(See a description of the #433rds project here.)

April 11

Little Miss Spider Muffet

An idiot day, mostly, noir with deep shadows and Pepi curled into my butt, but! Progress! The mental judo it takes to get oneself to do a thing. Sometimes the lovely book-miracles happen. Today in the tub, it was Jane Tompkins on Westerns. Not my book and I chose it at random, but the first page I opened to! Truth opens in the bathtub heat!

“Westerns pay practically no attention to women’s experience. Nor could they. When women wrote about the West, the stories they told did not look anything like what we know as the Western. Their experience as well as their dreams had another shape entirely, as scholars like Annette Kolodny have recently begun to show.

Now the question is, Why should this deauthorization of women have occurred?

Forget the corner mildew. It’s the gospel of Jesus’ wife, exhumed! (Not a forgery, they think. The inclusion of a single woman is probably not a forgery. And Jesus might be a fish, but Stanley Fish isn’t Jesus.) Hooray! Hip hip.

It is 1.6 inches by 3.1 inches, that gospel is. We haven’t lost all sense of proportion. Still, many congratulations to Karen King, who is brilliant, even if she didn’t think the title “Jesus wife” would be inflammatory. She said, back in 2012, that if the fragment was proved not to be a forgery, it would be “cherry on the cake.” Cherries on cakes is new to me. The expression, I thought, was icing.

First course: Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake. (I chose it over the cherry.) Second: avocado on a tuffet of greens. When it comes to articles of faith, I do not believe in dessert putting a lien on dinner. Pudding first, meal last and lots of salt and lemon.

The day was mostly muscles aquiver with pain, but a few vigorous elbowings later, some fe fi fo fumming, and they’re cello strings now instead of screaming violins. Today’s headache was sponsored by Key and Peele, whose Continental Breakfast sketch helped ratchet my neck a few clicks loose.

The Pepper-Spray Cop got $38,000 for his emotional distress. Hard to be a meme. Two rappers fight over their bitches on Instagram but one might have been hacked. Robin Williams walks around looking angry. Craig Ferguson might lose his job. It’s all to do with faces, isn’t it: the detail with which we look at one and the story we’re willing to see.

(See a description of the #433rds project here.)

April 10

programmed to receive

Our handyman likes to call the toilet “the commode,” and it makes me happy every time he does it. He lies a lot: about when he’s coming back, about how much things cost, about being sick. (Heart attack one week, cancer another–he doesn’t do things by halves. Says he’s jaded, says he drinks 16 V8s a day.)

I’m talking in present-tense even though it’s been months since he’s visited. The bathroom is done and I miss him a little every time I look at the uneven plane of the floor.

I miss him enough, despite not liking him much, that I decided it meant I needed people. If I’m lonely—and I’m not sure that’s what this is—go to the library stacks to work around other bodies. So I did. It was perfect. Then a young man sat down at my table in a nostalgic mood. He was playing “Hotel California” on his iPhone, loud enough that I could hear its tinny strains through his headphones. By the fifth replay the air had become a Tiffany-twisted hellscape of wheedled beats.

Luckily the library’s bathroom is nicely architected. Solid, five stalls. Anteroom with a cushioned bench. Full-length mirror. Soap. Bathrooms are like fax machines in that technology should, by any reasonable definition of progress, have evolved beyond them, but nothing has replaced their almost unhackable concreteness. Their longevity is Victorian. It’s queenly. They’re better at what they do than headphones, and the few high-tech improvements we’ve attempted—circulating plastic on seats, automatic flushes, hand dryers–only mar a perfect thing. They’re singular and virtuosic, saxophones in the orchestra of rooms.

When I returned, the young man was packing his things to go. I could have stayed—the window light was beautiful, the stacks were full, some Fanny Burney letters were tempting me—but enmity is a point of connection, however marginal. We left together.

(See a description of the #433rds project here.)

April 9

somnia

A nut and bot walk into a bar. The nut says, “hey, yew,” and the bot turns into an iron chicken. I slept for all but three hours today–the only exon in a day of junk DNA. Sugar hours, underwater mindjuice with tedious neverending storylines. I pried my eyes up with showers, a swanky belt, a tiny castle university, but I was Jonah and the jaws kept snapping shut. A nut and a bot walk into a bar. The barkeep is Mark Twain, who thinks he’s in an Austen novel because everyone in the bar is a Presbyterian. He tells the nut and bot that her characters are detestable. The bot asks him to tell them a story with a likable protagonist, so he tells them Sleeping Beauty. The nut’s into her cups by the time Twain finishes. She says, over her fifth white Russian, that she’d do a better job cutting through the thicket than the bot. They bot says don’t bet on it. Mark Twain offers to judge the contest. The Presbyterians rise up and kill Twain dead.

(See a description of the #433rds project here.)

April 5

the piano teacher

The wasp from this morning still isn’t dead, but I’ve discovered the perfect breakfast: it’s three beignets and a coffee.

Things weren’t good before it. I remembered, the way you do when you’re climbing out of sleep and fall off a cliff, that I still hadn’t answered her invitation. It was issued indirectly, to my mother, which makes it hearsay. I never got it, I can think, or pretend to think, but it’s this: Be a guest of honor. Play at our concert. (The answer is a no, a wretched no, but how do you say “I can’t” to someone to whom you have never been able to say “no”, or “I have forgotten why we fought”, or “my life became sloppy without you”.)

To breakfast! What a mess our car is. Of course the radio is playing Liszt. Of course it’s a child prodigy. I shut the radio off before I can hear his voice.

We find a space. I scuff around in the gravel pit next to it while Aaron wrangles the parking meter and I almost drown in the drowsy pleasure of scuffing. “That’s like your version of a Japanese garden,” Aaron says. A bit of gravel surrounding a half-dead tree. There are cigarettes in it. Of course, I think, because before breakfast I exude self-pity and think in absolutes: it’s the undiscipline that set in after her. Ten years of regimented practice, of bows and drills and trips to Japan. I think I was once good at raking perfect rows in clean white sand. I know I was once good at balancing on curbs.

Childhood is sitting on curbs waiting for things. Fifteen minutes for a table, the waitress says, and we sit obediently. I used to go the three blocks to Linda’s for my lessons walking on curbs, counting the steps between the sidewalk slabs.

Over breakfast I think of grenadine, of Shirley Temples drunk at the bars where—as a kid—I sometimes played.

After breakfast we passed three liquor bottles in a tidy row in the gutter. The gravel next to our space is less magical now: the man who lives in front of it is raining angry blows on his window.

We get in the car and drive home with perfect stomachs.

The wasp is still dying. The dog still wants to fight it. I want it to die so I can light it properly, take some close-up shots of its flawless spotted eyes. These are the only circumstances in which a person can really enjoy coffee—heaps of powdered sugar on the dough next to it, to cut and cut the taste.