http://evdospina.com/home.html

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

- The Velveteen Rabbit

The Dance of Avoidance

Things you will do to avoid doing the thing(s) you must, must, must do, immediately, but dread doing:

- Go for a very long run outside, even though you really suck at that.
- Tweeze your eyebrows.
- Clean the kitchen.
- Write an essay about Jonathan Brandis, for no reason.
- Write an essay about weight loss, for no reason.
- Write an essay about an essay-writer you love, for no reason.
- Answer seven lingering emails to friends and family who probably don't give a shit about what you're rambling on about.
- Go to California. It's lovely there.
- Post a photo album of the California trip on Facebook, because you are just plain adept at wasting time.
- Write a blog post. Don't post it.
- Write a blog post. Don't post it.
- Ponder becoming a poet while sitting in your cubicle on a Friday afternoon. Laugh at self, loudly and with maniacal zest, when you really consider the insanity of paying over 30K to earn a piece of paper that legitimatizes you as...a fucking poet. WHERE, pray tell, is your very best beret?
- Decide - today! - that it's vitally important to start reading up on how to run properly, though you've been doing it for months now without instruction and have somehow survived.
- Clean your bedroom.
- Get lost, utterly lost, in the internet.
- Discover a new poet and read his work exhaustively online. Of course.
- Read a magazine.
- Eat two huge bowls of delicious chili, and some chocolate, and some potato chips, and some ice cream.
- Drink five cups of coffee, one cup of tea. Thus far. The night is young.
- Shower for longer than is reasonable.
- Organize your finances.
- Snuggle your dog.
- Snuggle yourself in blankets.
- Cry at least twice, over nothing. Confuse and worry everyone around you with your intensity, which you have tried your whole life to shed, but just cannot. Cannot! Reconsider being a poet, which is perhaps the only field in which that kind of intensity is acceptable. Buy that fucking beret, and definitely begin smoking French cigarettes immediately.
- Wonder if ethnic cigarettes are a real thing.
- Organize your clothes for work tomorrow, even though you have literally never in your life done that before, because you are not that girl.
- Go out for bagels. Twice.
- Write this list.
- Post it.

http://www.incidentalcomics.com/

Paradise

January finally drags into February and one fumbles with
numb fingers at the ordinary knots and hooks of life. People
are irritable, difficult. Some days you want to stay in bed
with the covers over your head and dream of paradise. A
place where the warm sea washes the white sand. There
are a few palm trees on the higher ground, many brightly
colored fish in the lagoon, waves breaking on the reef
farther out. No one in sight. Occasionally an incredibly
large, split-second shark darkens the clear water. Sea birds
ride the wind currents, albatross, kittiwake...and pass
on. Day after day, sea wind and perfect sky...You make a
big heap of driftwood on the beach.

- Louis Jenkins

Last night I walked through Hoboken in the dark, and it was windy, and the air was so cold my bones and face felt shattered. I tucked into a coffee shop and got a hot chocolate, which helped for approximately one minute before it the heat leached out of it. Then I sat on trains for awhile, all of them taking too long, drowsy with warmth. I watched people and thought about cold, about what a tropical sun feels like, about the lives of the other people in my train car, about poetry.

Could there be a better way to spend a day than making a big heap of driftwood on a beach? Quietly, alone, and under a perfect sky?

So Yeah, California is Nice

I was 22 years old when I drove cross-country with a car full of laughing friends. I'd graduated from college at the end of a rough year, which concluded a somewhat rough four years, and to me, getting in that car signified freedom, sweet relief from the stagnation of staying still and being me.

I wasn't the one moving to California, but I was still at the beginning of something, at the start of a journey, and that's what counted. With every mile of wind in my hair and every radio song blasted in my lungs I felt better. Lighter. Stronger.

As we left the desert and pulled towards the coast, my friend who was moving grew nervous. What if she was making a mistake? We said to her the soothing things that friends say: you'll be fine. You're so brave. We'll be here if you fall down, if you want to go home again. And then the sea appeared over the sandy California hills and her nerves slid away under the weight of all that perfect blue light. We blasted up the coast laughing, towards her new life, away from our old ones.

I wrote this essay about that time. It's one of the first essays I ever "tried" to write deliberately, one of the first things I didn't just blurt into a journal or an email. I wrote it about a year ago, and I've learned so much since then that I can see the holes in it from miles away, but I'm still proud. That essay was another beginning of something, the start of another journey, though I didn't realize that until much later. And now I'm at the bottom of a new mountain, which is my favorite place to be - metaphorically and maybe a teensy bit literally - and nothing in the world excites me more than beginning something hard that is also loved. I'll climb this new mountain word by word and phrase by phrase until I learn a little more about this fancy writing thing.

After that drive nine years ago, we dropped off my friend into her new life, and another friend at the airport for her flight home. That left my best friend Mike and I with the day free to explore before our own flight home, so we left the airport with our rental car and headed into San Francisco.

At 22, I still had the vague idea that I might live in Los Angeles someday. I'd dreamed of it since I was a little kid with actress dreams, and hadn't quite outgrown it yet. But from the first moment I saw San Francisco, I realized - nope. This is it, this is the California spot for me. This land of hills to climb, of sea views from every corner, this gorgeous town that is still California but slightly more serious, slightly more internal and misty and soft, would be mine.

