I love:

(inspired by Pam's blog and my waning desire to actually write paragraphs)

• my mother
• the heat of bodies under blankets
• smelling baby heads
• how small, surface impacts of deliberate love and care sometimes add up to cataclysmic, geologic transformation
• when my dad really tries
• coasting
• when noise becomes music
• climbing trees until I am high enough that I should stop, then climbing more
• seeing my aunt cheat at cards and board games
• kids running while holding hands because they need to share
• the juncture that separates the pads of my cat's paws
• hilarious misspellings
• healing injuries with cotton balls, humor, and Band-Aids
• absurd and unselfconscious children’s drawings
• unrepentantly awful jokes, including Knock-Knocks
• remembering love with a heart that’s whole
• the way good memories tend to glow, uncorrupted by truth
• starting a campfire using only last night’s embers, then feeding it until it doesn’t need me anymore
• when strangers smile
• the way sea water feels thick and coherent when you skim your hand across it
• drinking coffee and eating oatmeal in bed
• when anyone or anything falls asleep on me
• camping for so long that seeing yourself in a mirror is a surprise
• when a kid asks me about my skin and I explain it, and they go, “Oh, cool.”
• the swirl of hair at the nape of my brother’s neck
• bird bones

words

• crepuscular
• verdant
• fatso
• redundant
• patsy
• vanilla
• robust
• supine
• lupine
• fervent
• melodic
• pustule
• hawk
• jaundiced
• retroviral
• inhibit
• vestigal
• metastic
• bovine
• hydrophobic
• virulent
• burgeoning
• astringent
• ascend
• abscond
• Judas
• pulchritude
• sepulchre
• coprolalia
• and I have renewed ambivalence toward: auspicious
  

dubious beginnings

It's strange starting something whose failure you're anticipating. I don't read blogs, don't particularly like the word "blog," and don't know many people who regularly update theirs.

I have thought about writing one for a while, but I wonder how long I can self-consciously type to an unknown and most probably nonexistent audience. But, as my grandfather never said, wondering never built any bridges, so I might as well write.

Here are some of my intentions:

• to not abandon this within a week or two - to persist
• to post interesting and strange and beautiful things
• to use this as a catalyst to create interesting and strange and beautiful things
• to type without too much fear or self-doubt, but a little of each
• if ever I mention this to people in real life, to never use the word 'blog'
  

In my fine tradition of minimal commitment, let's see what happens.

-N