Notes from the Land of Lost Content

Melodrama alert

2009-06-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-08T22:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-08T12:50:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-06T21:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-05T20:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-12-07T11:06:00.001-08:00

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

2008-10-14T19:58:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-09T20:02:00.001-07:00

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.

Making three wishes (without unwelcome consequences)

2008-01-30T20:44:00.001-08:00

1. An understanding of how to be happy.
2. The ability to act on that understanding.
3. The ability to convey both to others.

I-Ching in Se Sa Ket

2006-12-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

How can I be less unhappy?

1. Wishes will soon be fulfilled, support received, plans accomplished. Better not rush. Family enjoyable, Patient recovering. Lost persons will be found. Good lucks gradually approaching. Discovering mate who could become a good match.

Looks like my bases are covered.

Also.

2006-12-12T03:10:00.000-08:00

They just brought me ketchup with my pizza.

From a balcony in Bangkok.

2006-12-12T02:58:00.000-08:00

Tum was a monk, and a singer, as holy men used to be, and one of the best. Because of his skill at making songs, he traveled often from his monastery.

One day coming into town on such a request, he saw Teau – a girl as beautiful as he was skilled. He walked back to the monastery without his heart and with heavy feet.

Tum found excuses to visit again and again, but Teau had entered the sacred period at the end of girlhood, in which women-to-be spend three months in solitude, out of the eye of the sun and the world. Still Teau sent her handkerchief as a sign.

Tum went back once more to his monastery, to beg the head of his order for permission to leave. But he could not win leave to go.

And now Teau came out of her solitary time, and her mother arranged for her a marriage to the town’s richest man.

The custom then was for the girl to go to the king to win his blessing. Because of her beauty, the king too loved Teau, and for many days he kept her there. But he saw that she was sad and only wept. When he heard the reason, he sent for Tum.

In a fury, Teau’s mother called her home and the wedding moved forward. Tum, at the king’s urging, arrived at the town just in time – to find the rich husband-to-be waiting for him. He was taken to a deserted field and slaughtered.

Teau followed him, using a knife in her own hand, within a day.

This story is told by Cambodian parents to their teenagers, with the moral “the cake cannot be bigger the scale” – or, “don’t get too big for your britches."

Linger

2006-11-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's clothes smell like I spent all night in a bar where everyone was smoking turkey.

Night of the Drosophila

2006-11-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

On Monday night, I had a few fruit flies. I disposed of the offending banana and took out the garbage and forgot about it.

On Tuesday night, my "few fruit flies" had blossomed into "mighty fruit fly swarm." All over the cupboards. All over the walls. All over my grandfather's crazy bullfighter picture. Not acceptable.

I spent the evening researching online -- and then built a few beta version fruit fly traps. This morning, I assisted two jars full of tiny, red-eyed, crawling monsters out to the garbage. Recreated the most effective trap for the stragglers. Hoped I wasn't selecting for the flies too smart to be trapped, which will now breed and soon be re-sorting my books and CDs to their own tastes, making it impossible for me to find anything. Do fruit flies make good cat-sitters?

All night, I had guilty dreams about small animals and insects I've killed, inadvertently or with intention. With occasional bouts of wakeful skin crawling.

How to win a turf war with the best lab subjects ever:

1. Acquire a jar, taller than it is wide. My favorite so far has been the Trader Joe's salsa jar -- about as tall as my hand is long and fairly narrow.

2. Put one tablespoon of vinegar (apple cider vinegar recommended) in the bottom of the jar. Add water until there's about an inch of liquid.

3. Drop in some fruit -- banana is the classic.

4. Make a paper funnel for the top. This is the only tricky part: the hole at the bottom of the funnel should be about half an inch, and when you drop it into the jar, the base of the funnel should be about two inches above the fruit/water. So you may have test a couple of times before you tape. The idea is that the base of the funnel is close enough to the fruit and wide enough that the odor can easily escape -- but far enough and small enough that the fruit flies have to really focus to get out. Fruit flies don't focus very well. Or fly in straight lines.

5. Tape the funnel to the top of the jar. Tape all around the edge of the jar, so there's no space for them to creep through. They're going to fly right up between the outside of the funnel and the inside of the jar, so you're blocking their main hope of exit.

6. Set the jar wherever the swarm is mightiest. Wait.

7. Change the jar whenever you can't stand to look at it any more -- and keep using it for a few days after the flies are gone, in case there's another hatching cycle lying in wait.

Superheroes.

2006-11-14T14:53:00.000-08:00

I have conquered the limitations of linear time and economics -- but am using my powers only to make the work day infinitely long and my paycheck infinitely small.

Greetings, ginger ale.

2006-11-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

Girl drama: the female tendency to expand the smallest details into a galaxy of significance and possibility. The world hangs on a word. Poetic, really. Questions like "what should I wear" aren't mere vanity; the crossroads of an entire future are in the choice between jeans and a dress. Play it safe in clothes your brother would wear? Or look pretty and tip your hand? The ramifications cycle as mercilessly as Vizzini's dissertation on which cup holds the iocane.

