Oodalolly!

joshua in bloom

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:17:28 -0700

Camping was beautiful. I’m going to do that a lot more in my life. I’m also, come hell...

This Is Me In A Tree.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:25 -0700

This Is Me In A Tree.

things that are embarassing

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:47:14 -0700

First panic attack in a while; I’m trying to come down from it at the moment, so don’t...

Just made this. (Photo’s not mine.) Tofu is essentially my...

Sun, 26 May 2013 21:03:42 -0700

Just made this. (Photo’s not mine.) Tofu is essentially my lifeline, but I’m getting a bit bored with the few ways I know how to make it. This used a new technique and only required things I already had at home. Delicious, spicy, satisfying.

Here’s the recipe.

theparisreview: David Bowes, Six American Days and One...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:00:41 -0700

theparisreview:

David Bowes, Six American Days and One Night

Saving for later research. These are gorgeous.

"As a woman, people are going to ask you to write the kind of insipid shit they would never in a..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:12:27 -0700

“As a woman, people are going to ask you to write the kind of insipid shit they would never in...

It’s funny. I eat really healthy (when I’m not at...

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:08:00 -0700

It’s funny. I eat really healthy (when I’m not at work where there are snacks), but I don’t think I do it totally by choice.

Sautéed vegetables are 1.) the only things that don’t give me heartburn, and 2.) the only things I know how to cook. I eat so. many. vegetables. I really should investigate the other food groups.

Tonight: the above + lentils (my other staple). All of these veggies were free / leftovers from a work event. Cookin’ that shit UP.

R., You truly are, and will always be, one of my favorite...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:07:19 -0700

R.,

You truly are, and will always be, one of my favorite writers.

Please, please never stop.

wordsfornakedpeople:

Open Letters to Random Followers, #1

Dear Dani, you’re the only person I know to have made it out of the Midwest alive, and one day you’re going to have to tell me how you did it, preferably in a bar somewhere out west, or east even—anywhere, really, with some kind of coast. It’s a sort of homesickness, I think, but grandfathered, a genetic memory reminding us that nobody should be this far from the water. And yet when it rains all day and the river is rising I can still see myself growing up here, and instead of dreaming of midnight cities and silvery highways curling like cigarette smoke I’d be content with the feel of old land, a bay’s spine rolling beneath me as I ride the perimeter of a retired lumber magnate’s property, checking the tension of the fences. But we can leave the shiny bits of ourselves anywhere, and after having traveled so far and long I’ve spread myself out to the threshold of the insubstantial, with nothing left but the days of my life to leave behind; when you’ve rendered yourself so vulnerable, you can fall in love with a sudden wind, broken sticks indicating the recent passage of deer.

Say hello to Koreatown for me, to the stage and the poetry battles, to your actor friends working in the restaurants and shit bars selling obscenely expensive alcoholic disgraces to the natives. Find a religion that can take credit for the mild winters, fall to your knees. Never has a winter come so close to killing me. In Michigan my car broke down in the middle of a tunnel with snowdrifts three- or four-feet high blocking both ends; in Bariloche a storm sent a telephone pole crashing through the window of my hostel room; it was only ever here where I looked at the sky trembling over the dead trees and sincerely believed that the gray days—within and without—would never end, and the only way out was with a last viewing of Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep and a heart full of Lorazepam and grace.

Then it’s spring and the dogwoods are budding all along the mountain roads, and I’m driving through violet country slow as possible, willing everything to last last lastlastlast. Last, the wormwood. Last, the bend of the river through the fields. But exiled though I am in ways where even the desert failed, I can’t help but feel like my anxieties have finally spilled over and infected the rest of the country. Watch for it, Dani: The Brothers Tsarnaev will be the most remembered of America’s novels, a magnum opus of the modern Prometheus regarded as enigmatic apocrypha in some future place where the sedative of time has muddied the water, blurred the line between content and context. The news comes on during my drive home, some new school shooting, some other bombing, and it feels like we’re determined to fulfill the prophecies ourselves, having grown so tired of waiting on the one that finally carries everything away, and I want to say fuck the scenery and just haul ass, make it home in record time to hold tight the ones I love and tell them that everything is going to be all right. But spread out as you all are, that’s a drive that would take me around the world, and none of you have ever wanted or needed me half as much as I wanted or needed or wanted to be needed in return.

