tuckova

foundation

The foundation cracked about twenty years ago
you poured in some dead rabbits and kept building
a roof over your head because Maslow said to;
and other things, important:
Insulation against the extremes and
windows for looking out.

You laid a floating floor over the cracked base
you have done a good job of covering that up
it is not perfect but it is level as your gaze.
Sometimes it creaks a bit, maybe, or maybe
only you hear that.

Some years ago you put in a door,
decided people could visit,
held some dance parties
broken glass and everybody
has a good time

But sometimes you think about that foundation
--step on a crack, break your mother's--
and you think about danger,
what if it all crashes down,
what if it folds in over you and anyone
with you when it happens.
What then.

Is there insurance to cover your contingencies
is there a way to repair damage
without tearing it all down
is there a point, in short, to sitting here,
after dark, listening to the creak that
maybe only you hear, after all.

Some people think it helps to slap your forehead

We went to the beer garden yesterday to play Scrabble, which we've done nearly every night for the last week. School starts Monday, so spending every possible evening out of doors, especially for Squire, seems necessary and important. Although it was the same even temp in the apartment yesterday as it is every day, it was colder outside, and my sleeveless dress meant I was unable to spell words other than "freezing". As Squire was anyway not playing, I called him over & begged him to run back to the apartment to get me a sweater. The apartment is less than 15 minutes' stroll from the beer garden, and I thought that Squire, running like the wind, could solve my chattering teeth in about 20 minutes. Bribes were offered. Specific sweaters and their locations were mentioned.

Slightly over 30 minutes later, he ambles back. He was delayed because he went to the bathroom at home. He has a letter from the mailbox. He has his magic wand. You totally know where I'm going with this, don't you.

I myself suffer from recurrent destinesia. I will walk into the bedroom to get my glasses, stand there for a minute, dumbfounded, and wander back out again with no glasses. Did I walk in there to blink myopically at the dustmotes, or what? Ten minutes later I may even do the same thing again. However, if I say the word "glasses" before walking into the room, it kicks the brain over the barrier with ease. How could someone have a clearly described item in his mind, go for the specific purpose of getting it, have a bribe dangling at the end of the line, and ... forget?

Anyway, he went back to get the sweater, and this time it only took 20 minutes. I do understand that it was entirely my fault for forgetting to bring a sweater (I normally do, even in the hottest months), and I understand that my physical unease today is a result of my behavior, not his. However, I am a little worried about this whole "back to school" thing. Between the early onset destinesia and the new "different teacher for every class" system, I think we may have a very long year ahead of us.

Heel!

"Great tits!" he said. I was standing at the bar waiting to pay for my liter and half of wine, this is the bar down the street where they have it on tap and you bring in your empty water bottle and they fill it up. I wanted a bottle of red, and the tap had run out so the bartender was in the back hooking up another keg or whatever. A cask, maybe.

I took a step back and moved my arms out, palms out. "They're not even tits, really," he continued. "They're breasts. Full, round, round breasts. They're perfect." I hate this, I hate this so much. I want the quick retort, the one word. The one that shrivels him, and all I can think is phrases in English. Spoken like a true gentleman, I have, and a few sailor's greetings, but I can't twist the idioms into Czech somehow. Come on brain, move. "Of course partly it's probably your bra, but it's also just that you have such big tits. I mean breasts." I start wanting him to make a move to touch me; the people around us are starting to watch and I want it to be clear that he went to touch me and that's why I had to hit him. I'm looking at a picture to the right, one of those old cigarette ads, maybe from the 1940s or maybe made to look that way. It's framed and I can see his reflection in it. He's a lot taller than me, which means I'd have to get him on the ground before i could smash his head, which is what I want to do, but he's drunk enough it wouldn't even occur to him to block a solid punch in the belly, and I've got rings on.

The bartender comes back in, sees me being towered over, yells SIT and the man sits down like the slobbering dog he is and we all turn leisurely away. I pay four dollars for the wine and go.

