Author: tuckova

Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

connected but not dependent

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First: This sensation. That you thought you were fine, nourished, well fed even. That there was nothing you wanted. And then someone waves this past you, this thing that you suddenly want in such a primal way, the thing that has been missing from your life. Oh, it's so exciting to want something, isn't it? Want want want because now that you've caught the scent, you know that want will be followed by have. And then suddenly it is taken from you. Mmmhmm and what now. Do you go back to wanting nothing, your smug contentment? Or do you reach out your hungry fingers and try to clutch at what is already out of your reach, just waiting for you to acknowledge your failure? Or do you, perhaps, try to build one of your own, a thing to satisfy the desire that is eating through your thoughts? This feeling. But I didn't want. But then, let's not forget, but then you did. 

Second: This sensation. The thing that you wanted and desired and begged. The round holes you hammered your square self into, to turn want into have by force of will. The fire that consumed you and you tried feeding it small branches, twigs, pinecones, anything, and everything you gave it sparked and ashed away and left you burning. Burning to the extent that you thought it was your natural state, the human condition. And then one morning to wake up with a cool pillow by your head, the fever gone. Clean. 

Third: Clearly you pour that which is full into that which is empty. Your hand wraps around the full vessel, prepared to tip the contents into the empty one; balance is important. Isn't it? Hesitating. Probably this is right. The sensation of being pretty sure, hovering in the space between decisions has never been your strong point, plunger of worlds, but here there is suddenly a moment to look around, so you do. 

Onset, by Kim Addonizio

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Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers,
bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of
is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.
Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing.
And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately
I can't stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers
of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug
beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs,
even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me,
the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other
like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything,
my hands and eyes, yours; doesn't that frighten you sometimes, remembering
the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you,
beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs,
don't look at them all or they'll kill you, you can barely encompass your own;
I'm saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it's spring
and it's starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

carrying stones across a stony field

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When I was little I had a best friend. I don't mean my best imaginary friend, but a best real friend. She lived across the street. We walked to school together. We rode our bikes after school. We had birthday parties together, played together, read books together. As twilight came on I would ask to walk her home, then when we got to her door she'd walk me back home, back and forth until somebody's parents caught on, and then she'd run back across the two front yards alone, her hair caught the moonlight; she was magic. She was wildly different from me in many ways that were probably important — she was sporty, tireless, not given to long periods of day-dreaming — and we were brought up with radically different values and perspectives. I remember particularly playing badminton in her yard and every time I missed the birdie, which was often, I would go to retrieve it while she or her sister listed out everything that was wrong with me. But I loved her so fiercely and so completely and on days when she loved me back my world was perfect. Some days she played with other kids and I would fling my whole tiny jealous body across my bed and weep. How could she? Why? Why couldn't she just love me back as intensely as I loved her, why couldn't we be best forever and only friends? I read so many books about best friends and I guess I thought I could will it into being, that I could will her into loving me like Diana Barry loved her red-headed Anne.

When I was 13 we moved across the country and since unlike me she was not much of a writer we fell out of contact. I went back to visit the house where I grew up and the yards weren't nearly as big as I'd thought, her sacrifice in walking home alone might have lasted two minutes. There were not a lot of kids in the neighborhood, but there was a neighborhood and there were kids; I played with Kelly sometimes and with Sara, or with other girls from school, but it wasn't the same. Why was I so fixated on this one person, accepting no alternatives; why did I want one friend, one special friend, a best friend so much and why was I determined it should be her?

I've been thinking about this lately, that after the bottom of that basket fell out, I never again put all my eggs in one place. Not that I haven't had friends — I absolutely have, intensely close friends, people I would honestly kill or die for. And having friends has gotten easier as I've gotten older, much in the same way that letting myself recognize and say "I love you" got easier when I realized that loving one person will not rob me of the ability to love another — in fact, rather the opposite.

But sometimes I think there is a small Anne inside of me that still wishes for one person. We would know each other so well, where we were and how we got here, someone who would know me and still be interested in me. Someone who would be genuinely curious about hearing my dreams, someone who would be eager to tell me theirs. Someone who could not get enough of me, the way I can never get enough. And people do like to listen to me, and people like to tell me things, and I'm happy to sit and converse about just about anything as long as you don't want me to play badminton while I do it. The things I once did for love, the things I did to be loved. But I don't think it's possible now to put it all on one person, if it ever was. Poor small Anne, it was hard enough when you were eight and nobody could sit still now for your fifty years of metaphors and details, the intensity of the obsessions, much less the tiny day-to-day stuff, even if you could sit still long enough to tell them. I'm happy where I am now, happier than the little freckled girl soaking her pillows with hot tears could have ever imagined. I wish I could pat her back and tell her it's going to be okay, better than okay, just different, some day.

