July 27, 2007
On Public Diaries
This is a bit from one of my all-time favorite books, Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory. Through simple line drawings and watercolors and small bits of prose, he chronicles his family's daily life in Manhattan after his wife - and the mother of his ten-month old son - is hit and paralyzed by the #9 train. I've given it to many friends going through tough times, and will give it to another one tonight.
As I was thumbing through it this afternoon, this bit caught my eye. It's interesting as I've been thinking a lot recently about why I keep this blog, what I should or shouldn't be writing on it, whether I should close it to the public, who's reading it, what they think of me, what writing it means, whether the entire act is merely an exercise in self-involvement - and, if so, if I should instead devote my creative time towards something more beneficial to the greater good.
Like Eazy-E powerpoint slides. Or, really, anything made out of fimo.
Clearly, I have a lot to give.
Without a drop more of ado, let's turn to the point of this whole post. Mr. Gregory, take it away. Please.
"Writing this boring crap and drawing ineptly have become fun and something I feel an actual need to do. So if I haven't written page after page of crackling, witty insight and my drawings look like they were done by a monkey using a stick up his anus, sue me. Maybe one day, I'll do better. Maybe not. In the meantime, I like this, it makes me better to myself, makes me reconsider a lot of things in my life, makes me take some risks and open some doors. This new path is too short for the view to be different than where I was except in my fantasies, so rather than dash them, I shall continue down it, and the landscape will change."
Posted by Bree at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2007
Thoughts on Possibly Climbing a 14-er This Weekend
"I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots." - David Rakoff
An interesting perspective - and one which I might have aligned myself with a lot more readily in the past.
Besides, if I get up at 4 in the morning to hike up to 14,000 feet, I can definitely have like 60 margaritas back in the Mile High later in the day. That's what the kids call "motivation." And the counselors call "alcohol dependency." Ba da DUMPED!
Posted by Bree at 08:03 AM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2007
On Repeat
That I might be gone a long, long time
And it's only that I'm askin',
Is there something I can send you to remember me by,
To make your time more easy passin'.
Oh, how can, how can you ask of me again,
It only brings me sorrow.
The same thing I want from you today,
I would want again tomorrow.
* * * *
If it were a boy I was heartsick over, lonely for, and worried about, things might be easier. I've been there before. But this, this separation; this is all new to me.
I miss her.
I miss my best friend.
And there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
Posted by Bree at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2007
Something to Consider
"Any sign is an admission of architectural failure." - Massimo Vignelli
Posted by Bree at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
July 04, 2007
Keep Reminding Yourself
"The process has become more important than the product."*(**) - Tucker Shaw
*Click on through to see where this came from - a book I bought at Rare Device and have been reading and rereading these past few years.
**Man! Once word gets out about this whole Google thing, shit's gawn get crazy! Just a prediction.
Posted by Bree at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2007
Word
This is the last bit I'll post for a least a tiny time re: the majesty that is my man of letters J.S., but Rick sent me this quote today from a piece called Immortal Days from There & Then: The Travel Writings of James Salter, that I thought was well worth a share:
"It is snowing in Glenwood and Vail. The snow is sweeping across Denver, across the plains into Nebraska. The long months of winter are here, the lights of the town in the dusk, the blue falling on the runs. There are crowds in the bar of the Hotel Jerome. The huge windows are misting over. The young men who in an hour will be waiters are leaving to change their clothes.
It is not a life we are living. It is life's reward, beautiful because it seems eternal and because we know quite well it is not."
Posted by Bree at 07:55 PM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2007
Herewith: The Reason Why I'm Mad for the Salter
I wake in the darkness and lie there. The aftertaste is not bitter. I know, just as in dreams, I will die, like every living thing, many of them more noble and important, trees, lakes, great fish that have lived for a hundred years. We live in the consciousness of a single self, but in nature there seems to be something else, the consciousness of many, of all, the herds and schools, the colonies and hives with myriads lacking in what we call ego but otherwise perfect, responsive only to instinct. Our own lives lack this harmony. We are each of us an eventual tragedy. Perhaps this is why I am in the country, to be close to my final companions. Perhaps it is only that winter is coming on.
