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Saturday, May 17th, 2008
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11:28 am - For Crying Out Loud
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Went swimming at the pool down the street, part way I remembered my forgotten bike and thought of the young kids I knew who had biked to the pool, and how I could be like them with towels thrown over their smooth shoulders riding bikes too small. And that is how things are now, I do things, beautiful things, but not as well as I'd like.
Sometimes days stretch out like admonitions against my barren ideas. The things I love to do that never build, lie flat where I set them. When I was in Middle School I taught myself sign language and had no one to talk to. I am learning again how to make hands words, but I become skeptical at it.
Sometimes I come home from work like waking from dreaming, no memories but rather senses, recalling a smile and a hand. Forgetting is worse than boredom, like salt thrown behind your back. I am against loss, with all my hours.
Theorize a lack of friends and then go to them, go to drink, and half way done with that rise up for pen and paper. Into drunk and crowded streets to play tag. It is a natural and easy thing that I am winning at tag. Some one yells: stop running! and I come to sudden halt, ready as anything to behave well.
Yes, and a profusion of hours on the phone trying to chase up what it is exactly that I do with myself, for people who I only see on holiday, the loved and family.
Sometimes I shore up against loss by not wishing for things, by passing a hand over my hair when I wake up and asking myself only "what today?" and sometimes "what tomorrow?"
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| Thursday, May 8th, 2008
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3:08 pm - I have moved to Austin.
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I am still waiting for a box of film for my finicky camera. Across from my back door, across the road, is a stone staircase that goes down to a waterfall and pond with a dinner plate size snapping turtle. Down the road a little bit is a stone creek bed that overlooks an empty waterfall, or empty but for the thinnest rivulet. It is a good place to throw leaves and see how fast they can scoot by, and I have empirically proven that it spontaneously brings to mind Terebithia. Twenty paces gone by and there is a beautiful wooden bridge that ends by honeysuckle and roses. Fig trees and orange trees seem to be everywhere, and the cactus are about to bloom. One person does not mow their yard and the flowers that come up look like a field of stars in the evening. The moss is trying very hard to cover the earth, and tosses down perfectly round sons and daughters that look like Martians and are the ideal size and softness for throwing at people. I know the best place to go to watch turtles lay atop of each other, and I've even grown fond of the poison ivy, if only for it's perverse ability to thrive in every wild spot I want to go. In the front yard a Magnolia tree is blooming- I have spent longer smelling a Magnolia than any dang flower.
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2008
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2:27 pm - Common Dream Element
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| Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
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8:18 pm - So far beyond the casual solitudes.
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"I admire compression, lightness, agility, all rare in this loose world."
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| Thursday, January 24th, 2008
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5:35 pm
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I am moving from one room to the other in a very cold house. A space heater tells the thermostat that all is well and I walk shivering in the hallways. The room I am moving from is all windows, wood floor set out from the rest of the house, hovering off of the foundations. I suit up to go into it, gloves and hat, ready to gather fossil socks and vacuum lint off the futon. That room is being turned into a den, although what loving couple would want to go in and snuggle at 30 degrees is beyond me. Adolescence bumps into me as I go to the bathroom, now that I live in my mother's house. (Did I mention that I have committed the gaffe of moving in with my parent?) My mother has a boarding house and I am one of her tenants.
I recommend with wholehearted abandon the book "A High Wind in Jamaica" and am about to read "Lolly Willowes: or the loving huntsman" and "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren." Several animal cookie cutters have been strung out like washing along the ceiling, and I regret to say a few were stepped on, making them into invertebrates. In a week and two days I am taking a test that will carry equal weight to my four years of college and today I went and got new contacts for luck. The doctor told me that veins in my eyes were moving closer to my iris and that this could be stopped. On the desk is a procession: the pink & blooming jesus, prehistoric parents carrying a rock and a child, the star that bore the sea, two baby deer, a chipmunk skull, and a day of the dead virgin mary.
