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Sitting in a favorite coffee shop, the one with the pock-marked plank floors, with the sun burning through the dirty windows and the through the flame-shaped bulbs of the turned-off chandelier. The one with the simple translucent electric lamps, looking like something just invented. I’m snorting leftover bits of the H1N1 nasal spray and realizing I would never want to do cocaine. Reading some disappointingly mediocre stories for a fiction contest, looking for the gems, the ones with some spark, some oomph.
I have to contrive something to get myself up early now that I’m making my own schedule. Today it was a doctor’s appointment. But I need something daily. Any ideas?
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Whoa, I wore fishnet stockings for the first time in my life, and let me say it is kind of awesome to have a crisscross pattern of warmth and cold breeze on your legs on a brisk fall day. Also, they don’t look as slutty as I thought.
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More searches that have led people to this blog:
“how to clean up dingleberries”
“dog dingleberry photos”
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I’ve come up with a name for an everyday urban phenomenon: the panhandler Doppler effect. (Note: this only applies to the minority of panhandlers who are dicks.) The sound changes depending on your relative position. Approaching him, you hear, “Hey sweetie, can I talk to you for a minute?” Passing, it’s: “Hello? Hello! I’m talking to you!” As you get farther away, the anger volume increases: “Thanks a lot, you dumb bitch!” At this point, sexism and judgments based on your presumed class amp up as well.
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The other day I saw a lost dog poster that was most affecting because of its simplicity. It obeyed that rule of every high school creative writing class, “Show, don’t tell.”
Margo
3-year-old Black Lab mix
Chipped canine tooth
Wiggly butt
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For someone who is highly attentive to the subtleties of language for two reasons: one, because she is a lover of poetry and multiple shades of meaning; and two, because she is extremely wary of hurting others’ feelings, so always chooses her words carefully, for this person learning a second language is an interesting experiment. Because she’s so desperate to grasp even the first layer, that of literal meaning, and because she has no idea how she sounds or what she’s implying, a kind of liberation takes place.
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Speaking of which, I was on the WordReference forums yesterday, where people ask and answer questions about usage, syntax and expressions in English and Spanish. A native Spanish speaker was asking for help understanding an English sentence he had come across. The sentence was, “I put the cute in execute.” I’ve had English on my tongue for 25 years, and…what??
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It’s official. Come Friday the 13th, I will be joining the ranks of the unemployed, as a member of that less common heirloom variety, the Voluntarily So. I’ll be kicking off my inauguration into the Creative Class with this combination mudbath/5K on the following day.
Here are my goals for this blessed stretch of tiempo libre:
- Write. I’m working on a collection of interviews/essays. Poetry-wise, I’m going to be experimenting with various straightlaced forms.
- Study Spanish. Daily at home, and in a yet-to-be-determined Latin American country for at least a month.
- Take pictures. My mistress creative outlet, the one that doesn’t hurt my brain. I want to learn how to use my camera manually.
- Travel. I’m off to the Caribbean for a week in January, then a few days in Chicago, and then a tour of the Northeast with a good friend. Later I plan on spending a month in Guatemala, Mexico, or Ecuador studying Spanish.
I know the economy is crumbling and all that, but the way I look at it, I am giving someone else a chance at a great job. We shouldn’t be greedy with what little work there is in Portland, Oregon.
And I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay away from working with survivors. The women and kids I have gotten to know over the last three years are very close to my heart.
But for now, ¡a explorar!
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Summer is gone. Remembering a June bike ride around Sauvie Island with a friend I’m lucky to have. We mingled with some llamas, ate lunch (complete with Queso-Its) on the Columbia, picked strawberries while speaking in Spanish, and eyed the grapes, grass and myriad misty offerings at Kruger Farm market. Now fall is here and we’re both turning over new leaves. ¡Vámonos!
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Tonight I have been engrossed in the story of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a blighted steel town so depressed and desiccated that it was used in the filming of The Road. The hulking Harvard grad of a mayor, John Fetterman, who arrived as an AmeriCorps volunteer (AC pride!) and now has the town’s zipcode inked on his forearm, has been trying to rub two (black mold-ridden) sticks together and start a spark in this community. To a place with no grocery store and a post-Katrina-esque landscape, he hopes to attract artists, entrepreneurs and activists. But he’s not interested in another Williamsburg (Brooklyn); his passion lies with rebuilding viable livelihoods for the existing residents.
Check out this article to read more about his efforts. The New York Times article includes a good video. And here is a spectacular gallery of images of both ruins and revitalizations.
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Did you know? Voodoo Doughnut used to offer a Nyquil Glazed doughnut and a Vanilla Pepto Crushed Tums doughnut, but they were ordered by health officials to stop selling them.
