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I am getting so tired of fighting for my life. This life wants to be hell and I am not giving up. I want the beauty, the purpose, the love and the light. I have seen it, I do not doubt it nor the partnership with shadows. You hand me the dredges of dysfunction and of it I try to fold a miracle. Why do you want me to perish? Why must I be cruel in order to live a full life? No longer a member, I am to step on the writhing bodies of the damned? Use my strength to push aside the weak? The sheep are bleeding crocodile tears and I am cleaning the wool with a soiled tongue. 

Yours Forever,
Allyson

It is funny to say "Bukowski is right" but Bukowski is right on his epitaph to tell us not to try. Frankl tells us that our obsessions with our neurosis are in fact the foodstuffs to keep them going. We fear our fear and the fear comes to get us. We expect it, our hair turns white at the onset of this supposition. I am silly and try not to try. My attempts this year at harnessing my thoughts and reckoning with my emotions has been largely successful, however, I am all too aware of the dangers of ultimate control. I lose myself on nuances, crying tears of joy in crowds. I grow angry at the injustice on behalf of a small spider I tried to spare but lost in my hair. All in good fun, yeah?

Oh let me count the ways

Not listening to lyrics, not cleaning my car, staring at my car, hating my car, the dream cargo shorts I have in mind that don't exist and i still don't know how to thread the bobbin on my sewing machine, the gigantic handbag my therapist gave to me made out of white cow fur and red snake skin, laughing, the dream I just had about wearing a mint one-piece bathing suit with adequate side-boob and stealing my neighbor's porsche several mornings in a row, eating fried oysters and drinking halloween kool aid (ghoul-aid), writing messages to paul, having 6 pimples on the right side of my face but none on the left side, changing my pillow case, talking to my aunts all night on the phone, vitamins, crying in my car, raising my hand in class, too scared to write poetry but knowing it is the best thing for me, picking at my legs now 5 years and counting, listening to elizabeth smart interview on the radio hearing her talk about how there wasn't a good choice for sun glasses, picking my favorite alarm to hate later on

Trig Cove

Wanting to appear strong, like the asshole that takes all shit. The internet behind these screens, all these tubes, the ultimate vector through which we prostrate ourselves madly, sick little sheepies behind cadaverous 2-d veneers, mouths moving backwards "to hell with it". Come One, Come All -- A slinky whisper down the stairs.

If something happens and there is no documentation, did it ever happen? Was Spinoza right when he suggested that nothing ends? Does each moment continue on, seamlessly frozen to moving time? With no one to watch, no one to agree or condemn, no one to pat our little back and tell us how neat our efforts. Are they still efforts? This troubles me. I remind myself that what ever will happen will happen. Everything is ready. My fingernails are so long they snag my fly when i go to zip my jeans.

When i grow up i want to be an angel

I am afraid.

Bolaji

"The idea is that the creature must be graceful and angry at the same time, requiring slow, conscious movements. It is difficult. Backdrop here is just two meters high while I am two and a half with the suit on. I therefore had to be very careful how I move. While it is terribly hot inside the suit. The main mask is difficult to take off and when I finally succeed is my head wet with sweat. There is always smoke on the recording as well, so I often have breathing problems. "

"Well ... it has been a true and sad experience for him to be alone in that hotel room."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"Well ... the producers put him in a different hotel than the rest of crew, some distance away from the shooting, that he would feel extra strange and scary when he showed up. And it worked. He was always very lonely on the recording. Sat in his swing. "

"Huh?"

"Well ... he could not sit on regular chairs because he had that awkward costume wearing, so someone in the team built a swing for him to sit on when we had a break. There he sat in his loneliness and rocked in silence, with the mask on. "

Last night in a dream I was at a large banquet dinner. Everyone was dressed very well under the soft, warm lights..all of us seated very close to one another. I was wearing a long shiny dress and rings shined from each of my long fingers. Steve Martin was seated to my left and laughed earnestly at my jokes, he loved them. I thought he was great. When I woke up, I had a message waiting, telling me "your dad's in jail again." Dear God,
I GET IT. KEEP EM COMING-

(formerly known as flux or the bloody flux)

Two girls by a wood
whisper "nothing's changed"
(but nothing could)

When come question
(if ever wayfare wrought)

what should?

Now i know why i never wanted to hear what you were singing that everybody liked so much

"I don't know if this is something that other girls have experienced and I don't think it will be considered strange or anything, but...Watching a man (or anyone, really) eat an ice-cream sandwich. Oh my God, it's better than porn. Because usually they will be eaten slowly, to the point where they melt and

you have to lick between the outsides to avoid dripping.I remember the first time really enjoying it was in high school. Our high school sold them for $1. After I realized how hot this was I would offer to buy them for the boys I liked. What a perv.

