run out.

I don’t do a lot of printing on paper, for many reasons; e.g., it’s expensive, the paper industry pollutes like crazy, it wastes trees, and it wastes space in my place. It clutters my life. We got computers partly so we could stop writing everything down and warehousing it, right? A hard drive or a CD can store thousands upon thousands of documents.

Anyway, I do some printing, but it’s been months, and it’s still printing right along. Every time I click Print, the warning pops up and the printed page comes out. No problem.

Now PC World has published this article which confirms what I’ve long expected: that those ink warnings are often baloney. I guess we all know that printers have gotten cheaper and cheaper over the years because that’s not where they make their money. They make the dough on the ink, which is still pretty expensive.

So my thinking is this: When the warning appears, it’s a nice time to stop by the office store for a new set of cartridges. And when the page rolls out with no ink on it, it’s time to put them in the machine.

And now for something else to read:

The “Please Don’t Print this E-mail” Revolution

Corporate America Rides a Green Wave

Initially popular among a green activists, the “please don’t print this e-mail” signature has become a viral marketing phenomenon. Born in an age of on-the-spot information and quick communication, the socially responsible end-note is gaining popularity in the “cubicle armies of corporate America,” as the Los Angeles Times put it.

The L.A. Times traces the phenomenon’s origin to a 135-word Treehugger blog post that eight months ago asked readers to add this short line to their automatic e-mail signatures: “Save trees. Print Only When Necessary.”

E-mail has yet to produce the fabled “paperless office” that computing power pundits promised (According to GreenPrint Technologies, Americans use enough paper every year to build a 10-foot-high wall that would stretch from New York to Tokyo) but it’s easy enough to trim your paper waistline.

Just add your variation of the following eco-tip to your e-mail signature: “Printing emails is wasteful. Save trees and make this message go viral instead.”

Or, for a simpler call to action, just say: “Please don’t print!”

var isBlog = false; var imageUrl = “”; var path = “/environmental-news/latest/”; var pathArray = new Array(); pathArray = path.split(‘/’); for( i = 1; i ‘); } <!–The signature e-mail tag lines asking people to print only when necessary are becoming common.–> Save Trees: Please don’t print this post.

wait!

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So I’m hanging out in Coffee Bean in Montecito, down the hill from the burn. I’m talking to Bill, a retired professor of English. He lost his home in the Tea Fire a few days ago. I’m drinking apricot ceylon tea. It has an aftertaste that makes my mouth feel arid.

Bill says he’s a happy man. It’s not death, he says. He “learned about life and death and evil on Iwo,” when he was eighteen.” This fire, he implies, is not death or evil. I guess he must mean that it’s life. I have trouble accessing this level of stoicism, and offer my best, mostly-sincere, bright autumn day sympathies. He shrugs them off. What good is, “I am so sorry to hear that,” amidst the potsherds and ash? To face it is a difficult Job.

I sit with my laptop and look around: pretty girls, mauve walls, tile floors, Christmas decorations, packages of coffee and tea priced to make you proud you can afford it.

Wait … Christmas decorations? I shit you not, gentle reader.


That’s just not right. In the midst of all this life and death and evil, whatever you might imagine giving you defense or consolation in it, it is not by God Christmas time. Not yet. No sir.

Christmas comes after Thanksgiving, on any calendar you can find. Halloween, Thanksgiving, then Christmas. Add in any holidays – Hanukkah, for example – that you like, but don’t move Christmas up a month or change the order of things. It’s not offensive or sacrilegious so must as a pallid, insipid, dumbass way to enter the culture around you.

Take a step back, Jack. Let it be, is my point.

thunder, intoxication, and discontent

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Well, that was a pretty productive day, for a Saturday.

I got new brakes on the pickup truck.

Reinstalled Windows XP on this geriatric Dell desktop.

Did my volunteer thing to help a doggie in Florida get surgery.

Which is all nice and good, but I didn’t do any writing. I’m a writer. Writers write. So I sure wish I could get motivated in that direction. It’s been hard lately.I get home from work and I just want to zone out.

I recently, finally, finished a chapter in the novel. It’s pretty dramatic. Thunder, intoxication, and discontent abound. Want to read it? OK, if there’s any interest maybe I’ll post it. Leave a comment on this post. But I’m not going to post it if no one is interested.

I feel like I ought to have something to say about the fires. Over 200 homes lost here in my own backyard, and many hundreds more across southern California. All that comes to mind is Why? What on Earth has changed to make these firestorms happen? Again. I mean, besides the drought and the winds. There has to be a reason. Or not. If you know, please share.