The Blues:

While trying to write the other weekend, I was listening to some classic Appalachian blues and some of the lyrics were so awesome I had to write them down.

With great titles like Hesitation Blues, The Sky is Falling, and Way On the Outskirts of Town how could theses songs not be completely wonderful? There’s something so simple and true about the blues. It’s like reaching down and grabbing something straight out of your gut. What that something is exactly, I’m not so sure but that’s one of the great things about the blues, and most music for that matter–you don’t have to understand it to know it’s great.

Some of my favorite lyrics…

Put your man in your bed, put your husband down on the floor.

I was a playboy, I couldn’t be true. I couldn’t believe I really loved you. But when you left me, oh how I cried. You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.

See what you done done.

Don’t you marry no concrete man.

Look over yonder, tell me what you see. Yonder come the blues running after me.

I could tell you about my life. And keep you amused I’m sure. About all the times I’ve cried. And how I don’t want to be sad anymore. And how I wish I was in love.

The Horror:

I finished Stephen King’s On Writing a couple of weeks ago and it had some fun stories and good advice. I’ve never actually read King’s fiction (I’ve been meaning to pick up some short stories of his but haven’t gotten around to them yet) but I’ve read his essays and articles before and I’m always interested in how different types of writers approach the craft. King’s book had some good practical advice on how to live and write at the same time. I’m sure there’s some piece of literary criticism out there, or maybe just another blog, that articulates this better but there are writers and there are storytellers. I think you can be such a good writer that you can tell a story about farting (actually farting is pretty funny and entertaining so that’s a bad example) or about um… sitting in a chair, and it will be wonderful. On another note, you can be a pretty mediocre writer but if you have wonderful magic-filled stories then they’ll be wonderful as well. And I don’t just mean Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings magic. I also mean Cormac McCarthy, Jack Kerouac, or I dunno, Steve Tolz magic. (If you haven’t read A Fraction of the Whole yet, oh man, go get that book right now because it’s so much fun.)

But yes, Stephen King is a story-teller more than a writer. But he’s a great writer as well. He’s maybe not my favorite kind of writer but he is quite good.

And, as you can imagine, his writing book/biography had some great tips but it was also just a fun story about one writing man’s life. Some favorite lines…

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

The Everyday:

This week I’ve been reading a collection by John Updike, Pigeons Feathers and other stories. I had only read a couple of Updike stories here or there in college or in The New Yorker–I had probably read more about Updike than his actual stories. But, oh man, he is everything everyone said he was. His writing is completely delightful and amazing. Some of his descriptions are simply wonderful. They remind me of why, haha, I want to write. But also why I read. Why I go on reading new things and looking for new authors and stories and words and word combinations to fall in love with. Because maybe, just maybe, in that next book I open I might find and fall in love with something like this…

A barn, in day, is a small night The splinters of light between the dry shingles pierce the high roof like stars, and the rafters and crossbeams and built-in ladders seem, until your eyes adjust, as mysterious as the branches of a haunted forest.

I know just that feeling but I could never express it so beautifully. Or what about this…

What did we say? I talked about myself. It is hard to hear, much less remember, what we ourselves say, just as it might be hard for a movie projector, given life, to see the shadows its eye of light is casting. A transcript, could I produce it, of my monologue through the wide turning point of that night, with all its word-by-word conceit, would distort the picture: this living room miles from home, the street light piercing the chinks in the curtains and erecting on the wallpaper rods of light the size of yardsticks, our hosts and companions asleep upstairs, the incessant sigh of my voice, coffee-primed Molly on the floor beside my chair, her stockinged legs stretched out on the rug; and this odd sense in the room, a tasteless and odorless aura unfamiliar to me, as of a pool of water widening.

Ahh… I love it! Or, okay, so this next passage is best read within the context of the entire story but I simply can’t help myself…

He dug the hole, in a spot where there were no strawberry plants, before he studied the pigeons. He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dog’s hair, for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird’s body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests. Into the fragrant open earth he dropped one broadly banded in slate shades of blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over in rhythms of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, but for a salmon glaze at its throat. As he fitted the last two, still plaint, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.

