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

do be do be do

tuckova5 Comments

i’m not in my cleverest place. i have a dozen things on my mind and
every single one of them i start to talk gently to, ima lure you in and
figure you out, i say, and i hold it in my hands and then think this is
not the thing, this is not it, examining this will not make me
better or anything different and what is it with me and my need to
hold, to define, to describe. i start sentences that are full of
promise and then i feel like, i don’t know, haven’t i said this
sentence before. i know how i feel, you know how i feel, what possible
interest can there be in this for me. for you. anybody. even the things
themselves skulk away from me in a combination of fear and slithery
boredom that makes me wonder. what am i up to? i can’t say.

here’s one thing that i’m thinking about: why is it hard to do things
for myself physically? i don’t mean the way i look, like "why can’t i figure out the trick to mascara?" or "why does cutting my hair sound like so much bother?" about 10 years ago
i went through a thing where i couldn’t leave the house for a variety
of reasons, one of which was that i had this feeling that i shouldn’t
be in public without a bag over my head and i didn’t have a bag in the
house that would fit. it was a very complex feeling; i was not what you
would call at my most sane at the time. anyway, i’ve come to terms with
the fact that i have never been pretty but nor have i ever needed a
paper bag
over my head. when you get to know me you will say i am "actually kind
of attractive, in an unusual way". i know that now. but i had this
nasty thinking
about my appearance for years, alternating between self-loathing and a
sort of vaguely tolerant acceptance, and although now i like to think
of my attitude towards my appearance as "reasonable affection" the effects of the negativity are still
apparent, and it’s spread to areas
that aren’t about appearance but health. exercising is easy but
remembering to do it is hard. eating vegetables is easy but remembering
to buy them is hard. drinking water instead of coffee is easy but
somehow there’s the coffee in my hand again. why is that. none of these
things are even about long term results, it’s like immediate
gratification for me the minute i get my heart rate up over 120, and
the
next day when my stomach doesn’t feel all clotted and hateful, and the
night when i can fall asleep instead of lying in bed doing inventory of
all the bad things i’ve done in my life. and yet here i am.

i know people who don’t do things for themselves because
there’s this fear of failure, and i suspect it’s the same ridiculous logic. like, if
i don’t study and i get a C, i can say it’s because i didn’t study. but
if i study and get a C, then it’s because i’m stupid. i think at some
point i hitched my health to the idea of my looks, and although i know
that exercise, vegetables, and caffeine free won’t turn me out of a
pumpkin, i somehow have the lingering feeling that striving is somehow
setting myself up. not like setting myself up on a nice date with the
new improved me, but like, setting myself up to drop a bucket on my
head. so i’m fighting with this bitty leftover person in my head who doesn’t want us
to try to be good and fail to look good, and it’s a thumb war of
horrific proportions. today i had spinach and turkey for lunch, and
tvaroh with possibly the last tomato-flavored tomatoes of the year. it
was good.

but you see how this is not the thing, isn’t it; how i almost pinned it
but it got out from under me. it’s not like i can’t get where i’m
going, it’s that i get halfway there and think: hasn’t this been
covered? get a spine and think about something that really takes your
whole brain instead of another mirthless dive at how old habits die
hard. glar.

stupid

tuckova4 Comments

three ways i am stupid

1. games. we like games, we especially like catan but also i am quite partial to alhambra. transamerica was our gateway game. we don’t play as much as we used to but we still play. all these modern games. when my parents came to visit i told my dad, "if you would like to buy us an awesome hostess gift…" (see how we are polite, my family, with the hostess gifts, but how i am also a tactless cow who says what she wants her gift to be? what can i say, we were in the store looking at the box and i was overcome) ANYWAY, i tell my dad, "…buy us ‘risk’."
dude, risk is hard. i don’t mean risk is hard to figure out, i mean it is very hard to sit for six hours watching yourself getting slowly and certainly removed from the board. six hours of my life that i will never get back, the last hour of which was just watching the other three battle it out, as i was already off the board.

so i am stupid in that a) i asked for risk; b) i suck at risk; and c) i want to play again.

