Snugblog

Happy summer! I’ve been from coast to coast. I’m not ashamed to admit that I love Southern California with big chunks of my heart. Especially Santa Monica, the North L.A. canyons, San Diego and the deserts. These are my summer jams:

1. Beach House: Real Love
2. Bill Callahan: Rococo Zephyr
3. Altered Images: I Could be Happy
4. Jay-Z: Off That
5. CocoRosie: Lemonade
6. Joanna Newsome: Good Intentions Paving Company
7. Starf*cker: Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second
8. Boards of Canada: Dayvan Cowboy
9. In the Heights: When the Sun Goes Down
10. Tennis: Marathon

I’m excited to get ahold of Tennis’ forthcoming “South Carolina.” It’s the beachy lovechild of husband and wife duo, Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley. They recorded the tracks during the eight months they spent sailing on their very own sailboat along the east coast.

I’ve been listening to their single Marathon. It makes me want to sip summer cocktails in a white sundress and big shades after having spent all day sunning with my grandma’s aluminum visor. Think doo-wop, meets beach rock, meets Camera Obscura (in that foggy-achy-poppy-lady kind of way.

July: Portland to New Jersey to New York City
August: New York City to Portland to Redwoods to Yellowstone to San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego to Mexico to Portland to
September: New Orleans to Portland

I can’t stop watching this video. At first I vehemently hated it. Then I moderately hated it. Then I listened to it in my car and nodded. Now I wake up from each and every dream to it:

I am a cat stuck up in a tree
I am a cat stuck up in a tree
I am a cat stuck up in a tree

The Kanji characters for fireworks are “fire” and “flower.” The Kanji has a separate, single character for the word “fireflower” and it is not used for fireworks. I watched some fireflowers in Vancouver, WA. We could see different sets of them erupt along the Portland waterfront. I’ve been listening to them all week, bursting from peoples front yards, from parks and pits. They wake me up and I get angry for a minute. Anyways, I’ve been waiting all summer to share this poem.

4th of July
by Keetje Kuipers

If I have any romantic notions left,
please let me abandon them here
on the dashboard of your Subaru
beside this container of gas station
potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.
Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet
waiting to be shaken open by some
other man’s hand. Let there be another town
after this one, a town with an improbable Western
name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get
a room and a six-pack, where the fireworks
end early, say nine o’clock, before it’s really
gotten dark enough to see them because
everyone has to work in the morning.
I’m not asking for love anymore.
I don’t care if I never see a sailboat again

Maybe Dodger would say that Bob Hicok could be on her Mt. Rushmore of poets. Maybe she should! She found this poem in Poetry Northwest. She said I might like the bit about the tuba. I did.

One Man Band
Bob Hicok

In the dream I’m a man
who doesn’t remember dreams. A man
sitting quietly on a bench
not remembering dreams.
Pigeons ask my hands for bread
my hands don’t have but they might have
in the dreams I don’t recall. In the dream
of the poem that is the only dream
I recall, I feel the lake
formed when the rier
cut off the oxbow after years
of abrading dirt to a shape that looks
from the sky like a jew’s harp
is metaphor for wanting to be
a musical instrument. Specifically,
my elation is a clarinet, my dread
a tuba, I get the sense
there’s a band in me waiting
for someone to say, a one
a two and a three, which is the lit fuse,
near as I can tell, of such a fine ruckus
that people get quiet and stare off
at their own little bit of nothing as if
it is everything

You know what’s strange? When I Youtube-d “Dorothea Lasky reading” the third hit was this video of a Kimodo Dragon swallowing a whole live pig.

No ship, you are not sinking. You are home! May you drop an anchor and be covered in kelp and barnacles. Wonderful barnacles!

I’m amidst a 90 day Bikram challenge. This is a yoga that I have been practicing on and off for eight years. It is a set of 26 poses, completed over the course of 90 minutes in a room set to 105 degrees. The studio next to my house is all fitness, all self improvement. It is all sports bras and freeze frames of svelt ladies lunging on mountain peaks. Today Raj, a lively teacher who favors The Verve and Lady Gaga in favor of chanting or silence, instructed us to conjur an image of absolute happiness. He did some strange clapping things as we edged in to our happiness letting it envelop us. I pondered for a moment. What makes me happy. First a kaleidascope. Then yumm bowls. Coffee shops with my best pal. Poems. My twin sister. The Liberty Glass. Counseling kiddos. But these things passed away like clouds. The one thing that endured? My roommate’s cat Thomas Jefferson. I think I am broken.

When I came home tonight, a little bit latte’d and twirly, He was lying in a ball on my fluffy comforter purring at my brand new fine linens. It affirmed everything I had processed earlier in the night. I am a cat lady. With cat tendencies. Cats all my friends. Cats all my enemies.