Blue
14 Dec. 07
Good Morning, Oregon
I awake from damp Floridian dreams. I'll miss the subtropics like I miss everything else: like something that didn't quite happen, like something always just beyond my reach.
5 Dec. 07
Quietly
Hard to believe, but this little site is nine years old today. Looking around I think, as I'll no doubt think at The End: I should've written more.
24 Aug. 07
Uniform Foxtrot
The cold water isn't cold. I just tried to measure a window frame with a small box of raisins, instead of with the little tape measure that's about the same size. Take this as an example of tired. I sweated so much it may as well have rained.
I dream about the handyman, whom I've never met. He is impressed by my collection of tools, and my having killed a wasp with Febreze, which he thinks is ladylike and bad-ass at the same time. He keeps lumber in the attic above my room. I imagine this dispels ghosts.
Our house is so big, if I'm in my room with the AC on, I can't hear anyone. This is good and bad, as you'd expect. Sometimes, though, late, I hear voices through the vents. Singing, usually. I decline to turn off the air to see if they're real.
06 Jan. 07
Notes and Chords Mean Nothing to Me
I remember it as a Lyle (not an Epiphone); the date was sometime in 2002. I'm not sure how I missed the fact that it was a gift (not a loan), and I'm not sure now how she really felt when I returned it—years and the span of a continent later, its move-busted neck expertly patched—and I'm not at all sure how I missed this post, but I sure wish I had that guitar now. There are other, more important things to be so much more vehemently wished for, but I was never that much of an optimist—something I feel like now I should change.
12 Dec. 06
Some Thoughts
My friend Leslie was one of the kindest, wisest, most generous people I have ever known. We overlapped cities only once, in New York. I converted to Catholicism while we both lived there, and Leslie was one of the few people anywhere who supported me wholeheartedly, as though it made the most sense in the world.
She was, technically I guess, my godmother. Introducing each other this way baffled people, but it cracked us up. She gave the best hugs, and always had perfect hair.
Leslie dealt with an undue amount of unfairness in her life, and did it with exponentially less bitterness than she was entitled to. She was beautiful and tough and amazingly talented, and I will love her and miss her forever.
8 Dec. 06
Podcast!
Make your way to TothWorld, the online home of fab writer Paul A. Toth. He has a nice podcast series going. Number 67 features your truly, reading some little things for your holiday listening plaisir. (No iPod required.)
14 Nov. 06
Update
There have been complaints. Well, comments. Well, one.
I am in Florida. It's hot here still. I write a lot. Hello.
5 Sep. 06
Autobiographical Haiku
My life is a closed-
book test involving obscur-
antist formulae.
20 Aug. 06
"A Big Move into Steamy Weather" *
I'm here with my great-grandmother's Farberware, the ghost of my mother's ironing board. My sunglasses fogged up today when I got in the car.
* Thanks to Ms. Pia for the nice turn of phrase.
28 May 06
Examination of Conscience, or:
Lessons in the Conditional Tense
The unpleasant question to ask isn't what could you have done, but what would you?
26 May 06
Skill Set
Silence. Listening. You'd think I'd be good at these things, but I'm not.
And then there's my mythical niceness. It's not just skin-deep, but it has
its limits. What I'm trying to say is, I seem, surprisingly, unprone to
wearing other people's shoes, and not just due to issues of style or fit.
This bodes ill for writing and life both. I guess it's not just biology
that makes me queasy, but neuroscience as
11 May 06
Silent Anniversary
It's not like I forgot entirely, but somehow, you know, the day came and went, and I'm only just remembering it now.
13 Feb. 06
Better Late Than...
Okay, so Pia tagged me weeks ago, but otherwise right now I'd have to work on my last two grad school application essays, so of course now I find it easier to list ten allegedly interesting things about myself.
1. I was well into my twenties when I realized that La Jolla and "La Hoya" were the same town. (I, of course, blame the Georgetown University mascot for the confusion.)
2. I used to be married.
3. Many years later, I briefly dated a Salvadoran ex-guerrilla.
4. I can shoot pool ambidextrously.
5. I can only shoot guns right-handed, but I'm a very good shot.
6. Since there seems to be a musical theme going in these lists: I played French horn in fifth and twelfth grades, and drums in between.
7. In high school, I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, because it meant getting out of two class periods. I scored 98 percent. My senior year, I was courted by every branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, but very few colleges, as my SAT scores were kind of crappy. I briefly considered joining the Marines, so I could get in shape and play in the band.
8. Despite all that martial hoo-ha, "nun" has been on my shortlist of possible occupations for almost as many years as it hasn't.
9. In fifth grade, my best friend and I had a BeeGees fan club. We met in a refurbished chicken coop to debate who was cutest.
10. I didn't learn to drive until I was 26.
Um, Molly?
7 Jan. 06
Resolving to Resolve
If I had to come up with a practical resolution for the new year, it would have to be "learn to drive stick-shift," if only to prevent my dear friend Dan, on our next road trip (which, according to our current average, should occur sometime in late 2015), from having to drive fifteen hundred miles at a time with only a semicompetent navigator to help him.
Because, however, I am me (and contrary to a recent friendly email, not a Cancer but an Aries, and while, yes, acknowledging the existence and perhaps the necessity of human suffering, most certainly do not need to "lose the image of [myself] as the victim," that image being most certainly lost, and as far as I know never extant in the first place), my single, solitary resolution for 2006 is:
Thank you for reading, and for just being you.
16 Dec. 05
Nostalgia
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek nostos return home + New Latin -algia; akin to Greek neisthai to return, Old English genesan to survive, Sanskrit nasate he approaches (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.)
Of all my least-favorite emotions (and there are plenty of them, let me tell you), this may be the leastest of all. In the dark of the year especially one gets ample opportunity to indulge in this annoying pastime. Even happy memories manage to engender a certain amount of regret: cities left behind, roads taken then switched from, friendships thinned by distance. One wonders if it really is better to remain totally unattached. Like Holden Caulfield said, "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." See? It isn't just me.
30 Nov. 05
Just Desserts
You know how sometimes you go digging for the answer to a question that you really don't want the answer to, because you're afraid the answer's going to be kind of awful, and once you find out that the answer really is the awful thing you thought it was going to be, you know you have no one to blame but yourself? I hate that.
15 Oct. 05
Rhetorical Question No. 5,362
Am I the only person who gets drunk and decides to go to graduate school? Just checking.
6 Oct. 05
starving hysterical naked
Happy 50th Birthday, Howl.
19 June 05
Something Else
A rainbow opposite the sunset, on orange clouds, encircling a thunderstorm.
10 June 05
Usage Charges
It came in the mail today: The Last Phone Call. Incoming. Sixty-one minutes. It was toward the beginning of the bill, making this one a third the size of the last two; negotiation can be expensive in more ways than one.
9 June 05
Couplet
I am using up hotel soaps from places that we stayed; some things are just too stupid to be saved.
Materially Speaking, Anyway
The hardest thing to get rid of so far? A torn apple bag that once contained a sandwich—unusual and lovingly made—for the plane.
28 May 05
News Flash
Sometimes a lot of what's good about something exists only in your head.
21 May 05
Open Letter
There's a Latin term, splendide mendax, that means "nobly untruthful." I did not find it applicable.
I once had a doctor who taught me to breathe into pain. It works, generally, though it's better to remove the source.
17 May 05
Dateline: Newport
Coming in from the beach, I'd wanted to talk to someone about the anemones, which seem to be on every rocky spot—some colonies far above the present waterline, folded in on themselves, waiting, I suppose, for inundation and food or dehydration and death. Since I think it takes consciousness to be able to wait, I will not feel sorry for them. I couldn't talk about the anemones, though, because I am rarely one hundred percent sure how to pronounce them. Somewhere deep in my childhood I must have gone through a long and uncorrected "an enemy" phase, and now I can never seem to get it straight. I guess some words are just like that.
Last night I made up a new word, "abtuse," apparently by trying to say "obtuse" and "abstruse" at the same time. It seems legitimate, given that—although "obtuse" can also mean insensitive or stupid, implying some level of slovenliness in speech or thought—on one level, they both mean "difficult to comprehend." Root-wise, things diverge again—"abstruse" coming from words meaning "to conceal" and "to push" (more at THREAT)—and "obtuse" coming by way of "blunt, dull" and "to beat against" (more at OB-, CONTUSION). So you see I do, however OB-stinately, stand by "abtuse." Pass it on.
12 May 05
Safekeeping
Why is it that so often the things you lose are the things you took pains to put somewhere safe?
10 May 05
A Failure of Will
I've done that thing, I suppose, of parking four blocks from where you're going so you can walk there, although I didn't do it for that reason. Four blocks. Do people really think that's exercise? I guess so.
Walking down the street I stop, as I seem to nowadays, at a patch of clover. The way to find four- or more-leafed specimens isn't to pause at every hillock and examine them one by one. Despite their being "nothing more" than anomalies, mutations, they hide like nebulae and refuse to be found by us mere statisticians. So as much as I'd like to think otherwise, sometimes you really do just have to be lucky.
7 May 05
The Unshot Foot Isn't Worth...
I bet I'd be the type of general to shoot his men in the back if they ran. I mean, you can't pray for the consolation prize when you still want the prize, can you?
6 May 05
Ich wille mein Leben zurück
OK, whatever. All three readers will have noticed the ensuing hiatus, and the following few (vertically speaking only, really) quote-unquote missing things. Anyway, I'm back, for what that's worth (which, at some point, in some circles, would buy kingdoms, so back the F off; thank you).
12 Apr. 05
Question of the Quarter
Am I too cynical to live in urban paradise?
13 Jan. 05
Dank sei Google
I was worried about plagiarizing myself, and searched this site for "chew on glass" but found nothing.
