messy, surly, full of books
back up
My darkshire email is back up. Blogger is working again. All is well.
The River Alphaios, in the form of Minnie, has whooshed through the horrible Augean stables of the papers on my table and floor. Six months of bills to be filed, poems, cat hair, junk mail, M.’s paintings… it was several filing cabinets’ worth
regret
hate… neighbors… who start…. construction…. at 8:00am…
should not have eaten pot cookie and drank margarita. fortunately, did NOT get up on karaoke stage to sing “rappers delight”, “jessie’s girl” or “walk like a man”. Or “Convoy”. Or “Besame Mucho” or Lagrimas Negras.
The Notorious Kimberly was in full force with that Jewel song and “Be my Baby”, gliding in graceful descent from the stage like a goddess with arm dramatically extended… the crowd around me melted away like magic… and a 6 foot 3 glamour queen with a pansy in her hair knelt to sing to me. Please let there be photographic evidence! Oh please!
At some point in the evening I remember saying to S. “I’m having fun, but I’d rather be reading a book. In the bathtub.” Without missing a beat she replied something like “Sex? In the bathroom? Now? Oh honey maybe not this time I’m not up to it.” Leaving me to wonder all night in a dim, befuddled way if she just pretended to mis-hear me for comic effect, or if she REALLY thought I had just invited her to have sex in the bathroom.
take a mystery number
Just spent nearly 5 hours in the DMV to get new plates. It was incredible.
Just as I was about to give up, as I had to go pick up M. at 3, this strung-out sleazy looking woman walked up to me and offered to trade her number for mine – I had 83 and she had 73, and they were going through about 6 or 7 numbers an hour. But she wanted to leave and come back. I thought for a second she was going to ask me for money for it, but then she said she saw me looking at the clock and also how I was playing with this little girl (I kept someone else’s 15 month old entertained for about an hour with some paper planes, drawings, and various stupid games). She figured how I must have to pick up my own kid from school! Well, how right she was. It was like I had won the lottery!
assassination futures, anyone?
I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS!!!
The Pentagon had listed the program in defense budget plans sent to Capitol Hill and had briefed congressional staff members about it earlier this year. A Web site had promoted the program, and the registration of up to 1,000 traders had been due to begin on Friday, with trading set to start Oct. 1.
There is nothing I can add to this. Our government is insane. A few years from now, what country is going to take me as an exile?
I’ll be ordering my PFLAG t-shirt now
M. is in the tub singing “In the Navy” with wild enthusiasm.
crucial life skills, passed on from parent to child
I can rest easy, now that I have taught M. how to twist the two halves of the cookie before pulling them apart to lick the inside.
translate THIS, fucko!
Went up to The City to the Center for Art in Translation. Their office is right under 80, for maximal earthquake fantasy fear, but it’s pretty. They need a new executive director, someone who has a lot of experience with fundraising.
On a whim I decided to go to City Lights bookstore and see if they wanted some issues of Composite. It’s somewhere in North Beach, right? Drove around SF for a while, mildly and pleasantly lost. City Lights employees do Not want to talk to anyone. They do Not want to accept any grubby little poetry magazines, despite being “pocket poets” central. Fuck ’em!
There were some 50 cent copies of a translation magazine, Osiris. I have never seen it. I wonder if they still exist?
In Black Oak bookstore around the corner I found some fabulous treasure, if dusty old pink poetry books from the Colección Austral are treasure, and they are to me. A somewhat odd little book “coplas a la muerte de su padre” by Jorge Manrique, with more footnotes than poetry. Amado Nervo. An anthology of Peruvian poetry. Browsing amongst the tiny selection of books in Spanish, I realized with a shock that I was reading with reasonable fluency. That won’t help me with Manrique, who wrote in the 15th century, or Rosalia Castro, who wrote in Galician. Doh!
The Black Oak people (I bet they were the owners) were remarkably friendly and un-hipstery, giving me the sort of friendliness discount only a sympathetic reader in a used bookstore can give to a grubby, wistful girl in a silly hat when she spends 2 hours sitting on the floor reading and then surfaces with an armload of obscurity. They also seemed happy to take the Composites, asking suddenly even friendlier questions, unlike the City Lights jerkwater suck-Ferlinghetti’s-cock hipster clerks.
When I got back to my truck, my back license plate was gone and I had a hundred dollar “your license plate is missing” ticket. Goddamn it! I wish there were some way I could blame this, too, on the guys in City Lights.
day of listening
– how they do autism therapy training session
– endless town council meeting on using recycled water on playgrounds (more about this later)
After this, you might wonder what powerful driving force motivates me today. I yearn, I lust,
for the sharpie-marker style lip ink that s. showed me!!! It is out of stock and yet I must have it. Lipstick! But without the “stick” part so that there is no grody layer of stuff on there.
Alas, I slinked out of the council meeting at 11am, ashamed that I had never been to one before, unable to wait any longer for my 3 minutes to speak.
On Sunday, M. followed me around demanding something I didn’t quite understand. It finally resolved to “Mama, please wear that skirt on your butt!” This at least parsed as English but I didn’t get it until he handed me the apron and explained that I had to pretend to be Howdy, the storekeeper hamster.
Post-blogathonic stupor
Well, that was fun and stimulating. I feel all healthy and clean and sane now, as if the ship’s doctor had prescribed me a black draught and a blue pill for my mind.
Later today I will go back and add some links, internal and external, where appropriate.
That place where whump made a cameo is making me laugh, now that I look at it again. He has just brought us coffee and sandwiches and a copy of “Read or Die“, and we are about to play Carcasonne Hunter Gatherer.
I heard an earful about skarat’s rpg where he mixed his cartoon novel world and all its pop culture and reality. The players played themselves, souped up a bit. Aliens had sold some hi tech bombs and the Earth destroyed itself with, I dunno, cobalt planet buster bombs? Other aliens come back and realize the Earth’s former pop culture is a fabulous resource for export, so they resurrect everyone. Having no way to discern between fictional, pop culture, and people, they resurrect everyone, so you might be on the subway in the planet-wide city and run into Prince and the Revolution with big submachine guns.
[game playing interlude]
La la la, I rule, go, me, for I have won Carcasonne with 146 points. It is true, Hunter Gatherer is more balanced than the first version. The huts and river systems are way better than the boring old roads.
Cannot wait to watch Read or Die, which J. has been telling me to watch – it’s an anime movie about a librarian girl with a lot of books and incredible superpowers.
Dreams again
Wow, I just went back and read the first post of this morning. I had completely forgotten that dream. Now I remember it again, like magic.
Tomorrow or whenever I wake up and my wrists work again, I will go mark up links and interlinks and fix any typos, but no editing otherwise.
That’s that! I’m not waiting for the magic 600 to roll round.