Sprocket

a far piece.

2011-07-27T23:43:00.003-04:00

and a long time coming.

you hear limbs snapping in the darkness of the yard and do not know: branches down after last night's high wind, falling at last to the grass? or cows, moving unseen, beyond the window.

there is all the time and none of the time, and it has been two years, but they now seem a dream, and there you are, gone and far away, and i was wrong again, so wrong--though it all began in hope, as it always does.

there's nothing so strange as seeing the person that had become a stranger turn, magically, effortlessly, back into the person that was your beloved, and to feel that you were the thorn extricated from the paw of the animal you wounded, unknowingly. i can't say yet, that i hope that you're happy. i can only say that i hope to be able to someday say it.

you feel forgotten. a branch coming down, long after the rain has passed. no one there to see or catch it.

2009-04-27T23:02:00.001-04:00

i am fine all day.

then i get home.

and i miss you.

and so.

2009-04-23T22:25:00.000-04:00

i started a gum review blog.
i'm buying an xbox.
i have a fish tattooed on my arm.

i think i've pretty much guaranteed that i'll be single forever.

just the color of my blood.

2009-04-18T23:04:00.003-04:00

this is the best song i've heard in a long while.

there's a space at the end of the rope that you reach with someone where all you can hear is the wind whistling down into the spaces between your fingers. i resent being asked, however tacitly, to be the heavy, to be the bad guy, to call an end to anything, or to agree, by ending these things, that you are everything that you feel yourself to be. that you are worthless. i hate finding yourself participating in someone else's pattern in a way that enables them to keep making the same mistake, over and over again.

don't behave in a way that forces someone into hating you, just so that you can turn around and say 'see? i told you. i'm hateful.'

i'm packing things.

2009-04-08T15:17:00.001-04:00

i don't think i even really knew what being stoned meant yet, the first time i heard this song. but i also had to hide my records and tapes with swear words on them from my parents at my friend's house to listen to on the sly, so who could really blame me?

dear seth rogen.

2009-04-08T13:54:00.001-04:00

please start eating again.

secret codes.

2009-03-28T23:39:00.002-04:00

the laundry lists are killers.
so are the secret exams.

do you fail them?
it's okay. i fail them too. on the regular.

which is why, i suppose, you eventually decide to stop taking or administering them.

all old men have started to remind me of my grandpa. i was pumping gas on the way to work in the sunlight and an elderly man recognized a young man on a motorcycle and waved to him in the parking lot. he slowly made his way over, his outfit carefully clean and unwrinkled, the boy in a tshirt and leather jacket. but both were plainly glad to see one another. ever since i came home i've been thinking about my tattoo and for some reason, when something in my chest seized while watching this little moment play out by the shooting range sign this afternoon, i knew that i still wanted it.

i tend to be retroactively certain. some people go into experiences convinced of their rightness, expecting to be vindicated, and they are. i go into them expecting to be proven wrong about any inkling i might have about their rightness, and it takes my brain a while to catch up when the opposite happens.

that requires patience.
patience is in short supply.

do you still have that nose against the glass feeling?
i do.

these go to eleven.

2009-03-16T00:16:00.002-04:00

the most persistent man in the universe has to be the dude on the brooklyn craigslist m4w section who is perpetually seeking his 'natural unshaven woman'. come on, hairy masses of the internet who are of the female persuasion. help a brother out. spring's coming. i could make a joke about orgasms here but god, it's just too easy.

also, i have a crush on streeter seidell.

these two things are probably not related.

hummingbird, go.

2009-03-07T09:54:00.003-05:00

somehow we come out of frozen february into the march mud.
with a lot of alliteration.
the rest of the snow is a smear across the backyard, something not quite green, not quite brown, coming up darkly through the thinner places, and when i go out to walk the dog there is more than illusory warmth from the sun on the backs of my hands.
sometimes, spring is like being sick, and then waking up and finding it gone.
you want, after a long winter, the absolute realness of things.
hands in the dirt.

i remember all of those little orange tags in the wind, across the empty plots, and our dreams of vegetables, and sometimes it is so strong, the feeling that a place is not yours anymore, though it once was. i line up all of those names in my head, and consider how real they had been, in their turn. how they are still real somewhere, for someone else, for other people, and they live in their apartments and go through the atoms of the air and eat oatmeal and drink and fuck and sleep too late or not at all. i'm not there to see it, but, it happens. i do not miss them. consider them, yes. miss them, no.

what i do miss is a high meadow in vermont before a lowering thunderstorm. berry juice on my fingers, in my mouth, and my dress in the quickening wind. laughter.

you want to know what's important?
cheeseburgers in a diner after a wine tasting, with rain-wet hair.

what's not important?
so very many other things.

beets through the window.

2009-03-02T23:20:00.002-05:00

i don't know how or when it happened because these things are like hair growing but somehow, i became a person with patience. the sort that doesn't evaporate overnight. for the big things.

first you're scared, and you try to hurry.
then you try sitting still and not thinking at all, or thinking too much and then trying to erase it somehow.
somehow, at the end of all of this, you figure out the one foot in front of the other. however long it takes. but forward.

and that is the good part.

No Children.

2009-02-19T23:26:00.003-05:00

i shouldn't be your life raft.
or the One Good Thing.
or the Saved The Day From Being Shit.

that is Bad News.

you put someone in that situation, and, if they have any kind of sense at all...see how fast they run.

sometimes i worry that i'm becoming callous in my old age, but, really. there's no point in walking into a burning building just to save a door knob. is there? is there.

you're dalton? somehow i thought you'd be...bigger.

2009-02-10T12:45:00.002-05:00

they don't know how bad it can be. how months of heady intellectualized fervor can dissolve in the space of a few moments when you realize someone smells wrong, walks wrong, is even wearing the wrong pants (how did you wear the wrong pants didn't you know that they were wrong wrong wrong?) hugs too quickly or not quickly enough. they do it because they feel like they should, and, haven't you been thinking about this for ages, and then it happens and it's either not what you want, or, they are holding you as though you might bite them, and you have a horrible urge to laugh. sometimes, the nerves don't stop, but, usually they do, because despite what anyone says about 'maybe we just need some time to warm up', you know in the first few minutes if this is Good or Bad.

there are the times that it turns into 'let's try this anyway' drunken sex which is followed by 'we will never speak again'. there are the more tortured 'i want this so badly to be what i thought it would be that we'll lie to ourselves for one to two days until we have to give up the ghost'. sometimes that is relatively painless, and you have a long conversation on your sweaty august floor and realize that it's what you want anyway, that some part of you always knew that some part of this was wrong wrong wrong.

sometimes it's weirdly effortless, and it's a shame that you don't figure out that it was friend chemistry until after you've made out on someone's couch and they've grabbed your boob and later told you they wanted to see some person who wasn't you and you think 'well, damn, now we can't really be friends either'. but, again, for the best, for the best.

there are the times i say no, there are the times we both say it, there are the half-hearted yes moments that are monuments to the months that we spent imaginarily holding one another's imaginary arms, there are the coffees cooling on counters after a week of short emails followed by the two minute phonecall, there's ease followed by uncertainty (or a certainty that neither party wants to acknowledge because the certainty is that we're friend material) and there is hope littered like shrapnel across endless bars and streets and couches and restaurants and alleys. i tell myself that this happens because none of these people are the person, and it's the same on the other side of the fence, and the only way, the closer you get to that point where suddenly all of your friends are married, to keep going is to expect nothing. to not go out on any limbs, to not hope, to not even allow yourself to think well, maybe...

you get to a point where none of this even matters. because it all gets so predictable. 'there's no way this could not work!'. oh, son. let me tell you about thousand thousand ways.

long ago and far away.

2009-02-05T22:24:00.002-05:00

so many imaginary boyfriends.
or, so many beards, so little time.

and more seriously--there was some time last winter that i wrote about here, about driving to j's house on an empty afternoon road, in that winter light that is cold and somehow flat. metal frosted over, glass before you scrape it, but, also finely edged, so that you arrive at the far edge of the indistinct blur and find it razor-sharp. there was that deer lying in the road. the heels of my boots made a ringing sound on the pavement, and there was no one there but the wind for either of us.

you expect food or cities or lovers to fill you up, when what you really want is quiet, somehow. places to go still in. an empty road.

but, the closer i've gotten to what i think i want, the more i've always avoided it, sliding sideways at the last minute.

i used to court disaster.
now, i court bemusement and detachment. if i am ever in the thick of things, it is as a body in motion.

which is why i hardly write, these days. my head is an unlit room. i'm in the now, as much as i can be.

but, i know, loved ones, that i still owe you letters.

bars on the prairie. or the deep woods. or small towns.

