Melodrama alert

Not that I'm obsessed, but I can't stop listening to Jim Croce's greatest hits. My father used to play it on every family road trip, back when I was tiny and my parents were together.

I can't stop imagining what he was feeling, hearing to that album over and over while his marriage fell apart. It makes me think about all the things I thought love would be when I was small, and all the things love isn't.

I guess my dad and I learned those lessons at the same time. I was just a little younger.

The tongue bone's connected to the headbone

Today's score: one slice of banana bread with chocolate chips; four or five chocolate-covered raisins. And I finished the Ritter bar.

I'm deeply puzzled by this little "project" -- could there be a more useless (less useful) form of denial? I've not given up chocolate. I've just given up buying chocolate. A response to tiresome abundance; a resistance to being at the beck and call of every pastry shop in my hometown; a continuation of the last year's efforts to clean my home of anything not useful (e.g., frozen Thin Mints and chocolate bars more than a year old). It's hard to make a good story out of it, though things may get more exciting as supplies run low.

The subject line refers to the woodpecker's situation: tongue bone loops around to the top of the scalp, so if you pull their tongues (once dead) (them, not you), a little mohawk of feathers rises up to salute you. If you pull their tongues while alive (both of you, presumably), there's a risk of detachment. So don't.

5.10

Small climb, small victory for April 7, among a landslide of mid-size defeats.

Scavenged:

Three miniature chocolate-covered graham crackers.

One miniature gingersnap.

One chocolate-chip cookie, discarded when found with fly recumbent.

One chocolate-dipped macaroon, scarfed in wake of fly disaster.

Also ran to the workplace kitchen in response to email notice about free food, but no chocolate was on offer.

stop despra

Samuel Beckett's response to a question about his new year's resolutions and hopes, via paperpools:

resolutions colon zero stop period hopes colon zero stop beckett

Day 1: Gluten free

I didn't make it to work today, so those chocolate riches are still untapped. Score for the day: Stole a bit of gluten-free scone from the plate of my coffee date; ate the second half of a three-day-old brownie; nibbled on the leftover Ritter bar.

Too sneezy to say much more.

Living off the (chocolatey) fat of the land

I struggle with self-denial pretty much constantly and am in love with anything that makes me feel less guilty about it. Spending money on food, especially coffee and chocolate (often synonymous, in my limited coffeeshop lingo), is a particular weak spot.

Thus, the idea of living for an entire month on only the chocolate I can forage from the land. For 30 days, no new purchases of baked goods, chocolate bars, beautiful desserts from the Stumbling Goat. Note that this was not a vow to stop EATING chocolate. Just to stop BUYING it. Which I do compulsively.

How compulsively? Here's an informal inventory of chocolate on hold in my home:

Two Lindt bars with chili (Christmas gift).

Half a Green and Black's "Maya Gold" bar (came with my subscription to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, before the Ikea bar they sent, which I just threw away -- really? Ikea?).

Almost or just over one-half a Ritter dark-chocolate-and-hazelnut bar. I broke it into chunks, so I can't be sure.

Four Andes mints, origin unknown.

Three approximately one-cup servings of chocolate-chip cookie dough (frozen and, due to a butter mix-up, inedible except in emergencies).

One box of Thin Mints (also frozen).

One small loaf of banana bread with chocolate chips (frozen) (yes, frozen), about which I feel slightly guilty because it was made by a dear friend and usually I inhale the bread within a day, but this time I thought I'd be virtuous and freeze it, and now it just helps hold my gin in place.

One brownie from Simply Desserts, purchased, along with a piece of cake, after the resolution to buy no more.

Doesn't sound too bad? This is just the rejects -- most of these items have been hanging around for months, waiting for their turn in the limelight. These are the dustmice of desserts. The Jennifer Anistons among the chocolatey Angelina Jolies that I pursue daily.

Previous to making this list, my plan was to try to live off the chocolate of the land -- only desserts scavenged from workplace spreads, free samples, offerings from friends. Now that I see the inventory, I think one month may not be enough. It might take me a month just to work through the velvet.

Note that this just what I can see from my laptop at home. Gifts of chocolate have become the primary form of caretaking from friends and co-workers. Some days, small piles of the stuff gather in my office, encouraging me to choose between the guilt of eating it all and the guilt of not eating it all.

Tomorrow, an inventory from the office -- and a shocking continuation to my litany of sin.

Onward!

On writing crap

I very rarely have writer's block anymore. Occasionally at work -- when all I can think of is taglines we've used a hundred times before; the language of need can be appallingly general and repeatable. But overall it's become terribly easy for me to sit down and write something from the surface of my mind, just as I am right now.

When I try to write outside of work, which is even more rare than writer's block these days, I have also developed a certain painful facility. I used to think this was progress. I was no longer sitting and agonizing over every line, every word; I was writing! Easily! Spilling lines out onto the page!

There are a million distractions that stand between the writer and the page. Housework. Cats. Phone calls. Books ("if I read poetry for an hour, it's like I'm working"). The iPhone, god help us all. But this is a new one: the learned ability to write crap.

My heart gets up to make breakfast.
It would like bacon, but it will eat bagels.
It would like coffee, but it will take tea.
It would like juice, but it will drink water --
It would like love, but it comes back to bed with me.

