softspoken: May 2008

Thursday, May 29, 2008

a squirrel is not a rat

on break i sat outside of the student
bookstore and had a snack of reduced fat
cheez its and fuze green tea when i was
joined by a squirrel who came so close
that my heart beat a little faster from
nerves and proximity. he sniffed the air
and i tossed a cheez it his way which he
gathered up and jumped into the chair
next to me and ate quickly with tiny little
bites until there was a scattering of orange
crumbs beneath him. he jumped down and
walked beneath the table expectantly so
i threw another. he jumped back into
his chair and ate that too until a girl in
heels too high came scampering by loudly and
ungracefully which caused him to lift high
his head in alarm. i suppose he decided the
threat was little since he turned 180 degrees
so his back was to her, a seemingly annoyed
act, and continued to eat. he was, however,
a bit more fearful of two men pushing a large
garbage can and ran to the table farthest
away. he did return for more and wasn't at
all alarmed by the young faced boy who walked by
singing an opera in a voice both soft and strong.
eventually, after what must have been the sixth or
seventh, he began stuffing them in the
space beneath the seat of the chair and
the base - miming the act of piling on leaves
and patting them down for safekeeping so i
quietly, in case someone was listening, said
goodbye and back to work went.

read - blood and soap by linh dinh

highly recommended.

The List:

Books Read In 2008
-Blood and Soap: Stories by Linh Dinh
-A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
-Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
-Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina
-Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
-The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
-The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman

Books Read In 2007
-Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way: A Novel by Bryan Charles
-The Road by Cormac McCarthy
-The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
-A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel
-You Can't Catch Death by Ianthe Brautigan
-Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denimby David Sedaris^
-Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proux-
-Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore^
-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
-My French Whore: A Love Story by Gene Wilder
-Pryor Convictions by Richard Pryor
-Noone Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
-The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings by Kaylynn Deveney and Albert Hastings

Books Read In 2006
-Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir by Lisa Crystal Carver
-Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan
-Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
-Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
-Winning Ways by Dick Lyles
-The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
-Willard and His Bowling Trophies by Richard Brautigan
-The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writing by Richard Brautigan
-Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
-So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan
-Ida by Gertrude Stein
-The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
-Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
-Ask the Dust by John Fante
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
-The Stranger by Albert Camus

Books Read In 2005
-The Abortion by Richard Brautigan
-Fluke Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore
-In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
-Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader
-Women by Charles Bukowski
-A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
-Living On Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s Volume 2 by Charles Bukowski
-The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut
-Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke
-The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
-You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
-Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
-A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
-Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña by David Hadju
-A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan
-Holidays On Ice by David Sedaris
-Dreaming of Babylon by Richard Brautigan
-The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan

Books Read In 2004
-A Widow for One Year by John Irving
-Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson*
-Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
-Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
-Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac
-Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
-Love Is a Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski
-Orpheus Emerged by Jack Kerouac
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
-Journals by Kurt Cobain*
-Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction by Luke Davies
-Modigliani: Portraits by Fernand Hazan
-Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
-Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
-Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Anne Brashares
-Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins
-Tarantula by Bob Dylan
-Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac
-Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
-The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath*
-Life of Pi by Yann Martel
-Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger*
-Sarah by J.T. Leroy
-The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
-The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by J.T. Leroy
-Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 by Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson
-Sloppy Firsts by Megan Mccafferty
-Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali
-Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
-Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
-Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
-Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
-Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
-Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac
-Hell's Angels by Hunter Thompson
-Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
-The Yage Letters by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
-The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery*
-Bring Me Your Love by Charles Bukowski
-The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac
-Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
-The Spoken Word Revolution (slam, hip hop & the poetry of a new generation) ed. by Mark Eleveld
-Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
-Junky by William S. Burroughs
-Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac
-The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
-One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry
-A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
-High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
-An Unfortunate Woman by Richard Brautigan
-The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle

^ audiobook* reread

unapologetically so

it is very rare for us to fight, very extremely rare, but
basically tuesday night m stated you are so messy and
bugs in the kitchen the dishes and the sink and you are
so messy and when he walks into a room there is a silent
and secret sigh at my pile of things which maybe he thinks
i do not see but i do see it or at least i feel it. it is a silent
sigh and sometimes only done with his eyes or in the way
he tightens his mouth firmly. so now what. i am left feeling
slightly tired and increasingly resistant since before i moved
in i thought i tried so hard to make him see how i am and
showed him here, see, this is how i live, a tower of laundry,
see, this is how i live, a garden growing in my dishes, and are
you sure, are you really sure, i am messy, evangelically and
relentlessly messy, and he would smile and kiss me on top
of the head and say yes yes yes i love you it is all so cute and
so i thought ok. but now it is no kiss on the head but instead
it is the he is the one who is doing everything to keep this
house together and i am really treating him unfairly speech
so i am left feeling a bit duped and like the one who is doing
nothing and also the feelings of a lazy inconsiderate bum
which is what, i suppose, the messy one is left to be.

