—Charlotte Bronte

Last night when I was in bed, I was reading this poem by Rimbaud and I read it again and again, in English and French, and I wanted to sink into it, and sink into it, even though it is short, and sort of falls apart at the end, although I don’t know if it falls apart because of Rimbaud or because of the translator, or because of my own lack of understanding, but I am going to give you it now, because it feels like all I ever wanted, at least from a poem, at least from a paragraph, and now Rimbaud: 

CITY

I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been evaded in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the layout of the city. Here you would fail to detect the least trace of any monument of superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, at last! The way these millions of people, who do not even need to know each other, manage their education, business, and old age is so identical that the course of their lives must be several times less long that that which a mad statistics calculates for the people of the continent. And from my window I see new specters rolling through the thick eternal smoke—our woodland shade, our summer night!—new Eumenides in front of my cottage which is my country and all my heart since everything here resembles it,—Death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate Love, and a pretty Crime howling in the mud of the street. 

(Louise Varèse, translator)

Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle reminded me how much I love novels, and now I want to read all of them. 

Watching Joan Jett sing Smells Like Teen Spirit with members of Nirvana made me realize that even though I wasn’t a Nirvana fan in the 90s, there is a small part of my soul that is Nirvana. 

Eating chocolate filled with cookie butter from Trader Joe’s for breakfast reminds me that I lack self control and sensibility. 

A cool thing that happened, this morning, while raking leaves, though, was that I found two enormous puff mushrooms hiding under leaves, and the yard was covered in a cloud of spore dust when I raked over them. Hopefully I didn’t breathe too many in, but if I did, there shouldn’t be too many changes to this blog, since most of my posts have been indiscernible from posts made by mushroom persons. 

After the Lynda Barry workshop the person next to me asked me if I was a professor.

I told her, “No, I’m just a dude.”

Then I thought, “Why am I so weird?”