I rode a horse through the candy store, and someone told me that I should ride Napoleon's horse as it would be closer to the ground, and thus allow easier access to the candy. I woke up feeling guilty which means I drank too much; I'd frankly rather have the headache. While being curious over a shoulder I asked a woman what the google doodle was and she said "it's google" and didn't even realize that it was different, or know what a google doodle was. It was the first day of spring, which was true this year and for which I am grateful. I wonder what it is like to not be curious. My cat also wonders, although her curiosity mainly concerns how to get back up into the window she somehow fell out of. Poor furry ball of toothless stupidity. Lost a card from the deck and now can't remember if I've already asked you if you found it; did you? Sometimes I hate humanity so much there are no words and other times I want nothing more than for someone to pour themselves into me, every story a drop of wonder. I wish I could remember more people without mourning them. I got a haircut last week and then dyed it dark red; when I wear lipstick I look like sex and death, so you don't know if you want to kiss me or stay far away. What I told you was true at the moment but not true forever, just like this sentence.
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
chance, time, night, round, try
Walking home and I wanted one more because it was early yet and also because I am greedy and I always want one more, if we're being honest. And so treated myself to what I wanted, because we cannot be puritans all the time or we'd have nothing to write about. Sitting and feeling the wine roll on my tongue, the words rolling off, smooth talker and my face already sore from laughing. And we went to the bathroom and styled your hair because it was that kind of night. I got kicked out of a Denny's once for doing that but we're grown-ups now and also this is Europe and perhaps a little water splashed in the bathroom at the end of the night is no big deal. One more one more and I caught myself in the middle of a story that had no end and so time to go. Then walking home something small and cold flew into my mouth and I almost spit it out before I realized it was snow, because evenings end but winter is apparently forever.
totally unrelated, but numbered for your pleasure
I.
I nearly got scammed the other day on the phone. ME. I used to be so smart. I can only assume that some portion of "coughing my brains out" is to be taken literally. Yes! I'm still sick; two weeks and I can't stop this coffin. In a way it is a guilty sweetness to know that now I am keeping the neighbors awake with all my racket. But I would rather be well and listening to them than feeling like this, if we're being honest.
II
I got a nice letter from a man I've been editing for for two years now, who likes how "rigorous" I am, and mentions how odd it is that we haven't met. I do generally like the anonymity of my job, the fact that people don't know where I live or how old I am and some don't know I'm female. Like, hey, what a treat to be evaluated on the basis of really truly MY WORK. And with the exception of things like biographies, CVs, etc., to only be able to know the people I work for on the basis of THEIR WORK. I also got a couple e-mails on work I did earlier in the month to the effect that going over what I had done made them understand how to be better writers overall. I get this comment every year or so but it never fails to boost me for months at a time.
III
Third place at quiz night on Thursday, which was a little sad because we had disagreed about some answers and in a couple cases the wrong answer had prevailed. That's always frustrating. This was somewhat alleviated by learning that in fact I had gotten one answer (marked wrong) actually right, and while that half point totally didn't make a difference in the placing, it still felt pretty good.
IV
I'm at the point in the Pulitzer readings where pretty much all that's left is straight white men doing stories about straight white men. I am so ridiculously tired of Oh My Sad Impotence or Oh It Is Hard To Be a Drunk and a Sad Sack but Siiiiiiiigh Here I Am. And the next three in the list are Updike, Cheever, and Mailer. Oh dear heavens, that doesn't bode well. I may skip ahead to something more appetizing. It's my game, so I can make up the rules.
V
This advertisement for the Guardian is pretty much what I hate about where journalism is going.
Here, let me take the nasty taste out of your mouth with some Christopher Walken telling the same story.
what are we going to do without
Jackhammers from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. outside the building next door. I don't know what they're doing it for, but it looks like a long project.
I went to a birthday party on Saturday and danced and danced and only stepped on a few feet with enough force to actually hurt anybody. Whoops. How the room swirled. I left at 2 a.m. with the music still blaring behind me for at least a half a block.
On Sunday the cold I had been fighting came and took up residence inside my sleepiness. I sneezed so hard I threw my back out. I highly recommend having a teenager at such times. Doubly so if they can cook. It is hard not to pretend to feel worse than I do, just to extend the loveliness of being tended to, treated like a fragile thing. I think he's on to me, though.