A Settlement, by Mary Oliver

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Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

come find me when you wake up

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Every time the wheel goes around it goes bigger, the view gets clearer. "Back when I was an asshole" we say, with the understanding that those days are gone, until the next time around when we see that our understanding was little more than smug assholery, and refer now to that understanding as "back when I was an asshole" until eventually on one turn of the wheel or another the dissonance of seeing ourselves as assholes twice, three times, three hundred wears even us down and we get it: we will always be verging on hubris after insight and the best thing is to keep it to ourselves. Even now I'm still speaking aloud so I will have to go around again and see it again and learn it again.

Sometimes therapy is like that episode of Star Trek or whatever, name your favorite time loop story, where you learn the same lesson and forget it and learn the same lesson and forget it, and Die Taschen, three turns should do it, I assure you the cards are sufficiently randomized, don't forget your booties. A second of stunning clarity, an understanding, a view of how it could be outside of the cave, the pit, a moment, then the realization that I've seen that before but when but how and if so why am I here still. Sometimes life is like that. 

Hovering between wanting to be kind, to stretch my arms out beyond my fingers, to hold everyone, to love until my heart breaks and then on the other hand wanting to get the oxygen mask firmly over my own mouth first, secure. Between apologizing for being too rich, too heavy, too intense and saying "well fuck them if they don't like cake" to the walls again. I wanted the taste you had of me to be sweet. I'm sorry I overwhelmed you. I'm sorry I spilled over and stained your clothes. I'm sorry. 

I am the most myself when I am alone, probably falling down an internet hole, just as in my youth I easily fell into books. The lilypad jumps of the internet are also pleasurable, maybe more than books even, scratching the curious itch. Second most, talking to people who share my greedy mind and give me the same feeling of learning and growth without making me feel like shit for having not known, before. I am blessed to have friends who think about things and take the time to share their thoughts and know how to challenge me to be my best self while understanding that I'm most likely only going to be better, never best.  Conventionally you would apply such a computation repeatedly a finite number of times, and then settle for the better, but still approximate, result. 

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I am still so fully in my dreams that their vague images cloud the whole solitary day. Sometimes I wake up and I start talking to you before I even open my eyes. Sometimes you are there. When you're not, sometimes I write a long story about how that feels but usually I don't send it. 

Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón

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More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

unpacking

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You know the observation of how once a person gets famous enough to go on tour, all their stories are about travel? Yeah, so. This won't be a regular thing, but holy smokes did I pack and unpack a ridiculous lot this March, only some of which was in my suitcase.
 
****
I am extremely good at watching television, getting intoxicated, and creating extended metaphors, and it was pretty awesome to see people sweeping their calendars clear so they could fill their time with me and some or all of those exact entertainments. I'm good at other things too, like listening and chewing with my mouth closed most of the time, but I think it's interesting that people like to do things with me that they don't do with others. Like, have I convinced people that this is a fantastic way to spend time? Am I having so much fun that it's infectious? Did people just want me to have a good time? Isn't a YES to any of those answers a good thing? It is, it is. 
 
****
I saw you in a secondhand bookstore in Seattle, it wasn't you but it was, the same eyes and a haircut I can imagine you would have, based on who you were then; obviously I have no idea how you look now and I don't know if you'd recognize me, either. Sometimes I think I look exactly the same; sometimes I think I look like the ogre version of myself. Sometimes I think I just look older and that's fine. Same with you, bookstore clerk who was not you, with a little gray hair and some wrinkles around the eyes that would make sense for how old you would be now, plus maybe a few years of smoking cloves. It wasn't you, though I looked at not-you's eyes for a good long minute to be sure. The last time we talked, I hung up on you, or anyway one of us hung up on the other, and it still feels like that was a good call, pun intended, though sometimes I would like to talk to you about books for example but that wasn't you in the bookstore and I talked to her anyway and it was a perfectly good conversation about books so there's that.
 
****
I did not spend my time in the Seattle airport this year sobbing uncontrollably, as I was mostly annoyed at the mumbly walrus of a TSA agent and at the blatant capitalism of expedited treatment. Annoyance is not ideal but it was a step up from despair. I have wept openly for a range of reasons on a variety of forms of transportation, including two solid hours on a bus after a breakup, and I have to say Sacramento is a far better airport to cry in than Seattle, so if you're planning a possible sobfest, try SMF.  
 
****

On one plane I made small talk with a woman who was in her late 70s. She admired my tattoos and told me she wanted some, and over the course of the 90 minute flight we talked about how it feels to have a stroke, whether airline travel has improved by becoming more available, why people seem to think they can tell us what to do, and hobbies. She'd been a psychiatrist before her stroke, and told me that there was a time in her life when people paid to talk to her but now she was sitting with me and she couldn't stop talking and what was that about. She wept when she told me about her husband's death, and then we laughed about crying in public so I pretty much think I rode the plane with future someversion of me. When we disembarked, another passenger remarked they wished they'd been sitting with me because I had the best smile on the plane and it didn't feel like a line. 
 