So.
Ever feel like you want to just chew on glass? Like grinding your teeth, but, you know, more productive.
Later, a Bit Less Generally and, Well, Ground-Glassedly
If your soup is just not doing enough to warm your tired old bones, may I suggest a bit of curry powder and hot paprika? This also, of course, helps with the pallor of cream soups. (Should you overdo it a little on the hot paprika, a dollop of plain yogurt or sour cream should do the trick. Add chopped parsley? Festive!)
7 Jan. 05
The Real January Sixth
Except, of course, it isn't. It's a quarter past three on the seventh, and somewhere nearby there's a freight whistle blowing like it's being bratty, like it's practicing, like it's a mastodon in a tar pit that can't get out.
Now cars go by outside over recent rain and I wish my apartment was cleaner, I wish I'd gone to bed hours ago, I wish I had a boyfriend, or a cat, and am glad I have neither. I wonder why I thought having a party would be a good idea (because it usually is), why these rugs look so dumb (they haven't until now, which means they don't), why I ate all those French-fried onions (because I didn't want cereal and there wasn't anything else ready at hand to eat), when I'll come up with a good concluding phrase (I just did).
13 Dec. 04
München
Schall und Rauch
The great things were friendship, Christmas markets, and the mother lode of second-hand Tracht. The terrible things were memories, which hid around street corners. Cities, I've found, aren't haunted, it's just me. Still, I am taking them back one by one.
21 Nov. 04
What's Between My House and the Donuts
Signs:
—FIRE ALARM TELEGRAPH (disbossed in concrete)
—STEAKS: FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT (neon)
A man pressing grapes into wine in his apartment driveway.
(For the record, it isn't quicksand I'm standing in, just mud.)
12 Nov. 04
Navelgazing, South of San Francisco
Just to note: It didn't occur to me until I came up to this room that it too is tainted, by phone calls and the usual impotent sense of loss. It's a good thing area codes are escaping me, that's all I have to say. Weakness, along with cellulite and depressingly (to use the word lightly) bad hair, is the order of the day.
A train whistle or something in the distance sounds like church bells, incongruous in the midnight dark, and I fear this feeling of having lost some essential quality—hopefulness, confidence, spunk, what have you—that's gone for good this time, as unlikely as that may (please, God, thank you) turn out to be.
9 Nov. 04
I Have This Problem with Reporters
It may be nervousness, but I just start yammering on about the most inane things, like, we were just playing some basketball, but I had to tell the story about my poppy-outy right ankle and how it tends to devastate my opponents, when it's doing its thing.
4 Nov. 04
Skokie, Skokie, Skokie
OK, I realize that possibly the greatest blessing (and curse, natch) of living in the U.S. is that one (theoretically, at least) can hold whatever view one wants, and that others have to respect that right. But this is just crazy. And it needs to be remembered that a slim majority does not a mandate make, especially when the two sides are so virulently and fundamentally opposed on virtually every issue, including, most distressingly, if I may use a now-quaint term, what is is. Fifty-one percent means tread lightly, means Don't Tread On Me.
3 Nov. 04
Good morning, America, how are you?
Dear Cleveland Plain Dealer: Nice front page. "Election results in front section"? How good of you.
Dear most of Oregon, et al., who apparently believe, for reasons I can honestly not fully comprehend, that gay people should be feared and marginalized and denied the rights that any, apparently sanctified, straight person can enjoy: I would feel sorry for you, living as you do with your scared and smallish minds, if I weren't so, how do I put it? Disgusted and dismayed? Yes, that about says it.
And speaking of disgusted and dismayed, Dear 51%: You deserve what you're going to get; we don't. No, on the other hand, you probably don't, either, being nice, quote-unquote morally upstanding folks who can't look beyond your own wallets—hell, many of whom don't seem to have been looking in your own wallets, due perhaps to the dust and spiderwebs you would find there. I mean, "moral values"? Like lying, and sending people to senseless deaths based on those lies? Raping the environment? Having an Inquisition-caliber fear of science? Trampling on so many of our rights that I'm surprised the founding fathers don't rise from the dead and march on Washington? Riding off alone into the sunset because he don't need no advice from nobody, nosiree? Oh, I give up. I just give up.
P.S.
Dear vast majority of 18- to 29-year-olds, who didn't vote (same as in 2000!): I hope you had fun, whatever it is you were doing on Tuesday that was so important. Have a great time in Iraq!
P.P.S.
Dear majority of 30- to 44-year-olds, who didn't vote (more than in 2000!): My people. What, were you too busy driving around trying to find cheap gas for your SUVs? I won't try to thank you—your kids (and grandkids, and so on) can thank you later. Best of luck funding your retirement! Maybe you'll be able to get a job as a Wal-Mart greeter—I can't think of a better way for you to spend your golden years!
P.P.P.S.
Yes, I will try to play nicely with others, but only after the sadness, queasiness,
disbelief, and rage have passed. Oh,
23 Oct. 04
Parenthetical Statement
For exhaustive cross-country train-trip account, please read up from 16-19 Oct. Thank you.
22 Oct. 04
Stumptown
It's cold like Paris—that much is exotic. Fifty-four degrees feels like forty-five when the damp seeps in. The skylights leak a cold gray light; when the bathroom door is open, I can see if it's rained, through the televisual cant of the ceiling.
Some of the little lights in here seem too bright, but maybe it's just the dark of the day. Everything points in at everything else (again, because of the roofline[s])—it will be a challenge to bring back, or try to, the attitude of aeriness (sic) this place had before I began to fill it up with things.
20 Oct. 04
Sign from the Times
In a couple of weeks, hopefully this won't be about baseball.
"It was actually happening. The nerd was kissing the homecoming queen. Paper was beating scissors; scissors were beating rock. Charlie Brown was kicking the football."
19 Oct. 04
Somewhere Between Pasco and the Columbia Gorge
Again (always—one can take hope in this) the lightening sky. The east is behind me—the sun no longer comes up from the sea. ...
"There you are again, up at the crack of dawn—dawn's not even cracked!—with nothing to do." Little does she know, this is just about my favorite things: pen, paper, dim light, window, moving scenery, unlimited coffee just outside my door. ...
Gray clouds breaking into blue, the horizon only now (at six fifty-two or so) yellowing to light. Due east the sky pinks to peach—the point at which my Crayola 64-box color palette (circa, what, 1973, before Flesh was rightly Peach, before any hint of Raspberry or Purple Mountains Majesty) gives out. As the hills begin to show their shade of brown (what Crayola might call Goldenrod, or, in the way-back, Yellow Ochre, unless I'm just imagining things), they look for a moment (save for a lake to our port side) not at all unlike the Oakland hills, down the other side into Lafayette, Orinda, et cetera. I've caught up enough with myself (in the way, of, say, airplanes being too fast for souls) to not be somehow misled, confused—like waking in the middle of my first night on the train not sure where I was, with lost names—Moravia, the Sudetenland—tumbling through my head like leaves, or, more truly and less poetically, thinking I was perhaps somewhere in France.
Salmon Pink and Robin's Egg Blue
Who knew these orange mesas were here? Certainly not me. I feel like those people I always surprise by telling them that most of Oregon is desert. I have to look them straighter in the eye than is comfortable for me, for them to believe.
Rounding a corner, though it's nowhere near raining here, a rainbow touches down near a refraction of itself, just as we pass the replica of Stonehenge. This (like so much) means everything and nothing at once. This is a thing to be balanced: ontological ascription versus some benign sort of chaos, a word I learned to say years before I could recognize it on sight.
18 Oct. 04
Dakota
Woke up at seven to see what I like to call my favorite state (so placid, so rolling, so empty), only to find that how far north we are allows for only the merest hint of light in the east, which is, of course, behind us. I can see occasional lights, the reflecting surface of a pond, radio towers, and flat gray clouds. I write in near-darkness, watching the sky bleach to yellow, a line of pale orange near the horizon. The train rattles and sways and squeaks, and there's no one to wait for us at the crossings.
Ten minutes more, it's peach and navy blue. We keep going around wide, inexplicable bends. Is there really anything here to be circumnavigated? Isn't that part of the point? And while I now that now I need to go home, here is where I may come next: After some semblance of restoration, a clean slate is always best.
One of the windows in my compartment is scuffed to a little blurriness. This is the only place it hasn't mattered.
...
Peach fades into orange, and the clouds prove to not be a solid mass. Still a dark streak above the horizon shoots navy across the lightening sky.
At seven I woke up thinking it was somehow earlier (at one point last night I found that all my timekeeping gizmos said radically different things). I asked the attendant what time it was, which she confirmed. Then I asked why it was so dark. Slightly incredulous, she said, "Because it's winter." ... The rising light here shows leafless trees and what may prove to be ice at the edges of ponds upon ponds. If there were still buffalo, I would not dream of shooting them. That is one difference between some people and others.
Yes, even the great rolls of hay [disappointingly, none with eyes or tails] are frosted with ice, like giant pieces of shredded-wheat cereal. Yesterday at the Art Institute, Monet's series of haystack paintings in all weather made me laugh. Such interest! Such dedication! That's another dichotomy: capturing things as they are now, versus seeing how the same things change over time, are affected by wind, light, snow, or—in the case of the Rouen cathedral, etc.—one's own eyesight. (P.S. It's not just frost, it's snow; it's five of eight and the sun's still not up.)
I can now see that some of the windbreaking trees are birch. Small herds of black cattle stand in the mown fields. A sad outcropping of tumble-down houses and rusted-out cards, hunkered together against what's outside. The muscles in my shoulders don't hurt at rest, but are too sore to touch.
