December

"Let me tell you a story about war. A fisherman's son and his dead brother sat on the shore. 'That is my country and this is your country and the line in the sand is the threshold between them,' said the dead brother. 'Yes,' said the fisherman's son.'

You cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.

Bird 1: This is the wrong story.
Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient."

Richard Siken - War of the Foxes

Paris

It is a beautiful day. The world is a troubling (terrifying, horrifying) place. It is difficult to feel these two things so strongly at exactly the same time.

Lake Superior, July 2015

Went to our nation's capital.

These things happened

Wheat field Yo Yo Ma approves of everything you do.


Where did you park?

This happened

My eye doctor said I was farsighted and should wear reading glasses at work so I would stop having days in which I feel like my eyes are whole miles apart and will never focus again. Now the whole world is going to know I like Battlestar Galactica.

Also, I cut my bangs myself. Then Robin fixed them for me (results not pictured). But only a little. Self reliance +.5.

I'm behind on everything important, but slowly making progress.

I'm fighting November's 4:30 sunsets with vitamin D and strict dental hygiene. Routine is soothing. So far, okay. My poems are all lists dancing around a telephone pole.

Snowfall against the streetlights last night, wet, radiant, too brief. Is this a metaphor, blog? Choose your own adventure.

This press pass is already falling apart.

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.

Went to Minnesota to see some long-losts. My brother would have been there but instead we traded places and probably passed each other on the interstate near Osseo. The leaves are starting to go-go-go. My friend Amelia took this photo of my butt and my favorite sweater, then we climbed a mountain and ate too many desserts and became lumps fused with the floor, occasionally saying things.


Just before Baraboo on the numb-butt restless part of the drive home, all the sunflowers were like this:


Next paycheck I am getting a low-budget camera (the above photo is someone else's) and going back to see them shrivel up and die. Tonight, a lot of writing of the least fun kind.

Hanging art in the new apartment has been taking forever. There's something very different about looking at a painting of cranes at your breakfast table, versus while brushing your teeth. Are eclipse photos better viewed while you are reading on your couch, or when you are cooking? Or when you have several friends sitting around with a bottle of wine (this has not yet happened in the new place, it must)? These walls resist nails, so I can't just hang things every which-a-way and expect to change my mind about which room and how high up the wall.

But I always want to sleep under the Aztecs.


p.s., it's nearly the best time of the year in Wisconsin.



My birthday present for myself this year is going to be a non-cellphone camera.

Cleaning the kitchen tonight

Once, I had a crush on a guy who sat next to me in our "Philosophy of Contemporary Issues" class. We'd talk about the hypothetical deterrent effect of the death penalty and he'd drink this huge can of RedBull and I'd struggle quietly to not vomit from the smell. Now it is a vital chemical for most of my major life events, like moving and big writing projects. Go figure.

Other supplies purchased today (minus the cat):


Not pictured, the remainder of my bottle of Bulleit, which I must either drink now or forever hold my peace with breaking it in the moving process. This has happened before.

misc

Bought a new hat today. Going to wear it all the time. Feel kind of emo-slash-French-slash-country-housewife. Also, after new people have started following both my long-idle Twitter and less-idle Tumblr accounts in recent weeks, really have to make some hard choices about what parts of the Internet I am actually using and whether I am just doing so because they seem like big ballroom dance parties that I don't want to miss out on even though I actually cannot ballroom dance.

The beets cooked up delicious. My tomato plants are in a race to produce all their tomatoes before they succumb to a strange yellow leaf disease. So far, it's looking like I will have to learn to make fried green tomatoes and then chortle about the literary connection. Like that time I bought plums and kept talking up how sweet and cold they were. What an asshole of an in-joke.

(hat plus cat)

First beet crop, tiny but beautiful

In search of the Fountain of Youth

There is a non-blurry version of this one, but in it we are all really obviously sweaty.





Cemetery seahorses



Ernest Hemingway's writing studio-cum-mancave.



Sunset festival in Key West



Church in Key West



Our sweaty, suffocating homestead on Sugarloaf Key.



Powerlines



Giant prawn?



GIANT PRAWN!



Dragon fruit



Torrential downpour, with camera flash on.



Everglades with rain



That emu doesn't care at all that I'm about to kick its ass.



Shells playing cards.

