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

Stingers

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That one secret. You know the one. The one you can't tell because everything will fall apart. It sits on your chest at night, a squatting horrible homunculus. Presses the air from your lungs. Crouches in the back of your throat and tastes like tears. You learn to lie around it, to speak lightly, to make sunshine against this darkness that is the only thing that matters because it's the only thing that scares you. Not the thing itself, not the secret; you already know what it is. You're not afraid of what you know, you're afraid that someone else will know it. It's not even that; it's worse than that. You're afraid that knowing it will change them, the way that knowing has changed you. The only good thing about this secret is that it is yours, and it has cut you from the inside like glass; why would you give this to someone else, the pain of knowing this. 

And yet you want so badly to be known. You want so much for someone to want to know you. You want to be loved despite, maybe even because of this secret. And they can't know you if they don't know this, can they? You know that not telling is a form of lying. Or is not telling a means of being known and loved for who you are besides this, the lightness of you without the darkness. Or are you the darkness, and the lightness is the lie. You don't even know any more. 

One day you open your mouth. You tell her, finally, the truth. You roll the stone from your throat, tell her the secret. And realize in the telling that there is so much more, the small shards that are part of the larger break. Her eyes on yours: But you've been lying to me, you've lied all this time. How can I trust anything you say now? The homunculus leans forward, touches a greasy hand to your lips, smiles at you. You knew better than to tell. Or should have known. 

mildly solatic

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We were going to go to a Lindy Hop class but we couldn't find the address so then we were going to go to a salsa class but when we went outside it was too beautiful to go back inside so we decided on drinking in a garden instead. The streets full of people as if the whole town had walked out at the same time. Two weeks ago it snowed and now all the restaurants have outdoor seating, though at U Karla they'd spilled out onto the sidewalk even, and we all sat and gazed up and around as the sky turned purple and the stars came out. An Australian, a Brit, an American, and a Czech walked into a bar and they all spoke the same language and the electrician told us the names of the stars except they were airplanes. In the morning I shaved off most of my hair because I wanted the sun on as much skin as possible and I had coffee in the garden and watched a toddler grow a egg out of his skull ("It happens" he said) and then lunch in another place and then more coffee, grinning like an idiot from one place to the next, and then board games which is how I know life continues at a weekly pace. On Friday the clouds were back and my head was so cold it was like an ice cream headache so I chained myself to the desk and hit a deadline and went to Olomouc where all the restaurant tables were reserved in case the atheist patriarch showed up, or I guess more likely his fans, and on the train home I listened to the same two songs over and over because I couldn't imagine another one being better, the small and certain pleasure of already having what you want. I took a taxi from the station because sometimes but only sometimes we must permit ourselves small luxuries and I was cold. I feel grateful and generous and generally good; if I had any idea what you wanted I would probably give it to you, but you don't tell me and I'm tired of guessing so this is me, getting on with it. I have a Monday deadline but I can't focus for beans today so I wrote this instead. 

quite contrary

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Oh you and your well-tended garden. The flowers that bloom and fade and bloom again, perennials and annuals though you can never remember which is which, the giant tulip bulbs you unearth in the winter and push back under the willing dirt in the spring, don't you know that it's rude to keep your tulips waiting when they're in the mood. Ahem. The bushes laden with sweet berries that you kneel beside, plunging your hands in over and over until your arms are stained with blood from the thorns and berry juice from your over-eager fingers. The sweet soft grass you can lie back on, nap in a sunbeam. Mysteries of ivy and your trellised longing, roses with unusual names and the richest scent, you cut them down in bunches and fill the house with their inverted death. And in the winter, even in the darkest month, the hum underground while the snow covers every surface into anonymity. Gardens are like this, they burst forth and fade in sequence and you love this flow, the pull. 

In the corner there is a deep hole, the one place where you plant nothing and nothing grows. At some point you had plans even for this space, a tree that would provide blossoms in the spring, fruit and shade in the summer, a place for a child to climb, the stark beauty of snow on bare branches, the one thing in the garden that would never disappear. You dug the ground carefully, dirt caked in your broken nails, worms rolling away from your fingers. The first tree you planted too deep and narrow, and the roots never spread, you dug it up and planted it again but it was too late already. The next tree, too, though the reasons were unclear, you did everything right and it wasn't enough and when you had to pull it out the root system ripped through the rest of the garden to such an extent you thought it might never recover. And another tree, and another. You rolled a rock into the space and gave up on the idea of trees, and the rock was a good place to sit and read a book, rest your back against it in the summer and feel the heat radiate from it. Over winters, though, the rock cracked and eventually even that had to be removed as a hazard. 
 