2009-01-09T00:17:00.002-05:00

we know someone who knows someone who dated someone legitimately famous and i was talking to j about what it'd be like to show your famous love interest our hometown.

here are the cows in the snow.
here is the ice cream parlor whose smell doesn't leave your skin or hair or clothes until it is scrubbed out by force, and trying to explain why they sell so many rubber stamps in addition to curly fries and paper lanterns and rolls of stickers and penny candy is like explaining gravity. it just is.
here are the long nights we spent in our youth driving the winding back roads, looking for ponds to swim in, jacketed in our smooth teenaged skin under the vague glow of the moon, phosphorescent with hormones and sugar in the dim water.
here's the first time i got stoned and fell slowly backwards onto the grass after a conversation about feet. later there was lightning and i was on top of the middle school and i hadn't gotten the giant bruise on my arm yet, and cold water had pooled on the surface of the roof, under my back, but i didn't move. i watched the flicker getting closer, in the clouds, and thought that no one would probably ever fall in love with me, and i listened to the low conversations of the three other people and tongued the fading taste of cloves on the inside of my mouth.

how do you give those things to anyone?

whenever i ride public transportation i think about our invisible landscapes. if you're close to someone on a seat, and a mitten moves, or a jacket sleeve rides up, there can be a flicker, and you see it: trees. roads. late nights rising, so many hills in the darkness. we are riddles to each other. i selfishly want you to be a book that i can read but not necessarily know, or, for us to be our own language. all of the trees. every rock. the million rivers.

bad news for you.

2009-01-05T11:51:00.003-05:00

i sat at j's house last night after we ate in our town's ice cream bordello and read a 600 page novel in a few hours while we drank tea. this is why it's key to have friends who've known you since you were eleven.

who put up with your crushes on ian metzger, and, fictitious male characters.

and the fact that you might be the only person alive who actually likes the taste of green nyquil.

my thoughts are not connected to these fields and woods, their snowed-in recesses, their quiet. i remember how i used to need the noise of the lower east side and the dirt of jesse's neighborhood and one dollar dumplings and the strangely delicious feel of not showering to push me around the city in the rough sunlight. how i thought that all of the syllables of the subway were a necessary drug that i had to have humming in my veins. the aggregate of sound was a way to not have to listen to any of my interior spaces, even as its too-muchness sealed me up inside of them, because you can't walk around skinless in brooklyn.

you can, however, do it here. the wind will fill up all of those gaps between your bones. pack the snow in around your thighs, press it to your collarbone. put the ice behind your eyes.

boy sets fire.

2009-01-02T23:14:00.003-05:00

a lexus suv burst into flames in the parking lot at work today. the trunk popped open and flames flew out the back. no, they didn't fly, they sort of exhaled in ever-greater spurts out of the back of the car, and glass shot outward, and when the firemen finally located the hose and turned water on the flames, the smoke that rose up was the most amazing shape i'd ever seen.

the nineteen year old metalhead dishwasher got fired. i'll miss him.

when people try to pin down my type and i give them vague approximations what i think i'm looking for is that it's about how things are put together. i'm a structuralist, regarding the opposite sex. certain shoulder/waist ratios make me weak in the knees. our height discrepancy. it's about geography.

i'm trying to write an email to someone about the things that i saved, instead of the things that i gave away, when i got rid of most of my library. i am a person who saves:

poetry
weird line art
books about baseball
a handful of novels
an anarchist collective's manifesto
cookbooks
a few books about weird words/grammar/living in the middle of nowhere/grammar in the middle of nowhere (does it exist, who cares, is that robin really as fat as i think it is or is it my all-bean-diet, when did i last shower, etc.)
a loner's manifesto
the oral history of punk rock
a book about treehouses.

i'm turning 28 in may. i think i like it.
there's a lot to do.
i like that too.

winters in wales.

2009-01-01T20:17:00.002-05:00

when i stop bothering to construct the narrative, i have a hard time identifying what's left.

i can do this when i'm busy, when i am motions, actions, and not thoughts. i think this is why i always liked running, and backpacking, and why i now like cooking. anything that is more muscle than grey matter, where the brain is silenced by the sinew, or the heat, or all of the thousand things that you remember and forget as you perform them (and it is key that there are so many of them, because they well into a chorus that is a wall of sound, and it is nearly impossible to focus on any one individual note.) i think that really falling in love will or should be like this--enough thoughts and notes crashing together so that they make a big white blur, the world's largest fan, humming at high speed somewhere behind the bones. but i wouldn't know.

i think that i am artfully open with the things that other people are embarrassed to own up to, or give away, so as to avoid having to give away everything (or anything) that's actually far more difficult. we can talk endlessly about my missteps, how i do or do not like to be touched, how satisfying it is to pick your nose, that i still suck my thumb in my sleep.

we won't talk about how i feel.

what i think i'll remember most about 2008 is that it is the year that i began to belong to myself, to more fully enjoy my own company. i feel, not finished, not at all, but...all of a piece, somehow. not missing anything. i don't need the fictions, the way that i used to. i am putting my hands around the facts. i am enough.

not in the misery business

2008-12-21T12:44:00.002-05:00

i always run the risk of sounding like i practically live inside of my bellybutton, and the warehouse shows that i attend would belie that fact but now i've gone and made myself sound like a git, but, anyway, ANYWAY:

it is snowing like the dickens outside. i was listening to sigur ros, which is the soundtrack of the second to last time i got laid, which has nothing to do with the wave of homesickness for certain people that washed over me. my western MA people. my house on clark avenue, with its summer beer porches and winter snug kitchen and darcy and i cooking and remember the drippy blue icing we tried to put on the rock hard gingerbread? so many things are clamoring for attention in my chest--sledding down phoebe's driveway to get to the car in the morning, coffee mugs in hand, miraculously, our laughter bright in the trees. my drunk stumbling in the snow with barrett, the world tilted enough for it to seem like a musical, but not enough for it to tip over into melancholy. the first huge storm of last winter, when darcy and i left the house late at night to go for a walk, the snowlight everywhere, a diffuse glow, and the entire city seemed to be out on the trails by the river, laughing, sledding, and we licked the newly fallen whiteness off of low-hanging branches, and it tasted like pine and the ocean and cold breath. all of my mornings in orange, writing, watching the sun come up through the large windows, the smell of the woodstove and last night's wine draped around my shoulders, tea leaking steam into the air. i cannot even begin to say how much i miss you, dear ones. there are no words. i want us back in those houses, or new ones, i want our laughter, as sweet as birds, together. our footprints in the snow, our brave plans.

'tis the season/i'm not going to rhyme.

2008-12-17T21:11:00.001-05:00

for coveting things. but, seriously, it's like they READ MY MIND.

and i don't know how to love.

2008-12-16T13:23:00.002-05:00

everything i've eaten in the past week hasn't agreed with me.
i start to think about this in terms of having an input problem, that i'm overwhelmed on all fronts, that i've started to physically reject anything that isn't strictly necessary. sometimes, i have an urge to live like a house plant or an animal. i envy my dog.

my room is in a postmodern miss havisham state of disarray--lace underwear, dirty work jeans with mysterious vegetative stains on the cuffs, faux fur trimmed parka on the desk chair, necklaces exploding out of the silk elephant pouch on the bookcase, dust in the corners, dry flowers from grandpa's funeral, papers sprawled under the desk. deoderant stacked next to a pile of notecards, nail clippers, loose change, things i've written to myself that could be band names or people i'm supposed to call but have forgotten about.

i've spent the past four years feeling that i needed to be more rooted to the here and now, that my life was something that i was constantly sliding off of. life as greased pig. i'd fling myself on top of it, only to have it run squealing for the fences again, and half of the time i'd feel the sharp loss, and the other half of the time i'd want to just sit back on my haunches in the mud and light up a cigarette and say 'fuck you too, mister.'

what am i saying? i'm worried that i have a waterbug quality. astrological certainties are patently false--i'm not rooted to anything, except uncertainty. i know what makes sense minute to minute, but, not even day to day. i put a hesitant finger to grief, but take it back, quickly. i can't even buy a tshirt, half the time. i got all maudlin in a letter and said that i feel the same way about love, like it's some sort of thing i can walk around a store with forever, imagining how it would look in my closet, with that skirt, or falling around my bare legs on that first warm day in april, but that i always put it back. that's ridiculous. i am embarrassed to even type that out, but, i already did. anyway.

i haven't photographed anything in months. i sat in a bar filled with people whose lives all seemed to have tilted askew the other night and had that old feeling that life was happening everywhere else except in this vaguely sticky chair.

where to go?
what to do when you get there?

words make me nervous. i put my faith in actions. i don't know how to reverse that, which seems sort of intrinsic to having hope, or expectations.

tiny.

