Monday 31 August 2009: Dad’s weekend/food diary

Friday night:

Ate steak frites at Cafe Lago; gave wife birthday gifts–charm bracelet and Seahawks v. Bears tickets; Ate cake; Looked at Italy photos; Asked wife to hide keys to balcony so I didn’t jump off, almost caused scene.

Saturday night:

Had burger and fries at the Red Mill (noticing a theme in diet); went to bed.

Sunday:

Got up, went to church; Went to Bluwater (wanted a burger and fries) but Sue wanted pizza. I ordered a half-sausage and half-cheese with half the normal amount of sauce. It comes out will full sauce, tomatoes on all parts. By the time Sue got done taking the tomatoes and sauce off she ends up picking through the thing and barely eating it. Oh, and I had a mai tai with extra cherries. You know, maraschino cherries instead of fruit. The waitress asked if I wanted grenadine in it, too. I said sure, I want the grenadine AND the cherries. So I’m halfway through my drink and see a black speck in the bottom, spend ten minutes trying to get it out. The waitress noticed, and instead of getting me a full new mai tai she gives me half a drink in a tumbler without the speck in it. Which was good enough for me.

Then we walked Greenlake and noticed how many dogs looke like their owners.

Friday 28 August 2009: The birds and the birds

I love him.

from a Marc Jacobs ad?

Thursday 27 August 2009: The bees and the bees

I love her.

Wednesday 26 August 2009: Violet-banked approaches and pine-scented lounges

I went to SFMoma in San Francisco last week and, out of everything, found a sure favorite detail from Joseph Cornell’s photo repro “For Sale” circa 1957:

Tuesday 25 August 2009: Three Fish

When I was small I found three dead fish under the tree next to my window and felt spectacularly unsafe and alarmed. Some boogeyman fisherman crept to the tree the night before. Then he took out a protractor and compass and did the most complicated geography to somehow get the fish to lay perfectly straight.

The creepieest line-dead fish ever, because they were mathematically dead. I never left my window open at night after finding the fish, for years and years and years.

Monday 24 August 2009: Like warm milk late at night

I’ve spent so many Sunday nights taking the same little walk with D. The route is the same–up the hill, past the bodega, the pub, the bar, the doughnut place, the rummage shop. Down the hill, past the tree that smells like moth balls and the crazy guy that cooks with too much garlic’s kitchen window. He’s got old tikki torches and tin cans growing weeds all around his door, which makes me swear I really live in Athens, GA and not Seattle, WA.

I come upstairs after, belly growing week by week, and wash my face, pluck my eyebrows, put on pajamas and settle in. It’s the most personal, universal, everyday end-of-the-weekend routine.

Friday 14 August 2009: Out of the Office

I’m officially on vacation and off-line for the next week.

See you back on Weatherspoon Monday, August 24.

Thursday 13 August 2009: A Total CF

I’ve always wanted to feel more than I sometimes naturally do in certain settings, like by feeling more the situation will be heightened enough to become memorable. Which I’m realizing is total crap.

Some people I care about are losing their jobs today, and I’m sitting here near the end of a day that feels more like November than August listening to Elliott Smith. Baby’s kicking, E. Smith sings, “I’m never going to know you now but I’m going to love you anyhow.”

You don’t realize how much time you spend with co-workers, how big a part of your life they are, until they leave town or something. And then there’s this huge space that’s not actual intimacy lost, but commonality. Shared Mondays, bus rides, pet and kid updates, the sort of things people say around the office that they don’t say other places. Like, “That job is a total clusterfuck.” Nobody else says clusterfuck. And that’s over-sad.

Wednesday 12 August 2009: Sweet Spot

When you’re pregnant you have twice as much blood and water, a holy mixture, swishing around your body. And now I have mosquito bites all over my arms and shoulders to prove it.

