I don’t know about where you are, but where I am, this is the day of the Pride Parade, and I have three things to say, like this:

1 – I believe in inclusion, not exclusion;
2 – more people expressing more love can never be a bad thing; and
3 – one of the greatest things my country has done so far this century is legalize same-sex marriage (which we did seven years ago. Can I get an “Aw yeah, Canada!”?).

when twilight grass looks the way velvet feels or the way warm smooth metal can seem in a dream

when you sit outside in a day that’s almost night and the fireflies arrive

all the other places you never know in daylight open out to you

there in the glow

Brokeny can be a good thing. Brokeny can be a thing I like, and often is.

It’s still in my head, the image from a lot of years ago, the image that came to me one day when I was sad and angry and roiled with all the awfulness of what had happened, when my worklife had become void, when the job I loved had been lost to me by bad behaviour not my own. Smashworld came and I fell down until the moment I got up and thought to make my own way, which I did and am doing and will do.

Because I love the sad and beautiful truth of nothing-can-stay.

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.

… you just have to love it back.

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.

Oh. My. Goodness.

You know what I love? I love “yes”. I love “yes” so much, and so hard, and  also its more boisterous adjutants “hell yes” and “fuck yes”.

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

Sometimes I feel like Reepicheep finally arrived at the edge of the world and sometimes I feel like I’m standing way up high on a tall place where I have to make a choice about whether I’ll step off and float away, or not.

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.

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.

The carapace is a wonderful thing in its own right and I can celebrate its utility and its beauty — I can, I honestly can. But I never really forget that for all its protective value, it’s also a small, confined place, like a pedestal … or a prison.

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

If you take away my periodic PMS madness and my 92%-of-the-time short fuse, I’m a pretty fun gal.

There’s something very appealing about metal that’s handled in such a way that it looks delicate, fragile, or ethereal.

I am very, very afraid of fire. Very, very afraid of it and very, very — o so very — compelled by it.

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.

Do you wanna know a thing I really like? A thing I really like is when people who make things make things that mess with form or boundary, or our expectations. Needless to say, then, I am smited with smittenness for Scott Hove’s Cakeland project, not only because boys who sculpt a million jillion foofy pink cakes are boys I wanna know and go out for drinkies with, but also because hey! hello! domestic-arts-fucking-around-with, right there, woo-hoo!

Three is a delicious number. De.Li.Cious. In general, I would say that odd numbers are far nummier than evens (and all numbers — every last mother’s son of ‘em — are better than four, which is an evil number of death and brussels sprouts and clowns that come for you in the night).

Red’s not my favourite, it must be said, altho’ I appreciate that it stands for kisses and communism and a vast spectrum of things in between.