2008-12-13T21:29:00.003-05:00

i sprayed chance on my wrists at the chanel counter this afternoon just so that i'd smell like a jewel box in williamsburg. from across oceans, ladyfriend, my pulse is saluting you.

novels we've already read.

2008-12-11T22:12:00.002-05:00

i know this story.

remember that long walk on the dirt road in the trees, and the strange trash that we found, half-buried in the dirt? a plastic dog's head, a doll's body, empty cans, rusting away. these things surface in the nighttime lakes, bubbling up without sound, aglow. i hear loons in the rain. i think about the white arc of the ocean, curving away from the venetian water taxi, and the cold wrapping its long tongue around my bones, my face in the spray.

i'm hungry for new stories.

brief material foray.

2008-12-11T21:29:00.003-05:00

so, i stumble across things that i really love sometimes, that i'd like to own. invariably, these days, they're all weirdly from the pacific northwest. like this.

(or, even better, and to ruin what i just said that makes things in my life seem as though they have patterns and might be fortuitous, which they aren't, this. that is...perfect.)

light snow.

2008-12-07T12:26:00.002-05:00

the morning after overindulgence brings brooklyn back. the fields outside the window that are slowly collecting cold in their grasses give way to the smell of sidewalks and the rattle of the train and the way that i'd walk like a balloon being pulled on a string behind P, streets falling open the way that dominoes are pushed, collapsing outward from a fixed point. the way that we are careful with ourselves in the morning, our delicate heads, our bruised lungs, our sluggish blood. i peel tangerines at work and think about Marlow&Sons. i listen to certain songs and hear, tucked inside of them, apartments that i've known and slept or not slept in, the soot under my fingernails, my unwashed hair and slow movements on the way to brunch. i miss you, sweet friend. not in the way that i want the old times over again, but, in the way where i want the new ones, in an endless array, one after the other--days falling open from a fixed point. directions that we cannot, as of yet, see.

they'll find us here. in the guest room.

2008-11-26T21:47:00.002-05:00

more letters to fictions.

finding out that you're about to be engaged again mostly makes me feel that i'm in a car on a dark highway traveling at high speeds at that hour just before dawn, and the light is beginning to bleed into the sky the way that ink grows in a glass of water from a scant few shakes, or, fabric takes up the guts of a pen and makes itself over into another color.

and in the back of my heart where the dust has piled into the corners there is a small light, and inside the light, which fills and falls the way that a viewfinder in a camera does, imaginary future person and i are holding hands and eating ripe fruit, and it is all over our chins, and he is tall and lanky and wears stripes sometimes or shirts with pearly snaps but mostly threadbare tshirts and cooks barefoot. when he writes me a letter, it is all words of his very own choosing. there are no crib notes. i cannot search for parts of it and find them lingering in the electronic ether and be disappointed that he couldn't find his own syllables. but mostly, when i call at midnight and say 'let's go for a walk, the night is warm, we can look at the houses that aren't ours, and put pieces of them into the one that is, but has yet to be built' he will be right over. when we sleep. oh, when we sleep. it will be a room, without a proper door, built out of breath.

on god's highway there are fleet foxes.

2008-11-20T21:32:00.003-05:00

i said elsewhere recently that the onset of winter made me think of certain things and what i meant is this:

what i remember is going with you to your hometown, and the smell of darkness and snow which is a scent that stays inside of your clothes and mingles wet wool, warm breath, deep water, frozen earth at the edges of the parking lots and churned up into a smear at the bottom of the plow. what i remember is walking down the street and the thousands of votives flickering past the shops in their small paper bags, tracing lines up the hillsides to the old train depot. you could hear the river, unstilled in the night, pouring itself out against the freeze, and in my head, there is singing, even though i'm pretty sure there wasn't. silent night, holy night, etc. i remember the darkness of the workshop and the heat of the woodstove and the room, lined in pine, that we would crawl into like furred animals, restless for sleep and one another's heated skin. i know that we are wrong for one another, and the daylight proves this time and again, but here, in the snow, in this film that i unspool against the backs of my eyes, we are other people, and our love is something that i am so stricken with hunger for that something goes hot and still beneath my lids. but, the people that i miss are, perhaps, people that we never were. and people that we certainly will not be.

but. winter. i remember your town, spangled in the snow, a dream. and i remember you.

public service announcement

2008-11-19T11:51:00.003-05:00

DEAR INTERNETS:

the word 'alas' is not a happy exclamation or an expression of delight. it means 'oh noes' or 'sadly', or similar words that convey regret. as in 'alas, randy, i will not be able to attend your Nude Masked Ball, because i am already going to lord fauntleroy's Clothed Sack Parade'. see how i did that? you can do it too! i know you can!

a big to-do

2008-11-07T11:56:00.001-05:00

the list today reads:

work on novel
buy belt.

too many doors, she said.

2008-10-29T22:03:00.004-04:00

let things
come to you.

things coalesce all at once, ink on a page, water pooling on a chair. there will be another garden, there will be more late-night runs, there will be bike adventures, there will be darcy and sarah cooking too many veggies at one a.m. again, on the west coast. and it will be good. now i just have to see if my car will make it across the country. amongst other things.

p, i just realized that you're not going to be on this continent for new year's, and this means that we won't be eating aged cheeses together and avoiding being hit on by guys who ask us what our favorite dinosaur is. i'm pretty sure this is unacceptable. hurry up and add 'inventing teleportation' to your impressive resume, buddy.

i might write another novel. for the hell of it. only, i won't burn this one.

dearly beloved

2008-10-18T13:03:00.001-04:00

every flower
in the county
bloomed at once
we could not count them
angels swarmed like bees
at our command.

i am most appreciative of stillness when i am in motion, maybe because the motion throws the parts of me that are still into sharper relief, or, if my eyes are moving across a landscape it is easier for my brain to be at rest. i am the dog that hangs its head out of a truck window on a long drive, tongue in the wind, or that kid on the ferry railing who looks half-ready to leap over the handrail and into the foam, but holds back because then he would be stilled in the sea, instead of cutting steadily through it at a great rate. there are mornings (the early shift, where i get up at four-twenty a.m., and pull my jeans on in a delirium) driving to work where
i come down that long hill, near the farm, and there is an entire herd of deer, cropping grass in front of the glowing horizon, half in fog. the grass looks knit over with silver. they are a tableau. they are motion that has halted, as every line in a deer or horse conveys motion and action even when they are at rest, and some part of them always seems in flight, even when still.

everything is the beginning of something else. i do not think that we ever arrive, there is motion hidden everywhere, like sand, like oxygen. i sit with the loneliness, i walk away from trouble and its invitations, i do not drink. i wait for the motion to reveal itself, and then i will throw myself down that long hill, with everything i have.

dear patrick pestorius.

2008-10-09T21:00:00.002-04:00

last night at the show when you rubbed a towel on your face and then over your head, i kind of died inside. you know, in a good way.

but people don't throw undies at indie rock shows.

which is probably for the best, considering.

also, your name makes you sound like a character in a dickens novel. an earnest second-string suitor. until chuck has you rub a towel over your face and head somewhere around chapter 22, and the entire game changes.

down in the yard.

2008-10-09T14:35:00.002-04:00

a manifesto. of sorts.

my dog is getting old now and wanders around the backyard in small circles, she steps carefully around leaves, as though they will bite her feet. she squints in the bright sunlight and her muzzle is grey.

i am waiting to find out if my grandpa has cancer.

it is october and i am tired, all over again, and wonder if it's necessary to sustain enthusiasm for something every single day of your life in order for it to be the right thing, because, like i said, sometimes, i get tired. and then i start to doubt.

there's so much doubt.

whenever i go to a show i always think that my life is all wrong, that i should sweat and play drums and run and do push-ups and eat only clean things and not ice cream sandwiches and ride a bicycle everywhere and knit all of my own sweaters and my life feels too cluttered, too complicated, even though i've gotten rid of so many things, and so much stuff.

i still think about writing that email, at least once every other day, and start it in my head, and think that you won't reply. that our friendship is gone, like so much chaff, in a strong wind, and it seems strange, still.

i'm supposed to bake my ex-boyfriend birthday cookies.

i sleep with people too soon, and then wonder why they don't call.

they are the wrong people.

you probably aren't on the internet, and yet, i go fishing here periodically, just to check, because the waiting is killing me. i write one of these once a month to try to sort through the static, and all i really know is that the right things feel effortless and yet some how carbonating.

the right things are small. the right gestures are really so tiny, they are palmfuls of sand, but, they contain vast oceans of electric current.

i am unattractive when i sneeze.

there are days when going to the bathroom seems like a lot of unnecessary work, and i just sit at my desk being uncomfortable instead.

there's something rattling in my lungs.

what i mean to say is this:

you should do those things that set you on fire.
you should go outside and be clean in the wind.
when the interactions fail you, there are always the trees and the lake and the thousand small things in the grass that want nothing from you, who expect no signals or signs, only vague being-there, the way we all are, inhaling and exhaling.
knowing the things that you don't want to know is difficult. find a rock in the sun. take a deep breath. let them all go.
turn that part of your skin off that wants to hear 'i love you'. put it to sleep. be love instead.

hey, ho, the wind and the rain.

