(I’m calling this one, 10:18)

10:18

The pool is bubbling
because the filter goes on at 10.
It has something to do with the heat for the pool
it’s mostly too complicated for me.
What I find interesting, though, is that the bubbles
seem to always
come late.
I.e., not exactly at 10, but around there.
Like me, with C., when I say I will call.
At heart I’m just a swimming pool.
Bubbling somewhere around 10.

[You can still send poems here.]

No one sent me a poem, so here goes.  I called it “Blue Birds”, on purpose.  Two separate words.  Because the birds are either Jays or just Birds, bird people always correct me, but no one can tell me they’re not Blue. 

BLUE BIRDS

The fat birds belly up to the dog dish,
And squawk twice before they take food.
I suppose it’s to say they don’t fear me,
or the crane flies dropping post-coital eggs on the lawn.
Scruffy sleeps through all of it,
but if no one sneaks up to the gate,
He barks all day.

Lisa Austin showed up, finally.  She lost her car key.  It was in the pocket of the shorts she was wearing Wednesday, I think.  Isn’t that weird?  Then she had to go to Taco Bell and then she finally made it here.  We told dull stories and twirled our hair.  Actually, we told good stories and lounged glamorously in the sun. 

So the final word, I promise, on creepy-legged mosquito-looking flies is this:  if they grow up, mate then die, then it’s really depraved what’s been going on here this week.  You see they’re dropping dead, yes, like flies, I’ve got dead crane flies stacked three deep.  They’re dead.  Piles and piles of them are lying around dead, and what do they do to get dead?  Yes, they boink!  They’re having big crane fly orgies while I’m trying to sleep.  It’s the crane fly Sandstone. 

Why here is all I’m saying.  Why not next door, no one’s living there.  Whoever’s in charge of bugs has a sick sense of humor.

A. is wearing his new shirt, what do you think?  And I’m not working today, so drive me to OMSI.  Okay?  I’ll sit in the back and watch a movie with the kids.

Send me a poem, too, if you have time.  

I had a dream last night that had a hot dog and a shower, and I’m not sure how to tell it to you without sounding disturbed, so maybe I won’t.  (The hot dog is never IN the shower, knock it off.  It wasn’t that kind of dream.)

I missed a pedicure with ML and RSG and now my toes are mad, but I’ve been lazing about.  I’m lazing about right now in A.’s long decadent bathrobe.  I’m going to laze about until 3.  Or maybe 2.  Lisa Austin is expected at my house but I fear she’s forgotten.  Will you call her?  I’m very busy, I’m lazing.

I’m thinking of getting a mini-cow; they mow the lawn, A.  We’d save all that gas!  Plus the kids can learn to milk and he’d be good company for the chicken, that I want to get.  I think a chicken and a cow and I’ll be set.  I’ve been restless, you know, itchy, I’ve heard the call of the open road, I heard it on Tuesday.  I thought it was the next-door cats fighting at first, but I listened closer and it was definitely the road.  A chicken and a cow might keep me home nights. 

L. has the final word on the giant creepy mosquito-looking things that actually have a name.  All this time I spent cowering, when it’s the grass that should have worried.  And my future mini-cow. 

Hillary, kiddies.  I’m telling you, she has the goods.  But, all you bastards voted for Obama I’m sure it will work out fine. 

So it’s a crane fly, L. told me.  The giant mosquito is a crane fly and it lays eggs in the grass.  I’m pulling up all the grass today, we’ll have rocks, A. likes rocks. 

I had a weird dream last night about Iceland.  A.’s aunt Audrey moved there and we all visited.  Terri and kids, Richard, H. and T.   It was warm. 

Oh, look at the time — the cat’s due to throw up and I need to let Scruffy in to pee on the rug, gotta run.  Keep on keeping on.

I still don’t know how to Twitter, but I’m twittering.  I’m twittering anyway and you should Twitter with me, maybe we’ll have fun.  Though right now it seems like work.  Still.  RSG is following me, I have a follower! 

Most days there’s a nugget in Writer’s Almanac.  I still rarely read it; all these things come in, I can’t read them.  But today I did read and it’s Peggy Guggenheim’s birthday.  Art, museum, that Peggy.

