tuckova

twenty-first century fox

Once upon a time there was a fox. Foxes are awesome because they have all the playful bounce of dogs with an insouciant "don't need you" splash of cat-attitude (catitude? whatever). The fox is all, as long as I'm not living in England where the people have terrible teeth and hunt me, life is fine. Bouncy fox.

Foxes are omnivores so this fox ate a bunch of different things. Fruit, bread, bird food; even some chickens. Yeah I know about the unfortunate incident with the henhouse but we're actually going to be dealing with a different idiom here. 

So in the course of the merry bouncy life of this fox, lots of food. Some fantastic things. There was a bush of berries so sweet that it took some time to move away from it, and even though the berries were sweet only most of the time, and were in season only some of the time, still the fox stayed and ate them, mouth stained red with pleasure. Another period spent living near a farmhouse, eating mice, the excitement of chasing them, catching them, the fast gulp of consummation. A long time spent almost tame, living off what scraps were thrown its way, until the scraps turned from bits of tender fresh meat that could be ripped from the bone to dinner scraps to moldy bits begged from the back of the fridge and the fox knew it was time to move on.

And now the fox is out again, roaming. It's made a few poor food choices in life, shivering and heaving in the forest that runs alongside the houses, eating leaves to calm its stomach and thinking that anything that looks too good is bound to hurt. Thinking it would be better to never eat again than to feel this pain. Better to shrivel up.

One day the fox passes a vineyard, and remembers the taste of grapes. Some sweet, a bit of mold on them, the heady tail-chasing dance of that night. Some with seeds that crunched in the teeth and the juice ran down, sugar matted fur, the feeling of being completely sated. But the last grapes were a bad batch, sweet on the tongue but with a retching sour aftertaste, and now the fox isn't sure. Standing hesitant before the tidy rows of vines, and the fox doesn't know with certainty if the gnawing feeling is hunger or just curiosity, what it wants or if it even wants anything at all. 

between the bars

Sometimes I think I'm going to see you and I prepare fun stories in my head and then I realize that I'm not going to see you, that we're not like that now, and my whole little speech about how a diagnosis reads like a poem is totally shot, like our love of an/unspecified nature/suggestive/of malignancy.

I don't think I'm going to die today or even soon and sometimes I think that I have done some pretty poor planning in terms of my potential failure to die. Like the last time I did some life planning it was more like death planning and I was smoking a pack a day and drinking until the walk home was at best vague and now I'm hardly saintly but it occurs to me that retirement planning is like a real thing, like I am past the "good-looking corpse" clause if you know what I mean.

When Squire was wee he had a total meltdown on a plane where he was sure we were going to crash and die a fiery death. There was nothing to reassure him, and I felt then how empty such reassurance was, because this is exactly what you cannot prepare for, the surprise. Fat fear tears rolling down his cheeks, but he was brave and he was ready, even while he was beyond consolation. I might have turned around and gone home if we could have gotten home without flying. And yet what could I say: relax, you're not going to die. It's exactly what everybody says. It is exactly a lie.

I bought shampoo for gray hair today. I will probably never stop missing you. 

like a drunk but not

On Wednesday it felt like a really truly spring day and I decided to resume walking, which I used to do in great gulps and enjoy, but I like it much less when the streets are icy, which they have been for about a year now I think. But now it is sunny again, and it is fun to prowl the streets watching things and listening to podcasts. I walked down my street where a young couple stood in the middle of the sidewalk kissing while people walked around them, her arm extended behind her to hold the leash of her unwatched dog and his hand resting on her breast. Spring oblivion.

I went to Cejl, the Poor Part of Town, where a family stood on opposite sides of the street shouting at each other, one finally darting across the traffic to shout more effectively close up and then they hugged, with the conciliatory rubbing of shoulders and laughing. I got a massage as part of my quest to find the best reasonably priced massage in town (at least one a month until I find it; this is the best grail hunt I have set myself since the quest for the perfect martini). This was good but not great, a chalice but not the grail.

Then I went to the post office to pick up the only kinds of package they let me get now without complication, which is books. Yay for books, I know everybody loves a Kindle but I am too old for that specific technology. When there are teleportation devices I swear I will figure them out, yea though I am seventy, but I need books with pages or I don't feel like I'm reading. The line was longish, though it moved surprisingly briskly for a Czech line, and the couple in front of me with his chin resting atop her head, arms entwined, were able to maintain a steady elephant walk sway as they moved towards the window.

Walked up the hill through downtown and had an ice cream. I saw one couple making out on the new park benches on the main square. One homeless type with his hands down his pants. An older and much younger man, jaunty as if from a boat, apparently a couple, circling a billboard, reading all the upcoming events, not talking but standing too close to be strangers. I saw children chasing pigeons and the fountain hasn't been turned on yet so there were students sitting on the rings inside, backpacks flung aside, heliotropic faces tilted to the sun.

