anti:freeze

I apologize for not posting recently. With only two weeks notice to pack up our life in Portland, Oregon, my husband and I moved to Salt Lake City in early February. I will keep this site alive, but I also have a new blog dedicated solely to psychogeography in Salt Lake City. You can find it here:

west by northwest (by midwest)

Enjoy!

Recently published book reviews:

for the Los Angeles Times

review of the graphic novel Nocturnal Conspiracies by David B.

on Emusic.com

review of the audio version of Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

review of the audio version of The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

I recently reviewed the audiobook version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories for Emusic.com. Here is the link.

Enjoy!

I scrape my wisdom tooth with a knife and wonder whether the shavings, if consumed, would throw off the isotope tests in my bones. How many grams of tooth - my own tooth - would I have to swallow in order to alter the record in my patella or femur? In order to bring my bones back round to the same result as in childhood?

Like thousands of people all over the globe, I have recently fallen in love with a group of six Shiba Inu pups whose exploits have been broadcast live over the Internet via Ustream.

There are three boys: Aki (Green Collar); Ando (Blue Collar); and Akoni (Black Collar).
And three girls: Autumn (Purple Collar); Ayumi (Yellow Collar); and Amaya (Red Collar).

I love them all, but Ayumi and Akoni have my heart. Especially Akoni. He is (sometimes) the lone wolf - the outsider. When he howls, I want to scoop him up in my arms.

Every morning at 7:30 PST, I tune in to watch the puppies wrestle, chew on their toys (stuffed carrot, monkey, turkey, pumpkin; chewy rubber bones), and tear apart their puppy pads -- although, sad to say, they are now old enough for housebreaking and have started to use the doggy door to access puppy pads on the porch outside. This means the puppies will soon leave for their new homes and new lives. Separate from their siblings.

And this thing about the siblings has been torturing me. As the date approaches for the first pups to venture out to new homes (sadly, this coming weekend), all I can think about is how they will be ripped apart from their siblings - no more puppy piles in the soft bed, no more wrestling over toys, no more licking (and nibbling) ears. I know this is part of becoming a full-grown doggy, but still. I tear up just thinking about it.

And then I realize part of why I have loved this live stream so much: the chance to watch siblings be siblings. When they climb into their puppy pile and snuggle up (so tight they look like a dinner roll), nobody is left out. As it should be.

I wrap my wisdom tooth inside my brother's obituary, wanting the ink to stain the bone, and hide it in my empty jewelry box. If I could have attended the funeral, I might have slipped this in the coffin or tossed it into the grave before the diggers covered my brother over with cold Iowa dirt. I imagine an exhumation someday, when the obituary has long since rotted away, and my tooth is mistaken for his. Our bones, mistaken. That would be something.

When the greeting card aisle fails you, create your own card: interrogation transcript cut-ups, posted to cemetery.

The night of my brother’s death, I roll my wisdom teeth in my palm, listening to the click of molars, crown against crown, feeling the mangled roots poke my skin, wonder if they could pierce and infect it, even after years exposed to air. I remember when the dentist finally rooted the lower right tooth out of my jaw (the lower left had to be shattered and crushed), she played with it like a toy. "It looks like an elephant," she said. "Look at the curly roots! One of them is a trunk." I laughed as she “walked” it across the back of my hand. “These are very special and different teeth,” she said. “Very rare. I have never seen such roots before. Beautiful.” I turn the teeth over and over. They click like poker chips. I wonder whether my brother’s teeth had roots like this. Maybe this would be one thing that identified us as siblings.

More very rough notes.

Shave enamel from a dead woman’s tooth. A few milligrams are all you need to mine the isotopes - traces left behind from the water she drank as a child. These isotopes will be the same as the rain that fell where she lived as a child. Scientists have mapped out the geographic boundaries of various isotope ratios in rainfall, although some cover a broad swath, and some are identical. This is all you can mine from the teeth – nothing later than around eight years old. Teeth stop forming and changing at a young age, and so the recording clicks off: end of story. If you want to find out about the recent past, you have to dig deeper into the flesh – to the bones.

Bones complete the story – literally – remodeling quietly inside the body, changing and growing. Unlike teeth, they take in isotopes at all ages. You can mine bones for isotopes that reveal whereabouts of the past 10-20 yeas: geographic evidence that is of – not on – the body. Map out the places the dead woman once lived or frequented. Compare this with the teeth and plot out the movement.

Category: Thank you
Subcategory: for correcting the Obituary (surely this mistake happens all the time - why not a card for it?)

Category: Sympathy
Subcategory: My deepest condolences on being left out of the obituary (surely more families than mine have left family off the list?)

My brother's obituary listed the surviving siblings and their children - special nieces, they were called. Everyone including my brother's beloved dog. My sister and I - only half-sisters to him, after all - were left off the list -- either forgotten or left out or erased. Regardless of what my brother did all those years ago to ruin any chances of being a real brother to us, we still belonged on that list. Other half-siblings appeared there. An obituary should be an accurate accounting, not a public ex-communication. Not a political document. Funny, just days before an old friend told me, "The media can only be trusted for obituaries, births, and marriages. Everything else is politics." The media, I told him, is only as good as its sources. Turns out that is true for obituaries, too.

My father called to have it corrected. And we were added back in, part of the family line once again. Part of the story. Allowed to claim the loss. To grieve.

But my name was spelled wrong, and my last name left out, because even my family doesn't know me well enough to remember whether I took my husband's name (I didn't) or whether my name starts with the traditional "C" or the less traditional (and more German) "K."

Nobody bothered to correct that.

And nobody corrected the funeral home obituary at all. The private document remained as it had been - a private expression of precisely who was included and excluded, remembered and forgotten.