Blue
Archive
5 Dec. 1998–28 Jan. 2001
10, 28 Jan. 01
Notes from a temperate city
Went out in the rain on the L to drop off the film. Thought for a bit where I'd like to go, rather than back to sit inside and drink coffee and watch movies. Couldn't think of a single place, a single thing. Aside from the ocean, there is nothing here I missed.
...
Please, God, do not let me miss San Francisco, even though I feel like I missed the point of it to begin with. It's probably just that pining for things not yet left. Let me not be too precious—sincere, but not overly earnest. Patient. Bendy. Amen.
8 Jan. 01
Berlin Zoo
Travel (or any number of things wherein one's frame of reference constantly shifts in ways that one mostly cannot control) is like exercise: painful at first, but after awhile you realize how much Better you feel.
7 Jan. 01
Back to giant square pillows, back to skylit German attics.
...
Like a Schiele model, what was small has gotten smaller, what was not so small has stayed the same.
6 Jan. 01
I've had a pebble in my left boot since London. Pebble? Welcome to Berlin.
5 Jan. 01
Tips for travel
- Keeping your nails painted is a good way to
disguise the dirt underneath them.
- Walking very quickly is a good way to get
mistaken for a local and asked for directions,
usually in a language you do not speak.
- Coffee can help you forget how long it's been since you've eaten. Don't forget to add milk so as not to get too jittery.
Zentralfriedhof, Vienna
Ravens look costumed—their beaks too big, and bleached. I keep looking at the backs of their heads, for the strings.
4 Jan. 00
Munich-Vienna (EC Béla Bartók)
It's funny now how I see these white hairs on my dark clothes and think first: What old lady did I bump into?
...
Someone taking a balloon ride over the Alps, under a dim white winter sun.
...
My remaining train tickets (their original folder having fallen apart some days ago) are now housed in a Norwegian phone company envelope. Things like this no longer seem strange, and in fact, are barely even notable.
...
I can still see the balloon. Like the moon, it seems to be following us.
12 minutes east of Salzburg
Fir, alder, poplar, birch. Farmland, river bottom, hill and of course dale. Only the churches—the domes more elongated than Munich's onions—and the depth of the snow let me know for certain that I'm not at home.
And a strange thing yesterday: In the Great Court of the British Museum, looking toward the entrance soon before leaving, was the first time I looked forward to going back. The evening was spent being periodically tired of travelling, and now these, such reminders of home.
3 Jan. 01
London-Paris
You can tell the Eurostar is high-class by the Coloured Toilet Paper: pink, in rough little rectangles, like something to wrap gifts in.
Paris-Munich
I now feel like I know all these things: how to be comfortable (in all ways) doing my "toilette" in the washroom of a speeding train at night; to sleep in the coolest clothes possible (temperature-wise) because it is often too hot in the berths; to accordion-pleat the blanket at the foot of my bunk because it is often too cold (this last thing, though, I learned from my mother long ago).
2 Jan. 01
Back at the Vicarage
Several things have occurred to me today, for the first time or the tenth: That writing is hard work—time-consuming and occasionally tedious (first); that I tend to judge societies by things like signage, escalators, the quietude of children, etc. (tenth).
1 Jan. 01
An overdue observation
The reader-boards in the Tube stations have drop caps. I am repeatedly tickled by this.
31 Dec. 00
Vicarage Hotel, Kensington
There is something not at all unpleasant about waking up on one's first morning in London, fully believing one is almost late for breakfast, only to find, when putting on one's watch, that one's alarm clock is still telling CET. For one thing, there is a little electric kettle. For another, there is tea.
And I am thinking, as I sit here with my tea, at precisely the time (08:00 GMT) that I'd wanted to wake up originally (even though I am a bit worse for wear after all those pints after yesterday's long, long day), that maybe I shouldn't have reset the clock after all. ...
The sun is coming up (once again, pinkly) over our little street. Everything stands in some hyper-real sharp relief: the bare trees, the white townhouses across the way, the big brick and slate and many-chimneyed buildings across Church Street. The skies are still blue. It's a beautiful day.
Kensington Park
In Oslo the birdshit is a uniform medium green. The ice from the Kensington pond breaks underfoot like glass where it's strewn across the path.
30 Dec. 00
England, England
The snow has followed me (just a dusting) even here. But (and it takes me a good five minutes to notice this) a clear blue sky.
Ashford
Signs in English—how odd-looking. The train, stopped, intones like an elephant, or a dinosaur—much more the latter as we scream into tunnels.
29 Dec. 00
København-Hamburg (EC Thomas Mann)
Special bonus trip: Most people had left the train car. I of course was reading. I picked up a card from the pocket by the window: "Safety in tunnel." So why were we stopped there? For so long? And why (yes, dear reader, it took me several minutes to get to this point. No laughing, please) were we rocking gently from side to side?
I stepped out into the tunnel, which was marked "Deck 3": a fairly posh ferry boat called the Deutschland (which, yes, at long last I have learned to spell with one E).
I went outside twice (once with a hat, even— neither so good for this, my third day of Aggressive Sniffles. I mixed my Aspégic [powdered aspirin and lysine—the happy amino acid—lightly lemon-flavored] with Orange Fanta. Was I leaning preciously picturesquely on the rails? Perhaps, although really I was just trying to keep my hat over my ears and on, and gazing into the waves we sent toward imaginary shores).
29 Dec. 00
One definition of love
Two people leaning together over a campfire, grinning like fools, dropping twigs in.
27 Dec. 00
Oslo
Snow, terrible head cold (my coffee's cold, too); strange dreams last night: college reunion, F. playing (albeit creakily) softball, moving out of my mother's (fictional) house on the coast (mail piled up—mostly literary magazines of questionable design and inferior paper quality (think Asimov) where one was supposed to publish first). Something about a kitchen, some pretty Asian girl putting rice in the cornmeal she was cooking, making me (after sticking a finger in the pot) not want any (not like any had been offered), then something about a man who had become a woman: some of her colleagues didn't know, but large famous books, etc. had been written about her so how could they not (I mean, how to explain all those scientists following her around)? Then in a big car with grown-up people on a crowded road by the sea where boats were going out and people were stopped and watching. F. said something at my window which I couldn't see him say (something about not taking his physics magazines (they were poetry) before he had finished reading them), then disappeared.
I got out to look at the boats with a bunch of old ladies milling about and got splashed by a wave just as I sat down. Then in the soft sand (mostly before that we had been walking on small pebbles) there was a huge sucking sound and we watched a sinkhole open up (with a tiny shallow one beside it) that sucked the water down down down and back to sea.
I had clambered up the rocky bank when I neared the noise, but then ... I don't think I jumped so much as was compelled to fall. I landed on my back about two feet down, bent into a little ball, arms and legs sticking up, head less so. I could see some sand fall in and the sun as though from very far away and people's faces. Someone tossed me the sleeve of a summer plaid button-down shirt and, almost falling in, being careful of the crumbly edges, pulled me out. Then I woke up.
Now, head very stuffy, I sit here in the window and watch the snow, finding I can barely stay awake. The snow just falls and falls.
26 Dec. 00
Boxing night: Snow!
25 Dec. 00
On my plate at Christmas in Oslo
Husk at
elske,
mens du tør det.
Husk at
leve,
mens du gør det.
—Piet Hein
[For those of you whose Norwegian is a little rusty:
Remember to
love,
while you dare.
Remember to
live,
while you do.]
23 Dec. 00
What a hoot: Did you make any friends in Munich? Yes, but only after I left.
20 Dec. 00
Major themes
Patience, faith, gratitude, grace.
19 Dec. 00
Praha-Nürnberg
You can take the infrastructure away from the Communists, but you'll be hard-pressed to take the Communism out of the infrastructure.
One case in point: I just spent 45 minutes standing in line at the one open ticket window in the main train station in Prague. When I got to the head of the line and asked for a seat on the next train to Stuttgart, the woman said, "I'm sorry, I don't know when is the next train." "1:09," I said. She paused. "I think you'll have to change trains on the way." OK. ... "Can you tell me where?" "No, you have to go to Information."
I could go on (and probably will at some point), but it makes me feel all shrill and American, so I won't. But here's another Prague hint: If there is anything you need here which requires standing in a line, pretend you are at Disneyland. Because that is how long you will have to wait.
18 Dec. 00
A Prague hint
Beware the fake-wood-grained escalators. If they made them this fast in the states, no one under 12 would be allowed to ride them.
More fun with words
Nárocný, postvetit, vyoská pec.
15 Dec. 00
Hotel Evropa, Prague
Ludovic the night clerk is a sculptor, and a mystic. We go on adventures—on tours of this hundred-year-old art nouveau shipwreck—until two o'clock in the morning. His little dog Gigi comes with us or stands guard at the desk as she sees fit (the security guard, in regulation three-piece gray pinstripes, lounges in the now-dark reception office).
It is here that I learn about Communist-era hot water: That if you wait long enough, are very, very patient, and sometimes if it is your lucky day, you will get it. Tomorrow I will move into a room with no bathroom, since there is little point.
