why i am going to turn on some carole king while i think about eating dinner tonight

I just finished reading The History of Love. It's a legitimate book, I'm not being cutesy. In fact, it's so legitimate, maybe you've heard of it.

Somewhere in its pages it talks about love (imagine that). The love where you love someone but then they are gone and there's a hole...or maybe it's that your love grows around them and you're a tree and then they're gone. You love them, they become part of you, you grow and then they're gone; and like a tree that makes space inside itself for something that is near it or rests on its bark you now have a space inside yourself for something new. 

Because the truth is, you never had the right to keep that something forever, to yourself, inside your bark. So now there is a hole and it needs to be filled by something else. That's why we fall into this pattern of behavior that people call "the rebound." But the rebound seeks for an immediate fill for empty spaces. I don't think this suffices. For each void we need to try at least ten new things and in the process of trying we're bound to make new holes.

We love and then things change, it doesn't mean there isn't love that lasts or that love that doesn't last is bad, it just means that we keep accumulating holes and we keep filling them with different things. This is how we embrace the world around us. It begins at birth when we must all the time be held and be loved and then we learn we are separate from everyone who has been holding and loving us. Our first hole. So we try something new. And so it continues.

To make the holes go away would be deforestation.

across the wide and lonesome prairie*

This photo is stunning.

Led Zeppelin is playing on a pandora station. Sometimes I forget how they hit the spot.

I have a rather significant collection of "Dear America" books I amassed in elementary school. I loved reading every journal entry, even the banalities of "Monday, January 4. Today was wash day."
Journaling/documenting has been my one true love since birth. Journaling I'm not always good at but I'm certain it's one of the most amazing things to hit this planet. And it's a love that keeps growing. It's why I'm studying film, it's why I study, it's why I converse, it's why I breathe.
What an utmost expression of honor for life. For an individual life and for the world at large made up of all our lives.
When I read the pages of someone's recordings I feel woven into something deep, profound, and heart-reaching. There is sincerity, pure heart, pure ideas. Free. Freely. I feel added upon, I am lifted up, I am humbled.

Enough of my literary flowerings.

Today I shared lunch with chums M and E, enjoyed the sunshine while traveling my errands on bicycle (BICYCLE IS FIXED!!!!!), and dear-friendsy-catched-upped with roommate E. An afternoon well spent with friends and lots of sunshine streaming in through windows. What more could one ask for than:

good food
friends
sun
bicycle

I am content.


*title of a Dear America book and a line that makes me ache for home and childhood of reading in bed until 1 or 2 a.m.......

bursting, addended

I'm facing escalating pressure from G.O., who is actually the O.G. of G.O.G., and from my Mom to write to you.

Plus it's sometimes very nice to be Marge Bjork. Like right now.

There is the constant threat of spider attack in my basement now. I found one on the wall by my head when I was laying in bed last night. I immediately screamed and jumped into my roommate's bed and made her kill it for me as I hyperventilated. I'm not sure which I am more afraid of: the encroaching spiders or the brain damage that could result if I continue to use roach spray to kill them. Brain damage would be a pretty horrible loss, I'm pretty pretentious about my brain. The other night I was remembering how, being the baby of the family I like to have my family's attention TOUT LE TEMPS, so on this particular family trip I was trying to charm my sister until she finally couldn't take it anymore and said, "Can you please be self contained!" So I started singing about being in a tupperware. But it just hit me, some five-six years later, of course in my family we wouldn't say something normal like "Quit it!" "Leave me alone" "Look what you did ya little jerk!" No. We say things like "please be self-contained." The more syllables the better, I say.

I can't help but be serious lately. So can you forgive me when I get gushy and say you're all pretty damn amazing. Don't doubt it, don't forget it. No one is cooler than you. My roommate, her sister, and I burned Twilight the other night*. The book. It's a great laugh for pretentious literary kids, you know, to burn it, but there was actually a real need deep down in my soul. E, my roommate, and I had been reading Twilight out loud to each other for a cheap laugh. But we got to the part where character B thinks that she's not good enough for character Vampire and I couldn't take it anymore. I've seen that too much. If you think you're not good enough for a Vampire, call me up and I'll set aside my battle against the dead horses and we'll kick it. Because me and God in Heaven have a hard time knowing that Vampire has got a hold on you. Then we'll kick the Vampire. No. Then you'll kick the Vampire.

Anyway, whenever I've been party to book burning, I've always been amazed at how beautiful the process is. It's a good thing I like reading books so much and I believe in rabble and rebellion and conformity and have a high ambiguity tolerance because otherwise I could join in with Chuchompfsky in Azbiristan and burn books for a living.

You start off by ripping the paperback covers off. Newer books have glossy resistant paper covers and need to be prodded and pleaded into burning. Then you rip the book into smaller stacks of paper. Start a few pages kindling at the edges. As the tops burn down and off and the flame dies down to embers you start digging through to find the untouched stacks of paper. Once you start to fan them out, blow on them and the flames will jump to life. The page will start turning darker and bubble up and shrivel into itself. I'd like to film the process sometime.

well...

fin. That's the french word for end.

love you,

Marge

* I respectfully do not like the Twilight series and do not presume nor wish to make fun of people who do. Please feel free to love every page of it. Amen to you.

****"Shake thyself from the dust; arise, sit down, O Jerusalem; loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion. For Thus saith the Lord: Ye have sold yourselves for naught, and ye shall be redeemed without money."
3 Nephi 20:37,38

discaught

only in the library for a minute and already I'm on twelve tangeants.

Three papers, neighbors, and I'm done with school work. C'est tout !
But what happens? Not three papers. What happens is I open up my lap top in the cubicle that is in the very back corner of a quiet floor, but I let myself glance up and across a few crowded shelves my eyes lock on a large red book: THE FIRE DREAM. I can't resist the fire dream's draw, I walk closer and see underneath it all sorts of amazing titles: "American Mischief," "Armed Love," "KILLSHOT," "God's Ear."

Don't you see? I'm doomed to failure! I already have four library books at home, two for leisure reading on top of the e e cummings book I bought a few months ago that I'm reading now and the Gwendolyn Brooks poetry book that was on sale in the bookstore today. Now I have four more books stacked beside me.

Oh help! Oh help! I'm drowning in a sea of print and yet my thirst is still not satiated. And I'm distraught because I just found a band from the 1960's that I am in love with and I'm not sure what to do about it.

At least it was a lovely, lovely jogging evening.