raven72d's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Listenbourg There Are Statues To The Old Gods And The New London calling to the occupied towns... St. Patrick's Day weekend, and a beautiful spring day in the Deepest South. Clear, cool, sunny, maybe 70 F most of the day. I avoided the big Mid-City parade, though. I decided yesterday that I was looking forward to a quiet weekend-- no crowds, no traffic congestion, no crowds of drunks. Up early, and off to the hilltop deli. I brought my own jar of apple butter with me, and so I had something a bit special to go with biscuits and lightly browned honey butter. Apple butter is something I've loved since I was a vur' petite Small Long-Eared Desert Hedgehog, and I remain perplexed at how hard it is to get apple butter at diners here. I stayed at the deli 'til 10h30 or so, then got one of Kristen's excellent French Dip sandwiches (she makes really great gravy) and took that home for lunch. I'm pretty sure there was a nap after that...and then around 14h00 I went over to S&E's and had a couple of pints of Guinness with two of my usual crowd. That did count as being part of the St. Patrick's Day festivities, I think. The Celtic part of my ancestry is Scots rather than Irish-- Clans Gordon and Buchanan, family legend holds --but I'll never let that stop me from enjoying Guinness. The downtown skies today had urban hawks aloft. I love watching them. I'd love to know more about them, of course. How many are there? Where are they nesting? Do hawks fight for hunting territory, or do they cooperate? I'd like to think we'll have them with us for a while. These are hawks rather than falcons, but that's fine. They're beautiful to watch, and that's what matters. Last night I finished a journal volume and opened a new one. The old journal volume runs from 22 February 20 through 15 March 24. It's a leather-bound octavo volume with a reproduction of a 17th-c. world map on the cover. I bought it around Christmas of the Year Nineteen-- fairly expensive then, and I'm guessing that a new one would be close to fifty dollars now. I got it at B&N, but I haven't seen anything from the same company at either B&N here in town, and there's nothing online. I'd hate to think that the product line is defunct. Anyway...being like I am, I have laid in a supply of new journal volumes. I have...well...half a dozen black Gallery Leather duodecimo journals-- 192 ruled pages each. They are elegant little things, and the 12mo size makes it easier to take them in my shoulder bag when I want to sit at a coffee shop and read and journal. The paper seems to handle fountain pen ink well, so that's a thumbs-up. My new journal has only a single entry in it so far (Levenger True Teal ink), but I'll be taking it with me in the morning when I go for iced chai latte and cheesecake. As a note...I'll be taking a copy of Tanizaki's "In Praise of Shadows" with me to re-read. I did have one unsettling moment thinking about the new journal, though. Yes, I bought six of them, and there's probably something psychological to be said about that. But what caught my attention was the estimated life of each. Okay-- 192pp. per journal. Let's call that two years each. That's a potential twelve years worth of journalling. Plus the two 128pp. journals in 5.5 x 8.25 in. size that I bought on sale at a FedEx. Plus a black 192pp. Gallery Leather 6 x9 journal and a 192pp. Tomoe River 212mm x 132mm black leather journal. Twelve years plus four-- an estimated sixteen years of journals altogether. It's entirely possible that I'll run out of time before I run out of journals. And that, as I said to Mister Taylor last night, is unsettling. Back in the Long Ago, the Small Sea Otter called me late one night and told me (in the Toddler Voice) that I wasn't allowed to grow old or die. I was, she told me, too important to be allowed to do either. I miss hearing her say things in the Toddler Voice, and I miss having someone in my life who cared enough to say that. I'm not sure that I can do anything much to avert mortality, but it means a lot to know that someone did once care enough to worry about me. Today in Ms. Avery's Dorset, Wolf is writing things as well: The Doctor and Old Fox had encouraged Wolf to start writing again in his diary. How about a few "notes on Nature", suggested Old Fox, the things you see on your walks. So that morning, after a five-mile lope around the village, Wolf made a list in his book: "Daffodils, hundreds of 'em in the high banks & round the Green; Blackthorn coming, blanchy-white as snow; first of the Hawthorn leaves, green, furled and furious keen; blossom all out down Honeyzuck Lane; saw Professor Hedgehog buying his supplies, had a green felt hat on with a long feather; fresh bread and cake and caramel smells in the square; pussy willows along the Hamlet road readying themselves for Palm Sunday; lark song above the fields, all sun