(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 27, 2015)

The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviors in one self and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviors.

Putting on your face.
I call it Star Self-F**king.
Pitifully normal.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 26, 2015)

The tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.

The small bag of corn chips, the can of soup,
the box tray of pasta, studies of portion

marking progress through existence.
Units move from your hands to your body

whatever the form of consumption
like track loops, pudding trays and poems--

they all have their metrics, even nostalgic
collages hiding behind miscellany.

Even improvisation has its forms; every mess
and message has its borders like nuclear meltdowns

moving in waves to the California coast,
Nepalese earthquakes and the avalanche of Ever

through years of tremorfications.
The corner diatribist can always tell you

there's a horrific endlessness to it all
and many, many happy ends.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 25, 2015)

The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions.

The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.

It's late at night and I'm forty years into a very thorough and consumerist collection of the vast ouvre of Cherilyn Sarkisian, 60s street urchin turned enshrined Hollywood A-lister -- iconic up there with Halston, Bianca, Liz and Jackie.

Paper and vinyl and electromagnetic tape, discs and cassettes and books and blankets and dolls and perfumes and magnets. Words and music and ideas every one purchased from corporations and strangers and seven 7-inch picture discs bartered online from a friend I didn't know I would one day meet.

It's late and I've been the Wrecking Crew premiere, sitting in the middle
of an Albuquerque scene of sorts,  the documentary opening at the local art house with me wedged between California-Sound fanatics. I'm sitting next to an oldies DJ everybody in town seems to knows but me.

The DJ laments how political the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is, (but then aren't they all?), and how Chubby Checker has yet to be inducted. As I see Cher self-depricate through the movie, I know she's an outsider to even this outsider culture. And if we peruse the halls rosters, we can easily make her case. But omissions always mean something. My basement full of memorabilia tells me what ain't right. But that's the bias talking. The same bias that gets The Byrds inducted, those who we've just learned didn't even play on their own records, or the theatrics of Alice Cooper, or the season of Ricky Nelson, or the artifice of KISS, Madonna....I've spent a fortune but just wait until the book comes out.

Post-purchase rationalizations, aren't they all?

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 24, 2015)

*The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.:

My press-board dresser is a found poem.
Partly not-me but traces of my DNA
all over the ideas of wood.

Pointing to it I say:
this is me, something more
than nothing.

It is my romantic grain to cherish this,
to value the mass produced artifice
alongside the singular sensation.

One. Many. Me. Them.
What’s it all worth?
Bullies of values poke us

to tears and craft and craftiness.
LA street art disparaged by NYC
fashionistas. Let us drill down

the spur of all gangland critique.
Face the mural as it lays. Park the car,
face the plane and listen

to what every one is saying,
even if it’s nothing but
a minute reclaimed.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 23, 2015)

The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.

The intellectual stone:
intrepid bravado,
indissoluble substance of certitude,
the very matter of suffering
unable to dissolve its own errors
and miscalculations of how we are.

Unmovable, it burns in the sun.
It sinks in the stream and rolls
only when the other stones roll.
We love our stones. We do.
But what about the rock’s soft
cradle of soil, the embrace of earth.

Goodwill we say, (because love
implies too much), is a practice,
a radial gradient of feeling
gripping, like a muscle, the joy
and sifting go of the hard ache,
the tight cerebral prizefight ropes,
the square platform comprising a ring,
soft gong that ends the quarrel  
which was always only
gray canvass in the brain.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 22, 2015)

When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This thought an instance of “blocking” where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.

That uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.


The mind sees what is broken;  the mind chooses
broken things; the mind breaks to survive
the unmade, unfinished and unresolved.

The heart is the fixer, the clincher,  
wants to color the tongue out to the tip,
wants to fill in the oval, urging and fathoming

parts undone. Breaking and fixing the self—
the tug of war between the thready broken
and the seamless whole. Heart’s pride

is fear of death—so much the stacks
unsorted, the protest unfinished,
the game—something short of won.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 21, 2015)

Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.

That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.


The remotest Bigfoot is the easiest to believe.

Today, search for the Lock Ness monster yourself with Google’s underwater Street View.

The easy truth is hard to believe.