And so now you have the hole again, waiting for you to step in and twist your ankle, you hear the emptiness of it calling to you across the garden. What to do. The soil has been so salted with your tears that nothing can grow there, you know this, and even thinking about trying to find another rock makes you almost sleepy. You pile some smaller broken rocks around it, pottery shards, high enough to protect you from falling in, a little wall of warning, and turn your back on it to look at the parts of the garden you love. It's unfortunate but then every garden has a fallow area, so.

In the Desert, by Stephen Crane

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In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

after the dream of falling and calling your name out

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people I talked to:

  • a group of Czechs who were returning from Rwanda where they were laying the groundwork to make a documentary about a children's circus
  • an air-traffic controller victorious from a golf tournament
  • sanitary napkin moguls with a precocious six-year-old motormouth, all shouting to be heard
  • a consultant for HP who mostly slept but also made great small talk
  • some French nuns who were baffled by the visa paperwork so I filled it out for them; with no language in common we merely smiled at each other with fine form-filling fellow feeling
 
stimulation:
  • an oddly Paul Simon-heavy soundtrack broadcast from inside my mind
  • the trees, exactly what I expected but more beautiful
  • a school of bright blue fish that I almost drowned following; so many, so lovely
 
things I thought about:
  • planes should be divided into sleeping and not-sleeping sections
  • Dubai is disturbingly like Vegas while also being its opposite
  • how listening is an act of love
  • why people think anger is an effective response when it usually isn't
  • friendship and its facets, the sparkle and the cut

she sells seashells by the seashore

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Without wishing to oversimplify, it does seem pretty simple to me– to be the person you want to be, start being that person. If you want to be different, change. If you can't change, then stop sitting around wishing you could. I don't mean unrealistic things, because it is true that I have not stopped wishing I could have wings and or a tail, but the things that are well within your range — if it bothers you that you aren't a certain way, why aren't you working towards being that way? Or working towards not being bothered?

I want to be a person who clears deadlines, and so… I clear deadlines. I thought that I would like to be a person who can strike up a conversation with a stranger and enjoy it, but after having given it a valiant effort for a few years I concede that I am not that kind of person and it doesn't bother me anymore because anyway they invented podcasts so I do that instead and it's lovely. I sometimes think that I would like to earn more money at my job but then I remember that I had a job that paid me ridiculous piles of money and I loved that job, but when I stopped loving it I had to quit so I know that money is not as important as I thought it was.

I decided a couple years ago that I want to be the kind of person who says YES unless there's a really good reason to say NO. Curiosity killed the cat, but only after she got a good look. Last week, I was asked to go on a trip and I'm going because there was no reason to say no. I cracked my tooth and it got infected and I won't have time to fix it properly before I go so I expect this little adventure will be like an intensive spa — all sunshine and no solid food. See you in 10 days, assuming I can't figure out how to post pictures while I'm gone.

a luscious mix of words and tricks

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“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.” ― Douglas Coupland

This quote has popped up on my feed a few times in the past week and it baffles me. I can only assume Mr. Coupland, or more accurately the character that Mr. Coupland has express this sentiment, has had an awfully easy life. I think there are lots of things more cruel that you can do. Leaving aside actual physical cruelty I can still think of things that are much worse than pretending to care. You could care and pretend you don't, for example, and isn't that also fairly awful? You can genuinely not care about someone who wants you to care about them even a little, and you could let them know you don't care. You can care and then abruptly stop caring, and not explain. You can explain. You can set the phone down gently on the counter and walk away for a little while instead of just hanging up, you can practice hanging up, you can practice lots of things that are more cruel than pretending you care. 

To be clear, I think genuine caring is a lot nicer, but sometimes you want to care but you have a deadline or you know you should care but there's a stone in front of your heart and it's hard to feel much of anything. Sometimes you are swirling in a vat of molasses and tears and the only way to keep yourself afloat is by pretending not only to yourself but to other people that you give a shit about anything at all, and the people who let you pretend to care about them are full life rafts, and sometimes in the middle of pretending to care you realize you can see the shoreline and you have a moment of real caring that you couldn't have gotten to otherwise and I don't think that's cruel to anybody. 

And anyway, there are very few places where the emotion behind an act is really all that important. What does caring look like? Cook a meal, change diapers, make tea, show up, listen. Caring is easy; it involves only slightly more effort than watching a television program or reading a book and wondering what happens next. I spent enough of my younger life agonizing because I feared that people didn't really care about me and trying to keep being cared about by the few people who I thought genuinely might, and I'll tell you what I know: caring about other people is a kerjillion times easier than worrying if they care about you. And it feels better; it just does. 

