slayed

sad girl

i am in a state of mind where what i do best is cross days off my calendar. this provides satisfaction, despite the fact that i am counting down to nothing.

***

it's funny how clothes are just clothes when they are in your closet, but suddenly become laundry when they are placed in a wicker basket. nothing else changes so rapidly from one spot to another.

***
why do i wake up every morning at 5 now? am i getting old? should i slice bananas into Muesli and check my blood pressure?

***

Wednesday is the worst day of the week, not least of all because people refer to it as 'hump day'.

***

I am in a bump vortex, my fall only interrupted by periodic hits of fluttery excitement.

down-hearted

a good bb king sample

dilution is the key

Home from Los Angeles.  In 5 days I traversed Santa Monica, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Sunset, West Hollywood, Palos Verdes, Redondo, Manhattan Beach, and paid a visit to Lacma,where I was uplifted and moved by the Archibald Motley jazz age exhibit. The city is my roots, I was made and birthed there, and though I prefer the unrelenting intellect of New York or DC, or even Iowa City--LA is interested in exercise and space and showbusiness, over ideas and literature and the world at large--I still like it.  It's a place that is eternally itself, not so malleable, it's still this.

remember how we used to party up all night

this is what makes us girls, ldr

in five weeks I will be in Paris. in three days I will be flying to LA. this morning I read about a plane that started to split open in midair. i can think of few worse ways to die than to be sucked from an alumnium tube into the atmosphere.

*

ahmed smokes in the front seat. from duty free i buy him cigarettes. he slicks his thinning hair back with what appears to be olive oil. his forehead glistens. he has five children, from two different wives, both of whom he is still married to. there is a third wife, his first wife, who produced no children.

i sit in the passenger seat. when my mother rides with him, she sits in the back, for propriety's sake. i am young still, i feel strange sitting in the back, like I'm Miss Daisy or a typical Ammani girl. I sit beside him and try not to notice when he glances at my leg. he thinks of me as a friend, he tells me his dreams--literal ones, as in, last night i dreamt that another man came and stole my wife. Which one? I ask. The one I love, he tells me.

writing, back to basics

i've returned to Sagan and Houellebecq to remind myself how and why.

"We had spent the afternoon in a café on the Rue Saint-Jacques, a spring afternoon just like any other. I felt bored, after a fashion; I wandered from the jukebox to the window, while Bertrand talked about the course given by Spire. At a certain point I leaned against the machine and watched the record rise slowly, then slant down to meet the needle, almost tenderly, like a cheek. For some reason a terrific feeling of happiness swept over me; I had an overwhelming intuition that someday I was going to die, that my hand would be gone from this chromium edge and the sun from my sight."

-- françoise sagan

beirut 2001

'in this white wave, you are silent'