2008-09-27T11:23:00.002-04:00

i have patience for some things.
but not for other things.

i have patience when it comes to standing in front of a stove waiting for this seven-grain concoction to finish cooking so that i can put cranberries in it and eat it. i have that patience.

p is going to madagascar next week, sandri is off to thailand, i will be watching the last of the leaves come down in the yard and even though i don't see either of these people that often, i know that i will feel as though two of the cardinal directions have fallen off of my compass and into the ocean when they are gone. some magnetic tug that i have towards two different states will snap, or stretch so fine that i will want to bounce up and down upon that unseen line constantly, to make it hum, to make sure that it still holds.

there are different strengths required to stand in place, and they are strengths that have not been mine, in the past. to move forwards in ways that keep you standing still, in a sense. i suppose in the end it's not that anyone is leaving anyone else behind, but, simply that our maps are all written in different scales. mine requires no less room, really, but, the scope of it is writ not quite so large. this wall is a field in connecticut. that wall is the eastern hemisphere.

but north is still north. south, south. we still only have two feet apiece, for all of that walking.

the rumors of my death

2008-09-02T20:49:00.002-04:00

etc. etc.

i'm alive.
my laptop isn't.

vanities:

i still want to go to grad school.
but i don't want to lose my chef hands. or my chef forearms.

in:
patchouli scented soap

out:
booze and the decisions made while consuming it

p told me to read this novel, and she has excellent taste, so i'm reading it, but, goddamn, you know, the last one that she tossed my way was a victorian ode to suicide as a way out of a bad marriage and this one is an ode to the descent into madness that's caused by the emotional wranglings between the sexes and you know, fuck it, i still want to get married someday. i maintain that all things would be less complicated if people were more honest with one another at the beginning. but, that rarely happens. we do so love to dissemble.

what we do.

2008-07-17T20:17:00.002-04:00

i was thinking the other day, in the pool, about that line from peter carey's novel 'bliss' that p lent me, last summer, or was it last fall?. the line about walking, and how the motion seeps into you, under your skin, and heals over all of the broken places, and that once you start, and you are moving forwards, that is all there is to the world--your body passing through space.

swimming is the same. i get into the pool, and start with a head filled with static, and the first twenty laps are spent cursing the things that have made that buzzing sound, the things i have no control over, the choices that other people made or will make that will affect me in some fashion that i will not like. and after thirty laps, the noise quiets. after forty, all i really do is repeat a number, whatever set i'm on, in my head. fifty and beyond is just motion, and then i feel as though i could continue forever, until the lights turned off, the guards go home, someone has to physically drag me from the chlorinated bath and say 'go home now. it's okay. go home.' i stand in the locker room, under the shower, and feel the water running down my shoulders, and it is a dumb, animal sort of pleasure, with no thought other than 'good' and 'tired' and 'thirsty' behind it.

i thought of the thousand things you'll never know. and, i was glad, yesterday, that you wouldn't know them. they are not yours.

another really long line.

2008-07-14T20:18:00.001-04:00

i never felt so clean

2008-07-02T13:21:00.003-04:00

likes:

the air changing scent before it rains. it goes green. there is a hush, down in the grass.

orange, white, clean floorboards, light against a bare wall, the whir of fans, the rustle of leaves.

red juice.

belonging to oneself, and feeling all of a piece, lying there in the bed, muscles tired.

crisp stripes.

my collar bones.

when i was in college and then also, when i lived next to the brewery and had a small closet, sometimes, i'd sit in my laundry basket, inside of the closet, with the door closed. i'd close my eyes and think. this is like being at the bottom of the ocean, or tucked into a shell, when the quiet has a rustle, and your breathing is the loudest sound you've ever heard. when you run or swim alone, it is your breath and your blood, thundering away in a tide in your ears. sitting in my laundry basket, though, there was nothing but the draw of my lungs, in and out.

once i had this dream

2008-06-30T21:48:00.002-04:00

i can't stop listening to the Like Bees EP.

there are blackberries in the backyard.

if a thunderstorm is coming, and it's late afternoon, and you're in vermont, you should really put on a sundress and some little red shoes and go out and pick strawberries. i'm just saying. (and i'm doing my best to squash the voice in my head that says 'way to give gendered advice, lady.') but still.

then you should go swimming at Indian Love Call, admire the clean beauty of your friends, hold a tadpole in your palm, and build a mica-flecked, riparian sandcastle, while the sun warms your back, and your thighs are still in the freezing water.

eat the strawberries for breakfast. you won't be sorry.

i wish there were more rules for things, sometimes, but, then i remember that i can invent rules like these, and i think 'why not apply this across the board, anyway?'

in earnest.

2008-06-20T22:02:00.003-04:00

the dog and i go out into the backyard so that she can pee in the lengthening grass and inspect the flowers after the rain. the fields beyond the fence are filling up with fog.

i was down at the lake this afternoon. birds telling me to move out of the way. it's amazing, how quiet everything gets before a thunderstorm--the wind drops in temperature, the sky goes dark, and you look over your shoulder to see the clouds piling up on top of one another, suddenly. a bruise covering the sun, a fist, a black eye, a blueness gone bad. all of the grass flips over to silver in a nervous sea, across the open headland. when you remember you have a camera around your neck, your walk becomes a trot.

of all the things i'd miss or will miss in a city, these are some of the strongest ones--the clean ozone of the rain, the grass, the water, and that sudden drag of wet earth across it all, the long bath of it in your lungs.

i am slowly learning chess.
we sit on the back patio, watching for rain. i tip beer down my throat, and feel the warm hum fill up my veins.

we should all write more letters.

al dente.

2008-06-13T16:51:00.003-04:00

there's the freshly mowed lawn leaking green into the window, and i'm recalling the aquatic light that would slowly fill up the walls of my bedroom in my old apartment. my bare feet would be resting against the heated wood of the floorboards and i'd be wrestling with finding something new to say for a tech blog about data storage and then i'd just give up, and haul up the window, and sit on the roof drinking ice-cold grape juice from a sweating glass. i'd compose some sort of broken william carlos williams poem in my head to my distant, L.A.-based employers, thinking

this is just to say
i am sorry
i have forgotten
how to compare
data backup
to captain beefheart
for your blog.

it was
so trivial
and
this juice
isn't.

when i walk down to the reservoir and pace around the point, and feel the sweat break out in beads against my lower back, the vegetal lake air calls to mind:

the puppy heap of the six of us in a tent somewhere outside of freeport Maine, asleep in the airless heat until someone laughs and then we can't stop

my pale arms cutting through the algae-choked water of the inlet, cathy and i trying to convince ourselves that we're swimming, somehow

peach juice on my chin

sitting against the kitchen wall, singing

brian and i, ghostly in the bowl of lake mattawa, well after midnight, the water as warm as skin, as breath.

dear john letter.

2008-06-01T12:49:00.001-04:00

Dear Brooklyn,

I don't miss you.

best,

S.

Dear HP,

remember how we always used to joke that emailing an author and signing it 'best' was really publishing code for 'please do go fuck yourself and your concerns about your amazon ratings'? yeah.

love,
S.

you're not too young, you're not too old.

2008-05-27T10:54:00.003-04:00

i go to bed and it's spring.
i wake up and it's summer.

i read a magazine and feel inadequate and then i push it under the bed and feel clean. the moth from last night is still clinging to the edge of the lampshade, the dark edges of its wings elegant and spare against the wall.

who are you to yourself when no one else is there to notice?
i ate two cold tomatoes and sub-par cottage cheese out of a yellow bowl for breakfast, and watched the tea bag slowly stain the tall glass of water, pale green, all the way down. it tasted like grass and perfume.

when i think about recylced molecules, i think that this morning, surely, has some atoms from that afternoon when erik fell asleep on the rock and cathy and i took off all of our clothes and sat in the river, water to our necks, sunlight on our startled backs, the long days before us.

i see myself walking into june with a packet of matches in one hand.
you can expect things of me, or from me.
i only expect things of myself.

bricks of gold.

2008-05-26T23:41:00.001-04:00

2008-05-23T23:39:00.003-04:00

until all of the light goes.