When I was little and I couldn't sleep I would match my breathing to my parents' down the hall. Not really snoring, but I could hear them, heavy and slow breaths through the night. And the first time I lived with someone other than my parents, I found myself also matching my breath to his, this breath lighter and faster than I was used to, but I learned. Putting myself to sleep by promising myself that everyone else was asleep; that if they thought it was safe it probably was. In, out, in, out. I did that any time I was with someone long enough to trust them; put my trust in their hands; put their breath in my lungs. When I was single I tried counting between breaths to prime numbers, sometimes even getting as far as 11 before realizing that I wasn't putting myself to sleep so much as suffocating, though that also works. Anyway last night I was counting on number five and I realized that I would probably not breathe with anybody again, and for a minute that seemed kind of sad, but five works pretty well and I breathed in for five and when I exhaled I blew that little puff of sadness away, because it IS safe enough to fall asleep, at least until the jackhammers start up again.
skimming
Something better is percolating, but I had to skim this stuff off the top first to give it room.
I have days of exhaustion where I will sleep 10 hours through the night, take 2 hour naps from which I struggle to wake myself, then back to bed as early as 8 or 9, feeling like I've plowed fields all day, absolute physical exhaustion, although sometimes the most exciting thing I've done is get the mail. Then I have days with bursts of energy approximately equal to my early 20s. Like, hours of varnishing the floor or clearing out all the cabinets or something weekendy, but after a full day of working.
I am thisclose to caftans. I'm not kidding this time.
The AMA is still refusing to accept plural pronouns as gender-neutral singulars, or however I should say it, but anyway it makes me mad. I spent a good chunk of the day writing around sentences with "he or she" because I hate it too much to let it stay. It's the 21st century. There is a perfectly simple solution. It's not traditional, but the problem is not traditional and so the solution has to be whatever works, which is: Everyone raised their hand. I'm over it, and I am not the most modern of militant grammarians.
If you are trying to find out how Whitney Houston died, I think we were never friends.
Oh, Squire went to camp for a week. His absence was like a cut thumb. He seems to have fun, although it took him 15 hours of sleep to return to his normal upright position. Now he's back to normal, and made me dinner so I could wrestle all the pronouns to the ground and put another checkmark next to another task on the list.
Why yes as a matter a fact I did cut my own hair using paper scissors and a hand-held mirror. You wanna make something of it? I mean: please. I expect it's a big ol' mess back there, and it only doesn't bother me because I can't see it all at once.
words are full of holes
Stumbled in a sidewalk hole next to a bus stop last night and pitched forward, accidental planking on the sidewalk, arms in front like Superman. This was on the way TO the pub, mind. Probably would have been pretty if I hadn't screamed as I went, which is what my grandmother said when I fell off the back of a horse: it would have looked good if you hadn't been yelling all the way down. Sorry about the noise folks. Some men came running all "ma'am, ma'am, what happened?" and as usual I had to laugh so that nobody would think I was hurt. The bus driver paused I assume to be sure I was okay and not so that everybody on the bus could stare at me in bewilderment, although I was not feeling particularly okay (hahaha, no worries, I just fell! Don't forget to tip your waiter!) and they did all stare. Thank goodness I managed to keep my head up is the only good thing, because I really don't want to mess up my beautiful, beautiful face. Well, and that I was wearing thick pants that didn't rip, so my knee is bruised but not all bloody. I have a bruised rib this morning, and my hands are still sore, and also my head a bit, although that could be because I was, as I said, on the way to the pub. On the way home I walked on the other side of the street for luck, and it was snowing, and I watched the flakes swirling in the halos of the street lamps even though I really should learn to watch where I'm going.
I keep forgetting your name while I’m writing this.