I’m rambling. Sorry. You asked me once what it is I’m after and I had no good answer for you then, but in this endlessly unfolding now I suppose I’m searching for a validation of that fear, a reason to be frightened all the time, for something to lose.

When the center no longer holds and the conflicts of the world slip out of the dark corners where we’ve placed and forgotten them, when the war finally reaches our shores—not isolated events of seemingly senseless violence but a final vengeful accounting of our imperialism for which there is no Nuremberg defense, no tenable defaulting to Arendt’s banality of evil—it’s the tired Minuteman thinking of his children and his long-haired lover who will be our bravest, ablest defender. And however his motives are judged by whatever civilization and its attendant morals that survive us, the morals and lessons of our age tell me that, when there is nothing greater than yourself on the line, bravery is little more than a smooth-faced boy with a bomb or a gun, innocent and indiscriminate in his deadly glory.

“I want to hurry home to you / Put on a slow, dumb show for you / And crack you up / So you can put a blue ribbon on my brain / God I’m very, very frightening / I’ll overdo it.”

That says most of it, I guess. And I’ll take that over a noble war any day, an old house that on summer evenings is filled, subtly, with the scent of perfume; a bathroom in disarray with dime-store pregnancy kits poking out of the trash and wet stockings hanging from a rail on the shower door; a small life, inconsequential to all other witnesses, needing only books and clear water and waking up to find her still there in the morning to nourish it, and when the death urges come as they always will I can bleed them out onto the page where

Brave you now these odd rooms, with ill-lit fire
Stolen from outmoded heavens; I wot
All too well, these things what linger’d action bought:
A serpent, my heel, the gardener’s ire.
Wander on, you cobbler, you Jew, and tire-
lessly stand, deliver! this fight un-fought
To the lotus-eaters in whose realms I sought
The water for sleep in this half empire.

xoxo,

R.

that poem about blue.

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:51:51 -0700

I don’t really believe in the practice of writing letters that you’re never going to...

but balanced on a twig.

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:08:00 -0700

When I think about the year so far — which I find myself doing often — I picture a...

Just when I thought my day was just shot to hell. Thank you,...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:16:49 -0700

Just when I thought my day was just shot to hell.

Thank you, sweet sweet jesus.

she's a...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:00:00 -0700

It’s a Sunday, and I have downtime. I’m realizing that I need to be prepared for...

when you walk up a hill, what do you think about?

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:53:37 -0800

My life is going… god, I don’t want to jinx it, I really don’t. I’m...

The Job.

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 04:17:45 -0800

Tomorrow (or rather, today… but I’ll get to that in a second) I start a new job....

bright like a diaaaaamond.

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:42:05 -0800

Just spent too much time in the OED looking up the etymology of “bling.” I could have...

fuck yeah valentine's.

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:23:07 -0800

Hey. It’s Valentine’s Day. I purposely subconsciously decided to stay up until six a.m....

Roxane Gay is Spelled With One "N": Hideous Scribbling Women

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 10:58:40 -0800

Roxane Gay is Spelled With One "N": Hideous Scribbling Women: roxanegay: Today, I am done with...

to make the grade.

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:21:47 -0800

Not a resolution, but I have written something (whether complete or merely a few words) every...

all the fermentation in the world, and what it costs.

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 01:27:00 -0800

I know whiskey is a cliche. Gin, liquor of all sort, really. Bourbon and scotch and vodka (*though,...

Walking the Tightrope on 24th Street

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 15:49:00 -0800

When we tell stories of grief, we often do so with an underlying assumption that it’s an...