fall

It's been getting as autumn-like as it can get in southern California. The leaves still change colors here, but some days are hot enough to make you want to go to the beach. I'm remembering driving down Fredrick Road in Ellicott City in the fall and watching the yellow leaves blow around in the wind and the cows grazing on the side of the hill across from the antique shop, where I once stopped and bought celery salt and pepper shakers, and an owl pillow for a friend. Tuesday night I saw Belle & Sebastian play in a cemetery and it was just cold enough for a dress with leggings and I probably didn't need my parka. They were amazing, of course, but I did think the Sunday night show was the best. I was so happy when they played There's Too Much Love I teared up a little, what a weenie. They are just so magical.

bye, favorite shirt with the flowers.

These days I feel like I have very little control over anything. My job, where I live, the way I look, being interrupted by LOUD people. It infuriates me when someone ruins my things, especially since I have spent years asking them to stay away from my clothes. I know clothes are just clothes and I shouldn't be attached to them, but I would like to have something that I can hold that no one can ruin for me. Please?

I wonder why I never listened to Iron & Wine before.

I've been listening to this song lately.

bits and pieces

It's fun finding things you forgot you wrote, started and never finished. I found a few tonight:

To put you in the cemetery or keep you with me. Leave you there with all the others I pretend I’ve forgotten, I’ll call them onesies and twosies and the in betweensies who wait in a line under the burch tree for a permanent spotsie. But the problem with onesies is they dig their way out beneath the gates and are soon floating down the streets you told them to stay off of. The twosies are no better, they come around, just not as often. They appear in the morning in your closet while picking an outfit for the day, when you’re starting the car,



This is the morning, when the fog hovers over the roads
and a man on his way to work smears his finger across the
foggy window as he sits in his car at a red light. He tells
himself today will be a good day. He will have coffee in his
new mug, and he will talk about nice things with everyone,
like the weather. He will be patient and gracious, and he
will sign all his emails with a friendly salutation. “All the
best” or “Have a lovely day,” he can’t decide which.
When he gets to the office, he folds his sweater neatly over
the back of his chair and fills his new coffee mug in the
kitchenette. On his way back to his desk, he greets
everyone he passes warmly and compliments someone
on their new haircut. He begins his work, proofreading a
twenty page informational booklet about sexually
transmitted diseases. As he reads over the symptoms of
Chlamydia, he tells himself he is lucky-




Last Summer in Baltimore

Wondering why steam rose from the sewers,
why everyone here wanted me to run
them over with my car, why I seemed to be
a finalist for lots of things but not quite right,
why I had to jump over a metal pipe every time I crossed the street
to the supermarket, why nothing here stayed fresh
between June and August, and where I should go –

Nights I sat in bed until the sun came up,
eating yogurt for old people with digestive problems,
wondering if my stomach pains were real or not, whether
I would ever leave this room again, reading Sylvia Plath’s
journal checked out from the public library, where the man
with the big curly hair who always sat by himself at bars
pushed his cart through the stacks, watching me in the next
aisle over the tops of books.
I was hoping for advice or signs somewhere in the pages.
The book was old and poorly cared for, pages separating
from the spine. Nights when I did sleep, I woke up with
loose pages crushed beneath me, like
August 9, at the beach house, Sylvia makes tunafish salad
for the children she nannies,
and
January 10, 1953 Sylvia breaks her leg skiing.

Every day a huge beetle flies into my window screen.

More pictures from Mammoth last week, and there will probably be more because I'm going again next week.

good girls and lots of cheese

Lately I've been overdosing on late 50s/early 60s summer romance at the beach type movies with Gidget, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, and A Summer Place. They're all very cringeworthy but cute. Well, A Summer Place isn't so cute but more dramatic. If you can get past all the camp, it's really interesting to see how much America has changed since then in terms of sexuality, and how some countries haven't changed at all. I still haven't watched Gidget Goes to Rome, but I really don't think it could be any better than the original or any cheesier than the second. I also don't know why they recast Gidget twice, I think Sandra Dee is perfect in the first one.


The song in this video is from the movie, but somehow they found a way to redo it and make it even cheesier. Ack.

at the mountains