--ALL
MY LIFE NOW SEEMS TO BE ONE HAPPY MOMENT
…Yesterday
the wind blew so hard I thought my windows were going to crack. I thought I saw Dorothy and The Wicked Witch
flying through the air.
I watched
some sparrows struggle with the gusts.
The eagle didn’t seem to have any trouble.
Twigs and
other bits of detritus nicked the glass in my office. It sounded like a pellet gun being shot at
the windows. It was slightly startling.
…I just left
and you didn’t even realize it.
The power
went out. It was out for six hours. Apparently a tree fell across the road and
took several power lines with it.
During the
outage I read until it got dark and then I got a lantern and read some more and
finished a very great book: “Dept. of Speculation,” by Jenny Offill.
I’ve never
read anything like it. You should give
it a go. It’s quite short, not even 200
pages, but here sentences and observances are fantastic as you’ll hopefully see
at the end of this post.
…Last weekend
was something else. A last minute trip
to Portland for a boy’s weekend to watch the big fight. Groups of guys together are a lot different
than groups of women together. Guys are
pretty stupid. You have to drink a lot,
or at least fake it well. One of our
party threw up in the bathroom and then kept hugging and kissing my cheek (he’s
not gay, just quite affectionate.)
The fight
raked in millions, maybe billions. But
the fight wasn’t about the fight. It was
akin to The Super Bowl. Cronyism. Bonding.
That sort of thing.
It’s good to
have friends. When I’m with mine, I feel
more alive. I wish they didn’t live so
far away…
-“The baby’s
eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night,
she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the
island she’d washed up on.”
-“There is
nowhere to cry in this city.”
-“There’s
that moment, you know, for most people, when you decide you want to wake up in
the world for one more day.”
-“You can
never fucking outrun entropy.”
-“There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.”
-“To live in
a city is to be forever flinching.”
-“Evolution
trained us to cry out if we are being abandoned.”
--Jenny
Offill, “Dept. of Speculation”
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