Yeah, I don't care how long this post is. Some of the horizontals seem to be cut off, so for full views and more photos I recommend going to my Flickr page.

If I delete this later it's because I used it in a project.

Independence Day in the Florida Keys coral reef system. All you can hear besides the motion of the water is the tiny crackling scratch of thousands of fish eating coral. If you look up from the sea floor, above the waterline, you will see twenty other tourists face-down in the water, invisible except for their snorkels and luminescent flotation devices, looking for all the world like giant fishing lures. Days before, NOAA reports a 61-80 percent chance of tar balls coming this way. There is a sense that one should be gobbling up as much of this experience as possible, in case it is the last chance.

Bloomsday, too, might be literature self-fetishizing.

Another day, another brand new pretentious $17 notebook to fill up. The last one took me more than 2 years, starting with a bullet point outline of a poem I never wrote, ending today with "we change our names and order pizzas / to be sent to the neighbors" so you see I started out with a much more finicky standard for what I wrote in it. Only solid ideas and words already by-my-standards perfect. Now I slosh anything remotely interesting (and many dull things that might eventually be made interesting) onto the pages like a 3 a.m. drunkard. I buy the expensive notebooks for my creative writings with the idea that I'll want to be able to flip through and re-read and re-use ideas for years. But there is no guarantee. It's possible the act of writing on acid-free pages is all just exercise. Words you expel like a long exhale, never to be considered again. I'm all for fetishizing the printed word, I'm all for bound books and the smell of rich mahogany. I still can't quite feel something is real unless I can see it without the help of electricity. Take it camping with me. Set it on fire.

The new notebook gleams with unrealized amazement. Blank pages still recall the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil, and that moment as a child when you first realize that a word is more than just an assortment of squiggles. Before you learn that a word is still not quite omnipotent. I think I am fair when I say many people who write do so because they believe (even if they do not admit this to themselves) that if they can just get The Most Perfect/Sharp/Lovely/Breathless/otherwise ideal arrangement of words to the right people's eyes, they can put the oil back in the well and raise the dead pelicans like feathered Christs. Or cure unkindness. Or rub the world's metaphorical feet on carpet until we spark at doorknobs and keyboards and become, all of us, electrical superheroes capable of incredible feats and glowing-eyed awesomeness. I don't think this can happen anymore, but the wish is still one horse in the team pulling my motivation stagecoach.

My sister has been digging through family photos and scanning them and sharing them all over. This is me and my dad's bear arm.


Once Becky was old enough to be dressed like me, my mom dressed her like me. At least I got to wear green. There was, also, a matching pair of sparkly pink shirts with giant cat faces and big rhinestones.

I like to think that if I ever had babies (unlikely), I would not submit them to such indignities. But we all know such cyclical behavior is inevitable. When we don't know what else to do, we become our parents.

Anna

My Polish-fought-the-Nazis-via-the-Warsaw-underground-when-she-was-18 grandmother talks too much about her inevitable demise, about how she's slowing down and sleeping too much and about to turn 90. Talk of the future is always in terms of, "If I am still around." "I will love to see your photos of Korea if I am still around." "I am going to California in October if I am still around." & etc.

She also says great things like, "If I buy clothing at $1 a pound, that leaves me a lot of money for wine," and, "I like men, I like their little tushies, but they are such babies." If I aspired to things like weddings or children, I would say, I hope she is around to see that. I do aspire to a lot of other things that I hope she is around to see, but really it's ridiculous to expect everyone you love will be able to see everything you do in your lifetime of which they would be proud. Lately I just find myself wanting to introduce her to friends. Because I want to show her off, and am proud of knowing such good people, I guess.

brr

Crafty Robin made me armwarmers last week. Thank goodness it got cold enough to enjoy them a little bit before summer remembers what it's supposed to be doing. Snow in other parts of Wisconsin. We turned on the heat in the newsroom yesterday, Tim kept his jacket on while he finished his story.

monsters

Rainy day. Narrowly avoid marauding politicians. Pretend to be a monster. Toothgnash and talonswipe. Growl, grimace. Laserface. Bludgeonbone. Wings made up of baby mice, mewling. Monsters eat obstacles for lunch. For dinner, plundered sandwiches. Curl up in their monster caves with spiny tails for pillows. Remember Eustace the dragon, from Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Gold plates are not a cozy bed. Dirt and laundry. Soapsuds.