I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. |  | October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. |
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November 10/31/00 - All Hallow's Eve. Samhain--happy new year, Piglet. Anniversary of Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses. Friend troubles. People I have known and loved for aeons, suddenly not returning my calls. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? et al. A sad sort of evening. Daily resolution: go out, get drunk, do not weep on anyone. 10/30/00 - Rain, rain, go away. I broke my brolly Saturday. Then I borrowed Annie's, and I left it in the movie theater. Sorry, Annie. (I was too chicken to confess to you on Saturday, so here I will confess publicly, to the Web at large: hey, all you people, I stole my roommate's umbrella, and then I lost it. Bad me! Bad, bad me!) I had resolved, to-day, not to eat any sugar. I have an insatiable sweet tooth, and it has been particularly bad this last week; jellybeans at the office all day, and M&Ms at home. So this morning, I got up and I looked myself in the eye and I said, "Self: no sugar to-day!" And I was very good and exercised formidable self-control and I made it almost to 10 a.m., at which point someone put a bowl of Hershey's Kisses in the lunchroom and it was all over. In this weather, I want only to stay in bed. I want to stay in bed with a book. I want to stay in bed with a book and have someone bring me tea. I want to stay in bed with a book and have someone bring me tea and then join me in bed, nice and warm. I think I will stop wishing aloud right there: my mother reads this web page. But where are all the men who like to spend rainy days in bed, or playing board games, maybe, or reading great works of literature aloud, naked? Rainy days lead to unhealthy romantic longings. And mushrooms. 10/27/00 - The new moon. I wish you would Come pick me up Take me out Fuck me up Steal my records Screw all my friends (They're all full of shit) With a smile on your face And then do it again. - Ryan Adams Too much melancholy music before bedtime. 10/26/00 - St. Lucian's Day: the necromancer converted. There's hope for you, too, I'm sure. Last night, I dreamt I was a mermaid. Earlier last night, a giddy extravagant dinner at Farallon with Mags and Annie, my treat, to celebrate marathon finishes and to thank them for being so patient with months of marathon fanaticism. Much champagne is drunk. Foie gras, persimmon salad, lobster bisque, roasted monkfish, pumpkin orechiette, chanterelles, braised leeks, Atlantic salmon, apple cake, brown sugar napoleon, chocolate chantilly, three glasses of late harvest Vin Glaciere. Three hundred dollars later, we tumble giggling and tipsy into Border's to consult travel guides: Mags buys Spanish books, Annie looks for a list of hostels in Amsterdam, I am absorbed in the Let's Go Guide to Eastern Europe. In the Muni station on the way home, we make change for a teenaged boy and his girlfriend trying to get home, and they promise us a month of good luck. The Grey Neighbours, in disguise. A woman on the platform asks me where I get my hair done: she is the fourth in two weeks. Darling Ivo! We giggle our way home, Annie and I fall into bed, Mags bakes cookies. I sleep an hour late this morning, wake at 7 instead of 6, and the house is freezing cold and smells like Christmas. It used to feel like I was drowning. Then the water receded. Now there are just shadows in the corners, angry mornings, dull afternoons. I self-medicate with money. Dangerous remedy. Where do I want to be? Where do I go next, from here? What happens if I don't know? I wish I were a rock star. But only part of the time. To-day: The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman. The Smiths: my own soundtrack for melancholy days. God bless us, every one. 10/25/00 - Burmese food last night: ginger salad, coconut rice, chicken with mango. Oh, oh. I went home and had the most delicious dreams. More flowers, more letters. Most of yesterday afternoon was spent writing letters back to people. I haven't yet answered all of them, and am feeling a little bad-friend guilt. Still a plaintive note from Lalena, and one from Diana, and a very indignant message from French Jeremy saying, "I feel like I'm the least of your concerns at the moment." Well, yes, Jeremy: that would be a fair assessment. So sorry. And I haven't seen Stenny or Toto or Erika or Geoff or lovely Kate in two weeks. *sigh* I am listening: Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker; PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love. I am reading: Shiny Adidas Track Suits and the Death of Camp. I am looking forward to reading: the new McSweeney's. 