One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.
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
the remains of the day
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I went into a hormonal rage and pulled all the shelves in my room down. In about two minutes everything was chaos on the floor — books, toys, knickknacks, everything. And I stood there, sort of shocked, and then I started picking it up. Some things were broken, but I swept them up and kept going. I don't remember how long it took, but I remember how the violence and the drama did not make me feel better in any way, but the slow methodical work did. And the sky opened up and a beam of light on my forehead and the voice of clarity and reason, so rarely heard by the pubescent: now you know how to calm yourself.
And now I am thirty years older, and I have been cleaning my home and other people's houses for most of that time. It's a thing I can do, dishes and dusting and floors, and it's usually soothing. Plus when you clean other people's houses they pay you, either in money or free accommodations and food, a range of delicious treats in exchange for you doing what you'd do at home anyway, haha. And I did always clean at home, too, for the meditation of it, and the feeling of calm from everything being where it belongs. Except I lived for a long time with people who did not care if it was clean, and you're allowed to not care, I'm sure it makes life much easier, but it makes cleaning up after you kind of a pain. Also my knees started to go weird, locking up, which didn't make kneeling and scrubbing any fun.
So five years ago I got a housekeeper, a teenage girl who came once a week and dusted and mopped and scrubbed. And she did not do the work as well as I did, because for one thing you cannot get a floor clean with a mop, you get a floor clean on your hands and knees, ffs, Yes I know. But she did it every week and she did it without complaining, which in some ways reminded me of my teenage self, and she was pleasant and she didn't want to be my friend, she just came and did it and got paid and left. Then she went to college, which was the worst.
I have some ideas in here about hiring people to do menial labor, and about privilege etc., which I think I dodged by hiring a teenager, but it was on my mind.
For two years I tried to find another housekeeper, and it was just ridiculous. One who told me the house was a mess (uhm, nope) and so it would be hard to clean; one who talked and talked and talked at me so I couldn't work while she was here, which I thought: shouldn't we… both be working?; one who smelled like cat piss and mold. I did not find another teenager and I did not enjoy the dialogues in my head. So finally Squire and I have been doing the weekly cleaning together, I do the standing parts and he does the kneeling parts, it's not FUN but it helps to feel like I'm not alone and I don't feel weird about it and we get it done and whatever, it's a couple hours. But the cat hair, my god. There is one cat, and she sheds a kitten per room per week.
So we bought a floorbot. My sister's is named Benson so I named this one Stevens because he is also a butler (I was thinking of Miss Kenton, which is more correct, taskwise, but I just couldn't see Emma Thompson in his shiny black morning coat). He is tiny, he cleans one room and then runs out of energy and has to be recharged, so I have to pace him. It is a funny new addition. It is interesting to have watched so many programs about robots in the last year and then find myself behaving exactly as those silly humans, assigning emotions and personality to an object. I mean this is a cheap version, I don't think it even has a memory, which as Deckard will tell you is what separates the roombas from the replicants. But anyway: Stevens. New member of the household.
Well you said you wanted something a little less… sad. And I'm trying, I am. Though the fact that I named my floorbot after the butler who could talk about anything except his feelings instead of, say, Wadsworth, is not lost on me.
In the Pitt-Rivers Museum
Curiosity and wonder, they call it, and put it behind glass and we press our faces against it and hold our breath so as not to cloud the view. Trophies of war, declares one sign, and behind it dangles chunks of the real live hair of people who are no longer really alive. The head of your enemy, with the part that thought it could hurt you carefully removed, just the face now, the dead eyes even deader, filled with sand and looking more like fuzzy dice than anything that could do you harm, which is the point I guess. Body art is a whole floor, and there are objects from rituals once sacred in one place, now trendy in another. Still rituals, though. These cabinets are better curated than a B-lister's Facebook page, they look like chaos but each item has a tiny label in penmanship that makes my fingers cramp in sympathy and longing. Here are shoes worn by a woman who was so rich they had to hobble her to keep her from walking, the wretched smell meaning that all the perfumes of China will not sweeten this little foot.
