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”.

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?

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.

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.

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.

You know, I’m not really a big fan of birds (the Byrds, yes, birds, no). Okay, truth be told, I find them horrible and creepy, more than is strictly reasonable — if in fact there’s a degree of finding-birds-horrible-and-creepy that could be characterised as “reasonable”. Mostly, of course, my distaste for birds doesn’t matter, doesn’t have an impact on my life — except when preparing a whole chicken for consumption. Yow. Now that is the stuff nightmares are made of. Mostly, however, I don’t think about birds or worry about birds.

The world spins on its axis, on and on and on, no matter who comes here or leaves here, no matter how happy or sad you are, no matter, no matter.

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.

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.

Okay, so there’s this Canadian clothing designer, Natalie Purschwitz, who runs a small and very interesting operation, Hunt & Gather, out of Vancouver. A few months ago she got the genius idea to wear only clothes she has made herself, for a whole year, in a project she calls Makeshift. Makeshift, I find, is a very nifty notion, if not also a little daunting. (But of course most things worth doing are a little daunting.)

I like the feeling of dream, the look of dream, the words of dream, the music of dream, the LSD of dream. I like the blur, the opacity, and the glow of dream. I like the strange wrong flawed perfect images of dream that sometimes tell a strange wrong flawed perfect truth.

This is a period of similehead. I always have quite a bit of that but it’s really all-consuming  lately.

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

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).

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.

by guest blogger rachel cheetham douglas

i went bra shopping the other week. i have a small collection of racerback tops that just sit there in my closet, year after year, because i don’t have any racerback bras to wear underneath. well, that’s not true. i have two racerback bras, but i can’t wear them because they’re itchy and hateful and itchy and they ride up and did i mention they’re itchy? itchy is a funny word. say it. you almost feel a little japanese. or maybe i’m overcaffeinated today. whatever, the point is that goddamn i hate those bras.

Two of the categories on the bookmarks bar of my lovely lappy are: abc and maps. So just imagine how I’d feel if somebody came along and made art that combines typography and cartography. Just imagine the jumping up and down and squealing like a girl I’d do, if not literally (altho’ quite possibly literally), then certainly figuratively.

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.

Not so much of a weekend blogger, me, but sometimes an unruly dame’s gotta do what an unruly dame’s gotta do.

The notion of a participatory makeocracy thrills me, well and truly, for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that I relish the blurring or even eradicating of borders and divisions — integration not segregation!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all, just like you: the Internet is a fœtid swamp of depravity and conjecture and rumour and fibbery and inaccuracy and pointlessness and Lindsay Lohan’s twat, and I can’t really come up with a compelling argument to dissuade anyone of such notions.

To be honest, it took me ages to write this piece on the work of Toronto-based sculptor Lynn Jackson. I keep structuring the damn thing to be a tidy, polite, well-behaved little enterprise. I finally realised that that couldn’t be the form it took because Jackson’s work makes me shiver and shudder, it makes me gasp and flinch, it makes me want to be held in your arms.

The backbone of the backbone.