We're crazy, we are. Universes unfold from the tone of an email, the look on a face, the turn of a phrase. Everything is out of proportion. And yet -- women, most often, are the keepers of relationships. We maintain, watch, repair. Isn't it our job to be vigilant?

The bad news for us is that men are oblivious to most of the questions that fascinate us for hours. We'll kill bottles of wine chasing down a shade of meaning that doesn't exist anywhere but our heads. Meanwhile, great novels get written by our better halves, who trust us to let them know when it's time for bed.

But it's in this insane and magical world that women fall in love. Staying out of the fray means developing such a thick skin that flirtation is as dry as a lecture, and passes go right past. Some of the most datable women I know are so sensitive that everything is a pass to them, even a simple "hello."

I was walking with a friend this summer past a couple of men playing football. When we were about two feet away from one of them, he tossed the ball and hit me right in the chest with it. I gave it, and then him, a scathing look and then said "Pardon me" in my most schoolteacherish tone.

My friend started laughing, picked the ball up, and tossed it back to him. With a look of relief, he said "well, at least someone's willing to play with me." Score: Me zero. Pass missed. Ball dropped. But to pick the ball up -- that meant creating a connection that probably wasn't worth the effort. Not to mention the risk that we were just walking in the way ... looking ridiculous. Girl drama is all about looking ridiculous.

I need a version of Westley's iocane tolerance regimen, so that I can swallow girl drama without dying laughing.

And I need to know what to wear tomorrow.

Torn

2006-10-18T22:15:00.000-07:00

Damn it all to hell. It's one thing to be drunk and to tear apart friendships, romances, blood ties. It's another to rip the jacket of an innocent book. No invisible mending can repair it; the torn cover reproaches endlessly: "you were careless. you guarded not. you protected not that which you valued." The words inside are forever the words of the broken spine, the foxed edging, the endleaf signed "To Mildred, knowing you will never read": Good but never fine. Loved but never treasured. The book unbound, with no rebinding possible. Take care, reader. Some things cannot be undone.

One for the road

2006-09-19T22:31:00.000-07:00

I saw Jack Despra last night, at the Kingfish Cafe. Didn't say hello, of course. Despra was mean once, and he could be mean again easy -- the kind of guy who wouldn't bother to kick a puppy if he could kill its mother. Oh, it's not that he enjoyed it. It's just that he saw the world a certain way, and he took steps to make what is closer to what he thought should be. Just like any do-gooder would, but in the other direction.

He looked the same as always. Tall, one of those in-between builds that still says I could break you. Black jacket, as always. White shirt with the little priest collar. Grey hair and grey eyes without the wrinkles to back 'em up.

At a time like that, I think gin is the best solution. Something to hide behind -- something to keep the tongue busy so it doesn't say anything you'll regret. Something to help you forget what came before and, later, what comes after.

Shopping lists

2006-09-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

In front of the Safeway on 15th and Market there's a gate and two bright, bright lights -- really in front of the Safeway parking lot, so in front of a great dark space of silence, inert but full of potential harm -- a gate and two bright lights that shine down, slightly cockeyed, as if you could walk through them. You cannot. The gate is shut, just a prop for the sign that during the day says "Safeway" and at night says nothing.

There's a woman who sits at a small card table under the lights, resting on a crate that's attached to the same sort of handle and wheels that make carryon luggage work. Or did, before, when there was carryon. She sits on the crate, glowing white in the fierce glare, with a blanket draped over her head and around her face. It's already fall in Seattle, which means it's already winter.

She keeps a book in front of her, and a notebook next to it, and she reads in one and writes in the other. She must choose the spot for the lighting, as abominably direct as it is. Imagine the Nevada desert at noon, without the softness. What do they call those lights? Not Noah's arc lights, but maybe sodium lamps -- pillars of their community, darlings of the righteous.

She is the judge before the void, inscribing sins from out our tangled desires and fears onto clean, blank pages, where they are unobscured and unaswerable.

I like to go around. I'm afraid if I went through the gates -- which you can't go through -- I might not come out in the parking lot. Or I might, but in a lot of a very different sort. Either way, cake would no longer be my destination, and unambitious as it sounds, I'm pretty happy with cake most of the time.

Start saving.

2006-08-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

"Space tourism has been been on the launching pad for years, and now, with the backing of Richard Branson, it may finally take flight. Branson's Virgin Group has formed Virgin Galactic with plans to offer suborbital flights into space starting in late 2008 or early 2009. Virgin Galactic has ordered 6 spacecraft based on Burt Rutan's groundbreaking SpaceShipOne design. The first space tourists will undergo 3 days of training in the New Mexico desert and then board a 6 passenger Virgin Galactic spacecraft for a 2 hour flight that will reach 75 miles above the earth. The cost? About $200,000 per person."

Mr. Housman

2006-08-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Into my heart a killing wind
From yon far country blows.
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain --
Those happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.