Anyway, Peggy was once asked, “How many husbands have you had?”  And Peggy said, “Do you mean my own, or other people’s?”

Well, that’s what someone says she said.  No one really gets it right, the quip, the first time. 

It’s still Olga’s last day, I’m still in despair.

Have had three more elephant mosquitos since we spoke of it last.  And had 300 people tell me they’re sweet harmless things that I should leave be because they eat bad mosquitos.  You’re trying to tell me these creepy dangly-legged things are just looking out for me.  I don’t know. 

I’m having trouble in Chapter 6 right now, among other places.  If you drop pad thai off here at the house, right in front (just ring the doorbell and run, please) then I might be able to get through Chapter 6.  If not, there’s no telling.

Update:  Omg, omg, I have two more followers!  On Twitter!  Oh my God, Twitter so rules!

Today is Olga’s last day and the thing about that is … I’m FREAKING OUT!  Not really, I just wanted to use caps.  Freaking out takes energy and here in PST it’s not even 7:00, I’ve just barely sipped coffee.  What I am is sad, a little.  Cheerless, disconsolate, plaintive dismal woeful, sad.  A bit disconcerted.

I don’t like change or movement or disruptions in my routine.  In fact when I’m old I’m going back to an office job so I can complain bitterly at the memos — the new coffee machine, the revamped sick leave policy, the changed security codes, I’ll hate all of them.  I’ll mumble snide comments as our team leader goes over them.  My body language will be hostile, and I’ll snort condescendingly about the very idea of “team leaders” and sick leave policies.  How in my day, blah blah, etc. 

I’ll be the proponent of non-change.  When we upgrade to a new system, the young software trainers will worry themselves in conference rooms about getting me to adapt because the project manager will have told them I’ll be a challenge.  I’ll have my own line item on the project plan.  I won’t go back to an office job unless I’m assigned a critical yet almost-obsolete function that everyone hates to need me for but does.  I’ll use my power to halt progress. 

So yeah, change, I don’t like it.  A. is much better at change, and for the first 10 years of our marriage I acted like I could change, too, like I was a changer — reckless and adventurous, a hearty change buccaneer, I acted like that.  Well if you’re reading this, A., I was faking.  I’m not a changer.    I want to eat the same breakfast and read the same paper and have the exact same vacation over and over again in the same outfit.  And so I hate last days, and ends of summers, and school supplies … we have to get school supplies, I hate getting school supplies.  Though that seems contradictory, doesn’t it.  School supplies never change. 

The house is making odd sounds.  A. is back from Boise, it was hot there he said. 

C. wrote a funny email yesterday and I’ve got books to review.  A bunch of them.  I’m going to read them first, I’ll do that now.  If you think of something special to do for Olga’s last day don’t tell me, because I’m pretending she’s not leaving and that nothing will change.

I tried to read an article on Salon just now, by a writer I like, Joe Conason; about Biden and blah blah and I found I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t read it.  I can’t care about politics this year.  I made feeble attempts, they fell flat.  I’ll vote, and we all know how I’ll vote (or if we don’t, who cares), but I’ll wait for the last minute to vote (we mail it) because I don’t care.  People will call on the phone and I’ll say “I don’t care.”  They’ll knock on my door, maybe, and I’ll say it again.  They’ll say stuff when I’m over to their houses for dinner, and I’ll say, “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.” 

I really don’t care, it’s true, I don’t.  I’m not so certain that anyone else cares, either, to tell you the truth.  Let’s take a little informal survey:  f you care, send it here (your care).  I’ll count the cares and subtract the rest of you and then tell you, when I’m done, how many people care. 

So there’s that, and of course I’m desperate for inspiration.  I’ve been toiling and bumbling and hating the words I write for too long now, a week.  C. said to someone once, maybe to me,”if people don’t inspire me, I’m unnerved.”  Or maybe it was, “If you’re not inspiring me, you unnerve me.”  It was something resembling one of those two sentences anyway.  And what she meant is that she hoards inspiration, I do, too, we have to.  We hoard it like … what?  Do people hoard anymore?  I don’t know that hoarding still goes on in general so I have no comparisons, but anyway, I hoard it, like she does.  Inspiration. 

