Chappaquiddick, the Big-Hearted Moose

Admittedly, in July I planned to increase the frequency of my blog posts from almost exactly one per day (which isn’t bad by typical blogospheric standards to begin with) to several (shorter ones) per day. Looking back, I find that this resulted in my output in July increasing to a whopping 1.5/day, then falling back to what may be ToddSeavey.com’s natural rhythm of 1/day. It just seems easier to find one fifteen-minute interval per day for summing up and posting the day’s thoughts than finding multiple breaks (or faking multiple breaks in one fell swoop of entry-writing).

But a more optimistic reason for wanting to stick to longer/daily is that I’m anticipating next month’s “Month of Utopia” entries, which by design will cover one utopian (or dystopian) text per day, a disproportionate chunk of the things I’ve been reading over the past few months. After that festival of musings, with November’s twentieth anniversary of the collapse of Communism upon us, anything goes and we’ll see what mood and mode seem to capture the moment (and then the future).

Prior to October and Utopia, things’ll probably stay long/daily, but if that doesn’t sound like the vicious, punky approach posited in July, here at least are some quick observations about vicious animals:

•Maybe I just needed the laugh or am deeply disturbed, but I found myself giggling aloud more times at this Onion piece about a squirrel than at any piece of theirs in recent memory.

•And you have to love this headline of theirs this week as well: “New Species of Lobster May Have Come from Outer Space.”

•These pieces in turn tempted me, perversely, to write a book-length poem called “Chappaquiddick, the Big-Hearted Moose,” if that hasn’t been done already: The big lug wants to help everyone with free healthcare, is glommed onto by a female parasite, then goes into the river and unwittingly disposes of it (but never becomes president) — the whole thing writes itself, sorry as I am for thinking of it.

I will atone by writing nice things about the Amish and abolitionists over the weekend.