tuckova

In the future everyone will think about love all the time.

1. In the future, I live in an apartment and my other friends are also in the building, and we visit each other and have coffee and cakes and wine parties and conversations that are endless because we will finish them tomorrow. There is collective shopping and a certain amount of gossip.

2. In the future, I live at the cottage and have in particular chickens, maybe rabbits, and also some vegetables I've learned to grow, plus apples and berries, and somebody comes once a month with necessaries and my hair gets wild and some people think I'm a little crazy because I know something about herbs or whatever.

3. In the future, I live winters in Greece or someplace warm, leaving when the rooks arrive from Russia and coming back when they're well and gone; there's some small place where the tourists go in season and I walk on the windy beach in the morning, and in the summer I come home to the beer garden and the ordinary life of trams.

day dried my eyes

Oh the nights of hot weeping how I would like to have them behind me. So much else behind me now that these few things are weird stragglers, they're like the people who went to the bathroom too long and got ditched by the group and they come back all abandoned but instead of having the sense to quietly leave they think they can get the party started again on their own. The party is over, you can go home now. The rave has lost its ravey flave, the... yeah I can't top that. Go away now being my point.

What is hard about being a grown up is remembering that you can be one all the time. I don't mean you have to give up balancing on curbs because that would be ridiculous. I mean that you do not have to see that boy from eleven years ago on the street and immediately dissolve into terror that he will hurt you again, that you do not have to alert the teacher to the bully while letting tears in your voice, that you do not have to fight back against perceived authority by sulking louder.

It is funny how knowing yourself can make the same amount of things harder.

I was asked to be wise recently, whereupon wisdom fled me entirely; it is entirely true that I am smarter for anybody than for myself and will say soothingly to you to go ahead and be nice to yourself you are fine a good person lovely inside and out, here is dark chocolate here is a tender kiss, here is warm food and good books and my love, while some small part of my mind is searching for a nice hairshirt for me, something in large because I am fat, and something that is easy to put on because hideous girls who are all thumbs can't get dressed in the dark, I don't mean can't get dressed nicely but seriously, why can't I work these snaps. I need a pullover hairshirt with just that little bit of lycra. No really I'm actually fine.

I have this picture of Gustav Klimt in his garden wearing something by Emilie, and I want to learn to sew well enough to make one for me, for the three of us really, and one extra for you. I will make them in burlap and silk and soak them in wine so that when you visit you can spill over the sides as much as I do. And I will listen.

Who's your favorite Beatle?

When I was young we crowded around the pictures and we kissed them and he wasn't my favorite but I knew he was everybody else's and I pretended because I was good at that. He was objectively good-looking, pretty in a girly way, and maybe that was my introduction to androgyny and the appreciation of things that looked like other things or maybe I was just trying to fit in, but anyway: it was a physical evaluation, and oh, he passed.

And then in college laughing scoffingly at those people, because then I loved a clever boy/man. I liked a person who set aside privilege and if he did so from a bedroom that cost a fortune to make it look stripped of grandeur I did not care about the hypocrisy because I cared about a turn of phrase, an insight, a way of setting words to music that made the words themselves music. And of course it was full of principle and searching and striving, something better coming up, glimpsed but not reached, hope. But mainly it was about loving what was clever, and how that love is both complicated and pure.

Later, much, when I was even saying I didn't care, I would have said that if I cared I would have gone for -not spirituality, but spiritual searching. And ultimately, kindness. Thoughtfulness and consideration and yearning, which is different from striving, because it involves acknowledging that some things are out of your hands. Understanding that it didn't have to be complicated in order to get the job done, and understanding that getting the job done was important, but at the same time devoting myself to what I cared about. It was about showing up for the team but not necessarily being a team player.

And now, and now I really don't care, but if you asked me I might say that my admiration is turning to the one that showed up every day. Not the prettiest, not the cleverest, not the kindest, but the one who chose to be on a team where he would, by virtue of the company of diamonds, never himself shine. What would it feel like to be fully confident that you were always good, but to understand that in the context you chose you would never be seen as the best. I'd choose goofy, I'd choose an utter disregard for appearance, a lack of interest in proving myself every single second. I'd choose a silly affectation to give people who didn't really know me something to work with in place of my real identity. I'd keep my true identity for people who mattered. I'd choose to get along with everyone even when they're fighting with each other. I'm not saying I'm there. I'm saying I'm realizing that it's worth my admiration.

WWXD

Top five, top of my head:
Judith Martin
Mr. Rogers
David Byrne
Laurie Anderson
Kurt Vonnegut

yours?

a place where nothing ever happens

Is it harder to explain the place where you came from to the people where you are now, or the place where you are now to the people in the place where you came from?

ghosts

This one sits in the living room and coughs politely to get my attention. Five a.m. and the polite cough is quite Jeeves so I decide he's probably wearing a bowler hat or something. "You've been cleaning," he observes. My people call this understatement. Fall cleaning is thorough and involves windows. I tell him that I've got a whole system now: start at the lamps. I wrote it out. The enthusiasm is leaking out of my balloon already and it's not even daybreak. "You didn't rearrange the furniture, though," and this tone is gentle reprimand. I want it to be gentle humor but I'm not there yet. Listen: I moved through three countries, more apartments. If I can't get away from you then what's moving the couch going to do really. I moved the dust because that's what bothers me, and in return I get a butler in the finest rebuttal style. Yay. I want to go back to bed and get a little sleep before the day really starts and that's so not going to happen now. I bet he has a cane somewhere. Gloves. "It's no good," he says, "No matter how much you move. No matter how much you clean. Getting away from me is not the same as making what I observe go away." Like I don't know, like I don't hear the echoes all the time of every outwit I've pulled, like it's not louder in my head than anywhere in the first place, and I was never in first place. I do wish he would go but I feel like mainly what I have to work on is acknowledging and even accepting that he's going to stay, that this is of more value than spending the rest of my days putting chairs in the middle of the room for him to trip over. Hoping he's as annoyed by me as I am by him; until the next one. "I'm going back to bed now. The bed is a nest of clean blankets and that's where I want to be." He nods in the darkness. "You won't sleep any more tonight, though. And you were never any good," raising his voice so that it carries through the door I'm closing on him.

handling fire and thinking it will not hurt

It reminds me of the story about the man who falls into a hole and his friend jumps in after him and the fallen man berates the jumper and the jumper says no it's okay I've been here I know the way out. It reminds me also of an awkward conversation I had more than once in which somebody tried to spare me and I put my hands in the fire anyway, thinking the only way to overcome pain was to feel it.

