drunkenbee

Dude.

Shut up, right?

I can't believe I was just complaining about a malaise. I'm going to effing Spain on Thursday! I've never been to Europe before! THERE WILL BE HAM WHICH HAS ONLY FED UPON ACORNS IN ITS ENTIRE KISSED-BY-THE-SUN-GODS LIFE. Ed is going to have to watch me closely, lest I steal off to plunk down $1000 on a ham that I will secretly photograph and paste over Ed's passport photo so that it may sit next to me in Seat 42B on the way home. Something to cuddle with in bed and use as a salt lick? Sign me up. "Pass the damn ham" Scout said.

I'm also dorkily tickled with myself right now because I just wrote the following phrase (yes! I also just decided to sit down and do some writing before taking two weeks off): "Via the wormhole of literary-historical influence..." You take amusement where you can get it when writing on Hawthorne and James. I got it, in this case, "via the wormhole of literary-historical influence." You guys, that phrase is so stupid that it's awesome. Columbia here I come.

Finally, check out this picture. I love it so much. Apparently Roger and I have the same muse. I bet Roger wouldn't sell his muse down the river for a big slab of ham, though, and that's why best friends don't need to get married to one another. Wow. I just blew my own mind with that theory about the institution of marriage. Although, we are talking about Roger here, and I think all bets might be off it we were dealing with the Platonic plain hamburger.

Photo by Rocco Kasby

A Landed Fish

Bear with me as I am about to engage a variety of fish metaphors to describe my current mental state.

If it had been more sweltering or sultry this summer, I might have more of an excuse of why I am drifting through each day with mouth agape. But the world has generally been objectively delightful. Every morning, though, we can't get out of bed. We find ourselves catatonic in the evenings on which we don't have Spanish class, in front of the blue waterglow of the television. We've taken to attempting to hide various beeping electronics from ourselves in the morning (one person hides one, the other person hides the other), thus forcing an early morning scavenger hunt for the snooze button, a bet laid hopefully on the off chance that such physical activity might spur one or the other or both out of bed on the first try, rather than the tenth snooze.

We recently re-watched Terence Malick's Badlands. You know the scene with the fish? When Sissy Spacek just throws her pet catfish out in the garden for no reason, and the camera pans in on it gasping and flopping? (That moment brought to you courtesy of Frank Norris). The fish. Man, that fish. I'm either it or I'm the Sissy Spacek character, played upon, brought around, a waif amidst forces. I can't tell which. I don't really have the energy to decide, either.

It's true that I'm currently in passive mode in my work right now; not writing but reading and researching. So that probably has something to do with it. I told myself that this chapter would be different; that I'd make sure to both read and write every day, but the moment you get a taste of what it's like to just read for one day, rather than face the great white computer screen...well that's a hard current to swim against.

When Henry James returned to America in the early years of the twentieth century after being away for a long while, he noticed a "dreadful chill of change" from the bustling air of reform and excitement of the 1860s and 1870s, a chill that made him feel that all around him was "conscience gasping in the void, panting for sensations, with something of the movement of the gills of a landed fish." Yes. That's it. That's it exactly.

To Spain in one week. I had better damn leap this pond before we leap that pond.