And I do like my en suite—the toilet flushes threateningly from eight feet up—but it is, after all, retrofitted— the down-the-hall bath is original—we went to see the bas relief, the Turkish lamp over the fourth-floor foyer, the secret rooms in a far-off wing for 700 crowns a night.
But I love my room, with its fainting couch and dressing table and double doors (not -wide, but -deep, so there's warning if someone's coming in), the outer door with the trick lock—lsometimes you have to turn it three times, sometimes two before the handle will turn.
Kavárna Slavia
Two men in a blue and purple pickup truck, at a corner, stalled, in the way of a tram. The drivers open their facing doors. They consult. The tram driver (white shirt, dark blue tie and sweater vest [and yes, pants— don't get smart]) comes over to help push. They maneuver the truck out of the way. Two tram passengers leave (this was before). The tram driver does that manly slapping together of the hands that means "greasy" and "job well done" all at the same time.
14 Dec. 00
The unfortunately named Vanillekrapfel
I love Müller Brot, but ... I've had Krispy Kremes, und Herren, this is no Krispy Kreme.
München-Praha
The high-pitched whistle from the platform. The minute hand clicks to 49. The doors close; a pause; we're off.
We speed through the train yard into the outlying industrial areas. Another train overtakes us from the left, its first car empty, the rest filled with passengers I muse are smug at their passing.
13 Dec. 00
What does this mean, "concede"?
If you want to read happy stuff about music and adorable babies, please see the expanded entry below. Because you sure don't want to look inside my brain as I gaze at today's Salon's front page and behold the insipid visage of that [gnashes teeth, attempts deep breath] smug nincompoop, who now, apparently, runs the ranch. Oh the world is going to have a field day with us, and it's about time. Expatriation, anyone? Oh wait ... I already did. Ha ha. Ha ha ha.
9 Dec. 00
Another small miracle
This morning I woke up in what these days is known as my very own bed. It turns out that the person Molly is subletting from, who currently lives in Zurich, who has the only extra set of keys, is not only in Munich for the weekend, but, when I called him (just two and a half hours after discovering my distinct lack of keys), was having a beer at the Brauhaus across the street from the building out of which I was locked. Wow.
...
So. Foiled in my attempt to get a Budapest guidebook from the Anglia English Bookshop (they close at 2 on Saturdays, and not 4 like I thought), and am not up, I think, to trying to get through the X-mas crowds to Hugendubel (the big bookstore). It took half an hour yesterday to walk the four or so blocks from Karlsplatz to Marienplatz. Yes, that included a brief stop for chestnuts, but it was brief.
About an hour of my early afternoon was spent in the Karlsplatz U-Bahn station, having come across a particularly inspired bar band playing there. I grabbed ein kleines Bier and joined at one of the stand-up tables, among other people, Christof, a produce wholesaler from Hannover.
We talked about politics and vegetables and holidays, tried to figure out whether some song was by Bryan Adams or Bruce Springsteen (I'm almost sure it was the former, but was sort of horrified to admit that he had a point. ...)
I had never seen so many people in an U-Bahn station before. Another interesting U-Fact, discovered, unfortunately, while finally boarding a train at Marienplatz in a veritable sea of people: When the doors close, they close hard.
"Wherever you go, take the weather with you."
...
Why is it so much easier to listen than to speak?
His name is Paul
It is also sometimes Maus. He is maybe 2 and very blond. He can almost say "Hallo" in a way that sounds like "Hallo" and not like mystery baby syllables. His parents are extremely nice. Paul comes to visit me kind of a lot while I am waiting for my food, and sometimes after that.
Now he is walking around (mit Papa), talking to everyone (Mama is—now peacefully— eating currywurst). He is working the room. Everyone loves him. Cranky must surely apply to him sometimes, but I am convinced obnoxious never does.
...
Drunken older couple sitting at the table nearest the door. At any moment I expect them to break into song. Disapproving older gentleman (like Beckett in a sweater vest) sits at the table on the other side of the door and occasionally glowers in their direction. He, of course, finds Paul to be a perfect gentleman.
...
Ach, they are gone. "Ciao" from Papa, "Tschuss" from Mama, waves and grins from Paul.
Later that same evening
This is why I travel: so I can wander cobblestone side streets on rainy evenings looking for something I've only ever seen out my kitchen window.
8 Dec. 00
Ach, je!
Earlier this evening I stopped to write "There are few problems that a nice mug of glühwein can't solve," when I discovered that I had no pen. It was in the search for said pen that I realized what else I was missing: house keys.
This would not be such a big deal if Molly wasn't out of town for the weekend ... in Chicago.
If I were to take this as a sign, it would be that I should have left town for the weekend too, like I'd planned, rather than wandering around here. As she comes back on Monday, I may end up doing that after all. I just hadn't planned on doing it with one change of clothes and my least comfortable pair of shoes.
What was it Buddha said? Three things: attention, attention, attention.
6 Dec. 00
Extra!
First car alarm! 3 a.m. Just honking. Mercifully short? But repeated: Oof. And again: Ach. And again: Mein Gott. And again?! Verpiss dich! And again ... VERDAMMTE SCHEIßE!! (Zzzzzzzz. ...) [Ed. note: It went off several more times, yes, but my dictionary is small, and I ran out of swear words.]
5 Dec. 00
A popular slogan for the, er, apparently united Munich beer front, rhymes, but only in English: "Die Welt sagt 'prost' mit Münchner Bier," but "The world says 'Cheers' with Munich beer." ...
3 Dec. 00
Our apartment is like an Arab tent in a pre-War Warner Brothers cartoon. You might almost pass the plain entrance by, the safety glass on the door in an irregular starburst shatter. But come in through the dark (and, admittedly slightly dingy) foyer, up the (need I mention it again? :) hundred and eight steps, and step into, well, light.
We have windows and skylights that altogether face three compass points as well as of course skyward (one of those over my bed has a rather imposing view of the huge chimney—something at which my erstwhile California self alternately shudders and smiles). Six floors up, the view of the tidy red rooftops on clear days goes on for miles.
There's a bakery downstairs and around the corner with 1DM specials every day. The bakers are jovial, mustachioed—although we startled the taller one last Friday morning, around 2:30. He was just taking the first trays out of the oven and we were coming back from jazz, fairly drunk and very incoherent—in at least two languages! Still, I wave whenever I go by. The other guy always waves back. ;)
We discovered the little flea market in the alley around the corner and across the street just yesterday. I'd seen the sign for weeks, and finally asked, "Molly, what's a Trödelmarkt?"
She stopped and bugged her eyes and grinned and said "Flöhmarkt." Flea market.
Luckily we were both hungry and fairly short on time. It's small, but afternoon-type small.
...
We saw the Veens last night! They're in town for Jeff's speaking/teaching tour, which is taking them to all manner of enviably wonderful places. We drank Glühwein and wandered around the Christkindlmarkt, which had just opened that day, and watched the lighting of the tree, that looked large even in front of the Rathaus.
Then we went to the Paulaner for Wurst and beer, then off to our respective sleeps.
Now the sun is all the way up and Advent bells echo all over town and I gotta go, gotta go.
...
America really needs to revisit the whole "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" thing. Jeff V. says they're "like tiny mashed potatoes." All that plus the merest hint of cinnamon, the ideological bent of toasted marshmallows, what boiled peanuts wish they could grow up to be. Nine for 4DM. Some guys bare-hand them right off the pan. ...
1 Dec. 00
Last night we discovered that we live two blocks from possibly the coolest (not to mention smallest) jazz club on the planet. Who'da thunk?
29 Nov. 00
München redux
If one has been drumming one's fingers on the desk waiting for something new here (all four of you, yes ;), one might wish to skip down to the 18th and read up from there.
...
This morning the sun came out and I danced to Elvis Costello, across the bare floors in plaid pajamas.
28 Nov. 00
Today I balanced my checkbook, and sang all afternoon.
26 Nov. 00
Stazione Signa
What I will miss most: Sunday dueling church bell din.
Firenze-Assisi
Florence is indeed so gorgeous it makes you want to cry. And I'm actually glad I'm too old to buy a second-class train pass. I usually travel that way anyway, but (especially when one is tired, sad, cold, and/or damp) first can be comforting from time to time.
...
I want to know what the air does when two trains pass each other, especially at high speeds, when sometimes they make that popping sound.
...
How can we fail to do things the failing of which we know we'll regret later: buying little calendars in Florence for people for Christmas; buying the ducks with heads and feet, then buying a cleaver?
...
There are beginning to be villas, and the occasional castle.
...
Rather than trying to get to "the warm countries," which of course are not currently warm, I going to come about, change tack, and head, almost invariably after this, into the cold.
...
There are almost as many dogs, it seems, in Italy as there are in France, only here they're larger, and more surly.
Assisi
All manner of weather here today: clouds, sun, rain, hail, thunder, lightning; then the stranges sunset—in rolling near-dark, a finger of yellow fire pointing through black clouds onto the hills, then later a shallow band of pink lying across, then darkness.
