it wasn't a beret, it was a cloche, and it was really more scarlet than raspberry

So in my dream last night, I was going for an interview to be Prince's personal assistant. We met at his little house. Dave came with me. I was wearing a snappy little vintage red wool coat and hat duo, a sixties sort of number. Prince came bounding out his front door and gave my outfit the once-over. He loved it! He grabbed my hand and we skipped inside with Dave trailing behind us.

The interview was in Prince's bedroom. Prince and I chatted for a second and then Dave came into the room. He didn't seem too pleased that the interview was going to be taking place in Prince's bedroom, but he tried to sort of make nice with Prince. He saw some scrapes on Prince's knee and gave him some advice about bicycle safety. Prince, on the other hand, didn't seem too pleased that my husband was taking place in his bedroom, so he was frankly quite chilly about the bicycle safety advice. Dave left us alone to conduct the interview, and Prince made an insulting comment to the effect that Dave was overly righteous or something. I said, that's my husband! You can't say things like that about him! This interview is over!

But it wasn't over. I was getting sucked into the black hole of Prince's sexy magnetism.




Before I knew what was happening, Prince started working some sexy jujitsu on me. He had the kind of arcane tricks you just knew Prince would have! As soon as Prince planted a teeny tiny kiss on my clavicle, I was like, uh-oh. I'm going to have to go on with this interview. I'll just go on with this interview for like five more minutes. And then Prince started talking into my shoulder blade in a deep, soft voice. And I was like, the shoulder blade! We've all been overlooking the shoulder blade as very prime erotic territory! You just talk into it! Who knew?? I'm going to go on with this interview for one more minute. But by now I had overly emboldened Prince, and he was pulling out some showstoppers. I knew we must cut this interview short or my marriage would be hosed.

I summoned all of my strength and with some difficulty I pulled myself out of the bedroom of Prince. Soon thereafter I woke up.

Dave was a trooper. And Prince and I must never meet.

max fischer didn't turn out well

Oh, man. This loud, wrongly genteel drunken fellow in a tuxedo just knocked on our door and asked Dave to help push his car into a driveway. He'd left his lights on. Much retardedness ensued*, involving Tuxedo yelling at an off-duty cop** who told him that he wouldn't be driving anywhere tonight.

*including Tuxedo telling us we have a beautiful lawn. Oh, Tuxedo. You can say many things about our lawn, like "Why don't you cut it?" or "You must love dandelions", but you can't say it's beautiful.

**He accused the cop of being a serial killer and demanded to see his license number.

But my favorite part was when Dave left him. Apparently, Tuxedo said, "I'm the star of a play, and I'm going to bring some tickets by for you and your wife!"

I love I'm the star of a play!

Next time I'm in a play, that's how I'm going to tell people about it. With verve like that.

Right now, the Tuxedo's out on the street yelling HELP! HELP! to passing cars, trying to get a jump so he can drive on ill-advisedly out into the night. I bet those cars would stop if they knew he was the star of a play!

Now he's fallen asleep in his car. Sleep well, Hamlet. Don't go anywhere.

hot for baby buddhas

 

what it says where you can't read it

In this leftover picture from childbirth class, I'm saying:

"My shoulder is above my ear."

lost at sea

Dave just got this unbelievable fat poetry anthology called Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. It's all poets born after 1960 who have published three or fewer books. Hot! Hot hot!

Here's a poem that's apropos for us these days, by Patty Seyburn:

First Bookshelf

There is a duck lost at sea when
his crate breaks after the boat is
destroyed. Tossed, overturned,
claimed and buoyed by a frigid
ocean, he observes the moon and
stars, knows loneliness, isolation
and lack of purpose. He wonders
if he'll find a home. There is a
monkey who makes countless,
thoughtless errors and manages
to redeem himself with friendly,
anonymous counsel. He makes
great messes and never seems
to gain an awareness of what
others endure on his behalf. He
is not held accountable for his
mistakes. A royal elephant has
appropriate adventures and an
extended family. A huge dog
with morals means well but his
size often inhibits his ability to
reach his goals. He frequently
learns to compensate for his errs
by giving rides, providing shelter,
protecting the meek. There is a
mouse with balletic grace, while
her tiny cousin has nothing but luck
and the charm of the weak: you
can't choose your family. There is
another mouse, crudely drawn in
primary colors, whose exploits are,
at best, prosaic. She keeps company
with an elephant, an alligator, and
a female of ambiguous species.
She drives a bus, cleans house,
bakes gingerbread, takes a bath,
attends the fair. She is middle class.
And yet another mouse, with many
paid friends and a girlfriend, sister
or cousin, also paid. They used to
keep silent but have, of late, learned
language, which has increased their
popularity but drained the pathos
from their exploits. A company of
pigs, an obdurate spider, a ravenous
caterpillar that endures change and
sheep: lost, defiant, naked. The duck
story is somewhat true except that
we are given the duck's perspective,
which must be questioned, as we have
no small stake in believing that we
are the only ones who understand
that we exist, with little notion of why.

