jacktellslies

My garden is small but good. My mother just gave me a gift of herbs growing in a pot far nicer than the ones I usually manage to salvage. I spent a couple of days recently cleaning up the abandoned lot next to my house. I found construction materials from the people who refurbished my house, cement and paint poured onto the ground, beer bottles and cans from neighbours, children's juice boxes, and useful things: bricks and cinder blocks I'm using for other projects, snail shells I kept, pretty bits of glass and metal, and enough empty and untorn trash bags to fit all of the junk that I cleaned up. And I found so many worms! My niece came to visit me one day, and we collected them in a cup and put them to work as slaves in the mines of my compost pit. The lot looks far better now. I plan to put down some pretty groundcover in the front part in hopes that it will prevent people from dumping things there again, and maybe building some raised beds in the back.

I had my first couch surfing guest come to stay with me. He is an American, from farther North than I am, and hoping to move to Philadelphia. He's a terribly sweet anarchist named Bobby who likes spending time in the sun on his roof, and writing poetry, and hoping to learn to build furniture so that he can move with almost nothing but tools and build what he needs when he gets here. We liked one another immediately. I took him on a walk through my city, almost an accident of good streets and local markets and parks on our way to meet some of my friends. He was so thrilled with all of it, and liked my tribe so much. The next day Whitney and I started to plan for our early Bealtaine celebration, and he joined us, first coming with us to our favourite stalls at Reading Terminal Market. Then we had a good adventure, searching for firewood in the city for the evening's bonfire. I wore a big backpack, and sticks and twigs and lumber stuck out of the top of it, making me look like a proud wicker man. We carried seed bombs with us while we explored, dry little balls of compost and clay and seeds, and tossed them into empty patches of dirt that needed some flowers to fill them. We collected huge quantities of moss, too, which I later fed to my blender along with beer and yogurt and sugar. We painted it on the walls of my back yard, sharing what was left of the beer, toasting with the moss. Now we mist it and wait for it to grow.

Bobby had to pack up and get on a bus before the party. That evening more friends came, and we lit a big fire with sparking pine branches and the things that we'd gathered. Whitney made a salad with strawberries, raw goats' milk cheese, excellent balsamic vinaigrette, and caramelised pecans. She made asparagus and mushrooms too. I always admire the local royal trumpets and oyster mushrooms at my market, but I usually settle for the far cheaper criminis. It was nice to finally have reason enough take a few of the fancy ones home.

Pardon my silence. The last while has been painfully busy. I work until I drug myself to sleep so that I can rise and work again. I'm building new muscles, tearing them again before they have time to heal, and gods, they hurt. Shrove Tuesday I was running to work by four thirty in the morning, but when I was done I was racked and cracked, then massaged, then found good liquor and good friends. Our table was strewn with my masks, and we told them our worries and our plans. Tom was newly tattooed, more fatigued with pain and with high ritual than I was with work and with practice. I felt as if I stayed up late, but I was asleep shortly after ten. Today I swore I wouldn't get out of bed, and I haven't. I read. I spoke with my lover, plotting a tricky seduction. I took a bath with candles and a glass of wine. I accomplished none of the personal things that piled up while I worked. It is Ash Wednesday, and I am repentant for nothing. And staying still felt so delicious, so decadent, that my work ethic, one of the American flaws in my temperament, recoiled in horror at my sloth. I start work again in the morning. I suppose I'm ready for it.

Ages ago, before I left to travel, my friends Penny and Liam and Lady Tapestry allowed me to dress up like a clockwork conductor, brought me to an abandoned steam train overgrown with plants and home to spiders and a beehive, gave me a sword and a mask made of brass, and allowed me to pretend that the train was my TARDIS while they took my picture. I can't actually imagine a better day.

This series of Penny as a (the!) Cartographer, however, are flawless:





Her new Flickr account, clearly, will be one to watch.

Beth and I have taken to laughing, "I get everything I want!" for those moments that manage to be irrationally perfect, more than you'd ever ask for piling around you all at once. And yesterday was better than that, a consistently and unreasonably lovely day. I'd stayed up late the night before dancing around a cauldron of glue in my oven room, a bulb burning directly over my head, my halo, my moon. And I woke up early, no reason but a hunch, and done with dreams. My suspicions were correct, and someone I'd been wanting was tangled in the aether cables. I hadn't known what it would call. There were crows above me, instantly, calling in a grey and writhing sky. There were three or five of them, when I've not seen crows in this part of the city in years, if ever. Obscenities, my only prayers, fell from my tongue like fairy gold turning to feathers.

I did yoga; I did not, so far as I can tell, shatter my spine. I'll proceed with caution. I'd quite like to return to it in earnest.

By the time I'd dressed it was nearly time to leave, but being occasionally irrational, I decided that I couldn't possibly be seen in public that day without a new hat. I found the streets of Philadelphia, my lover, boot to brick, moving in her in a fury of winds. Other people's sigils were burnt in the alleyways, mirrored cave paintings replaying my perfect morning and laughing, certainly correctly. I pouted and preened for myself in the shops and returned with something I liked.

I got to the park laden with fruits and red and white wine. I found friends there, beautiful ones, and we ate grapes from one another's chests and trousers like silly foul mouthed children. The trees insisted on joining in, covering us in spores and other spunk of the natural world. Tom, being even more of a true city-dweller than most of us, was unfamiliar with such obscenities and was terrified.