2. i didn’t vote. i thought you had until tuesday to mail it, so i thought i would wait until my parents were gone to finally sit down with my two kilos of decision making. i usually decide on the basis of what’s important to me, rather than on party lines, so sometimes it takes me a while, but i thought i could get it done on sunday and off by monday, a day before the deadline. SADLY, absentee ballots need to ARRIVE before the election day. so, whoops. i resign my right to complain for two years. i suck. i don’t think my vote would have swung things in my state, but i feel pretty crappy anyway; it’s the first election i’ve missed in 20 years i think; that includes the year when i knew so little about so many of the issues that i voted largely on the basis of which statement had the fewest grammatical errors, rationalizing that attention to detail was probably just as important as anything else.

so i am stupid in that a) i didn’t vote. there’s nothing more to it.

3. i’ve given up thinking i’m always right and i thought somehow that when i gave it up it would all be easy. i thought that if i was willing to accept that some people were just different from me, and that the choices and opinions they had that would be bad or wrong for me didn’t make the people holding those opinions bad or wrong that it would be over. i thought that somehow when i didn’t want to argue in order to win anymore that i wouldn’t have to argue to defend myself either. i do the wan smile and the yes-i’m-sure-that’s-best-for-you but somehow that’s not enough. i am not stupid for not wanting to fight (and i’ve learned some things by just listening instead of arranging my arguments in tidy formation for the slaughter), and i don’t think i am stupid for smiling til my teeth itch instead of rearing up and screaming you are so wrong, you stupid waterbag of brainwashed idiotic thoughtlessness, not only do i not agree but i would rather cut off my thumbs than… i think i am stupid for having thought that my lack of interest in confrontation would mean i wouldn’t have to be confronted.

so i am stupid in that i thought not voicing the screams in my head would quiet them, when instead it just turned them into a constant stream of static, no less loud and not much less irritating.

that’s all, i think. other than that? perfect. seriously.

Squire Tuck

tuckova4 Comments

Squire Tuck is pretty awesome. it’s interesting to me, our ability to go on for days
and weeks just sort of existing together in a calm affection and then one day he’ll enrage
me to the point that i think MAYBE BOARDING SCHOOL because i will never be able to handle him as a teen, and then the next
day he’ll melt my heart. recently it’s a lot more of the melting. this is preferred by a majority of the panel.

school is not so good, he is (or is
perceiving himself to be) the boynobodylikes, he doesn’t seem to think
people hate him but there is an stated absence of affection that
baffles me. he seems uninterested
in doing anything about that. i think that this is maybe okay. i told
him today on the walk to school that nearly everybody i know who is
interesting now had a pretty shitty time of it when they were kids, one
way or another, and he said, it’s only school that’s bad and i’m trying
not to mind it.

i wish i could make it better for him somehow but i think that i can’t
change the actual problem. i think the only way to make it
"better" is to counterbalance it and that effort seems to be going much
better. it’s i guess month six of "let’s not talk about school unless
Squire Tuck brings it up" and i’m not saying i’m perfect but we have
discovered a full range of other topics that are tremendously
interesting and much less stressful that we can talk about.

like on the walk to school we pass this guy almost every
day. he has a huge dog that he has clearly not trained and can barely
control; he walks his dog around the school every morning at the same
time the kids are arriving and you see him struggle to hold the dog
from attacking other dogs and small children. i hate this guy so much i
have to cross the street so i don’t punch him. "there goes that
donkey-hole again," says Squire Tuck as we cross the street; Squire Tuck, who is
trying to model for me cursing without cursing. donkeyhole is not as
good as pitchforks but i like it. in addition to its being clever, i
like that it sounds like "don quixote". your anger is tilting at
windmills, it says. lighten up.

one of the things we were told to do was to read more with him in
czech. it is hard to find great books in czech for this age. i go to
the bookstore and it’s row upon row of something translated from
english, and the translations of children’s books here are notoriously
bad. some are good i’m sure but i don’t know
which. this kills me because i know which books are good in english and
can talk about YA literature until my teeth are blue; i go into a
bookstore here and it’s nothing but series books from english, most of
which stank in the first place, translated by someone who at first
glance has translated "indian" as if it meant "american indian". i put
the book back on the shelf and walk away. Friar Tuck usually winds up reading
the news with him. perhaps that’s edifying.

right now they’re sitting in the living room; they’re reading a fairy
tale by jan werich, one that features a king giving a poor but
clever maid a riddle and she solves it and he marries her. i like
this version because it goes on after "happily ever after" and also
because it’s not remotely insulting to kids. also, it’s funny. they are
laughing pretty hard and that’s a good sound.

