tuckova

ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things

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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

Category: THINKING

  • three

    1. I'm vacuuming the inside of the car at one of those coin-operated car wash places, and I only had enough quarters for one cycle, so I really have to be efficient if I want to get all the pet hair and crumbs out of the car before I go to pick up this person…

  • add salt to taste

    Three parts: the ingredients, the kitchen, the chef.  We like the ingredients to be fresh, seasonal, familiar to the chef.  We like the kitchen to be clean, well-lit, stocked with all the gadgets that are necessary and none of the ones that are not. We like the chef to be capable, adaptable, knowledgeable, creative. And…

  • big enough for the both of us

    There is a child who has been learning to swim and is actually getting pretty good at it. The water an unfamiliar thing for so long, and the child still doesn't much like getting her face wet. She swims chin up, eyes determinedly fixed ahead, legs pumping, arms swooping in mostly graceful arcs, in small and…

  • somebody come and play

    There is one piece of playground equipment in particular. I think it's called the spinner? It's hard to find any more, as they're clearly death traps. When I was little, the spinner was a large round platform about a foot off the ground with several metal rails on it that you were supposed to hold…

  • rhymes with surface tension

    When I was young I loved red wine, a good in-your-face red that stained my teeth and shriveled my tongue, I sat in the bar I could walk to from my hovel in south San Francisco and wrote to him on the back of a paper placemat: "cheap red wine will always have a place…

  • Roll Up Roll Up

    Ah, and here we are, back at the circus. I'm worried about the funambulists, having been one myself, teetering on the edge, learning not to fall by virtue of doing it and learning to be brave by knowing what my downfall would mean. So I've got one eye on them, the chalk bags, the slackline.…

  • too few to mention

    It is my great regret that I never read to you like I promised I would, because if I had read to you, you would have loved me. I regret that I did not paint what you wanted, because if I had painted it, you would have loved me. I'm sorry that we never went…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…