The conflict creates a war in my head where both sides suffer including the victors; ABBA does a bouncy dance soundtrack for Napoleon but nobody sings about Rouen which anyway the lack of an adequate soundtrack is the least of my worries.

I know what has to happen and so we march off, my troops of moderately convinced selves and the fanatical devotion that comes with not knowing the whole story. We are determined and proud and along the way we compliment ourselves on our armor and we say my don't we look strong and determined. That shaved head is as free of nonsense as they come and we shush the voice at the back that mutters that people who need to look free of nonsense are full of it. We are warriors. We lay out the story with facts and supporting players and nothing to lose, then later we have insights and the fact that we won some battles before and aren't we ever victorious modestly advancing only where wanted to win and conceding the battles we couldn't win see how we are practical we say.

And so we won the hardest battles and emerged victorious with not so much lost really except a review of the troops has some of them longing for the home they never had and there were some hot tears in among the celebratory libations but I'm sure that's from the fire, from the smoke of what had to be burned. There were bridges. And a week after the campaign the allies say that in fact you did what you promised, the vision that only you saw, what your voices promised you, that in fact you have given back what was stolen, the missing piece restored where nobody saw what was missing but you, the righteous king returned to his throne.

The counterattact surprisingly comes not in the heat of battle but later. The current challengers, who are not what we are not ready to call the enemy though we admit a certain fathoming in that depth, would like to mention that defeat makes you stronger that iron is tempered with fire that after all you were not so happy at twelve, were you. I don't mean midnight or noon. Yes that's all very interesting but I am right and you must concede that it is the king alone for whom I have battled and battle still. I am not fighting to control this territory I am in fact no conqueror. Truly I am fighting for another's righteous place I swear it.

Then why are you telling the story again, clapping your hands for another retelling. Why do you point to the voices when you are unsure, and then point at yourself when it's time to be blamed. Not every story has to have you at the center. Let's tell it again from the dauphin's point of view. Or shall we stick with you as if we were in battle still, when you know perfectly well that when you say you are willing to die for a cause that is exactly what you will have to do. Well which story do you want to tell now.

Vse Je Jednim

What it's like is that sometimes I don't think I can say anything directly, that I feel like all conversations have to make a stop at metaphor and line before we can get to where we're going. We get in the car with a dream I had. You start the trip when you say it's your fault, and it's not, but when I say it's not you start crying and you say "I wish you never brought it up" which I never meant to make you cry but if I could take one thing from you this burden would be first: I have to bring it up so I can lift it away from you.

I am not accustomed to handing other people tissues. What I mainly do is take charge and fix stuff and later on I cry alone. I mean that's why I have tissues in the first place: for me. I am not supposed to hand them to you and definitely I did not mean to make you cry and anyway why are you crying when I tell you it's not your fault, because this is not a sad thing but a statement of fact like how the beer garden is going to close soon is a fact. I mean it's just a thing.

It is hard to have nothing to invoke. For the love of poetry, I try. Oh, for Prufrock. Please don't cry. Please let me take this sadness from you and please for both of us let's throw it away far, down the field, far out. Let's throw it past the boy counting dandelions in the outfield, past anybody in the stands; let's make it something that nobody finds because nobody wants it. Let's steal home. It's not your fault. It's full of damage but we can't trace fault lines. Instead let's look towards construction that can weather the whether. Let's get past sports and geology and blame. Let's stop crying. We're running out of tissue.

green is the new flag

If we had been told to plant victory gardens 7 years ago, instead of to go shopping, we'd have good asparagus by now.

Sometimes I feel so bitter I imagine other people can smell it on me.

down to this

thirteen minutes to get it out, go. either you walk through the world and hand out knives because nothing can hurt you anymore because you've moved into the perfect white between, or you walk through the world shielded and afraid, or you stay inside and hide behind the glass because it's too scary on the other side. your choices are fierce or cowering or hidden. you cannot go out and only deal with people who do not frighten you so the choice is go out and be strong or go out and be hurt or stay in. you cannot selectively hold your heart in your hand on your sleeve please look at it pulsing and pretty and then somebody gives it a poke and you say they had no right. you cannot claim the privilege of offering it without claiming the responsibility for the damage and what do you care what they say about your heart, your bloody sleeve, your pitiful open hands, what you got that's so precious anyway, precious sweet it ain't like it's a ring somebody's gonna steal from you am i right. you cannot continue to alternately hand the knives to the people who stab you and then send morse code to the people across the street with your window blinds: see me. it seems to me like you have to make a choice. it seems to me like you're in or out. it seems to me like the stakes being high is what makes the game worth playing but it seems to me you could choose how high and give yourself a little room to twist free. don't start with me with your invisible options. don't ask if you could maybe go out and leave your heart at home. don't talk about going to the casino if you don't want to gamble. stop gambling what you're afraid of losing is all. take your heart with you and don't put it on the baize, somehow. or stay home. what do i know.