a winter’s tale

tuckova5 Comments

he said he was sorry and i think he was. i think that what happens between us is something i can tell you about and i can try to explain but i don’t know if it’s something you’ll understand. you’ve just never been here, you’ve never been in my shoes.

he’s here for me when i need him: he not only has my back but he warms it, it’s focused and intense. he’s here enough that i feel like i can trust him, rely on him. he brings light into my life and without the person he is when he’s wonderful– i don’t know much, but i know that i have never been as happy as i have been then. sitting outside, a cold beer and the sun on my face and Squire Tuck frolicking and this is what i want and it’s who i want to be. this year was probably even better than most, despite the stormy unpleasantness in august.

and it was good for so long. september and october were like long apologies, like a daily dose of flowers and warmth to compensate for august. everything could be done: plant a late garden and it bursts forth. i walked home at twilight and felt safe, like i didn’t need layers and layers of subterfuge, like i could be–not naked, i never feel that safe, but like i could show myself and it would be okay. like i could flirt a little, something low-necked, a bit of ankle showing. you know.

the window replacement? that was hard times. what if he hadn’t been here for me during that? what would i have done. and my parents? only a week, but the whole time, everything was perfect, i danced alongside my mother kicking leaves and saying "see how he’s good? see how he’s good to me? see why i stay? all this beauty!"

but then today i woke up and it was as if all that happiness never happened. he says, "i held back as long as i could but you knew my nature when you came to me." and i did, but still, it was like ice that wanted to rip through me, take out my heart, make me question everything. it was a cold slap in the face; it was siberia. and there will be no relief.

it will go on like this for months. there’s no point in fighting it. i know how to handle what’s gone and what’s past help. i will hunker down and take it because i know in the end it makes me stronger. or actually i don’t know that but it’s what i say and it’s how i get through.

i know some people who think i should leave. who think that four months of bliss doesn’t make up for six months of crying every day, tears frozen to my eyelashes and knowing that every day etches more wrinkles into my face than a month of cigarettes. the fear of being knocked down, sliding, the constant ringing in my ears and the feeling that maybe i chose wrong. i don’t know what to say to those people. i usually say, "come in the spring. come in the summer."

first snowfall today, y’all.
please to remember that i speak the metaphor fluently, hm.

razor sadness

tuckova3 Comments

i am sorry that i’ve been doing this to you lately, this "let me tell you about our friendship" nonsense, this "let me tell you why you are important" because i know how tiresome that is. it was 20 years ago i read the sentence "when can we stop talking about this relationship and have it" and i knew it was as true as anything i’d ever read. friendships are not made by constant definiton; they are made by the perfect mobius of being there and needing someone to be there. need is too strong a word, but you know. friendships, real friendships, are shared interest and shared value and over time the shared space that is the two of you standing back to back against the world and the shared space of knowing that when you really fuck up, that friend is there to face you, tell you you fucked up and then brush your hair from your eyes so you can see your way out.

given that we know that, and that part of our friendship is that we know that, my recent apparent need to TELL you that is surely a rub. i don’t mean it how it spills from my eyes. you hand me a tissue and i take it and this is what’s important, not that i tell you "you always have tissue when i need it" but that you had it and i took it. surely that’s enough. i know that’s enough.

but i also feel wrapped in uncertainty and meanness and i am afraid that this leaks from me like my tears and when i tell you you always have tissue what i mean to say is i am sorry that lately my tears are as full of bile as they are of salt. rag water and bitters and blue ruin; i am afraid of spilling out over the sides to anyone who will listen. i am afraid of being engulfed, i am afraid of dragging you down when i grab your lifeline. i hope that by explaining how what you do means something to me, that this will somehow protect you. i mean to admire your buoyancy, not to pull you under when there’s no need.

i realize that in a way stating my high estimation of you is a way of underestimating you. back to back we face each other. i meant to thank you and leave it at that. thank you. i mean that.

raggedy anne for sure

tuckova6 Comments

we had a halloween party last night and it was fantastic. i am basically delighted with everybody. there are some photos up at flickr starting here.

i am trying to figure out this typepad business and hope someday to get the archives put back in their proper places. my parents are visiting now so it’s not going to happen this week. maybe next. anybody who wants to tell me how much they hate all the color is welcome to do so, but i’m channeling a lot of gare so you may just have to deal with it for a bit.