2001
My Heart
Today: A lovely gray day with clouds like heavenly cat-fur...and I should have known, it happens too often not to expect—the rain began to fall (falling) just as I walked out. So I didn’t walk over to the U. District to buy a coat at the Wise Penny. I walked down the hill to the library instead. And on the way I got, all of a sudden, a pain in my chest. Right in the center of my chest, and a funny feeling in my right neck. I prepared for death—that is, I kept walking. And decided it was more likely hiatal hernia, especially in view of the green salad I had just inhaled. I really out ott ought to remember to chew my food. But then my fillings would just disintegrate faster, wouldn’t they?
I got to the library & drank cold water. The pain stopped. I printed a page. Kate told me the Wise Penny closed a good year ago, so don’t bother going over. I won’t bother. I mean I may go to the U. District (or ride a bus out to the end of the line—though I believe line ends in these parts tend to be charmless). But I won’t go to find a cheap coat. —And not in the rain.
I may have to try Value Village.
Sitting here & looking out the windows, I start to imagine things blowing up—explosions in the Biltmore across the way & body-parts & brains raining in the street. These unwholesome visions are caused by an infection of the Zeitgeist.
[Olive Way Starbucks 9/25/01]
Holo/Homo Deludens
These thoughts (all my recent thoughts) are appropriate to the second half of life, when you look forward not to being grown up, getting the job, publishing the novel, finding the lover, calving the child but—imagining death, or sickness or inanition & dependence. Well, it’s bound to change your viewpoint.
What we want is for things to last, for loved ones to endure forever. What we get is constant change and recurrence of types.
So I realized as I walked home last night in the deepening dusk & looked all unexpecting at a porch & there was, looking back at me, a ‘Mas-cat. I stopped all melty, said, “Mas!” & he/she got up & came over to accept my tribute, gazing at me with those green eyes of depthless mystery (living emeralds) before backing away. (O, I don’t know you.) So there is, after your love is no more, more love.
But that does not offer the same comfort as a personal god who has prepared an eternal paradise with everyone you care for.
(With the same relations? Yes, even as they are here on earth. That’s how you know men made it up. The women didn’t contribute—they were too busy chasing after the kids. Besides, men won’t listen to women if they can avoid it.)
But there is no reward in seeing clearly, and even less in telling others the naked truth, am I right, Cassandra? (Yet what else can Cassandra do? Remain silent?)
[Broadway Starbux 9/26/01]
Ugly Thursday
I have looked on Beauty bald & I have looked on Deformity with every hair-do imaginable.
Today on Broadway, for instance: well, on Broadway we expect the more baroque forms of sin & decay, but today—everybody was hideous: drunken bums of all races but mostly one sex, fat proles in grease-stained tee shirts, the young in one another’s pants. The guys with plugs in their earlobes, the punky/Goth girls in ankle warmers (good god, are those coming back?), the yappy little dogs, the mangy big ones. The drug addicted, the water allergic. The doddering old. Mark with his improbable hair chartreuse instead of the “usual” magenta.
—And even gawkulous me in my new hair um hearing-aid, hairing-bun, herringbone jacket. Tendinous as well as tendentious & risible, not risen. Nor rising.
I couldn’t find any new clothes.
My dreams are bad, the weather cool. That alone...
Think of oceans. Think of water—nudged, pulled, simply urged? Rocked, tipped—however sent or lent, falling all over itself in its eagerness to prostrate itself upon the beach. Out of love or aggression. Oh...
Together always. I want that.... from wanting (that or something else—& it’s always one or the other, or both), I am distracted first by Lee’s ballistic laugh. Then by him asking me if the music playing out here is “Jingle Bells.” “I’m not listening,” I tell him. “What?” he says.
Over by the window Carole G. pauses in her writing to dig about in her nose with a Kleenex-wrapped finger. Tch tch. (I never do.)
