Here are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Ah, I have been tagged by, let’s see, Heidi, Heidi too, and Kirk (I think that is all). I should confess before I begin that I am nor going to do steps 3 and 4, even though I know that does not really keep with the spirit of the meme. I think this is going to turn out to be one of those longish posts, which may even end up needing one of these ratings.
1. I, and at least one of my brothers and maybe both, when we are really, really happy and at home, sing songs with nonesense syllable or words. And, no, I cannot give you an example, both because I cannot really remember any of them just now and because, well, such times, even in their joyfulness, are rather intimate. It is the closest us Dases come to speaking in tongues.
On the subject of speaking in tongues, my dear Uncle Virgil Bodenbach attended several charismatic churches in his time, but truth be told his tongue speaking did not sound much different than the easy, how-to method of speaking in tongues my friend Tim Garrett taught me: Repeat in quick succession, over and over again the phrase “I bought a Hyundai. Shoulda bought a Honda.” For the record I am NOT a cessationist.
2. When I was younger I was fairly athletic, not super athletic and talented, but agile enough to have a lot of fun in pick up games of soccer or football or basketball or racquetball. This still displays itself in quick bursts of speed for which the Dassler Effect is named. And I mean to be more and more athletic once again as the weight goes away. It will not be the same at this age, but whatever I can manage will be fine.
3. I once tried to get my colleagues to call me “Jack,” in honor of C. S. “Jack” Lewis and because I think it is such a cool name. Witness the user name at the bottom of this post. But then my brother, Adrian, went and called my wee nephew Jonathan Vincent “Jack” Das. Jack is so cute that I have long since forgiven him. My brother, on the other hand…. Also, he previously named his daughter Gracie, another name I liked. Now, I did not exactly have dibs on it, and what legitimate dibs can a single, marriage-delaying fellow have on baby names, but I did name a character in a story I began to write that, and, well, character names do not come from nowhere.
My other nicknames include Dassler (by accident), Dassu and Spot (from high school), and Wog, “Zimby Wog,” “Horseface Malone” (from my brothers…see item #1 above), “Neilie Pies” (from my mother and father), and “Neilie, Peelie, Lal, Gulabi” (from Pakistani grandmother, which means “blue, yellow, red, and pink”).
4. I can get quite sad and low from time to time, but even when doing well, I get achy and longing fairly consistently on Sunday afternoons and evening. Not sure exactly why, but my brother Adrian does the same. Perhaps it is because I often take naps then, and waking up from an afternoon nap is always a bit of a disorienting thing for me. Generally, it is dusk, which is another time I tend to get low, when the brightness of the day is gone and the blanket of the dark has not yet come. And in Pakistan, as often as not, when waking up of an evening you will hear the Ahzan, or Muslim call to prayer, which set against the failing of the light is one of lonliest sounds I know, though lonely is not quite the right adjective.
Also, in boarding school we would have Singspiration on Sunday nights when we would sing songs together and have a short devotional, a combination which is one of my favorite things in the world. I really enjoyed these in Junior High and High School, though on a couple Sunday evenings in elementary school, it might have only been one, my mother, who had been visiting for the weekend, was leaving to go back to our home and, well, you get the picture.
5. I believe I have it in me, or at least I have the desire in me, to one day publish a piece of writing. I am not sure what it might be, fiction or non, a memoir or something didactic, but I really want to give it a go some time.
6. I am fairly handy with tools, probably about as handy as I am athletic, or perhaps a little bit more. I helped my father in the process of doing small jobs when he was building his and other houses he was selling. One result of this was to create in me a bit of conditioned aversion which manifests itself when I enter a store like Lowe’s or Home Depot (I began to call it “Home Despot” in my mind and rearranged the letters on the logo). I don’t know that I can ever be one of those individuals or a part of a couple who are actually excited to go to such stores and enjoy spending copious amounts of time there and then working on their homes. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but just not my thing, at least not just now. This weekend though I fairly placidly went to Home Depot with a friend, selected some lumber, and put up two window AC units in her apartment. Now it took a longer time than it would have with someone who is more adept (paging Jesse Heirent), but I was very satisfied with the accomplishment.
7. I am always longing for home.
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28 Jul 2008 by Neil E. Das

Walk

23 Jul 2008 by Neil E. Das

The New “Dead Deer”

Even though the “official” title of this piece is “Fallen” or “Fall,” the unofficial title is certainly “The Dead Deer,” because that is what everybody calls it. This is a pretty polarizing piece actually. Either folk really like it, even if they still find the deer disturbing, or they cannot get past the disturbing aspect in order to see the beauty that still is retained in the deer, its glory as a creature, fallen though it be, and the beauty of its autumnal bower.
Well, I like this piece for all those reasons, and actually have been wanting to work on it a bit so as to make it a bit more stylized, and then hang it up in my house. I greatly regret that this was not taken with my latest camera, and, so, it is rather grainy when blown up. This is, indeed, part of the reason for stylizing it, to hide the graininess. And when I print out this piece (I have a gold frame already selected for it) I plan to add the finishing touch of getting some textured gold paint with flecks in it (kind of like zinc oxide for you nose, but gold) and guild the protruding ribs with it.
Weird? Perhaps, but what I want to convey is the the dying glory of the the beast and how it is a “glorious ruin,” which, indeed, will be the name for the new piece and the term which Francis Schaeffer used to describe postFall human beings, because, in the final analysis, it is that event which this scene most evokes for me.
Without further rambling, here is “glorious ruin” (make sure to view it large).