Front Page, Minot Daily News
"Minot gets first snow"
Outside Williston, ND (last stop before Montana)
The sky is pale and soft around the horizon, like at the sea.
...
A natural-gas well with a flame like a flag.
...
A cemetery on a hill; a gate without a fence. Oil derricks, like dipping birds in the cold wind.
Shelby to Cut Bank
The stripes and patchworks of fields, intricate as baseball diamonds, are only slightly less mysterious by rail than by air.
More oil derricks. More snow. Found out that cows (and pigs) with different colored rings around their middles (white on black, etc.) are called "polled." Really for some reason would like Christmas to be Right Now.
Port of Del Bonita, MT
A new, green sign and nothing else but telephone lines, a long straight road, and some cows. One imagines that the cozy-looking trailer a mile back houses what passes for the harbormaster nowadays.
We turn a little south, so my window faces the sun, setting ferociously behind a mean-looking incoming front that covers invisible mountains. The train veers again, spinning me north, sounds a whistle at the dark as we head into it, gaining miles and hours too fast, yet nowhere fast enough.
...
With moving as with life? What I've learned in the past two weeks is that being methodical can save you, is a meditation in its own right.
17 Oct. 04
Capitol Limited
Stopped in Ohio behind a broken-down freight just after waking. Given an extra hour at breakfast when reminded by an old woman who lives on the lake in Chicago. Two Mennonite ladies at dinner last night. They look (as do serious Muslim girls) like nuns. Now speeding past cornfields and painted-looking stands of wind-breaking trees. I am currently known as "The Girl in the Hat."
Winter wheat coming up in Indiana, looking phosphorescent. Last night at sunset (this would have been near Martinsburg) I saw a barn on a hill, see-through like old leaves or lace. The silo looked the same, and I wondered how it was the metal cap still hung there in the air, with, it seemed, still some sense of purpose. The house stood straight, bleached gray, the windowless windows letting the last light through in thick streams.
I slept last night with my head facing northwest, jostled and rocked in an upper bunk on the bottom floor, unable to remember, while briefly waking at station stops or at freights' passing, what country I was in. Sometimes it didn't feel like any nation at all.
We just passed through Plumrose, on our way to Elkhart or South Bend. In Toledo you can transfer to somewhere I used to like to go. Even if I'd been awake, I couldn't have gone there, and besides, you have to take a bus. I haven't cried yet, but my heart feels weighted down, like eggplant slices or cabbage, as if to squeeze something out.
Empire Builder
Chicago is already in winter hats, the wind whistling down the shaded streets already enough to make your ears hurt. I skipped two of the four paintings I'd wanted to see, but found three new favorites in the search. The train was late, and that's all the time I had. In an upstairs car this time, still with north-facing windows (nice for not being blinded by pre-winter sun). I'll have to get up early to catch North Dakota; if we're on time, we may get to see the Rockies at sunset. Two private cars—the Hiawatha and, I believe, the Geronimo—roll red and gold and sleek behind us.
16 Oct. 04
Reporting Live from Our Nation's Capital
I thought Washington was a ghost town until I realized that the Library of Congress is not everone's idea of a prime photo op.
Maison Blank
Maybe it was the three hours' sleep or the lack of lunch, but I found myself tamping down the urge to scream bloody murder (literally? figuratively? who cares?), before I was distracted by the stylish blue jumpsuit of the rooftop sniper. Yay!
13 Oct. 04
Finds du Jour
A new brass deadbolt in pieces with no key. Twelve small wheels, meant for furniture. With the magnetized end of a screwdriver, I make momentary mobiles from the nails, brads, and tacks I pull from the folds of the bottom of a long-unpacked box. I solemnly ponder drinking eight-year-old tea before remembering I already packed the kettle.
11 Oct. 04
Holy Crap
You know how when you're moving it always turns out that you have at least twice as much crap as you think you possibly could? Story of my life today. That and paper cuts, cheap Chinese food, and Vitamin Water.
Update
Accidentally dropping the blender from a great height is a good way to not have to pack some dishes.
5 Oct. 04
Ontology, Etc.
They're soothing somehow, fitting rooms. The Sarahs and Keelies bring you things in different colors, in this size or that. There is time to sit and think, to stare and pontificate. I tried on, among other things, a yellow silk shirt. Not the new yellow of sun or the centers of daisies, but the old one of dried roses and long-kept letters. It wasn't the color, but the style that didn't go: one too many ruffles; too fitted one place, not enough another. I hang things up fully buttoned like my grandmother taught me. I buy wine for some friends, coffee for me, then go sit in the park, on the same bench where I sat when I first saw him here last, coming up out of the subway in half a suit. (Which half? No jacket.) The outdoor café behind the statue of Lincoln is closed now; rumor has it the temperature tonight is supposed to dip to fourty-four.
All I wanted were some corduroys.
29 Sep. 04
What Happens When the F Train Comes Immediately
The problem is when one is rocking out on the iPod—OK, when one is listening fairly intently to the Yo-Yo Ma Bach Cello Suites and maybe paying half the attention one should to one's connecting bus, despite the fact that it seems as it always does—forward-moving—and despite the presence of The Cute Guy, who turns out to be Scott the Subway Announcer in his adorable jacket and with his sonorous voice, to whom you tell all your subway-announcer fantasies, and how you both hate those new fake voices and how yes, you would only take that test, and not the conductor one (You do not tell him the part about wanting to work on your accent.). But you tell him you're leaving town and he says, Oh, that's too bad, and the construction—though it's been going on for weeks, and though up to this moment it hasn't seemed to be making anyone pay one bit of never mind—makes the bus do some crazy detour (This is why you thought Scott the Subway Announcer had something to do with the bus, because he and the driver both got out at the same time, around 16th and 7th to survey the nothing, then got back in again.). Then you get out someplace so far from home you walk through what you know is another neighborhood for awhile before you name it, and then you walk into a car service office and say Hello and ask how far you are from where you want to be, because you are no longer concerned with who they think you are or in what way they think you have gotten yourself so far from home, and you take their card and keep walking and talk only to cemetery crickets and the one lone jogger, who, though he hears things he likely shouldn't, has no business being out this late anyway, and so you mutter to the crickets some more, then turn the corner, then up the stairs to sleep, and for once—for once—everything is Just Fine, as if to spite you.
28 Sep. 04
Logic Problem
If leftover puttanesca sauce, then pour over chicken breasts stuffed with Manchego and spinach.
27 Sep. 04
Exposition
In the mornings I make coffee and sit down to write about the weather, about birds, about everything but the things I miss. My life is constructing itself out of corrugated cardboard and tape: That is one way to turn away from things. Money falls through my hands like sand.
21 Sep. 04
It's Later than You Think
Today overhead: The first loud V of geese.
18 Sep. 04
Punchline to Something
And then I woke up sitting on the couch at six.
17 Sep. 04
Oh, thou joy of all the sorrowful
Tonight I cried for everything I've ever lost. Outside, children screamed, and the neighbors paced nervously above.
Passage
I think I need to stop taking photos. Allow enough time to pass and they all invariably make me sad.
15 Sep. 04
(In)curable
Why isn't there a sort of methadone for people addiction? (And no, the answer is not "other people.")
14 Sep. 04
For Those of You Keeping Score at Home
The sunflower, after being stem-cracked by storms, attacked by squirrels, then left to fend for itself in the summer sun, did manage to pop out a few petals—from a small node in the stem, no less—before giving up the ghost sometime while I was away. I, for one, say, "Bravo."
8 Sept. 04
A Different Chromatic Scale
Dusky purple is the color of sleep. I learned this in Manhattan, in the fall of 2001, when it suddenly seemed to be just me and the cats. I wore two different shoes to work one day and no one noticed. I wouldn't have, either, except for the fact that the older of the two (the other was new) let the rain leak in. Still, my first thought upon realizing my sock was soaked was, "Hey, I just bought these shoes." Sometimes it seems stupid to always (or at least as often as possible) assume the best, but it also seems hopeful. That being said, I should have known he'd prove unreliable when the town seemed to be falling down around everybody's ears and he called so seldom and when he did he said things like, "Don't worry," and, "It's not as bad as you think," because I did and I do and it was, it most certainly was. Where were you?
3 Sept. 04
In the Morning at the Window
Today is rug shopping and phone calls and other people's yard work. Construction across the street with cars and bicycles speeding past. Coffee and trying to remember the definition of "liminal." My shoes will not go with the rest of what I am wearing. Tools fall on girders like bells, then the saw starts again.
There is emptiness I am reluctant to fill. The days are noticeably shorter; it feels
like October even though September's just begun.
2 Sept. 04
Lists and Things
It's what I do these days: lists of things and measurements and people and
places and times. Big tables and little bookshelves; make-do solutions that will or won't
work. Remember not to drink the coffee too quickly, there is sludge at the bottom.
26 Aug. 04
Picking
White spiders on black berries. Blowing them out of the bucket and back onto the vines. The glossiest and fullest fruits of course tumble out of reach. Battling wasps over the rest. Snagged and itchy-dripping under jeans. "Bloodied but unbowed" and all of that.
The dog is loose again. He circles close by, thinking that every order or temptation is a game. (There is an analogy in here somewhere, I'm sure.) He has been in the river and I am now too citified it seems to grab hold of his smelly wetness as he bolts past. This, I am sure, will soon change, like the weather, often and constantly.
25 Aug. 04
Typhoon Maggie
The message said (incorrectly) that the remnants of Typhoon Maggie had gotten sucked into the jet stream. I could elaborate, but basically a) there seemed to be some sort of confluence that b.1) seems significant to b.2) someone, such as myself, who tends to notice these things.
Now on the porch with a beer watching clouds go by, periodically getting up to swat wasps. For once everyone seems happy. I don't want to say it's all because of me, but it may well be.