[Boston Market (OW) Starbucks 9/27/01]
Today: A lovely gray day with clouds like heavenly cat-fur...and I should have known, it happens too often not to expect—the rain began to fall (falling) just as I walked out. So I didn’t walk over to the U. District to buy a coat at the Wise Penny. I walked down the hill to the library instead. And on the way I got, all of a sudden, a pain in my chest. Right in the center of my chest, and a funny feeling in my right neck. I prepared for death—that is, I kept walking. And decided it was more likely hiatal hernia, especially in view of the green salad I had just inhaled. I really out ott ought to remember to chew my food. But then my fillings would just disintegrate faster, wouldn’t they?
I got to the library & drank cold water. The pain stopped. I printed a page. Kate told me the Wise Penny closed a good year ago, so don’t bother going over. I won’t bother. I mean I may go to the U. District (or ride a bus out to the end of the line—though I believe line ends in these parts tend to be charmless). But I won’t go to find a cheap coat. —And not in the rain.
I may have to try Value Village.
Sitting here & looking out the windows, I start to imagine things blowing up—explosions in the Biltmore across the way & body-parts & brains raining in the street. These unwholesome visions are caused by an infection of the Zeitgeist.
[Olive Way Starbucks 9/25/01]
Holo/Homo Deludens
These thoughts (all my recent thoughts) are appropriate to the second half of life, when you look forward not to being grown up, getting the job, publishing the novel, finding the lover, calving the child but—imagining death, or sickness or inanition & dependence. Well, it’s bound to change your viewpoint.
What we want is for things to last, for loved ones to endure forever. What we get is constant change and recurrence of types.
So I realized as I walked home last night in the deepening dusk & looked all unexpecting at a porch & there was, looking back at me, a ‘Mas-cat. I stopped all melty, said, “Mas!” & he/she got up & came over to accept my tribute, gazing at me with those green eyes of depthless mystery (living emeralds) before backing away. (O, I don’t know you.) So there is, after your love is no more, more love.
But that does not offer the same comfort as a personal god who has prepared an eternal paradise with everyone you care for.
(With the same relations? Yes, even as they are here on earth. That’s how you know men made it up. The women didn’t contribute—they were too busy chasing after the kids. Besides, men won’t listen to women if they can avoid it.)
But there is no reward in seeing clearly, and even less in telling others the naked truth, am I right, Cassandra? (Yet what else can Cassandra do? Remain silent?)
[Broadway Starbux 9/26/01]
Ugly Thursday
I have looked on Beauty bald & I have looked on Deformity with every hair-do imaginable.
Today on Broadway, for instance: well, on Broadway we expect the more baroque forms of sin & decay, but today—everybody was hideous: drunken bums of all races but mostly one sex, fat proles in grease-stained tee shirts, the young in one another’s pants. The guys with plugs in their earlobes, the punky/Goth girls in ankle warmers (good god, are those coming back?), the yappy little dogs, the mangy big ones. The drug addicted, the water allergic. The doddering old. Mark with his improbable hair chartreuse instead of the “usual” magenta.
—And even gawkulous me in my new hair um hearing-aid, hairing-bun, herringbone jacket. Tendinous as well as tendentious & risible, not risen. Nor rising.
I couldn’t find any new clothes.
My dreams are bad, the weather cool. That alone...
Think of oceans. Think of water—nudged, pulled, simply urged? Rocked, tipped—however sent or lent, falling all over itself in its eagerness to prostrate itself upon the beach. Out of love or aggression. Oh...
Together always. I want that.... from wanting (that or something else—& it’s always one or the other, or both), I am distracted first by Lee’s ballistic laugh. Then by him asking me if the music playing out here is “Jingle Bells.” “I’m not listening,” I tell him. “What?” he says.
Over by the window Carole G. pauses in her writing to dig about in her nose with a Kleenex-wrapped finger. Tch tch. (I never do.)
[Boston Market (OW) Starbucks 9/27/01]
posted by K. E. Ellingson at 4:09 PM
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