25 Nov. 00
Casa Rossa
A pre-winter sun fires out across the Tuscan plain. The Arno lies in cloud-shadow. Trains snake along it, separated by rows of trees, the tracks mirroring the river's course. Larger trains make enough rumble that I first scan the still-cloudy skies for departing planes. A bee half the size of my thumb (they are small thumbs, but still) flies slowly past, listing to the rear.
It's the cypresses I love most of all. (I always liked the background of La Joconde the best, which is all about the cypresses, the villas and hills.) Old men who stay at your side until they are sure you have in fact managed to make the phone work (most do not; keep this in mind before you waste time being frustrated).
The estate wine they bring us a case at a time (there are nine of us, but still), and moreover the cloudy green olive oil, just pressed, just bottled (all down the hill from here), that smells and tastes like olives, with an aftertaste of pepper—the oil we spent days pouring over almost everything, that we place bets who will be caught drinking first, out of the green-stemmed apertif glasses, or the pale blue espresso cups.
I am out on the veranda, at the top of a hill, overlooking a sickle-shaped swath of Signa, Florence, the hills beyond. The coffee is of course very good—we seem to drink up as much as we can buy. The wine as well. Last night we managed to have bottles to spare, I think. This is a first. [Editor's note: It was when I went to bed at just before 2. At 4:30 it was evidently a different story.]
I don't think I regret not having eaten in a restaurant yet, although I probably will later. But we have a fabulous kitchen. And so much food. A duck and four chickens at Thanksgiving: stuffed with juiced lemons, and rosemary and sage from the yard, salted inside and out (of course), then oiled, then basted occasionally with a mixture of The Oil, lemon juice, dijon, and acacia honey, surrounded by onions, carrots, and potatoes. I didn't cook them— mostly just pointed, bellowed, and drank (the root vegetables, however, were Molly's idea). And, like a true chef, most of the credit and all of the accolades were either pointed or redirected at me. A gunshot just cracked from the vineyard next door. I see an older man tramping through the trees beside, holding a rifle regulation style (pointing up). His careful steps convince me I can stay put. And, except that I've now run out of coffee, I would. Immediately, and in a larger sense, I wonder what he's shooting at.
...
Last night I dreamed about rabbits or cats or dogs: something warm I held.
23 Nov. 00
I have made the coffee much too strong. I hear songbirds and wish for a cat, or a pellet gun.
22 Nov. 00
Outside Innsbruck
Hills. Tunnels. Fortress. Snow.
This is a work-day, this train. 9:30 to 5:30. What's your job? I ride on trains.
Above Firenze
Last night I dreamed (again) about my mother and (for the first time) baseball. No apple pie, though.
A pleasant exile tonight, upstairs to a midway room with a fainting couch with a bolster and a quilted coverlet that fits just so. Might be too warm up here, but after being cold all night last night, this should not be terrible. under the eaves with a little Persian throw rug.
19 Nov. 00
CdP
"Une poème par Paul Verlaine, pour la jeune Américaine."
18 Nov. 00
Paris
It is silly how happy I am to be drinking middling café crème in the Gare de L'Est before sunrise. I want to kiss the ground.
Later, sitting by the pyramids, I realize I am startled that it's still dark, then that I have not been up at this hour for quite some time. It's a mess here. I love it.
...
Mon dieu, entire sentences come out of my mouth. I am so happy.
A Tip
The payphone downstairs at Au Chien Qui Fume is a welcome touch (especially if it is after 2 p.m. and you still don't have a place to stay for the night). Also: Right now it is all about the Beaujolais Nouveau. Don't kid yourself into thinking you want anything else; you will only be disappointed.
17 Nov. 00
Quotidian details
Yesterday I cut my hair, with sewing scissors. It does not look bad. Today it rains. Tonight to Paris.
15 Nov. 00
SDA.de???
So I keep seeing these two American "Elders"— first on the U-bahn, now on Marienplatz, only this time the one with the braying voice isn't braying, but playing a particularly jaunty version of "This Land Is Your Land" on the harmonica. Then, just down the way, a table staffed with women, one of them standing to the side and singing, from a book, and not badly.
Momentary Grace
I found a girl's wallet on the steps at Sendlinger Tor. Then I found the girl.
And not only because I am bad, and keep forgetting
The very good and nice friend of mine who invited me to Munich has been writing a lot of things lately which are ever so much more comprehensible than what I've been doing here. Longer, too. Go see Molly now, ja?
13 Nov. 00
Oh, ja, I am somewhere between Schwabing and St. Ludwig's. My hair is a catastrophe. I am almost but not quite (in fact, intermittently) running out of ink. I feel somehow ill-mannered. I am at Caffè Greco, where there is Greek music but no Greek food. I am about to have spaghetti and beer. I have absolutely no idea why I didn't order wine.
(Answer: Because the beer here is delicious. Because it is full of starch. Because I have walked a long way. Because I am in Germany, for God's sake. I did not come here to drink wine.)
14 Nov. 00
Breakfast, unassisted. Postcards, churches, etc. But still. Paris pulls like a magnet—the one of three familiar things here—the only one I feel I can get to with any sense of regularity or ease.
The clouds have arrived a day early, depending on who you believe. It's still not truly cold.
12 Nov. 00
Homily
And of course the only words I understood were "love," "faith," and "gift."
11 Nov. 00
How many more times?
Am I Jason or Job? [I shouldn't complain but] I've lost count already.
10 Nov. 00
"What the fuck am I doing here?" has crossed my mind more than once. So has the discovery that the literal translation of "angst" is "fear." "Time will only tell" is irritating as hell, but nowhere near untrue.
I feel like my glasses are suddenly the wrong prescription (I've felt this way for days), and marvel at the universality of pigeons and crows.
...
The old women have thick ankles and wonderful hats. There are too many Burberry scarves. The wind is like ice.
...
It may be true: I flew too fast, and my soul has not had time to catch up.
In other words
Fun with dictionaries: demanding, consecrate, blast furnace.
8 Nov. 00
Frankfurt
How is it, yes, that you are one day doing something as mundane as drinking jug wine and playing Trivial Pursuit with your family and some other day soon after are in a country where you can really only smile and nod (no, yes, maybe, good morning, good night, one to a hundred, excuse me)?
Munich
Somehow someone asked me to help ring the bells at St. Stephan's. Somehow I did.
7 Nov. 00
En route
Airline seatmates previously unknown to you should be either interesting or asleep.
...
"Gourmet" pepperoni pizza: Ah, the last taste of crappy American food. Now on search for crappy European food. Convinced beforehand that there isn't any.
...
Inexplicable feelings: not nostalgia, not cold feet. I ask over and over again if this is the right thing to do, and hear every time kindly but exasperated sighs of "Of course it is. What, you want a map?"
I've called everyone there is to call. Anyone else would only pre-scar wounds that aren't even there yet.
...
I can't even say "all I can say is"; I can't even say "all I know."
...
And the words I really want are things like "but," "other," "only"— "I feel," not only (always) "I am."
3 Nov. 00
Achtung, baby! Contrary to popular belief, postal mail is probably not such a good idea, unless you send it to my mom's house, and are very patient about a reply.
28 Oct. 00
27 Oct. 00
Moving
After one cup of coffee, shaking like I've had ten. It's not that cold. It's not that warm. I think of "like a leaf," or, "like a leaf in a storm"—all those clichés which serve to distract from things lurking, not at all unkindly, just beyond where I can bring myself to look.
25 Oct. 00
If hope is its own food group, fear is like a tapeworm: Lure it into the open and you can be saved.
24 Oct. 00
When building houses of cards, it is seemly to avoid looking surprised when they fall down.
22 Oct. 00
Just replaced the battery in my car, with the "help" of my neighbor Joe, whose acquaintance I made while at the auto parts store. He reminds me of my grandpa, who would be about the same age, with the same full head of slicked back almost-white hair, and who used to have the same car, within a year or two ('50s T-bird).
Joe drove me and my new battery home (a relief after the walk with the old one). The help was "help" not because it wasn't good help, but because I didn't need it, but I let him give it anyway, because he wanted to, and because it's nice to work on cars in the sun with someone who reminds you of your grandpa. In other words: I learned something important today, and it had nothing to do with auto parts.
20 Oct. 00
Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen. [Hebrews 11:1]
11 Oct. 00
Ah, fall. The smells of Camembert, burning dust (the furnace), and un petit air de natural gas (also the furnace). (And no, I can't figure out how I lit the pilot (again), only that (as usual), on the second day of trying, it stayed lit.)
5 Oct. 00
Working: Editing the RU-486 (excuse me, Mifeprex) monograph.
Loafing: Looking at pictures of Belgrade on fire.
Wondering: If freedom always involves destruction of some sort or another and, if so, why?
4 Oct. 00
My God ... I'm full of angst. [Cue Planets.]