and air; river rushing along, very important with itself; feathery tulips by the grammar school, like paper twists, pretty as anything; silver aeroplane overhead, going seaward over the Chesil; celandines by the turn to our lane; back home, best place, with all the flowers, more than anywhere else, and breakfast, tea cakes, hot from the oven, with Brimstone butter and chocolate to drink with cream and brown sugar. Can't write anymore now." I very much like that. Wolf was once a keen-eyed reporter, and it's good to know that he hasn't lost his ability to see the details of the world around him. Whatever else, I want to be able to see things and write about them. This morning at breakfast one of Kristen's friends came in for coffee. I think I'd seen her before, though I don't know her name at all. Very much crush-worthy, though. She's maybe in her early thirties, maybe 5'9. Shoulder-length dark hair, greyish eyes. Narrow black miniskirt, Doc Martens boots, lightweight black leather jacket, cropped charcoal pullover. Great look, great poise, great legs. We nodded and smiled at one another as she came in, and needless to say I developed an instant crush. By the time she left I was already considering scenarios where she and I ran off together to southwest France or opened a small bookstore/gallery in Sapporo. Who knows-- one day I may even know her name. It's a small neighborhood after all...and I'm far too likely to develop a coffee bar crush on her. I'll probably never actually speak to her, but I will have the name of that bookstore/gallery picked out-- just in case. Semper paratus, after all. Even in this hellscape timeline, there's always at least some mathematical probability that a beautiful hipster girl will unexpectedly ask me to run away to Sapporo or Dax with her. Yes, I am passport-equipped. And I could be packed within an hour or so. Right now Au Renoir Simone is playing on iTunes-- "Lark". I like the song, and I like it that Au Revoir Simone was featured in a couple of episodes of "Twin Peaks: The Return". David Lynch has good taste in music. Mister Taylor has a smartphone now, although that's a relatively new thing in his life. He had a landline only for years and years. Now I had a landline until the last few months of the Year Twenty-Two, but I'd had a cell phone as well since about the Year Four. It was hard for me not to think of the landline as my "real" phone and regard my mobile as just a secondary thing, an accessory. And I didn't want to give up the landline phone number I'd had since back in the last age. Taylor just refused to get a mobile for years and years, just as he still refuses to get a laptop or an iPad. I have no idea why. I will say, though, that somehow the idea of him speaking into a 1980s-vintage landline phone just seems...right. My own rooms-- the lakeside flat --looks, as I've said before, like someone detonated a bomb in a bookstore. I've no idea what Taylor's apartment in Austin looks like. What is amusing is that it's the same apartment he lived in the mid-1990s. He moved out, moved to Santa Fe for a while, and then came back to Austin...where he ended up returning to the same apartment complex and the same apartment that he'd lived in a few years before. There's something very David Lynch (or Coen Bros.) about that. In some better world, I'd have a podcast on the Oedipal Channel, and Mister Taylor would be co-host. I've long thought about having my own radio show on the shortwave band, something broadcast out into the aether from a studio in the high desert (or at least from a set of rooms in Rabat (or Dunedin in NZ). The co-host part is new, of course. My vision of a shortwave broadcast always came down to me telling stories late at night or else interviewing obscure and arcane writers and historians and artists. Mostly, yes, me telling stories. I have a vision of laying out Tarot cards and creating stories based on the cards. You know how this works-- my broadcast would begin with the Clash: London calling to the occupied towns... It's almost midnight here at the lakeside flat. Time I think for a shot of Jameson's before bed-- something in honour of St. Patrick's Day, or at least in honour of the House on the Borderland in some mythical version of Connaught. I've always thought of Connaught as being (along with Cornwall and the Orkneys) a place where the veil between the worlds is vur' thin indeed. Anyway...there's no gentle Toddler Voice on my phone, no one calling to tell me how much I matter and how I'm not allowed to grow old or die. I miss being important to someone. So I'll have a small Jameson's and think of the unnamed girl in the black miniskirt and black jacket and that bookstore/gallery in Sapporo. Anything is possible in Hokkaido. I need to keep believing that. 11:57 p.m. - 2024-03-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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