It’s terrifying to run out, so you have to snatch up every little bit, you have to be stingy with it, hide it in a small box beneath the bed.  And C.’s point was that if someone wasn’t inspiring, then that person, too, was likely a hoarder and greedily feeling her out for inspiration.  Hands off my inspiration, pal, go get your own! – that’s what I’d say. 

I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Do you?

Do you see how desperate the situation’s become? 

Anna Winger just wrote a book, the name escapes me now … something about “Place” and I read enough about it to be intrigued, to get a faint whiff, a hope of “inspire.”  I’ll try to order it on the Kindle.  Not every book can be Kindle’d you know.  Herzog, for instance, no Kindle.  Which is very disappointing to me, because Saul Bellow, now there’s inspiration, enough to light up Kansas.  And Herzog in the Bellow book line is likely my favorite (did you see me quote it here?).  But Herzog is not on Kindle. 

Still.  I love my Kindle.  I love my mother-in-law.  (I love my mother, too, of course, but I’m speaking here in relation to my Kindle).  I love C. even though she speaks terribly about her Kindle, right in front of it! 

I love Anna Winger if her book with the word “Place” inspires me enough to make a chapter pretty today.  I love popsicles.  Not really but one sounds good now, I don’t know why.  I do love black licorice, though, Nibs.  I think they’re called Nibs and they’re chewy little squares of licorice, I love those. 

Sigh.  Tell me three things you love, tell me please.  It will inspire me and I won’t feel so bitter and betrayed.  Three things.  One, two, three, send them all right here.  Hurry, I’m failing!  I’m weak.  Need - *gasp* - water. 

Oh, by the way, I noticed when I linked to this up there earlier, that the A. character looks like Joe Biden if he were red.  The hair, I think.  Maybe I do care. 

(Have a fun day.)

Yes, I’m about to announce my running mate.  Today, for sure, sometime today.  I’ll text all my supporters, you can text all your friends.  It certainly won’t be Very Tall M. — hamsters make up a good chunk of my base.

For the record, I think I have six homes.  One is a tent and I have to put it up still, but yeah, let’s say six.  I’ll confirm with my staff.

There was a party last night, and a fire, and lots of very excellent red wine.  Which reminds me I’ve had no dinner parties, or movie parties, or drunken brawls, or small awkward dinners with strangers.  Nothing here at the house at all this summer, nothing.  In the fall I’ll finish a book and come out of my office and braise artichokes and steam chard, plus I’ll au poivre steaks and gratin roots and we’ll be fine.

D. has 500 cookbooks, did I tell you that?  I want to go over to her house today and read some, can I come over D.?  I want a superfast jet with a witty-banter pilot and be able to drop in at Verona whenever I want.  Or at Stuyvesant for that matter, or even an old schoolhouse on King Street.

I want adventure, I want to fly!

Or maybe just more wine.  I’m making an asparagus bread pudding this afternoon, bring something that pairs well with it. 

Dammit, Scruffy’s out.  I hear him down the street, how does he do it all the time?  How does he get out?  We’ll figure it out over wine.  Chop-chop.

Elvis is the monkey at Alf’s.  I’m worried about him.  The past three times I’ve seen him he’s been under a scratchy wool blanket and listless.  I’ll check him again today. 

M-III is going fishing, or gone fishing, or something.  And he has new pontoon boats and I hope they help him catch fish.  What do you do with the fish, M-III, do you eat it?  I  know you take pictures of them sometimes.  If you eat the fish, how do you eat it.  Lemon, butter, a little pepper? 

I know too many M.s now, it gets tricky.  There was one last night, I’ll call him Tall M.  Or maybe Very Tall M. so that the other M.s don’t think I’m calling them not tall.  Sigh.  You M.s.  Anyway, Very Tall M. told me a story about cutting a testicle off a hamster.  In his defense, it was dangling and about to fall off anyway.  And it’s also his job, it’s not like he’s a weirdo.  Still.  Some job. 

I’m not cutting testicles off of anything today.  Just starting at around p. 158 in TGW and cutting words.  Words, I guess, are my testicles, so I’m metaphorically cutting testicles.  

There, I have little else for you.  Unless you hear back from me you’re on your own.  TGitsFriday.  Everyone be good.  Send testicle stories here.