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| Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
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8:52 pm
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It was maybe today, three years ago, that I walked into a car and made Bobby laugh because I was in love. I think of that moment every time I listen to the Silver Jews song "I remember you".
He almost walked into a wall
Oh man she was a sight to see
At the party down the hall
He said "you are the highest apple in the tree"
Out the window in the harbour he saw a little ship
The moon was worn just slightly on the right
They slowdanced so the needle wouldn't skip
And he held her till the room was filled with light
Hand in hand down a waterslide in Chattanooga
They did not hide from love you see
A winter's plane flight to Aruba
Where he threw a boombox into the sea.
One day they were cutting flowers for something to do
On the bank of the road 'neath the cottonwoods
He turned to her to ask if she'd marry him
When a runaway truck hit him where he stood.
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| Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
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9:28 am - In the future people will wear clothes.
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I spend time looking at the International Fashion weeks, a festival which has just bounced from New York to London, and is shortly due at Milan and Paris. There be monsters, and fashion which imitates the way flesh is peeled by scalpel, there are proms, big and little, there the future and the past lie, spread flatly upon flat chests. Every morning I read it scrupulously, like an event of pressing importance, as if the clothes that are due to emerge next spring, as objects of economy, bear upon themselves oracular properties.
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| Friday, September 14th, 2007
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9:39 am - Faith in worthless knowledge
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I wake up under blankets, all afright. I have been wasting my time? Day warms me up but my nose stays cold and silvery. Maybe I have made mistakes! Maybe I won't know what to do!
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| Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
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10:06 pm - With love,
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| Friday, July 20th, 2007
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11:33 pm
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I am, even now after spending a month in Southern Mississippi, resisting the compulsion to don a jacket before going outside at night.
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| Thursday, July 5th, 2007
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12:00 pm
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There are few things more lovely than waking up and going outside with people from many different countries to hold hands and sing.
"In our hands the future lies;
Seize the moment 'ere it flies.
Stamp the present with an act;
Dare to make our dream a fact."
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| Friday, June 29th, 2007
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11:34 pm
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I hate it when I don't have toothpaste, and I hate the icebergs I inherit into my heart, and I hate the constellations persisting through the blind spots.
Tomas of Brasil, who is old at eleven and hates to lose, knows more
about love than I do, at least for today. He has not been speaking to
his beloved, not out of aloofness, so much as the happiness of habit,
and she has left him. He cries constantly, sometimes silently,
sometimes shouting loudly in Portuguese about love and pain. He begs
us to be allowed to go and apologize to her when bedtime comes and
leans against a wall in defeat when we refuse. He wrings his hair and
holds his head.
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| Thursday, May 31st, 2007
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8:29 pm - Lepidoptera
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| Sunday, May 27th, 2007
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12:13 pm
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| Wednesday, May 16th, 2007
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11:59 pm
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| Thursday, May 10th, 2007
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11:25 pm
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| Friday, May 4th, 2007
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12:31 am - The Golden Rooster and The Hoodoo Queen