It takes every bit of my effort to focus on the bartender, to focus on the parallel between a drunk man and a misbehaving dog, both needing to be trained. I do not believe that in spite of everything people are good at heart but I know that I am already wildly disinclined to leave the house and that if I think about any part of this story other than the bits that are funny I will entirely shut down. Later that night over the wine I explain to Marcela about space, the assertion of, and detach from the story enough to tell it.  Laughing because he was, after all, right, although completely unpoetic and rather smelly besides. And this is how we re-enter the world.

more obvious things i have pointed out

Who should set their alarms for 6 a.m.: People who intend to get up at 6 a.m.

Who should not set their alarms for 6 a.m.: People who sleep next to insomniacs who are low on sleep to begin with; people who are able to merge the annoying howl of their alarm clocks with a dream about pretty birds for a solid minute; people who are not getting, and have not ever gotten out of bed before 7.
Bonus: people who can't remember how to turn off the alarm without turning on a light and looking at it even though the clock is some 5 years old. I am looking at you, and this is why you are not allowed to play with my shiny new camera.

Diner of Abandonment

When I was little, I used to report on the quality of every public restroom I ever used. Cleanliness, size, and any special features (black soap!) were relayed in what I assume was the piping high voice of an only child, the voice that is sure it is conveying information of greatest interest to those gathered around food that has magically become less appetizing. My lucky family.

Eventually, I was given to understand that these bathroom reports were not as interesting to others as they were to me. Coincidentally around that time I started having a fear, and this is before those annoying Culkin movies, that I would be left in a bathroom someday. That I would walk out of the bathroom to find that everyone had gone on to prettier places and there I'd be, alone.

As I got older, and started increasingly thinking like an anthropologist, featuring the idea that all behavior has a cause, the fear took on new layers. Either everybody was thinking about me as much as I was thinking about them, and there would be a combined unanimous decision to leave that annoying girl behind, quick let's sneak out while she's in there, or there would be a combined inability to think about me at all, and people would just inadvertently wander off, no head count to ascertain that one of us had been left behind, and what do you mean by "one of us": who are you?

As a result, I have probably the fastest bladder in the world, and even though I wash my hands every time, I can be back from the bathroom before anybody has a chance to ask for the check or even start a new topic of conversation, a skill Sam Diamond would envy, but advantages born from fear are always tinged a bit with their ugly origins.

I was well into my thirties before I confessed to this fear. It was one of my more difficult confessions, and to be honest my throat gets a little tight even typing about it, because I do get what it says about me, and I understand that while my brain would greatly entertain a psychoanalyst, it is not always a whole lot of fun to live with.

And to my point: Imagine my delight and surprise last week, walking out of the bathroom of the diner where we had breakfast, to discover that while my purse and cards remained at the table, my entire family had vamoosed. Like a dream coming true! Nifty! Fortunately they hadn't gone farther than the parking lot, so I rejoined them without incident (and my wallet was still in my purse, yay).

I don't know what it means, whether I should take from this that things I dread will happen but not really matter that much, or that there is no way to reasonably to prevent what I know will happen, or what. I do know that I had recently talked to certain wise people about this very fear, and that means I had somebody with whom to share the punchline, and I think maybe that's the important part: not that your fears come true, but that you have somebody to laugh with you after.

Photos of the Diner of Abandonment and the rest of the trip are up on flickr.

i'm in yr time zone, soakin in yr culture

I'm in New York hanging with my friend G while Squire Tuck is off doing some grandparent/child bonding thing upstate. I assume our young Squire is having a good time, but I suspect I'm having a better time. During the day, G's in school and I work on his adorable little laptop (how DO people work on laptops? I feel like I'm used to being the captain of a starship with my giant desk and my wave keyboard and suddenly I'm like trapped in some bitty shuttle craft), which is not a blast, BUT in the evening we whirlwindily do New York Stuff. We walked through Central Park, we went to the Met and looked at marble dudes, we watched a sunset off a pier, we saw Xanadu!, we had very schmancy drinks in an unmarked bar, I smoked a cigarette on a stoop, and I'm not telling you the half of it. I got Squire a t-shirt from the Natural History Museum. I think we'll keep the fact that I went to the circus just between ourselves, though, okay, or he'll never let me out of his sight again. I have FUN when I travel, I'm saying.