3 Oct. 00
Thinking: Airports where your flights connect are no-man's-lands. Thinking also: Since it's impossible to have read everything there is to read, the likelihood of this thought having been not only previously thunk, but both written and read, is quite high. Thinking yet again: So what?
1 Oct. 00
Weevils wobble but they don't fall down. Unless you pour Pine-Sol on them.
28 Sept. 00
Truth be told, I haven't finished unpacking from my last trip. I never really do, until I'm ready to go again.
Judging by boxes (I now have only three, in the living room closet, a new record), I've been in transit my whole life—never really settling in—never completely at home (Old Testament perched, packed, waiting)—barricaded, but nonetheless ready to go.
27 Sept. 00
It's so typical, this seeing-things-for-the- first-time feeling. Sitting in Union Square soon after sunrise, staring-down pigeons, watching the light creep down the St. Francis Hotel, remembering my grandparents taking me there more than 20 years ago just to ride the elevator. My eyes well up to think of how much time has passed.
Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.
...
(The stupid juxtapositions of this town are not its greatest fault.)
24 Sept. 00
Sundress days spin into flannel-pajama nights, reminding me ever more loudly that Time Is Passing.
I gave notice on my apartment today. Surprisingly, that made things seem more unreal, rather than real like I thought it would.
20 Sept. 00
After all the heat, the city is obscured by fog. A walk down Mission Street reveals that the random Latino gift shops—with their white frilly dresses and rubberized crucifixes and lurid wall-clock Virgins—are all run by Cantonese. It is almost fully dark at 7:15.
They no longer sell prayer cards at Walgreens at 23rd. This neighborhood really is going to hell in a handbasket.
(I try to focus on things that I know to be true. To be, in Myers-Briggs-speak, more observant than introspective. I am trying to keep myself out of trouble. Trying.)
17 Sept. 00
It's particularly difficult to remain calm these days, realizing that my quasi-zen detachment is something to which I aspire rather than something I possess— and that it's been, at least up to this point, a good part hubris. "Oh yeah?" I think. "Look at me—I'm so calm." Mm-hmm.
Now there are sometimes these fibrillations of fear, about any number of things. Little moments of pre-panic that I try to let slide by: Holding onto them just makes their teeth sink in.
(Observation: a red balloon with a Masonic seal, caught in some shrubbery near the train station.)
...
And of course now I get the urge to go run, now that it's a hundred and five. "I'm antsy," I think. "I'm brooding. I'll go run awhile and then I'll feel better." At least my self-defeating thoughts are getting more humorous. ...
15 Sept. 00
Leave in silence.
14 Sept. 00
This morning I dreamed of an imaginary Beckett play based on an imaginary Manet painting, both of which, at least in the program I was looking at, I found quite tiresome.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
(Apologies to Grace Paley.)
Dropped off all the film in the Castro; took a bus up to my favorite stationery store on almost-Pac-Heights Fillmore. Out of light blue, so dove grey instead: not entirely inappropriate.
Walked up to Broadway, then left—toward North Beach with the water in view off port; arbitrariness of fog and sun. Wearing the same shoes as when we traipsed around Wheeling (brown oxfords; two-inch heels). Signs I notice now: bus 33 (Geneva/Munich). Germania Street. Et cetera.
Heading back to where I started. Five years ago almost to the day: Specs, for beer, scribbling, and song. Because home (what's that?) to what?
...
When you get to the driving terminus of Broadway going east, the hint of your reward appears slowly over the crest of the hill: a pyramid; a bridge tower.
Then you can sit on a bench just on the leeward side, see half of downtown and the Bay Bridge halfway to Treasure Island. A soft sea breeze blows. The wild parrot flock squawks, cavorting somewhere just out of sight.
Do not be seduced: This town is much more like the walk than the view.
(A Brief Analysis of Transcontinental Beer
The reason one can painlessly drink half a dozen Shiner Bocks at two sittings must mean that they're virtually alcohol-free. Because: One now remembers why Rainier Ale is called "Green Death"; one is glad one did not have two.)
...
Half a block of 4th, between Bluxome and Townsend, is gone. That's how long I was away.
28 Aug.–13 Sept. 00
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
An Essay in Many, Many Parts, by Magdalen Powers, grade ??.
Theme: Loud insects (except in Texas).
Anti-theme: Coffee. Difficult to find, especially in places such as, say, Columbus, Ohio.
(Let's start at the very beginning.)
13 Sept. 00
Austin, TX
It's 4:45 in the morning here and I am inexplicably awake. Not especially hot or thirsty, not particularly beset by nightmares or noise. It's 2:45 at home, 6:45 in Halifax, 11:45 in Germany, et cetera. Time has ceased to have a whole lot of meaning.
Flying out tonight at 5:30 (aka 3:30, 7:30, 12:30 Thursday, etc.), returning to things not entirely known or unknown, feeling, as one would expect, not entirely glad or sorry to be going back.
Houston
Streaming rain; a rainbow opposite a sunset so beautiful I wanted to applaud.
Houston to San Francisco
Sitting in the middle of a family of four before taking advantage of the relative emptiness of the plane to take a row for myself, and to let them sit together.
Before I moved, the mom (a less spooked-looking Sissy Spacek type) noticed what I was reading, commented about what a great book it was, said across the aisle, "Hey, honey, look ... Blue Highways." Then she told me they'd been on one of the roads in the book—in Appalachia—across the country on bicycles for six months.
The kids looked about 5 and 9. "This was before we were married. We figured it'd be a good test."
She talked about staying with coal miners in the east, millionaires in the west. Laughed and said that's what was good about travel: meeting real people. I couldn't agree more. Safe trip, everyone.
Night Flight "Home"
Finished this trip as I began it: About an hour of stolen sleep five or six miles above ground. Fog below like soft-serve. Evidently 70 degrees. Half an hour early getting in. Doesn't it just figure.
10 Sept. 00
Nunc et Semper
Normally I only cry like this when I'm leaving home. I've now done it twice this trip.
More Sub-themes
- Church St.: Every town.
- Lines to no lines to gravel.
Newark to Austin
Any time you want to dis Maxfield Parrish, just remember that he never saw a sunset from 35,000 feet.
...
Baby like a playground whistle.
9 Sept. 00
Bethlehem, CT
Today: Secondhand blessings. Yesterday: Mother Margaret Georgina hanging from a rafter in the dairy barn, swinging a few moments in tea-length blue denim before dropping to the hay-strewn floor below.
Really, though, it's just as much Vermeer and Brueghel as it is Salgado or Lange.
8 Sept. 00
Terce and Mass
Slight crashing just off the trail from the church, then: whitetails, bounding up the hill.
...
All that black. All that silence.
...
There are stories I want to write, but I don't want to offend or jinx. We have been apart now long enough for my mind to start its own editing process: reinterpreting things which at the time required no interpretation, into memorials of blindness, stupidity, wishful thinking. This is habit, protection, hedging my bets; not quite ready to risk everything. In all of these sissified tendencies, I am disappointed.
Escape into labor. Into dirt under nails. Wild turkeys and deer. Crickets at all hours.
(Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.)
...
Pray
without
ceasing.
Rugged Collectivism
(Apologies to my favorite expat.)
Three hundred and fifty-two bales. Fresh-cut clover, with crickets peeking out of every one. Five gallons of water, five gallons of pink lemonade, five gallons of white with crushed ice and mint (that we scooped out of the top instead of pouring out the spigot, to get the ice).
Sister Azar winks and says, "Life isn't always this affirming."
Riding back up for the last load, approaching 5:15, I ask if there's special dispensation to miss prayer for haying. Mother Margaret Georgina smiles and says, "Vespers happens."
Forearms stung from a hundred little scratches, back hurts already. There is nothing ethereal here; plenty transcendent. I am learning there is a difference. I am learning, truth be told, a great number of things.
7 Sept. 00
I-84 East
Finally (live) deer: two fawns, one spotted, just outside Danbury.
Lost in Connecticut
Incredible urge to play Cowboys and Indians. Where are my homemade moccasins now?
St. Gregory's women's guest house, Abbey of Regina Laudis, O.S.B., Bethlehem, CT
Sub-theme: Being lost.
The concentric-circle system of navigation is marginally effective, if irritating. I am only slightly better with a map.
Made it here eventually; was scared half to death by the prioress. Finally made it to the guest house, found my room, put things down. Am in need of guidance and a snack. Vespers at 5; 2:50 now. Tempted to take a nap, but afraid I might sleep through.
Low, dark-beamed ceiling downstairs; almost unfinished plank floors throughout. Incense, very faint, and woodsmoke. Despite quote-unquote traveling alone, this is the most alone I've felt so far: silent; not quite at ease.
Upstairs, white-painted beams and hallways, eggshell doors; please do not disturb third-floor guests—please leave messages on table in first-floor hallway.
Once again, insects are the loudest things here.
...
My mother is not happy that I'm here. If I thought it was funny anymore, I'd complain that she was violating my First Amendment rights. I try, but cannot altogether vow, to ask her why.
...
