one more delay

The clouds moving across the sky, the few leaves shuddering on the branches fingered out above us, the distant call of the freight train all made me think of Bard, of the Hudson, of Donna and of Dennis's songs about women and cities: "these are my mountains, these are my hills, the train runs through them, fills me with chills...the quiet titans, the monsters sleep, the locomotive, the river deep." The man skulking about the cemetary all in black cut short the excursion, but V and I held close and traipsed through the city streets nonchalantly nonetheless. When a big black dog tethered to an invisible leash leapt barking out of the darkness she became larger than life, told it to back off in a firm deep voice. We are brave girls, we. Forlorn sometimes, dreamy often, longing girls but brave.

I would ask pardon for the sentimentality, but I'm trained not to. No disclaimers. Take it for what it is tonight; tomorrow will be another story.

i feel like i know her but sometimes my arms bend back

Oh Stove, you're going to addict me to this thing.

Neko Case makes me feel like I should be hanging out at the Road House from Twin Peaks. Shaking my hips back and forth and twirling cherry stems like Audrey. It's very very warm out and I should be sitting outside, but I won't be able to see my computer screen. So instead: soft light and mint green variegated walls. Looking at a man with a waxed moustache (for reals) and a woman who once taught me Pilates. Both employees.

I would like to work out the vagueries of my thoughts on unreliable narration post-research into scholarship of The Remains of the Day, but I have a feeling that work had best be done within a paper form. So off I go to be productive.

stick leash:

what the little girl walking past the window is being dragged along with. Slightly unsettling.

As previously mentioned, it's homecoming weekend, and that makes everything rawther surreal (as Nanny would say). Today's example: V and I are having brunch at the Runcible, when a cadre of pleated-docker wearing young gentlemen come in and surround us in a sinuous l-shape. The group, we are told, is called "Straight, No Chaser," and they've come from Hillel House to sing us a ditty or two, after which they're going to collect money for "The Sudan, Israel, and" some other unrelated country that I've forgotten. I have to say, I've never been the biggest fan of acappella music, and their song that involved a distance between the speaker and the narratee, as it were, was a surround-sound version of pretty terrible. I mean, they were "good boys," they had nice voices, but sheesh. V made the highly entertaining observation that if we were a couple in the middle of a breakup, the song choice would have been highly traumatic.

Best Halloween costume gimmick so far: competition between "The Snuggler," the blankie-d superhero who went around the Vid giving hugs, and my friend A's "Intergallactic Love Warrior" that went around shooting folks with a love gun. The ladies seemed to love the love gun.

In a time of slutty "fill in the blank" being the most prevalent costume, I'd like to take the idea to the extreme. Slutty Eggplant, perhaps, or Slutty Trash Bin. Now that I think of it, though, Mary already did this best with her "Baberaham Lincolm" costume.

Saturday is a Work Day

There's something deeply satisfying to me about sitting here at this table in this cafe with all these stories spread out around me to read. Dozens. I'm listening to Radio Free Klezmer. I'm plowing through story after story about father/son relationships, most of which involve a)hunting b)fishing or c)camping. Then there's winter sports. Poor V has to deal with my constant stream of "never do this" in a story. The latest had to do with fabric stretched tight over women's breasts. Christ. She said she wants to write a story in which fabric droops over a woman's breasts. I say more power to her. I'm realizing why Jenna Blum was so anti-child narrators now, and why AGNI has a blanket policy. (That sounds like a policy to issue afghans to its contributers, but of course I mean a blanket policy against child narrators).

It's homecoming weekend and yesterday I passed a float that consisted of two large papier mache yams. How rad is that?

Stove, the leaves on the trees are still bright. I wondered to myself whether that would still be the case when you came, then realized you'll be here in 5 days, and how much can really change in that time? Yee-haw.

my house needs better insulation

I think that my broken power cord is perhaps too broken, because every time I plug it in the muscles in that arm begin to ache, and I can only assume an electrical current passing through is the cause.

