It was gone for too long … not for me because I only really care as a byproduct of my son caring … but gone for too long for my hockey-mad boy. The hockey strike is over now tho’ and the shortened season is better than no season at all, you can be sure of that.

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.

There’s no rational explanation for how much I love frogs. I mean, there might be a rational tidbitual oddment I could lay down for you  but all the tidy, comprehensible bullet points in the world wouldn’t do justice to how deeply fascinated and charmed and shivered I am by those little half-blood princes, those darling swimmers who leave the water to tuck the soft green of themselves into the grass so they can lie in wait for me, so they can leap in ambush and make me bark a laugh of surprise at their ridiculous bodies, hurled up from the grass, bounced high, airborne.

So yes, I’m making a beautiful bookthing. It’s that wondermental thing known as: a labour of love.

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:

Swarm
by Cheryl Coon

think of awaking one morning, some morning
with the tail of a fox
or platypus feet
with a hard crunchy shell
or suction-cup legs
with a body of quills
or a soft feathered belly
with a set of long antlers there on your head

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.

Yellow! I don’t really like it, most of the time, and yet my favourite shoes in the whole wide world are yellow and I love it when a cool-toned garden is warmed by splashes of yellow and I think lemons are not only delightfully delicious  as foodstuffs but delightfully delectable in every aesthetic aspect and I like looking at my bookshelves and seeing the yellow spines of Upside Down and Cheap Chic and A Prick Up Your Ears and What It Is and maybe now that I think of it I do like yellow, not as the object or the subject, mostly, but in small illuminating punctuatory doses.

I read a blog (very intermittently kept) written by a Korean artist who writes in English, which is not her first language. Her tiny strange observations are often very beautiful and made more so by the flaws in her English, a lot more so, I think, because those flaws can be very illuminatory — that skewing of language can make you look at a thing from a whole different perspective. The accidental nature of some of the beauty she writes makes her observations fresh and astonishing.

How to catch an octopus
by Patrick Widdess

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.

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?

Defending Walt Whitman
By Sherman Alexie

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.

How to Craft a Cello from Parts You Have
by Tanya Laramie

Leo Tolstory rocks my world, man.

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.

The backbone of the backbone.