lindsayliveshere.org

Reading: White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I hated the first fifteen pages with a passion and could not wait for the book to end, so my book club could stamp my passport that yes, I read it, but now, halfway through I am entranced and when I fall asleep the characters inhabit the dreams.

Listening: to the Mountain Goats, and the concert this week was a breath, that breath after you realized you weren’t breathing, like someone’s taking your photo and you think you shouldn’t breathe, it’ll mess up the photo.

Watching: Law & Order on repeat, hail Netflix, and brain rot, and because it reminds me of all the terrible things that aren’t happening to me right now. What a fruitcake, I know.

…the cafe where I always just get back from, the hippie coffee shop that usually hands me my morning coffee. Tonight I had a milkshake. And a friend told me about the motorcycle he’s selling. I loved every word of it, and now I am going to plan on taking the test to get my license. Knees are weak.

For a while now I’ve wanted to learn to ride a motorcycle. Chalk it up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, worming its way into my brain at the tender age of 17. A few years ago Deanna sent me a magazine essay written by a guy biking across South America, and the words sounded like a rush of wheels, all Kerouac-meets-Hunter S. And then my friend Dean got a bike, and came back from a long trip with achingly beautiful photos and good stories, and so. I can’t help it if my dreams are unoriginal. I signed up for a motorcycle class.

Here’s what I learned:

-Less blood, crashing and fires than I imagined. No one fell off. Balance was easy.

-Stopping and starting, by contrast, required more coordination than I generally possess. You can’t just turn the key and go. You have to put it in neutral, turn the ignition, pull in the clutch, pull out the choke, and then start the engine using two buttons. Stopping does not just require the application of the brake. There’s two brakes, one for your right hand and one for your right foot. Plus pull in the clutch at the same time, but more gently than you pull in the brake.

-After my fingers numbed out from the cold, I couldn’t hold in one of the controls anymore. So the instructor gave me a different bike that was even more difficult to handle, although that one control was easier to manage. I suddenly understood what it must be like to be the slow kid. You get a little behind, and then a little more behind, and then you start to hate everyone and everything. There was a young couple taking the class together who kept shooting each other cutesy looks of achievement while I was still doddering around, annihilating orange cones. I made gagging sounds at them while revving the engine.

-Your bike will go where you look. It turns when you turn your head, press the handlebars and lean.

-You might have hypothermia, if your lips are blue.

-Riding fast feels like being that kid in the NeverEnding Story who rides on Falcor the luckdragon.

Sometimes I think about reinventing, starting from scratch — remember freshman year of whatever, when you thought for a second that you could be anyone, ANYONE and no one would know different? I saw the NU kids for homecoming weekend and was struck by how we seemed like a filmstrip scrolled forward by accident. Nate and Liz are about to have a baby, which does not compute with my vivid but long-ago memory — them holding hands on the sidewalk in the humid sunset outside that concert. Adam and Mark and Eliina are people of The Law. They could get a person out of trouble. Or into it.

I remember being in charge of dorm New Student Week activities and knocking on each new freshman’s door to take a photo for the bulletin board. Mark leaned backwards off the top bunk and made a goofy face at the last second, like this would not be the photo where he made a normal smile-face because everything was different now and he was starting from scratch.

I’ve never been able to do it, starting from scratch would take too much energy. I like what I like. Arm warmers and other non-traditional outer layers. Seasonal foods and beverages. Learning new forms of transportation. Maybe some day.

Random Friday thoughts:

–I daydream. My most productive and inspired thoughts come from daydreaming on purpose by taking long walks without a destination or a taking a hot shower until the water runs cold. (Whatever, water conservation!) I’ve been criticized for this. Too daydreamy. Unfocused. Wired magazine explains the power of the daydream.

–Kirkegaard’s ideas of despair are dissected in the New York Times. Kirkegaard was the only philosopher who made real sense to me, probably because that class was taught by a black turtleneck-wearing prof who opened glass bottles of orange soda on the edge of his wooden desk.