Mike and I squirmed in our seats in excitement as we neared the Golden Gate Bridge. I was a film major deep in a phase of videotaping my friends every words and breaths, incredibly annoying and aggressive with my camera, so I held it high from the passenger seat as we advanced. As we left the land behind us and darted out onto the open bridge we both burst into goofy singing, blaring out the lyrics to the Full House theme song at the top of our lungs, fancying ourselves clever and hiliarious.

Then the video ends, then abruptly begins again. I am laughing so hard the camera is shaking, almost falling into my lap. Michael is cry-laughing and wheezing as he drives, and it's frankly a miracle we survived this particular vehicular moment.

I'd realized, in the brief dark moments the camera was turned off, that I could, in fact, see the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance, that burnished orange steel shining under the sun. This of course meant we were not actually on it, we'd realized with a startled snap. And as that thought crystalized, Michael gasped and said we were actually singing, so loud and with so much heart, the theme song from Family Matters. Not Full House.

And so, two goofy fools singing the wrong song on the wrong bridge in a new state in a rented car 3,000 miles from home became of the most hilarious and ridiculous moments of my life. I hope when I am dying, crinkled and decrepid and gasping my last painful breaths, a moment that flawless, that absurd, is still fresh in my mind, and I cross over smiling.

Being friends with a like-minded fool is a beautiful thing.

Last night, I flew again to San Francisco to visit my beautiful friend who was so brave so long ago, who moved far away on a whim and into a new life. I met Mike there at the airport, and today we'll rent a car, drive over a bridge, and for a little while we'll all be together, plus a brand new little California baby.

I was afraid, at 22, that we would all lose each other, that we'd each spin off into the big world in different directions and the threads that kept us together would break under the weight of all that empty space. And I was right to be afraid, because that is often what happens when you grow older and dig your way into your own space on the earth.

But if you're smart, and you try really hard, the threads don't have to break. They just stretch out into the air to impossible lengths, and if you feel for them in the dark, they will guide you each home to each other. For a little while at least. Which is sometimes enough.

Glass

In every bar there's someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed
by whatever he’s seeing in the glass in front of him,
a glass that looks ordinary, with something clear or dark
inside it, something partially drunk but never completely gone.
Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing,
the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness
opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless
while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him.
And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles,
the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue
nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining,
toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker
signals for another. Now the relatives are floating up
with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt
and a little laughter, too, and even beauty—some afternoon from childhood,
a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few flurries of snow
that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole
world’s gone white and quiet, until there’s hardly a world
at all, no traffic, no money or butchery or sex,
just a blessed peace that seems final but isn’t. And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker’s own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,
the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?
Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything
but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people
they’ve managed to gather around them against the uncertainty,
against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar
with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well?
Forget that loser. Just tell me who’s buying, who’s paying;
Christ but I’m thirsty, and I want to tell you something,
come close I want to whisper it, to pour
the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you,
listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober,
while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass,
while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay,
give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop,
I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up.


- Kim Addonizio

...oh.my.god.

the words! my face is melting off.

"What horrifies me the most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age."

- Sylvia Plath

http://www.bethhoeckel.com

UPDATE: Here is the credit for the photo in the post below. Would like to formally thank my dear friend Erick for being all up on my internet shit and sleuthing it out, and for being a general good guy. Would also like to formally thank this dog for existing, and her human for being so weird and also good with a camera.

Happy Sunday, folks.

FOR THE RECORD: I loathe when people post photography, writing, paintings, anything to blogs without crediting the artist. It's pretty much the worst, lowest kind of thievery there is. However, when I found this it was already sans-credit, and it's too adorbs to look away from.

Allow the statement above relieve me of my art-stealing guilt. If you please.

Coffee drinking puppies!

!

Who is this mysterious chinese man? I like him.

Trembling on the Brink of a Mesquite Tree

And the Lord said Surprise me, so I moved to L.A.
After packing my posters and scrubbing the bathroom and bidding goodbye
to the permanent circus, I drove through The South
with its womb-like weather, and I drove through the center
with its cross-hatched streams, and the century unspooled
like a wide, white road with lines for new writing
and the century unspooled like a spider's insides
and the country was a cipher, so I voted my conscience.
And the country was a carton of twelve rotten eggs.
And the country was a savior - come deliver us from evil! -
and my car burned a scar across the back of an angel
and yes, I was afraid. No, I've never gone hungry, but I've woken alone
with a ghost in my throat and I've been like the child
whose sure she perceives some creature in the dark -
some night-breathing thing - and I know there is something I can almost see...
But the future's a bright coin spinning in sunlight
so fast that it's sparking a flame in the grass, and who knows
where they'll find me - on which sunken highway? - so I'm writing this poem
to remember my name. And I'm writing this poem
to let something go, in the mode of surrender, since God
needs a ritual, like kissing needs another, or a knife needs the softness
of a melon in summer, and leaving New York is like leaving
the circus, and entering America is like entering a fortress,
flooded by soda and we float to the bars in our giggling terror
and driving from one shore across to another?
That's one sign for freedom, one small stab at change,
so when the Lord said Surprise me, I moved to L.A.

- Brynn Saito

So this poem is pretty grand and all, and has a couple of startlingly perfect lines, but nothing rocks my socks quite like this one did. Holy crap, girl. I mean...I can normally find something to say (er, write, I hate to talk) about anything, but she just writes with such a pulsing, frantic energy and such bright colors that I just kind of stand around with my hair blown back.

Love her. She's worth it.