The clouds move quickly and low, just like I remember, and the crickets are out all day. Inside, the birds chortle and squawk. I'm done for now caring what anybody thinks.
...
The breeze picks up again, liquid-feeling and cold. The crickets speed up, then slow down as the rain begins again. Drumming on the house all night, I woke up, jet-lagged, before dawn. Now I hit wasps out of the air, keep an eye out for a rabbit and trucks, practice laying low. Tonight: a cousin I haven't seen in more than thirty years. Last he'd heard, I was in the hospital, in 1974, tremendously ill. He'd grown up assuming I had died. Such a strange sort of resurrection; the proof that it's possible—that maybe I've been living in an alternate universe all along.
A gaggle of girls coming down the street. Their likes and you knows echoing off of houses and trees. They are absorbed. They don't look up as they go by.
A burble of dishwater through the kitchen window reminds me I promised to help with things: string up some ivy, feed the dog. Sometimes everything comes together on its own; you just have to give it the slightest push; like a Calder stabile as a microcosm of the wider world: Just set it in motion, and it goes.
23 Aug. 04
It's OK
I seem to get kind of annoyed when people love me, anyway.
Not on the List
So instead of packing, I'm listening to old records and making a photo album with pictures made from film I thought I'd lost. Somehow these things seem Terribly Pertinent.
22 Aug. 04
Philadelphia Story
Right now it's Trenton and crickets and darkness. ("Trenton Makes / The World Takes") But earlier it was Philadelphia—dry sunshine and blinding blue and lots full of grapes and locust bean trees and impossibly tangled rebar. ... The bridge was a nautical blue, and we drove by it to a different river: a hill, a canal, some bicyclists. We paused for a while and then moved on, back another way to where we'd come from. There were fronts of boathouses. The Iraqi soccer team on the radio, winning the quarterfinals against maybe Portugal. Passing the art museum, we heard for the second time that day of masked gunmen stealing "The Scream" and "Madonna" right off a Norwegian wall. The paintings were held up by wires. The guards were unarmed. Of course they were. Does anyone think it really should be different? By the time the police, summoned by the alarm, arrived one minute later, the thieves had escaped.
18 Aug. 04
Tompkins Square Park
High up on an oak tree there's a bejewelled mailbox. You know, mosaic mirrors and such. The flag wasn't up or I'd be climbing, sequinned flipflops be damned. I'm sure there's nothing there, but it's someplace I'd be tempted to leave things—scraps of improbably spangled hope in this forbidding season.
14 Aug. 04
Austin Saturday Morning, or: The Burning Business
I'd gone to live in a sort of ladies' group home—not a convent exactly—where, the literature said, the most common problem people had with staying there was suicide. After a couple of days, I could see why. It was simply unreasonable, with their gratuitous rules and sanctimony. I believe I was plotting my escape.
There were bicycles and lockouts and I was indeed depressed—only one or two of the younger women showed the slightest sign of levity. I decided to pay close attention to things and write a book called Sorority.
There was a fire on a hill in town. Someone's business. No one cared. An Indian man like the man I walked to on the train the other night made, perhaps, some sort of sly overture, and it seems I did not encourage him. When it seemed the burning business was endangering the buildings around it, there was some activity—old men in fire hats and a woman from my church who thought it should be in the papers and understood my concerns with the home.
She and I went to a gray stone plaza, where there were a fountain and some scattered religious statues. It was unclear where the sidewalk ended and the monument began. People were tossing money into the midst of the stone figures. It had become somewhat of a thing. I put a five-dollar bill in a special envelope. "Are you going to?" she asked. "Yes," I said, and leaned forward through the fountain's spray, my progress followed by a man with a large camera. I let the envelope loose like a Frisbee. It sailed under the water to the stones.
12 Aug. 04
Rhetoric(al)
What is it with guys who make you paranoid and shrewish, then complain that you're a paranoid shrew? Anybody?
11 Aug. 04
Recipe
Windowbox dill, South Jersey green beans and garlic, vinegar, water, cayenne, salt. Boiling water everywhere aside, it still makes for a little peace.
3 Aug. 04
Horticulture
The sunflower that the squirrel ate the top off and the wind has cracked the stalk of has in my absence acquired six new flower buds. This could merely serve to attract more squirrels, but I prefer to interpret it differently.
1 Aug. 04
Moment of Silence
I feel like I have given up on introspection. I sit down to pray or think and within a second or two I want up, out, away. There is new information from multiple sources; there are credible threats: we've never known this much before. It's not the state of the world or the state of my heart, but something in between, and right now I don't want to pay attention to any of it. A moment of silence? Right now that's about all I can do.
29 July 04
Super-Fun Summer Reading List—Yay!
—Forgiveness Is a Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope, Robert D. Enright
—Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Haruki Murakami
—The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Philip Zelikow, et al.
Special Bonus Soundtrack!
—69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields
2 July 04
Summer
I saw fireflies in my own backyard. That's enough.
25 June 04
Scabs
All my life I've picked at them, helping the formation of many of my scars. I wish this only had to do with cuts and scrapes.
17 June 04
Dingo-Day Afternoon
Feeling very Karen Blixen today: hair up but tumbling, linen and shorts, caffeine and work and wanting to languish. But where is my rifle? Where are the lions?
Downpour
Remember that cloudburst in Kraków? This one is just like that. I have on the same shoes and everything—blue plastic flipflops (made in the ROC; why does the Dalai Lama wear them?)—hot tar sticking to them now as then, my feet sliding as I make my way quickly back to someplace I'm not sure I want to be.
14 June 04
Corpus Christi
Sometimes you're looking for something else, but surreptitiously, sneaking up from behind. On your way out you bow your head, lest you find yourself staring the unexpected in the face, and try to stop your giggle while it's still only a smile.
12 June 04
Mi Casa Es...
At four a.m. the hallways smell like woodsmoke and comic books left too long by the sea.
11 June 04
Not Even Summer
Already so much outside air-conditioner din it took five minutes to recognize the sound of rain.
6 June 04
Stupid Allegory
A nice pair of pants not worn for four years because of a tiny rip in the seam it eventually takes five minutes to fix.
5 June 04
Eagle Provisions
At my grocery store, they keep cello-wrapped corn on the cob (kukurydza) where I think they should: in the meat department, amid the rest of the barbecuables. Song of the moment: "Catherine" by the fabulous Reclinerland. The weather, if anyone cares, is looming: leaves upside down, air currents cold and shaky—just about as perfectly melancholy as things can get until September or October. It's nice to be commiserated with, if only meteorologically.
4 June 04
Yet Another After
I go through entire days feeling either stared-at or invisible. I feel like air kept by flesh from dispersing, but only just. Like sometimes the only way to not be lied to is to stop listening.
Of course I have questions. They're just getting too rhetorical to bother with, such as, "Why, when I have often been too much, am I now somehow not enough?" or, "Bitterness is unattractive and ungrateful: So what?"
17 May 04
Vocabulary
"Suppurate" is not like "separate," it's like "ooze." Band-Aided blisters overnight transformed into a row of cherry dots, numb to pain, but still eschewing shoes. Half past noon and not dressed yet, loath to do the simple tasks I have myself assigned. Outside: airplanes, lonely dogs, and the sun.
26 Apr. 04
Fine English Ladies
Went down to the Narrows tonight to see the QE2 and the new Queen Mary safely off to the Old Country. The QM is indeed impressively huge, but otherwise suffers by comparison: Las Vegas to the QE2's Atlantic City (twice the glitz and none of the old-school glamour). The ships were late; it rained. The park was full of kids and would-be mafia types and Hasidim (among, of course, others). We met tiny dogs named Scalliwag and Hooligan, found a new saint (Rita of Cascia), and made a new friend (Christina, my one-generation-ahead doppelgänger). Meanwhile, the ships (dowager duchess vs. light-up Jawa land cruiser) sounded their farewells, then slid under the bridge and out to sea.
15 Apr. 04
Providence (MI)
In falling sparrows, sure, but also in flying mourning doves and scolding squirrels and sunning turtles, a hopping robin, endeavoring cherry trees, the liquid warbles of marsh birds, and even the sudden contrast of the occasional airborne red-bellied beetle: Everything will be OK, and probably already is.
9 Apr. 04
Because It Bears Repeating
Re: That Movie: "...I appreciate Cardinal Egan's words reminding us of Catholic doctrine that states 'Jesus gave his life.' No one took it from him!" (Fr. Peter Brophy, Pastor, St. Francis of Assisi Church, NYC)
7 Apr. 04
42-68223
They've found Saint-Exupéry's plane. I don't know why I find this comforting, but I do.
21 Feb. 04
Say what you want about the Administration, but...
Spot, First Dog, R.I.P.
29 Jan. 04
My Little Chickadee
They're there in the morning, before first light, little dim dark and dun shapes picking through the things I've left them. Quizzical, nonchalant. I know one shouldn't ascribe these things to birds, but sometimes that's how it goes.
Last night, while buying the blueberry suet blocks that they prefer, a young man (handsome, well-dressed) came in to inquire about "apartment birds, small, something for beginners." Just then a myna bird let out an eardrum-piercing whistle. "Myna birds are too loud," I said, faux-sagely. His reply was noncomittal, edging away toward the cacophony of cages in the back room. I think he thought I said "my birds." But my birds aren't loud at all. A veritable flock, seen through glass: sparrows, mourning doves, a couple of blue jays, a pair of tufted titmice, one shy lady cardinal, two types of woodpeckers, and now the chickadees. Once, in advance of a storm, four immense purple grackles with vast fantails showed up, confused; they ate and left and haven't returned since.