–My friend Samantha stayed up until 2am with me on the night before my birthday. We made a huge pot of spaghetti sauce from my grandmother’s recipe and rolled meatballs, 40 in all, for my dinner guests the next day. Samantha sometimes says the phrase “a little more delicious”; as in, “if we fry the onions first, they’re a little more delicious.” Or “Let this sit overnight. Makes them a little more delicious.” I love the phrase because it means delicious can be quantified but not in any numerical, concrete way; not by taste alone, some combo of taste plus intuition, a sixth, delicious-oriented sense.

MARLA
Everything terrible you’ve ever thought up or saw or read in the paper…eventually everything terrible happens to you. To everyone. You’ll know loneliness. You’ll know hunger. If the Indian doesn’t tear off your scalp, eventually the worms and the alley rats will.

MARY
That’s it?

MARLA
Yes. Sometimes lonely. Sometimes bored. Except every other Friday night.

MARY
A new picture?

MARLA
Yes. Till then it’s avoidance, anxiety, fear…but in the movie house we are all looking at the same thing. That gives me…something

MARY
Comfort?

MARLA
Maybe. I don’t know.

–Bob Fisher, excerpt of script draft for The (edward) Hopper Project [via]

Last week I was in the audience for a reading of a new play created by 10 writers with the starting point of Edward Hopper’s paintings. When I lived in D.C., age 23 and working at Turning the Page, we took kids from public schools to the Phillips Collection, which showed a selection of Hopper’s work. Back then the paintings resonated — I was feeling the cold alienation and disorientation of vaulting from a college-town bubble into a real live job in a real live city. Hearing the play reminded me that this feeling is past and present all at once.

I guess the ocean is what I have been missing. The ocean, and family. Last weekend my sisters and I went to the beach on Isle of Palms off the coast of South Carolina, where my mother was attending a conference for work. I don’t really see my family very often. I forget what it’s like, to have other humans with similar traits puzzling through the same problems. Especially my sisters, who are A+ examples of how to survive with the Muscato DNA. Our anxiety-addled brains. The tide lapped around our ankles while we debated about whether or not to go further out into the warm water with the low, rolling waves on a perfectly sunny 70-degree day.

Staring into the middle distance, like she’s about to make some poetic comment, my mom says: Do you know what a riptide is?

No, no we don’t.

It’ll kill you. If it starts pulling you under, swim parallel to the beach.

I kind of wanted to go out more, chase a few bigger waves. Hope my bikini top stayed tied. Leave the ocean floor for a moment. But then, the riptide.

Christina and I hung back. Lisa waded out farther. The sand was so high underneath the tide that it looked like she was walking on water. We followed, gentle surf, no rocks, wanting to get hit with a really big wave to feel it sweep me off my feet, not wanting to find out if this sand dropped off into nothing, and we’d have to swim, and maybe get swept up by a riptide. Our mother went back to the beach and stood stiffly by the towels, watching us wade away from shore.

Sometimes I don’t know what I like. Sometimes I lose touch with what I want, more specifically. Sometimes I go along to get along; the evaluation mechanism that makes choice A over choice B just numbs itself out into a phantom limb and I don’t know — you pick. Things get stressful. And busy. It’s easier to ride on autopilot, to not think too hard, to take what comes along.

MFK Fisher, in How to Cook a Wolf,reminds me why it’s important to follow your hungers, whatever they may be.

There are too many of us, otherwise in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers. Some stuff the wax of religious solace in our ears. Others practice a Spartan if somewhat pretentious disinterest in the pleasures of the flesh, or pretend that if we do not admit our sensual delight in a ripe nectarine we are not guilty… of even that tiny lust! I believe one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.

This weekend’s tiny lusts: breakfast for dinner, apple beer, long walks for cider and records, rummage-sale hunting, old love notes, hanging pictures on the wall, lying in bed after a hot shower with the covers piled on, new songs.

Lately I’ve been reading:

–Q&A with Lynda Barry. Because it hits the high points of the talk she gave at the Cusp conference, where she was so fun that I forgot to take, I don’t know, notes.

–The Intern. Because of stuff like this and this.

–Fruitslinger. Because it’s apple season.