A cross (no pun intended) between camps: summer and boot.
...
A nap, but waking with that same strange feeling: that the sun has moved, but I have stayed still.
6 Sept. 00
Howells, NY
Not safe to go out. I sit on the porch, drinking
the local
It's walnuts.
Like gravenstein-green baseballs. I can't tell if it's squirrels or age or Newtonian physics, but I doubt even my new black Sou'Wester (from Peggy's Cove, yes, if you must know) would keep me from getting bonked.
Thus the porch. Lower Hudson: Hard Hat Area.
...
The best map of anything so far: Middletown Quadrangle, New York—Orange Co. From the U.S. Geological Survey, circa 1969.
5 Sept. 00
Howells, NY
The house smells not unlike my friend Kitty's parents' red beachhouse (all books and toast and cats and rain); the cants of the floors not dissimilar. I almost want to look for the Classics Illustrateds, although I know I'll not likely find them here.
There is everything in the world to read here, and, outside, seemingly every kind of bird and insect: chirping, buzzing, shrieking. Tiny birds that fly like butterflies: frantic swoopings up, then coast a second on the breeze; repeat; repeat; alight.
Coffee on the front porch after something called a Chocolate Breakfast Treat, because a juxtaposition of those words just could not be passed up (at least not in my book).
The light coming through the blowing trees translates as sparkling.
Walnut trees here are the first to leaf and the first to shed their leaves, so I have been told.
I am suddenly unclear on the date, and must go in to figure it out.
Leaves are falling; not a cloud in the sky, which is to say: The weather's beautiful; wish you were here.
Ellenville, NY
Wurtsboro likewise smelled good like old books, despite the fact that the library was closed.
I detoured to Swan Lake: to see if there was a lake; to see if there were swans. As is the usual case: yes and no.
Howells, NY
Too early for maize mazes, too late for fireflies. The leaves are just now starting to change: walnut, sumac—partly red or floating yellow down. One gets the feeling that everything is in flux—that things are about to happen—an anticipatory wildness—a forgetting to breathe. (He is in everything I see, in everything I touch.)
4 Sept. 00
Ottawa International Airport
Canada's coffee is its unsung treasure. You can tell Ottawa is civilized because of the presence of toilet-seat covers (aka "ass gaskets"), which I have not seen since possibly Ohio.
Howells, NY
Loudest bugs yet. In the woods. Tinnitical. Conversant. Big moth on the windowscreen. Tomorrow: long pants and trekking. Maybe not drive anywhere a'tall.
3 Sept. 00
Prospect, NS
Actual cream in actual cold sweaty silver flagon. Fluffy tail hugs from resident cat whose first name is the same as my middle. Pink pressed-glass butter dish. Quiet clouds hung low over the silent sea. The boats are tempting.
Off to the Star of the Sea on Terence Bay for 9:00 Mass (the same priest moves down the coast to St. Christopher's at Hatchet Lake for the 11:15. Our Lady of Mt. Carmel (a stone's throw from our promontory home, with the 25-foot white cross bolted to one of the many glacial boulders, opposite the lighthouse, appropriately) only offers Saturday afternoon (4) and Tuesday morning (9)).
The boys are asleep: G. out earlier and mumbling (after falling asleep in the car on the long drive out—changing the radio in his sleep, but unable to navigate from there); B. and I up until 2, talking about our confusing families, only slightly less confusing work situations, and, as always it seems these days, Philadelphia.
1 Sept. 00
Maplewood, NJ
There are things now of significance; there is the city from which I watched you go.
The room I'm staying in is cool enough to make me want to stay up late just to remember what it's like not to be hot.
If I'm dizzy, it's not entirely from lack of sleep.
31 Aug. 00
New York City
I walked around Central Park until I was awake, reluctantly, as if from a dream of how I wanted my life to be. I ended up back where I started, at East 83rd and 5th.
30 Aug. 00
Praying with someone is pretty intense. There's the whole birthday candle aspect: You want to know what they asked for, but you don't ask, and not because you think if they tell it won't come true.
29 Aug. 00
San Francisco to Detroit
A Day of Reprieves
First: We'll fire you, but not now. Maybe later.
Second: He called last night after all, about half an hour after I'd left for the airport. A dog barked in the background. "I'm sorry if I've added to any uncertainty," even though, for the record, I can't say there was any really. ...
...
Detroit streets under fog: I think I had a skirt like that once.
Detroit to Columbus
The engines at taxi like the voices at the beginning of Koyaanisqatsi: Good sign, or bad?
...
The sun was red when it rose.
...
There are propellers. There are no oxygen masks. There will be coffee.
Departure
Observed: The more cul-de-sacky the housing development, the prettier it looks from the air at night. All those sodium lamps.
...
Not to say that I don't loathe Lenny Kravitz just as much as the next person, but there is not a thing wrong with hearing "Let Love Rule" by accident. ... Like my most recently late grandfather, I take pretty good pictures of flowers.
Humility ...
... is extremely important when your department is the only one in your office that isn't set to be eliminated by Christmas.
It's also a good time to take a vacation. So without further ado ... just what (well, some of) you were waiting for: Blue (is at least temporarily, for starters) becoming an actual travelogue. Whether it will be live(ish) or not depends on the usual things, and remains to be seen. In any case, I'm gettin' the heck outta Dodge.
(Really, it reminded me of 4th grade when Mrs. Green came over to my desk and stage-whispered "You don't have to write." Sure, I hadn't done anything wrong to begin with, but neither had a lot of other people. Something about sitting in a room with all your colleagues and listening to the CEO say that everyone's positions were being eliminated, "Except for YOU!" I could see in my mind's eye: him pointing; bright lights, confetti, bells, whistles, streamers, a party hat; maybe even a donkey: the whole nine yards. Really it was not at all like that, but you get the picture. Needless to say, the first query posed during the Q&A was A) directed at my department and B) not particularly charitable.)
...
So of course the morning of my departure I am not doing dishes or folding laundry but rather drinking coffee in my pajamas and fixing the binding on a 1968 hardcover edition of Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever for my nephew's third birthday, which is soon.
27 Aug. 00
A soft morning. Cool, sleepy breezes. Maybe rain; probably not.
(He occurs to me in my dreams, even when he does not appear.)
26 Aug. 00
Popular Grafitti in My Town
SUSHI? [This is painted.]
MEAT KILLS [This is usually etched in concrete.]
25 Aug. 00
Last night I dreamed that things I'd lost had been given back.
24 Aug. 00
Am I one of those people who just stays places, or am I merely glacially peripatetic?
...
I want to get rid of everything I own, but I'm afraid of what would be left.
23 Aug. 00
Sometimes returning is worse than having gone.
22 Aug. 00
Why I do not often write for money: Here I am with 12 pages of notes, going through a long dark night of the soul over a frigging book review. ...
21 Aug. 00
I am the Histamine Queen.
19 Aug. 00
A confluence of allergies and red-wine hangover, after arguing for half the night with Texans about the origins of the Mongol hordes, et cetera. Awake (despite) at 6:37 for water and more pillows, sitting half upright to breathe.
Today: A sidewalk sale.
18 Aug. 00
Butt end of a London broil soaked in balsamic vinegar, half a glass of zinfandel, one clove of garlic (sliced with a steak knife), and pepper long enough to have a decent conversation with my mother; seared then cooked slow with the rest of the vinegar mess; half-moon zucchini tossed in at the end and the heat turned back up; pouring out the pan juice almost grainy in its deglacé. Damn damn damn.
15 Aug. 00
I rescued a puppy this morning. He was fat and gray with yellow-green eyes. Someone had misaimed a sprinkler, and there was a puddle across the sidewalk. A happy man in shorts and a T-shirt walked ahead of the puppy, encouraging him to ford the lake.
I walked into the street, around the puddle, and back. The puppy walked into the puddle. Then stopped. Then seemed to have a thought. Then started drinking.
"A-ha," I said to the puppy, "you've stepped in a big waterbowl."
The puppy turned around and looked at me. He wagged his tail. He decided I'd be fun to walk with, even though I pointed toward the man in shorts and said to go with him. So I picked the puppy up out of the puddle and hugged him and gave him back.
The people, we laughed. The puppy, he made an "Aw, didja hafta kiss me in fronna the guys" noise, and left a small muddy footprint on my white shirt which I did not go home to change.
14 Aug. 00
Almost nothing cannot be undone.
13 Aug. 00
Crosswalk powder fairy dust shimmers and glints on the sidewalk just before it ends, sending me hiking through dirt and eucalyptus, in the finally seasonable heat. Except it's suddenly autumnal, and none of us knows how that happened.
12 Aug. 00
Brown lizard on a cinderblock wall. Not a cloud. (Increasingly, hyphens annoy me.)
9 Aug. 00
I remember when divinity was just a candy I couldn't stand.
8 Aug. 00
Listening to Nebraska and feeling somehow I've lost myself along the way.
...
Last night I dreamed.
7 Aug. 00
There is not enough coffee in the world this morning.
