Replaced

At the newspaper, the features editor would hang above his desk a different staff member quote each week. Usually it was an innocent thing taken out of context in true "that's what she said" fashion. Our readers weren't allowed in that part of the office, thank goodness. I still get these in e-mail form every week.

This week was rather touchingly prefaced like so:

"I had feared the departure of Christie "Ears Always Open" Taylor, a diligent reporter of unintentionally inappropriate comments, would hurt the flow of quotes. But then along came , who has no filter and speaks before he thinks. He's a Quote Board dream."

I'm glad they're not hurting without me.

Got my notecards and everything

I'm giving this speech at a birthday party later tonight. I've never given a speech that wasn't homework before. I'm worried about details like, Is three minutes too long? What if the birthday girl can't hear me because I just had a cold and my voice is a croak and she is 90? Fluster.

"The first time I talked to Anna, it was homework. For my history class, I had to talk to someone who had lived through World War II. So I called Anna, at my dad’s suggestion. Now, most of you are probably familiar with Anna’s stories of World War II. That she was 18, in the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, smuggling weapons around the city, and doing other things that sounded really glamorous to a 15-year-old high school freshman. I remember feeling my entire life view of what a young woman can do rearranged and amplified exponentially during that interview.

Since then, she has become a dear friend and one of the most influential people in my life. In talking to friends, I’ve tried and failed to express how much I love and admire her countless times. I’ve adopted the word “slush,” (that would be Anna’s word for “slut” and “lush”) for my own personal use. She’s been the inspiration for everything remotely crazy that I’ve ever done, and when I’ve needed to push myself past fear, I’ve always thought of her and felt braver. Knowing her has taught me many things, not the least of which is that when we make mistakes, that’s not the end of the world, because at least we’ll grow from that experience. Anna has always encouraged me to grow.

When I was in South Africa two years ago and had the privilege to stand in the same room as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, I immediately wrote her to to say that his personality reminded me so much of her own warm, generous humor. It was uncanny. And I could keep going forever. Knowing her has been such a privilege and a joy. My only regret is that I’ve never traveled with her – I think the two of us would have gotten into some marvelous trouble together. I hope when I am 90, I am even a tenth as big-hearted, fearless, and “slushy” as she is today. Happy birthday Anna. I love you."

We wear our trousers rolled.

I got a letter from my first internet friend yesterday. This is the girl I met on Dragonriders of Pern RPGs, who happens to share my last name (no relation), to whom I would write long letters about my teenage angst and put them in envelopes I'd painted the same vibrant pink as her then-dyed hair. I'd yell at my parents for accusing me of having "no real friends," because I spent so much time on the internet. But she was a real friend, in an era slightly before people accepted the internet as a real form of communication and connection. I visited her the summer before I started college, and it was my first solo cross-country trip. We hiked near Mt. Rainier and picked berries and rode the bus.

We managed to intersect a few more times. I visited her in Indiana. She came to Madison. I visited her in Michigan. And yet, it has somehow been four years since we saw each other or really communicated about our lives.

She gave me a list of her major life events, sorted by year, since 2007. The heartaches. The jobs. Somehow her mother has had cancer and a year of treatment/remission in that time.

I started my reply with a similar format, and quickly ran out of room on the card I was using.

It is so strange to me how time can slip away like that. I guess that is how these 20-something years go.

I think I might have some friends in common with this Madison woman who blogs at Your Ill-Fitting Overcoat, whose blog I don't remember how I found, but which I love.

Her latest post had me going yes, yes, and I wanted to hug it/her.

I don't own real furniture. I don't put paint on the walls. I've been saying this for years and for years, but every time I think to change, something in my gut says no. I have this sense, all the time and all the time, that this is not my Real Life. I am living an Intermission Life, a Pre-Life before the main event. And at any moment, my train could arrive, you know? The one that takes me there from here. And if I get the chance to go, I don't want a thousand-dollar couch weighing me down.

This strikes me as a strange way to live.