This room is for crusty old men smelling of wet tweed and pipe tobacco, and for Mrs. Frankweiler, and for me. For people who do not think in the rigid lines of time and space as well as we would like to imagine, but instead group things together in a logic that defies; a pile of thoughts, confirmation bias, and objects used for the same purpose across generations, continents. Here is a cabinet filled with things for Woodcarving, and we suspect that maybe some of them might be sex toys, though later on we find out that's in another museum. Adze is a beautiful word. Here is a world with problems, the cases say, here is rain and hunger, the need for food and shelter, and here is how it has been solved, and solved, and solved, with wood and mud and traps for feathers and meat and bone; here is what we do with what we need, here is what we do with what is leftover. There's a labret made of a soda can. Here is boredom, they say, and breathe across your mind until it fogs, and then they wipe the mist away with a piece of leather soaked in salt and vinegar, and there are so many beautiful ways to solve that.
You gaze into Permanent Arts, the eyes of a woman with a stack of neck rings and wonder if she feels exploited or pretty, her eyes defiant or beckoning, and beside it a corset and an x-ray of the woman who wore it, her deformed skeleton. Or in this cabinet, pig bristles and woven straw, a mixture of things to cause malevolent events, earth from the grave of a man killed by a tiger, bad beasts do not harm me, I'm quoting here. Charms, says the cabinet, and I'm charmed, magicked, transfixed.
And Now it’s October by Barbara Crooker
the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run
to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy
pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells,
the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright
as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery
grasses shine in the slanted light. It's time to bring in the lawn chairs
and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker
down. Summer's fruits are preserved in syrup, but nothing can stopper time.
No way to seal it in wax or amber; it slides though our hands like a rope
of silk. At night, the moon's restless searchlight sweeps across the sky.
tatters
What I wanted to write about was the feeling of being ripped up, that pieces are being torn off me, that sometimes I believe I can actually feel my soul being just a little shredded. I tried to write that and it came out as some kind of poem, the kind that my friend once said "Oh, so this is what fire is for, to toss this into." Not so good. So now I'm just trying to write AROUND the idea for a bit, and what I wanted to get to from there was the thought that if all these pieces are being ripped off of me, maybe I can make something of it, some kind of papier mache creation, if the words of me are ripped off and then dipped in liquid and then reformed, wouldn't the new me be marvelous, the way I planned it, some kind of collage beauty that only showed the parts I wanted to show, something lovely. But right now it feels mostly like the tearing part, the rip of paper, the destruction, and I feel like the pieces are just blown into the wind before they can be reassembled into anything of meaning.
So that's happening, the ripping.
Despite that I'm mostly happy, I'm working a lot and that always makes me feel useful. I play the ukulele almost every day and I have not improved even a tiny bit. I'm going to London and Oxford for a few days to visit friends, yay. I'm starting to hunker down into winter, piling my books and blankets around me and making sure there's lots of good television lined up. Sometimes I wish you were here and we could just talk and laugh and be ourselves; sometimes I don't think about you at all.
meta
This is how we live then, walking in circles among the daffodils, their oddly human faces drooping at the riverbank. This is what we do, repeating back what is said to us, like we learned to do in psych class. So it sounds like things are hard for you right now, right now, we say, our voices are your voice bouncing back across the river, across the mountain range. We are so sad we need another word for it, beyond sorrow, beyond grief, but we push that back and focus on what you're saying because maybe that will be more interesting, and if you don't ask about us then we don't have to think about it; we're not beyond noticing it's a form of co-dependence. There was a time when we talked so much we got on other people's nerves but in your presence we are reduced to repetition, and you can only hear us say the words you say, because it's not in your nature to listen to us. So like our sisters the mirrors we are not making much, we are mostly reflecting, and what we are mostly reflecting is you though we try to tilt and lilt at a certain angle so you only see and hear what you want, the things you like about yourself, and every time you look at us or listen to us you fall a little more in love and for a second we get to imagine you're falling in love with us and that's about as close as it gets but that's closer than it gets anywhere else so we take it. Sometimes it sounds like we're singing but it's how we cry, and our tears tangle in our throats and come out sounding almost like laughter. The heat of our passion meets the coldness of your feeling; we burn for you and yet we are never consumed. It's just a constant hot longing in the cold air and the pain defines us more than our existence, we are colored in flames outside of the lines. Caravaggio came and captured some part of your beauty, the way your hair tucked behind your ear, and he left us out of the picture but then that's hardly a surprise: out of sight out of mind, as they say, out of yours out of mine. May I die before what's mine is yours, you shout at us, and we answer: what's mine is yours, is yours.