Finding God and heaven in a pile of dead pigeons? I mean, come on, does it get any better than that? Ha, not for me I suppose. But I love the sublime in the everyday. I love it when authors do that. Find that. Create that. (OMG, it’s like so totally Virginia Woolf.) And, my goodness, there is so much beautiful and perfect in that small piece of prose I can hardly stand it. It’s enough to make me hold a hand to my heart and say things like, My goodness. Ha, like I’m some kind of old woman out of breathe from a walk through the park or a scandalous scene in a move.

So ya, I really like Updike. I recommend him. Go on, go get you some Updike. You won’t regret it.

The I Don’t Know What:

So to supplement my other reading and mix things up a bit I’ve also been reading Barry Hannah’s Airships. I’m not really sure how to describe Hannah but the word raw comes to mind. Raw and maybe dirty. Maybe it just seems authentic. I dunno, something about him and his writing reminds me of the blues lyrics I was writing down up above. Maybe some art comes from the heart and some comes from the gut. Then again, maybe it all comes from the same unknown place and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Either way, here are some passages….

She sat on the rear fender and they went off in the damned most bizarre juxtaposition you ever saw. Similar to a circus tandem but not for fun. This was loyalty and romance, brothers. I know he was leaving blood up the road, though you couldn’t see it at night. The bike was wobbling all over the place, but they were going ahead.

That was some man, that boy.

In the alleys there were sighs and derisions and the slide of dice in the brick dust.

Some of us are made to live for a long time. Others for a short time. Donna wanted what she wanted. I gave it to her.

The old man who’d told his story was calm and fixed to his place. He’d told the truth. The crowd on the pier was outraged and discomfited. He wasn’t one of them. But he stood his place. He had a distressed pride. You could see he had never recovered from the thing he’d told about.

I am her always and she is my always and that’s the whole trouble.

I’m not sure how to end this little post of mine so I’ll sum it up with one more quote from an old poetry professor of mine…

Books are great. I like books. People should get ‘em.

Now instead of Scrooge McDuck imagine my cat Rupert.
And instead of a room filled with gold imagine a cat box filled with kitty litter.

That’s pretty much the way it goes down over here.

“Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die; beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.” -Vladamir Nabokov

This quote doesn’t have to do with much in my life right now but I think it’s pretty and true and a little bit sad so I included it. The picture is City of Books by Ma Chevrette—a print I got off her etsy the other week. I think it has a lot to do with my life right now. But then, books and art always do. And a city made out of books? Well, that’s just too perfect.

I wonder if she pitied the books when she turned them into buildings. And I wonder if she pitied the buildings after she created them.

But I’m feeling oddly poetic and a little dreamy at the moment so I’m wondering a lot of things.

This is a picture of my car with a missing tire:

Ha, with a missing tire. As opposed to, without a tire. I don’t know why I chose to say it in just that way, but it goes to show that when you lose something you gain something. I may have lost a tire but I gained a missing tire. And a story to tell. An old friend of mine once said, “Isn’t that what life is all about? Having stories to tell?” I’ve always remembered it.

This particular story is simple:

I woke up.

I walked to my car.

It had a missing tire.

It had a missing rim as well.

I put on my spare tire and drove to the shop.

I got two new tires and a rim.

Now I park my car closer to my apartment.

The end.

Ha, it’s a cautionary tale I suppose. Don’t park your car next to shady characters. Wasn’t it just a few posts back when I was talking about how excited I was to find a good place to park my car? I think I may have even used the words shady characters. Ooops. If I was capable of reading my own life the way I read a novel, I might have been smart enough to see that one coming. It’s such obvious foreshadowing.

I went to the symphony with my good friends Laurie and Scott. I’ve never been to the symphony before and I’m not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to classical music but it it was wonderful. It makes a big difference when you’re there and experiencing the music live, when you’re surrounded by it, and with other people.

Scott told me how the main violin player, essentially the first violin, of the San Francisco symphony gets to play this violin that the symphony owns that’s over 300 years old. Could you imagine? Playing something with such a history? And having something that was built in such a real and lasting way that it survives 300 years of existence? And not just any existence, actual use? That kind of stuff just blows my mind.

I have to say, going to the symphony for the first time felt like how I imagine some people must feel going to a baseball game for the first time. (There is so much history there–in the building, with each player, instrument, composer, each sound and note, and even the owners and operators. It’s just like baseball…only it’s so much older.) So yes, I loved it.