Edit to add that I'm married and my husband knows about my little secret. So, occasionally and not enough to ruin it, he buys a box of them and slowly tortures me."

appel du vide

Kierkegaard uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. When the man looks over the edge, he experiences a focused fear of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying impulse to throw himself intentionally off the edge. That experience is anxiety or dread because of our complete freedom to choose to either throw oneself off or to stay put. The mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, even the most terrifying of possibilities, triggers immense feelings of dread. Kierkegaard called this our "dizziness of freedom."

King p.75

"Don't chew the Trojan gum it taste's just like rubber (AVOCA IA)."

King p.76

"All that you love will be carried away (WALTON NEB)."

I dont know what any of this

"B****  **** was at the fair this weekend. He brought his baby there. I would never bring my baby there"

I was waiting in line with some friends to go through a haunted trail this past fall. There was an infant in a stroller being pushed along by a man wearing a demented joker mask. The woman controlling the traffic said her baby went through when it was just a few months old.

I remember a radio show of some sort where they compared babies to little scientists..conducting subtle experiments, seeing how we larger humans react to various stimuli. When they push the fork off the table, we will pick it up

toungetied.avi

10 minute video. The first 5 minutes consist of an elderly woman making out with a mannequin. The video cuts out like it did in jimbo.avi halfway through, and the scene is now a group of mannequins huddled together in a circle around the camera. The lights have been dimmed, and the elderly woman is nowhere to be seen. From this point on, there is no sound.

jessica.avi

Another 4 minute cameraman video. This time he’s outside a house, talking to another young woman. They talk about canoe rides. The camera zooms out to reveal the city streets behind them occasionally.
The strange thing is: No one so far has been able to identify where this street is. Guesses have ranged everywhere from Europe to Australia to the Philippines, but there’s yet to be a match for the street shown in the video.

jimbo.avi

A 5 minute video of an obese mime performing his act. It was actually pretty funny, particularly one part where he pretends to pull up a chair, then pretends that it breaks because of his weight. In the last 30 seconds of the video, the camera cuts to static briefly and cuts back to the man sobbing quietly, still wearing mime outfit and makeup.

lickedclean.avi

A 10 minute video filmed by a hidden camera in which we see a repairman working on a washing machine for the first 2 minutes. When it’s fixed, the repairman talks to the owner briefly, and then leaves. The owner checks to make sure the repairman is gone, and he begins to lick all over the top of the washing machine. This goes on for 7 minutes.

And as everybody knows, shots of love acts can be used for goals for which I wouldn’t be available..

The story of Ida Sabelis, the first woman who had sex in a MRI-tube

by Ida Sabelis, organizational anthropologist, Heemstede The Netherlands.
(translation by Truus Pinkster, Feerwerd, The Netherlands)

MRI images produced by Sabelis and her colleagues

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ida Sabelis is a co-winner of the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine. The prize was awarded to "Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, 'Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.'[Published in British Medical Journal, vol. 319, 1999, pp 1596-1600.]."

Although one of her co-authors (Pek Van Andel) did attend the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Ida Sabelis was unable to come. She instead sent this acceptance speech to be presented on her behalf. It was read at the Ig Medical Lectures at Harvard Medical School.

In the autumn of 1991 Pek (M.V. van Andel) phoned my partner Jupp. Whenever he does that, he mostly has something special on his mind. The point was to visualize with a modern scan how it really shows when a man and a woman are making love.

As far as known it never has been done before and who knows which not foreseen, never thought images should emerge.

Apart from that it would be very beautiful to image this act. Pek suggested it should be just something for us, we are slim, and because of our background as acrobats.

In the spring of 1992 we were sitting in the train to Groningen, each with a pad on the knees to write down our conditions. We wouldn’t be only testees but should have participation in what should happen with any shots.

My background in womens movement doesn’t give me much reason to trust in advance in the humane feeling of medical men, aspecially medical specialists. And as everybody knows, shots of love acts can be used for goals for which I wouldn’t be available..

After the first conversations with Weymar Schultz and the other ‘medical gentlemen‘ very quick there is a good atmosphere Part of my being armed disappeares through the down-to-earthness and the humorous undertone of the conversation. We rather like ach other, I believe, and that’s the first condition for further cooperation really.