Sometimes she posts things just as I'm thinking them. Right now I want a real bed, but I've been saying that for months and doing nothing about it except making do. With similar hesitations. But I'm not waiting for a train - I think I know which train I want and when it's coming. I just need to get myself to the station at the appointed hour. Platform 9 3/4? Maybe this metaphor has gone too far. & everything in the meantime is still Life. I just don't know if it's bed-buying Life.

Dear blog, my life is tiny butterflies with sharp teeth. How are you?

My fiction-writing friend Matt got engaged over Christmas. I e-mailed him when the news broke.

I: "Congrats on the engagement, sir. Obviously I want to know when the wedding is, and can I throw shredded-up poems at you at the reception? Of all the people who are on the verge of marriage, you're my favorite."

He: "You most certainly can toss shredded poems. We're thinking about an October 2012 wedding and doing everything at the Orpheum. The Orpheum doesn't like confetti of any sort, but you won't get any grief from me. The more literature at the reception the better."

This is a party I'm already looking forward to.

Hat collector

Multiple corners of my life have been strange, strained. But I swear, I've been having fun. And the first major winter has hit us, the bonesaw-cold, the icy roads, the scarves hiding everyone's identities. When I said December is clearheaded, it is definitely not clear-eyed. So much of winter, really, is a problem of vision. Darkness, snow, water stuck to and clouding our various glass. I've got the plastic on the windows, after waiting a little too long so I could slap another coat of polyurethane on my astronomy-plastered kitchen table. I am almost done with Battlestar Galactica and there are good books lying all over my apartment, waiting. I got myself back to yoga class and remembered how lovely it is to surrender to that kind of discomfort. To sweat, but slowly, to watch a drop of it plunge off my fingertips while the rest of me holds still as an easel.

Also I've learned that I really like The Killers. They give me shivers. The way I discover music now as a young adult, after spending my NPR-only teenagerhood having driveway moments with Beethoven and Prairie Home Companion, I tend to be way too excited about something that everyone else I know has already loved to the point of cliche.

But other songs come on and the whole room gets electric because everyone in it feels the exact same way. When Wolf Parade cries out, "I'll believe in anything." And that old difficult word "duende" shivers down from eyebrow to heel.

Postcards received by e-mail

These things happened

Wheat field Yo Yo Ma approves of everything you do.


Where did you park?

My downstairs neighbor is my future self.

Clues:
- she lives alone with her cat
- she enjoys yard work
- she has a take charge, do-what-needs-to-be-done attitude about living in a neglected building that I find inspiring.
- she left me this note today with my new package of books

"This was at my door w/a pile of mail. I opened without looking because I've been ordering a lot of books recently too. Sorry!"

Sometimes repetition isn't boring:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

The latest

• There's an owl who lives in the tree outside my apartment.
• I have a bruise that looks like dragon smoke, but purple.
• My remaining cat is love-thirsty and cries when I touch her. Then after a while she settles into rumbling peace.
• A much-missed visitor coming.
• My poems are slack, limp little things.
• Minor legal troubles.
  
• My job is interfering with my work.
• I want to learn to play banjo. Thanks, Dark Dark Dark.
  
• I am considering moving again (elsewhere in Madison), this summer. Most of the good things are east of here. This building feels like a shelf lonely people stick themselves on to gather dust. I feel like even my occasional visitor is a disruption of this. We talk and the walls rattle and threaten to fold. I exaggerate.
• Meteor shower tonight. I think I am getting up supremely early instead of staying up late.

My friend Matt visited from Chicago this weekend. At breakfast today he told the story of his night curled on the floor by his friend CJ's bed, driven there (from the couch) by ghosts. Strange footsteps in the hallway (there are no neighbors on that floor) and, "It sounded like it put my shoes on and was walking around in them." CJ swears the place is haunted, and the cat was mewing at shadows.

"I was going to call you guys," he tells me and Carrie over our respective scramblers.

I kind of wish I could have gotten that phone call. If only because no one has ever called me while in the process of being haunted. I am not sure I would have said anything useful, but I like giving useless advice.

Forward

Dear blog. I want to talk about politics, I want to talk about poetry, and I want to talk about the things I am doing that are not my job.