Another word for you is narcissus. Another word for us is echo. Nothing ever changes, changes, changes.
waiting for Kirikou
It is lodged in her back somewhere between one vertebra and another, a small thing, sharp. It doesn't hurt at all unless it does, a slight movement forward and she feels it. The reaction is, as most are, involuntary: a gasp, wetness in the eyes; the need to do anything at all to not feel it again. She drinks to quench the fire it burns through her, the flames that lick at her heart, she drinks a river and there is nothing more to drink and still it hurts. This sharp… who put this in her? Why is it here? She cranes her neck around but it is just out of her sight, it is just beyond where her fingers can reach, that one spot, like kissing your elbow, unreachable. A man comes to tell her to stop screaming and she eats him whole and still it hurts, it is an endless pain except when she doesn't feel it at all. Days go by and she can forget it entirely, it's nothing, it never was. She even imagines that she was just feeling someone else's pain, which is a logical risk of being a sorceress, except then she reaches out in a particular way to take a specific thing that belongs to her and there it is again, the knife in her spine that twists with grief, and she is crying again until the whole village shakes with her sobs. Another man comes to tell her to try to hold it together and she swallows him before he can finish his sentence. Men. Meanwhile she is trying to do her job though it's clear that her pain has driven the less devoted customers away. This one needs a love potion; this one wants to stay up all night talking without saying a word about the actual problem. This one wants nothing except to be wanted, a mobius band of longing that she treats with alcohol and a song about shoes that can leave and don't. And still her back is sharp with anguish, the mirror won't show her what it is, and now when her fingers come close the pain is such that she can't even describe it without weeping. This is getting ridiculous. Another man comes, another, they are asking questions but it is only for themselves, what they want, she is interesting to them only in terms of what she can give them and she eats them, a pile of bones she spits at her feet the only remains. One day some day someone will come and ask her the right question, one day some day someone. Put arms around her, hold her gently, brush the tears from her cheeks, pull the thorn from her back. A thorn! Yes, that is all it is, like all horrible things it only feels big, but it is smaller than a splinter. They will pull the thorn out, lick the blood from the tip, put it in a jar with other things that used to scare her. They will laugh together. That will come later, and she will be so grateful she will give back the river. She will give back the men and call them warriors rather than bores. It's in the story, it's bound to happen. But not yet; today she mutters spells and wails, wraps her arms around herself and tries to keep her hands on grace, hopes.
anne “insomnia” tuckova
Contrary to my impressions, there are only 33 memorial roads in California that feature nicknames, and most of them do actually seem to have some relation to the person's given name. MOST. But why is William called "Ivan"? And wtf with "Fresh Air"? I'm going to take some benadryl tomorrow night, is what.