****
On the day I left your town I drove past you, standing on the stairs outside. I didn't have time this year, I just didn't and if you could see everything I had to do I know you would understand but not seeing you is a regret worth mentioning. 
 
****
I understand that part of being in this life is that I am always missing someone. I understand that I chose this. I believe I came by this genetically, that the compulsion to keep moving and missing people is almost a unifying feature of Americans, as compared to for example Czechs who seem to have a homing beacon installed that goes off at a certain age. Americans seem to think that if we keep moving we can find happiness, just up there around the corner, and then we go back for high school reunions or annual pilgrimages or whatever and compare ourselves to our younger versions and wonder: are we happy? are we happy now? could we be happier still? And I am so ridiculously happy really most of the time but I still wish we could all live in the same building, or even just the same town.

Bad People by Robert Bly

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A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

Schrödinger’s something

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I don't have cancer. Just before Christmas I felt a lump in my breast. I have been getting lumps since forever, and they always turn out to be nothing, so I wasn't too worried about it. When the holidays were over, I made an appointment to see the doctor for a general checkup. I didn't mention the lump because of magical thinking. He was able to see me in February and I got a referral to get a mammogram because it had been two years since my last one and I have a family history. The nicest facility in Brno has DBT machines, very modern, and is up on a hill around some pretty posh houses, and it's a nice little walk from my place, so I booked an appointment there. I put the whole question of whether I had a lump or a LUMPlump out of my mind: just getting a checkup. I managed to not talk about it and not think about it for basically two months, until the actual day that I had scheduled the mammogram.

In standard Czech waiting room shenanigans, there was nobody to announce myself to when I got to the clinic. Nurses popped in and out of various doors and I tried to say I had an appointment but they waved me away or looked right through me. At one point I actually got up and stood in front of one of them and she snapped that they would call me and to sit back down, so I did. About 30 minutes later, my phone rang, and it was the nurse, who scolded me for being late. "But I'm… I'm right here! In the waiting room!"

So finally she came out and actually looked at me and we went into the room with the super modern machinery and she said that since I was late the doctor wouldn't have time to see me. I scheduled an appointment for the following week, went back out to the waiting room, put on my coat and hat and gloves and Lost. My. Mind.

I just collapsed on a plastic chair in front of the entrance and bawled my eyes out. This is the thing about magical thinking; it only takes you so far. You can convince yourself that worrying won't change anything, which is true, and that you're probably fine, which is true, but somehow the closer you get to reality the more wavery those truths become. I was not worried and I was sure I was totally fine until I was in range of a possible fact, and when that knowledge was snatched from my grasp, it was like someone had disintegrated my skeleton. I kept trying to pull it together and leave and then having another wave of weeping hit me. When I finally got out, I'd cried off all the cold cream on my face, which was red and raw, and my tears turned into little icy crystals while I waited for the bus instead of looking at pretty houses because I didn't have the energy to walk home anymore.

Also, as a side effect of which I am not remotely proud, I wanted very much to find out I had cancer and then go scream myself hoarse at that nurse.

Anyway, so I finally went to the appointment. I was mentally preparing to be kind of snooty with the nurse but it was a different shift and the one who came out of the mammogram door, about 10 seconds after I got my coat off, was perfectly lovely. The whole thing went pretty fast. I told her I'd found a lump, making her the third person I told, and she said "We'll take care of you" in a way that was super brusque and efficient and perfect. Then the doctor called me and said that the mammogram showed nothing but she wanted to do an ultrasound too just to check. She told me I was right to be cautious and concerned, but there was absolutely nothing to on that scan either. So, that's that for two more years.

I passed the plastic chair on the way out and it seemed like it had been years ago. I had been so incredibly frightened — not of having cancer, honestly, but of not knowing something. I don't know what lesson to take from that — I almost never let fear keep me from doing what I want to do, even though I'm often very scared I just keep pushing through until I can get to a place where I'm not scared. It felt in that moment like I stood still and it caught me. But walking out of the clinic back into the cold blue felt like victory. Once I'm through it, even if it was awful, it's not a mystery anymore; I think it's the mystery that scares me. I guess that's why I keep doing stuff, because of that feeling, of having the facts, of knowing what the other side of my inexperience feels like.

Anyway everyone knows I'm going to get plowed over in a crosswalk and this whole thing is just to be sure I'm right on that.

touché

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We did not make love on a rooftop in Japan during a typhoon. 

We had sex on a rooftop, yes, and that was fun, 
and that was a memory I wanted to keep. 
But later, when there was a midnight storm 
you didn't want to be bothered
and that's the actual truth. 
 
The truth is important. Details matter. 
This was not the only story you got wrong.
 
One good thing about you being gone 
is knowing that our true stories
will not be harvested anymore
tarnished by lies and
twisted into cheap pickup lines.
 
I'm sure that someone mourns you 
and I am sorry for their loss but 
all I feel is relief 
at being able to spit out the poison of you 
and know you will never administer another dose.