and so yesterday on the internet i looked up "fighting about
cleaning" and "fighting couples messy" and both gave me
nothing until i discovered "couples cleaning messy neat"
which was the answer. and eventually i found this article
which presented all the reasons in which i relish being messy
and all the reasons i have thought for myself about messiness
and creativity and why i could never actually be great friends
with someone who says i am going to spend all saturday
cleaning or even worse, i am going to spend all weekend
cleaning because really what a bore and drag they must truly
be. but the article. this article has such things as so and so
says "cleaning is a huge waste of her time as she could be doing
far greater things than decluttering her office" and "piling allows
for a lot of creative accidental thinking — because you're forever
bumping into things you don't expect to and suddenly bouncing
off them to create potential new ideas" and "constantly filing,
finding and re-filing things requires a huge hidden cost in anti-
mess maintenance time — more time I suspect than many
messy people spend looking for things" and "that mess is really
more of an aesthetic issue than anything else — and that one
person's mess may be another's laboratory, with a hidden
underlying order that only the mess-maker understands
perfectly." and i thought, yes, finally, this is it exactly. it is not
so much an issue of lazy as it is an issue of how i want to spend
my time or even how i don't want to spend my time of which
i have so little of my own anyway and also a matter of how i
like sitting in the midst of piles of things and the discovery and
the dig and having all of my projects around me to look at and
contemplate and how they are there to pick up once i am ready
again.

but trudging through the rest, most said the answer is to let the
partner know what he is getting himself into beforehand which i
thought i had but i guess i failed already, and then the next
answer is compromise which is no surprise and a yawn, i mean,
of course, that is what all counselors are taught to say
since they first took psych 101, but also that the best and most
effective answer is to allow the messy person a room of their
own in which to be uninhibited and unabashedly messy. which
in our small house is not a luxury we have or can even consider
having. there is no room or spot for my things as it is, they are
basically in the attic or in the overflowing spare room or stacked
in boxes in front of all the spots for his things. there is not even
really a regular spot of my very own, a private uninhibited and
unabashed spot even less so. so i am only left with the answer
of compromise which in this case is defined in my head as do
what i am asked to do as he asks me to do them in order to
keep some semblance of peace and not appear as the lazy do
nothing one. which really slowly builds resentment and
resistance behind my ears and on my shoulders and makes it
difficult to make eye contact and say casual everyday things in
the same way that i can when things are as usual. instead of my
day was fine i had lunch with ann and then i googled how many
minutes after birth before a fawn learns to walk and would you
believe it is only 90 minutes, it is just my day was alright and a
polite smile before staring down at my plate again or taking a
long drink of water to look away. and i am quiet for a few days until
gradually we forget and i try little by little to smile for a while
longer and then it is back to usual. i would rather it was different
and i would rather not feel so each time it comes up but to instead
smile and agree and go along and it's not really as if i feel that
he is asking things of me that are unreasonable, it is not as if he
is the bad guy, but in the same turn i also feel as if they are
things that are not in my being to be want to always do. in a world
of neatzi's it is the messy who must reform. and compromise, i guess,
they always say it is the answer.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

in shop now!

softspoken.etsy.com

florals and dots in shop now!

softspoken.etsy.com

reading

image by mandalaybus

Overhearing "where I come from, people don't..." you punch the speaker, a blind elderly immigrant, in the face, knocking two teeth out, before you yourself are knocked unconscious by a blunt instrument from behind. Waking up days later, you are told by a lugubrious dog that he, too, has often slept through the best parts.

"13"
Blood and Soap
by Linh Dinh

Monday, May 26, 2008

weekend away

saturday and sunday we went to aiken, sc
to get out of the house, out of town, out
of here.

we stayed at the hotel aiken
which had creaking wooden stairs and tall
ceilings and orange throws across the bed.

and black and white tile in the bathroom

we spent a little time walking around
and then got in the car to search out
a goodwill emporium where i found
dresses for etsy and dresses for myself
and a couch and chair and dresser that i
wished could've fit in my pocket and come
along home.

once done we went to aiken
brewing co. for beer and dinner. the menu
wasn't quite veg friendly but we made do
with onion rings and house salads and
bruschetta.

downtown there were three weddings
and everywhere was abuzz
and awash in visitors and
bouquets. everyone stood around
uncomfortably in suits and
ties and dresses that they
never wear.

after a few separately and a few
shared we left to cash in our free
drink tickets at the hotel bar.
there we did things we never do
like play darts and listen to
mustang sally.

the jim fisher band (and me):

by the end of the night i was
very drunk girl wobbly and clothing
adverse and boyfriend friendly.

the next morning i ate away my
headache with a veggie and egg
quesadilla from new moon cafe.
m had spinach and swiss quiche
and coffee. we both had the
best parfaits with fresh warm
mixed berry toppings.

i took one last photo of the hotel and
m took one last photo of my one last
photo taking and we went for a walk
about hopeland gardens.

before heading home we drove up
to augusta, ga and grabbed tea
and cookies at a second new moon
location and strolled downtown
and the riverwalk. on the way
back we took the long way through
peach fields and farm towns
stopping at a produce stand for
tomatoes we would eat that night
with white bread and mayonnaise
for tomato sandwiches.

well, this is true

Tom Snyder: I kind of think of this whole thing as ongoing - that there is an eternity and that we're going to be a part of that eternity. That we're not just corpses in graves when we die.

Ayn Rand: But we aren't corpses in graves. We are not there. Don't you understand that when this life is finished, you're not there to say, "Oh, how terrible that I'm a corpse." No.

Tom Snyder: Well, this is true.

Ayn Rand: It's finished. And what I've always thought was a sentence from some Greek philosopher - I don't unfortunately remember who it was - that I read at sixteen and it's affected me all my life: "I will not die; it's the world that will end." And that's absolutely true....and when it's the end I don't have to worry about it. I'm not there. It's too bad that the world will end - and I think a very wonderful world will end with me, but I've had my time and I can't complain.