Vicente “Vince” Andrade Memorial Bridge: Route 78
CHP Officer John “Jack” Armatoski Memorial Highway: I-40
William H. “Harry” Armstrong Interchange: Route 168
William Elton “Brownie” Brown Freeway: I-580
Callie “Joel” Buser Memorial Sign: Route 14
CHP Officer William “Ivan” Casselman Memorial Highway: I-80
John “Chuck” Erreca Rest Area: I-5
Lt. Leonard B. “Larry” Estes and Deputy William R. “Bill” Hunter Memorial Highway: Route 149
Caltrans Highway Maintenance Lead Worker Michael “Flea” Feliciano Memorial Highway: US 101
Signal Hill Police Officer Anthony “Tony” Giniewicz Memorial Highway: I-405
Kern County Deputy Sheriff William “Joe” Hudnall, Jr., Memorial Highway: Route 178
Richard “Fresh Air” Janson Bridge: Route 37
Harold “Bizz” Johnson Expressway: Route 65
Harold “Bizz” Johnson Interchange: Route 92/US 101
William “Bill” Lehn Memorial Highway: Route 99
Mignon “Minnie” Stoddard Lilley Memorial Bridge: US 101
Colonel William R. “Bill” Lucius Highway: US 101
Redding Police Officer Owen “Ted” Lyon Memorial Bridge: Route 273
Viggo “Vic” Meedom Memorial Bridge: US 199
Reverend Cecil “Chip” Murray Overcrossing: I-10
Special Agent Richard “Rick” K. Oules Memorial Highway: Route 140
Fire Chief F.S. “Pete” Pedroza Memorial Highway: Route 111
James B. “Sunny Jim” Rolph Bridge: I-80
CHP Officer Douglas “Scott” Russell Memorial Freeway: US 50
Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo Memorial Highway: Route 60
Correctional Officer Jesus “Jesse” Sanchez Memorial Highway: Route 83
Silvio “Botchie” Santi Memorial Bridge: Route 36
Gerald “Blackie” Sawyer Memorial Highway: Route 39
CHP Officer Ambers O. “Sonny” Shewmaker Memorial Highway: I-10
CHP Officer Charles “Chuck” Sorenson Memorial Highway: Route 12
CHP Officer Andrew “Andy” Stevens Memorial Highway: Route 16
Deputy Dennis “Skip” Sullivan Memorial Bridge: Route 44
Robert H. “Bob” Weatherwax Memorial: Route 29
so far
Nostos algos. A visit to a godfather, to beautiful poets, old friends, childhood idols, the girls I looked up to in the schoolyard, my prom dates, the first people I danced with, the first writers I both admired and considered peers. Remember when? When we met in town squares on the hour. When we were single. When we thought we were immortal. When we drove all night. When we were raging with hormones. When we cared about everything so much more. I remember.
The ache of homecoming. I have thought that I could remember everything because the memories I had were always so vivid, textures I could still feel on my fingers, I remember your hands shaking like birds when you told a story, I remember holding you from behind, resting my head in the hollow of your shoulder blades, I remember the taste of your skin. I remember the first time you fell in love and called to tell me about it; I remember your breath on the phone in the spaces when we didn't speak. This summer has been the realization that my memories are telephone poles, with long gaps of mere wire in between, where I trust that information is traveling until we come to the next telephone pole, solid wood I can wrap my arms around, splinters in my fingers. Why those memories and not others? Together we make a map of who we were, untangle the wires to avoid getting shocked, string our memories together. Ten years since we first met, twenty years, thirty. I was only fifteen then. I was never so young.
Pain from an old wound. It's lovely that we have grown up, richer now in most ways. If my seventeen could meet my forty-seven she'd be … happy. Surprised, I think, to still be alive, and to be so happy with life. The sadness that consumed me then is present, but a shadow only, and I keep my eye on it but it doesn't cloud my vision. And you, my friend. The same smile only with more lines around it, the same beautiful eyes but so much wiser. Our hands have touched so many more things, we have been burned, we have scars, and yet we are the same. We are strong; we have survived.
The way you tap your finger against your mouth when you're thinking. Rub your ear. Hold my eyes with yours. I was a little in love with you then. More than a little. And still. I am glad we are both alive in the world.
The Rest Is Dross, by Leonard Cohen
We meet in a hotel
with many quarters for the radio
surprised that we've survived as lovers
not each other's
but lovers still
with outrageous hope and habits in the craft
which embarrass us slightly
as we let them be known
the special caress the perfect inflammatory word
the starvation we do not tell about
We do what only lovers can
make a gift out of necessity
Looking at our clothes
folded over the chair
I see we no longer follow fashion
and we own our own skins
God I'm happy we've forgotten nothing
and can love each other
for years in the world
tuckova 