2008-05-05T18:01:00.003-04:00

the light carbonates you and tilts you sideways.
my arms are stretched above my head and my fingers have trailed into the grass. the light that moves over them is warm, a lick against the palm, the sweet weight of the invisible rendered into heat. my hair has all tumbled off to one side. it's good to go away. it's also good to come back.

there were so many things that we were supposed to do, that we won't. there are times when i miss our fictions, hanging over the summer like an exhalation. we were never those people, anyway.

living like weasels.

2008-04-28T11:44:00.002-04:00

there is necessity, and then there is necessity.

i stole this from my friend Sam. it's a good reminder. i mentioned that annie dillard bit about the weasel in an email to a stranger yesterday, and then i read this, from sam, and i thought that there is animal necessity, and then there is invented necessity. and only one of them really causes trouble. and it's not the one that makes you want to put teeth to things, tiny and sharp, and dig in.

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

- Louise Erdrich

modern love.

2008-04-27T13:56:00.002-04:00

this sunday's modern love column in the new york times appropriately sums up everything that i feel about dating in my twenties, and more specifically, dudes in brooklyn.

i threw away all of my action toys.

2008-04-19T21:27:00.002-04:00

it is warm enough to have the window open, and there are tree frogs in the darkness. it smells like green things. it smells like earth warmed and thawed and covered with new grass. i'm wearing the blue and white striped bathrobe, and i have a fat collection of joan didion's essays sitting on my desk and this reminds me of that date i had at that bar with the guy who loved joan and couldn't find any of her books anywhere in the valley. we drank a beer, i made him laugh a lot, we never spoke again.

i get that a lot?

i don't know what it should look or feel like. i used to have theories and notions and perhaps they're wrong. perhaps it's back to the drawing board. perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

when i chop large bunches of cilantro at work i lean down in over the cutting board and take a deep breath. the green goes to the back of your throat. it's a front porch and a warm evening and fireflies and the right amount of buzz humming in your veins, there in a hot kitchen.

a board to the forehead.

2008-04-18T10:54:00.002-04:00

the universe keeps trying to tell me that there are no formulas for anything, and i keep trying to squeeze them out of stones anyway. tell me tell me tell me, i say, shaking the plastic 8 ball, or peering into my breakfast cereal remains, poking at tea leaves. i comb through other people's stories and experiences, trying to find a thread where a + b = X seems to hold true, in a consistent way, because i have problems with patience. patience has paid off earlier this year, but, between then and now i've forgotten the practice of it, and what i want most, are answers, and i'd like them now, please.

but this is not how it works. i think that we can sense change. we know when something has shifted, or is different. but, i don't think that you ever really know how or why or to what extent, until later. we're all conditioned to want or expect the chorus of angels. what we get, most often, is the cacophony of midday traffic, through which we try to pick out a single, clear, bell-like note to follow back to its source, somewhere in the crowd.

frampton takes a nap.

2008-04-14T12:56:00.001-04:00

oo, baby, i love your way.
i miss you.
we used to be so good together. i'd do that thing that left the dent in the mattress. you know the one. the big S.
we call it sleep.
ohhhh yeah. mmrrrow.
your crisp sheets. your silky threadcount. you make me crazy.
we've gotta get it together. soon.

tweedle-dee.

2008-04-13T21:03:00.001-04:00

the fool might be my middle name.

2008-04-12T21:11:00.004-04:00

my hair is a tangle.
i climbed the tree in the backyard in a miniskirt.
i'd call my underwear twee.

my brother and i walked around in the warm spring air, and sat on the porch, talking about growing up. i photographed the light in the sky, the begonia, people laughing, a chocolate torte. i left long messages on people's voicemails on the drive home from work this afternoon. i'd forgotten how car-flirting works--two sets of hands, in two separate cars, tracing the curves of the unseen wind by the window, waving. hair whipping in front of my face and across my sunglasses and down the low, open neck of my shirt. we opened a drawer in the coffee table after dinner and found a mad libs tablet that noah had written in, playing cards, a photograph of me when i was fifteen, a copy of 'Rookie of the Year'. mom and i decided that it was like a weird time capsule for an alternate reality copy of our family, where people didn't die too young, we enjoy baseball comedies, and play regular rounds of poker.

spring makes me want to have somebody to get out of bed early to make a fried egg for. spring makes me eye convertibles on the road. spring makes me take my golden shoes off and climb barefoot into a still-bare tree, scraping my white leg on the winter bark, taking deep breaths of the greening air.

lemonade.

2008-04-10T12:56:00.004-04:00

airless morning in chelsea in p's sweatbox subaru filled with sacks of coffee beans that we are all sitting on. when everyone else takes a nap, we go out for a walk and passing a bodega, i am hit sideways with the sweet smell of ripe fruits.

claw-foot bathtubs
lavender soap
lying on my back in the warming sunlight having an aimless conversation with sandri, a long stalk of grass clamped between my teeth, biting away at the green taste of it.
clean skin
lemon zest
spanish cheese, white sangria, twinkling lanterns on a front porch
skinnydipping and starlight
smoke curling away from brian's cigarette in the spring air
nutty, melted anchovies, bright lemon, bitter wilted raddicchio, parmesan
the late-night august breeze in my hair, cold clear mojito in my hand, out on the balcony.

aimless

2008-04-09T00:48:00.000-04:00

We go for late night drives and sit in a parked car by some body of water, listening for the dark clicking over into dawn, and whatever’s playing from the speakers. In the place between waking and sleep, I’ll have your hands on the hot, smooth skin of my ribcage, and the bulk of us curled together in the bed, punctuating the sheets.

yes. let's.

2008-03-24T12:18:00.002-04:00

let's go to portland. the oregon one.
let's wear hoodies to brunch. the old ones.
let's walk aimlessly down streets and take it all in slowly, and let the damp have its way with our slept-in hair.
let's drink tea. and coffee. and things stronger than tea and coffee.
let's eat things that make us grin.
we'll stay up too late.
we'll sleep in too long.
we'll lose clothes under the bed and maybe leave them there.
i'll bring back a bottle of eau de vie and on some future east coast evening when it's gotten too hot to do anything other than sit on a rooftop waiting for an errant wind to unstick our t-shirts, i'll bring it out, and we'll drink cold crisp pacific pears out of sweating heavy glasses. there will be birds, cutting wheels into the air. the sentences that they form are what we'll read, until all of the light goes.

love.

2008-03-24T10:26:00.003-04:00

:

driving home from the lake after another stolen afternoon of swimming where sandri and i took all of our clothes off, midday, and paddled around the deserted water in the sunlight. the windows are wide, and the sun is warming my arm on the window of the car, and the wind is lifting my hair off of the back of my neck. we are listening to otis redding. we are lazily tossing the names of vegetables back and forth across the space between our two seats, planning dinner. these are things that we will go and pick out of my garden. they will be warm in our palms.

i am alone and in my underwear on a rock somewhere on the side of route 2 west, watching hawks appear and disappear over the tips of the trees, my white limbs stretched out to the edges of the cool stone. the boulder fits the curve of my spine. the river nudges one of my dangling toes. i put the straw cowgirl hat over my face and watch the light of the day become pinpricks. i listen to the water, and the wind in the branches, and feel the hairs on my arms rise, one at a time.

my head's clearing from its nighttime fever, and i am half-consciously humming outside of the coffee shop, in the williamsburg sunlight. i am peeling a tiny orange. phoebe's humming too. small sprays of citrus keep flying up into my face. i close my eyes and inhale.

r is for romance. but also rennet.

2008-03-23T14:11:00.002-04:00

which is what they use to make cheese.

coincidence?

it's time to do my laundry when my dog starts trying to sleep in every little heap of discarded t-shirts, jeans, hoodies, etc. on my floor. she looks at me forlornly when i say 'hey, no!' as though to say 'um....there are unidentifiable kitchen-related stains on every single pair of these jeans, and this hoodie has something that resembles the guts of at least ten cucumbers on one sleeve. you're seriously going to tell me that dog hair is some sort of tragic addition to the existing mess?'

or maybe she just thinks 'jerkface'. her brain is pretty small.

i know, i know, i don't write anything in ages and then i open up with a lame joke about my dog sleeping on my dirty clothes.

there are plenty of other things that fly through my brain when i'm dismantling case after case of bell peppers and staring at my flexing and cracked knuckles through their protective latex-free gloves. and there are thoughts that i have when i'm driving route 66 to work, and come down that long open hill near the hunting preserve, whose skyline seems stolen from some other state. they translate poorly to the page. they are better in birds and late winter water, worn-out muscles and eggs, shimmying slowly around a heated pan. i know you were never in that particular kitchen, but, when i think back to it, i place you there, amidst the wooden spoons and sunlight, because it is a smooth fit, and i think that you should be the one handing me that plate, and we should be half-awake and quietly happy, to the ends of our sleep-fingered hair.

a shot in the arm.