10/24/00 - The temptation to edit myself for content is overwhelming: the Return of the Coy. Darling Deacon Paul thinks I ought. I will not edit to-day, I will go one day more, and then maybe tomorrow I will erase it all. No, okay, that's a lie: I have edited. The incriminating paragraph is gone. Phew. So I am officially now coward and liar both. The best breakfast ever: poppy-seed rolls and coffee. The marathon is done. Overwith. I did it, I finished, I made a very satisfactory showing for my first one. Marathons are revealed to be rather more grisly affairs than one would expect: deaths on the race course. (Really. As in: dead runners.) Parades of shrilling ambulances. People vomiting, people passed out, people lying on the side of the road with I.V.s anchored to their arms. People lying in the middle of the road with cordons of Marines standing round them, Marine medics working frantically atop them, blood on the asphalt. A horrid affair. The first ten miles were all excitement and optimism and determination; the last sixteen-point-two were a progressive downward spiral of pain and fatigue and sickness. After about eighteen miles, the mile markers start playing tricks on you: you reach 18, and then you don't pass 19 miles until it seems like Tuesday. Then you pass the 20-mile marker maybe 4 or 5 times, and then you don't get to 21 until Christmas. Next Christmas, Christmas 2001. It was crowded. It was hot. It was very distracting, people screaming at you from the sidewalks, people trying to hand you things or high-five you as you passed, other runners in your way, or passing out, or running into you. Hard to stay focused, hard to be Zen. Sometimes I caught myself forgetting to breathe. We ran all around D.C., past the Capitol and the Lincoln Monument and the Washington Monument and around the Mall and all these other lovely D.C. sights, and I was increasingly pain-blind and I saw none of it. None. The only monument I remember seeing was the Iwo Jima Memorial, which is where the finish line was, and so it is perhaps the most singularly beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. Iwo Jima! Iwo Jima! And then a Marine put a medal around my neck when I came over the line, and then I started crying, and then I discovered that walking was mysteriously difficult, and just staying upright required more motor control than I seemed to possess. The Marines are beautiful men, so beautiful, so organized and so polite, and they all called me Ma'am and they wanted to untie my shoes for me but I couldn't stop walking or I would have fallen over. My left foot was bloody, one of my toes all mangled. And they gave me water and bananas and bagels and apples and grapes and my bag with my dry clothes and my other sneakers in it, and I hugged all these things and carried them around for twenty minutes while I looked for my parents. I tried to ask some Marines, some of the beautiful polite Marines, where the Iwo Jima monument had gone, because I was meeting my parents next to it, and I couldn't say "Iwo Jima," I kept saying "Imo Wa" or "Jiwa" or something, but they politely figured it out and politely directed me there, and it was still the loveliest thing I've ever seen. At dinner that night, I ate three plates of food and two desserts, and then I danced. And thank you, all you marvelous people, for phone calls and letters and flowers and cards. You are all such generous people. I think I will do it again next year. Anyone want to join me? Airplane reading: Elizabeth Peters' terribly funny Amelia Peabody mysteries; Agatha Christie. Wish List: the new John Ashbery; at least one new toe. My mother has got a Very Dirty Mind. At least now we know where I got it from. 10/19/00 - The Big Day approacheth: Sunday. I fly to D.C. tomorrow morning. I may as well not have come to work to-day: I am utterly useless as a human being. Making mental lists. And then, on Monday, I get my life back. And now that I have done it, now that I have these last weeks resolved okay to go ahead and have a crush for real, a crush acted-upon, I am finding out again (again, again . . .) why it is a wrong idea. I am a little raw-ended bundle of nerves, inventing all kinds of anxieties and evil scenarios. Anxieties I have no right to have, so prematurely. Breathe deeply. Breathe deeply. Wait until November. Must I repeat some lessons so often? Idiot girl. In other idiot girl news, you would not believe how much money I have spent in the last three days. CDs, it was, this morning. PJ Harvey, David Gray, et al. Yesterday it was a blue leather skirt. A blue leather skirt? What was I thinking? I wanted a green leather skirt. Now I shall need new boots as well. Small daily happinesses: Roast beef sandwiches with horseradish. My boss gone home early, again. Dates for Indonesian food. The other Pix. Hello, nice Pix. And here is one of the new Pix's friends, whom I like for reasons of my own. Who's insecure? Not me. I'm just a Liar. 10/12/00 - A sense of the terrible, closing in. An inevitable sort of day: Inevitability #1: The day you wear new, not-yet-broken-in shoes to work is the day the Muni will break down at Powell and you will have to walk from Stockton Street to the Embarcadero. Inevitability #2: If you take a sick day from work, on your return the next day every single one of your colleagues will tell you how much better you look to-day--oh, so much better!