i snuck a photo of a fabulous tagged van as i was scrambling to meet E in a hard-to-reach corner of brooklyn this afternoon, and joe snuck a photo of the moon caught in the williamsburg bridge as i butchered an avocado this evening; balance is satisfying. here they are in my phone, punctuating shots of the cats slinking into the hall to huff the elevator.
i would like to say that i blundered through the navy yard as gracefully as steve and matty intimidated the neighbors' welcome mat, but i've left manhattan just four times since the spring and am no longer accustomed to interiors in which i shouldn't be naked. E and i talked about traveling in the After Times - we met in tasmania in january - and lifted our mouth-drapes at each other re: how very few people would get how our work has changed. it was strange a year ago; now it's unimaginable, from where i'm sitting, though some of our mutual friends continue to happy-talk about meeting in, like, istanbul next year. she's planning to go for an MFA this fall, and i have saurian memories of the essays i pitched before i decided to bank coals and say yes to a season of simple carbs.
i confessed to E that i think i just read a dozen books by women, no breaks for dudes, for the first time since i was a tween. that wasn't especially intentional, but i do notice that my reading list is evolving: prior to this spring i grabbed anything that caught my eye, a not-insubstantial portion of my reads came from my used bookstore volunteer gig, hey, it's all easy and usually cheap. now literary social media is my weekly booster shot; i feel like a baby grad, an ickle neonate in a mortarboard. am i better?
08.31.20
it's ten before midnight and one of my twentysomething neighbors is running laps along the paved path in our garden, arms bent and tucked, gait jittery, which can only mean one thing: he's trying not to turn into a werewolf. i should have stopped him, as i'm sympathetic: the corn moon and his increased power and impulses to prowl and howl are seasonal and beyond his control. (better the lower east side than the moon.)
growing claws is wild, no? first the toe boxes of your shoes constrain you, then you start scissoring your sheets in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden you're shattered in the moonlight, dumb and hungry and awake to the fact that you might need to be an animal for the first time in your life.
one of my dearest friends grabbed me on election day in 2016: we are the people who run into the fire. he was wrong, and we have been so complacent, but i have broken for lycanthropy.
growing claws is wild, no? first the toe boxes of your shoes constrain you, then you start scissoring your sheets in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden you're shattered in the moonlight, dumb and hungry and awake to the fact that you might need to be an animal for the first time in your life.
one of my dearest friends grabbed me on election day in 2016: we are the people who run into the fire. he was wrong, and we have been so complacent, but i have broken for lycanthropy.