For tomorrow.

Dear December,

This year I have something special for you!  An advent calendar!  Come back tomorrow and open the first little door....

Collections XII

 

Friday: I'm in love.

 

Trimline Telephone, 1968; Designed by Henry Dreyfuss (American, 1904–1972); USA; plastic, metal, electronic components; 8 x 23.5 x 7.5 cm (3 1/8 x 9 1/4 x 2 15/16 in.); Gift of Henry Dreyfuss; 1972-88-179-1 Collection of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

Dear Receiver,

As I live and breathe!  Have you seen this?  Meaning of course, have you heard of Dial-a-Poem?  Because, I don't know how in the world I have lived without knowing about it!

Dial 641-793-8122, poetry is standing by!

You can read more about artist John Giorno and his project Dial-a-Poem here, on the SFMOMA website.

Collections XI

 

Everybody talk about...

 

Pop muzik.

(Your song of 

the day).

Collections X

 

Honey pie you're not safe here.

 

Dear Constantly Played,

Here is your song, your song, for you, for the day!  So, hang the dj with me and play it loud!  

Bonus track:  Honey Pie.

Collections VIIII

 

On skates.

 

Dear Lovelies,

It's been a long time since we talked about this, but, today is day 900, and so I will attempt yet again to convince you to roller skate!  

Why, you ask, why roller skate?  

The glamour:  But no, that's not really it, because it's only glamorous if you are Gloria Nord or on the internet.  Just to set the record straight on glamour, let's hear some sound advice from the Dirty School of Skate.

The absurd:  Wheels!  On boots!  On your feet!  That is some kind of human, beautiful, passionate, crazy!

The frightening:  Falling hurts, and you fall; yup, you fall.

The challenge:  It's difficult, and see above, falling hurts!

The joy:  All of the above combined with hurtling, even faltering, slow hurtling, through space and time!

There are also a few more personal reasons that I love skating.  One thing I love about roller skating is the fact that it isn't filled with teenaged boys:  I like that roller skating is something that girls and women do.  I was interested in skateboarding, but not in being the object of a teenage boy's ridicule.  I had to endure that when I was a teenaged girl, and I hated it then, too.  (Question to self:  Do girls ever mortify boys by making fun of their physical abilities?  Hmmm.)

Another thing I love is the parts and the gear.  I love trying different wheels, different knee pads, making skate leashes, rotating wheels, cleaning bearings, all the geeky details.

And a last thing, which is related to the challenge; for me, it's a place to be daring and even a smidge righteous, in the pride sense, because to even try to roller skate is really amazing.  I am the evil opposite of a 'gifted athlete;'  I am a ball ducker.  I have poor balance, no innate grace, and a paralyzing fear of injury.  This makes me suited only for chess, but I am rubbish at that, too,  and chess is a dull and sadistic game that requires utter surrender from your playmate.  Chess also has too many teenaged boys, especially the annoying middle aged ones.  However, after skating regularly for 12 years, and floundering on our mini ramp, I still cannot drop in.  My massive and wonderful consolation prize is that I am part of an extremely elite group of 52 year old women who even try to skate ramps, and this perverse fact gives me a heap of nearly harmless and totally comical self-satisfaction.

Sisters and brothers, won't you join me?

Collections VIII

 

Your Pale Blue Eyes

 

Dear Eyes,

Here is your song for today; sing or tambourine along, won't you?

Crowded rocks.

 

Collections VII

 

Cancelled wedding RSVP stamps.  1999.

Collections VI

 

Quiet as it's kept.

 

Dear Readers,

Follow me now, and it won't be easy, because the way things happen is not a straight line; the way things happen is meandering at the minimum and tangled at the max.  

A good pal of mine read a book a several months ago.  She read a book, like she often does, but this time it was harder to read, because she was worried about a pandemic, and fretful.  She made a plan and a schedule and a time to read each day, and she traced with extra difficulty the words, and pages, and books.  

And one of the books was this one:  The Book of Delights.

It's made of small pieces, this book.  

And my pal gave it to me, knowing I would like it.  I read slowly, or nearly slowly, because I wanted each piece to really last, like a a hard candy that I would not crunch down on.  

And I wanted to read you so many of the pieces.  Or pieces of the pieces, like this one:

Prose, though, I often write on the computer, piling sentences up quickly, cutting and pasting, deleting whole paragraphs without thinking anything of it.  for these essays, though, I decided that I'd write by hand, mostly with Le Pens, in smallish notebooks.  I can tell you a few things- first, the pen, the hand behind the pen, is a digressive beast.  It craves, in my experience anyway, the wending thought, and crafts/imagines/conjures a syntax to contain it.  On the other hand, the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out its own archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is

For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language.  I mean writing.  The point:  I'd no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer.  And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer's green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull.  To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it's kept.

Meanwhile, another pal heard Ross Gay on the radio (or something like the radio- a podcast, possibly) and she told me she was instituting a daily delight practice based on the book. She was looking, now, for delights everywhere.  

And finding them by the bucketful.

And, I saw a delight on Sunday that I want to tell y'all about:  Ambling down the highway towards the East, I saw the Three Mules!  You may recall me mentioning the Three Mules here on these pages some time ago.

And, now it is time for you to go out and read this book, or find a delight, or maybe you will even do both.

 

Normal Song

 

Dear Listeners,

I hope you enjoy this lovely 3/4 time song* for today.  I really love these austere songs, but y'all already know that, don't you?  Doesn't it just make you want to sing your own?  To put your own thoughts into a little melody and add a little thumping time beat?  Well, if you do it, I know it will be great, and I hope you go out on your driveway apron, or your apartment balcony, or to the front of your tent flap, and that you sing it for the world.

*This song puts me in mind of Cat Power, Jeff Buckley, Velvet Underground, M. Ward, and Talking Heads.

Collections V

 

Christmas Shopping

 

Dear Shoppers,

Do you have someone on your holiday list that is hard to shop for?  Here is something truly for the person who has everything.  You should also give a life vest to the lucky recipient!

Etymology & Definition

 

Dear Everybody,

Well just who in the world wouldn't want this?  It's a site that lets you research what words were coined in specific years:  Check it out here.

When I am not reading about words, I am thinking about them.  For example, what are 'feelings'?  Are those thoughts that come faster than usual?  Or, does it mean the sensation of rough wool on your elbows?  Or, is it a construct of ideas and ideals, like the feeling word we use so much, 'love?'

Love is not the same as "I care for you," but it can include that action and statement.  F'rinstince, I love words and I love thinking about them, but, I do not really water them like plants, or make them a sandwich like I do my flat mates.

So, today, join me in thinking about what the word love and care mean, or, take a nice romp through the above website and find another word to think about, but, know that I love you and care about you.

Collections IV