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.

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

And again I love the internets with mighty might because here I am unrulying away in Toronto and all the way over in the Czech Republic Akile Nazli Kaya is making films and sending me nifty pics of her studio space at the Film School Zlín.

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

Sometimes I think it might be enough for the wild things of your brain to assert themselves sufficiently that instead of pretending they don’t exist, you have to turn your gaze to them, even if you can’t classify them. Taxonomy is good and useful — delicious, even — but maybe not always necessary. Maybe you don’t always have to be able to assign a clear name or narrative or meaning to a nightmare. Maybe the beast that rises from the deeps when you dream a dream like that doesn’t have to be a beast you recognise. Maybe not being able to speak the creature’s name is not only okay but an important component of baddreaming.

Dock Ellis Pitches a No-No on LSD
By Jilly Dybka
From Elysian Fields Quarterly

The ball’s big — like lobbing a volleyball.
And the batter’s box is so far away.
Tiny ball, red ball, white ball, rainbow ball.
Wasn’t even supposed to play today.
The batters are whiffing in slow motion
Because their strike zone is five miles wide.
The catcher is wavy like the ocean,
Before my release, have to time the tide.
Straight bat, bendy bat, big bat, little bat.
Feels like I’m pitching inside of a dream.
I’m flying as high as an acrobat,
My fingers feel every stitch in the seam.
I wonder what all the fuss is about?
I’m just trying to get the guy out.

The backbone of the backbone.