kerouac says

oh. tired. the monkey forgot to shut the blinds, and seven ay em was like infinity. then my late mother and a late breakfast and i'm out of a job again, and . . . why talking about cars? why? i hear the honda accord is just too much car, Too Much Car and yet the civic lacks a certain luxuriosity. crapgroan.

it's over tonight, my nice employment. i'm trying hard to think it'll happen again. it will.

tomorrow, you mofos, we're going camping. see you in a week. i will tell stories of sabotage.

i woke up so happy. and it wasn't just the sex, either. there are just fewer clouds in the house now (fewer, yes). i feel like someone gave me a string for my mittens so i wouldn't lose them except the tether connects me to this man who gives me zerbits and has clown hair and imitates geese and strokes my neck while i fall asleep.

see you.

i've been recalcitrant. truth is, i'm not sure what this is for right now . . . my musings don't seem very compelling. so. i dunno. i'll still be around, and the monkey found some donation-ware that'll possibly improve the amenities around here, so maybe we're all on our way up. it's a rising tide that lifts all boats, friends.

see, i fixed it. and how? like the other stuff i do at this desk, i faked it until i could read the answers off someone else's paper.

hmm. archives are missing. wonder why that is. prolly because my skills are for doody. where are you, mid-february?

i know this because i was looking back, and found kind of footprinty evidence that people are reading all this. or maybe not all this, but certain bits. well. i got a little pink at the thought.

the best thing is when you have a conversation and at the end of it, instead of feeling evermore alone and like you're clinging to a piling at the edge of a chasm and the other person on his piling on the other side is irrefutably not near you and you have to look away because the inevitable end is just staring you straight in the face, you feel like he's next to you in the queensized bed, snapping the elastic band of your underwear and calling you bunny. i swear to god that there is nothing better than talking that actually works.

we had a good one. see? some days there is no trauma to repair, and no one's crying, and it's just a good, solid thing. people can say whatever they want about time and place, and . . . i dunno, "healing," and "space," and maybe i'm all kinds of wrong, but . . . this is topsoil. this is earth-salt. this feels better than anything. that's what i know.

i'm a dweller. even when i'm ecstatic to move forward, i can always be reduced to weepy and kind of doubty-feary by a big show of what i'm removing myself from. even when it's something i consciously decided wasn't so important. if i could change the process, i would. i don't like feeling tethered, but like this it's hard to leave anything behind. i'll do it anyway, this time, but i wonder how much earlier it would have come. it's like once i've found someone who'll sit with me at lunch i can never leave the state. sheesh.

the cranky is gone so fast and so completely that i wonder if it was what people's grandmothers call "the hoormones." he's so beautiful.

yesterday we were discussing recurring dreams in the green room, and i think this one wins: one of the guys has a dream over and over again in which he's a schoolchild on a tour of a tuna-canning factory. they're up on catwalks over the working floor when he falls and tumbles down, growing smaller and smaller as the tuna packing operation nears, until he is the size of a tiny tin and falls straight in and becomes a *can of tuna.*

when i was a little girl, i always went to the giant grocery store with my mother on fridays to do the shopping. i have various grocery memories--one of crying in that cage-like area under the basket of the shopping cart, where children ride, because we were buying chicken and chicken came from killed chickens. one of shaking the box of minute rice like a maraca in the aisles of the scary college town supermarket when we went to outfit my first apartment with necessaries while "dancing queen" played on the musak system. and a big one of the habit we got into, while wheeling the cart out through the OUT doors past the banks of pop machines of my mom pulling over, every week, and fishing two quarters out of her enormous streched leather change purse. no words, just two quarters with no restrictions and a standing armada of soda vendors.

to this day, a coca-cola spells treat to me, and there's something about my mom routinely slipping the young girl a couple of quarters that makes me go all soft-serve.

sweet, tweet man. i guess in my heart i'd prefer it if things here, with us together in a small space and sick and sometimes sad and largely jobless, were perfect and made of ice cream. and they haven't been so perfect all the time. i've been crabby, and all . . . and i know you know this, but i wanted to tell you quietly and in your ear:

i love you. i'm enormously glad that you're here. the occasional bumps don't even begin to touch that.

you know that.



it's all good, yo.

well, for one thing, i can't get over the idea of sonya punching a stuffed weasel:

www.noematic.org/implode

and i think making any inanimate thing spit out hamburgers is sheer genius.

frankly, i'm glad someone else is cranky. because i'm feeling that the force of my inner crank is going to wear heavy on anyone who chooses to hang out long enough for my flammable annoyance to catch a spark.

i'm reading this j.p. donleavy story, and he describes someone not wanting to succumb in older age to a certain "au blet" corpulence (please to imagine italics). i'm tickled that "blet" is really a word, and i looked it up this morning in my french dictionary. the formal word? "over-ripe." yum.

the monkey just found a photograph of the president in which he (president, not beloved monkey) does not look like a doofus. he posits it's because you can't see how close together the presichump's eyes are. hey, says me. those of us with close set eyes (yep, i've got 'em. also, lots of recessive genes and a grandmother with webbed toes) are not necessarily doofuses. monkey looks again and says, yes, but on you it's okay because you have a NARROW HEAD.

hrm.

