Spring has sprung

Spring is full of light. Green grass. Budding trees. Warm air. Hazy evenings. The look of the National Mall with people strewn everywhere in crazy quilt patterns. Coming together. Rolling down roads with no friction on your bike wheels. Eating outside in the pleasant breeze. The feeling that everything getting better every day. The music of the new season.

Benito Juarez's Birthday

206 years for him, 2 years for us. Better now than ever before. Enough said.

They say california is a recipe for a black hole

I have been on a serious Rilo Kiley kick for at least a week. Blame it on cranberry sauce, which I was making last Wednesday, and it was lovely, had the house to myself all day and just listened to tons of music and cooked odds and ends of supplemental Thanksgiving foods. I love those days, maybe once a month. Silence and solitude and making something out of nothing. Insofar as there is stress in my life, these are the days when it is released, when you might say I channel and release tension from my shoulders into the food I make.

As for Rilo Kiley, they are everything. Sweet, cutting, country, rock, peerless lyrics, great music. Three Rilo Kiley songs:

Jenny, You're Barely Alive

My Slumbering Heart

Portions for Foxes

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.

Windwhistle sentences, Part One

*Martin wished she had given advance notice of her visit, so that he could have made his expectations far too high to meet.

*The crown of the rock was encumbered by low clouds and a crowd of puffins.

*He took his frigid feet as a sign he had long overstayed his welcome in the shady nook.

*Caressed by the ever-present breeze, his feet carried him to places he could not have expected, even as he wished he had.

*The refrigerator laid ice cubes four at a time, and Mary grew tired of the private joke she replayed in her mind when they fell, clattering.

*He wondered fruitlessly if her claim that it was different this time around was only a feint, though he knew it to be genuine.

An afternoon spent laughing

-We'll start with a quotation of one of Barthes' parenthetical references which struck me:

(A squeeze of the hand -- enormous documentation -- a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest -- this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)

This is from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, published in 1978. It's an amazing book. It describes in minute detail all the sensations of being in love, simultaneously from a detached philosophical perspective and from the perspective of one who has been in love. Barthes has been a lover, but is viewing love in a cold, dispassionate, academic manner. The juxtaposition of the two within the book is fascinating.

-The way it feels to wake up an hour before the real post-time, and put a pillow over your head, with utmost confidence that you'll be able to get back to sleep. So much confidence that you don't know you have confidence in it; you experience it as knowing you'll get back to sleep, as a fact. How many things can we really know with this kind of certainty? These moments are valuable when they happen, because they are so rare.

-Feeling of waking up in a cluttered, dirty apartment, wondering mostly why? Why bother with all this again? This feeling had passed by the time I was showered and getting dressed, but I remembered the panic there was in it. Not getting anywhere is what it felt like. This coffee cup I left on the corner of my desk was there when I went to bed last night, it is still here this morning; Nothing ever changes, nothing I do means anything. I don't know why the feeling passed so quickly but I was happy to let it go. Something in the bustle and work of getting dressed and ready to leave felt significant enough to reassure my nervous heart.

-Heaven help me, but the best thing I did yesterday was to let myself pass out at 11. I always wake up too early on Saturday anyways. This time I was prepared, though. Woke up at 6:30 feeling well rested, and I thought it had to be about 10 until I looked at the clock. Went back to sleep until 7:45, when I woke up with about 8 and a half hours of sleep under my belt (It's only 11:30 right now, and I've been up for four hours. What a lark!). It felt great, and it makes for a day of limitless potential, which I will now proceed to squander.

-Emptiness of the train seat that was full a minute before. Now, sun shines freely through a window that had been obstructed by the face of a stranger. She is gone now, to God knows where. I'm almost sad to see her seat unfilled. I had nothing to do with her, why do I grieve her absence? Is it that any trace of a loss hurts us as humans? Was it the way the light fell, that it just looked sad? I don't know, but it hurt me that she was gone. Human emotions are baffling.

[semi-appropriate lyrics that I was thinking about on the train while pondering the above incident:]

The person across from me, sitting in her train seat, reminded me of you.

And I looked out, past her cheeks, through the glass light conduit. The sun had sunk, disappeared into New Jersey; Oh why don't they have phones on these things?

What can I do? I'm stuck thinking about you.

Did you know my sweet, yeah that I once took the liberty of watching you in your sleep?

Shining steel, tempered in the fire

Truths (subject to debate)

=Stop trying to make me care about college baseball, ESPN, I continue to not give a rat's ass. There is just no more room in my brain for caring about more and more obscure and meaningless sports. Clearly your business plan involves expanding forever ad infinitum, but I cannot be bothered to care about the College World Series and the "Road to Omaha". I mean, come on, they use metal bats. What is this, Little League?

="There's laughs and fun up where the conversation flows". I used to think about this song in a completely different way, in a wishful thinking kind of fashion. It's different now.

=You can't make coffee strong enough for me. I will not fall in line.

=Obviously everything will be fine. Obviously. Why can't I remember this, though? When I need it most, I forget it.

=I bought two CDs yesterday at Newbury Comics. Jeff Buckley and Saturday Looks Good To Me. Does that make me anachronistic?

=A place where the temperature is forever lingering between 65 and 85 degrees F with a cool breeze whenever you need it. This would be a lovely place, a place I would gladly call my home.

=There are a lot of bookstores in Metro Boston. A ton. It's sad when one closes, but I think we're dealing with an embarrassment of riches here, really.

=Haven't you ever wanted to cry, just to get rid of it? Happens from time to time, and it would be nice to be able to cue it up and cry at will. I'm not ashamed to say that it really works. It's a concentrated flush of emotions leaving you all at once, and it feels great when it's over.

=Dirty Old Town. The Pogues. It is beyond lovely. Give it a chance, in spite of the bad teeth on display in the video. The note of defiance is important, otherwise the song would dissolve into gooey sentimentality.

=Bullet points make things easier, but they feel like a cop-out.

=Thanks for the kind blog words, JD. I wish my attention span was long enough to write the nice long-form posts like yours.

=Reading, how important it is. Don't stop reading! Television is fun, but it's mostly junk food. Feed your brain with books.

Whoop, Jug! I love thee

These thoughts gave me comfort just now:

-There'll always be more plantains to cook.

-You can always just go for a run.

-Life will always go on.

-I won't be 48 for another 24 years.

Peg

Right now,
I can barely tell if I'm sleepin' or awake.
In a little while
It'll be the morning.

You won't remember bein' lost
In the after-hours,
Take my number down
Write it on your hand
Call me in the morning.

Which of these worlds is going to find you?
Is gonna remind you what you have to do
And why do you feel that you're being lied to?
Why don't you feel like anything new?

Peg,
It's almost winter time,
Is it snowing where you are?
Wait another hour,
It'll be the morning.

-Lyrics: Saturday Looks Good to Me
Transcription: Me

Better call the taxidermist

"The House of sticks and stones"

you can't sing to save your life

Kinds of Port in my liquor cabinet: 4

Kinds of Bourbon in my liquor cabinet: 2


We are lacking in Bourbon.