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It is my mom's birthday! Huzzah!
A very happy birthday to you, momoo!
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Jeff and I live next to a park. When I first moved into the neighborhood, four years ago, there was at the foot of that park a convenience store that did not deserve the name. A retrograde bodega stocked with merchandise from the Hoover administration. The only two items that moved -- beer and paper towels -- were begrudgingly vended by a proprietor who was personally enraged by any customers that did not provide him with exact change. It was a terrible place.
Last year, the grumpalumpagus sold out, and after a period of closure and remodeling, the Bodega From Hell reopened as a combination yuppie gourmet and floristry emporium. The kind of place that sells six kinds of organic honey, milk from a local dairy, and handmade sandwiches that incorporate creme fraiche and capers. In keeping with the florist aspect of the business, the yard of the building has been transformed with giant potted palms, gazebos, infinite fountains, and mind-numbingly insane experimental items like lemon trees. Bananas. Madness.
The proprietors are evidently not satisfied, however, with the small plot of dirt that they actually own, and have begun to invade the teensy city-owned plots along the sidewalk that normally contain large shade trees. The plots alongside their building, however, are bereft of shade trees, and the bodega owners have taken it upon themselves to fill the gap with -- corn. Giant stalks of corn. With big silky ears of corn upon them. I am interested to see whether this causes an infestation of smart-alecky cartoon crows, or more realistically, whether they will sell the corn, or have a corn-tasting party, or something else that the whole neighborhood can enjoy.
Also, it makes me wonder how common it is for people to sneak on to fallow bits of city land and repurpose them. The corn guys are not the only urban farmers in the neighborhood. As I was walking along from the grocery store the other day, I noticed that someone had planted the median strip with eggplants. They also have a good crop of hot peppers coming in.
There are all these teeny strips of land that serve no real purpose, covered with nothing but grass. And they're usually the best kinds of places for a garden: near enough to homes for someone to drag a hose out there, but far away enough to be exposed to full sun. Why not let people just plant watermelons on them? It's community-oriented, encourages people to grow healthy food, maybe for charity or donation purposes, etc. I suppose someone could come along and steal the watermelons, but I think that if someone steals your median strip melons, they probably needed them more than you.
I am making this sound all too easy, most likely. After all, my own food-growing right now comes to two tomato plants on the roof, and the amount of watering, spraying, tending, netting, and cooing I do over those two plants is tremendous. Let's just say that if care translates in any way into savoriness, the produce of those plants ought to taste like liquid diamonds.
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Yesterday I was in a funk about my poems, walking along thinking about how awful they are and I can't even figure out what's wrong with them, but something is, and they make the world sad, and I should stop and do something more useful with my life like (ha!) be a lawyer.
Then I was disturbed from my mopey reverie by giant acorns falling out of the oak trees under which I was walking. They were about the size of plastic-coke-bottle bottlecaps and landed with sharp, loud thonks. Kind of scary; I would not want one to hit me on the head. One fell on a car parked at the curb and left a little dent.
So then I thought about acorns and oak trees and got interested in some kind of phrase, and ended up walking very slowly home writing a poem about acorns on the back of the envelope to a Verizon bill because I didn't have any paper. Then I got home and finished my acorn poem (I know, lame, acorns, but wotthehell), and then wrote another one about tomatoes and became happy again.
So this is my stupid problem with poetry. I'm hardly ever sure whether my poems are good (I mean, sometimes I think they are, and then I read the same poem the next day and am convinced it is so bad it is actually sucking goodness out of the world and neutralizing it). But I like to write poems. The actual writing makes me happy. But I also find it hard to write, perhaps because of the inherent SET UP FOR FAILURE that is writing poems. Arghhh...
I have a new mss. It is a collection of stuff. Not a giant project. A collection. This is weird for me. Sometimes I look through it and think, well this is very nice. And sometimes I look through it and think, why, god, why have you made me parent to such awfulness. And then I rend my garments, cover myself in ashes, and hide under the porch, and Jeff has to coax me out with expensive goat cheese.
I would like people to look at the mss and give me comments, except I have the whole foreboding sense of failure thing going on, that everyone will hate it. So maybe I will have people send Jeff the comments and he can collate them and use them to create a letter grade, and in three months he will come to me and say, "your poetry gets a B+" and I will think "Whew, okay I pass. Next time I will do a little better and also all the extra credit assignments and totally ruin the curve for everyone!"
The upshot of all this: I am ridiculous. Also, if you feel like looking at the manuscript, drop me an email. I will send it to you, and also some gold foil star stickers to put on it, so that even if you don't like it, it will look awesome.
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American poets, to a one, have overused the word "sweet." Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. We've all done it: casually tossed the word "sweet" into a poem, even when it doesn't actually describe what we're talking about, or where another word would be far better. It's just so crisp in the mouth, and flexible in the ear. The upshot is that our poems are awash in it.
This is a major health disaster! "Sweet" is a radioactive isotope of English, and we have caused immense poetical environmental degradation through its overuse. "Sweet" has a half-life of one year, after which it decays into a stable, harmless state. Therefore, we must all commit, for the good of the nation and American letters, not to use the word until August 17, 2010.
In the meantime, may I suggest any of the following as a replacement?
saccharine, dulcet, candied, honeyed, luscious, lush, mellifluous, pleasant, agreeable, gratifying, welcome, refreshing, comfortable, cordial, genial, glad, delectable, dainty, delicious, inviting, winsome; heart-robbing, alluring, enticing, appetizing, enchanting, entrancing, enravishing, charming, delightful, felicitous, exquisite, beatific, seraphic, empyrean, palmy, halcyon, fragrant, aromatic, redolent, balmy, perfumed, ambrosial, sonorous, vibrant, harmonious, intense, fresh, tender, pearly, mellow, contented, cheerful, blithe, chipper, buoyant, jocose, sprightly, sunny, brisk, happy, joyful, courteous, gallant.
There you go. Enjoy...and remember...lose the sweet before it loses us all!
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Yesterday Jeff went out to buy a new trash can for the back alley. In an effort to keep unscrupulous neighbors from putting their trash in our can, he has decorated it with blinding white duct tape, as follows:
Of course, it may also keep the garbage collectors from approaching and emptying the can, as it appears as though it might be filled with poison.
In the photo, you can see our kitchen floor. Not a week ago, prior to a visit by my parents, I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed that floor with bleach. A week later, it is so dingy that just walking on it makes us cringe. We have not been able to discover any method of breaking this habit of our floor to act as a gravity well for dirt of all varieties. I have come to believe that it is actually haunted. I believe our floor committed a grave sin in a past life, and its tendency toward filth is the psychic manifestation of its crime.
I woke up this morning feeling rather awful, and as a result, have been no good for anything but sitting around quietly and reading. I've made some headway on selecting a new computer for Big Game, and will probably have both that and new book-editing software in hand by the end of the month. Huzzah for progress! And now, I will take my leave and return to my reading and tuneless, head-achy moaning.
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