Ephemera & Tales

just a poem for today, because i worked way too many hours and i'm pretty sure i fucked something up and there is absolutely no way i can handle september and october busy season by myself.

Before this day I loved
like an animal loves a human,

with no way to articulate
how my bones felt in bed

or how a telephone felt so strange
in my paw. O papa—

I called out to no one—
but no one understood. I didn’t

even. I wanted to be caught. Like
let me walk beside you on my favorite leash,

let my hair grow long and wild
so you can comb it in the off-hours,

be tender to me. Also let me eat
the meals you do not finish

so I can acclimate, climb into
the way you claim this world.

Once, I followed married men:
eager for shelter, my fur

curled, my lust
freshly showered.

I called out, Grief.
They heard, Beauty.

I called out, Why?
They said, Because I can and will.

One smile could sustain me for a week.
I was that hungry. Lithe and giddy,

my skin carried the ether of a so-so
self-esteem. I felt fine. I was

fine, but I was also looking
for scraps; I wanted them all to pet me.

You think because I am a woman,
I cannot call myself a dog?

Look at my sweet canine mind,
my long, black tongue. I know

what I’m doing. When you’re with
the wrong person, you start barking.

But with you, I am looking out
this car window with a heightened sense

I’ve always owned. Oh every animal
knows when something is wrong.

Of this sweet, tender feeling, I was wrong,
and I was right, and I was wrong.

--"Bitch Instinct", Analicia Sotelo

i think i might have figured out what my bigbang is about - like, what the story actually is - which would be great except if so, it means i'm only at the middle or possibly the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end, and i have two weeks to write a lot more than i was expecting. altho now my title fits better.... i've done bigbang enough times that you'd think i'd know what i was doing by now, but no. i don't.

in other news, i spent a lot of time today hanging out with people and buying stuff i probably don't need (chiefly a salt and pepper shaker set shaped like cacti, because cacti). first, brunch with tamalinn and friends and yummy pancakes. then four of us went to home goods, which was like half an hour away. we met a very cute, very chill shih tzu and her little old lady mom and her mom's little old lady friend. apparently she was a rescue and came with a box of clothes. a stylish puppy! the little old ladies were really sweet and had absolutely no problem with these total strangers giving their dog some love. and seriously, she was the most chill dog. after that was target and no dogs, but i did get the aforementioned cactus salt and pepper shakers and a new teakettle, because the whistle in my old one is busted. so something useful and something cactus. :D after that the grocery store (by now just me and one other person) and then it was 5:30 and i was finally going home. and then i worked on my bang for a while and realized at like 9:00 that i might have hit on the actual story. even tho i still don't know how it ends.

and yes, i will eventually stop talking about the bang but probably not for two weeks, because the draft is due may 1 and i'll probably be panicking right up until then.

last night at seriously ass o'clock i signed on to my work laptop and e-filed a bunch of tax returns and extensions. but not as many as i was hoping! tomorrow will be fun. :|

South of Plaza Mayor by Plaza de Cascorro—
past streets named Lettuce, Raisin, Barley—
is Madrid’s outdoor market called El Rastro,
hundreds of stalls, lean-tos, tents squeezed tight
as niches where anything from a clawfoot tub,
to a surgeon’s saw to a tattered La Celestina
bound in sheepskin could be haggled down
with raunchy bravado or the promise of beer.
Mostly it was junk passed off to the tourists
as pricey souvenirs, like plastic castanets, hand fans
of silk (rayon really), or tin-plate doubloons.
So what drew the youth of Madrid to this place
every Sunday afternoon by the hundreds?
None of us were bargain hunters or hoarders,
just hippieish kids in patched dungarees,
espadrilles, & wool coats frayed to cheesecloth,
our pockets with enough pesetas to buy
a handful of stale cigarettes. It was to revel
in life, squeeze out joy from the lees of fate,
make fellowship like pilgrims to a shrine.
We’d sprawl against a wall or a lamppost
long into the afternoon to talk, joke, carouse,
eat cheese rinds with secondhand bread,
drink wine more like iodine than merlot,
oblivious to time & space, the crowds tripping
on our legs, tossing butts into our heads,
how they smelled like horses & we told them so,
who then shot out crude medieval curses,
but we didn’t care, for we felt alive as never before,
singular in every breath, word, & thought,
stubborn as wayward seeds that trick a drought
& grow into hardscrabble woodland trees.

--"El Rastro", Orlando Ricardo Menes

yesterday was disconcertingly chill for the last day before a big deadline. i'm expecting monday to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions. i brought my laptop home with the assumption that there are going to be returns or extensions that need to be e-filed over the weekend, and if i can do them now, i won't have to do them on monday. hopefully.

and i was so excited to be leaving before seven (ok, i left at 6:45) that i forgot to put postage on all the certifieds i had to send, so i ended up paying $73 to certify twelve checks for a client. >.< work will pay me back, but still. i was annoyed mostly because i had to wait for the postal clerk to put postage on all the envelopes, rather than just having him stamp all the manifests.

there was a woman on the bus home who had the coolest shoes, and i really wanted to take a picture of them but couldn't because that's a. weird, b. rude, and c. stalkery. and i thought it would be equally weird to get up and move seats on a half-empty bus just to tell a total stranger i liked her shoes. but they were really cool. like spectator shoes, kind of, but with a heel and in two shades of maroon. i loved them. i seriously should have told her, weirdness be damned.

i had four things to do today (dentist, taxes, comics, bigbang) and did all of them! holyshit. and yes, i did file my taxes two days before the deadline. ahem. never let it be said i did things on time when i could put them off. i'm starting to panic slightly about my bang, tho, because i don't know how it ends and i don't know if i'll actually be able to finish it before may 1. assuming i figure out how it ends. >.<

God likes to be played like a piano.
Dawn glows with sailors dancing in the eye of a storm
by the river of black water. These days
things make sense under the green and yellow
and brown sky of Granada and I wear a tie as penance
for the sins of my navel. The saints of the north
and the saints of the south fly by dropping scorpions
down my neck and those women
with fire in their eyes drink melon juice and wink.
I play billiards on the other side of town
thinking bone in and bone out is the legacy of canines.
The camouflage, the hunt, the war of ice and water.
God knows. He clinks all day and night.
Fly me to the moon. Yes, I’d rather be sleeping.
A slender, tender rain comes over Granada
and the storm passes and the city sighs.

--"The Andalusian Dog Finds Answers", Pablo Medina