Restless sleep. Ambiguous mornings. Daylight that does not differentiate- wet and gray, so gray I have forgotten any other color. Occasional sunclouds, the storms churned into piles of whipped-cream and floating in golden caramel. The heavens can be rainbows, pink and blue, molten gold? Surely not. My dog takes three cold showers a day (that … Continue reading my life right now
Month: March 2011
my chihuahua is infinitely beautiful
She is peanut-shaped and her fur is like a field of wheat that has been shined by the rain and combed into place by the wind and then warmed by the sun she is a hillside a landscape an Andrew Wyeth painting she is North Dakota since the people have fled to the cities and … Continue reading my chihuahua is infinitely beautiful
no hope
“Without hope, there is no fear.” -Buddhist saying “When hope dies, action begins." -Derrick Jensen I’ve been trying to apply these concepts to my own writing. Writing is easy, writing is fun. Writing a novel is like digging through a wet cement wall with just my fingernails. The difference, for me, between writing “just for … Continue reading no hope
personal writing and the internet
Once upon a time, the only people who wrote about their lives and called it “memoir” were celebrities and US presidents. Other writers, when writing about their own lives and experiences, called it “fiction”. A person who wanted to write a memoir about themselves, and wasn’t already famous, was considered a narcissist and a fool. … Continue reading personal writing and the internet
A post not about my childhood
Today it’s spring. There are little flowers everywhere, suddenly. The light is less hazy and stays for longer, the rain is warmer. I leave the window open when I sleep and I can hear birds in the morning, wind chimes, children shouting. Neighbors running their car engines. I go on long walks with my dog, … Continue reading A post not about my childhood
ramen
There are so many ways to eat ramen. Ramen wet, ramen dry. Ramen that got stepped on, straight from the package, crumbled up. Ramen in a bowl with hot tap water. Put another bowl on top, if you have one. Let it sit for three minutes, if you can stand to wait. Ramen quickly, … Continue reading ramen
snow cave
I’m nine years old and our apartment is filled with smoke. Yellow, heavy, cloying smoke, the cumulative exhaust of thousands and thousands of cigarettes. It’s been a long winter- cold, dark, blustery, trees popping in the night-time, bitter stars, snow piled up against the window panes. The electric wall registers are cranked to full-blast and … Continue reading snow cave
fish soup
My mother rarely ate anything other than cigarettes, mountain dew and strong black tea. Occasionally, when she was feeling generous, she would buy a bag of fritos and a tub of cottage cheese and we would eat them together, sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Fritos and cottage cheese were a combination that she had brought … Continue reading fish soup
Light box
As an adult, I look back and I see the paranoid schizophrenic woman who raised me, and I see the woman who raised me- and it is impossible, sometimes, to separate the two, to know what would have been different if this woman hadn’t been so paranoid, if she hadn’t been hallucinating, and what would … Continue reading Light box
OCD
Barbara is out of cigarettes again. It’s wintertime, and she can’t remember a time when it was anything other than wintertime. She takes her long, puffy pink coat with the toggle buttons from the ladder-backed kitchen chair where it lives and buttons it up over her tall, narrow frame. She puts her long fingers in … Continue reading OCD
CARROT QUINN 
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