There is just too much happening.

I do miss my cat, though.

Also, I kind of want to give Wisconsin a big hug. We'll make it, guys. In one form or another, we'll make it through these politics we do not like, which scare us, which make us clutch our guts in pain at their illogic, and we'll do what we can do limit the damage, and when we get the chance, we'll turn things around in a better direction.

I hold up the hope that the new Republican leadership will somehow stumble upon success by accident, and, worst case, I hope they are somehow right about what will fix this state's economy. Because that's better than them being wrong and all of us suffering for it.

A sort of nuclear glue

Days like Carl Sagan's birthday make me miss my brother. He can do a pitch-perfect impression. I am sure I have said this before. One Thanksgiving he just erupted with the most beautiful "billions and billions," and we all gawked and laughed.

I called him tonight to demand a performance and he obliged and I laughed and clapped my hands. He is not, however, thrilled about my "Let's bake billions and billions of apple pies and watch Cosmos and call it a party" idea. Oh well.

all your sanity and wits, they will all vanish

At Gogol Bordello on Sunday night. A dancing pixie successfully resisted arrest by two burly security guards, then was lifted out of the balcony by a police officer. A lighthouse and the wheel of an imaginery ship. Reunion with long-lost friend. Someone in a Barney costume came to the front of the balcony at the appropriate moment to remind us all that s/he has always worn purple.

Despite miracle crust, this pie was better for throwing at things than eating.

Carrie says, "It's worse when vegan desserts fail. It's like being told you are not allowed to have desserts at all."

October

I am making my kitchen table less boring.


And I very intently watch my cat eat. He is not doing it so much. I am like Hansel & Gretel's witch, trying to fatten him up with tricks. Like following him around and setting his food dish next to him a lot.



Mostly he's not impressed.


Also I leave my apartment sometimes.

Texts from last night

"Is there a verb 4 what flashlights do?"

There's a pause most people take that wards off such disasters.

This city is crawling with poets who know me. I haven't written anything worthwhile in months, so I start to feel panicked and acidy when I see old professors or the one curmudgeonly jazz poet who remembers me from my high school competition days and says really encouraging things about how I can totally make it without an MFA. I managed to bump into both varieties yesterday and acid, acid, acid.

I also took the garbage out yesterday and was two seconds too late to stop the back door from swinging closed. I forget for a critical moment that my building has auto-locking outer doors. None of my neighbors was home. All the doorbells seem broken, anyway. I learned I can climb to my back porch by standing on a railing and grabbing another railing and just hoisting. But the door I never lock was locked anyway. I sat up there until I got cold.

Luckily I'd already finalized my plan to meet some friends at the top of State St. for dinner and a Book Festival reading, so I just started walking, phoneless walletless, wearing not quite enough, passing the big "legalize pot" festival and accompanying fire dancers on Library Mall. About 45 minutes, I think. I got to the rendezvous just in time, bummed dinner off one friend and a scarf off the other. Mary was crashing on my couch, and had a car, so we drove back afterward, and knocked on the front door until the downstairs neighbor who I never see wordlessly let me in. I think he hates everyone, and has potential to become the reluctant but heartwarming friendship you see in Sean Connery movies.

I really enjoyed climbing up and down from my porch. I have this fantasy of coming and going that way all the time. Or forcing friends to do so.

Seeing The National play last night was really great. They actually stuck a nice mix of songs from not-High Violet in there, and played nearly all my favorite Boxer songs. R and I both wore oversized hipster-mocking glasses. Saw two people from my 20-person work team, including my mentor. I always manage to be wearing animal hats when I bump into work people.

Good shows make me punchy. I was clutching at my elbows and vibrating in place.

Also, since they played for the Prez "Whoahbama" earlier that night, it's like I didn't even miss much by skipping the rally. Kidding. The lead singer was right, though, when he said they really don't actually have any songs that are political. Still, they dedicated a couple songs "to America." Eyeroll. The Decemberists somehow manage to be more hope-y change-y than them.

Getting tied/forgetting why.