We were in Washington D.C. for a few days, hanging with family and making sure my tear ducts are fully functional. They are! In addition to Standard Familial Strife, things that made me cry were: watching Barbara Morgan on the live feed, Mr. Rogers' red sweater, seeing the ghost dance dresses, that giant Calder mobile, and the fact that the Smithsonian is free. Best and worst of America, all right there. I wanted to kiss a flag and burn it at the same time, and even that conflict made me feel more American than I have in a long time, and more at peace with it.

The day before I left I found out somebody had been copying my writing here and passing them off as her own. This caused me quite a bit of --I don't want to say I was angry, but I certainly was confused. Why would you want to pretend to be someone else, have someone else's life, in an online journal? It is ever so strange. And it stirred up some stuff for me, like Why Do I Write and What Is This Thing Called Blog and so on. But then I had a plane to catch so I couldn't really work it out.

Anyway, that's how we roll. Hope you're having fun where you are, too.

what I read

I finished "The Golden Compass" over the weekend. I had started reading it to Squire Tuck and then apparently wasn't reading it fast enough, because he started reading it alone. Since I hadn't already read it, I hopped to so we could talk about it.

I liked it a lot. It takes a certain amount of thinking for granted, which I particularly like in a children/YA book. It was well-written, and there was a decent flow to the plot. I liked that the end of a chapter was really the end of a chapter, and not always a cliffhanger. I liked how things progressed in a way that was exciting and possible to follow.

I also thought Pullman did a good job of telling you things about characters in a way that revealed his thoughts about them. For example, there's a part when he says that Lyra has no imagination. This is hard to fathom because she's a great on-the-spot liar, which to me requires an active imagination, but Pullman explains that in fact she is a good liar because she believes what she says... in a way, he presents something and explains it away at the same time. I wasn't sure I agreed with him but it's clear he thought about what he wrote.

He has a way of describing people through their behavior that I thought was really powerful. Mrs. Coulter only has a few complete scenes in the book, and each scene revealed more about her than a page of adjectives. I wish that he had spent less time using the adjectives later, because it felt a little screenplay to me, a little "stay with my visuals!" but he did so well describing action to reveal character that if he wants to be sure you see HIS character, that's fair.

On the downside: He doesn't always describe how people interact and how they got to feel the way they do about each other very well. Some relationships are clear in a sentence or two ("Ma Costa had clouted Lyra dizzy on two occasions but fed her hot gingerbread on three") but many of them fell short, for me. Lyra explains that she loves Iorek because he was kicked out of a country for murder, as was her father, except that no loving relationship ever seems clear between her and her father. Her quick affection for Iorek seems reasonably placed but the reasons given don't line up. I had problems with her relationship with Lord Asriel, too, who spends quite a few pages threatening to kill her in the beginning, but is described later as always treating her as "an adult engaging a child in a pretty trick." Wha--? Her parents' relationship was particularly difficult for me to understand: so passionate and so dead at the same time. Maybe I've never had relationships like these, so it doesn't make sense to me, but I think the problem is that Pullman doesn't really know how to describe these relationships himself. A relationship that should be key, Lyra's parents are fierce and infinitely sad and passionate and dizzy and they don't make sense, and it hurts the book that they don't.

And... the alethiometer seemed a little too handy. It was not as handy as "because Dumbledore thinks so" (glargh!) but it really did seem almost too much. As if the book got written and then there were holes in the plot that had to be mended, and boom! they were. This is a minor complaint, though. It's just -- he did so well at describing other otherworldly things to a degree that made them seem really possible that I'm sorry he didn't spend more time making the alethiometer seem as real, at least not to me. I finished and wanted to think for days about what form my daemon would take, but I never once considered what I would ask the alethiometer, if I could. Do you see what I mean?

Anyway. Good book, glad I read it, want to read the rest. Next up will be some non-fiction, I think. By the way, when people tell you Nora Ephron's latest book ("I Feel Bad About My Neck") is "funny" what they mean is that they have never read a decent blog post, because there are at least 20 writers out there who make my ribs hurt, but Nora Ephron never even made me smile.