tisiwoota

My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.

No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal-
in the rhythm of my daily soul
I do not desire-I am moved;

by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors…

Be my buffalo head nickel, my foreboding mountain, the leg I don’t have to stand on.

What if there were big things at stake?
Be my ruckus. Be my shoot-out.

Be my corduroy, my perfect non-sequitor.
Be my cedilla.

Be my circuit breaker, my prosecuting attorney, my lengthening shadows at dusk, my nest of pine needles, my second-story window, my autodialler.

Be my hilarious fugue, baroque rococo.

Be my Boolean logic, my array of pointers, my system architecture, my database management software.

Be my cascading waterfall, my oscilloscope.

My engaging imagination, my radical metonymy.
Be my stone fence.

Be my axiom.
Be my if-you-stare-long-enough-you’ll-see.
Be my subatomic particle. Be my ten lords a’ leapin’.
Be my backbeat, my key of C minor, my surly apostle, my green sea birdgirl.

Be my long strides, my inscrutable syntax, my mystic chancellery.

Be these things. Be them. Be my maximum payload, my elemental munitions, my full
complement of arms.

I’m asking for guidance here. Once I was water coiled under sand. Now I make my plea. This is errata. This is what I forgot to say before. Listen. Aren’t I your blossom, your acceptable loss? The comet is ellipse. The mitosis is continental divide. It communicates within its own enzymic parameters. I’m asking you. All this will be ours. Every desperate clutch, every extenuating syllable. Emerge, come forth.

Be my long gaunt carnivore, my nullifying vision.
Be my simmering, seething, flickering, radiating, shimmering, and undulating.
Be my hereby known as, my previously referred to, my otherwise, my elsewhere.

Be my scandalous reparté.
Be my semiotic wilderness, my midnight blue metallic, my queen’s gambit.
Be my unheralded latecomer.

Be that one move: the one where you cross over, go behind your back, put it through your legs, spin around, in midair, no look, no hands, with a wink, outstretched, half twist, and somehow escape with your eggshell intact.

Be my come on. Be my let’s go. Be my it’s a great day to be in Montezuma.
But I’m new now. I can never go back.

1. Much Fun at SFO Airport.
So, remember that CompSci PhD student who got in trouble last fall for running a website that generated fake Northwest boarding passes to publicize the ineffectiveness of ID checks at airports? Well, this past week I happened to discover his blog, and am pleased to report that his tousle with the FBI has not dissuaded him from the cause of exposing the “security theater” practices of TSA.

In one recent entry, he tells a story about one day when he passed through airport security and challenged the TSA employees about some of their procedures. His own bit of theater was going quite well, until much to his surprise, one of his bags set off the explosive detector. Oops.

After sweating it out for a few minutes, I was told that everything was fine - that my bag had tested positive for a chemical substance, but one that was common in households. Phew. I asked the TSA staffmember if I should throw away the backpack and get a new one, to avoid this experience, and he said I didn’t need to worry about it.

The one cause for concern, however, is the fact that he pulled out a logbook, wrote my boarding pass/name/date in a log, and attached the printout from the chemical analysis machine (with a big spike midpoint through the graph) - which means that the data on that search will be kept somewhere deep in the bowels of TSA, potentially, forever.

I’m new to the law - however, I am taking a couple classes at the IU Law school this semester. From my couple weeks of classes, as well as chats with various lawyers over the past few months, I gather that “standing” is a rather important thing in the legal world.

The silver lining of today’s experience, I think, is that I now have standing (should it be required) to find out exactly how long TSA is going to keep that printed out graph, what they’re going to do with it, and who “owns” it (i.e. the government, or the citizen that the data is on).

And perhaps more of us might be activists about TSA if we knew it would let us bypass the security line and get through faster.

2. Re-Naming Barack ‘Something More American’. Barack Omaha? Borat Obama?

3. Bicycle Lift Installed on Hilly Streets in Norway to Promote Cycling. I’d definitely like to live in a city with that feature. Though wouldn’t entice me much where I am at the moment, with the problem being -2F weather, not hills!

4. Maine Rejects Real ID Act. Another item on the security theater of ID requirements. Legislators cited concerns that the Act could lead to easier identify theft.

5. A Google Earth Second Life? There are some rumors going around that Google may be developing an online world… But perhaps they are just rumors.