It’s a myth that birds will reject their young if they’ve been handled by humans: birds, as it turns out, actually have very small olfactory nerves. Once or maybe more than once a person had the opposite problem and their lover smelled like someone else. I’m inclined to find this to be a myth as [...]
Yearly Archives: 2008
* * *
Never getting older means stabbing people in the ear
Seems to me that reading quotation books is a little weird. It’s something you do solely for the purpose of collection, tiny personality-rhinestones to have and hold and maybe share if there is an appropriate occasion. (or tumble) I went through the Bartlett’s pretty faithfully in high school because high school is about [...]
* * *
A man on TV said this was a “no man is an island” situation
Here is why I don’t believe in having fish as pets: I do not like to own things I can’t hold. I told the neighbor I named the fish that lives on our dining room table Sarah Jessica Parker because it was frivolous, and he said “exactly right. Sarah Jessica Parker is why we are [...]
* * *
.
McSweeney’s is doing a really wonderful thing right now. This word selfish comes up in suicides like the word devoted does in eulogies: selfishness on the part of the suicide, selfishness on the part of the survivors for feeling personally injured, selfishness on the part of the survivors for feeling guilty about the selfishness instead of feeling [...]
* * *
Between a life actually lived and a shadow cast on…
At some point choice became this really bad thing.
There was one room in the Los Angeles art world like Wonderland, where we stood three feet shorter than the table, near chair legs like pillars. What we wanted, what we chose to want, was to feel our feet swing over the heads of the balding, the [...]
* * *
Fourteen August Three AM
There are sixty seconds of 3 to 3:01. In the first ten I think I saw my ribcage move, sort of in the way the sand breaks over ghost crabs. The right leg splits at twelve and the left at thirteen. The trembling of an unstable leg emerging shakes off a black shiny oil, like [...]
* * *
* * *
Self pity is the least interesting
Two knees to the floor. Scarred, both. Two kinds of falls, and this a third. One bled forever, the childhood one. Off something. The second was adult, and superficial. These scar the worst because they don’t bleed. That was into something, in a way. Carpet burn.
This is not like that. Two palms together and a head to [...]
* * *
.
It is too hot in Venice in August and there is too much rain in Ireland to live. There are pictures only: the sun, the humidity, a small distant window. In fairness, a holdover from twelve years of Hawaii keeps a heater at her feet in fine, stable weather: marred, always, by the weather of [...]
* * *
Good reasons, I think, to go places
You have these parameters for judging people that in most cases stop making sense when you aren’t where you’re used to being. You have these parameters for judging situations that in most cases stop making sense when they aren’t situations you’re used to. Most people who leave their homes are with you, parameter-less as well, [...]
* * *