tuesday afternoon in the 9th circle of white collar hell

“So — ready to commit murder yet?”

“You have no idea.”

“Mm, I might have an inkling.  Anything I can do?”

“‘Til I get my fish that I’m going to vent to, you can be that fish.”

“. . . Sure thing.”

stilled

She’s startled by how easy it is, finally, to say, “Beloved.”

And how hard it is to hear it.

borrowed thought (i)

When you realize you’ve not

once touched your maker,

each act of progress is a mantra

and a trauma.

– Tara Bray, “The birds are making me”

in the absence of practical talents

The trick is to build it up and tear it down as many times as it takes, without losing patience.  Begin again.  Again.  Again.  Try, this time, to be more generous, more precise.

Lose your shutters.

Consider it penance when you have to and grace when you can, but understand, in either case, that it’s the result of an impulse you’ll never quite untangle.

Yes, every work, every gesture, will be riddled with faults.  (You’ll remember Cohen:  a crack in everything.  It’ll be cold comfort.  Hold on to it anyway.)  Yes, you’ll come to grief.

Yes, you’ll mostly fail to come close to what matters.  If you can manage it once or twice, count yourself lucky.

Content yourself with small achievements.  Be happy on the rare occasions when you do get it right in ways you can be sure of.  A dozen good lines before he died:  that was all Rilke wanted.  And you’re not Rilke.

“Your resilient patience,” someone said.  It isn’t always true, but you can earn the compliment.

You’ve always liked the adjective “lapidary.”  Aspired to it, even, in more than one context.  Earn that too.

author’s note

This was — as most of them are — an unintended adjustment.

I gave up using credit cards a while ago — paid off the balances and let them expire, one after the other.  I was more or less happy to do it. 

My great grandfather, J-B, refused credit.  Said it was the stupidest possible financial decision a person could make.  He paid by cash or cheque, saved until he could afford things. An almost unthinkable practice, these days.

Like most of his rules — that houseguests were to be eased out the door after three days; that one should always offer help where it was needed; that the responsibility of the person in the passenger seat on a road trip was to entertain the driver, and if they fell asleep while on duty they were to be banished to the back seat with the kids — it seems to have served him well.  He lived what was by all accounts a good and useful and largely untroubled life.  So I thought I would follow his example, in this instance at least.

Then January 1st came around, and with it a note from Typepad, saying I needed to update my credit card information if I wanted to keep my blog.

I had a moment of compunction re:  the death of ordinary noise.  I did want to keep it, after all.  It was pretty, and stable, and after four years I was getting comfortable there.

On the other hand, there’s such a thing as too much comfort.  And dislocation can be useful.

I’ve taken the more decent bits of noise and put them here, mostly so I don’t have to disrupt my own sense of narrative continuity.  I might write over on blogspot while I figure out what I’m doing with incidental fictions. I might write in both places at once.  I don’t know.

A new name, a change of scene, seems to require a new angle.  I just haven’t decided what it is yet.  Bear with me.

Or, you know, don’t.