2008-03-09T09:56:00.003-04:00

i'm sitting on the steps of the american legion in the wind staring at a vacant lot and a warehouse and the music is coming through the door behind me, all stomps and emphasis and psychobilly fervor with the high wail of a violin. i'm holding a plastic cup of ice water in one hand, and my teeth are chattering but my skin feels clean. the wind smells like the ocean, all ozone and asphalt and a rush of water. i start grinning because i know what i want. and it feels good to say it out loud, in my head.

this morning there's sunlight, and i walked out to the mailbox bare-legged and be-slippered to get the times. the light filled up the dining room. i ate granola and wild blueberries and listened to summerteeth.

shameless consumerism dept.

2008-03-04T20:46:00.000-05:00

i love this.

pickle.

2008-03-02T21:34:00.004-05:00

i am most inclined to believe in something and its veracity if it is what i least want to hear about any given scenario. i.e., the further away your advice is from my ideal scenario, the more likely it is that i'll think that what you're saying is god's honest truth.

good thing about working this much: when i do have the free hour to go to the woods and walk in the snow without anyone nearby or around or within shouting or seeing distance, i take my headphones off and listen to my breathing and it is the best sound ever. just my lungs emptying and filling up again, and my blood running in my ears and my feet sliding through the melting snow. but this is something i've also carved out on sardine-packed subway cars by staring into a fictional middle-distance and listening to the deep hum of the hidden engines. it's a good trick.

to leave it to them to get out of their valleys.

2008-02-26T21:05:00.003-05:00

i'm wearing some of my oldest clothes--grey socks with red double-decker london buses on them, the short black skirt whose waistband is slowly disintegrating, the black sweater that i've slept in on countless trains. i haven't washed my hair today. i drove home in the fog and the downpour, and i really do like commuting. i listened to destroyer. i counted exits. i thought idly about radio silence and optimism and patience and the great big letting go that i always trip over. the rain's slapping all of the windows and the speakers are bleeding sound and if there are people determined to forget you there's not much that you can do to stop them. you'll lie on the floor and feel your breath expanding behind your bones and slowly stretch until your spine pops. somewhere out there in the dark your nana is anticipating surgery. you're about to begin back to back fifty hour workweeks for the next four months. when the words fail, there is always the work. there will be walks. some nights, going to bed feels like putting one slow foot in front of the other.

i think that what i'm trying to say is that i have faith. i am comfortable with failure. that patience is something that i keep on finding, shoved to the back of the drawer, and when i pull it on, it gets closer and closer to fitting. that i don't think that the only way through something is to set fire to all of the bridges, willy nilly. sometimes, you just have to wait and see.

holding it in.

2008-02-26T10:36:00.003-05:00

so, we have this little egg cooker contraption at my house, where you poke a hole in an egg with a sharp object, and put it in this little panopticon-style chamber of horrors with some water. it then boils away, and you come back a few minutes later to a cooked egg.

only sometimes you're me and you wander upstairs and start reading an article on slate and forget about the egg and come downstairs to find that the top of your egg has exploded.

so you shell it.

and once it's denuded, and you're sitting there across the table from your dad, who is placidly reading the Times, you realize. your exploded, now naked egg, looks exactly like the head of a large penis.

and it would be vastly inappropriate to turn to your father and point it out.

i should've included this in my 'what i ideally want in a relationship' conversation with good old papa--'dad, what i really want is someone who will laugh and agree with me when my hard boiled egg accidentally resembles a phallus. thnx.'

whoever said you make your bed and then lie in it.

2008-02-25T19:26:00.002-05:00

not just a character in Spaceballs.

2008-02-25T14:38:00.002-05:00

just now, from H:

"You, my dear, are genuinely hilarious. I just snarfed salsa."

i am putting this on my resume.
and then i am sending H some tissues and a nasal-irrigation system.

additionally.

2008-02-22T17:59:00.001-05:00

if teleportation existed (and at this point, come on, why doesn't it yet?), P and i would be in a booth at spike hill sipping scotch. because that would be perfect.

definitely.

2008-02-22T17:08:00.005-05:00

-moving to bklyn in june.
-made a hooker joke in my job interview. but got hired anyway. (perhaps, because..?)
-received a text that read 'am drunk and shopping for women's clothes and apparently X is a big slut' a few minutes ago.
-networked my ass off. this blog is slowly becoming completely ass-centric. i apologize. unless that's your thing, in which case, no judgement, and i prefer Hanky Panky lace boyshorts, in medium, in black, and am accepting donations.

will sheff broke my ass.

2008-02-19T22:52:00.002-05:00

well, okay, maybe i should really expand that to include the entirety of the band. and my own overwhelming sense of rhythm, well-documented by my brother's cousin-in-law Sunil when i went for broke and picked up the tambourine at the last thanksgiving, shaking my way through a medley of l. cohen tunes in addition to a decent portion of the beatles' later catalog. yeah. the point being, if 'Unless It's Kicks' weren't so fucking catchy, my ass wouldn't feel the insatiable urge to walk to it, on-beat. (while i grin like an idiot as i run around the muddy woods and stare near-sightedly out across melting lakes) all of which leads to me come home later thinking you know, i'm not sure my hips were designed for that sort of metronomic force. yow.

not that this will stop me, let's face it. it's too good.

if you've got something to say, say it now.

2008-02-19T10:32:00.002-05:00

:

listening to this until my ears fall off
book proposal
writing songs again. it's good.
green tea in the blue glass cup
push-ups
deep sleep
aluminum water bottle
solo morning bedroom dance party
running stairs
long drives

wah wah wah.

2008-02-17T18:07:00.001-05:00

some frivolity: new tights!

the water pulls around the pier.

2008-02-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

this record is so fucking good.

rich re-post.

2008-02-14T13:45:00.003-05:00

in honor of, you know, the v-related hooplah:

from Adrienne Rich, in 'On Secrets, Lies, and Silence'--

An honorable human relationship–that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”–is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying for both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

still my favorite, really.

i think i've spoken about this before, here, but, i spent most of the morning having a long talk with my dad about the particulars of love, and adult relationships, and the problems that people create for themselves in them simply by being afraid that there might be problems in the first place. (or, you know, to quote Dune instead of a poet, 'fear is the mind-killer'. i know, i know, i'm so that girl.) but. anyway. my dad asked me what i'd most want in a relationship, and i think it surprised him, as it surprises most people, that i said space.

i think, as a readily social being who, when she's not in a transitional-living-in-connecticut sort of place, has a pretty jam-packed schedule of events, it's easy for those close to me to assume that if i'm this much of a people person in general, that i'd want my Special Person around all the time. what fewer people know is that i'm big on the Fortress of Solitude. my space, when i come back to it, is a sacred sort of thing. i like it uncluttered, ordered, inviolate, and clearly mine. that there are plenty of times when even knowing that there's another person somewhere in the house or apartment will set my teeth on edge.

i like clear evidence that someone is thinking about me fondly, but i don't like to overspend 'i love you'. and, given a choice between daily sight of you, and an unexpected one in the morning call that says 'hey, i'm coming over', i'll always take the latter. it's not an always sort of deal, but, i do like to sleep alone. to take up all of the blankets, to sprawl to the edges of the bed, to wake up at two when i have that repeating zombie janitor dream, make myself tea, and decide to re-organize my photographs. it's nice to be remembered. but to be remembered, you have to be missed first. and that takes space.

get lonely (with transportation).

2008-02-13T23:22:00.002-05:00

on cars, and music:

of all of the things that i've given up, in my current living situation, perhaps the one that i miss the most is the late night drive. late late. the roads are empty late, all of the traffic lights have turned to blinking yellows late.

there would be fog shredding itself across the pavement and under the wheels, and the engine's low hum. when the heat first comes on in my car, sometimes there is a sudden whiff of olive oil.

there's my hand and its fingers curling around the knob of the gearshift whose sides are worn smooth. in the fall i'd leave the windows open, still, and the cool air would be filled with dying leaves and other people's fires, some far-off drift of river water, the post-rain tar. and there would be music, which always sounds better late at night, moving across the tumbling grind of four wheels, when your skin knows that it should be sleeping but the rest of you has forgotten how. sometimes i'd bring tea. and if i sang at all, the sounds of my own voice would startle me, and seem new.

i found myself halfway to the city, once, with the sun burning a red line into the horizon, without really knowing why. i turned around, and drove home, listening to Funeral.

fetish fit.

