Last night an angry bee was bothering me as I took a leisurely stroll down a narrow path that seemed mostly like a grocery aisle. Flapping my hands in front of me to get rid of it. I don't know why I didn't just turn and walk the other way; this fuzzy yellow creature was obviously intent on stopping me. Fwap fwap fwap with my hands at it, effectively blowing it out of my way on puffs of agitated air until finally it landed on my hand and I couldn't shake it off, and I felt the stinger go in. A mixture of pain and… relief, then, because now the thing I had been dreading happened, and now the bee would die so I could proceed unhindered. Except it kept coming at me. A wasp? Is it bees that die and wasps that don't? And which are hornets? I could feel my hand starting to swell. I just wanted to get to the end of the path, where it opened out again; also, I wanted to find tweezers to get the stinger out, and they're on another aisle. I am, even now, confused about why I didn't turn around. Instead waving my hands, sometimes brushing against the fur of a very determined and angry hornet, the buzzing, the pain in my hand. I put a scarf over my head, tenting it over my face so the hornet couldn't sting through it, then wondered where the scarf had come from and why it was so heavy and finally woke, buried under the blankets, sweating and frightened and very confused. I still need tweezers.
Category: TODAY
the density of angels
In May I had almost no work at all, which scared me because May is usually a pretty busy month. Freelance means you set aside some money when you get some money and you enjoy some time when you have some time and you try to hustle reasonably in busy times and you also try not to panic unnecessarily in slow times so even though I experienced some concern in May I mostly enjoyed the fine weather and the free time and waited it out. Summer's always slow; things predictably picked up a bit in September, but I still hadn't come close to making up for May.
AND THEN: November and December were absolutely crazy. Every academic in Brno wanted to publish something, the air was thick with the smell of grant money to be spent before the end of the year. January promises more of the same, and I finally took time out to look at finances and raise my prices, which I haven't done in ages. I know this is a very interesting story that I am telling you. Stay with me; it gets a little better.
I am thinking about this, about feast and famine, about the flow of things, and about boundaries. What happens with my work is in many ways the same as what happens in my life and I have to remember to keep my eyes and hands and heart open and take it all in and let it all pass. Just like the absence of work in May, there are times in my life when I am scared, when I feel lonely and like what I have is not enough, that I need more hobbies and more interests and more life in my life, but if I can remember to look at what I actually have and assess whether changes need to be made, most of the time the only change needed is the passage of time, into another month and then things are different. And there are times with work and with life when I feel almost overwhelmed, like a hamster running on a wheel, but then I have to remember that I can stop that wheel whenever I want, and that in fact I do kind of love it, running like that, too much to do, 20 pages a day every day, weekends too, and no time to sit around dithering about angels dancing on the heads of pins or practicing ukulele or exercising or anything other than work and basic social maintenance. Not forever, but for a month or two (or three, if I must) it's okay.
And raising my prices, it's so scary in a way because: what if I lose clients? But asking isn't hard, and in this case it's just a yes or a no. And if the answer is no and I don't especially like the client, then it doesn't matter. And if the answer is yes, then I can start enjoying months like May with even greater pleasure. Similarly with life I am asking a lot of my friends right now, for their patience and kindness during this period of self-absorption and overwork, and I'm blessed to have friends who do understand that there will be a sunny day somewhere in the future; a beer garden and the pure pleasure of laughing the sun down, maybe even waiting for the fireflies, because we will have earned that. And the yoga and the ukulele can wait, too.
pruritus
It is there whether you think about it or not, this impulse that is below thought, or maybe beyond, or over, or in any case not fixed with your consciousness into a place where you can overcome it; it is simply there. Brought to you by a pet, maybe, or something you ate, a walk in the woods, a picnic; probably there was sunshine but not necessarily, and now you have it.
The way it affects you is impossible to ignore, it is stronger than desire, it is more than almost anything, and even when you manage to put your thoughts to something functional like work or reading, your hands wander back again and again to it; it is more than pain and you realize this when the red ribbon of blood unravels under your hands and you still can't think about anything but this.
Cover it if you can, smother it with magic potions, creams; wrap your hands in bandages; recite the songs of childhood forwards and backwards, spells and incantations, still it rises, insists, whines, cries. It will not be denied. It murmurs in your ear at night, wakes you with hot whispers, your physical response to it is stronger than your thoughts are quick, and your mind is mercury but this is faster, more, demanding.
How do you deal with it? The persistence of memory, the persistence of thought, the realization that it doesn't matter how it started or when it ends but all that matters is now, right now, how you will deal with it. Try for one minute giving it your focused and complete attention. The whole of you absorbed in this, the whole of you absorbing it. Realize you will never satisfy this. Finally now, you can accept it, even take pleasure it in, see it as a mark of where you've been; it's not release but it's better than it was. For now.
everything was beautiful at the ballet
I went to the ballet last night. One of my dearest friends here had been gone for a month, and I wanted to celebrate his return, and another of my dearest friends has put up with a disproportionate amount of my chaos lately, and I wanted to celebrate her sweetness, and also I will not miss an excuse for what looks like a good ballet, which it did. So we went.