A large new Presbyterian complex near the railroad tracks asks a question from Lamentations: "Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?" Although I wonder what it says on the front of the building—the back side facing only the commutation of trains—I wonder more about the question: if anyone notices, or has an answer.
Our next president has a hangdog look, vastly preferable to the current's simian smirk. He looks weighted down, though perseverant. During the last election, I would have voted "No Quorum" if given the chance. It should be an option: the ability to protest without the danger of lousing things up. The only problem, of course, is that I can see most people voting "Quorum," which here I fear would translate as "I'm with Stupid." Perhaps I underestimate. Really, I'd love to be proven wrong. I wait for it. It never happens. This place is great, I suppose, but moribund. Post-Communist countries can be depressing—with their bad air and vast industrial wastelands—but at least they have momentum; at least they're going somewhere. In America, we sit on our ever-widening backsides, hurling blame at everyone, staring slack-jawed with the remote, pressing Next, Next, Next, hoping that something better will simply occur, not in real life, but on TV, which these days tends to call itself "reality."
It's like keeping a kookaburra in a cage: it gets sullen, resentful; it just doesn't work out. "Give us your tired, your poor, your—" Wait a minute: We're already here.
23 Jan. 04
Definition
My grandfather says a genius is a person who, when eating soup and reading at the same time, puts the soup on the far side of the book. I guess some people are just like that.
15 Jan. 04
Steam-Heat Haiku
Such luxury! Ice
inside the open windows
but it's still too hot.
13 Jan. 04
1:49 a.m., or: Words, Words, Words
I read it seems sometimes to stay awake. If pressed I would be petulant, like a child. To find excuses: more water, less heat, different pillows. I know what these gaps are in the Textual Record: turning my back on things I don't want to look at. Like once watching lovers arguing in sign language, one shutting her eyes on what the other was saying. They weren't long after that.
Someone in a car with a sickly horn honks outside. It's almost two in the morning; what the hell are they thinking? Soon, but not for long, I'll have to get up early with the rest of the world. Never every day, and only for a matter of weeks, but still.
I'm trying to cultivate detachment. That, too, is hard, and always has been, as once detached I tend to stay that way: immovable, slightly alarming. I know what I want, or I think I do—in those purest moments before I pull it all apart in pieces, like a chicken—searching for the tastiest parts and ending up with a pile of bones.
I read to keep my thoughts at bay—to keep my own sentences from forming; things no one needs or deserves to hear.
9 Jan. 04
Love or Fear
Why do you do what you do? [Hint: There is only one good reason.]
7 Jan. 04
Lately
In the past twenty-four hours I have made soup and bread and brownies, all from scratch and without the aid of loud mechanical/electrical devices (the stove does not count).
I found the recharger cord for my otherwise cordless drill. Now I can resume making holes in things.
Although it's impossible to know for sure, it may well be true that I wouldn't be in any club that would have me as a member, as I am not in any clubs.
3 Jan. 04
Perfect
It's a verb, not a noun: revisiting places in similar disguises, but with different (usually no) company; trying to change the present, if not the future—the past glowing on some dark horizon, an almost-forgotten city accessible only by maps one prays aren't lost.
31 Dec. 03
Resolutions
Wagons and ducks; circles and rows.
30 Dec. 03
Clarification
For something to be found, it must first be lost.
28 Dec. 03
Damocles
Portland is screaming windshield wipers and roaring defrost. Wet-rat squirrels and twinkling lights and clouds. A city (it has been said too often) of roses and books. Rife with nostalgia: It hangs in the air, trapped by the overcast skies. Those few days in August, we're free. Our pains and memories float their slow and soggy ways to the sun. Come November we've thought of new ones—worse: the same old ones again. A place of spinning; of staying in place, or moving forward only incrementally. Sheaves of wheat burnt into a café table. Traders, traitors; poets, potentates. We are not as squeaky clean as you surmise. If we were a floor, you could not eat off of us: painted concrete; eavesdropping ("I don't even like sailing"). And a multitude of the heavenly host. And the glory of the Lord shone round about us. And we were sore afraid.
24 Dec. 03
Brooklyn
Parallel-O-Gram
The wine store by my house has set out the figurines
once again: Big bottles with stocking caps and scarves, some holding
bundled-up airplane bottles in their pipe-cleaner arms. On the right
this year, there is a Christmas tree, hung with non-anthropomorphic
single-servers; on the left, a menorah made of wine glasses and
some blue liquid. All of this goes to show how things can be the same
but not; how there can be comfort in the midst of chaos, but that doesn't
mean the chaos doesn't still affect. Wishing you happier
22 Dec. 03
CDG-JFK
Tip for Travel
Except for socks, underwear, etc., you do not need to pack more than one of anything. The exception allows for not doing bits of laundry every single night.
"Comme sur un nuage"
In France, cloud nine has no number. Outside the sky is white. Only a lighted sign and the bilingual persistence of the purser keep my from getting up and getting more wine. First it was too cold; now it is too hot. My eyes are dry, but my mouth is wet.
20 Dec. 03
Prague
Holešovice
Nearly an hour early for my train at the station bleak at any time. Good coffee but almost no seats—those available occupied by some rogue's gallery, and just adjacent to the wall that serves as a tiny casino; so I stand at an actually adequately tall granite table instead, trying (and, of course, failing) not to think of the nice breakfast I could be having right now if I'd known it only took fifteen minutes to get here. Oh well. Something for another time.
My train car and seat numbers are written on my fingertips. This will save continuous/-al/-who can remember? checking of my tickets, which I do almost obsessively, rarely committing the numbers to memory—just looking down to make sure they are there.
Tip for Travel
It is nice to bring something to share on the train.
19 Dec. 03
Prague
Tips for Travel
—When unplugging converter contraptions from recessed outlets, the plug adapter itself often remains behind. Remember to remove it. It doesn't hurt to carry a spare plug as, oddly enough, they can be hard to find.
—Also please note: The main ingredient in most greasy hair products is white petrolatum, otherwise known as Vaseline. That this substance's original commercial use was as machine grease should not bother you.
Česka Pošta
OK. I take it all back. If you read the instructions (allow me to repeat: read the instructions), the Czech postal system reveals itself to be almost a marvel of efficiency. Choose the category of service you need, push the corresponding button, and take a number. People who just want to buy stamps get faster service than, say, people sending big boxes of crap to the U.S., but still: you get to sit down on their fabulous modern bentwood seats and look at the almost floor-to-ceiling Art Nouveau paintings and listen to the delightful little bell that sounds whenever a new number comes up. With some help from a young, admittedly ditzy American filmmaker and the one of my two postal people who knew English (the other didn't, but that ended up not mattering, interestingly [to me] enough. This is a big theater town, after all, and the effect of decent pantomime is no to be underestimated.
So now the reward (after a mere hour or so auf Pošta) of svařák, the local mulled wine. Not quite as good as glühwein I think, but (mostly) less potent, which is good when it's not even really lunchtime.
In looking for a new muse, I'm thinking Prague could really fit the bill. There are people I can talk to here, but there is also, should I want it, a lot of silence. Budapest—or, God forbid, Sofia—might provide an unhealthy amount of the latter. Besides, I don't know how keen I am on the wild frontier. The people who sneer at cities like Prague as having been "done" are I think missing the point, and a lot of nice towns besides. I mean, I could go somewhere politically and socially less pleasant, but why? To prove something? To whom? I like a few amenties, a cohesive art scene; the remnants of Communism hold little appeal. Staid old ladies like Paris and grouchy old men like New York still have their charm, and foreign-ness, (you are almost always foreign in New York, unless your grandfather helped build something tall) is often challenge enough.
While at the Rudolfinum
The ads for Alfa Romeo say "Beauty is not enough." Sometimes it is.
18 Dec. 03
Prague
The Charles Bridge saints are black with grime and the river, glowing only where wished upon. I ask them for nothing, no longer sure of my heart's desire.
Unsound Sleep
[After waking from a brief but terrible series of dreams involving my mother, whom I called at 00:30 local time, and who is, of course, fine.] Here I keep sneezing. The outside sounds have quieted. It is either too hot or too cold. My eyes can barely stay open—a good sign—so I will let them close.
Breakfast Room
So how could you date someone you didn't share a language with? You could know they were a good person, but how could you know if they were funny or smart? Check their book collection? But does it matter so much, the intellectualism, really?
Welcome to the Occupation
It's not so much that we had never been attacked, it's that we have never been occupied, forced to learn another way of speaking, to forget our history—then, when the foreigners leave, to be gracious when they come as guests, to place their language beside our own on invitations, warnings. I'm just saying that there are many shoes in the world, and that we should at least consider what it's like to walk in them.
A Friendly Holiday Reminder
Mistletoe is a parasite.
A Relatively Sobering Thought
Can fiction teach anyone anything? Yes, but it has to not try to. But perspective, empathy, geography, other points of view. It can do all that and more. It just has to do it quietly.
17 Dec. 03
Ivrea, Italy
Tips for Travel
—Keeping a soggy Kleenex in the coat pocket that holds your change may discourage pickpockets. Then again, it may just give them colds....
—800 numbers can be reached from abroad by dialing 880 instead. Why this seems to be secret knowledge escapes me. Neither my bank nor my credit card companies list this in their contact information.
Prague
My tiny reserve of Czech is gone. Bits of German and every Polish word I ever knew (all thirty of them) bubble up out of the murk like landfill artifacts. I did, however, pronounce "venison" well enough to not have to find it again in the menu and point to it.
Noticed
So cars will stop for you (here and in Italy), but the catch is you have to walk out in front of them first. Object lesson. Also, what's with Italian guys and their Very Loose Tie Knots? I know it's supposed to be fashion, but I don't get it. [People who know exactly how much I do not get fashion, please stop laughing now. Thank you.]