One of my greatest obstacles in writing has been the evil little inner voices that read right behind my pen. Providing an immediate reflection and judgment on each word, they are not happy companions. Learning to write past those voices, I thought, would be a breakthrough.

Turns out turning off those little voices is a hindrance, not a boon. Or it has revealed a new and more serious sickness-- the way high blood pressure can mask kidney disease (obscure reference that will be understood only by those with elderly cats). Being able to write with facility makes it all too easy to write without diving deep.

Oh lord, and there's a copy of Life Studies on my bedside table ... but I'm not think of anything confessional; saints forfend. I'm think of the way that the good stories come kicking up from the muck, to be cleaned off, polished, revealed as the pearl-eyed corpse of your father or a lost and beloved childhood toy or the toothy (not toothsome) sea beast that swims in your head when the lights go out.

Yes, I'm obsessed with toothy sea beasts. Ask me sometime about my mother, her sister, and the trip to Universal Studios' Jaws attraction.

Frankly, I am no longer certain that it's worth trying to get down there. I'm a pretty happy person, all things considered. Lucky, right now, in my job, in friendship, in health. As long as I stay at the surface, all is well. And maybe that's a place I could live for good. I'm not sure why I keep coming back to the notebook, producing nothing. The occasional dream that hangs over into the day; a project at work, completed but not satisfying; a hollow feeling on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday night.

You must wonder: many people have creative talent and drive and desire in some proportion. It's rare that the proportion is just right for good work or even regular work. To take real joy only in creating -- and not have the talent or the drive to reach that point at will -- seems like a curse, at worst, and a genetic defect at the very least.

What they feel like

Chickadee
Insubstantial; lighter than the sheet you use to catch it. Hard to tell whether you've caught a bird or just a handful of air.

Crow
Now you know you have a bird, but feathers remain foremost: soft, shiny, and easily rumpled. Rarely runs, rarely struggles. Indignant afterward.

Seagull
Cat-sized and -weighted. Wings and feet are easy to hold, the head wants to snake out. The beak must be grasped firmly between your palm and fingers before the rest will be quiet. Wet job for whomever goes first.

Canada goose
Strong, heavy, stubborn, a double armful. Lies tense but still, cupped against you, until it feels you relax; then fights out with leg, neck, and wings at once. Pose with feet against your thigh, wings between your hands, while someone else manages the head. Hold with all your muscle but without squeezing.

Rehab

On the way to the center this morning, KEXP was playing an interview with a woman who runs a rehab center for chimpanzees who have been lab animals or performers. She was highly, spittingly indignant; she detailed the outrages of tooth removal for circus animals (no biting), darting for lab animals (no struggling), the suspended cage from which one (if one is a chimp) may be attacked from all sides (Foucault would be proud). Eventually I became sick and had to turn her off. The very real horror of what she was saying was overcast by her sense of affront. Animal activists have a unique talent for forgetting their audience -- which may be one that agrees, as I am inclined to, that fuzzy people are still people -- or maybe one that exceedingly does not.

This morning I moved a squirrel for the first time, and the first time I moved an animal that I could vividly imagine hurting me. Squirrel teeth are sharp, or at least I think they are. I've never been bitten by one, but I have the impression that rodents can give a good nip. This squirrel is blind, though, and he just huddled in misery and fear as I draped a towel over him, tried to find his head so I could control it, and then worked my mad yoga skills (negligible) moving the other arm around and behind to take the weight of his body. If he'd nipped me I would have been relieved.

I moved him to the new cage, and the rehabber told me I could add more greenery and it might give him minimal comfort -- the smell -- but that it probably wasn't worth it, since he couldn't even see the box we gave him to hide in. He had found it, though only managed to hide his face in it, like the famous child who thinks you can't see him if he can't see you. I found some pine and ripped it fresh from the branch. It smelled good. I hope he liked it.

The blind animals are the hardest for me. I sympathize, as my own eyes get by deceptively easy steps closer to a blur that isn't dark but definitely isn't light. And it emphasizes the ridiculous alien-abduction nature of wildlife rehabilitation. Stuffed into a box by some well-meaning incompetent, hauled off in a foul-smelling automobile, stretched on a table and palpated and injected, shoved into a cage by volunteers who barely have their learner's permits. Even more appalling if you are blind. Squirrel, Cooper's hawk; scamperer and flyer; our blind animals are just waiting to die. They can't be released. Their entire world is gone, and their last few days will be spent in abject terror and incomprehension. I would like to be with him when he's euthanized, but admitting that would demonstrate attachment and make me the last possible candidate to assist.

The rest of the day was a more cheerful and smelly kind of comedy. Seals shit A LOT, even baby seals, and when they're moved from one pool to another, the old pool must be cleared. Enter nonprofit equipment: a faltering sump pump, a broom, a hose, a writer working an extra volunteer shift. It took me two hours of sweeping, hosing, pumping, in various combinations. Scrubbing his seats sprayed watery shit all over my shirt and pants; the sump pump, whenever it lost suction, aerosolized the same solution into my face. A metaphor too close to life: the more clean water I poured in, necessary to keep the pump running, the more dilute the shit became, in an infinite regression of pool drainage. I can never shower enough.