jacktellslies

Today was unpleasant. Therefore I thought it an excellent day on which to discus cursing. I'm as fond as anyone of the usual references to fornication and excrement, but apparently utilize them a good deal less frequently than I think I do. My Dutch flatmate once asked me, "Do you ever actually curse, or do you just say, curses?" Indeed.

As it happens, cursing in Dutch apparently focuses on disease. It mostly uses the slightly old fashioned names for ailments like consumption and various venereal diseases. More recently a few people have taken to exclaiming, cancer! when they are displeased. Although it was considered quite shocking at first, it seems to be catching.

I do like saying curses, though. It's pleasantly antiquated and ineffective. I use it when I feel slightly and momentarily thwarted. It's the one I'm most likely to use in the company of others. When I'm alone, I curse a bit differently. The word slut tends to fall out of my mouth when I reproach myself. This has always struck me as slightly odd, as my disappointment with myself almost never has anything to do with my choices about sex. Despite that, I call myself by that word with some frequency. Perhaps the quieter parts of my brain feel something I don't. I also like slug. It's the tamest in my personal arsenal, although as I spend more time gardening I suspect it may develop gravity. The severest of my swears is also the most embarrassing. I'm afraid that when truly annoyed or inconvenienced, I'm given to exclaiming, balls! I'm not proud of it. Sorry, gentlemen. I promise that the rational parts of my brain neither disrespect you nor your anatomy.

How do you curse, when you do?

A roving band of pirate children wander past the Fort with some regularity. Admirably untamed creatures, they can be quite loud. Today, while stepping outside to leave them an offering of two pumpkins to smash or eat that I'd managed to forget about until today, I heard one of them, a slightly older girl, shout at one of her cohorts a thing I think near constantly but almost never utter aloud: "You know better, bitch." She's a far braver and more honest soul than I. Bless her.

My friends seem to believe that I don't read enough fiction. I show them my useless degree in English Literature, which clearly states that I've read all of it already, but to no avail. They keep tying me to the psychiatrist's chair in my living room and reading me twenty chapters of Woolf at a go, the magnificent bastards. So I've been busying myself with Victorian adventure tales in order to appease them. (I'm also reading Alan Moore's long awaited League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: the Black Dossier, and Vacant: A Diary of the Punk Years 1976-79.) I only just started Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days last night, and already I stumbled across this perfect line: "If to live in this style is to be eccentric, it must be confessed that there is something good in eccentricity." Indeed!

I fell asleep after coming too soft for trying for too long. And I dreamed it dirty, and graphic to a hard fault. I've only had two such dreams, now, and both were of people I'd never want to touch, and both sickened me. Usually these dreams could have been true, or fail. They are soft and lack sense, like dreams do. But these ones are reasoned, and I know I won't forget them. I hate the things I know I won't forget. I wake up breathing hard and moving to it. I've come back from sleep coming, but only when I'm crushed breathless with disgust before it has even had the grace to end.

There are bits of mirror and tile in the alleyway closest to my street. It started as faces on plates, then lines, and then today, all at once, a little broken world found its way onto the walls. I passed them working in the rain as I walked home. "You did so much today! Thank you for decorating my block." Isaiah was there, and his wife (I sell her fish!) and some others. "Just keep walking here," he told me. I changed the way I walk as soon as the faces were there to watch. It is beautiful. It goes south. We do not deserve it, but we need it.

I finished The Book Thief, finally, after years and years (or something more like a few months). And this whole time I couldn't bear the thought of it ending, although I'd always known where the end would be. I cried until my bed was wet, until my boat slipped under everything. I'm holding it with me, although it isn't mine anymore. And despite that, four pages are creased, for remembering. I'll keep them, although you won't hear them. Not yet.






( The Word Shaker. )






Megan Etzel, thank you. Thank you. It will go to the next one. We should talk. I am cain son of eve. Thank you.

She worked so much today and yesterday: she is out of my bed by six thirty. She'll only be leaving the shop at midnight. I've made a midnight picnic: good rosemary bread and strawberries and apples and goat cheese and roasted tomatoes and even chocolate cake. I hope that she is awake for it. I hope on strong arms and on body scent for her happiness tonight, even if it is the exhausted kind. I hope hard.

I posted to vintage_sex today for the very first time, I believe. It won't at all surprise you, or if it does, it will be a matter of your confusing your history; it won't be me.

Oh, yes, this is fun. I'll play this once. Have I interests you do not understand? You should ask me. And then you should ask, too, if you like.