12 Dec. 03
À Strasbourg: A Rhyme
There is fog in Champagne, everywhere. / My pain au chocolat's full of air.
Munich
Confisorie Rottenhöfer
There is a brass band playing somewhere outside. I mean, there always is somewhere, isn't there? Pondering the stylistic disconnect occuring on (with? within?) women wearing fabulous hats and dowdy shoes. Must go put on other shoes and jacket (Docs and fake gorilla fur versus jackboots and antique chat mort.) After that, will feel much better.
11 Dec. 03
Paris
Je Suis Arrivée
One of the joys of winter travel: Empty hotels that let you check in before sun-up. Desk clerk with a fabulous moustache, turned up at the ends, antique pink Murano glass chandeliers in the foyer and hallways, everything shiny and neat. There is even a regular pillow, in addition to the customary bolster. Barely light at 8. The trains sound like drums in the distance below.
Confidentiel à J.
Les choses qui sont belles, il faut que les laisse comme ça.
And furthermore...
<<Il n'y a pas des parapluies ici.>>
<<Nous avons surprisés. Nous les avons.>>
Tricolore
The fruit flies here are so fat, they begin to resemble regular flies. They rest on the window curtain, making brief forays to my pile of bread, which I wasn't really eating anyway, so OK.
Au Chien Qui Fume
I tried to read the grounds, but all I saw were two dogs—one self-assured, one running up behind him looking freaky. Is the sky falling? Wait, that was chickens.
10 Dec. 03
JFK
Idlewild
From the world's most interminable check-in line to a mysteriously empty Catholic-incense-scented bathroom, to a dancing Italian who made a too-big mocha with espresso, milk, and a packet of hot chocolate.
Asthma inhalers do not count as "pressurized containers." This makes sense, and is in fact something I'd assumed, but still.
Low clouds, darkening, London flights all delayed due to fog. I can feel myself slouching, but am not in much of a mood to straighten up. Primness suddenly seems, if not entirely unneccesary, then at least not so important.
The familiar pulling-muscle aches from too-heavy luggage. The re- and re-re-checking of train tickets, mental notes, etc. I was excited earlier today; now I'm just sleepy. Happy to be going, but, as in so many other things remaining—almost without effort—entirely nonplussed.
5 Dec. 03
The Dream
I was hiding from you, but you came anyway. I hid some more, and reappeared to think you'd gone, but you and my dad had just gone to buy more beer.
People kept showing up. We went for a walk and you kissed me in a way that made me laugh. There were many questionable examples of urban renewal, despite the fact that we were in the country. I didn't tell you my secret then, but I will. You told me yours.
[Editor's Note]
Fool's Paradise is 5 today. Whew.
2 Dec. 03
SNOW!
Ahem.
30 Nov. 03
Blue
So where is the watery wavering that signals
the end of the dream sequence? Where is my fin de sitcom
laugh? I keep
28 Nov. 03
I am learning the value of silence.
26 Nov. 03
Velocity Girl
Tell the whole story to your hairdresser and no one else. Try to drink little. Try to eat less. Move forward, until things become more clear.
22 Nov. 03
Relativity
The music upstairs, with its perpetually thumpy bass, is finally off. Savoring the semi-urban quiet, it occurs to me that noise, like other things—events, surprises, vexations—doesn't bother me when it's constant, only when it's discrete.
7 Nov. 03
Words, words, words . . .
For the longest time, I thought it was "tenderhooks." Sometimes I think it still is.
4 Nov. 03
Ever want to chew glass?
. . .
Grading
Sometimes it's like you flunked a test you didn't even know you were taking.
31 Oct. 03
Mathematical Certainties
I am noticing from certain friends' travelogues that I am not a person who travels expansively. Which is to say I take things into myself, rather than maybe engaging more directly. Or something. This is probably a fault, I know. The real math here, though, prosaic as it seems, is that I can rarely manage to get to bed sooner than three or so hours after I stop working. When I stop working at a quarter to one, this can be a problem.
29 Oct. 03
Forward, March
Julie and I were in the Army. It was part of school and run by our junior-high math teacher, Mr. Howard, whom we ludicrously now had to call "sir." There were special clothes and special stores. A lot of giggling, but not much in the way of training, much less guns. We looked trepidatiously toward the day we'd have to actually enlist, because we were too old. We wore little tank tops sorted by last initial and waited to be found out.
25 Oct. 03
Sleeping Late
The dream was all about climbers who fell: their handholds no good, their sickening lurches and drops. Someone brought us sour cherries in cream. I had some Kirschwasser; I was going to make a big dinner. We bought a rabbit (skinned, to eat), but there were mice in the kitchen (shit caught in the cobwebs on the drainboard).
We lived in the middle of a great shallow waterway where I hated my mother's boyfriend for not giving me adequate jars to fill with silt and snails. He poured milk on them and they died.
I stole two yellow plastic boats—like those a child would play with in the bath, but big enough for me. But then I am not so very tall.
The sherriff came, looking for the stolen boats. A bearded climber—who really had fallen only six feet or so (I saw his "mountain") had accidentally dropped his brother's keys off the side, and valiantly offered to go back to the forest and get them.
No one wanted to ride in my boats. You forgot to bring the cherries, so there was no dinner. The rabbit desiccated on the counter, looking at us accusingly with its lack of eyes.
19 Oct. 03
The New Math
Whatever you do, do not walk into a store and say to the universe, "I don't care how much it costs, all I want is a pair of pants that fit right," because it will cost a lot.
13 Oct. 03
So Much of It Is Not Fabulous
So much of it is not fabulous. It is crow's feet and shitty diapers. To say the least. Once in a while it may even be something almost unforgivable. But the parts that have been fabulous mostly always will be. That seems as much of a certainty as this world is likely to give you; I suggest that you take it.
11 Aug. 03
Once and Future
So there has been Brooklyn. Soon there will be Berlin and probably Kraków, then Halifax and possibly PEI. I am expected capital-H home at Christmas, but there may be too much singing.
Work is. I send many sheets of paper out, and get a few sheets of paper back, which I exchange for places and sometimes things.
It's true, you know, what they say about happiness. I will use that as my only excuse, and be grateful for it.
31 Jan. 03
Self-Indulgent News of the Day
Page 7 of 7
You're done!"
I mean really, if it were only that easy. But still. :-)
28 Jan. 03
State of the Union, or, Just what the hell kind of time is 9:01, anyway?
I am avoiding other things, but also It: Catching up on friends' sites, reading about Weimaraners, trying to make myself reserve a van to move in, forgetting to buy toilet paper, making mediocre pasta sauce, wondering if I have any stories lying around, checking and re-checking the Illegible List, trying to get excited about updating my resume, etc. Something tells me I should just go to bed.
26 Jan. 03
Oof
Sometimes it's better to ask for help with technical difficulties. Sometimes it's nice to have a break and figure things out when you figure them out. Whatever. Hi.
30 Nov. 02
Housekeeping
I have turned down the job. I am recycling the Peace Corps application. I have yet to feel as though I've given anything up.
28 Nov. 02
Thankful Nonetheless
If all you really wanted was sitting right in front of you, would you take it? Would it be easy to? If not, why?
14 Oct. 02
Airborne
The plane flew low through a clear blue sky. The wrinkle again cut between my eyes. Then I saw a mirror image, mere degrees to the north: geese. The first V of autumn. That I've seen, anyhow. A guy crossing the street near me was fiddling with both a digital camera and a camcorder. He seemed confused by my smile and gazing, but it was too complicated to explain "take a picture."
4 Oct. 02
Standin' at the Crossroads, Tried to Flag a Ride
Why is it that the difference between courage and deeply chicken is sometimes so hard to discern? What's the difference between a story of a life and the life itself?
16 Sept. 02
Pretty in Black
My grandparents' house is being overrun by daddy longlegs. For some reason this, more than just the stark passage of time, makes me nervous. It has never, in my experience, happened before. (The spiders, I mean.)
I watched The Courtship of Eddie's Father (the movie, not the TV series) with my dad. I did not identify with the bitchy love interest, although Ron Howard, in the role of Eddie, did irritate me somewhat.
We're close enough to the San Francisco Airport that I can hear jets rev up to take off. This, as you can probably imagine, is not reassuring to me. The one thing I know for sure: I will wake up tomorrow, hung over, underslept, sort of dazed by sun and sentiment, likely still wondering at my grandmother saying, "I wish you hadn't yelled. I don't like yelling," when she yells all the time—when I hadn't yelled at all.
15 Sept. 02
Packing Tips, Revisited
To add to "swimsuit when travelling to even potentially warmer climes" and "something for the unexpected fancy dinner" (to avoid dusty brogues at the Ritz, in case of emergency cocktails): "something to wear in case somebody dies."
September 11 for me was almost peaceful. I was in San Francisco, sleeping late, then going to a more ecumenical Mass that I would've given the Catholic Church credit for. I went to Ocean Beach and walked in the waves and jousted with crabs I was tempted to take home for dinner (but instead helped them bury themselves against the circling gulls). During a late dinner with my grandparents, the call came. It was 9 p.m.
Is seems that at 11:41 p.m. Eastern time (which, despite my upbringing, is how I calculate things these days), the last of the truly old ladies in my family passed away. I'd almost made it through the day free of any sorrow save that of my own device: no TV, no radio DJs (any hint of patriotism had me hitting the Off button), etc.
So now it's Sunday. I've just spent more on clothes in half an hour than I'd spent in the last fiscal quarter. I feel guilty about the boots. I cried into a three-way mirror in a dressing room at Ann Taylor. Black dress, black skirt—both on sale. It's a two-parter, you see. My grandmother, whose mother this is not, thinks ritual is stupid, thinks we're going overboard. My grandfather, who is the tour guide of our grief, does not.
