Tuesday, November 30, 2010

He had a certain brashness to him

The end of November. It was a fine month all around, all will agree. I came closer to finding out where I'm headed, this month.

What I'm trying to say is, I've got freedom and my youth. What I'm trying to say is, I'm in a happy spot. Here's to another glorious year! [years start on December 1st, right?]

[The business with the exclamation points is really getting out of hand! I need to be careful, or I'll start using them without thinking! WITHOUT ANY FORETHOUGHT! Can you only imagine?! That would be like throwing a party and charging your friends 20 dollars to get in to the 'VIP Section'! Say it ain't so, Joe!]

Monday, November 29, 2010

No Good With Secrets

Tonight he was the master of salmon. Whirling in the small but uncramped kitchen, pasta was boiled, and fish sauteed a little too long, but with a gentle intent. Lovingly the onions went over low heat with sherry and capers, just enough care given to keep them from burning before the liquid arrived. Crackling skin gave up billows of smoke from the cast iron, but no harm was done. The sweet tangy sauce played against the bedrock fish, lapping at the edges, eroding a little, but not having its way fully.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Rupert, Destroyer of Loaves

The dog has been into the bread, again, and I'm much less angry than amused. He has a fondness for all things that people eat, but for bread especially. He sits there in the kitchen, without any shame, awkward as always, with the evidence in plain sight. Empty paper sacks, or plastic bags with three slices left, and the rest having disappeared into thin canine air. I can't help but laugh in amazement.  What goes through the mind of a dog at times like this?


By the way, check out our new blog:

http://refugeinreason.blogspot.com/

To you I'm a symbol or a monument

The pace is what frightens me.

Following people who knew half as much as they should, but twice as much as me at the time.

Acceleration is the best, when you're throwing extra fuel on the engines, and they're throwing the power right back at you, all ankles and thighs flashing, stick your tongue out as fast as you can go.

We went back there and I could remember everything, being nervous, being properly insane in youth, being entirely unready for anything; memories flashed at me through trees and down twisting paths to the river.

Monday, November 22, 2010

4 Months

Places I have lived or spent time in growing up that could partially or fully be considered my hometown:

*Boston, MA
*Ipswich, MA
*Groveland, MA
*Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
*Bamako, Mali
*West Newbury, MA
*Cannon Beach, OR
*Portland, OR
*Grenoble, France
*Medford, MA

[In approximate reverse chronological order by date of first contact]

It's a list. I'm nothing if not transient.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Out of context, floating free in time and space

I have a feeling that F. Scott Fitzgerald had the opposite problem. He had too many people that believed in him. There's a quote on the back of my book that even says “You are a great writer. Believe it, not me.” I'm getting the feeling throughout this book that Scottie [that's what his intimates call him] was given to believe that he was a great writer a little too much [this is another problem, his abuse of italics in the text]. He has too much confidence in himself as a man of letters. He believes too much in his own powers of description. He is also clearly pretty snobby about being an American expatriate in Paris, and is eager to show how much he knows about this lifestyle, much the same as Hemingway.

Monday, November 15, 2010

I guess this new fare hike means that I'll ride my bike

Aspirational Marketing

Goal:

blue leather,
back of a
chauffeured town car
to the salon
Christophe does your bangs
for a [who's counting] grand
or two

Here:

blue leather,
back of a
commuter train seat dilapidated
Girls on their way
to nothing jobs
try to dress the part
doing hair in vaguely oily
mirrored window sheen

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Get a stew goin'

I love cooking, but sometimes the prospect of all those ingredients having to be put together by just me, working against time and hungry bellies, is completely daunting. Daunting enough to make you give up. This is why I always make soups or stews.

Nothing has to be timed or perfected, or cooked just so. Everything just comes together in a big, soupy mess. The soup is the most forgiving dish known to cooks, save grilled cheese. No doubt there's an art to getting the broth to taste good (or appropriate?) and getting the vegetables to have just the right bite, but what tastes better and is so consistently easy to assemble, if not soup. If not soup, then what?

I will spare you the answer. It's soup or nothing. The joy of the warm, savory broth. The satisfaction of adding some arcane ingredient which won't actually figure in the taste, but makes you feel like an expert all the same. Soup, which nourishes our bodies and contains enough salt, when done right, to pickle our organs. Soup, the signature dish of fall, the autumnal enterprise of slightly shivering city-dwellers. It does a body good.

[Also, a good part of the conception of this post was how much I like to hear my fingers clattering on the keyboard while the words simultaneously appear, marching ahead on-screen. Strunk and White advise that you should delete or heavily edit things you write for these reasons, but they were writing before the existence of blogs. So I will have my cake and post it too.]

[Brackets are so much more entertaining than parentheses]

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Let's Talk About Feelings

What I have tried to say, on more than one occasion, and usually stumbled over or mangled, is that I want the opportunity to have a future with you. I want you in my life continuing into the future, lingering, ongoing, more than just the present. I want a chance to know you and love you for a very long time. I want time to grow with you. I want you to be with me.

Have I made myself clear?