From the control room you have a sight through a window on the big white space where the MRI machine is arranged.In the centre of the enormous cake-tin is a tube in which people can be slide in and out by a sledge-bed. The tube is circa 60 centimetres and the height on the highest point nearly 35 centimetres. Embarred through the spectacle I withhold my thought that we probably never can embark that machine. We agree that anyhow we will try.

After some shifting with dates, 24 of October was fixed as the day. I was worried, now it was really going to happen, about the consequences. What should colleagues say? And neighbours, friends, family? An approving ‘Just something for you’ or yet: ‘How do you get this in your head to be available for such a thing‘?

But the most and most important thoughts preceding the happening yet were on ourself: how shall it be in such a sterile white tube? Would we able to switch off the surrounding and just have a good time? To have to go in such a tube needs a very great trust in what and how you do things with each other.What shall we do when one of us shall get not any sexual arrousal in ‘ that thing’? How can we help each other to do that for which we have come? Should there be some switch or such a thing with which one could connect with the closed control room? Anyway, should we nearly be stucked in that tube or still have any ‘play-room‘?

Willebrord (Weymar Schultz) was waiting for us in the hall. The MRI-building was accessible only for us. It was conspiratorial in a pleasant way, as we were walking through the empty spaces. Eduard (Mooyaart) has tuned the machinery. The window between cake-tin and control-panel is covered with large blue pieces.

But how can someone starts such a thing? Again, as in the first conversation with Willebrord, with a talk about the weather. Pek asks questions and is telling about an article he’s going to write about the things w’re doing now. Another cup of coffee and then I say "Jupp, shall we do something..." Everyone comes into action: we look at, match and pee. Suddenly I become conscious that I have a strange position: the only woman between four men, on the verge of becoming intimate with my lover in that machine, while the other three gentlemen in the next room, are operating all sorts of machinery to take a shot of our inner side.

We undress ourselves, lying down on the sledge-bed and are slided in by Eduard: We are lying on our side and facing each other.. That’s the position unto which we decided and which comes the nearest to the expectation: of the photographers gentry: on top of each other, male on top, female under. In every way we reject the idea to ly on top of each other and packed together, much too heavy and moreover a postion which for me produces hardly any arrousal.

It’s narrow in the tube -- there’s nothing other to expectate -- but it goes...I can manoevre my left hand just to the place where I wish him and above us the pitching of the magnets starts.

Than nothing for a little while. Confined by the space we make the best of it and that’s just not so uncosy. On a certain moment there’s sounding through the microphone "the erection is fully visible, including the root." Again nothing for a little while. We report the control room that their microphone has to be open as we don’t know what’s going on. The first shots are taken: "now lay down very still and holding your breath during the shot.!" Forty rythmic little bangs of the magnets above us and then one may exhale.

We are giggling a lot, because excitement, let alone of which nature, and an erection as the most visble, simply sinks down like an arrow when you have to hold your breathe during many seconds... and then going on.

Its becoming pleasantly warm in the tube and we truly succeed in enjoying each other from time to time in a familiar way. When the microphone is telling us that we may come- insofar possible- and that only we have to inform them in connection to the photo, we burst out into a roar of laughter and some moments later we do what is the purpose.

Sniggering we lay down a while before we announce that we just now like to go out. Like buns which are pushed out from the oven we are coming outside.

Enthusiasm everywhere, it works and. we get dressed quickly to look at the shots in the control room. Of course some are blurred because of movement. But some other are of an amazing beauty: that we are ! Not so much a passport photo for daily use but surely a shot that shows so much that it makes me speechless.

There, it’s my womb and surely, on that place is Jupp, naturally in a way as I know from my own sensation: below the cervix. Very clear all details of our both innersides are visible up to and including the common boundary between our both bellies.

Only two days later I’m feeling a kind of pride: we tried and succeeded!

© Copyright 2001 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

Anderson

Einstein's poem about Spinoza

How much do I love that noble man
More than I could tell with words
I fear though he'll remain alone
With a holy halo of his own.

For He so loved the world..

“I danced frightening things. They were frightened of me and therefore thought that I wanted to kill them. I did not want to kill anyone. I loved everyone, but no one loved me, and therefore I became nervous.” 

Nijinsky's delusions a haunting memento of days spent whitewashing my furniture, my legs, my lamp, the spines of my books. He was totally out of the world when he wrote in those books... seeing Romola, concerned, eyeing him fearfully as he scrawls, "They think i'm crazy but i'm not, i'm pretending." His little daughter lived in a different house, they did not want her near him.