And I feel bad for musing like this. For wanting to help carry the coffin. It's just that I've always felt so removed from these things: far away, not told until sometimes months later—as an afterthought, as though something quote-unquote expected shouldn't be mourned.
Another day where everything feels petty and ludicrous: e.g., please, God, don't let us crash the car, my underwear doesn't match.
13 Sept. 02
The New Economy
In the dream you had called and you were crying. I hadn't said anything yet. You were trying to find a job but couldn't. I thought I was sighing solicitously, but realized I could be misunderstood. I was going to actually say something, something nice, when the phone rang for real. It was 7:10 in the morning, vacation time, and afterwards I couldn't get back to sleep. I tried to call you—to tell you I love you, in case you'd forgotten—but your phone was busy. I don't have the number written down anywhere now, so it's only a matter of time before I forget.
11 Sept. 02
Open Up Your Golden Gate
Memories crowd and elbow: playing tennis at the Dolores Park courts in 25-cent orange polyester University of Idaho shorts bought down the street, along with some socks. I forget where the sneakers came from. The racket was $2. That was how long it had been since I'd done something of that sort: long enough to run out of all the accoutrements.
The gorgeous mosaic dome of Mission High School, the spitting image (spit and image?) of the one on my old church in Burlingame. (I have decided I don't want to hear them talk about this day. Anything they'd have to tell would be wrong somehow: The best thing to say today is nothing.)
It's in the 70s already, at just before 11 a.m. Dry with a touch of ocean breeze. I like skirts because I think they look better, but in pants you can sit any way you want.
Walking Back (Ocean Beach)
Seaweed like feather boas. When the waves went out, air holes opened up in the sand like applause. When I came out of the water, ashes from the fire were still on my hands.
7 Sept. 02
Verbophilia
I have always (as long as I've been able) read every word that crossed my path—cereal boxes, road signs, advertising circulars—can't seem to help it. Sometimes I try not to, but I rarely succeed.
. . .
(So often, though, words don't tell the whole story: a list of ingredients is not the taste of a thing. I mean, even if wishes were horses, if the beggar isn't actually riding in the direction of his heart's desire, there's little use wishing in the first place. Sugar and apples, though, are always on hand, just in case.)
6 Sept. 02
In Transit
The red marble of Utah, the rhodalite and jasper of the Oakland refining pools. Due north to the sameness and the difference of the river and the creek where they meet: a crawdad claw, and just enough flat rocks to skip. New bridges over old pathways, cramped rooms filled with tropical birds. The dog is new, and earnest. There is concern about what to do with him in the winter, since he has been so far almost constantly wet from rivers and lake. I say he'll just have to find another job: right now he herds rocks. Someday in sleep I am sure it will come to me: what this means.
. . .
Eponymous blindness on the Sunset Highway—I race to catch up to the cars ahead, so as not to be left behind.
31 Aug. 02
Packing, 1 a.m.
In no particular order:
Robyn Hitchcock, Greatest Hits
Freakwater, Dancing Under Water
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli with the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, Souvenirs
Freakwater, Old Paint
Stan Rogers, Home in Halifax
Gabriel Yared, Betty Blue/37°2 le Matin
Various Artists, Until the End of the World
Jeff Buckley, Grace
25 Aug. 02
Stargazer
Cinnamon-sweet pink lilies prompt window-closings, air-conditioning, as if no one, no one else deserves such scents as these.
24 Aug. 02
The Last Goodbye
It's like a deathbed visitation—like I need to read up on my Faulkner. I hold no hope of reconciliation, since, oddly, there's nothing needs be reconciled. I only hope to pull off a modicum of dignity—I've been told I'm good at that.
22 Aug. 02
Amateur Cartography
The lines are still there, but I swear they're finer today than they've been in years. More like sketched than carved in stone.
21 Aug. 02
Tonic & Balm
Mechanism: Makes you sleepy like you did something to deserve it, as after a long walk to someplace peaceful and back; pads the corners and edges of things—they're still there—can still touch you—but their power to harm is gone; makes you smile at everything good, even dogs that are not quite so cute; makes you pensive and loopily grateful. Ideal dosage: As often as plausibly possible. At other times, simple recall will suffice.
Deo Gratias
I went to ask forgiveness; ended up just saying thanks.
20 Aug. 02
Hence the Name
So fingerling potatoes, cut in quarters lengthwise. Ran out of salt days ago—the closest store doesn't have the kind I want (nothing special: not Kosher or sea or gris or any of that—just plain crystalline grindable), and I'm for some reason unwilling to travel the slightest bit further afield to find it, thinking that maybe like Lot's wife if I'd only turn around to see what I'm walking away from I could have all the salt I wanted. But an insistent hand pulls me onward, through all these deserts.
Occasional Grace
Sometimes it's enough to hope you gave back as much as you took.
12 Aug. 02
Dinner
Eggplant slices weeping oceans only point out the need for the sea—none seen for more than a month, and anyway, not "my" ocean, for whatever that's worth.
A headache that describes my brain, then settles between my eyes, like a bindi, or a bullet.
A lack of discipline is likewise painfully evident, and is in great need of remedy.
10 Aug. 02
Not Quite Nostalgia
When do memories get that misty veneer? It seems all of a sudden, that it turns from something happening yesterday, or like it was yesterday, and then one morning you're struggling to remember, and details rise up and fade like something sinking, that you're going to let sink.
8 Aug. 02
Car Alarms
Even though my arm's still pretty good, there are only three eggs left, and I wouldn't want to waste them.
25 July 02
A Cautionary Tale
Never try to make pickled beets at home on your lunch hour while wearing a white sweater and the apron's in the laundry. Not even if you have a favorite beet farmer and the beets are going bad.
If, however, you have done this terrible deed, perhaps this will cheer you up. It has certainly worked for me.
19 July 02
Again with the weather
When the heat broke, it split in two. Thunder from the distant West like an advancing army, clouds seeming sucked from the ground—rising up behind buildings like raptured spirits. Lightning everywhere, all at once. The sound of gunfire. Then darkness, and insistent rain.
9 July 02
Those three little words that mean so much:
Key
Lime
Pie
23 June 02
Location, Location, Location
On the map it's where the duckbilled platypus of Canada pierces the Great Lakes. Where something is pointing at you, reaching out a hand maybe, or a chandelier to swing on, to where the swordfight continues on the circling stone stairs, to where you eventually prevail.
20 June 02
It may be Manhattan, but by God there's pie.
18 June 02
It's all in the ...
Say what you want about geologic time and what-not, but I still think a year can sometimes start to seem very long indeed.
16 June 02
Vacation
Coming back every year, same place, enough to be
14 June 02
Morning
It's only after too much sleep that they happen. This one twice as big as it should've been. Full—you could see the cabin lights from far away. It lay gently down, horizontally, in the distance, the crash like late-summer fireworks over water.
Evening
Hallways lined with umbrellas. Editing a book on Africa, propelled through the plangent mugginess by that sine qua non of colonial beverages: Coca-Cola.
9 June 02
All These Stories
Today I became reacquainted with what I often refer to as my former self: Queens Botanical Gardens to look at the roses; slight sunburn; home looking up bookstores I'd almost forgotten; pondering stories long-since written, when my favorite nail polish colors were Marooned and Big Apple Red, when my friend Gerald was still alive; when around my neck I wore not a saint, but a subway token. I can still spot Marooned (and Japanese Violet) from five feet away. All these stories: They have a life of their own.
7 June 02
Pick a Little, Talk a Little
I can't stand that gleam in the eye that gossips get, especially when they're relaying Very Bad News. That's the thing I try to avoid: that fevery glint.
5 June 02
Hit the Ground Running
Another plane-crash dream last night—this one a high-speed test craft that punched straight into the ground in the field between my high school and grade school. I remember saying, "Not again," but I wasn't talking about plane crashes in general, only about that particular dream.
This time the pilot lived. He was carried off on a stretcher by some cheerleaders. Actually, I don't remember who took him away—only that he lived, and was carried.
3 June 02
Corpus Christi
I am no longer looking for signs. In fact, the next sign I pay attention to will have a big arrow on it and consist of the single word, "YOU."
1 June 02
Aging
4 a.m. is definitely too late. Orangina is slightly too sweet.
31 May 02
Summer Storm
At times the lighting flickered like the whole outside was watching TV.
30 May 02
77th Street Station
You know you've waited long when he gets through his whole four-song repertoire and begins again.
27 May 02
Burritoville
For those of you keeping score at home, I still don't miss San Francisco, although I do miss the idea of mainland California, and the actual fact of Baja.
Commercially available "Moroccan mint tea" here is nowhere as sweet as that made by actual Moroccans, which is a crying shame.
26 May 02
The Second Degree
It looks like a pink comet. A classic marbled streak halfway up the right middle finger. Where it ends, swooping up slightly onto the ring finger for style, the skin is crinkly and two shades lighter than "angry red." The whole of the ring-finger knuckle resembles nothing so much as one the "Killer Omelets" from my favorite Star Trek episode.
The blister, which appeared as soon as the iron rolled off my hand, is less robust today, but still the same three colors, mostly yellow. (This is for protection.) I worry about it breaking. (This is a metaphor.)
With all the bandages on, it looks like I got in a fight. I wear little dresses and things to help dispell this notion. I have found that if you keep a burn wet enough (fresh aloe vera is preferable, but bacitracin ointment—preferably with a topical anesthetic added—is also a good choice), even minor thirds won't scar (burns, not music). This I learned, like so much else, without wanting to.
25 May 02
Rating Solitude
Pro: Eye cream. Lots of greasy eye cream.
