about spring, the fourth plague

The flies come inside because that's where I am.

about a type of metal band

The style suggests that repetition is rehashing, that sustainment begets staleness, and redundancy is unwanted. The sound is bait—it strings you along and promises the next moment will pay off. It could, just by percentages, but almost all of it will be lost and forgotten without any attachments or lasting connections having been made, leaving you wondering what you have been doing all this time.

 

about a bus ride on January 8

The police offered to take me to the detox center but I, of course, refused. I walked to the library and this girl followed me. I knew she hated me and was drama so I stayed away. But she gave me the finger from across the street. I still don’t know what I did to her. Soon after that, she emailed me a picture of her having sex with three guys, and she wrote a description about it all in the email to me. I did not know what to feel. Then I saw one of the guys in her picture sitting in the Safeway parking lot looking at his phone and shouting at it super-hard in his Mazda. We all heard it.

one line about being winter's ghost

My nearly invisible wave at them under gray snow clouds.

(posts) a Raymond Carver poem: "Deschutes River"

Deschutes River

This sky, for instance:
closed, gray,
but it has stopped snowing
so that is something. I am
so cold I cannot bend
my fingers.
Walking down to the river this morning
we surprised a badger
tearing a rabbit.
Badger had a bloody nose,
blood on its snout up to its sharp eyes:

     prowess is not to be confused

     with grace.

Later, eight mallard ducks fly over
without looking down. On the river
Frank Sandmeyer trolls, trolls
for steelhead. He has fished
this river for years
but February is the best month
he says.
Snarled, mittenless,
I handle a maze of nylon.
Far away —
another man is raising my children,
bedding my wife, bedding my wife.

 

 

 

Note: I liked this the first time I read it; when I revisited it several months later, I liked it less.

something about first reading David Sedaris

I knew of David Sedaris because I, probably like most people, had heard him on National Public Radio (NPR), including the annual Christmastime rebroadcasts of his 1992 reading of "Santaland Diaries." It is a funny story perfectly written. Call him a humorist and NPR celebrity, but Sedaris is a writer.

Sedaris's stories draw from his own life. I suspect much of it is stretched and embellished. Some parts could be completely fictional. But almost all of it is good.

So far, I have read Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Both are collections of essays. These essays spin off Sedaris's childhood, his family, drug use, on-the-job and education experiences, and his relationship with his partner Hugh, which led to a relocation to France.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, published in 2000, might be Sedaris's most popular. He read some of the essays on the public radio show, “This American Life.” The stories I enjoyed most include "Go Carolina," which describes a young David going to his elementary school speech therapist for his lisp; the story about his brother Paul, "You Can't Kill the Rooster" (I think the accounts of Paul’s swearing are almost entirely fictional); and "Today's Special," which makes fun of fancy restaurant menus.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another collection of essays and was released in 2004. My favorites here include "The Change in Me,” in which Sedaris attempts to become a late-era hippie; “Slumus Lordicus," the story of working for his low-income-housing landlord-parents; and "The End of the Affair,” one I really enjoyed about Sedaris and Hugh disagreeing about a romantic movie.

Of the two books, my favorite Sedaris prose so far is in “Slumus Lordicus," when Sedaris is reflecting on the collection of low-income rental properties his parents now owned:

"So what do you think?" my father said. He wasn't talking about Lance or Minnie Edward's boyfriend, but all of it. Everything before us was technically ours—the lawns, the houses, the graveled driveways. This was what ingenuity had bought: a corner of the world that could, in time, expand, growing lot by lot until you could drive for some distance and never lose your feelings of guilt and uncertainty.

Note: Sedaris’s first collection of essays, Barrel Fever, was published in 1994. His sister is Amy Sedaris, who was Jerri Blank in Comedy Central’s “Strangers with Candy.”