It is, I think, the nature of us veterans of the Fort to threaten as much as to flirt. But this being the first of spring, I think we may have outdone ourselves. It was filthy. We accused one another of vile things and promised one another worse. A running tally of my failings was kept by Winston Churchill (here represented by a delightful young bulldog, clearly drunk and a scrapper) and my dead father, drinking deep of the whiskeys of hell yet still unable to forget their unnumbered sins and disappointments made flesh and left to wander the streets in the form of yours truly. In our defence, for the first of spring it was a bit cold and the wind was cruel; we were fighting and flirting to stay warm. Eventually we were forced indoors for mystery beer, a charming custom of paying next to nothing for a surprise in a paper bag and a bottle. Sometimes it was quite good, but there was always the risk of falling victim to some of that mainstream American beer that tastes like a mixture of spit and the underside of the furniture in a fraternity. The waitress, being wise and just, only inflicted such indignities upon Tom.

I feel like I've left out some of the goodness, but I'm not sure I'd know how to convince all of it to fit. I don't know how one day managed it, still. But the winter is dead at last, and I'm hopeful that this day won't be the last of its kind.

I've not been dancing in months.

I'm atrophying. I get the distinct feeling of late that I'm meant to be hibernating. I'm perpetually exhausted, surly, and demanding that Beth, shoeless and crying, bring me dripping piles of (faux)meats and bread, butter and beer by the bucketful. Fishmongering is rather physically demanding, but that's always the case, and it doesn't always push my body to become a useless fob watch that I never bother to wind.

It's also left me feeling unreasonable resentment towards the DJs of this town: nothing could possibly be queer enough for me just now, no transition even close to well matched.

I'm pining for the trashiest of London fag bars, Berlin street corners at three AM. In turn, I'm struck with the feeling I don't usually allow myself anymore, that time and space are cruel, that the vastness of distance is crushing. What a useless feeling! Missing people who are here because one day I'll miss them, longing so intensely for places that I'm going. I live in South Philadelphia, jagged and winding cathedral of brick and broken glass, in street market temples of spark and ash, under an ever burning post-industrial sky! My friends are brilliant and morally lax! And tonight, possessed by caffeine, by red wine and rum and lipstick, we go dancing!

The favourite of the Roman Emperor is taken to be entertained by the mysterious Egyptians. He wears only a loincloth of red silk and is fed grapes and honeyed wines by boy-slaves while he's carried about on a litter, finally returning home to be devoured by his friends. (Et tu, Beth?)

Stopping to consider the mostly unopened morning glories, wondering if I was awake earlier than they or if I had just missed them, I watched a bee squirm inside a few of them, bulging the sides out, barely welcomed. I like the insides of flowers. It's like looking up someone's skirt with absolutely no idea of what one might find there: a thousand identical but seemingly separate buds, imitation insects, sweet poison and small dead things, colours horrific and obscene, curving pistils and stamens both, or nothing but petals, twisting inward endlessly, perfect and disappointing.

Meredith and Rebecca and I walked in gardens on Saturday. We kissed stone goats and orchids, climbed a tower, tested water lilies, and illicitly ate berries and tomatoes and peppers. They were bold Eves; I only ate what they gave me. My rib is theirs to do with as they like.

A great many fish, especially those in the bass family, have sharp spines along the ridges of their backs and on the strongest bone or two of their fins. The spines of red snapper are not only sharp, but also poisonous. The fish produce bio-toxins that ensure that when we fishmongers stab ourselves in the knuckle with one of the spikes, as we often do, we'll have a joint that is swollen, limited in its range of motion, and in a good deal of pain for a few days. It is one of our more interesting battle wounds, and we count ourselves luckier than ordinary predators: at least we don't take it in the mouth. This time, however, besides the usual symptoms I was also given an interesting series of red lines tracing their way up my forearm, at first in the shape of a tree as it followed my veins, and then converging and spiraling most of the way up my arm. Blood poisoning! What a clever fish! The doctors and nurses were all fascinated, as apparently this sort of reaction usually takes a week or two as opposed to a bit more than a day, and not many of their patients come in with fish related injuries. They even had to do research in order to give me an exact diagnosis. The people for whom I work were kind enough to cover the expense of my visit to the hospital and my medication, and to pay me for the time during which I was at the hospital instead of work. Even better than that, the amazing Tom and Erica were extremely good to me, visiting me in the waiting room and bringing me a cookie. All of fishkind, meanwhile, rejoiced, having finally taken their revenge.

To celebrate Parker's having started T, Carla and I threw him a surprise, ahem, tea party. There were cucumber and watercress finger sandwiches, artfully arranged platters of meats and cheeses and smoked fish, ladyfingers, and little cakes with fruit. There were also, of course, several thousand varieties of expensive and exotic teas. As I'm sure you've noted, it was intensely manly. In fact, following a discussion regarding the strange ability of those sphinxes, women, to pick at the tiniest quantities of food and rely on the clever application of pauses in order to appear delicate and half starved while secretly consuming entire galaxies, we decided to hold an experiment. We embarked upon a quest to prove our virility: twisting their deceitful feminine ways to our own purposes, we nibbled away at entire pyramids of watercress sandwiches, cheering one another onward to still greater feats of gluttony, more daring displays of masculinity, leaving naught but pure machismo and crumbs in our wake. Debbie brought a gift of beard grooming products, and at the end of it, as a ritual acceptance of adolescence and, eventually, manhood, we took Parker out into the woods and circumcised him with a straight razor while chanting the following:

( Gentlemen, behold! )

We'll host a sausage party when he's a bit further along.

Tonight I found my way to an underground bar (Safe from the war, as Robert said. Nine steps closer to hell, I added.) with friends, including Courtney, back from the south for the briefest of stays, and a DJ. I'm the bartender's roommate, so all I had to do was encourage him to create things, to give me adventures, and suddenly I was standing by the bar in a suit and holding a martini glass containing something new and interesting and unnameable. He wouldn't even let me tip him, let alone pay my tab. So, should you find yourself at Bar Noir with a handsome young barkeep named Terrance, please tip him well and write something dirty on a napkin for him on my account.