Recently I acknowledged my inner grouch. Like at an AA meeting or something. Hi. I’m Lindsay. And this is my grouch. And then I guess if there’d been some kind of meeting (metal folding chairs, weak Maxwell House in styrofoam cups?) I could’ve stood up and said in one breath (because who wants to admit these things) that: It’s hard to realize when you’ve been a grouch for like three weeks and didn’t realize it and thought you were just busy and thought the world should pretty much be ok with the grouch because HEY you’re getting stuff done.

She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what ‘growing up’ entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

— Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to the Cusp Conference, held at the MCA here in Chicago. Got a whole lot of good inspiration, the kind that wipes clean the mental whiteboard and redraws a whole new way of thinking.

-Paul Hoffman, who heads up BigThink.com, reminded me of the power of story and the gap between perception and reality.
-Lynda Barry, artist, who made me re-appreciate hand turkeys, misheard song lyrics and first phone numbers.
-Ryan Knighton, blind Canadian punk writer, who warns: don’t be a raging asshole if you accomplish great things. Even if that great thing is that you’re blind and taught yourself to ecolocate objects.
-Dave Lyon, car designer, who confirmed my desire to drive the new all-electric GM Volt all across the country and blog about it. Volt PR staff: Call me.

I’ve been angry lately. Not at any one particular person. Just in general. I haven’t been really, truly, genuinely angry since I was a public school teacher. It’s that frustrated anger, the kind where you can’t really stop yourself from saying something too snipey but it comes out anyways. That anger where it’s like you’re just on the edge, and any one thing could knock it over, a flower pot balanced on a windowsill and there’s a game of baseball down below.

The quick tour of Caitlin’s new apartment suddenly went awry: When we walked into the living room, there it was, something flying, something — a giant moth? A bird? A crazy tiny bird? A humming bird, buzzing against the ceiling, and shooting along it from one side of the room to the other.

Neither of us had a plan beyond: get a broom. (That’s my default plan whenever there’s a critter — mouse, bat, etc.) Caitlin found me a broom; she wielded a string mop. Back in the living room, we swatted near it with our respective cleaning implements, like we could encourage it to fly the opposite direction. Turns out, it could be herded, but not controlled… it would fly away from the broom only to dart around it — screw you, humans! Whirrr, whirrr, whirrrrr… finally in a stroke of insane luck, it stopped flying and landed on the bristles of the broom, just for a moment, before taking off again. We knew what we had to do.

We spent the next hour trying to get the bird to land again on the broom long enough to slide it out the open window, the way you’d slide a pizza into an oven on those long paddles. When it landed, I held my breath and began lowering it slowly, the slowest I’ve ever moved, so slow that it was hard not to laugh at the sky-high tension. But it worked, and in went the bird, through the open window. Problematically, the living room opened not to the outside but to an enclosed sunroom, with its own set of windows. And so, hour two was spent in the sunroom, with a mop and a broom, with our silent pleas and louder running commentary: Come on, just trust us! Let’s go! Slow down, out the window, please little bird we don’t want to hurt you!

(Not that I could have really hurt its tiny whirring frame, no way. I can barely kill a roach let alone a hummingbird.)

We had many, many false starts. It landed on the broom only to take flight a moment later — screw you, humans! I could feel our energy flagging. How much longer? All day? We had stuff to do, places to be! Finally it landed on the bristles of the broom, so light that I couldn’t feel its weight at all. I slowly lowered the broom, smooth as I could, and found the beginning of a forgotten prayer float to the top of my brain. Our father who art…

The bird stayed long enough on the slow-moving broom that it reached the open part of the window, and phfoom! It was gone.

After I said goodbye to Caitlin, I drove home and started to think about how scared the bird must have been. How impossible an exit must have seemed. I could relate. We are all stuck in our strange enclosed rooms, flying at the wrong places, frantic and darting around. Relax. Land on the broom. The open window is right there.

Previously, in surreal bird news:

Allentown Story.

The days have flown by as the days do when summer is slowly but swiftly sliding away, an egg from a hot frying pan ready to hit the plate, and I’ve shaken the sand from the toes of each sneaker and have gone hunting for that jacket. where is that jacket; this is just the morning chill but soon it will be an all-day chill and tempers will burn like candles trying to take the edge off the cold. But for now I’m off to Michigan for the woods and the stars, and we’ll see what happens on the other side of this one.