2008-02-13T13:41:00.003-05:00

so. i know plenty of you know all about my weird forearm fetish, and how, when i'm pressed to describe its particulars, i tend to fail. and then i proffer up the 'i know it when i see it' lame duck, whose neck hangs dejectedly towards the floor and whose plumage has seen far better days. (sort of like david crosby's facial hair.)

thankfully, BUST keeps on publishing literary erotica, and i keep right on reading it, and someone else clearly has a yen for this sort of thing too.

from the Feb/March issue's one-handed read:

"He's wearing a light blue oxford shirt, unironed and untucked. The sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, exposing a pair of forearms you wouldn't believe. Good, healthy veins, that sexy ridge that forms where muscle meets bone, the perfect amount of hair."

hi, Sylvia Shaul. you read my mind.

your reader to reader column.

2008-02-13T12:16:00.002-05:00

the local paper in my hometown has a section called 'Good Neighbor'. a place for people to post notices requesting items/help/etc. they're listed in a column, with their subject matter highlighted in bold. and they are accidentally awesome when you read them as a poem.

Pots
rocker
tap 'em
ebay
snow fun
chicks
rug
pine
new to area
mantis
bowflex
oil tank
trade?
sax
alto sax
ralston
generator
old paper
deere
mary kay
full or queen
bins
shed
appliances
typist
canasta
announcements
mouse trap
barrels
wood splitter.

whenever Sandri and i get our musical project off of the ground, i think these should all be song titles.

suave: not just a shampoo anymore.

2008-02-12T13:19:00.001-05:00

so, someone a while ago said to me, about john mayer, 'isn't he kind of a pretty man?' and i had said 'uh, you think?' or something equally witty because it was probably one in the morning. anyway. now there's this. someone gave him a haircut. and NECK CHAINS. a nice spritz of eau de boyband? i think that was in the insert featured in this month's Details magazine. 'smell the hair product. smell the teen fervor. smell boyband.'

okay, i'm done now.

romance!

2008-02-12T09:03:00.000-05:00

i sent a holiday-themed email to friends.

gmail asked me if i'd like to purchase 'shrub bin liners'.

why yes, yes, i would.

so i am glad.

2008-02-11T09:06:00.000-05:00

i've been waking up early. this morning, at six-thirty. there is already light in the sky then, but it is not full-blown. it is rosy and cold, and doesn't have the sharpness of nine in the morning, which is light that takes each thing it touches and cleaves it neatly into lit and not-lit.

the coffee pot sighs when it's nearing completion--twice. and they sound tired, those sighs.

i like the immediacy of being awake this early, before my brain has a chance to begin cataloging the various anxieties and ills of the previous days and nights, so that my thoughts are all short and register only sensations and need. my bare leg touching the napped flannel sheet, the cool air on my ankle where it is hooked around the layers of down and cotton, the white underside of my arm with its dim rivers of veins running into the curve of my thumb. i think that i'll want tea, from the huge white cup. the neck of my shirt has grown stretched in sleep and my shoulders slip out of it, white on grey. the world and its news and its concerns are only the pulse under my collar bone. my limbs under the sheets. this low bed in a small room where the light climbs the wall, and the tips of a lilac bush wave wildly in the wind, below the window.

out of fashion.

2008-02-09T16:20:00.000-05:00

it is not de la mode, in my age bracket, to mingle romance and hope.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld said 'We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.'

I'm pretty sure that I do this the other way around--I perform according to my hopes. I promise according to my fears, in an effort to retroactively close the barn door after the escaping horse. Or to affect some semblance of nonchalance, of not caring.

this often makes things difficult. my mother is a pragmatist--she deals with nothing that is not already on the page, in the here and now, in front of her, within arm's reach. and there is some of that in me--i'm not the first to say 'i love you', i will not be picking out wedding invitations after a successful date, or even assuming that there will be another one. where i think we differ is that i do not like to claim that i will know, at the outset of things, the likelihood of their success or failure based on past performance, or similar past scenarios. i think that it's good to learn from them, and to recognize constellations of things that make something Not Working Out fairly likely, but, i associate them with people, and not with situations. i am less apt to blame the circumstances, than i am to blame the people and who they were at the time in them. maybe it's sort of architectural---you can watch ten houses sink into a bog, and blame the failure on the landscape. i prefer to blame the people who didn't take the bog into account when they were building the house, who didn't choose to invent some way to make it work, or to get around it, for the sake of seeing their vision through. i accept that plenty of people would find this a stupid practice, and say well, there are twenty other perfectly good plots of land that you could have without this hitch. but, sometimes, it's a bog, or nothing. or the bog is spectacular and captures your imagination in a way that the twenty other perfectly serviceable plots of land can't, or, it affords you a view that you'd never get from any other angle in the landscape. and given that choice, i'd always rather try to build the house. and that, i suppose, is decidedly not for everyone.

levity.

2008-02-07T22:45:00.001-05:00

i have no ass. nearly literally.

but, sandri, not 'literally'.

soft like there's silk everywhere.

2008-02-06T10:13:00.000-05:00

there was a definite sensation of driving up and out of the state of connecticut yesterday afternoon, somewhere past windsor. the sky split, and the sun fell out of the rip, and all of the scalloped remains of the clouds were blown back to the edge of the highway. that air looked scrubbed. spring air, not february air.

by the time i hit MA the fog had come back, making the buildings of Springfield loom weirdly with all of their attendant neon. always, the death star-like orb of the basketball hall of fame, blinking away into the uncertain light, and the Big Y billboard telling me to buy more chicken. (you always need to buy more chicken).

it's strange, to drive to a town where you lived for so long, and to realize that
a) you really have to pee and
b) you can't just go to the house where you spent two years of your life and do it.
this leaves you with
c) fast food restaurant bathroom. someone had stacked cups on the floor inside one of the stalls. 'found art'.

the polling place was in some multi-purpose room in a state-funded housing building. the population that lives there is mostly elderly--i walked up to the wrong door at first, and two benches filled with white-haired denizens all looked up at me from the other side of the locked glass and motioned with their canes towards the next door down. a muffled chorus of 'next door over next door over' coming through the wall.

i voted. i called three people in quick succession 'hi, it's me, i'm around for a few hours, maybe i'll see you, bye'. the light was going, and the fog was falling into a more settled shape. i browsed through piles of vintage sheet music at the Raven (where i sold the bulk of my library), and the stacks of 60s pulp novels about The Future. i got tea from Jenny O. at the Hay. i chased the little ghost versions of me down the streets, read half of a graphic novel about love and AIDS in Broadside, walked over the bridge, listening to my heels hitting the metal outside the academy. more fog, spangling my hair and making the ends curl up.

chris bought a motorcycle. darcy applied to grad school.
it's a good town. but i don't live there anymore.

marginalia.

2008-02-04T21:25:00.000-05:00

the ice is receding in layered sheets. the shoreline is grooved, like the rim of a record.

one of my eyes has been acting up, for a while now. blink, and it goes clear. blink again, and there's a fog. the end of the day sees it bloodshot and tired. this doesn't stop the 'so....are your eyes actually that color?' questions.

i made a man cry over cheese last week. my question about a jam/wensleydale pairing led to 'i knew a girl once. i loved her. i treated her poorly because i was young and too stupid. god, i haven't thought about her in so long' somehow, and before i knew it, he was blurry-eyed and backing away from the counter quickly. people like to tell me their secrets. often accidentally. often like this.

i called j and left her a message about the park smelling like My Little Ponies and strawberry chapstick. i only do this to people that i really like.

i want to have a meta moment with you.

2008-02-03T19:36:00.000-05:00

best:

standing outside of Marlow and Sons in the bright sunlight slowly peeling a tangerine while my hair dried in the warming air

singing over red heart the ticker with sarah in the ikea parking lot as we looked for a space, our sleepy, scratchy voices looping across one another in the car

p somehow getting cod in her eyebrow during brunch

laughing with emilee about the radiator that sounded like a pug with emphysema

now playing

2008-02-01T21:00:00.000-05:00

rainy night reading urban history in your underwear records:

Shearwater 'Winged Life'
The Crabs 'The Sand and the Sea'
Beth Orton 'Daybreaker'
the early bootlegged Dylan that jesse sent for xmas
and good old Elliott.

drifting clear.

2008-01-31T23:38:00.000-05:00

i unearthed the Neil Halstead album. i should be driving an old American car through Iowa right now. it should be early summer. i should have a strand of straw clamped in my teeth.

but also good for bedtime, in a quiet room.

it could be raining there too.

2008-01-30T10:27:00.000-05:00

my freshman year of college, one of the girls next door to my room became pregnant. and then she went through this phase where, every night, at around three in the morning, she'd start listening to 'lady in red' on repeat. it would vibrate through the wall, in its full-steam, lugubrious waltz, and rattle my bed. (i had a male friend who suggested that i could put this to use somehow, in some vaguely lewd way, but, lee, you always were a little vague then, on the mechanics of the female orgasm..).

all i can think is that it's a good thing no one lived next door to me, the summer before senior year, when i rattled around Albright house like some sort of latter-day Miss Havisham. they would've had nothing but a steady diet of 'fade into you'.

a warm coffee cup is a good thing to hold against your collar bone.
i'm going to listen to this all day, i think.

minna pratt in Astoria.

