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.

Mmmmm, hands.

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

Humanity is bad and terrible and capable of the most horrific acts of cruelty and venality. But oh my god, when a beautiful brain does beautiful brain things, it makes me remember that some of us are not only unbad and unterrible, but really fucking wonderful. What I’m thinking of here is this thing I found on the webs that are inter, this fabulous wonderful thing. To be precise, this thing:

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

Maybe you’re a creature like me: all loved up by words. Or maybe you’re a creature like me: all loved up by dreamscape derangements.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I like the notion of the skin being breached so that change can be rendered to the organism. I like the idea very much, altho’ I fully recognize the malarial reality of the wrong kind of puncture, the bleedout reality of the wrong kind of slice. But here in my metaphorical LaLaLand, sharp things are pretty things that are also agents of change.

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”.

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.

You know what I really love? I love to go to art galleries and museums to look at what humans have made, with intention. But I also love to walk out in the world and find the deliciousness of happy accident. I sure do. I really love both the incidental and the accidental. Like, really a lot I love them. All the funny found little bits and pieces of art or music or poetry that jump out at you and yell “Boo!” or maybe they peer around the corner and breathe “Pssst!” at you but however they approach you, they can all be filed under the heading “Ambush, such a lovely”.

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.

Oh. My. God. The happies, they are upon me.

If you’re a bling-averse ladyperson like me, then you don’t give a fiddler’s foxtrot about jewellery and have spent precisely zero time in your life thinking covetously about shiny, sparkly gems.

Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about body hair, especially women and. I am intrigued by the fact that we live in a time where we aspire to near-hairlessness. It’s a lot of fucking pressure, is what it is, to be sufficiently depilated to please that body hair–governing cabal known as They. They are merciless taskmasters, for sure, because They are relentless about pushing the hairlessness agenda and making us feel ashamed if we don’t thread our eyebrows and wax our pits and pussies and pins to perfect glassine smoothness.

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.

How to catch an octopus
by Patrick Widdess

Here’s a thing I just realised. Chet Baker had it right: let’s get lost. That’s what running is, for me: a getting lost, the way you can get lost in very few things, maybe only love and sex and music and physical exertion and the way the air smells in the woods in the fall or the way a cold lake feels on your body when you jump in naked and let all that cold swirl across all your bare skin to leave you gasping and shuddering in a strange beautiful release that’s almost like the moment of orgasm, in the pleasure/pain aspect of it and also in the being completely present in your body aspect of it.

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

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.

Want. These. Want. These. Want These.

Blue-and-white china is a lovely thing indeed. I have rarely seen any that I did not like, at least a bit, at least the colour scheme if not the pattern. Because while green is queen, blue is definitely her consort, and the consort’s most worthy consort is white.

Lisa Auerbach’s Tract House project is full of badassery and makes me happy.