V has found my blogs. We've traded so I've sat here noddling through old entries. Had I had my eyes closed, what would I have assumed I'd have remembered and what would I have predicted forgetting?

I've discovered that carrying around The Satanic Verses is quite a good way to meet people. I'm considering taking to reading it in public more often. My friend R once had a weird boxy outlet sort of thing in his room that we decided he should label, "conversation piece," and he did. I would like to label my book, "conversation piece," and wait for them to come. In class today S asked how many of us remembered the fatwah in the news, and I felt old, being one of two beside the professor who did. I felt older when it turned out S had been 5 at the time. My copy is my parents' from Royal Books in Franklin. I remember how everyone was talking about the controversy, and how my mom rushed out to buy the book, and it felt funny to write in its margins all these years later. It occured to me tonight that as awful as the fatwah is (and fun fact - it can never be revoked now that Khomeni's dead...it's an "endless arrow"), the severeity of the controversy is a kind of testament to the power of literature that seems oddly quaint in an age where controversal literature consists of Harry Potter, The DaVinci Code, and Danish cartoons.

I like sitting next to V on the couch and working (or not) together. Last night we dredged up old videos on YouTube, dreamed of playing PJ Harvey's basslines and rocked out to Snoop Dogg. We are total dorks and I love it.

I'm going to think about the postcolonial subject vs. the globalized subject now. And maybe do a little writing, too.

Synchronicity

In my dream I watched one of those "Monster Trucks" (as in Sunday Sunday Sunday at the Arena) drive over a smaller car and get stuck. I wanted to run away from the fire I worried would start, but PC was there and convinced me I should help rescue the children who she somehow knew would be inside. We broke in - suddenly it was an RV - and helped the children out. We had to step on hot flames. We had them jump into the mud and this was soft so they were fine. I was holding a child in my arms, running from the flames, when I woke up.

First thing I look at the news. On the Boston Globe Website, front page news, is a picture of a fireman holding a child in his arms, rescuing her from a fire. Not prescience, but still eerie.

Here at my favorite coffee shop in town, I am working next to a tapestry in the Velvet Elvis mode of Pope John Paul II. His thumb is stuck in a book.

Halloweeny

V and I went to the Grudge II as an effort to drive away the outside world. The theater was all but empy so we pulled up our hoods and watched between fingers and squealed at will. I think the last horror movie I'd seen in the theater was Scream. The scary things were so beautiful that I didn't want to cover my eyes -- only my ears for the crick crick crack sound that was so scary. And the pacing of the two narratives was intermeshed really well so that rest from tension gradually became points of even greater tension. And now it's cold and rainy and I'm going to go get coffee and think about reading and grading and reading some more.

Someone I know carved a pumpkin into a buddha. Sometimes all I want to do is facilitate seasonal fun.

this post is for

stove, who's right that I should be contributing more to the social experiment. So here's what I will say. This day began well, with actually getting up and making breakfast and writing. It began with waking up and not feeling the dread of alienation from loved ones. In other words, a relief of a morning. That the soy milk curdled when the espresso hit it was frustrating, the moreso that the soy latte was part of the treat for the writing, which though not entirely sucessful, happened.

You would do well to note the conjoined frustration and illumination; that was my day.

This morning: dear A sitting on the bed playing his guitar while his son P sat on the floor facing him, playing a recorder. They sang a song about a shark who turned into many different things, including a pumpkin. P did some rockin recorder solos. A kept asking P what happened next, and when P told him he would make up a verse around it. The verse about the pumpkin who drank juice that turned all his teeth red, except one tooth, who turned out to be named Fred, reminded me of one of the Camp Favorite Moose songs. You know the one.

Later P and I sang the most intense version of "Masters of War" ever. We stared into each other's eyes and I sang the real lyrics and he echoed with made up words that ended in the same rhythmic drawn-out growl as Dylan. That kid is one smart cookie. And he makes a good egg. I like that I can play the guitar well enough to sing a song about a museum with dogs on the wall instead of paintings.

I like that P listens to me. A good egg. Stove. I like my good eggs.