6 Aug. 00
Think Lent; think Noah; think the last temptation of Christ.
4 Aug. 00
Last night I dreamed I helped deliver a baby on a bus. We were going to the hospital but, of course, it was too late.
The grandmother played catcher in much the same position as one would in baseball. I sat with the mother sort of in my lap, with my right hand stroking her forehead and my left resting on the crest of her belly. It happened quickly, but I distinctly felt the little guy turn, and move, and leave.
Afterwards I wandered the streets of the unfamiliar town, looking for a place to wash the blood off.
When I awoke, I could barely move my head. I went looking for my little Marx-Engels Reader, but all I could find was Cheever and de Tocqueville. The coffee's good, but it still feels like it's fixing to be a long, long day.
26 July 00
Weather Report
Yesterday I was hit so hard by a gust of wind that I felt like I'd been slapped.
...
When the wind goes out of your sails, you have two choices: row or drift. As usual, the difficulty lies in deciding which.
...
Sure, nothing ventured, nothing gained. But the rate of loss is always commensurate with what was risked.
25 July 00
I'm coming to this appliance thing sort of late, but at last I understand the reason one might want a food processor and a blender: In the pesto from the blender I found a perfect pebble of garlic—like you'd find at the beach, or in the rock tumbler I wanted but didn't get, Christmas of 1978. The configuration of the blades.
24 July 00
Last night I dreamed a polar bear pulled my hair and the alligator swung and broke his cage. Then some bitchy New York girls came to visit while I was in my pajamas and left in sneering exasperation when I refused to get a makeover. There was espionage, bubble bath, poisoned chocolates, etc. What I'm trying to say is, the farm wasn't designed to hold zoo animals, just horses.
22 July 00
Now I believe: There's not a cloud in the sky, and white corn is five ears for 99.
20 July 00
I wish I never had to sleep.
19 July 00
N-Judah
It's not Desire, or even Elysian Fields, but after all what else is, but those?
18 July 00
Some Small Miracle
Yesterday was winter coat weather. Today, fog in the utmost West, haze in the East, but not a single cloud between. The dogs on the path are Bay-soaked, the songbirds doing a brisk business in larvae.
15 July 00
If you find you're out of your depth, swim anyway.
13 July 00
Today was the day the dragonflies hatched.
...
When I was in school, I used to find four-leaf clovers all the time. Well, not all the time, but often enough that I was usually carrying two or three in my wallet on any given day. I used to give them away.
I haven't found one in probably a dozen years. I was starting to suspect they were like unicorns—something the no-longer-innocent couldn't see, losing my faith in the passage of ordinary miracles.
Until I found a five-leaf one today. Here's luck to you.
12 July 00
Housekeeping as Obvious Metaphor
My apartment is almost capital-c-clean for the first time in probably over a year. Not just superficially, but at least mid-way down, in some places more, some less.
There are still things that need fixing, still small caches of chaos, but I've pretty much accepted that it's a work in progress, and it's not going to kill me if it never gets done.
11 July 00
Handy Household Hints
Beware the ancient legumes. They go from vexingly crunchy to paste faster than your car will get to 60. And do not think to the cayenne "Why is this not hot enough? Fie, I will add more!" Just don't.
6 July 00
Maybe there really is no other shoe.
4 July 00
In the usual hideaway spot at Powell's— last counter seat to the right. Cookie. Coffee. It's raining and they've demolished the brewery across the street. It's still Tuesday and they're still playing Go. I feel so tragically unhip, and I don't think it's just my age. There's that damp Portland melancholy—like I miss it despite the fact that I'm here, or perhaps because.
I walk here like a ghost—unrecognized, unseen. Spending a dollar five on phone calls and talking to no one. I want to leave already—get it over with—not the long, drawn-out downhill of going.
Now it seems I want a sea-green Volvo station wagon and enough kids to fill up the back seat. This is what people do.
Speculation is a sin of fearful minds, yes? But I see it. Pictures. Fits and starts. Like old Super-8s: that rattling noise in the background. And how do you keep it a secret? How do you cap the wellspring, divert the course, breathe in, breathe out, be silent?
3 July 00
Too much wind on the water. Scattered sun. Hanging black clouds moving north and west. Swarms of baby catfish in the pestilentially muddy water by the banks. Mud past my ankles. Not a single bite. Quiet like waiting. Smell of blackberry blossoms, hose water. Snakes in the grass. Firecrackers in the distance. "Battle Hymn of the Republic" after Saturday Mass. Hook. Line. Sinker. Step into the water. Cast again.
It was the clouds here, and way the light shines through them, that first made me believe in God, and, infallibly, they're what reminds me.
1 July 00
Last night I dreamed I became a cop. The uniform was cool, but they didn't give me a gun, so I just took long walks and yelled at old ladies as I crossed the street: "Hey, think you could pull out any farther into the intersection?"
20 June 00
Train Yard
Appalachian Northern
Illinois Central
Canadian National
Graniterock
Southern Pacific
Union Pacific
Missouri Pacific
Golden West
25 June 00
PLAY HOCKEY.
23 June 00
Coincidence is a wonderful thing. I'm not sure it means much, but it does serve to make one feel connected, and observant, and sometimes even a little clever.
But when someone else has one for you, and then feels compelled to tell you about it, now that's a little strange. Now that might just mean something.
22 June 00
The trick I think is finding out what you're supposed to learn from your little trials while they're still happening. Sort of an intensive summer class for the soul.
...
What's a blessing? What's a curse? Sometimes the difference is just a question of breakfast, or sleep.
...
I have problems asking for things—especially anything 4th-dimensional. I always feel unduly greedy.
20 June 00
I dreamed again of trains and work and loss. These dreams are cinematic— plot-driven. They are not like other dreams. Not since I roller-skated down the hill into the pirates' lair when I was 8 have there been dreams like these.
Not as memorable perhaps, but huge—almost wholly fictional—peopled more with professional actors than friends.
To my more-than-occasionally inflexible mind, that can only mean one thing: a return to fiction; a storing of mirrors; a look out to sea.
...
Every third thought is a prayer for patience.
19 June 00
Eggs; basket: chickens; hatched. (Delete, delete, delete.)
16 June 00
Sometimes I think the only faith I have is my middle name.
13 June 00
It is particularly apparent this year that these are the longest days.
30 May 00
it's finally spring:
my litany of tan pants
begins once again.
...
In chess as in life, it's my middle game that's all fucked up.
...
Burn all the scripts, but remember having read them.
...
I have taken even to praying at work. Desperate times, desperate measures, and all that.
...
My grandfather survived Anzio, but shot himself forty years later over losses that began then.
I understand loss. I understand the tunnel that opens up, the wind that whistles down it. What I don't understand is forgetting that when you turn that tunnel into a black hole of grief, it sucks in everyone around you.
The nerve. The goddamned nerve.
But did I forgive him? Of course I did. Somebody had to. And I vowed to never leave anyone that alone. And I won't. I promise.
...
This weekend a friend of mine lost someone he loved, for a silly, sad, and, yes, tragic—i.e., preventable—reason.
So hey, everybody—especially those of you with any sort of chronic health problem—please take care of yourselves. There's somebody out there who loves each and every one of you, and it would sure hurt to see them in so much pain.
It does hurt: picking up these pieces. They're sharp; they cut the hands.
29 May 00
I took a bunch of calla lilies, and trimmed the grass around the stone.
27 May 00
I can finally feel that the cold-pack is cold, but I sure wish I hadn't put the ice cream away in the refrigerator last night.
...
I don't look punched, just smacked hard. Just another excuse for hermitage.
26 May 00
I'm holding the cold-pack folded up under my chin like a violin rest. The whole thing took only about 45 minutes: forms, panoramic X-ray (side/front/side all on one film—a Mercator projection of my head), shots, waiting, more shots, leaning, chipping, horrible sounds, gauze. The actual extraction part lasted all of three minutes, for which I am extremely grateful. I only had two, both on the left, impossibly adorable—the upper one almost tiny, pointed, the roots of both grown together, or never split apart, the front half of the lower giving the illusion of legs demurely crossed—both, just like my dentist predicted "like ice cream cones in the sand." They came right out.
The dental assistant was an elderly woman named Bea who let me hold on to her through all of the noisy part, keeping up a constant stream of encouraging words. And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Her safety glasses had marbelized pastel frames. When I asked if I could keep my teeth, she brought them back in a little plastic carrying case shaped like a tooth. They've promised me a copy of the X-ray when I go back next week. I feel more like a grown-up than I have all year.
24 May 00
Theory on the Proclivity of the Rectangle as Canvas
You'd be distracted by the symmetry of the square—too prone to preciously put things off-kilter. The quiet asymmetry of the rectangle gives us comfort, lets us be unself-conscious, lets us forget about the frame.
...
I find photography easier than writing because the feedback is so obvious and accessible. You can say "I created this once, one time, in the past." You have an object. A photograph is done, separate from you—not in progress, not something that your hand still remembers making, from which your self cannot detach.