One night in the darkness, outside, listening to the distant booming surf, "Isn't it strange," I say, "how you want different things at different times? Now all I want is a house by the sea. Hawaii was like this, still empty then, still beautiful. We used to make love in the cane fields."
"Who? Who did you do it with?"
"A naval officer's wife, I remember. Her name was Sis Chandler."
"Whew! That's a hot name. She must have been something. Was she blonde?"
"No."
In fact I could not recall what she looked like, but I remembered her and one or two things she said. It was her name that mattered, especially after so long a time. Pronouncing it had made me feel a long-vanished warmth towards her.
I have not forgotten those days, I have only
Forgotten how simply they seemed to occur...
It was difficult to write. The heart for it was faint. It was useless, as in Chekhov's crushing story, to try and tell someone of my child's death. I could hardly bring myself to mention it. You must remember, but it was precisely that which was terrible. In reality I tried to forget her and what had happened.
In a jeweler's window off Bond Street I had once seen an antique gold box about the size of a box of matches. It had a small drawer in which lay half a dozen ivory strips upon which riddles or questions were written in black enamel. Inserted in a slot they produced an answer in a narrow window on top of the box. Qui nous console - who consoles us - was one of the riddles. Le temps was the answer, a word which can mean either weather or time.
In the country there was both.
Posted by Bree at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)
March 04, 2007
A Take on Denver c/o The Original Beat Officer
Aside from some band that America apparently loooooves called The Fray, Jack Kerouac is Denver's most famed export. 5280 Magazine recently published an excerpt from a letter he wrote to his friend Ed White on the mile higggety-highest, which I will appropriate here for you, dear readers:
"I picture myself taking a stroll in the Denver streets after supper, then going back to my room to write. On weekends having big wonderful parties like the old Burf parties. In the summers swimming, drinking brew, going up to the mountains, fishing and hunting...in the winter skiing. Chatting. Living. Going out with the fine gals out there. Eating ice cream. Screwing up at Pecker's Knob. Eventually raising a family out on the farm I'll get...I look forward to Denver as something of a salvation. I only hope you will live there someday, but I guess you won't. I'm going to make it my hometown...I think of Colorado also as a great place to raise my kids. There is a gravity there...as in Lowell...that N.Y. lacks; a Carlylean, earnest gravity. And the most wonderful guys I know all seem to come from there."
Posted by Bree at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2007
Something to Remember
"I have come a long way since I left you, and I regret every step..."
Posted by Bree at 10:45 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2006
On Walden Pond
"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success." - Henry David Thoreau
Leap in the dark towards summthin', anyway. The lights have been out over here for a while now.
Posted by Bree at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2006
Brian Doyle Breaks It Down
“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end - not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched up by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words ‘I have something to tell you,’ a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mothers papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.“
Above is the last paragraph of the delightfully succint and succulently delectable essay Joyas Valadoras. Get nuts and read the whole piece aqui, or check it out in Best American Essays 2005.
Oh and of course - be sure to pour yourself a Big Gulp of Lange Pinot Noir to enjoy with as our man Doyle is, coincidentally, the author of the book: The Grail: A Year Ambling and Shambling through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World. And that's the boozy lit that made this Zin-suckling freak finally see the light in regards to "the noble grape of Burgundy."
Yeah. I'm a regular Paul Giamatti over here. Whoooey, Pinot! Whee! Yeah! Allllll right! Etc. (I'm far too overwhelmed to type through all these emotions. Also, I'm totally wasted on Diet Pepsi and string cheese. Don't worry about me; it's nothing I can't blame on altitude.)
Posted by Bree at 12:19 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006
Monday Morning Cup of Quoth
The intimate spaces of our interiors are the screens on which we project our inner visions; they are the shells from within which we view the world beyond, their windows our eyes, their walls and ceilings our security, their furniture and decór our convictions and our fancies. They are our most personal art.
-Paul Tillich, theologian, 1933
Posted by Bree at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)