Meanwhile, in repurposing / why didn't I think of this sooner news
Made this keyboard riser for standing desk work from three shelves my grandfather made for my late mother's apartment. Been staring at them for a couple of weeks, looking for the right wall. Nice to have finally been able to give them purpose – no wall required.
reading:
This one's been on my to-read shelf for years (at least since Schiff's 2017 PARIS REVIEW interview) but, given that the Rethugs are determined to party like it's 1692, I figured now was as horrifically an appropriate a time as any to give it a long-overdue read. My complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
there are many meetings after someone dies and other truths learned in the last 24 hours
even if they were cremated and put in their box the day after they died. Apparently the funeral home has an "informative packet" for me which should be interesting and, perhaps, even, informative. At least they got rid of that fucking fountain.
(I seriously don't remember having to go to the funeral home so much even after my stepfather, who had $10k worth of pomp and circumstance, finally kicked it.)
Ok, I guess that’s the only thing I’ve learned in the last 24 hours.
Had to install more anti-Kirby pre-planting floral fortifications.
the cardinal at the window
Over the past couple of days a cardinal has been slamming his head into the living room window. We've put up fake owls in the window and he still slams and slams and slams. Intercrainal hemorrhaging would have taken root by now, surely?
Or a broken window, whichever comes first.
Or a broken mind, to wit: I have been swearing at this cardinal because my mother, in the months before her death, had – at least as far as the items I've found and mail order items delivered – become obsessed with cardinals.
The day she died, I opened one of the delivered and unopened packages and found it filled with little chotchke woodblocks relaying messages of something or other about a cardinal being an angel or memory or IDK whatthefuckever, and, given the timing – and in spite of being the indifferent agnostic with atheistic tendencies that I am, I (my stance: if I'm wrong, I'm wrong – and I'm relatively convinced that holy water would melt me like Christopher Lee circa 1965)– suitably, I think, and sans too fine a point, freaked the fuck out.
We've now entered day three of the intercranially-hemorrhaging headslamming cardinal and I am swearing at him still, jesusfuckingchrist go away, youre not getting in, youre not making me feel guilty anymore for being me im free now – or I will be once I get all of your fucking Christmas decorations out of your garage / QVC does NOT constitute generational family heirlooms…
want to v have to
Ongoing:
this mental guerilla fracas between what I want to write and what I have – what I am compelled, via surrounding circumstance and requisite processings - to write and being the devoted companion of a desire to write in a different rhythm than the one I've been sporting for the last several years.
A desire to transcend my own rhythms via my work? Perhaps.
The answer is, as always, to let what happens in the midst of The Work happen, to stay out of my own way (as best I'm able), and to surprise myself; the biggest surprise will be, I think, an increase in my capacity for staying out of my own way.