old entries

Starbucks with my cousin Robyn

We should always write things that other people will like and understand...
"Is that true?"
She shakes he head and puts her chin in her hand. Her cheek is dangerously close to her pen which is in the same hand.
She laughs while i read this out loud to her as i write it down. Im writing as quickly as i can, without looking up, i imagine she is making faces at me.
She reads the text messege when my phone vibrates on the table between us.
"Tell everyone that i just served Colin Powel, theyll find that interesting." says the text messege. Max is a waiter in the hamptons.

"...1990 right?"
"what?"
"when you were born."
"yeah. when were you born?"
"1998. ...that makes you almost 20."
"Robyn is very good at math." i say and write. "i wont tell her, except to write it down in front of her-"
"you're saying it out loud too."
"...but the fact that robyn is so good at math makes me a little anxious because she is twelve and i am bad at math."

Starbucks, as usual is playing jazzy pianoey music and i play air piano to amuse no one but myself... ...and possibly robyn, and possibly to six year old boy who is standing across the room.
In a Pull focus moment, with the six year old boy in focus, and his father out of focus behind him, the focus shifts and his father comes into focus and his father is laughing at me and i am playing air piano and rocking back and forth in my purple easy chair and i suddenly remember how old i am.

"Robyn leans back in her chair in exasperation, crosses her leg over her other leg and stares at me while i write and read. she twirls her hair around her finger and pouts. But with i write/say 'pouts' she laughs. When i write/say 'she laughs' she smiles. when i write/say 'smiles' she grabs her cheeks and pulls them so her eye sockets stretch. She crosses her arms and says 'crossed.' she blinks, sniffs, giggles, sticks out her tongue.
She crosses her eyes. when i pause to jazzy dance in my chair.


What we need
In the short story, 'Archangel' by John Updike, the archangel explains to someone, you, all the gifts that he brings.
He begins with 'Francansense and Myrr'
moves quickly to 'food shelter and love
and then, there among the nessesities: "the light glinting off the wet ink of your own words" as beautiful to john updike as ' the white arms of a woman dancing' and something about fixing wooden houses with pegs of opposing grain."

Sweet
There are two men in the bus station who, one at a time, begin to speak to me and then in their own time- one after writing me a short song in spanish, the other after feeding me a dried fig (from a sealed container that i saw him open... i mean... i guess it could have been poisened... but i mean... come on.) ask me for my phone number.

at which point i explain to them that they are ruining the story of 'friendly interaction between strangers meeting in the bus station" if they continued to ask questions like that.
But they continue to ask. I tell one that i have a boyfriend. I tell the next one that i have sixteen boyfriends.

"i hate them all!" I yell at Adam later than night. we are standing in the rain while he smokes a cigarette even though I've been proud of him all summer because he quit.
"give us a chance." he says
we go back inside and watch the end of the matrix. And when Neo dies and Trinity brings him back to life with her stilted love spell, i put my fingers over my ears and hum.
Adam throws a pillow at me which knocks over my tea. "i think its sweet." he says.
It is sweet. But while squid machines burn through the roof, showering down red sparks, while profecies and mesiahs are proven and people are dying inside their minds, sweet is not the point.