23 May 00
Sometimes Death likes to stop by for a visit. Not to stay; just to chat.
22 May 00
Fiction is difficult because I'm so tied to truth.
18 May 00
How many rebirths do you have before you're finally born?
...
Momentum works just as well as inspiration.
10 May 00
The economy of the town I live in is based on cars: buying, selling, fixing, detailing. It's interesting to note I think that there are no wrecking yards nearby. This may be (stereo)typical California surface/spackle/shore up/deny death culture, or it may just be coincidence.
In any case, this morning while I was waiting for the train, I noticed that one of the auto shop's signs was missing a letter. That and being partially obscured by trees make it clear that I lived around the corner from the GNOSTIC CENTER.
The clouds this morning have moved in fast—huge and clearly defined, painted-looking. The rain is delicate and cold.
...
God does not micromanage.
8 May 00
I am losing my holiness bit by bit: unkind remark by jealous thought by selfish act.
5 May 00
Brooklyn always makes me feel old and "ethnic." My ankles are fine on the plane. I step on the A train, they swell.
2 May 00
Worst night's sleep last night (which, these days, is really saying something): went to bed at 11, woke up at 12, woke up at 1:30, woke up at 4:20, 6:00, 7:10, 8:02 and finally got out of bed at 8:33 after exhausting bouts of dreams of religion and money, with dead friends become preachers, fill-in-the-blanks banking, foam-pellet-gun siege by the Dust Bowl kids next door.
Now I wear dark silk and sunglasses, waiting for rain.
25 Apr. 00
We all get the God we want, or deserve, or can understand.
14 Apr. 00
-616
I always said I'd laugh when it hit, but I hadn't planned on being in the trenches when it did.
13 Apr. 00
Leave it to me to get archival matting and secure the pictures with masking tape.
. . .
We are on the gravy train caboose and the bandits are catching up. You didn't hear it here first.
12 Apr. 00
It didn't set right; I had to break it again.
. . .
I can't believe I'm sitting here at work at 8 o'clock at night trying to find out if "great northern beans" is capitalized or not.
10 Apr. 00
It is not good to use alcohol as a soporific. it is not good to use alcohol as a soporific (especially on Sunday night). It is not good to use alcohol as a soporific. ...
. . .
It's good to have skeptical friends: they keep you honest (at least nominally, to yourself).
8 Apr. 00
And it's not that I feel constrained in any way. Rather I am overwhelmed with freedom.
OK, occasionally squelched by naysayers. But why shouldn't one perfect one's French or learn to play the cello? After all, one only lives once ... doesn't one?
. . .
My shoulder blades hurt so much today I fear I'm sprouting wings.
5 Apr. 00
Mark Mothersbaugh, Muzic for Insomniacs (Volume 2, Part 2): Neither soporific nor stimulant, but: accompaniment.
. . .
My father and I are comrades in sadness. I wonder if he knows it yet?
3 Apr. 00
If you're an insomniac, it's best to live as far east as possible—that way you can call in the middle of the night and not wake anybody up.
. . .
I practice not caring, but I'm never very good at it.
. . .
We are each other's absentee parents: I missed the calculus midterm; you missed the paint-stripper burns, the new counter.
. . .
I ran for a train which turned out not to be mine.
1 Apr. 00
I live for those moments when I see things as they are, and not as I've carefully built them up in my mind's eye. Sure, it brings about both exhilaration and terror, like being thrown in a river with all your clothes on on a hot, still summer day: it feels so good but then you realize you have jeans on, and they're heavy, etc. But one does tend to climb out all right. Just those brief glimpses of what's real, like flashbulbs in the catabombs: just enough light by which to see, to make a map in your head of what's real.
31 Mar. 00
Elation, despair, elation, despair, hard, fast, over and over, like flipping a coin at gunpoint.
. . .
It's not as though you can just issue an eviction notice to someone who's set up residence in your head, your heart. They didn't just walk in, or show up as for an open house. Like Jesus (into your heart as Your Personal Savior), or Dracula (through the French doors at the end of the hall), you let them in. You said yes. Maybe a bunch of times. Maybe even in front of other people. And like bad renters, it's going to take a court order, the county sheriff, and possibly the local chapter of the National Guard to get them out again.
30 Mar. 00
As usual, I cut the ropes and am surprised to find myself adrift.
29 Mar. 00
And now back to our regularly scheduled angst.
I want to break your heart like a piñata: eat whatever falls; hoard the rest for later.
. . .
Sometimes grief needs an audience.
28 Mar. 00
I keep catching myself whistling «la Marseillaise» under my breath. A bad sign, no?
. . .
Coughed up something tan last night, and this morning my throat feels raw, my breath catches sometimes, slightly, crackles.
Delayed Paris bronchitis? There were air-quality warnings for the last two days we were there— the warmest and brightest days—the days of lurid sunsets—on Tuesday the sun flattened on the horizon like a red-orange crayon melting in a sea of aquamarine and violet-blue. Pollution has its plusses.
I of course blame the advent of SUVs on the Paris scène. It amuses me only because I don't live there. I wonder what will happen first: a ban, or abandonment—there's no place to park them in a city where people drive cars the size of scooters, and gas is (if only it were here and don't complain, because it ain't) prohibitively expensive.
Why do they drive them? As a display of wealth, they seem characteristically un-French. Perhaps it's the devil-may-care driving style for which the Parisians are (in)famous: they drive these monstrous things badly—worse than tiny idle housewives do here. Surely a matter worthy of serious anthropological study, which, of course, I feel too ill-read to undertake. C'est la vie, as we think they say over there but rarely do. Tant pis—too bad, tough luck— now that's something.
27 Mar. 00
It feels funny not to be carrying a dictionary around anymore. I keep wanting to look up words—silk, saffron—and being unable to, feel stunted and dumb.
. . .
So now my dreams have moved to San Francisco. But it's not San Francisco, just like my dream-Paris was not Paris: the protagonists were Hispanic, and the buses were almost right, but the streets were wrong, the infrastructure was wrong, the open country was too close by and none of the plants were native.
PARIS NOTES
22 Mar. 00
A schoolgirl poll:
«Do you like policemen?»
«I like them OK. Especially late at night, in the métro.»
They giggle, like, well, schoolgirls, but write this down very seriously.
...
The weather:
Another day in Par(ad)is(e).
21 Mar. 00
Métro Charles de Gaulle/Etoile:
«That's not a riot, that's an escalator.»
20 Mar. 00
«Excusez-moi, monsieur. Qui est gagné le match du rugby hier?»
«[Sigh.] Vous-êtes Irlandaise?»
«Non.»
«[Sigh. ...]»
...
Sainte-Chapelle:
God has left the building.
19 Mar. 00
Je ne rève pas dans un langage que vous savez.
18 Mar. 00
La leçon:
«Peux ... Je ... Caresse ... Ton ... Chien?»
16 Mar. 00
Le Jour des Escaliers
L'enfer n'est pas d'autres, l'enfer c'est d'escaliers:
- Métro, métro, métro
- Les Catacombes (et «la fange de la mort»)
- Montmartre, Montmartre, Montmartre
...
Sign at Au Copains d'Abord:
«L'eau est reservée pour faire cuire les patates.»
13 Mar. 00
Tomorrow I'm leaving for Paris.
And yes, it's a lot like this. And even more like this.
10 Mar. 00
I am glad to learn that my grandfather is a fantastic dancer.
I am even more glad that I learned this while dancing with him.
7 Mar. 00
I get pulled through my days like a preschooler walking an Airedale: I have no idea what scent he's on to, only that we are going, now.
23 Feb. 00
Enter one or more significant subject words:
Sure, beauty is ahead of truth (828-249), but good is still well ahead of evil (907-630).
P.S. The buying or selling of transfers will result in your arrest.
17 Feb. 00
Entry Word: cad
Function: noun
Text: a person without gentlemanly instincts <gloated over
his rival's distress like the cad that he was>
Synonyms bounder, cur, rotter, yellow dog
Related Word boor, churl, clown, lout; guttersnipe, mucker,
vulgarian; ||creep; bastard, heel, louse, rat, stinker
Idioms Jack Nasty
Antonyms gentleman
13 Feb. 00
Maggie's First, Second, and Third Postulates
(just in time for Valentine's Day!)
No one I have a crush on will ever like me back.
No one who has a crush on me will A) be recognized as having a crush on me, or B) be liked back (by me). 1
No one who receives Actual Written Evidence of a crush which I have on them—no matter how typographically superior or literarily meritorious—will think anything more (or less) than "What a weirdo," or "Should I change my phone number?" 2
1 This is not some Groucho Marx thing either;
this is the product of decades of empirical research.
2 And please, no letters of pity or disagreement, no matter how fervently held your
beliefs may be. This is science, folks. Science does not deserve your pity.
5 Dec. 99
You can never erase someone so completely that you can't still read their name when you hold the page up to the light.
23 Nov. 99
He's been home now for hours and hours. I miss him like he was just across town; I miss him like he's gone for good.
