… you just have to love it back.

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

Sometimes I’m a romantic creature … okay, who’m I trying to fool here? … always I’m a romantic creature. Forever and ever I’ve been madly shivered up by the sweet gesture, small or large or somewhere in between. I have made those gestures and had them made for me and some of them have been over-the-top — whoa, Nelly, way up and way off the precipice of mad-for-you, with a celebratory shout of “For you are my beloved” — and some of them have been tiny and odd, discernible only to me and the person whose lips I wish to kiss.

This year, watching the Tour de France on TV, I heard one of the announcers say, “There’s the beautiful sunflower field” and it made me happy that, given all the manful muscling in the pelotonic tumult, he thought to mention that quiet golden place. Since then the words”There is the beautiful sunflower” have lodged themselves in my imagination in the inexplicable way certain words and phrases do from time to time, becoming something like a prayer or an offering or a streamer of solace unfurled the way a strand of birch bark can be freed from the tree.

Also?

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.

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.

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.

I went to Ikea a couple of weeks ago with my friend Allysun. It was delightful, as trips to Ikea can be when you’re not there to make some big significant purchase (cos let’s face it, there’s more than a little truth to the old “Ikea: Swedish for ‘Out of Stock’” joke.) But this was a fun outing, no pressure, just cruise around with a friend, have a yammer, and enjoy the Ikean spectacle.

It’s not terribly often I say this but

I keep hearing the book is dead.

The book isn’t dead. Cannot possibly be.

Leo Tolstory rocks my world, man.

There’s a bunch of pictures of wood and wooden stuff here. And I’m posting ‘em in the morning. So I guess that means I’m giving you some morning wood.

The backbone of the backbone.