last night playing scrabble, i balked at making the word "raping," even though i knew it was just scrabble and just a word and all that. still, it's hard to look at, isn't it? and then i had a dream about trying to save this young boy from a gigantic pro sports player who was going to abuse him.

this i saw in the paper this morning. it makes me think nothing bad has ever happened to me:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/135019124_crash18m.html



and, glibly, let me say there is a man in the coffeeshop whose voice is louder than a car and whose laugh sounds like it was made on a synthesizer or by frank oz, and i'm wondering whose hand is up his shirt and how he made it all the way here from the children's television workshop.

being in love means making grilled cheese for the sick one in an eighty five degree apartment. avast, yo.

louella sold some books in prep for moving to the used bookstore! and then bought more than she got rid of with the store credit!

oh, books. i could marry them.

spent father's day evening with an honest-to-god family, if not my own. drank two bottles of wine, had much beef, ate cheese i didn't think i'd like, and talked for hours with someone who'd dropped out of the scene. (when i start every second sentence with, "here's another thing i don't miss about being an actor," i hope someone tells me to quit my day job and jump back in.) and of course, there was the darling who made the papa a papa, the curly dervish, who at one point yelled, "dada! i'm going to run like a cheetah!"

and then lapped us all, and then cried,

"i can run AS FAST AS I CAN!"



oh, love. it's true, it's true.

i read in the new yorker about blimps last week. one airship-legend has it that blimps became so-appelated because it's the sound made when you thwack the fabric of the hull and it bounces back:

*blimp.*

which means, of course, that i thwacked the monkey's bottom and made the same sound, because it pleased me:

*blimp!*

he got a little offended. seems that implying your love's bum bears any resemblance to a giant puffy vessel is not so kind. he announced in a huff that he was taking his goodyear into the next room.

hey, i said. at least i didn't compare you to the hindenburg.

only when i've been eating burritos, he said. and then, marvellously, he pooted. and then yelled, "o, the humanity!"

please, o please. please cut open my mouth and proceed to graft tissue.

i have had seven appointments to have this surgery done. none have been successful. i am now paying out the nose for private insurance so that i can have this thing done and still i cannot get all the shit to come together at once. unreasonable doctors offices, scheduling snafus, fucked up insurance. why do i feel like i'm running through the medical/dental establishment yelling, *please cut my mouth open! please hurt me!

this is me, shaking my tiny fist at the world and paying it three hundred dollars a month to disappoint me.

at lunch today, i ordered off the kid's menu and then asked for a beer.

the waiter asked for my ID, even though i assured him i was both under twelve and greater than twenty-one.

the show is open, huzzah. i've never recieved so many cards and tiny useless presents in my entire life. it's great. and on saturday the friends and the parents and the monkey all had wine and dessert with me at home and things only came to blows once.

i think with time, patience, practice and continued cash flow, i could really make something of this thing you call cohabitation.

he's here, and it's a thousand degrees. we bought a fan. at the home store, someone came up and said, "i'm sorry, but are you the burnses?" we were not. "i've lost my couple," the saleslady said, and drifted away.

i don't know that i'm prepared for the day in day out living with wonder. i feel slightly underequipped. i wonder when he will get tired of this. i make him cold cut and challah open face sandwiches and we eat apples in bed.

about every third minute, some clock in me rings to say: this is the rest. this what's forward. nothing's the same, buttercup.

oho, cruella. yes, under my skin, but in stepping so far over the line you exposed yourself as aptly named and moreover an indisputable jackass.

i believe it should go without saying that someone with whom you have a, howyousay, *difficult or *problematic or *waning relationship asks you to hurt someone whom you love dearly, you tell the inappropriate waner to step off. that is, if you're able to supress the urge to knock the waner's block off.

i don't think you should have to be told this. i did, though, have to tell the monkey. that disappoints me. the conversation was clear, though, and . . . i think he gets it. i worry that getting it without acting on it will always be far easier and will never be a full solution. i suppose we'll see. i don't like thinking that the reason it won't happen again is because we're moving away, not because he's able to slough off his incredible timidity when it comes to even saying boo to her.

i wouldn't want a partner to live in fear of losing me, but i'd like him to get his act together when i say we're approaching a dealbreaker. also, if someone called me a dirty name, i'd want him to get pissed. maybe it's jane austen of me, but it's so.

that out of the way, he arrives tonight. tonight, tonight, tonight. and it's the last tonight. the last waiting. it's so far deep, his coming home, that i don't know what to sing about it. thrum, thrum, thrummmm. earth sounds.

the watchwords are:

kind

and:

plain.


i don't think you can really go wrong with those.

i woke up leaning toward the melancholy side. everything today seems slightly goodbye. i thought about the woman here i thought i'd be friends with but somehow it didn't happen, and my first love who lives in santa cruz, and the new pal i met during rehearsals who i just like so much. everything seems to be about moving away.

perhaps its because the monkey's en route. almost. he comes on thursday, earlier than we dared suspect. his sublet came through and nothing's holding him in new york. this morning when we talked i was the tiniest bit scared, about what would happen when we were down each other's throats all the time instead of a continent apart.

what a long road, and you can't really keep track of anything. i want to have the right things kept in my pocket.