present company excepted

bibliomancy forecast for the week of march 24th

I do enjoy having mountain outlaw on my resume.

the king of cups, and a paragraph from Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes

It was hard to wait. Time was folded in endless, deep, bellows-like pleats. If he did not pause at each fold he could not go ahead. And in every fold there were all kind of suspicions, each clutching its own weapon. It took a terrible effort to go ahead, disputing or ignoring these doubts or casting them aside.

the aleatory

I took my first walk in the new neighborhood the other day. It isn’t a neighborhood I was entirely unfamiliar with—my old gym is near our new apartment, and there’s a really good onigiri place right up the street.

But the texture of reality is entirely different walking around a neighborhood as opposed to driving. The smoothness of driving makes it possible to glide over details. Too much gliding and you won’t see anything you look at. The effort of walking unfolds time into bellows-like pleats—the only place where lizards live.

I have always loved the early days of an apartment, when it’s just a mattress on the floor. When it’s just a key, even. Putting the first packet of soy sauce into the soy sauce phone charger rubber band business cards we can’t throw away a marble a match book drawer.

I always think about how for the first few days of a trip, you don’t really know how you’re going to remember it—and then something happens, like driving through a blinding typhoon-esque Midwestern thunderstorm while “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” blasts on the car stereo. And from then on, it’s the trip when that happened.

Suspicions and their weapons only exist once the time has folded and become habitual. If you want to avoid them, don’t do time to them. (Tell a story.)

the forecast

Balance something on the tip of your nose. (NOT a checkbook.)

writing prompt

Write something that is as much in the texture of life as possible. Start exactly where you are and unfold layers.

a chune

“Jamaica Resting” by the Pool

Man it really shuts my big mouth up when an algorithm shows me something I really like/should have heard of by now. Like, I was a fact checker at The Austin Chronicle for two years—how did nobody rhapsodize about Patrick Keel AKA the Pool even once in those pages? Austin is so absurdly proud of its musicians, even/especially the ones that don’t really deserve it, but not a word about this guy who wrote “Dance Yrself Clean” wayyyy before LCD Sound System did. This is the sound of the first warm days, pretty perfectly. When it suddenly becomes possible to move your body past its winter range of hunch.

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credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
“Jamaica Resting” by the Pool

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dear diary, we’re almost all the way back in Los Angeles, thank god. Mountain living is good for proving to yourself that you can do it, you can live on a rock scraped by clouds and stars and you can survive feet of snow but I can’t survive being laughed at in the grocery store. (A woman laughed at me at the Stater Bros in Lake Arrowhead, I guess because I was carrying too many things in my arms at once? I laughed back at her. I made it sound real mean. It was a great personal victory for me.) I’m ready for the serious amounts of linen and bauhaus-inflected barrettes, Los Angeles. I won’t even look at you sideways. I take it back. It’s like, when you watch the documentary about the libertarians who call themselves anarcho-capitalists, it makes you look much more fondly on the praxis anarchists you have known, even if at one point their antics (dumpstering cotton fabric and sewing their own underwear? I’m exhausted just thinking about it) were not dear. Thank god for goblins everywhere. Tchuss! XS