C.B. Potts's Blog, page 3

Tuesday Morning

Just now, a man driving a black car drove by and took a picture of a neighbor's home. It only took a second; he turned around and drove away very promptly. And seeing him now reminds me that I've seen him before - yesterday, certainly, last week, perhaps. He had an air of scuffy professionalism; short hair beneath a baseball cap, not in fighting trim now but he's been there before, an evident agenda. He used a cheap digital camera, not a phone.

Monday Morning

I wrote about the Nazis last night, the night my husband had himself convinced that the pain in his hip was obviously incurable cancer. Not the Nazis in their heyday, but the Nazis as I knew them; decades after, old men, self-satisfied, fat, stinking of cigars and beer for breakfast. The men who were both confident and terrified, at the same time, all the time; they wore a veneer of obnoxiousness, of bluster, of righteousness. They all had wives but I don't remember them; they were women...

Tuesday Morning

There are ways to divide the world:

Things that are alive; things that are not
Things that are flammable; things that don't burn
Things that can be eaten; things that can't - not if you want to live a long time, anyway
Things that can be let go; things that must be carried
The things that you remember; things that slip away

Monday Morning

So you take your chisel and you put the edge of it here,
at this little bone knot where the ribs all come together,
you take up your hammer,
and there you go.

It is important to understand how things come apart.
Easier to take apart than to put together -
never no mind create -
but still there's an art to it.
By now you should know.

Violence is a part of it,
even well refined -
that's why old women
butchers and cooks
it's why we treat them so

Such necessary evil
is wrought by the kind.
Of such st...

Monday Morning

I dreamed the house was full of smoke. When you have a woodstove, that's not a dream you can ignore. You have to get up and check. It was both cold and unexciting in these parts round midnight; the wind had blown the fire out and I did not start it again. Dawn comes soon enough. What else are blankets for?

Thursday Morning

Imagine if you were a jellyfish and the water you were in suddenly froze solid. Yes, it is most probably a terrible experience, but before you died, you'd have an intense crystalline awareness of who you are; where your body ended and the sea began, boundaries wrought of pain are still boundaries.

That's how I feel right now, except I'm fresh thawed and moving. And maybe a little bit ferocious. There is an immensity of potential - so much could be done - and I have found my war. My...

Wednesday Morning

A chickadee just tried to drink from our Christmas lights. There's a handful of them this morning, flying fast. They look tight, feathers shining, bellies plump; this late in November sometimes that's not the case. It's been warm where they've been. It's warm here. Migrating must be easier when the whole world's not frozen beneath you.

I'm having a hard time this morning. My brain doesn't want to wrap around the things it needs to. But I wanted to write somethin...

Tuesday Noontime

The national debate regarding refugees has revealed to me sides of my fellow Americans I'd much prefer to have never seen at all. Cowards, fools and bigots - the worst ones, of course, are those who have spent a lifetime preaching at me and singing real loud about how much they love Jesus. It makes me sick and I don't think it's going to get any better. What can you do? I'll keep holding the line on my position that treating people with kindness is the only way we're going...

Monday Morning

This is a duplicate from Facebook, which I try not to do, but no time this morning:

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that matter (which is a storage medium for energy) can neither be created nor destroyed - only changed. The bombs falling from the sky right now are simply martyr seeds; killing leaders, soldiers, fathers, brothers, sons, lovers, husbands - all of whom will need avenging, meaning the cycle of killing may slow from time to time, but it will never truly stop.

Important to r...

Friday Morning

In Benin, lots of people have had polio. You don't have to have vaccines there if you believe God doesn't want you to. The ones who have grown up with withered legs - the ones who can not stand, who can not walk, who have no hope of this ever changing - do not have much in the way of economic opportunity. But there are people who will specially modify Vespa scooters so they can carry far more fuel than others, and they change up the handlebars so the bikes can be operated by using onl...