this girl's gon' fishin, where all the g’s are cut loose from the wind-up, and feckin is half a human’s vocabulary: feckin A, feckin boaht, feckin engine cut out on me, floatplane’s goin feckin carry me miles away from town, no feckin phones, no feckin internet, goin feckin miss me’s friends, hope the weather’s feckin good, and I better catch a mess of feckin salmon, hell yeah. (Oh, me mummy’d have a feckin English heart attack. And I also want to mention that coming back from fishing to the lower-48 is one of the most confusing acculturations around. often when I come back, my "potty mouth," as my mom calls it, is the most predominant feature of my character, and it takes me awhile to adjust back into the erudite sophistict'd critter ya'll know and love.) soooo, to finish the fisherman's cheers... the only noun not available for the cussin is Our Lady the Ocean, may she hold me dear, but not too dear, if you know what I’m sayin.

so if me’s blog don’t change from now ‘til the end of August (which it won’t), you now know why. Hugs, kisses, and the virtual equivalent of a paraglide jump off a cliff. Heh.

And now… some words not as good as Pirates of the Caribbean, which rocked ass other than the ending, but I’ve been running through…

another two excerpts from the piece I’m working on called "Revise This":

*[whaaahka. I'm removing old drafts. suck it up, it's rational.]

quotes I like

reminder from b’s email:

“Every healthy boy with a robust soul must set for the ocean someday.”

chain of thought from my family, specifically brolaw and sister

“As far as I’m concerned, PeeWee Herman ranks right up there with Willie Nelson as a true American hero.”

“And Teddy Roosevelt.”

“Perfect—now there’s the best possible configuration of three for our government… but J’d probably want a woman in there somewhere.”

“Hey, J, did you know Margaret Cho hit the list of the Year’s Worst Comics?”

from “The Magic Poker,” Robert Coover

“Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spell-bound.”

“Somebody just went around these rooms driving his fist in the walls because he had to hurt, it didn’t matter who or what, or maybe he kicked them with his feet, and bashed the windows and ripped the curtains and then went to the bathroom on it all! Oh my God! Why? Why would anybody want to do that?” The window in front of Karen (she has long since turned her back) is, but for one panel, still whole. In the excepted panel, the rupture in the glass is now spanned by a spiderweb more intricate than a butterfly’s wing, than a system of stars, its silver paths seeming to imitate or perhaps merely to extend the delicate tracery of the fractured glass still surrounding the hole. It is a new web, for nothing has entered it yet to alter its original construction. Karen’s hand reaches toward it, but then withdraws.

from The Waves

“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.” (Neville)

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall of the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body.” (Rhoda)

“I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another.” (Bernard)

“With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures.” (Rhoda)

“I should be transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon fading, soon darkening and dying there where it meets the wood, were it not that I coerce my brain to form in my forehead; I force myself to state, if only in one line of unwritten poetry, this moment; to mark this inch in the long long history that began in Egypt, in the time of the Pharaohs, when women carried red pitchers to the Nile. I seem already to have lived many thousand years. But if I now shut my eyes, if I fail to realize the meeting-place of past and present, that I sit in a third-class railway carriage full of boys going home for the holidays, human history is defrauded of a moment’s vision. Its eye, that would see through me, shuts—if I sleep now, through slovenliness, or cowardice, burying myself in the past, in the dark; or acquiesce… telling stories.” (Louis)

bike riding generates thoughts


like writing, bike riding involves a drag-ass extortion from my daily slothfulness. getting started is torture, but I don’t even have to be down to the pavement to find that exulting feeling of righteous and pulse-ridden vim. bike-riding has been my means of working through an absurd and endless middleclass white-girl fury that overcomes me in Bville and turns me into some kind of coke-snorting jabberwock. I wasn’t meant to be so fucking pissed off, but here I am. one of several techniques: casting images in head, I jump on the bike and pedal like I were in competition with the very forces that piss me off—values, differences of existence, passions. so, here’s what I’ve decided while pursued by several severed versions of Cerberus:

*every day without pause inhalation through the body non-cerebral interfered uninhibited unsharable not-for-the-market valueless creatively natural artistic small everything dream burst or bursts-plural of absolute joy for having this moment freeze frame chance to be inside wrapped with wrapped in wrapped apart purely connected with laugh and pain and whatnot and important hope for inexplicable occurrence and that chokethroat love of simply, humbly, standing in front of… is a wasted day.

*in realization of the previous, Thomas Wolfe had it right when he wrote you can’t go home again. it’s not about who Bville is, because it’s green, contains family, sits near maybe inside the ocean, tumbles mountains lakes, has incredible friends, and further. but it’s about who I am, what I carry. And you just can’t launch if you walk around in defensive poise.