2008-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

sometimes i think about the overheated night we spent walking the back streets of queens while holding hands and how you took me to the wall of the secret garden. and i marveled at the low, vegetable noises coming from inside the enclosure, and the breeze moving the airlessness around. the houses that had always been there, and were starting to crumble down into the sidewalks, and then the sudden newness of that one misplaced mansion. the church that looked like a theme park, everything gilt and loud, even in the darkness.

i drove to the lake the other day and admired the patterns that the wind had pushed into the snow. i sat in the car and watched the light go from the sky until everything was blue. i had that old self-destructive urge flare up in my chest, and i wished that i were a smoker for an hour. i thought about august. and how i've said that i slept with people, once upon a time, for the story it would make later, and how that's partially true. and that the other part is that maybe i slept with them because of the idea of who they were. and the idea of who i might've been, at the time. and this sort of thing happens, all the time. people going to bed with fictions, and waking up to facts.

but, i broke myself of that habit. the right facts are better than the fictions. and you shouldn't have to chase them.

letters and sodas.

2008-01-27T22:48:00.000-05:00

the ice where it had broken against the rocks in the lake was several inches thick. a board's thickness. the strays cluttering up the emptiness, in squares and near-squares, frosted on top with snow, slick on their sides. there were people on the other side of the dunes, out on the lake, smoking and drinking.

when i'm walking, i'll try different sentences out in my head. to test them for hidden certainty. to see if there are any echoes. living without the benefit of religion can sometimes leave you scrabbling out on the edges, looking for signs. the birds are just the birds. the ice the ice. the wind, the wind.

i could sleep.

2008-01-25T10:58:00.000-05:00

people are fond of saying that they don't have time for X. whatever X is.

over the past year and a half, here's what i've noticed.

i will, and do, always have time for:

tea
late night drives
long walks through strange neighborhoods
you, most likely
music
naked swimming (mid-day, or otherwise)
quiet
noise
short stories
a quick drink
a not-so-quick drink
feeding other people
roadside photographs
an extra five minutes in bed mapping my half-awake body and watching the light climb the wall
a dirty joke.

when my city friends (hello, darlings) bemoan the fact that there's no time for love, i always want to ask--what sort of love is it that you want, or how are you defining it, that it isn't already going to be part of all of the tiny things you secretly know you have time for? if it's not gonna fit in that particular suitcase, then, i think it's already too much baggage. an ill-fitting shoe. you, prancing around in a pair of pants several sizes too small saying dammit, i'm gonna stretch these out somehow and then they will FIT. etc.

time to throw out all of those pants. and to find the thing that slyly seems as though it was already there, even while it carbonates your blood and makes you hum.

while wearing a wifebeater

2008-01-23T20:17:00.000-05:00

and pretty utilitarian underwear. and an old black skirt. as inspired by recent conversations/the Vogue i stole from the post office:

sexy:

the ocean in winter
the first whiskey
reading in bed
stubble
making me tea
making me laugh
the moment when 'the funeral' goes from quiet to big and urgent
a late-night 'hey'
anticipation

and plenty of other things that vogue knows absolutely nothing about. wearing fishnets with your cowboy boots and enjoying the way that they slide against your legs when you go to shift from fourth to fifth on the highway, late at night at the exact moment that the beat of the song matches the sudden up tempo hum of the engine, for instance. the process, when you're traveling, of finally getting to a real hotel, not a hostel, peeling out of your slowly disintegrating sweater, and scrubbing away twelve hours' worth of accumulated train grime in a white marble bath. crawling, flushed and clean, into those impossibly starched sheets, and stretching your naked limbs out to the four corners of the bed, resting in the middle of the pillowed mattress like a secret waiting to be found out. i don't think that anything that's truly sexy is obvious. it's a slow burn, a burr that tugs at the back corners of your brain, an itch that eventually howls to be scratched. the sort of sexy that can't be spent or used up in a single sitting. when i think about the things that are worth waiting for, or that are hard to find--what i've gotten more picky about, in my old age, if you will--it's something like this. the indelible tattoo, vs. the curious george temporary tat that rode on my arm for a single sweaty rockshow outing.

there should also be room for boob jokes.
i'm just saying.

secret morning person.

2008-01-23T09:47:00.000-05:00

good:

spanish almonds with sea salt and rosemary
early morning light on the ice, fishermen scattered across it like haphazard punctuation
white tea
clean, bare skin
crisp sheets
nowhere particular to be

you're it.

2008-01-21T09:56:00.000-05:00

tags for Glossary on emusic:

'Tags: emusic, Alt-country, alternative rock, homosexual intifada, let's assume you understand the concept of irony.'

misc.

2008-01-21T09:44:00.000-05:00

my brain:

playing: marnie stern's 'vibrational match'
thinking: 'isn't that what happens during a good moment at Toys in Babeland?'

M: how soon will you be ready to go?
S: 'How Soon Is Now?'

road sign: 'Low Salt Area'
brain: legions of desalinated occupants crawling on hands and knees towards a Seven-Eleven on the horizon, where a man in a white robe holds two things aloft: a bag of Fritos, and a container of salt and vinegar Pringles, while 'Ride of the Valkyries' plays boomingly from the sky.

i didn't have the nerve to say no.

2008-01-17T19:23:00.000-05:00

they weren't really in the budget. lord knows i don't need any more ballet flats. but...shiny.

nearly every time i'm out in public, at least once, someone will find me and decide to tell me their life story. today, while looking at porcelain egg cups (so twee, so unnecessary, so i-almost-bought-four), somehow, a woman remarking that she really loved the store where we were browsing turned into the same woman telling me about her husband's love of eggs, how she hates them, how it is a point of contention between the two of them, etc. we were off. i know that she never wears satin. that she wishes she could kidnap the window dresser at Anthropologie and bring him home with her to redecorate her house. that the best mascara is still made by maybelline and she thinks that i have fabulous lashes. that i shouldn't buy that top because it's too 'fussy'.

i should've invited her to lunch with me, and to buy fishnets.

fitted shirt.

2008-01-17T19:18:00.000-05:00

as in the song.
also, as in 'why i sometimes take my bra off at night and find things in it. things like cheerios, or a peanut.'

four limerick oysters.

2008-01-16T19:31:00.000-05:00

from the leg and foot series.
as well as the 'white is my natural color' files.

bandwagon.

2008-01-13T20:39:00.000-05:00

but sexy. and stuck in my head.

alt-country album art i have known.

2008-01-11T11:55:00.000-05:00

Four Million Kinds of Microbial Wrong.

2008-01-10T12:24:00.000-05:00

Dear Going NYC-

I appreciate all of your thoughtful updates about the dank, hipstery fun I'm missing out on by not living in your fair metropolis. the shows i could be getting sloshed at, the beer i could be having poured into my boot, the bearded lads i am surely missing out on making out with in some alley while three other people try to pee behind a dumpster. normally, i open you, sigh over these lost sexually-and-chemically-charged opportunities, and move on.

but not when you invite me to the No Pants Subway Ride. then, i look you straight in the eye and say 'don't you remember that email from joe over the summer wherein he told you about his morning train conductor warning him away from the seat he was about to perch on because it had recently been vacated by a homeless man visibly crawling with lice, and how he was certain that he was going to contract G train butt lice and die a horrific, itchy, sexless death? no? WELL NOW YOU DO.'

i'm all for running around without pants on in the comfort of one's own home (or, occasionally, the office--or, your college campus. um, also, fields, parks, and lakes hosting unsuspecting early-morning fishermen who probably didn't expect to see your pale white ass running into the water at six a.m.), but, Going NYC, PANTS ON, on the municipal transit system. thnx.

yrs trly,
s.

(p.s. 'pants off in the office' is what you do when no one remembers to inform you that they're all taking july 4th as a holiday, and you're the only boob who shows up to do work. if you've gotta be there, taking care of business, you might as well take your skirt off and celebrate your independence with your leopard-print skivvies. then you have to call everyone you know to inform them that you're at work. and you're not wearing any pants.)

in the mix.

2008-01-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

making mixtapes (or cds, let's be honest here) is so viscerally satisfying. and it makes me miss my radio show. (certain things sounded unexpectedly better next to one another, than they did alone. i had so many moments, with my headphones jammed on my ears, and my eyebrows shooting to my hairline when something transitioned into something else and somehow, made more sense. was more itself. was louder, grander. or broke your heart more.)

the new year.

2008-01-04T20:47:00.000-05:00