I can’t find the origin of this poem but I can’t stop thinking about it.

We have
always been

a whaling
village. The temple

is for the
whale fetuses.

Last night I learned how to make jam and dill pickles and canned tomato sauce and spicy pepper mix. I was up drinking wine and canning with a couple of girlfriends until 4am. Another unqualified blissful summer night.

Spent yesterday afternoon at Lake Harris, watching snakes and birds and fish and floating on inner tubes in the water, lazylike, eating strawberries and basil, looking across the water at Skull Island and the Dam and making up stories about them. L brought a cooler of gin and made martinis. The dogs romped around and after 6 years together, I finally convinced my dog to take a swim. Came home a little sunkissed and very blissed out.

I found this little calorie calculator and discovered I am eating somewhere in the neighborhood of 700-800 calories a day–except on milk days, when it’s much more like 300. That amazes me.

Aaaaand after a very very late night, I woke up this (late) morning to my landlord delivering my new house keys. That’s alright. There’s nothing for a hangover quite like grinding out a move when the heat index is 110.

A tutoring session in the Writing Center yesterday turned into a breakthrough–I watched, with astonishment, the transformation on my student’s face–and I sort of realized all of the sudden why some people love to teach, and how I might.

Which felt like a reward for some very strange and difficult selfwork I’d done that morning, into which I don’t want to go too deeply, all I’ll say is that I am getting too old to be explicitly repeating my actions with the expectation of a different outcome–at any rate, happy tears as I walked across campus to my car afterward, and then I found the shell of an insect on the sidewalk.

a cyclone full of feeling, the silence of the moon

Now iced coffee from a mason jar. Now napping under the window unit all afternoon. Now Eleni Sikelianos. My Saturn Return started with a bang.

If you put a monster in a big town there’ll be a story you can open like a book but you need the town, the monster being just old terror without it–a roaming hull, a speech balloon. You need a grid (for temptation to have come to location). I’d be the same whether I tried to get closer to love or not; I’d dawdle or I’d inch in, either way. Let love rub itself up against pleasure. You need some boulevards for the monster to cross like he was anybody coming through the camp.

CS Giscombe

Music appears, the voice coming not into itself but to real things such as animals. A whole slew of repeat performances coming up. Today, to me, is the opposite of relief: today’s blunt-toothed and equivocal, ugly. Music does the talking, the hem of my garment just banging away on the skin.

CS Giscombe

After I dropped the J’s off at the Birmingham airport this morning (they’re hiking in the Andes for the next two weeks) I drove to a big outdoor galleria and had a nice long shop. I tested cosmetics, tried on jewelry, thought about a new perfume, tried on shoes and bras and jeans. I bought a few small things, but mostly I just basked in the afternoon heat and the sheer normalcy of strolling from store to store with an iced coffee, no specific aim in mind and no place to be. After, I drove to the Whole Foods and spent hours wandering from aisle to aisle, examining grains and produce, strange nut butters, linguica sausages. Having realized that my diet alienates me from the vast majority of foodstuffs over which I dawdled, I filled my cart instead with shea butter soap and seaweed salt scrub, good supplements, expensive coffee, a bottle of Spanish red. And naturally, another orchid.

Then I treated myself to sushi-tuna and salmon nigiri, two pieces of avocado roll. I sipped my miso soup slowly and stared off into space. No book, no frantic text-sending, just lingering over the smells and tastes and the slow sensation of fullness.

It was a really nice date.