--leading you to wonder what the hell you must have looked like on Tuesday. It is my impression that in most parts of the western world, if someone writes to you and says, "I am sick to-day," it is considered polite and kindly to write back at some point, with something appropriately sympathetic and indulgent. It Girls tend to make very sulky sick people, and enjoy being indulged. People who fail with even this simple gesture lose points so fast they fall right back down the stairs to where they started. That is the consensus, anyway. It is still October, and how much do I wish I were in Vermont or New Hampshire? *sigh* 10/11/00 - Buffy's birthday, apparently. I'm sorry, Mum, it was mean of me. Home sick from work. Or at least, not at work--not much at home, either. A day to get errands run. Out in the city, in the middle of a Wednesday morning: I feel weightless and free. I buy tea and sit with it at a cafe table, bundled in my sweater, reading Akhmatova, watching businesspeople go by. I am not a businessperson, to-day. Neener neener. In the afternoon, my sweet sweet roommates send me illness offerings from Kozmo. I sit on the couch with my knitting, eating the soup and the fruit and watching the movie they have sent, and I feel like a terrible roommate. 10/10/00 - The rainy season begins. Also, I have "Silver Bells" in my head all the time. Seattle. Oh, Seattle. Why am I not in Seattle? Seattle is where I belong. I am moving to Seattle. Next year. After I move to France. Or something. Thank you, Fjggy and Eric. The marathon is in two weeks. The weekend after this one. I feel suspended until then, I feel like everything in my life right now, my very crowded busy life, has taken a deep breath and is holding it until October 22nd. I am tense. I don't like to go out in the evenings, I should be running, eating, sleeping: I go out anyway, I go out too often, and I feel guilty and resolve not to go out again at all until after the 22nd. Except to-night, of course, because to-night Emmalo and Abs and I are going to see the Bulgarian Women's Choir in concert. Ourrah! Oh, and on Thursday I'm going out to the Richmond with Annie and Mags and maybe Katie for Russian food. Oh, and on Friday I promised Stenny we'd do something . . . . I read the new Ursula Le Guin, The Telling, on the plane up to Seattle. It is unthinkable, it is unimaginable, it is incomprehensible, but: it is dismal. It is wretched. It is such a bad book that it makes me sad just to think about. After all her talk that night about how important it is to distance onesself, to keep one's own personal and political voice out of one's work--well, Ursula has been naughty. It is a deeply didactic book, a short story with about 250 pages of moralizing and pseudo-anthropology grafted into the middle. The woman has translated Lao Tse; if she wanted to write a treatise on Buddhism and eastern philosophy, why didn't she simply do so? If she wanted to anthropologize, why not write another like the superb Always Coming Home? Why go instead and ruin the last book of the brilliant Hainish cycle? I am worried now, ever so worried, for these two Earthsea books she has coming next year. If she has tampered similarly with Earthsea, there can be no forgiveness. Last night we watched "Casablanca". I cannot imagine that there is a better movie than "Casablanca". It makes up for a lot of things. 10/5/00 - St. Foy's Day. I can't remember what St. Foy does, and I'm too lazy to look it up. But yesterday was St. Faith's day, and "foy" would have been archaic English for "faith," so one wonders if we aren't celebrating the same saint, divided into two mythic halves, on two different days. But then again, one has to assume that the Catholic church knows what it's doing, doesn't one? Another outing with Jeremy last night, dinner and coffee in the Mission. We ended up talking politics and current events, and as J. only follows the news when it's relevant to France, I found myself trying to explain the events in Yugoslavia in muddling French. J. is mysteriously unable to understand that Serbia and Russia are not the