scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

25.9.10

a rainy day, stopping often enough but never a lot of time for the street to dry. words on a shirt, words over a sandwich, words between coffee, an easy river. I watch the people go by on the street, raising and lowering umbrellas, hoods, newspaper. The beggars stand up and make their way homewards.

i dream: a boat, blue water, blue sky. i take myself away and breathe sunshine. all of this is just beginning. (all of this is just)

Labels: vienna, writing

scrawled @ 15:39

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22.9.10

i cast a circle, a perimeter fence, i draw it in close against my skin like a layer of sweat. this will not hurt me if. this will not touch me if. i test its safety, moving within it, shifting beneath it, measuring myself against glaciers and tides and redshift. (you are so far away from me.) i trace its outlines, toe its edges, skirt it like it doesn't matter after all.

Labels: reflection

scrawled @ 13:06

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15.9.10

black is white. up is down. yes is no. I will never give knives as a wedding present. first an onion: tear off the skin, trash. Quickly dice, oil, flames, bigblueflames. i cut the peppers, i tear out the whites, big chops, big pieces, slicing, slicing. Everything on the fire. I force out the insides of mushrooms with my thumbs. I put my wet finger on an ice cube and wait, again, three times, and now when my wine is cold my dinner will be finished. Serrated blade for the tomatoes, for the sausage. I am rough with them all. Give it a moment. Steam rising from the pan, the peppers turning black, the sausage going after it, onions coming fast to brown, honest salt only and tomatoes last. Flip the sausages. Let it swelter, let it burn, but i stab the tops of mushrooms with my wood fork as i watch it char.

Brown bread and pale cheese, the bread hard and nutty and the cheese, it yields, it allows, soft and melting, and the wine is cold with the ice slowed down and stillstanding.

and then the pot is alltogether, the sausages warm and dense, the mushrooms dark. tomatoes diffusing through. it smells divine. i am bright, i feel bright, easy, drinking the wine too fast. I get a fork.

Labels: food

scrawled @ 17:10

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14.9.10

The coffee machine at work sputters, the nozzles must need cleaning, and i lick warm cream from the rim of my mug and close my eyes.

Labels: food

scrawled @ 08:50

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13.9.10

a glider, over the city, just below the autumn clouds of morning. So delicate, so slow, and i imagine the pure silence of it. Compare to here on the road, the cars and the trucks and buses and the construction scrapes and hammers, big-man motorcycles with no mufflers, horns and radios and people shouting, and i look up and the glider skims the cumulus underside like a waterbug.

Labels: vienna

scrawled @ 08:19

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12.9.10

a day at the zoo. i jump with both feet into nothing, over nothing, with no preparation. we see the baby elephant. i risk everything, like i almost remember how i used to do. there is a mass of people before the tiger, but the lions are always sleeping and abandoned. small things, big things, and my perspective cuts between, racing in sequence, until i can't tell which battles to pick and so i let them take me. with all vienna spends on beautification there are still enough litterbugs for that bag from that movie with that girl ... watch how i soar.

Labels: writing

scrawled @ 19:02

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10.9.10

*save template changes*

sweet.

Labels: family, media

scrawled @ 07:56

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9.9.10

I press my opportunity while noone is in my office: i will take this fried chicken with my fingers. The Austrians will not see me. How on earth they use forks and knives for the darndest things, i think i am too old to learn, but i keep chopsticks at my desk.

Munchkin comes home from kindergarten and requests, specifically, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a plate. On a plate, mommy, i need a plate! I consider renting a movie, i consider putting that wine in the fridge, just for me, just for later, just for the persistent memory of Thursdays. I consider making cookies for a dozen different reasons.

For dinner she says she wants sausages and noodles and cheese, and somehow i figure i can manage. Maybe she'll be awake long enough, maybe she'll eat what she claims. May as well.

Labels: food

scrawled @ 15:31

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7.9.10

The Dream in a relative greenspace, a fine bedtime story for my princess, with the painted fairies and the giggling and the Dramatic Dashing About. We may go back again. She doesn't get the jokes, i hope, not yet, but cheers when i do. He gave back the flowers for the premiere - i tried to get her to choose roses, i wanted the yellow ones, but she had none of it, so now they sit on my table. If i had given them to Puck then i wouldn't have to look at them now and think of him in his tailored suit. But poor Hermia, spurned for being stumpy, and i laugh and laugh until my sides ache - don't tell me how it ends, bitch, i know how it ends, and in any case in the end i wouldn't have it any other way.

Labels: media

scrawled @ 10:05

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6.9.10

Picked up on that, did you? I am not afraid of this moment, this bubble of time within which we travel. Not now, not today. Maybe tomorrow i call the lifecoach again, who can say? (PSA: holy shit, do i ever recommend that.) When i was a kid, i said no when i should have said yes (when i should have said yes i will yes), and then i had regret for things i had not done. Only ever for things i had not done. I made decisions out of fear that changed everything, this tiny, terrified child. Now i am big and this is the world as it is, here is the path of what has been (you see this point, where it dips into shadow? and this, and this? i will show you, i have shown you), and i look out over the expanse of future (i relax on a mountaintop and look out over the plains, the trees like a line of tiny, waiting buttons, the rivers and lakes shining with the sky) and i want it all, every choice, every bifurcation, everything, anything. Shantih shantih shantih. Right? I read it again and this time i understand the German. I had quite forgotten that there was any.

There are good moments, ones where everything in the world is luminous, where the things that run across my head are god, i love my life (that was in a Starbucks) and whatever i did to pay for this was worth it (that wasn't). The black spaces between, the old ways, they come less often - not that they don't. To have it, and to have it taken, sets off a hurricane, and the aftermath comes, as you already know, or you can imagine. But i want to keep this, in my eyes, on my tongue. In the palms of my hands. Again. Now.

Labels: reflection, writing

scrawled @ 08:00

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4.9.10

I love peaches when they're perfect, in season, yellowflesh and with the promise of sticky leaving a line down your wrist. This one, these, all of them. I love mangoes, the way i always think the skin smells intoxicatingly like a pine forest on a certain day (however long ago that was), the way the insides are so slippery, the way the strings that get caught in your teeth still taste of it, and so it is so, so long until it is finally just a memory. Breathing at just the right moment, walking past a strawberry seller in an outdoor market, that's advertising. When someone eats a pomegranate the whole world knows afterwards.

Labels: food, writing

scrawled @ 15:47

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