jacktellslies: (geroges barbier mermaid)
Hallahan is a local Catholic high school for girls with a tradition of jumping into Swann Memorial Fountain at the end of the last school day of the year. They swam yesterday. I have a fondness for private schools and all of their pageantry, and, I admit, I don't mind living in a city in which at least once a year more than a hundred teenaged girls go swimming in their uniforms. Bravo.

Unfortunately, as the article mentions, the city has been wasting a great deal of time and effort in trying to prevent people from swimming there. Those responsible lack any respect for tradition, any sense of adventure or spontaneity, the slightest understanding of why the fountain is beloved, nor do they posses the smallest bit of tact or sense of urgency (there are more dangerous things that one could do in this city, such as being young and poor). I hate to be the one to have to point out the obvious, but the time for revolution has long since past. This must be the final insult, the last restriction upon our liberty. To the streets! To Logan Circle! Clad in bathing suits, army boots, and righteousness, we must free the fountain and ourselves from tyranny.

Also, although I am not yet certain, I believe that I may, for the first time in years, have access to a working bathtub. This calls for a celebration! Would anyone care to join me? And shall we have wine or tea?
jacktellslies: (bear girl)
I talked to Alex. There was music, and a big salad with strawberries in it. I have a secret diary on the answering machine of my friend Liz's mobile phone, and fountains are lit at night and children splash in them, and the sky roared and the universe was aligned perfectly: the safe little bombs, and the only break in the trees, and then me. My niece and my sister and her boyfriend came for a visit, and we went to one of the science museums. We played with magnets and electricity and with a glass armonica. Allyson is three, and afraid of lots of things. We offered to take her on the real train that would have taken her on a ride of four feet very, very slowly. She told us that it was too big, and that she likes small things. She claimed to have a small and pink train at grandmom's house called the Allyson Rose. She then explained that she flies by holding on to balloons. While flying, she catches birds in her hands. Upon catching the birds, she turns into one herself. She wanted to watch the kids splash in the fountain, too. Debbie came to the house, and later Courtney came, too. We watched movies: Josephine Baker in Princess Tam Tam, a weird little exercise in colonialism that I'd like to read more about, and In the Realms of the Unreal, an orphan-turned-reclusive-menial-worker's room and fifteen-thousand page novel and autobiography and photographs and tracings and collages and dreams.

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jacktellslies

August 2009

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