same country. I'm fairly sure this is not due to a flaw in my French. J. anyway was not much interested in Yugoslavia, and managed eventually to steer the conversation back to French corruption and campaign finance scandals. I watch the news from Belgrade. I am having a drifting double vision, disorienting, recalling the August of the Russian coup. We were at the Quonochontaug cottage in Rhode Island, on the sea, and Hurricane Bob came grinding up the coast, and the police drove through at 5 a.m. with bullhorns to evacuate us all. The rain was lashing down outside, the sky piled up iron-grim, and we were running back and forth from the house to the car with suitcases and duffels. Taping windows. Bolting storm shutters. I remember there was water on the floor of the house, though from blown rain I think, not flooding. My father turned on the T.V. while we all ran around, hoping for a weather report (though the weather seemed to me obvious; who needed reporting?). Despite the imminent hurricane, despite police with bullhorns and closed roads and soaked rugs, there was no weather report to be found. Every channel it was the same thing: there was a coup underway in Russia. Tanks in the streets. Yeltsin on the steps. I remember Gorbachev's face, though I don't remember if he was delivering a statement or if it was just stock footage of him looking tired and unhappy. Possibly the latter. We drove back to Connecticut in a long traffic jam of other evacuees, with rain and hail hammering on the car, the pitch skies lowering, and everywhere on the news, frantic and elated commentators, everything was Russia. It was surreal and amazing. My Weekend In Seattle. Hurrah! I have just done possibly the stupidest thing I've ever done, ever. 10/4/00 - Last night I had a peculiar dream about Russia. Over the weekend, it was England: Oxford. Last week once it was Spain, or Greece (unclear, in dream-context). Now we're back in Russia. I haven't dreamt of Russia in a long time, not since the Peace Corps plans fell through. I think mention of Petersburg yesterday must have set me off: strange dreams about that city, about Pushkin and the Bronze Horseman. The cost of airline tickets to Moscow has dropped, the Internet tells me. Too bad I don't speak Russian any longer. But now I am thinking about it. Sara? Shall we travel? I am becoming obsessed with Orsinian Tales. I ought not get in conversations with people about Life Goals. Life Goals are tricky animals, and there are the ones I am willing to tell people of--the harder ones, the less likely ones, the ones that require too much money and the guilty abandonment of loved people--and then there are the ones I am not willing to share, not with anyone. The real goals, personal and incorrect. For some reason it embarrasses me terribly to talk about plans. I feel like the past is one thing, everyone has a past and it's happened already, it's become public property and just so many stories to tell. But the future is a different sort of art, a different story, very fragile, and if you breathe on it wrong it will break and you'll have to start again. I swear to God, all I'm looking for is an excuse to use the phrase "eschatological lemmings." Do you ever feel like you're missing something? 10/3/00 - We start a new month. It is our favorite month, though not in San Francisco, where one would never know it was October. Nevertheless, we have lately been moody and unsleeping, we have lost our temper at innocents and written terrible letters to well-meaning people. To-day it seems like a good idea to leave our own words out of this. "When I look around I think this, this is good enough and I try to laugh at whatever life brings 'cos when I look down I just miss all the good stuff and when I look up I just trip over things." - Ani DiFranco Best love song: "As Is," by Ani DiFranco, on "Little Plastic Castle" Current reading: The Leper's Companions, by Julia Blackburn; The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich, by Fritz Leiber; Orsinian Tales, by Ursula Le Guin. Things I have not done to-day, which I was supposed to do: Gone running. Booked a conference room in Glendale. Emailed Jeremy. Paid the phone bill. Eaten lunch. Things I have not done to-day, which I was not necessarily supposed to do, but which would have been nice: Fallen in love. Read the collected works of Turgenev. Had a picnic in the park. Played hooky from work and gone to the MoMA. Things I have not done at all, but ought to someday: Gone to St. Petersburg. Written a novel. Learned to play the violin. Skydived. Eloped. Studied Italian. Gambled everything on the roulette in Vegas. Won a Nobel Prize for anything. Shhh. September August July June |
Everything I remember from my childhood |
