happen in passing

On New Year's Eve day, I flew back to Chicago. I got off the plane and onto the Blue Line and off at the Addison stop, from which I walked to Target, hauling my overweight suitcase behind me. I heaved the bag into the cart and plucked thigh-high gray knit stockings, nail polish, and other things I knew I needed off the shelves and dropped them into the child's seat. I cabbed home, dyed my hair black, put on the olive green embroidered silk dress I'd recently purchased at a vintage shop in the Mission, and went to an ultra-trendy gallery warehouse sort of party, the kind you never know if you'll enjoy or not until you get there, but the kind you know well in advance you'll enjoy reporting to others of having attended.

At 3 a.m., we were walking up Ashland Avenue, waiting, hoping, calling for cabs. There's never a shortage of cabs in this city except half the time you want one. Instead we found a 24-hour Dunkin Donuts and, because it was late and cold and we were drunk and needed no other reason, we went in, flirted with a few cops, and left with hot chocolate (because it was freezing, just bitterly cold) which I promptly spilled all over my new old dress, slipping in chunky heels on invisible ice while stepping into an about-time-finally cab. I should've known it would be a bad year for writing, but I was all sorts of forward-looking and if you're the sort of person who makes resolutions on every night but New Years Eve, then it's easy to believe that on any unparticular day, things are going to be different, completely and noticeably.

It's hard to write outside of cliches when the day-to-day is so explicitly laden, like spilled hot cocoa at 3 a.m. on a now-tragic favorite dress. I used to write a lot in and about cliches. I used them like metaphors, though I never referred to them as such, all those bridges, windows, letters, and earthquakes I was genuinely enamored with. When I stopped writing in and about them, I started theorizing at them. Mediation, I'd say over drinks sometimes, mediated and mediating. There's something in the instability, in the dependency, and it reads like biography if you're inclined to overly close reading. Perhaps that something in the mediation metaphors is why I can never remember the term for what they do to bridges to prevent them from collapsing or the word for the kind of solid ground that's safest for building near fault lines.

I've been reading quite a bit of poetry lately, at least a lot for me. I'm inclined to think it's because I'm too lazy, too busy, too distracted--like I was when I was 14 and had just started to learn to love to read most things. Poems came first because they seemed flexible. A spacious and forgiving poem fascinates me as much as contemporary architecture in California--six-story water tanks and the obscene symmetry of any thing such that if the world decides to shake it, it can still be a thing. Then short stories, then essays, and finally, maybe sometime in college, I started loving novels, and not for the plots, like I did when I was in junior high.

Reading poems now feels like packing the essentials a month before a move. I'm the sort of person who boxes up the flatware and the silverware first, has to dig through her luggage for her toothbrush several hours before heading to the airport. Lines like "i like my body when it's with your / body. It is so quite a new thing. Muscles better and nerves more." and "I literally don't know your middle name. does that / matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small / disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth." and "You are not beautiful, exactly. / You are beautiful, inexactly." aren't staying put away, will be out on the table again long before I finish the Russian novels, which I'll do this time around, with the patience to keep track of all of the names, I promise.

And some thoughts thought lately in words used such as I could never hope to be able

(why I leave this one) Untitled

That lake is not
an ocean. Even still

May happens even in Chicago.
Even in April

(it’s not) my pacific
seasons will and do (you still?)

happen in passing. Last June
almost at least (that’s what you said) once
a week

the sky at two a m
brilliant. Don’t talk at me
weather.

This lake is not. Trust
in time love is

not
an ocean.

I leave I’ll leave out
this time. Send my things and don’t
look back.

I want to tell you this
lack this miss this gone
is real.

Somehow is not
pacific. Enough.

- Kristin Lueke

Basically Just Exactly

Chicago, you're no good for me. We both know. Here and there for a moment, it becomes clear to me that you love this, this thing you do. You can't not, I suppose, and then I love that you love it, and we laugh about it, and I love you again. I smile and offer directions to tourists and don't lie to them like I'm tempted to when they're toting Cheesecake Factory to-go bags and looking for the American Girl Store. When the older women on my street pass by with their tiny dogs and throw tiny looks at some tiny half-pajama outfit, I smile and say hello and good morning and what is his/her name? I wear sunglasses and walk south for coffee, dodging stray sprays from the sprinklers in the patches of grass between the sidewalk and curb, tiny fenced-in, manicured plots still wet from yesterday's rain. It's hot and sunny this morning, will rain hard later, and I've just made outdoor plans for this evening.

We're together, then not, but I fall for you again and again, each time I'm on a train that's not too bad and the light's just right. Budweiser, Beatles, whatever; it's gorgeous and I love it because it works and makes me happy in spite of all else. And this video does too.

Do what you want, you always do, but I suggest watching this a few times; Chicago, palimpsestic.

Let's (just) be friends

I am averse to profundity. It is not a thing that is on the internet.

Profundity does not reside in a blog you read, nor in one I write. Let's just be clear about this one thing. I think profundity is on Kindle but I don't really know. I don't have a Kindle.

I respect you too much to make promises now about what you might expect here. I'm a person on the internet who is a person in the world. There's a venn diagram somewhere that could illustrate these persons to you, perhaps, but I'm bad with circles and numbers, so I'll spare you.

Let me tell you a few little things:

- This is a profundity-free zone. And by "zone" I hope you understand that the internet is not a place. As the old idiom goes, a cupcake is a cupcake is a muffin.

- I used to roundaboutly write about sandwiches and other things. There will be sandwiches. Oh, there will be. Unless things go horribly awry. But to answer in the negative (as one is wont to do), you won't exclusively find sandwiches here.

- And by sandwiches, I mean discussions of sandwiches. Kristin and I are still working to develop ways to blog food to one another. So far, I've lost 45 minutes and half a fudgesicle on this endeavor. We'll keep you posted on our progress. That was a blog joke.

- I promise you up to 340% more fake statistical evidence than any other blog on the interweb, guaranteed.

- I will forget most made promises almost immediately after having typed them.

- Any apologies herein are disingenuous and exaggerated for dramatic effect.

- I sincerely apologize in advance if anyone is offended by anything at anytime, ever.

- I like shiny things, pretty things, letters, style, and sarcasm. On these issues, I will not disappoint. That is not a promise.

Our internet personalities are but shades of our non-virtual selves. I'm not trying to be profound here--I don't mean shades as in Shades of the Dead in the Odyssey. Then again, maybe sort of like them, in that on the internet, as in hell, tales are told, histories are elaborated, and epics are enhanced, but the Shades are left for eternity and the guy the reader cares about goes back home and slaughters all the guys who've been eating all of his food and trying to hook up with his wife.