I’ve been running more lately and, even though I try to look up and take in my surroundings, I tend to run with my head down. (I’ve always done this–spaced out and looked at my own feet when I’m running or walking. I feel like half of my day is spent reminding myself to look around me instead of just watching where I’m going.) But it was during one of my city runs, with my head down, looking at my own feet, that I started to notice all the messages people had drawn into the sidewalks.

There are a ton of messages and art and hands and pictures and just random stuff drawn into the concrete on the sidewalks of San Francisco. The first thing that really made me take notice was the scene above. The Wonders of Life. I mean, come on, how can anyone with even an ounce of romance in their soul not find that completely delightful? They even drew a sun, and stars, and flowers. Clouds and birds. Very nicely done.

So yes, I started a tumblr: http://somethingconcrete.tumblr.com/. Thanks to one of the many wonders of life, new technology, if I happen to find a fun message or picture drawn into the concrete I can snap a picture and post it right away.

I’ve been watching the Ken Burn’s documentary on jazz. In addition to listening to Louis Armstrong and The Hot Five all weekend, I’ve been obsessing over this quote from Sidney Bichet:

Whatever kind of thing it was, whenever it happened, the music put it together…What it is that takes you out of being just a kid and thinking it’s all adventure, and you find there’s a lesson underneath all that adventure–that lesson, it’s the music. You come into life alone and you go out of it alone, and you’re going to be alone a lot of time when you’re on this earth–and what tells it all, it’s the music. You tell it to the music and the music tells it to you. And then you know about it. You know what it was happened to you.

There’s so much that’s beautiful and perfect in that.

One of the men in the documentary was talking about Louis Armstrong and described genius as the ability to hear something that isn’t there, something that doesn’t exist, something that nobody else can hear. Louis Armstrong heard a sound that didn’t exist, and then he made that sound. It’s incredible when you really think about it. Reminds of how Galileo saw stars nobody else could but it’s more than that. It’s not just seeing stars nobody else can see. It’s creating those stars. It’s constructing realities. Whole new sounds and ways of hearing. It’s changing the world. It’s the stuff you talk about when you’re young and up late at night, drunk and a little crazy with ideas and learning and loving and making mistakes. It’s genius.

My brother once told me that music is freedom. I’m sure he wasn’t the first one to say it, but it was the first time I listened. I’ve always remembered that too.

Despite the fact that he looks sweet and innocent while napping in the sun, Rupert is now a full-blown killer. He kills birds and mice and tortures them. And he gets very upset when I won’t let him into the house with his new toys. One night last week he stood outside my back door meowing this creepy meOOOOooowwphfff, that was really him trying to meow with a huge mouse in his mouth. That was actually kind of cute. You know, in that meowing with a huge dead mouse in your mouth sort of way.

He is averaging one kill a week.

Earlier this week I got home and a bloody wing was sitting on my back porch in front of the door. I don’t want to know what that’s foreshadowing. Sometimes these silly things happen and it seems like such an obvious symbol that it’s hard to remember that in the real world a bloody wing doesn’t mean anything other than my cat killed a bird.

I’m totally using that in a story some day though. And then it will be symbolic of broken dreams or, I dunno, destroyed innocence or something like that.

I went to SFMOMA again, not this weekend but the last, and there’s a new installment by Klara Kristalova that I really liked. She works with ceramics and her pieces play on different fairy tale and folktale traditions. Some are more whimsical while others are more creepy.  I really like her style though. It’s childlike and rough and that’s exactly why it works. Here’s a sample:

Kind of different for me, but I like it. The pictures don’t do her justice, so if you’re in SF and get a chance you should check it out.

My friend Victoria had her first Banned by the Bay event for Banned Book Week today. It was a great kickoff at the San Francisco library and I’m stoked for the rest of the week.

So there’s more fun to come. More adventures to be had. (And under the adventures, lessons to learn.) Ha, all the wonders of life–300 year-old violins, a bloodied bird’s wing, ceramic owl heads, and a city of books.

There are so many beautiful things to pity these days.