Finn sometimes will cry out briefly in his sleep, and I wonder if he's having a bad dream. I hate the idea. He's too little for a bad dream. And what would his bad dream be? Does it have to do with daily, earthly baby concerns? Does he dream he's stuck in a terry cloth sleeper soaked in baby cheese? Does he dream that he's thirsty for milk and facing a frustrating empty breast? Or does he have dreams of some complicated, more adult-feeling before-life? Does he miss where he came from? Does he have friends he left behind, wherever he was? Does he dream of being large and articulate and powerful, or does he dream about some former articulate glory? The little cry is so brief, but so pained. It rips pieces off of my heart and eats them.

oh my god bear with me

Picasa, I tell you! It's the joy. You can do all these things with your pictures. This is like quilting! (Yes, for those who can only make but the simplest quilts. It's not like quilting if you're one of those hotshot Devil-Went-Down-To-Georgia-Not-With-Fiddles-But-With-Sewing sorts of quiltmakers. It's like quilting if you can only sew squares together.)

These are all blog pictures I made. Some of you will be like, YEAH. I'VE SEEN THOSE. MOVE ON. And I will. But I want to point out that the picture that's second up from the bottom on the second-to-right-hand column is a picture I worked hard on for an entry about my childbirth class that Blogger wouldn't post. (The picture, that is. The entry posted. Fffff.) So, look at it. LOOK AT IT! That's what it was like in there that first day when I couldn't get comfortable for the relaxation exercise. Oh, Christ! Lord! It feels so good to finally get it out there. That's what it was LIKE.

Thank you. No more collages for at least...two days.





























A day.

cause and effect

 

mornings with quinn

Some guy that's on a poetry forum with Dave sent him a message asking him how things were going with Quinn.

Things with Quinn are going great.

This morning I was holding him in a pillow in my lap, sitting him up so we could be face to face. He'd scratched his face up because I hadn't had the balls to cut his nails in a while. One of his scratches is right around where his third eye would be, giving him a vaguely Hindu look. And he looked so wise this morning, I felt like I was holding a tiny teacher in my lap. We had a conversation. He was very serious with me - Finn is often very serious with me, when we talk.

It's sort of odd, referring to him as Finn. We almost never call him Finn. We refer to him as:

*Muffin
*Muffins McGee
*The Squizzler
*Mr. Squizzles
*The Buddy (as in, "Will you look after the buddy for a minute while I run to the bathroom?")
*Cutes McGoots
*Muggy Wuggins
*Lovey Buggy
*Mr. Fartybottom

Et cetera, ad infinitum.

It's all dignity, all the time around here.

So we were having a conversation this morning, wherein he would make a noise and I would say something encouraging like, "Tell me more!" or "You don't say!" or "Wow! And what else?" or "I'm listening!"

And then it occurred to me that I wasn't really listening. I was just pausing. So I tried to really, seriously listen. Listen underneath his face, his head, his body, underneath us in the room. It was like trying to stay underwater while wearing a suit of floaties. I kept bobbing up to the surface, where I can't really hear him. I feel like there's a place underneath us where if I can stay down there long enough, I can hear all of his meaning without the bother of the English language getting in the way.

So I bobbed around up there and tried to be heavy and sink into the silence while I waited for him to speak. His face shifted from regular baby to something like a world-weary Tibetan, and he offered up the word "bllrrr" in a cushion of bubbles.

I wish I knew what he meant.

******

Finn was in his Moses basket this morning wrapped up in his white swaddle blanket. Dave looked down at him and said, "We should scoot him over to one side and fill up the rest of the basket with Red Robin fries." He was too right. He totally looked like an order of Finn and chips waiting to be completed.

******

In other news, my feet keep slipping around underneath me today. I think somebody snuck in last night and replaced our floors with an ice rink or a raked stage.

******

Also, just you wait. I'm going to take pictures and show you the hilarious thing Dave does with Finn. I hope its hilarity translates! It might not. But it might! But it'll only happen if stupid Blogger lets me post a goddamn photo*.

*Oh, you know what I'm referring to, Blogger.

what i got for my birthday forever

25 story ideas have come here to die

I found this list in a closet we cleaned out the other day. Apparently, years ago I wanted to write a story. I didn't know how to write a story, or what one might be about. So I made a list of things I could write a story about.

