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.

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.

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.

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.

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 read a blog (very intermittently kept) written by a Korean artist who writes in English, which is not her first language. Her tiny strange observations are often very beautiful and made more so by the flaws in her English, a lot more so, I think, because those flaws can be very illuminatory — that skewing of language can make you look at a thing from a whole different perspective. The accidental nature of some of the beauty she writes makes her observations fresh and astonishing.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

I took my kids to see Zombieland the other day. (Because yes, I am an awesome mother.) It was a highly enjoyable experience, more than any of us had anticipated, honestly, and chief among the many excellent moments was the scene in which the four nonzombies who are our heroes realize the rules of quotidian life no longer pertain and lay waste to a souvenir shop, smashing and crushing and pulverising all the cheap tat that stocks the shop’s shelves. It is an exhilarating moment, for sure, because transgression so often is, and transgression that involves destruction? Ding ding ding! We have a winner, folks!

I am interested in the connection between the physical and the mental, in the connection between a crisis of the body and the germination of an idea.

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.

How to Craft a Cello from Parts You Have
by Tanya Laramie

Here is maybe the greatest Canadian song ever. And if you disagree, I’d love to hear your nominations for that position! (Click the green post title to make the jump.)

The backbone of the backbone.