Stopped in at the new pub to say hi but not to eat, and then walked home, and part of me was all YEAH FOR ME AND MY LEGS and the other part was like ow ow ow ow ow. 

This weekend I opened the balcony windows and sat on the floor in a sunbeam reading about Anne Shirley. One of the pleasures of my youth was re-reading, and I almost never do it now, but it feels like a thing that one could re-learn to do, to be interested in the plot precisely because you know where it's going, like walking all over the town you've lived in for almost twenty years, or thinking that public displays of affection are a nice sign of spring.

my little town

Brno is a VILLAGE. Sometimes I forget, because there are a hundred cafes and pubs and restaurants. An opera and several theaters. Nightclubs and bars with live music every night of the week. Four new places opened up this week, including the best one. To me these are all things you go to The City for. So I get to thinking that Brno is a city (albeit population under half a million) and then boom I slam up against the town green of it, the two degrees of separation. 

Anyway, that was what I was thinking last night when I went to see a concert and ran into about 10 people I knew in 10 minutes, tapping out our crude rhythms of bear dance tunes. If you want to go to a place where everybody knows your name, it is sufficient to walk out onto the street, or send a message via the woman who does your pedicure, or turn e-mail into coffee, tap tap tap. 

just saying

People you should talk to about how your wife is not nice to you any more:

your good friends

your therapist

a divorce lawyer

People you should not talk to about how your wife is not nice to you any more: 

a woman you are trying to hit on

nor whispers, nor witches, nor wandering stars

I made a mental note to myself to write about... something today. It started with the letter W but I do not remember what it was. Not wisdom, weirdness, wallowing. Nor pussy willows, though I got a bouquet of them a few weeks ago and they sat on the end of the counter, mysterious and soft buds. Winter? I have had so much more than enough of winter that I cannot fathom wanting to write about it; winter is my unwelcome guest, longer than three days, longer even than three months, the foul smell lingering like it will never go. Yesterday the sun was shining and I thought perhaps it would be nice enough to start walking again next week and checked the weather forecast and it predicted 25 degrees which felt AMAZING, just to think about what 25 degrees would feel like, I mean I do not even REMEMBER 25 degrees in this country it was so long ago, but then I realized that it was 25 Fahrenheit. Ohrightwinter. As you were.

I do realize it was ridiculous to have thought it could go from the snowstormy 6 below to 25 in a week, but such is my longing for any other weather that I was misled. It was like when you're in a bar and you're sure someone is just looking at you all the time but then you realize that there's a clock above your head. Or when Jackie O is waving at you and you wave back and then realize she's just hailing a cab. Neither of these things have happened to me but I believed a weather forecast and it is just as awkward.

When it is finally spring I will complain because every mammal in town is publicly rutting and reminding me of how old I am etc. I know that.

 

This weekend I planned to work on a book I have fallen behind in editing, and I also had a real desire to take a break from the book because I am having trouble maintaining a consistent day-to-day editing level and it needs planning. My usual method to getting things done is to take a deep breath and DO THEM but this is rather a large thing to get through without pausing. So the closets got organized, I finally figured out how to do internet banking, cleaned the fridge, watched a lot of television, finished listening to one book and started another, and plowed through a New Yorker. AND worked out a schedule for getting the book edited, since otherwise it will be so far on the back burner that it will fall off the stove, and who knows when I'll be cleaning back there again. Clearly I need more books to edit. Hook me up, yo.

small pleasures

The little ridges that form in a salt cellar, like sand dunes

How easy it is to tie something behind my back, like an apron

Finally learning how to play a chord, the soreness in my fingers the next day

Sitting with our feet up on the couch, talking about the pros and cons of living in communes

I had a mole removed from my back last week; apparently the doctor needed to remove my entire shoulder blade to get at it, or anyway that's how it feels. The things that go on behind my back. I couldn't open a door without shooting pain running across from my spine to my fingers; that sounds like a shoulder blade removal, right? I'm not supposed to shower until I get the stitches out at the end of this week but I think that's just part of the European shower conspiracy left over from the Middle Ages because the internet told me that in fact it's fine to shower after 12 hours. I'm trying to be good and keep it dry, but I sure am grateful for the internet so I don't have to stew in wonder (and sweat) over every thing. Also grateful for having a teenager who treated me like royalty all weekend, cooking and cleaning and opening doors as I winced around the house like the delicate flower that I am.

