9.29.2008

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

9.19.2008

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

9.18.2008

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