much too much tutu much

The new roommate cooking hamburgers in my kitchen in my pots using my plates. "I hope it doesn't gross you out when I eat meat." She said yesterday evening when we were sitting around the table talking. As if the five pound tube of ground beef didn't bother me sitting in the grocery cart nestled against a bag of doritos and a box of blueberry mini-muffins. No, the eating of the meat is not the part that grosses me out. It might be your revulsion to turkey vultures that is weird not my fascination with their lopsided flight. Now it is 38* outside and my bedroom window is thrown wide, I have a towel lodged under my bedroom door, and I can't leave my room because the smell of char is too much for my nervous system, and yet it is not the eating of the meat that bothers me. I did a handstand for thirty seconds, I did thirty push ups, I did a will squat with A-O of the Oxford English Dictionary balanced on my lap for a minute and a half, I still feel my spirit pressing out of my skin hovering outside of my body unwilling to inhabit that moment . A prisoner of my own making, I sit in my room, grateful that after a week of intermittent non-existence the internet has decided to function properly so at least I have an immediate distraction. I looked at 44 photos of Kate Moss spanning 16 years. She is an alien and I cannot decide if she is beautiful. That's all. Abide in temperance.

I Spy...

The holiday season left me sleeping minutes later into the predawn hour and with a large stack of reading material. I read as I am in life: consumptive, compulsive, following the peccadillos of mind over time; weaving fantasy, fiction, and fact into the fabric of my being; stitching new thoughts to old; seeding ideas fresh from history into this ever changing sphere of present hellos.

My reading list today How to Save Your Own Life Erica Jong, Best Food Writing 2011 Holly Hughes, Don't Push the River Barry Stevens, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" Bill Watterson, creator of my heros Calvin and Hobbes, Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller.


Fitting together hand in glove this collection of books glimpse into the human mind of the late 60s. The momentous zeitgeist, that fire of human spirit Henry Miller lit upon decades before Erica Jong grabbed and used to throw open the minds and legs of women. This book Don't Push the River by Barry Stevens is the Gestalt mind on paper in ink and it reads like sunlight through leaves on a windy spring day, leaving me the reader knowing that the process of becoming human is hot, tangible, personal.

Holly Hughes manages to catch the current pornographic nature of our food obsessed culture in her gathering of international essays. And looking back it makes me wonder if we as a whole group, not the few separate individuals leaping into the clouds, have lost human intimacy, our ability to connect deeply with those around us, so we move our connection to ourselves and that which we cannot live with out.

Bill Watterson, Oh, that's what it meant to be a child of the eighties, thank you, I forgot. I knew this book was starting to get to me when I dreamed 'my personal gravity reversed polarity.' As hyper sensitive, overly active child and now adult (I think they call this ADHD...) I relate to Calvin. His frustration and imagination defines the solitude of the only child, the pain of isolation, and the fulfillment of fantasy. More than that the book makes me laugh and I read the best bits out loud to Sampson, by world traveling bear of the last twenty plus years.

These books, each fully rooted in their time, are not obsessed with the future. Rather they express perfectly their present with typewriters, babysitters, smoking indoors, no mention of HIV; they are clear pictures of time in time. Looking back and wondering how to define this ever changing sky of a hopeful tomorrow it appears that we become the adults we deserve from the children we were. Some of us are obsessed with food. In that, I am not alone.