(heartfelt sigh goes here)

Life Lessons from Roald Dahl
from Green Apple Book’s blog

Roald Dahl’s birthday was September 13th and there’s a new biography out about him so he’s gotten more attention than usual lately. Green Apple’s list is delightful and brings back some favorite moments from his books. I love, “It’s okay to make your grandmother disappear if she’s really unpleasant,” and “Never let your guard down around an adult with power and a sharp object.” Here are some additional lessons I learned:

• Never trust a woman in square-toed shoes.
• It’s okay to steal from rich people as long as they’re mean.
• If you have super powers, it’s best to use them for revenge.
• Not all giants are bad.

Fun side note: Roald Dahl’s official website farts.

The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door
Online exhibit

This particular door has been signed by 242 writers, artists, and publishers and now they have this great online exhibit where you can explore all of them. I love thinking of writers and artists gathering in the same physical space. It seems almost magic how these communities get formed. It’s like Stein’s house in Paris. And it makes me wonder if there are any of these places around right now that I just don’t know about. Are all the future masterminds at some random coffee shop signing the back of a bathroom stall? I dunno, but it’s a fun thought. I wish I could get a poster or a print of the door.

Mysterious Paper Sculptures Found in Scottish Libraries
from the Central Station Blog

This is great. Someone is leaving random, beautiful, intricate paper sculptures all over Scottish libraries. My favorite is probably the coffee cup one:

But I love the quote from the dragon:

Once upon a time there was a book and in the book was a nest and in the nest was an egg and in the egg was a dragon and in the dragon was a story…

Sigh. How lovely. I wish all mysteries were about the origin of art and words. People do nice things sometimes. It’s good to be reminded.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside —  the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within — that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald from The Crack-Up

Wow. Amazing. I read this the other day and it was so beautiful and sad and true that it completely depressed yet enthralled me at the same time. I have to take a moment right now and be a complete great big mushy mess of a dork but can I just say…

I. Fucking. Love. Great. Writing.

Maybe that’s not so mushy (throwing an f-bomb in there certainly helps things out) but it is me overflowing with awe.

I love it when you come across a piece of writing that so perfectly and adequately portrays a piece of the world or an experience of it, an emotion or a feeling, a moment in life, that you recognize and come to understand something you never had before.

For instance…

Maybe you have begun to feel this vague unnameable pain but can’t explain where it came from or what exactly it is. Maybe it is something so small and so subtle that you barely take notice of it. Maybe it is almost nothing, maybe it is the smallest of sensations like an itch or a limb that has fallen asleep. But then, ah, but then… But then this beautiful perfect horrible little passage comes along and spells it all out for you and you realize what it is you have been feeling. Suddenly your pain is not so vague. It is specific and real, it does not have a name but it has words and an explanation. It has been made personal and universal and has connected you to this great big mass of people who have experienced the same thing. Who have read the same thing or written about the same thing, talked about it and created art about it, and really it is put so beautifully and perfectly that it’s not painful at all. It’s just real. It’s just art. It’s just life and art interacting and overlapping and, fuck ya, I love that shit!

Ha, so yes, obviously I’m being excessively poetic and dramatic tonight. Sorry about that but it’s how I feel so too bad for you.

One of my favorite lines about the desperate power of writing comes from a short story, My Hustlers by Edmund White:

My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.

Writing, a certain type of great writing, can turn something evil into flowers. Or something painful into beauty. Just by putting it into words and arranging them in the right way. It’s such a simple yet completely complicated thing. And then there are other moments, other pieces of great writing, that turn flowers into evil. Or something beautiful into pain. It’s amazing to me sometimes. A great passage in a book or a great piece of art can be completely humbling in the same way the ocean or a mountain range can. There’s a power in great things like that. I haven’t quite gotten far enough in my personal development (or whatever it is you call this growing and progressing as a human being thing) to know exactly what it is I’m trying to talk about, or what exactly that power is. Ha, but I have a vague kind of feeling.

So ya, I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately. It’s been good and it makes me crazy and awake and just a little bit drunk on words and writing.

But it’s getting late and I’ve probably had too much. Ha, and said too much as well. And if I read one more chapter I just may pass out.

Hmmm… that sounds kind of nice actually. I think I’ll go do that now.

And then, two days later I went to the Picasso exhibit at the De Young and there was a painting of a cat with a bird. This painting:

And it looked so much like my cat, and it seemed so odd and fated and connected somehow that there should be this painting of my cat at this exhibit (and all in the same week) that I had to buy the ridiculous print. It’s hanging above my head now. I kind of love it.