The first piece was Serenade, by George Balanchine. Bunch of pretty girls fluttering their arms about, with some guys trying to look like the goblin king in the pants department wandering around. One can like it, but it was: meh. I hate to say that. I mean, here I'm looking at a stage full of athletes and all I can think is: let's do math with Balanchine, because it really looked like illustrations of math problems or something. Not word problems, either. So mostly I sat there thinking about WHY I didn't like it, which is not really the feeling you want in the theater.
The second piece was Sofa, by Olivier Wevers, and that was totally different. There was a purple velvet sofa, and everybody danced on and under and around it, and it was awesome. It made me think of high school and how I couldn't have boys in my room but we could be in the living room, and how the sofa was like a way station to where we wanted to go, and the center of slumber parties, and where we watched TV, and it is still all those things, the sofa is so central, and these dancers were fighting and kicking and kissing and teasing all on a sofa, just like us, except of course way more elegantly and their feet probably hurt a lot more. And in this I felt fully engaged and delighted.
The third piece was Lunar Sea, by Moses Pendleton, danced by MOMIX, a sort of black light madness and chaos. Like the first one, it didn't have a story, but it was so busy and stimulating visually that it didn't need one. And so we watched people split open, creatures with four legs dancing across the stage, absolutely a hundred things to look at.
We ran across the street in the rain, ducked into a clean well-lighted place for tapas and wine, and talked and talked, the beauty of this, three generations of ballet in one evening, and how the first one made sense because we could see now how that non-narrative mathematical beauty made the other two possible, and how the third one called back to it, and how amazing it is to be able to see this when it is presented like that. It was delightful. I was delighted.
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.
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.
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
my summer vacation
This week has been a flurry of goodbyes as we all turn Brno into the summertime ghost town I love, and which I will be sad to be away from, but I have stuff to do, you guys.
I am going to New York to see one friend I've known since I came here, 20 years; he picked me up when I was broken last year and we went to Greece together, and sometimes we don't talk for months but now we are planning a trip to Philadelphia for July 4th, maybe also a trip to Coney Island, the pleasure of putting yourself in the hands of someone who knows how to have fun.
I will go and see some women in upstate New York that I have known online but not in person for over a decade, poets, women who use words to curse and to nurture, and they have promised to teach me how to apply lipstick, because I don't know how to do anything with make-up, but it seems interesting.
And then my beautiful and amazing sister in California. I will meet her parrot and remind her cats that I am the boss of them, and her husband gives the best hugs because he is a man who can pick up a refrigerator. We shall put limes into everything and it will be awesome.
Then Montana, where my relentlessly talented friend has just started a business which is a traveling bookstore, and we will drive around to festivals and sell books and drink good coffee and talk about love and losing our hearts and finding them again, exactly where they always were.
Then a group of women in a house on the beach. There will be brunch, which is the most brilliant American invention. And I have a friend who looks straight into your eyes and says: I know this to be true. And I am eager to hear what she knows is true, because it will be.
And all in there, other friends, more friends — from high school, from college, from later, people who are still interested in me even though I left them half a lifetime ago, people who have kept me in their lives with their words, people who have loved me enough to visit me in my life here, my pen pals made into flesh, with all those complications and all that beauty. I never feel fully myself there, but I never feel fully myself without them. There will be road trips and wine and laughing until it hurts, waiting for the moon and walking down the middle of the street. There will be board games, and there will be dancing.
So this is me. Hope to see you, in the summer or on the other side of it.
Black and White
I came out of the theater last night, my hands still humming from clapping so much and so long; nobody claps like they do here. Walking out into the evening light, which is my one of my favorite parts of life here, how the summer light stays, how you can walk out of a dark room and feel the night in the air but the sky tells you you can keep going, there is still time, so much time. Last night Siegfried fell down and the queen tossed back her hair, threw her legs around his waist and held on, and Rothbart slammed his cloak into the ground and then slid across the room like a child on a sled, and so much happened, but I came out blinking into the light as if there were still things to do, as if there were anything left to say. Blinking, my hands ringing, I scanned the crowd of people. There is a version of this story where you're standing there. You asked where I was going and I told you, and in this version of the story you looked it up, found out when it ended, came and waited, and so now you are standing in front of the theater, your bag leaning against your leg, watching the door as we all emerge, and I'm wearing the black dress you haven't seen yet and there's a second where you look at me before you recognize me and it's the world. I don't want to be a person who values gestures over actual acts, and part of me stands back and says this is just a gesture, and part of me in turn wonders if this is an act, but you are there and you are waiting and your bag on the ground means you are willing to wait, as long as it takes, and part of me turns into honey, liquid warmth, covering doubt with sweetness. You look at me and recognize me, pick up the bag and walk towards me, and this is one version of the story. In another version I realize it's not you at all, just someone for a moment flickered with your face. In another version there is nobody. In one version, I don't even scan the crowd, just turn right out the door and ask someone with long fingers for a light, prop my elbow against my waist, exhale into the light sky, walk home alone.
tuckova 