This happened after I ate all my teeth, maybe even the same night. Running my tongue across the new smoothness, salt and blood. How quickly I could destroy things simply by not paying attention. Driving around all night, coming at the sunrise from that side. This was the summer everything was on the other side of the glass from me, not a bell jar but more often a car windshield, cracked, covered in dead bugs and the half moon smears of windshield wipers and the last few desperate drops of blue fluid. Everything hurt me and nothing touched me. This was the year you came through the door and sang children's songs to me and I fell in love and rubbed ice into my hands until they were raw and senseless. I practiced not reacting, though I would blink to show I could understand. And so that night, or that morning with the sun coming up and my teeth gone and you ran your hand over the scar on my leg and said you'd like to know me. I don't think anybody knew me before that. I'm not sure anybody's known me since. You came close. Anyway that's what I remember, that moment nestled in a night, in a summer, in a year when I thought somebody might really want to know.
erasing the stars
Man, my desk is a mess. I've got a pile of tissues here, because I've been sneezy mcsneezerson all week. A bunch of pens I have neglected to return to the pen jar. The rings I was wearing last night. A few used toothpicks, which was my clever idea for helping to stop biting my nails, and it works, mostly, but it's maybe a little disgusting. The other day a man sincerely stopped beside my table in a bar and told me I was too much of a lady to be biting my nails. This is probably nicer than what I usually tell people, which is that their IQ drops every time they put their fingers in their mouths. so toothpicks. My favorite book by Josef Skvorecky, who just died. He and Havel off somewhere having a good beer together, I expect. I used to make little stars next to all my favorite lines in books, and then when I'd finish the book meticulously copy all the starred lines into my journal and erase the stars, give the book away. Now I have a house so I keep the books with the stars inside instead, which probably is a little irritating to people who borrow my books, all those Deep Thoughts so generously pointed out for them, but is easier on my poor old lady hands. My Christmas presents for which I have not yet written a thank-you note, and which therefore cannot be put away. A whole bunch of new music that needs to be put into iTunes so I can carry it around in my ears, so you can whisper to just me. My big Christmas gift this year was a washing machine. It is very happy with me and is not constantly making a break for it like the old one. Also it gets the clothes clean. Also the spin cycle actually spins the clothes, which means they get dry faster. It is not as quiet as I had hoped a new washing machine would be but then I'm hardly going to worry about disturbing my neighbors when they make plenty of noise of their own. Like right now. What else is on my desk? The rejection letter from the school that Squire had most wanted to go to. My voter registration form. Some useful things, like my timer and a calendar, but they're almost buried under what doesn't belong. You wouldn't think of me as a messy person, but this desk, this desk is my dirty secret.
I'll probably clean it off now that I've told you about it.
My new year's resolutions, since you didn't ask, have almost entirely to do with improving the quality of the media I consume. Whoa high goals. But seriously planning to read a Pulitzer a month worked out last year, so I'm going to continue with the remaining fifty or whatever that there are. Stuff like that. I have felt lately not very interesting, or not very interesting to others – and a lot of my brain space is taken up thinking about others, which seems perhaps not the best balance. So I will try to think more about fictional creatures, who do not mind my obsessions and whom I do not expect to return the affection. This year starts with The Shipping News, and Book Depository was serendipitous enough to send me a bookmark depicting several knots, so that's quite nice.
shadow of a doubt
It is like in the horror films when the character is running and running to get away and turns back to look and see if enough distance has been gained. The running, this constant treadmill of activity is in itself good, and a solid, sensible plan is to keep moving. It is work coming in, and the pleasure in doing a job well. Friends who hold your hands to steady you as you run. It is feeling strength in the legs pumping under you, feeling again capable of getting away from it, away from it finally, away from it for good…and then you glance behind and trip over a tree root you didn't see. And you are suddenly down, raw and scraped, knees bleeding, tears pouring out of your eyes because it hurts and because you forgot to see it coming. And the tree root angry in the ground, torn because you weren't watching. And while you sit there picking the dirt out of your bleeding hands it has caught you, enveloped you again. Did you really, really think you could get away? Did you think you could just pause for a second there, lean on a tree, catch your breath, and nothing would happen? Sometimes you are foolish and silly, and sometimes you are just plain stupid.
diamond scattering in the park
How going out at night made me feel like being a teenager again, though I did not have to crawl out the window but just walked down the hall, quietly closed the front door on the sleeping family inside, gently turned the key in the lock and then skipped down the stairs. How the night sparkled, with frost on the grass, and how beautiful it is to walk with headphones, so that everything seems faintly unreal, like a film or more likely a music video. So many people are asleep and the streets deserted, and then inside it is so alive that the walk through the silent park now seems impossible. How you kissed me in the taxi and it was sweet and I skipped back to the door just like I did 25 years ago, as if I would never be tired.
tuckova 