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At the dragging, sagging, weather-beaten rear, we find a London Review of Books piece about Keats which dates to January 2024 and, firmly unread, is stored beside a page bearing a poem called “Ice” by Gail Mazur. In reading it again now I remember the poem and I remember reading several cold weather poems and I remember like always that it started with Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”, which has, at the right moment, the power to make me sob so much I’ve a chance at getting sick from coughing and reeling because I think perhaps I am not processing my emotions properly and never have been but, anyway, is a nice poem that ends, famously, with the most excellent phrase (overquoted? Probably not. I am trying to remind myself, to know, and thus not need reminding, that the little I know of poetry, the little time I spend with it, with words in their various series and shapes, is in fact a great lot more time than many other people and things that might seem overplayed to me and my stupid zeal for novelty and for being always the most interesting always expanding and expansive, okay, sorry, just saying that actually most people don’t even know about this poem so can there really be any harm in celebrating it again even if it gets reposted to Instagram stories by poetry accounts and then by my own gay friends not infrequently during the dark months. No. There can’t!) “love’s austere and lonely offices”.
G.H. Bass men’s Layton Lug Weejuns Tassel Loafer. What a series of sounds taped up to look like words. $225. A New Yorker piece about Justine Triet. Her warm blonde hair hangs, in the included photo, around her khaki-clad shoulders unfussed with and chicly lank. Google search: Sheila Heti Alphabet Diaries. Google search: Braiding Sweetgrass. Google search: Paula’s Choice Dry Skin Products. Empty Ebay cart. Google search: Adidas t-shirt with stripes on sleeve cropped. This one spurred by an episode of Hacks, I fear. Google search: The Doughroom in Culver City. We did not go there. We met our West side friends, instead, at a restaurant called Hatchet Hall. There, my eggs were served badly undercooked and the sun itched at my eyes through a gap in the covering hung above their outdoor seating. Our server was young and had a gay haircut which I noticed because I had just gotten a really gay haircut. She was short and small and wore bootcut jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt yet only looked a little like a fifth-grade boy in 2003 because she emanated the elegant apathy and general disinterest in the goings on of her own workplace so frequently found among the hot LA server class. And good for them.
Racket MN dot com (great) article called WE WENT FOR THE WINGS: A Visit to the Mall of America Hooters During Its Final Days. Speaks for itself. Article about Royer Perez-Jimenez, nineteen, a baby, dying in ICE custody. Article about the best subtle self-tanners. My legs glow in the dark. I entertain this as a real concern sometimes. If we used to tell ourselves stories in order to live, now we tell ourselves there is a problem with our body we could solve by buying a product on the internet. In order to live? Royer Perez-Jimenez is dead. My legs glow in the dark. I don’t know what to do. Should a buy a seamless bralette? Should I sleep for fifty years? I can’t waste the sun. I can melt my slathered skin and think of nothing. When we went to the beach, though, after a week of sweltering in a historic heat wave, the mile or so along the coast of the city was cloudy and wet and it made me want to cry, though it was obviously one of those situations where the only sporting thing is to laugh. What a year. Redditers discuss a transformative new LA Metro train project that I want so badly to be excited about, though it is hard to believe they will ever break ground. The National Mah Jongg League store sells the standard 2026 cards for $14 and the far superior, if you, too have limited and ever-beleaguered visual processing skills which make distinguishing one hand of tiles from the others a soul and eye wearying nightmare, Large Print cards for $15. Last mahj night, I won my first game in many months of listless, pouty, discombobulated mahj nights (meaning that I, of course, was those things, because I am bad at games, and bad at being bad, and I get too itchy about my poor performance to improve, not the gathered friends or the general vibe of the hang, which were and are great) and it really did wonders for my mental and spiritual prospects/stamina.
We saw Ready or Not 2 (bad movie AND the soda machines were out of service) at Rick Caruso’s The Grove and in the lobby, amidst the black plastic drapes concealing stagnated construction, we saw Charles Melton, actor from the sticky fever dream CW program Riverdale and also Todd Hayne’s genius sicko banger May December. Actually, what I saw, at first, was a guy who was, without doubt, a professional good-looking person. It took me a moment of staring through space and time, and a conference with Megan, to confirm exactly who we were looking at, but that we were looking at someone too handsome to work a normal job was never in doubt. Chatting outside, I Googled Charles Melton. He’s 35. Google search: Yoshinobu Yamamoto t-shirt. New York Times article about the guy who wrote a biography of Judy Blume and got ghosted by his subject. Delta Dental sign-in. I have to get my teeth cleaned. I’m afraid to get my teeth cleaned. Do I need a linen-blend open collar short sleeve shirt from Uniqlo? Do I need Barry Lyndon in 4K? Google search: Koji Uehara. Google search: Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object. I broke with tradition and commented on a blog post. I want to be tender. I looked at the website of a candidate for mayor whose television commercial, which aired some seven hundred and ninety-four times during Dodgers opening weekend, boasts that he has coached twenty-one AYSO soccer teams.
A Scent Split cart sits unchecked out. I don’t need a Lucy Dacus is for Lovers t-shirt. I’m a grown person. Consequently, several pages wait for me in the Safari app holding information about different ways to treat acid reflux. NoOlympicsLA website. The Age of Innocence (1993) dir. Martin Scorsese Wikipedia page. Google search: Paige and Azzi. Google search: Abraham Lincoln. My mother told me there was a very beautiful woman on the show DTF: St. Louis, and although I cannot think of a situation which could induce me to watch a show starring Jason Bateman and David Harbour, I am a curious being of flesh and blood and I looked this actress up for my edification. My latest piece for The Rumpus, on Heidi Julavits’ The Vanishers, a book which has never come up in a conversation I’ve had unless I myself lifted it there myself and made everybody look and I have and I do and that’s fine and I’m being helpful because it’s a sort of silly, perfect, funny book for semi-recovered depressive college girl types and should get more play in dark academia pervert spaces, but whatever. Cinnamon sugar in a bottle shaped like a cowboy. This was a memory. My bowl of yogurt and granola was too bland. We had no berries on hand, so my thoughts turned to sweetnesses forgotten from breakfasts of old. I found a picture to show Megan. Over and over, she laughs, kindly, at my hunger for things of old, the great and lazy pleasure I take in remembering objects and places and people which stand out to me still today from childhood. She’s right to do it. Google search: past life regression. Google search: SpongeBob butt.