Love is never a bad reason to leave town. It's never a bad reason to stay.
21 Nov. 99
Which are more: The things I say and don't mean, or the things I mean and don't say? Which are worse?
9 Nov. 99
I only want a bathroom scale so I can estimate how much I'm going to owe at the wash-and-fold.
29 Oct. 99
If you leave things lying around, you can't very well complain when they end up lost.
25 Oct. 99
Vengeance is just not attractive.
23 Oct. 99
For the record: I am not looking for "forever and ever" necessarily, but for "let's just see how far this thing will go." If you tell me there's no difference, you're more of a liar than I thought.
12 Oct. 99
Walking to return some library books and a movie this morning before work, "Eleanor Rigby" spontaneously started playing in my head. Not such a good sign, I think.
...
I think we're getting past the point in history now where men are interested in literature. Correct me if I'm wrong, but nowadays one is hard-pressed to find, for example, firemen reading Shakespeare. Or even Hemingway.
10 Oct. 99
Believe it or not, there are still things I haven't told you.
7 Oct. 99
I hate it when they say "Don't worry, it's his loss." Because it's always mine, too.
5 Oct. 99
I haven't looked into the distance in so long it stuns me. Like sideways vertigo. Everything: the shore, the bay, the land beyond, looks flat—like I could just reach out and touch it all.
A wayward ray of sun pierces several layers of blurry lenticular clouds to land somewhere in Oakland that must be significant, like pointing out the There. Which means that this is Here. But What? That it doesn't say.
21 Sept. 99
This is the universe's way of telling me I have better things to do with my life. ... Right?
20 Sept. 99
So. Who have you betrayed lately?
14 Sept. 99
The Questionable Epicure
How I came to believe that the brandy was still good: It lit on fire when I set it.
11 Sept. 99
We swore we were showing 85% of ourselves but we weren't. It was more like 65-35—like uniforms, like permanent press.
10 Sept. 99
Anyone who can find joy in a flock of birds wheeling is nowhere near as far gone as they might think.
9 Sept. 99
Some people keep letters. Some people keep pictures, or clothes, or patterns of speech, or fragments of secret languages they barely knew. I keep toiletries: kinds of soap they thought smelled nice, dental tape instead of floss, Orudis instead of Advil for hangovers, stuff like that. So that at least twice a day I look in what serves as that shrine and ponder just a second: what it meant then; what I think it means now; everything in between.
7 Sept. 99
Dear Tom,
The raft is done. Let's go.
Your Friend,
Huck
4 Sept. 99
Now when I close my eyes I see circles— concentric, radiating—with my little round bobber riding placidly in the middle. This is the vision that has taken the place—however briefly—of your eyes. I savor it more because I know it will not hold.
27 Aug. 99
My heart is broken like a dinnerplate moon hanging over a cheap theater set, swinging wildly on a wire, reflecting misdirected footlights into the actors' eyes.
24 Aug. 99
I am bad at two things: letting things go, and realizing when something is wrong. Not wrong in the sense of "something" exactly, but wrong in the sense of "I am upset now, I really need to go lie down." My problems, as you can probably guess, are bourgeois and unbelievably petty, but they pain me none the less. Perception, not possession, is nine-tenths of the law, and I perceive my troubles through the fish-eye lens of an obstinate romanticism that refuses to lay down and die no matter how many times I beat it over the head with the truth, truth, truth.
Signs observed:
- Sale $1
- Today 3 Families
- Sweet to Your Heart
20 Aug. 99
I am perfecting my angry little girl stare in the mirror. The tiara helps (Just because I get all sweet on a guy does not give him the right to do somersaults on my heart like it was a goddamned trampoline.).
19 Aug. 99
The blister on my left foot itches, so I know it's healing. My heart pains me from time to time so I think it must be getting better. I'm alone, so I can listen to all the John Coltrane ballads I want and no one will think I'm trying to pull one over on them.
14 Aug. 99
There is nothing like waking up at noon on a clear blue Saturday with "19th Nervous Breakdown" running through your head and the overwhelming feeling that things are going to be just fine.
13 Aug. 99
I am not running Sister Mary Magdalen's Home for Wayward Boys, no matter what things look like.
7 Aug. 99
Is it really snooping, going through someone's letters, if you wrote them?
Is it really theft, if you take the one you wish you'd never sent?
6 Aug. 99
2:28 a.m.
Just because I wrote something nice about them doesn't mean they have carte blanche to party in the walls of my bathroom and wake me up. Tomorrow, they are moving somewhere more appropriate.
The headline in the yellow pages says "UNWANTED GUESTS?" The bathroom door is locked from the outside.
5 Aug. 99
10:52 p.m.
The raccoons are out chirruping by the trash cans again, and somehow that makes everything alright.
27 July 99
Sometimes the whole world is like bubble plastic. I can't quite explain it, but there it is.
21 July 99
O-negative: We can give to everyone, but we can only get from each other.
15 July 99
Lunchtime. Walking down by the boats. An almost windless day. A woozy breeze sometimes interrupts the lazy sun. Many butterflies and bubbles. The usual assortment of birds. More tiny flowers of more descriptions than ever. Also, more people on the miniature beach. And more swimmers—their outer clothing hung on the never-inhabited lifeguard chair (a chair whose only reason for existence seems to be as a holder for a sign that says "No Lifeguard on Duty"). Dollops and smears of clouds, with "God rays" shining through: shining—I swear—straight toward your house, shining—I swear— straight toward you.
29 June 99
Damn. I have been remiss.
15 June 99
Sometimes when I smile at strangers and they don't smile back I think it's because I've forgotten what costume I've got on that day, and have smiled at the wrong person.
28 May 99
A thought: Contrary to the assertion that computers are causing people to (sociologically) disintegrate, what about the idea that spending a lot of time sitting at the keyboard creates a literally object-oriented self?
26 May 99
Anyone who tells you that an ID badge is any less dorky than a name tag is fooling themselves.
25 May 99
How toilet paper in tall grass can look like egrets; how you and I together sometimes felt like love: We see what we want to see.
20 May 99
If you want to be alone, go right ahead.
Just don't make me be alone with you.
19 May 99
Why is it that applying for a scientific research grant would seem like a matter of course, but applying for a creative writing grant would seem like a source of embarrassment?
11 May 99
A great pair of boots should work just as well for kicking one's own ass as for kicking other people's.
3 May 99
It's like a vegetable hated out of hand: "How do you know you don't like it if you haven't even tried it?" And "You're eating it right now."
"[Spit.]"
29 Mar. 99
When people get too old to remember how mean they were to you, you have to start forgetting, too.
24 Mar. 99
Someone else asked me once, "How good a friend would have to be in how much trouble for you to change your life to help them out?"
Well now I know.
13 Mar. 99
A rule for living:
Never work later than you can buy liquor.
25 Feb. 99
So I asked my best friend if he thought I was an uptight freak. "No," he said, "you're just more dignified than most people."
11 Jan. 99
9 a.m.
Sometimes I get so awestruck by other people that I forget to be awe-inspiring myself.
That sucks.
[It is therefore that I would have woman lay aside
all thought such as she habitually cherishes, of
being taught and led by men. I would have her,
like the Indian girl, dedicate herself to the sun.
—Margaret Fuller, 1845 (thanks, Angela)]
10:30 a.m.
I think I've figured it out. All these years that I've felt so crazy and overwhelmed, like there was too much Stuff and not enough Time. ... It's culture shock. It's cities. I mean, it's all well and good to be able to, for example, drop in for an early morning Tai Chi session in the plaza in front of the cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, but really. Drinking iced tea on the porch on a Sunday afternoon listening to Nothing is really more my speed.
2 Jan. 99
Yes, I made some:
So there.
24 Dec. 1998
My brother is building a house. For his family. My brother the cross-eyed infant. My brother the sad-eyed child. My brother the brimstone-eyed adolescent. My brother the partner. The father. The carpenter. The wholly upstanding young man. And I grow old.
I just grow old.
5 Dec. 1998
I'm not a designer. I'm not going to be a designer. And that's about all there is to say about that.
Originally this site was set up to keep my mother, et al. apprised of my whereabouts when I flew the coop on an extended and fairly amorphous round-the-world jaunt. As of this writing, my excuse is that I haven't been photogenic enough to get a passport picture taken. That and the goddamn ruble. That and the fact that I found my dream house, literally in my own (childhood) backyard, and I think I'd rather dump a bunch of dough on that instead, rather than on an expensive test of my immunity to seasickness on large vessels full of boxcars and passengers who have more nerve and willpower at 70 than I maybe ever will and men whose language I do not speak.
Besides, the rest of the world will be there later, right? And if not, I can just tell myself that it was all just a figment of other people's imaginations, or an elaborate hoax perpetrated by some king somewhere and bought into by everyone since, up to and including Tom Brokaw.
This section in particular was going to be a travelogue, and such it'll remain, although in an altogether different sense I'm sure than was originally intended. So please to enjoy. Write if you like.
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