*believing someone else is crazy is always simpler than questioning the singularity of our own personal realities. and actually it wasn’t me who said there are more creative ways… so, I want to create a way to walk a different path.

best weekends come unexpected

Saturday: going to the naked beach with my brolaw, sister, and friend sp. we all got to different levels of naked, drank rum and coke, and went swimming for hours, splashing and kicking and breathing water, which doesn’t feel like it feels like it should, and feeling fishlucky and seaweeded. I scraped my legs up and felt it was some kind of reward, like really not sarcastic, I was just so grateful to be there and to have the sun on me, turning me red, lotion, dunking each other, ottering about, crabs moving. sp thought I was odd for saying I thought there should be a safe space around a person while they make for themselves the choice to submerge from one ecosystem to the other… i.e. she thinks splashing someone not yet fully committed to the water is okay, and I think it’s not fair game until the person is in the water. other than that, we chatted with the other naked dudes and watched pickle the corgi play with maggie the pit bull pup, and all of us were right up to the top of us aware of what kind of day it was.

Sunday: running down the river on tubes, sister brolaw again and ee and his brother and leah, who is really lovely, and again drinking under the sun and everybody had the same idea and we’d bump into crowds 20-people thick of tubers in the twists and turns, naked, one guy jumped and got temporarily saved on brolaw’s raft, and hanging upside down underneath a tube, with the sky separated above, and the mountain water was perfect, rushing by, taking me with, curving along, I had so much love for everyone with me and not with me, even the people I’m angry with.

And we lost three sunglasses under the water, ‘cause we couldn’t keep ourselves from hanging upside down, and when it got cool, and exchanging encounters with people we didn’t know – sharing reeces pieces and watching people pee and drink beer and get burned, all of us right there and nowhere else, but maybe experiencing that river in just as many different ways as there were different people, but still having some undercurrent that holds us all together, and it does.

all I can say is I hope you all have great great moments, quiet and shared, delicate like webs, unraveled. and we'll talk about it at the end of our summer...

You can’t make ice cream without harmonicas, don't even bother arguing; harmonicas are more American than Cracker Jacks. Speaking of which, I just finished a book that explains where Cracker Jacks, Ferris Wheels, Shredded Wheat, alternating current, Central Park, griddage and the term psychopath all come from. And that’s not all... a good book and I haven’t had so much fun reading history in quite some time, plus it gives me lots of things to go look at with semi-knowledgeable awe when I return to Chicago: Devil in the White City.

(ps. I miss you Chicago. I've decided you're home, something not expected. Miss my friends there too, yep.)

But back to ice cream. I just weighed myself today and I’m 15 pounds heavier than when I left Chicago, so there is some difference apparently between a diet of ramen noodles & cottage cheese and a diet of steak, chicken, salmon, ice cream, beer, pasta, and really good local potato chips. I am currently making all kinds of vows for my month’s stint fishing in AK and I’m hoping the exercise will whip me back into shape. Or maybe just the less food because I am getting more exercise, which entails gaining ground on reclaiming my ass: grinding ice cream, biking around the lake, kayaking, playing catch, dancing sometimes and going for the occasional walk.

But back to the ice cream. I decided to do a little experimentating and got some partial recipes off the web. Personally I had my heart set on mint chocolate chip, and thought there was plenty of mint around about in my mom’s yard, but when I went to look for it, it was revealed to me that my mom had gone on a mint holocaust last summer and had ripped out all of the peppermint and spearmint, leaving vast quantities of lemon balm. This particular mint, lemon balm, is great and all for hot tea in the winter when it is 20 below with the wind chill, and your nose is running and maybe a little crinkle in the throat so you brew up some of that kind of mint and add honey and viola, you have great medicinal tea, but nevertheless is not something I want to work into an early ice cream experiment. So instead I went about with a very sharp eye and gathered little shy renegade garmants of peppermint and spearmint. Then I blended them together with milk and sugar, strained the result and ended up with a strainer that looked like this:

My next move was to grate up a bunch of chocolate and then I also mashed some home-grown raspberries and made a raspberry-chip ice cream too. With the addition of the following moments…
















We ended up getting something like such…

Which created about 5 of my new pounds and also something like this…

So, I think it’s safe to say that the fourth of July was celebrated in true American spirit. Now I must gripe about something: Germany won against Argentina! Which means I won my sibling rivalry moment, although I was really pissed off when she swapped “sides” right as the game started and as we were watching a recording and I knew I had won the rivalry, I was annoyed to have to share the kudos when she really only changed her mind because she thinks Ballack is cute. But this isn’t my gripe. This is:

German freakin’ lost to Italy yesterday! How dare they! How dare! Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Italy was bad, but man, I’ve never seen such a bunch of swimmers leapin’ off the high dive. Every little wiffle of air or touch of the shoulder and those weasaly little Italians were hitting the turf and holding their noses and weeping with the pain of it all. Personally, I’d rather not watch a final showdown involving a bunch of foul-moochers.

But on the other hand, I don’t like the French because they were mean to me because I don’t speak French and so I can’t root for them either. That means I have to root for Italy just because they’re cute and make funny hand gestures (and they do), even if they are big faking fakers.

I've decided to become a cat.

Either that, or a Harley Hog road warrior with leather gloves that don't have the fingers in them.

i felt bad today. the swings again. i went to the docks and walked two feet past a mother seal and her baby. i felt a little better. evening on the dock.

phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhw. deep breath. people not related who love all of me: ellen, sarah, natalie, ehban, selah, peter, lambert, annie too, chuck, cow tranquilizers.