So many boats in my dreams, this last while. Boats and boats and then again boats. I like boats, always have (particularly those powered by muscle not motor), maybe as the result of having for a father a man who in his youth was a sailor or maybe as the result of my Piscean nature.

sometimes you have to lie on a bed
so your brain can be all in a floaty place

… you just have to love it back.

I love Milton Glaser.

You know how much I love words and the physical act of writing, how much I love the graphemic grace of  the thing that is written? Yeah, you do. And you know how much I like holding a pencil in my hand and making marks on a paper with it — marks with meaning, I mean — and also how much I like reading a paper full of writing from someone else’s hand? Well, I like all that very much, you know I do, but I like something else too:

I don’t know how it works, how to do the math, but it’s like every emotion I’ve ever felt somehow gets wrapped up in trees. Trees become some kind of conduit for thought and feeling, for understanding, for epiphany, for optimism, for love.

Dave Kinsey at Fecalface has a treat for you, me, and the lamppost:

Oh. My. Goodness.

If I had to categorise this unruly thing, I’d say it’s poemical, not polemical. It’s not really a blog about art, not in any sort of analytical way. I don’t take a stance; I’m neither critic nor academic. What I am, actually, is an unruly hoyden with a permanent case of chaoshead, a throbbing love-on for the made things of the world, and a hot ‘n’ saucy need to write things down, to write things out (as you’ll know if you’re one of the people I e-mail 972 times a week. [Hi, forbearing friends! Love ya! Smooches!])

In all the annals of object porn, there are no objects that incite greater lust in me than typewriters.

A couple of days ago when I was stopped at a street corner waiting for the light to change, a man walked up from behind me, stood beside me, looked at me, smiled, and said, “Nice legs, librarian.” Now, I’m really not a woman who enjoys strangers making commentary on her appearance but he didn’t have the stink of testosterone poisoning about him so I didn’t just default to my “Fuck you, you fucking fucker” setting. Plus? He called me “librarian”. And oh good lord, I do love me a librarian, so very very much I do, and am always so happy to meet a fellow member of that tribe, which obviously that man was.

Butcher’s charts take it all apart.

Sewing patterns put it all together.

The sundering and the reconciling … they interest me, both. I maybe love taxidermy because it requires both; I should maybe love the jigsaw puzzle more than I do, for the same reason.

Often I think of the poetry of objects
about the way a seam is resolved
or the way a spine grows
about the things we make with our bodies
and the bones from out of our bodies

I think I think too much about clothes — mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, whoever’s. Because really? I think an awful lot about them. Like, an AWRFUL lot. Thing is, when the world is being beautiful, I don’t want to be a blight on it and when the world is being unbeautiful, I don’t want to add to the ick, so I end up thinking a lot about my clothes. And in my thinking, I also think this: I think style is an act of generosity. I think fashion is just merchandising. I think one is qualitatively superior to the other, by a lot, and in my mind it’s clear that the superior one is style.

Imagine if we could remove the mortar that holds all the disparate elements of our selves together. Remove it and fiddle the bricks of character around a bit and repoint, so that we could be remade. Or maybe that’s too drastic (altho’ I am a woman who likes the grand gesture) — it’s not a complete rebuild that interests me but the jimjummery of a rejig.

Actually … actually … I’m a very bling-averse woman.

Ice is nice. Okay, if you’re me, it’s more than nice.

Want. These. Want. These. Want These.

I run. I like to run, a lot.

Correction.

I love to run. Love it, with big crazy heartsing heartpound loveness.

Okay, so there’s this Canadian clothing designer, Natalie Purschwitz, who runs a small and very interesting operation, Hunt & Gather, out of Vancouver. A few months ago she got the genius idea to wear only clothes she has made herself, for a whole year, in a project she calls Makeshift. Makeshift, I find, is a very nifty notion, if not also a little daunting. (But of course most things worth doing are a little daunting.)

I took my kids to see Zombieland the other day. (Because yes, I am an awesome mother.) It was a highly enjoyable experience, more than any of us had anticipated, honestly, and chief among the many excellent moments was the scene in which the four nonzombies who are our heroes realize the rules of quotidian life no longer pertain and lay waste to a souvenir shop, smashing and crushing and pulverising all the cheap tat that stocks the shop’s shelves. It is an exhilarating moment, for sure, because transgression so often is, and transgression that involves destruction? Ding ding ding! We have a winner, folks!

I am interested in the connection between the physical and the mental, in the connection between a crisis of the body and the germination of an idea.

Away is where I am right now and that is a thing I like, always. To be pulled away from the routine is disconcerting and delightful, both.

And here we are, arrived at the day on which Canadians give thanks. Truth be told, I did my Tgiving dinner yesterday and it featured poulet not dinde, but this is the official holiday so I will honour it and break my illness-induced silence by typing some words for you all.

This is a period of similehead. I always have quite a bit of that but it’s really all-consuming  lately.