early morning

Last night I tried the lap desk experiment, which means I sat up in bed to write with a breakfast tray over my legs and my notebook spread out on it. I propped the back legs with a pillow to give my surface a drafting-desk cant. My bed's a good sitting-up bed because the slats in the headboard are more or less a giant chair back anyway.

As a writing position, this was both a success and a failure. It was reasonably comfortable, but after two not-bad paragraphs, I yawned, rolled over, and went to sleep. Since it was not yet nine p.m., I'm not sure this is my best writing option.

On the upside, it meant that I woke up at five a.m. this morning, which I liked very much. Awake in the dark at 5 a.m. is a heady combination of virtuous and daring, hard-working yet decadent. Awake in the dark at six p.m. is just a bummer.

I read Mary Oliver and wrote a bit of a poem, and then I walked through the park in the very birth of light to meet the ex-co-con for breakfast at the Beacon Drive-In: greasy eggburgers and good talk. We walked down along the ocean, then up through the village, and I was still at work fifteen minutes early. I may go to bed at nine every night if I can have these big quiet mornings. And it's good to finally write again, even a little. Work stress had more or less killed that energy, and I'd forgotten how good it feels, how much richer the whole day is, when I actually write.

It was interesting to me that I eased back into writing through journalling about the mudane details of life, as though re-enacting the process of coming to writing itself, in miniature.

In lesser but still happy news: Tonight The Corpse Bride! And soon, Serenity! (Yes, Inlandsea?)

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incomparable gifts

I introduced the Next Most Gay to Modest Mouse the other day, with an emphasis on "Heart Cooks Brain" and its wrist-scratchingly beautiful lines: "My heart's the cliff / and my brain's the bitter buffalo".

Today he brought me a present. Our former director once made a speech to possibly a Rotary Club (or Lions, or maybe even Masons, who knows? They like that sort of Improving Talk. And they give money to things.)

They presented said director with an Original Watercolour, whereupon he promptly left town and moved to another gallery. The print keeps being sent down to Curatorial, where they reject it for cataloguing, and being sent back upstairs, where it gathers dust until someone gets tired of it and sends it back down again in another batch of new works to get rid of it.

And the Next Most Gay has now presented it to me. It is a painting or, no, I believe on further examination it may be a print, of a lone, lumpy, and no doubt bitter buffalo.

I think we should all pause to appreciate this. I know I am. It's matted and everything. The print. Not the buffalo. It appears to have been recently brushed.

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