Con: Wrestling with the air conditioner. (Tip: Those silvery vents on the back, while they look all delicate and nice, are actually very, very sharp.)
22 May 02
Portrait
When I lived in California, I had a black and white postcard of Jack Kerouac in an old fake tortoiseshell frame that I bought for 50 cents at the Catholic ladies' auxiliary thrift store. In it, he's wearing a plaid shirt and holding a cat. Once somebody asked me if it was a picture of my dad and I said, "No, that's Jack Kerouac. My dad likes dogs."
17 May 02
Rise and Shine (Snooze Alarm)
Every eight minutes
I flip myself over
to dream again.
12 May 02
Prologue
In all my dreams last night the moon was full.
Can we talk about the weather?
The thunder took a long time to fade—it never did, really—was subsumed into the city's hum. When it came again, it was more culmination than separate sound.
Life, Liberty, and That Other Thing
Three people quite close to me have recently been offered what amounts to or leads to their own particular versions of happiness. All of them have basically said they'll have to think about it. The vastness and vehemence of my exasperation at this hints at the fact that I may be facing a similar decision. Only damned if I can see what it is. But the advice? Say thank you.
7 May 02
Yet Another Theory
Maybe love isn't blind after all—maybe it's just those little sleeping mask things they hand out at the beginning.
4 May 02
Conundrum
I like clocks more than I like time.
29 Apr. 02
Lapin aux Pruneaux
Why is it that so many things allegedly taste like chicken, but all liver tastes fundamentally the same?
Wait—don't tell me.
18 Apr. 02
The Other Shoe
Nice guys often finish last not because they bore us, but because we're waiting for them to do something nefarious and awful, and sometimes the suspense is just too great.
ADA
OK, so love is blind. Fine. What I want to know is where are the seeing-eye dogs?
17 Apr. 02
Coincidence
Last night I shooed his ghost away like a stray dog, as it walked beside me on Second Avenue.
Burnin' in My Heart
It's so hot I just put ice in my wine. I mean—my grandmother does that (it works, too). [Soundtrack: Astor Piazzolla, German reissue, circa 1998. (The chocolate is melting; if I hung laundry out right now, it would not dry.)]
14 Apr. 02
Reasoning
There are things I do not photograph because they are secrets (the back of the Pietà in Notre Dame, viewable only from the rear chapel—"Service Only/No Visitors"); things I do not tell (re: Belgrade, 1955) for the same reason.
12 Apr. 02
Après le Déluge
The plant did not die, and I managed to sleep until 6:00. Not a bad beginning, really.
3–11 Apr. 2002
I went to Paris, and all you get is the expurgated text.
Mostly translated, for your convenience. Commencez ici.
11 Apr. 02
À CDG
Phrase de la semaine: trop compliqué.
U.S.S. Insipid
Customs comment: "Books we don't care about; clothes we do." Well.
7 Apr. 02
Moment: Pont de Solferino
Trois enfants, un qui saute et crie "Oui! Oui! Tuileries!"
La Madeleine
The priest looked like a movie star and the hosts were thick as 1£ coins and I swear had a distant taste of chocolate. The best statue of Joan of Arc is here: comes out swinging.
6 Apr. 02
Phrase du Jour
J'ai perdu mes chausettes—je pense que je les ai laissé dans la douche.
After the Demonstration, I Went To Buy Shoes
If nothing else, one has to admit that a bunch of Parisians
shouting, "Bush! Sharon!
5 Apr. 02
État de Siège (a store that sells chairs)
The English word "siege" does contain a strong element of "sit the fuck down."
Semantics, parts I and II
I say vs. I tell; I hear vs. I listen.
In French, they call it "célibataire."
4 Apr. 02
Air France 23
Now I believe I am a seasoned air traveler. How I knew: I opened the yogurt away from me.
Aside from the Luxembourg Gardens
Today was the most beautiful day in the history of Spring.
Taxi in a Hurry
It's in God's hands. (And God said, "Ask the driver to go faster, and to quit stopping at all the yellows.")
And I'm sorry, but ...
Kicking the media out has never had anything to do with protecting journalists.
15 Mar. 02
Upper East Side
And every time I see some small diarrheic puddle I think, "Gee, one of those little dogs just exploded!"
11 Mar. 02
Scan
I am steadfastly refusing to buy olive oil, for unknown reasons. Experiments with butter. Wearing a tiara and listening to nuns chanting and turning over and over my preposterously tiny phone, waiting for a call I do not want to receive.
Maybe I'm not Freudian after all. Maybe it didn't start with my father. Maybe it started with my brother: I've always wanted to love him better than I did.
9 Mar. 02
On the More Depressing Aspect of (Among Other Things) Massage and Psychotherapy
That we have to pay people sometimes to touch us, to listen.
Since You Asked (In No Particular Order)
Scotch-French-Irish-Catholic-Orthodox-Greek-Italian-Jew; Blackfoot not from lack of shoes or bathing; emigrant by nature; American by birth.
8 Mar. 02
Thoughts Before Dinner
Can someone please explain to me why Häagen-Dazs Bananas Foster ice cream (Limited Edition) has as much vitamin A as it does calcium? And, moreover, if they dispensed with that stupid diaresis (née umlaut), what would they be left with? Haeagen-Dazs? Haaagen-Dazs? The mind fairly wobbles.
7 Mar. 02
Almost Unmitigated Joy
I can't remember the last time I saw my name on a buzzer, or a mailbox.
...
In my refrigerator is more film than food.
18 Feb. 02
Yes, I know, it is not always about me. Once in awhile I just forget.
2 Feb. 02
Gusts of wind blew the supermarket boxes across Third Avenue where they smacked into curbs, audible from a block away, as cars dodged and honked. Above, windchimes (don't usually like them, my favorite set one made by a friend from a slim solid cylinder of aluminum—the kind used to bolster people's backbones) rang in some sort of alarm, even though—it being midnight on a Friday—there was likely no one home to hear them.
28 Jan. 02
A Rose Is a Rose
Pushing, rocking, finally with the cutting board on the floor, standing on the knife like a shovel, getting nowhere, more like Sleeping Beauty than Miss America.
25 Jan. 02
When Size Matters
Event of the evening: drilling through
double-walled steel with a 3/8" drill bit.
Not just a 3/8" drill, a 3/8" bit. Slightly
frightening, but not in such a bad way,
23 Jan. 02
Really
I am not altogether a fair-weather friend. Just maybe overcast at best these days.
21 Jan. 02
Halifax–Boston
Two propellers, 27 seats, two hours five minutes over open sea.
18 Jan. 02
New York–Toronto
Step 1: They stole my tweezers, but did not Actually Display my underwear. I am supposed to feel comforted by and grateful for both of these things, especially the former. I, of course, do not.
That the lucky penny in my boot failed to trip the metal detector leaves me simultaneously relieved and scornful, slightly ill at ease.
The Air Canada wing, so to speak, is yellow, and much like a place you'd wait to talk to prisoners in.
Not a bit of this leaves me truly reassured, nor, I suppose, should it.
14 Jan. 02
In French, "raisin" just means "grape"
My heart is like a thumb that's been too long in the bath.
Notebook
It does not say "If found, please return to," It says "In case of loss." There is a huge difference in there somewhere.
9 Jan. 02
Revisionist History
It shouldn't be "The first story I wrote," "The first time I woke up from a nightmare," but "The first time I remember," "The first time I remember."
Soup
Vichyssoise of sorts from leftover mashed potatoes and one overpriced leek. Something. Or rather sumthin'. Or, really quelque chose.
5 Jan. 02
02:00
Dreams of rats, indifferent cats, mugging and busy 911, and sick I wake up with the light on and my book upright.
2 Jan. 02
Q4
This will go down as the time when I started to get old. Disagree all you want, but it's true. This Christmas, even my most farsighted relatives could see the gray in my hair, the lines at the corners of my eyes. There is a new furrow. There was a period of two weeks recently when I turned inexplicably from "Miss" to "Ma'am." (I know it is not my elegant bearing that has made me thus.) When I first started to feel really tired, intimations of permanently so. The moments where thoughts of things I haven't done—things I realistically might never get to do now—strike me with real, not pretend, fear. Glimpses in the mirror of that slaughterhouse gaze. You know the one: the large, frightened eye. It always passes, just: Now I know it's there.
27 Dec. 01
Crystal Ballroom, Portland, OR
There are people who stay the same; places. Those you visit twice each decade or so, just to check up. The sound guy at the show you go to with a college-era friend. His look (the sound guy's) is more refined—the black vest and matching porkpie hat are nicer, newer, but the ensemble's still the same. There is something here to be scorned and admired; something in oneself to be proud and ashamed of: to stay, to go, to run, to entrench. Something to be said for the oasis, but to live there?
Like some ghost of Christmas Past offering somewhere you could live in: A past, a possible future—saying Here—saying How about this? Don't you want it? Don't you?
If it's true that the only thing to separate us from the rest of the apes is ambition, then what is this? Doing the same thing in the same place, but better? There is something to be said for that. A lot to be said. And some small fear laid bare for not—for making a new maze, a longer stick, a new set of impedences. Yet another more baroque excuse. Not for failure. Just for lack of success. Quote-unquote.
23 Dec. 01
Leaving New York
I'm always the littlest bit afraid it won't be here when I get back.
21 Dec. 01
At Least One Good Thing
People still say good-bye better hereabouts, with the obvious, if tacit, acknowledgement that you might not get to say it again. One gets the distinct feeling that "If only I'd said ..." won't be heard in these parts for quite some time.
17 Dec. 01
The Heat Is On
As of noon on Sunday. Feast or famine here, in every way: summer pajamas and windows open in winter.
15 Dec. 01
Excerpt