So when I lay in bed I imagine that my whole pregnant body looks infrared to mosquitoes, or that I’m ecto-green under the sheets. And for the last few mornings I’ve woken up covered in fresh bites after some lucky mosquito has had a very large meal.

I was up and down all night last night, and just before dawn I imagined charting out each bite. I started associating them one by one with particularly consuming or important parts of recent life, color-coding the bites into general categories like work, pregnancy, God, family.

I was about to get up and sketch the whole thing when I heard a buzz in my ear. Then I sort of lost it, woke up D and croaked, “A mosquito is eating me alive. DO SOMETHING!” I can’t see without my contacts, so he turned on the light and I burrowed into the sheets. He found the mosquito on the wall–this little thing gorged with my blood that had done so much damage–smashed it dead.

And then I was asleep, like that.

Tuesday 11 August 2009: Buzz Clips

I spent too much of every summer in high school watching MTV when I should have been reading. The things I loved more than anything were buzz clips, little promos that showed a few seconds of “alternative” videos. And prime-time MTV really played videos then. Good ones, too, meaty singles like Morrissey’s “The More You Ignore Me,” Radiohead’s “Creep, ” Smashing Pumpkin’s “Today”. But my very favorite was J.Buckley’s “Last Goodbye”:

Monday 10 August 2009: I Heart Seattle

I walked home from yoga in the rain, passed under a red bird feeder next to a brick building with wooden shudders, and thought about my parents, visiting the muggy midwest, bloating up after a family barbeque. Then I went home and had a steak and tomato salad, equally hearty but a lot more earthy.

Friday 7 August 2009: The Worst Thing About Social Media

Is that people start putting up pictures of themselves that look a lot like this.

Thursday 6 August 2009: Re-imagining a Very Sad Thing

The brother of the woman that was drunk and high and drove down the highway for miles outside of New York City on the wrong side of the road said she wasn’t an alcoholic, and I believe him. She crashed and killed herself, and her and her brother’s kids, and the people they hit, all in a second.

Maybe it’s just that it was July, and she had all these kids in the car, and it was rainy, the kind of day that felt like everybody should be cleaning bathrooms, or napping, or making coffee. But not driving in traffic and worrying about a lump in her leg. So let’s just say she started drinking scotch until everything smelled like Mr. Clean, smoked a joint from a little sardine tin rolled in a sock in her dresser drawer, and kept moving. Everybody keeps saying she had a stroke, then drank, or that something spectacularly medical happened. Diabetes, heart attack, stroke, and aneurysm have all been ruled out, says a county coroner.

But me? I think there’s something annually reckless about late July, because we’re on the cusp of everything falling.

Wednesday 5 August: Busy busy busy

Tuesday 4 August 2009: Fordlandia

Today on Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan reviewed Greg Grandin’s new book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. I can’t believe I’d never heard about the overly ambitious, culturally unaware, ecologically disastrous, over-the-top antics of Henry Ford, especially his failed all-American town called Fordlandia reconstructed deep in the jungle of Brazil. The book highlights the culture clashes that ensued between Ford workers living on a Main St. built 18 hours from anything resembling civilization:

Things went bad over simple stuff, like serving food. “Ford had very particular understandings about what a proper diet should be,” Grandin says. “He tried to impose brown rice and whole-wheat bread and canned peaches and oatmeal — and that itself created discontent.”

But when a Ford engineer changed the way food was served — from wait service to cafeteria-style service — the workers rebelled. Angry workers destroyed the mess hall, pushed trucks into the river and nearly ruined the whole operation. It cost tens of thousands of dollars of damage, Grandin says.

But Ford didn’t just want to tame men; he wanted to tame the jungle itself — and therein was his next failure.

It’s like the jungle itself inevitably made people really wild, made it impossible to live in an assembly-line fashion.

Listen to Corrigan’s whole review here. If you think about it, the failings of Fordlandia actually make modern-day Detroit all the weightier.

Monday 3 August 2009: Work Fridge