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Some searches that have led people to my blog:
1) “biggest dingleberry”
2) “dingleberry cotton balls”
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Some thoughts on marriage from David Rochester:
But I do have an odd idea about marriage, which is that the people who really need the formality of it are people who probably shouldn’t be married. I think that for many folks, the vow, that external authority, takes the place of the very hard and soul-searching work of getting up every day, assessing yourself and your partner and your life together, and consciously re-committing to it. I tend to be suspicious of marriage, for that reason. I hear people who are miserable together say that they are still married because they took that vow. Well, that’s a really shitty reason, if you ask me. A vow is only as good as the genuine intent behind it, and if that’s gone, the vow is a mockery of itself.
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Some thoughts on having kids by Tim Kreider:
Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.
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Confused. Help me out.
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I work at an emergency shelter with an incredibly generous, cohesive group of people, and the women and kids we serve continually amaze me with their strength. However, in the last month or so I have been finding it difficult to fully renew my energy and be present. At the same time, I have been loving Spanish. I have considered going abroad to study it intensively. There appear to be several good, affordable schools in Antigua, Guatemala. So…what should I do?
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Seen today while passing a dog park in Seattle: a standard poodle donned with a “cone of shame” sniffing a terrier’s butt. Unexpected bonus of post-surgery medical equipment: instant snifter for the canine with olfactory ADD.
Not quite prepared to extract the essential oil from Seattle, since this is only my second visit. However, I can say that I have enjoyed my daily walks past Cal Anderson Park. Lots of red and gilded foliage; an echoey, fluorescent nighttime soccer field filled with sexy men; and a big fountain spewing huge goofy bubbles or fine cappuccino bubbles depending on where you’re looking. This afternoon I was mesmerized by a crew of skinny guys on bikes. Slo-mo they circled backward in half arcs, like birds of prey in reverse, occasionally punctuating this hypnotic motion with a spin or a jump. I’d love to lather their tires with paint and see the pretty spirograph appear on the tennis court.
I will venture the observation that Seattle is more urban, what with the din downtown, cars that turn into the crosswalk too soon for comfort, restaurants open late, and piles of rain-saturated newspaper at the bus stops. There is also more to do.
The hipsters seem a bit less uniformed, though a bunch more unapproachable.
I highly recommend the Capitol Hill B&B where I am staying, the 11th Avenue Inn. Wish I could stay here a bit longer. Now I’ll tiptoe down the narrow stairs to grab some cookies and then fall asleep early watching Chocolat.
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In Paris there is an interesting park, the Parc de la Villette, which has something called the Jardin des Frayeurs Enfantines (Garden of Childhood Fears). It is comprised of an out-of-the-way spruce “forest” in which creepy music plays. When I went, it was deserted and I encountered a lurking lone male; thus it became a garden of adult fears and I left prematurely. But I still thought it was a brilliant concept. It occurred to me, the improbably well-adjusted adult manifestation of a very fearful child, to create a map of my personal Garden of Childhood Fears. You can explore it below. What would your map look like?
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Looking through job ads on Craigslist yesterday, I came across an error that reflects the current state of the economy:
“Compensation commiserates with experience and training.”
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Do you ever have one of those 24-hour bugs? Not the stomach kind, the head kind. Like a mini-depression. The three criteria for me are: not once going outside; not getting dressed; and eating treats at such a rate that, were I a dog, I would have at least a couple dozen Roll over!s or Speak!s under my belt (and, come to think of it, I would have at least earned what I ate).
Taking extremely long showers is one symptom of this bug. Just now I spilled a half hour’s worth of water for no good reason, mindlessly resoaping parts already perfectly clean and badly singing the one verse of “Mr. Tambourine Man” that I could remember. Occasionally I would bust out a new line, but then it would get redirected back to the corresponding part of the one verse I remembered, like a flow chart. The air around me turned thick steamy white and at this point I felt like a spittle bug. The spittle bug is a cowardly creature that lives in the center of a glob of what looks exactly like human spit. When I worked on a farm in New York, as I harvested winter savory and chocolate mint, I would occasionally stop to dig out a poindexterous green cretin from his cover of spittle and make him own up to what he was. Cruel, I know — but these are the kinds of horrors I am willing to admit to on my down days.
The spittle bug, shorn of his spittle. Photo by limowreck666, not me.
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I will leave you with a tantalizing tidbit (i.e., go and read the whole thing!) from a delightful post in which a formidable blogger goes up against a subpar rhyme on a baby shower invitation, and wins. Demolishes, even. Her humor is understated and measured — the stuff of good poems, actually.
Leaving aside the important question of whether diapers, while necessary, are likely to fill expectant parents with ‘glee,’ or really be a gift I’d consider ‘from the heart,’ it must be plainly evident that this is dreadful verse.
I know, it’s very hard to actually write good verse. I’m not saying I could do better. (It’s easy to criticize. Fun, too.)
But good people, please.
There’s no way this scans. It is painful to the mind’s ear to try to recite it. It has leaped over my low Doggerel Threshold and into my Verse Hatred Lobby.
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