I hereby solemnly swear that I shall not ever care about anyone who posts this quote on facebook, just to be on the safe side, though. Because I care too much to be cruel. 

Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, ‘We are All Writing God’s Poem’ by Barbara Crooker

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Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed
a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step. On the interstate listening
to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist
say, "The universe is not only stranger than we
think, it's stranger than we can think." I think
I've driven into spring, as the woods revive
with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy
scarves flung over bark's bare limbs. Barely doing
sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound,
and aren't we just? Just yesterday,
I read Li Po: "There is no end of things
in the heart," but it seems like things
are always ending—vacation or childhood,
relationships, stores going out of business,
like the one that sold jeans that really fit—
And where do we fit in? How can we get up
in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do,
put one foot after the other, open the window,
make coffee, watch the steam curl up
and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls
in the open window, while the sky turns red violet,
lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.
The moon spills its milk on the black tabletop
for the thousandth time.

country feedback

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This was maybe the summer of 95, living in the apartment near where Napoleon plotted that famous battle that gets replayed every year, the actors falling to the ground again. This film is on a maddening loop. I don't remember much; or I remember so much but this memory comes to me like a series of snapshots, disconnected. I remember pressing my face into the carpet and crying so hard, the nubbins of carpet dug into my forehead. I'd left with just a suitcase, and when I'd been here a month you sent me the shirt I always used to borrow. These clothes, these clothes don't fit us right. I never told you but I wore it for years, long after we'd stopped talking, until it was more holes than shirt and I finally let it go. 

Man, I could cry then, I could WAIL, cracked open and the pain just poured from me, then, and there was so much. I'm to blame, it's all the same. What's funny is that at the time I felt pretty dried up, emotionally. I woke in a pool of blood and moved and woke in a pool of tears and moved and woke and knew that while I would never get over the past I would never have to repeat it, and so all my tears were crystal memories.

You come to me with a bone in your hand. The letters we wrote and wrote, fingers already cramped over the fifth page and nevertheless tearing the sixth from a notebook, poetry, trying to be the more honest one, the more generous. You come to me with positions. Playing emotional chess by post, each move took three weeks and each move counted. You told me how when you were in bed with her, your breath on the back of her neck kept her awake, your guilt for that, the clench in my stomach, the hairs on the back of my own neck at attention to imagination and memory, but all I wrote was that you had misspelled bed, and was calling it "bad" Freudian or what; you wear me out, you wear me out. 

Maybe things were too far gone by then. Years. Self-hurt, plastics, collections. I came home and sold half my things and gave away the rest, walked down the middle of the street with you, didn't want to trade you but couldn't hold you either. Came to your door late at night, broken, and your exasperation with me was palpable. But you didn't want me to leave, either. I was central, I had control. Every time I pulled at the tether you tugged me back until I don't even remember which one of us let go. It's crazy what you could have had. Oh, I can't finish, it goes on forever. But I need this; I need this. Needed.

Flapper

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When I was in my early twenties and falling desperately in love for the second time, we were invited to a 1920s themed party. I went antique shopping and found this amazing flapper-style dress, from the 1960s-era obsession with the 20s. It was short, white, with a white sequined collar and layers of fringe that flew out impressively when I spun around. Oh, I loved that dress.I wore it to that party, I wore it at multiple Halloween parties, it was a lucky charm. I felt so incredibly stylish in it, like I became a more fun person when I put it on. 

Over time and kilos, I was unable to get into it any more. But I couldn't let it go. The thing was, even if I wasn't wearing it, just having it still made me feel happy, the memories I associated with times when I had worn it rushing to the surface every time my hand passed over that fringe. There was a twinge of nostalgia, pain from an old wound, the love had after all ended badly and I felt sometimes like the fun person who wore that dress was not still somewhere inside me, but as gone as dead. But mostly I remembered dancing at a Halloween party, brushing against other dancers when I twirled. Laughing.

Last weekend there was a costume ball and a friend of mine was looking for a dress, a flapper dress if she could find one. Heeeeyyyy I said. I could… you could… 

She looked great. It made me so happy to see her wearing it, being admired in it; it was almost better than wearing it myself, because when I danced beside her I could delight in the cool swish of fringe against my arm. I feel like I can let the dress go now, because it's found a place to be loved; I can keep the memories now without needing the dress. And this is always so, for me, that I don't have a problem with letting go when I'm sure that what I release will land somewhere better. Pulling that dress out of the cedar was one of the best things I've done so far this year.