Mmmmm, hands.

If tomorrow I were to walk away to some other place, go live in a where that is not this where, the place I would go would have lots of snow and the house I would live in would be made of cold, a house of snow — or of-snow-adjacent.

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 make playlists on my iPod and they’re often very theme-y because I am nothing if not a theme-y woman — I like to group and organise. I like to find patterns, or, in their absence, make them. Maybe that’s the curatorial urge. Or the librarian’s urge. Anyway, I have a playlist on my iPod called “river” and I listen to the songs on that playlist a lot, especially when I am despairing because those songs are very cathartic to hear and especially when I am all joyed-up because those songs are very cathartic to hear.

I run. I like to run, a lot.

Correction.

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

And here we are in a brand-new decade. I like that, a lot, because I’m much attracted to notions of new beginnings, even tho’ a new decade is no more a new beginning than a new day is and I’m still actually living the same life I’ve been living all along. I mean, the digits 2-0-1-0 don’t in any way change the unfoldment of a life. But the symbolism is juicy and yummy and also the questions posed to me about the last decade and the next decade by the very clever Sheila Killian are juicy and yummy and made me engage in some reflectional brain activity, which is generally a bit hard and scary and also deeply worthwhile.

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.

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

I don’t know why I always want to know “why” but I do. Even when the answer to “why?” is “because” or “dunno” or “what’s it to ya, mofo?” Even then, I still wanna know. Why, I wonder. Why am I like that? Dunno, really. Because, I guess. What’s it to ya anyway, mofo?

Last May, I ran a half-marathon. It was a dreadful experience, in ways I can’t, even four months later, fully articulate. I can tell you that I wasn’t jubilant when I crossed the finish line, I didn’t feel the lightness of spirit I had anticipated. Not at all. In fact, I was bitterly disappointed in myself because I hadn’t run the way I wanted to run and because in the months of training I’d done to prepare for the race, I’d lost all the things I value about running, sacrificed them to this goal of propelling myself 21.1 kilometres in tandem with thousands of strangers, in a specific and challenging amount of time.

Here is an immensely moving thing: The Waste Not installation by Song Dong, currently showing at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

I listen to a lot of music. A lot. And while I think my taste is fairly wide-ranging, ultimately I have to recognise that I am particularly drawn to and moved by music that is odd or broken or primal or otherworldly. I want from music what I want from poetry and fiction — I want to be moved. I want to be taken to a place of sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to borrow Eduardo Galeano’s most beautiful word, because sentipensante is “language that speaks the truth”. And my god, that is a powerful notion.

Once I wrote this e-mail to a friend:

There is chainmail and then there is trainmail. This here is trainmail.

Out the window of my train, I see a freight train, enormously long, car after car marked “CornProducts”. One car marked “cationic corn starch”. I don’t even know what that means but I like how it looks and how it sounds in my head.

If I could tell you one thing, that one thing would be: don’t be scared. Or rather, go ahead and be scared but run into the arms of the thing that scares you anyway.

Leo Tolstory rocks my world, man.

The other night I was drinking whiskey and thinking about Fibonacci numbers and thinking about Katinka Matson’s scanned flower images and thinking about how once upon a time I looked at her daffodils and realised how 

Awhile back I did a meme on Facebook that involved making a list of sixteen albums (CDs, for you whippersnappers) that had been really influential in my life. Only one musician got two spots on my list.

Green is the colour of making. It is. It just is. A metaphor of growth is completely the right metaphor for making. Germinating, budding, flowering … those are the parts of making every bit as much as they are the parts of plant growth.

I like the word “with”. Maybe because writing is so not a “with” activity. It’s really a pretty terrible pastime: lonely; painful; scary; frustrating; slow.  But it’s also the way I learn what I think — I often don’t truly know until I start the ridiculous process of corralling the headchaos.

The backbone of the backbone.