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It should sound like a mix CD in terms of strong stylist changes, but with a coherent story and cast. The story goes: [A detective is put on the case of a girl who took all the love she could steal and ran. He knows that she isn't really a cowgirl but she always rides into the sun and he follows her from Texas to Louisiana, via Sunrise. His sadness taught him to move slowly, to pull his hat down and turn up his collar.] [He finds notes on diner tables in her handwriting: The only thing I could never get behind, she said, is that you wore sunglasses in the dark. She writes: When I met you, you were the only boy around with a three piece suit. She writes: I was the only girl in town who could never hold her whiskey. She writes: I became a cowgirl just to shoot you down. He knows that she isn't really a cowgirl but in every diner he asks after the girl with invisible silver spurs.] [The notes stop in New Orleans and he sits and waits. On his clean white steps is left the head of a golden chicken and a note from the Hoodoo Queen telling him where to go if he wants to get the girl. The note says the girl's name is Sweetheart, a name the detective thinks he may recognize. On the morning that he goes to meet the queen he gets on his steps his first note in weeks from the girl with the invisible silver spurs. The note says, "Baby, watch your step. I'll hex you right back."] [The voodoo queen tells him that when he told Sweetheart "I'm going to keep an eye on you." he lost his name and became a cigarette and a flask of whiskey between a slouch hat and a long coat. She says: the world listens and makes changes accordingly. She says: Alligator feet and chicken teeth won't put her boots back under your bed. She says: It's a little late to be ethical about whom is climbing in and out of whose window. She says: She told you she loved you and all you could ask was Hoo Doo? The Hoodoo queen tells him that the missing piece of the story, the part he forgot, was that he wants his lover back and she reminds him "What is more sensual and earthly than death?" The Hoodoo Queen tells him where to meet the girl with the invisible silver spurs.] [He wore black. She wore white. He asked to see her palm where the voodoo queen said he would read a trace of indecision but all he could find was a trace of disappointment. The voodoo queen told him there was no evil in the gentler sex but he read it there clear as day. He knew then that some early morning he'd been outclassed and outhexed. He said, I came here just so you would fill me full of lead. She said, If I shot you down be sure it would be with a silver bullet. He wasn't shot but if he had been, it would have been by a silver bullet. She said: I'm through with climbing into windows, now I'm going to climb into the sky. Out on the levee the ghosts whispered: I love you and answered: Hoo Doo?]
(The brackets are where songs begin and end.)
Notes on orchestration: The detective sings the New York bar blues a la Nina Simone piano and drums with a lot of cymbal. The Voodoo Queen sings Bo Diddley, Screaming Jay Hoodoo jive with a bit of Motown Northern Soul sass. The cowgirl named Sweetheart sings Soapy Western guitar. When the detective and cowgirl face off it should sound much like a rip-off of Lee Hazelwood's Velvet Morning.
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| Monday, April 30th, 2007
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5:47 pm - black spider dumplings
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"caw! caw!" the downy young ones say,
"How lovely is this peep of day,
Oh, what a glorious sight is this,
There can be nothing here but bliss."
"Caw! Caw!" replies the mother crow,
"There is no joy unmixed with woe."
Go read it: http://www.archive.org/details/cawcaworchronicl00rmrmiala
I went to the museum to look at butterflies and curiosa. The one plant left unnamed is now named Zombi after Marie Laveau's snake god.
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| Friday, April 27th, 2007
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5:57 pm - It's a Batman Turner Christmas/ Infancy and the Sweetheart Despair
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I've been going straight home to read and listen to early DRO and Batman Turner laments and feel my heart mash up like an old moldy avocado. Someone needs to tell Anna to get off of her fanny and make cheesetoast and do anything besides sit all soddenly, and it looks like that person is going to have to be me. Go make Cheesetoast- it's delicious. Does everyone in Milwaukee hate hugs? Seriously. Cause I would make fancy ginger broccoli for anyone willing to make me a huggee. Fuck, I'd make miso, and anyone can tell you I make a mean miso soup.
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| Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
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10:54 am - The Rape of Rome
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I am reading anything about investigation I can get my dirty hands on. If you are licensed to be a Private Investigator in Wisconsin you are licensed also as a bodyguard! It is relatively cheap and easy, too. Reading Harriet the Spy again makes me wish I was more willing to put down in writing every terrible thing.
I was buying a notebook for my notes about the shift between ethics in classic v. hardboiled detective work when the lady cashier stopped me and asked me "Did you use to be a nun?"
I was of course confused and she continued "Oh, I only ask because you seem more serious and innocent, but your skirt is so short I knew you couldn't still be."
Also, the Veteran's society has divine karaoke which is heavy on the Frank Sinatra sung by old men whose only remaining ambition is to smoke and drink and still hit the high notes.
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