Let me preface this by saying, I WILL NEVER WRITE A STORY. I am not made to be able to write a story. I can tell you things that have actually happened to me, those kinds of stories. But I can't make up a story. I can't write a play, either, with characters. I've thought about it. This is the best play I could write, right here:

A: Hello.
B: Hi.
A: What's that you're doing there?
B: Eating toast.
A: I'm mad at you.
B: Well, I'm mad at you.

(pause)

A: I don't forgive you.
B: I don't forgive you, either.

The End

Isn't that great? It has conflict. Now, here's the list of story ideas I found:

1. a house burns down
2. a family moves away
3. a mayor is elected
4. somebody is killed for revenge
5. a family explodes*
6. a cluster of people explodes*
7. a cluster of disparate people are bound by something
8. a child is born, grows up, decides what it will be
9. a person becomes psychic
10. Two people buy a house together. They are the same. Then they find they are different. The house is a person, too. The house goes with one person. Who does it go with? They find out and the other one leaves.
11. a young woman moves to a new city. She meets what appear to be very safe people. Then they are revealed to be dangerous. Then she meets what appear to be very safe people. Then they are revealed to actually be safe.
12. a young woman is trapped in her old city. The people don't want her to leave. They devise ways to keep her there. They play upon her compassion. She finally figures it out that they are just playing a game. She breaks free and leaves.
13. a young woman who doesn't know something goes to a teacher and learns it
14. a young man hypnotizes a young woman, or a young woman hypnotizes a young man, a sensitive creature. The young man falls in love with the hypnotist and the hypnotist falls in love with the young man. Then the young woman has to leave and the young man is hypnotized and fixated and the spell goes awry and he self-destructs. The young woman is then hypnotized by an older man.
15. A very small girl discovers that something horrible is happening in her home in the memory of a young woman who is discovering that something horrible is happening in her home. As she discovers the horrible thing that is happening, she remembers what happened before. The thing she remembers helps her fix the thing which is happening now.
16. A young boy and a young girl who live next door to each other each want to trade families and live in the family of the other one, which seen through windows and visits seems very exotic. Then, one of them actually goes to live with the other one. One of several possibilities happens. One, they discover they like their own home better. Two, they discover they like this home better. Three, something happens to their original family. Maybe there is an earthquake and their home falls down. Then they have to stay with this family.
17. An earthquake happens. While a young woman is trapped in the rubble in the ground, she remembers lots of different things from her life. Also, she becomes psychic. This was starting to happen before the earthquake. But then it happens for sure. She knows things under there, and also, voices talk to her. She either dies, psychic, or she survives, and she has lost her family, and she is now the lone member of her strict family, and she is now beholden to no one and psychic.
18. a plague is sweeping through a city, a big city. The plague is that nobody knows that they were born and they will die and that there is anything beyond this life. They think they were always here and that they will always be here. Nobody knows that they are going to die. It is like the Titanic, only no one knows it is sinking. One person was gone while the plague struck, so it didn't get him. Now he's come back. He is able to convince one person that this is true by taking her on a trip somewhere where people die. So the two of them escape together and find solace in each other.
19. a girl becomes a woman in a crisis. What is a girl and what is a woman?
20. a young man makes a painting, he paints a woman that he loves. He is in love with an older woman. They are having an affair. By the time he finishes the painting, he is not in love with her. You can see it in the painting, it's changed.
21. a young man and a young woman live in a place where you're not allowed to go above ground during the day. It's like Plato's cave, only they know about the opening. It's just forbidden. They make a plan and go above ground during the day.
22. a man and woman are married. They both have affairs, each with the secret dream opposite sex version of themselves, fulfilling some forbidden wish of theirs, like the man has an affair with someone very successful and crisp and the woman has an affair with a criminal. But the criminal and the successful person are both that way in a petty way, not a grand way. The man and woman fall back in love with each other.
23. a woman has three children. Two of them will fail and one of them will succeed. But you can't tell who it will be or why, or whether she will know who succeeded and who failed. And maybe they won't know which of them succeeded and which failed. One will succeed, one will fail and the other will know which is which. So the one who knows, will fail, but know it. The other will succeed but not know it and the other will fail but not know it. Who is the success?
24. a woman gets to know another woman who is difficult to get to know. They become friends. Then it's clear that the first woman is harder to get to know than the one that you thought was hard to get to know. One is softer on the outside and one is softer on the inside.
25. a young man has an amazing sense of smell. He can smell what happened in a room. He's had this ability since he was a little boy. So he took up smoking so he wouldn't have to smell everything, and then his sense of smell dulled, which he liked. But then he takes too much Ecstasy and then he has to quit smoking, and it starts again that he can smell everything that happened. He finds a way to put it to use.

*I didn't mean that they literally explode. I meant that they blow apart emotionally and then geographically.

There. There they are. What might have been. I could have been a contender. Alas.