March 2012
14 posts
Some thoughts:
When I think about graduating without my father, about moving without my father, about starting a new career without my father, about having a wedding and wearing a white dress and starting a new life with someone without my father, it hurts.
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In my life: all change - whether its a late bus, a move across the country, or something in between - represents some kind of threat....
February 2012
32 posts
Oh, I am a lonely painter, I live in a box of...
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My Dead Friends
I have begun, when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinion and the answer is often immediate and clear. Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child in my middle age? They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads to joy, they always answer, to more life and less worry. I...
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“If ever I might find a kind word for the coming post-bibliographical world it...”
– Leon Wieseltier
“Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.”
– Faulkner
Also
Today is Molly’s birthday, and:
I live in a world where I only know Molly because she is Brian’s sister, and I’m glad I live in that world, because Molly lives in Wisconsin and I have no idea if I’d know her otherwise. But I hope - if I had to live in that world - that we would somehow know each other, because she’s a passionate, talented, hilarious, and kind...
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Brian, after returning from the bathroom at four in the morning and laying down on my side of the bed, face down, not moving:
Me: What are you doing? Brian: What they told me to do.
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Because you should read more of this beautiful essay, here’s another excerpt from “That Father Lost,” by Dave Lucas:
12 For years I have not thought of sitting out behind the shed with my father, he on the old stump and me on the log he’d felled from it. Years even since they each began to sink into themselves, soft with rot and the long becoming something else.
My father, of...
“I sit sometimes in the evening, when the house is quiet, and say Dad to the...”
– Dave Lucas, That Father Lost
1 tag
Nightsong
Beside you, lying down at dark, my waking fits your sleep. Your turning flares the slow-banked fire between our mingled feet, and there, curved close and warm against the nape of love, held there, who holds your dreaming shape, I match my breathing to your breath; and sightless, keep my hand on your heart’s breast, keep nightwatch on your sleep to prove there is no dark, nor death.
-...
Read this: “In Defense of Fact Checking,” Laura Miller, Salon.
Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been...
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Dear Residents
Dear residents of the world known as Planet Earth! I am required to inform you that the warranty on your world has come to an end the insured license will not be extended in connection with your not fulfilling the Conditions of Contract
From our perspective we have fulfilled our obligations see the attached table: Prevention of catastrophes of natural origin - 84% Prevention...
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“Come Pick Me Up” - Ryan Adams (via...
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“The house next door went up in smoke and flames one night ten or fifteen years...”
– William Maxwell - So Long, See You Tomorrow
I dream I never know anyone at the party and...
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Misgivings
“Perhaps you’ll tire of me,” muses my love, although she’s like a great city to me, or a park that finds new ways to wear each flounce of light and investiture of weather. Soil doesn’t tire of rain, I think, but I know what she fears: plans warp, planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away by floods. And worse than what we can’t control is what we could; those...
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things i haven't felt | emily lloyd
loveyourcrookedneighbor:
different, after losing my virginity. better, after the medicine i took. mosquitoes on my skin, before they’ve bitten me. profoundly changed, after i read that book. the call of the wild. the glow of pregnancy. guilty, after sleeping with someone’s wife. high as a kite, high even as a tree. the peace that passeth understanding. safe. god’s presence in the world, and that...
3 tags
“When it was decided (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all...”
– Pam Houston
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Autopsy in the Form of an Elegy
In the chest in the heart was a vessel was the pulse was the art was the love was the clot small and slow and the scar that could not know the rest of you was very nearly perfect.
- John Stone
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“Blunt advice for beginning writers: You are not interesting. The world is...”
– Dinty Moore