I’ve been doing a lot of taking in of life lately. Just a lot of running around like a gnome, a lot of working with kids, a lot of smiling and talking and listening. Some adventures. Some road trips. I feel like a feather falling back to earth. Coming into winter I feel the urge to make, the urge to make some crafts. I’ve been going down webcomic-memory-lane tonight. Natalie Dee and XKCD were the first webcomics I added to my RSS feed. It’s been a good couple years with them!
Here is a drawing I made in the middle of the night while eating a snack of spaghetti squash and homemade sauce:
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:
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