“Maybe he was Picasso’s cat in a past life,” my friend Stephanie, who was with me at the time said.

I always have called Rupert the Hemingway of cats (from an old conversation Victoria and I had about him) so it would not surprise me at all if he had hung out with Picasso. A cat’s life is A Moveable Feast afterall. And everyone hung out in those days. I know because I saw them all together in the movie A Midnight in Paris, that was playing at the Kubuki Theater last weekend. And then they were also all in The Stein’s Collect exhibit that’s at the SFMOMA. (That’s not to be confused with the Picasso exhibit I saw at the De Young or the Five Stories exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.)

I like when all the museums in San Francisco get together. It’s like the whole city is having one big conversation about art.

(I say this like it has happened to me before, like I know all about this connection between museums, but really this is the first time I’ve noticed this supposed connection since it’s only the second month I’ve lived here.)

The man who works at the corner store across the street from me (the corner store across the street, I think I like that) asked me what I do for a living tonight. I told him and then he asked me, ”What is marketing?”

I didn’t know how to answer so I laughed instead. The man had just sold me a sandwich I didn’t want or need. (I’m eating it now and it’s delightful.) When I couldn’t explain my position he asked me where I worked.  After I told him in the financial district he said, ”Did you know that I have two sons?”

I didn’t know the answer to that either so I laughed again.

This is a common pattern with me–unknowingness and laughter.

There is another, completely different man on my way to work. He works in the hotel that’s connected to the building I work in, but on the other side of it. I noticed him waving at me when I walked by the glass door he works behind. I’m usually kind of out of it in the morning, lost in my own thoughts and walking and daydreaming, listening to music. But I looked up and caught his eye once and he waved at me. At first I didn’t really think he meant to but then the next day I checked and he did it again so I waved back. I started checking every day and he waved at me every day and so I waved back every day. Then I started looking forward to waving back. At first I thought I was special, like I was the only one he waved at, but then I noticed… Other people were waving at him too!

There are a lot of us. I knew for sure what was going on when there was this old woman who stopped in front of his door and waited for a good oh, minute or so (he must have been talking to someone) for him to look over and wave. The sidewalks are busy in the mornings, especially at this spot, but she stopped and she waved and she got her wave back. After that, I started noticing all the others. You can tell who knows about the man because they pause a little bit before approaching his door. And, I have to admit, he’s a great waver. He doesn’t just wave. He smiles. He smiles big and he waves like a little kid–full of enthusiasm. Like a little kid in the back of his parents’ car on a really long boring roadtrip. Huh, and maybe it is in a way.

But it’s just about the best, most beautiful thing ever, his wave. Anyone who knows me at all knows that it’s things like this that get to me. It’s like being in on a secret. It’s such a small silly thing but it makes me smile. And when I think of how many people he must wave at, how many people that must be in on the secret too, it’s like joining some kind of amazing waving club. It makes me giggle to myself every time. It makes me smile like a little kid too.

There is an old woman I met on the J the other night. She wanted to know where I had gotten my New Yorker. ”I’ve looked all over the city for one,” she said, “and I can’t find one anywhere.”

I found this hard to believe but couldn’t be sure if she was exaggerating or not since I have a subscription. Still, she told me about how she had just moved here from Florida to be close to her daughter–she had been living with this daughter and her husband but it was “time for her to get her own place.” I told her I had been living with my brother and part of the reason I moved here was that it was time for me to get my own place too.

“Family shouldn’t live together for too long,” she said.

Which I thought was hilarious because isn’t that part of what a family is? People who live together? Not for long apparently.

I met a cab driver who hates traffic. “Funny thing, a cab driver who hates traffic, ” he said, “but I HATE it.”  Seemed kind of expected to me.

I got this print at the SFMOMA exhibit:

It’s by Marie Laurencin and shows her, Picasso, his mistress, and a poet named Apollinaire who was Marie’s lover. How scandalous it all seems and yet how dignified they all look. (Except maybe the girl in the bottom right corner, who is Laurencin the artist.) Something about it makes me happy. Maybe it’s just the story. Or maybe it’s the dog. I like thinking of artists all hanging out and loving and making mistakes with each other. I know it’s me romanticizing again but ha, isn’t what I’ve been doing this entire post? Isn’t that what I always do?