Other than that things go as they usually do. I am working enough. I have a list of things I want to spend money on and I might actually get to check some of them off. We are finally watching Friday Night Lights and it is good. I've heard it might actually be spring some day, maybe even this month.

the only thing that shines

A deep sadness that I have examined EXHAUSTIVELY over some 23 years and which would not go away and so instead became a story I am tired of telling; tired of telling myself, tired of telling others. Do you get tired of telling the story of how you met, your first death, your first birth, a funny mistake you made in a foreign language? I have told this story until I could tell it to anyone, until I had nobody to tell it to anymore, until I could tell it in my sleep, until it had no power over me. Yet it still exists, the sadness that made the story. Still a thing that happens, a tide that pulls up with some regularity. And I have to say, ah, there it is, that again. But I just don't feel like telling the story anymore and so instead there is a silence to observe it, like some sad anniversary. Maybe some day we will have picnics and fireworks and completely forget the meaning, though I don't think so, not in my lifetime.

Another story I promised to be done with already in 2009 that keeps telling itself while I curl away, ears plugged, wishing for some lizard-skin spine to keep it off of me, yet it settles on my shoulders again and again, this disappointment, this anger, black wings that are incapable of flight.

Heard the title of a song I once loved, a madeleine, so I went and dug out the tape. This is a tape he made for me before he left and so it belongs with him in my mind but it is also entirely mine. The plastic stretched and warped beyond repair, I can't even play it anymore, but now I can download the song in a heartbeat and listen to it again, remember curling around a speaker so that the sound reverberated through my body, how much I felt music then, literally. Listening to a song over and over; how it was to believe that if I listened enough it would be more than an echo of my feelings, that it might explain how to get out, because there is always that next song. 

 

every good boy deserves

Alligators, birthdays, cousins, drama, etc. Florida gets hot; i just knew love. Moaning never opens people quite realistically. Still, the undercurrent vibe was "xclnt' (youth zeitgeist).

Well you know. I went to Florida for a while because it should be hot there. It was warm, which was almost as nice. Family stuff, shopping, lots of eating. I came home and it was still cold here and that kind of bummed me out. Then the hot water heater broke and I realized it was still REALLY cold here and that bummed me out more. Fortunately I've had a fair bit of work lately so a new hot water heater could be purchased, yea even after I had spent very much money on many fried things, and so that is good.

I have some thoughts but I'm not feeling very writerly; part of the problem I am sure is the rusty fingers syndrome, so I'm putting this here like a sweet dab of rustoleum. A little elbow grease and I'll be good as new. 

question authority

A thing that is interesting about teenagers is that they think that much of what adults are doing is wrong. Either the act itself or the reason for it or the way it is done: wrong, wrong, wrong. I remember this feeling myself, as a teenager, that the grown-ups around me had missed some key ideas when laying out their lives. In a way, this is a pretty good thing, evolutionarily, that as they approach adulthood they're almost programmed to question every thing they've been told so far. If we didn't question, if we just kept doing things because that's how they're done, then we wouldn't improve much as a species. On the other hand, there are some things that we do precisely because they help us to survive, and so blindly playing the opposition isn't always smart either. 

I think that one problem for me was that people didn't often tell me WHY; they mostly told me WHAT. You have to iron your shirt because it's a rule. You have to be home by 10 because that's curfew (actually my parents believed in curfew as defined by the event, which I appreciated then and still do). You can't eat that because it's bad for you. This kind of logic is fine for kids, but it starts to backfire with teens. And ESPECIALLY if they've found out that some of the things that they were presented as absolutes are only true some of the time, if at all... well, everything else you say becomes doubtful. 

For example, if you say "You have to study or you won't get a good grade", then boy are you undermined when no study or poor study correlates with a good grade anyway. Talking to teenagers successfully involves so much conditional framing, and this at a time when they're some of them taller than you and twice as stubborn, and there you are with your wishywashy it might could... well, it doesn't feel nice.

I have noticed, though, that very specific directions with justifications tends to get things done better, repeatedly, than "because I'm the parent, DAMMIT" does. Even if that's what I very much want to say. I think it also helps to really encourage a teenager to question why every single time it isn't volunteered if they don't know. And (and I actually very much enjoy this part of parenting) it is very useful to have teens suggest and justify different ways of doing things, first because it encourages them to think through their alternate idea before they try making soup by dropping in whole potatoes and trying to cut them up later, and second because they may have a better way of doing things, since that is (after all) what their brains are supposed to be doing now, so it benefits everybody. Plus it's good practice for people to question what they don't understand and be answered politely as a matter of course, as it makes the world a more pleasant place to live when people are in the habit of not viewing questions as challenges, but as opportunities to explain. 

Just a thing I've been thinking about for the last week or so. Writing it down to help myself remember.