I’ve been reading a beautiful book. Here is a quote:

Because Momik has this gift, a gift for all kinds of languages no one understands, he can even understand the silent kind that people who say maybe three words in their whole life talk, like Ginzburg who says, Who am I who am I, and Momik understands that he’s lost his memory and that now he’s looking for who he is everywhere even in the garbage cans, and Momik has decided to suggest (they’ve been spending a lot of time together on the bench lately) that he should send a letter to the radio program Greetings from New Immigrants, and maybe someone would recognize him and remind him who he is and where he got lost, oh yes, Momik can translate just about anything. He is the translator of the royal realm. He can even translate nothing into something.

All of the kids in Noe Valley dress like princesses and superheros. If you go out on a Sunday, or even a weekday or a Saturday (but always on Sundays), you will see them skipping around the streets or tugging on their parent’s hands–Little princesses in Disney costumes somewhat at odds with their bicycle helmets. Boys wearing spiderman pajamas and crocks. It’s like stepping into another world where everyone is magic and has lots of money.

I’ve been listening to new songs recommended by an old friend. They make me happy and sad at the same time. But then, most everything worth loving usually does. Except for maybe dogs, potatoes, and ice cream. They’re always perfect.

I found a dive bar by my house where the bartender dances, they play Johnny Cash and Bonnie Rait, and the other night when I was walking by on the way back from the grocery store everyone was singing take me out to the ball game during the 7th inning stretch of the Giants game.

That. Is. So. Cool.

I was talking on the phone today, and I wanted to finish my conversation so I sat down on some steps before getting on the MUNI on Montgomery. A man saw me sitting there in my dress on the phone, I might have looked worried though I’m not sure why, and he came up and asked if I was okay.

I told him I was great but it was nice of him to stop and check.

I like it here.

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

She’s like that friend who you sometimes forget why you’re friends with–She says really annoying things sometimes and she’s always trying so hard. She’s trying so hard that everything seems forced and people notice and it’s uncomfortable. Maybe she  says something or does something like this and it embarrasses you in front of your friends. Or maybe you’re at dinner and she’s putting on her normal little show, and you like her show, you really do, but you’re also thinking to yourself that it’s still a show, that it still doesn’t seem real. That it’s fake and (there’s that word again) forced somehow. And you’re thinking, Damnit Miranda, can’t you turn it off for like five seconds so we can eat?!

But then… Ah, but then, you’ll be hanging out and she’ll say something so perfect and sweet, or she’ll make you laugh, or she’ll respond to something in a way that makes you look at the whole situation differently. That gives you a new perspective that’s meaningful and profound in a way you wouldn’t have expected from such a silly creature. And suddenly you’re reminded of how great she can be. How she really gets you in a way that other friends don’t, and maybe even can’t. That despite all her annoying tendencies–her not being able to turn it off, her theatrics, her whole shtick, and her “too-muchness”–she is actually pretty beautiful and real. And maybe it’s her too-muchness that gives her this weird power, that makes her what she is and allows her to see things and express them in ways that others can’t.

And then you smile, laugh, and love her for what she is.

Not everyone, in life or literature, is easy to love. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth it.

I pressed my lips to his ear and whispered again, It’s not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath teh ground: all these things are for you. Tehy are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. 

You always feel like you’re on the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it’s not true. Generally, people don’t like each other very much.

This is a picture of me taken in 1996. I am opening a letter from a stranger and no doubt my heart is pounding in a way that is uncalled for. I am 22 and I am just dying to know what this stranger has to say and I’m hoping it will turn my world upside down. Not that my world is so horrible, but I know it will be better upside down and understood by a stranger. It is this desire, to be transformed by understanding, that has pretty much propelled me through every single day since 1996.

She’s been in the literary news a lot lately and the articles have been kind of annoying too but I understand. She CAN be annoying. But she’s also herself. And she probably hates silly commentaries about her like this–thoughts on how she’s cute and annoying but still great.

Ha, but it kind of gives me hope for myself so too bad for her. Oh no… wait… Maybe I’M that friend! (Though I can’t imagine having that much insight.)