Archive for the 'this judas of a body' Category

FLAT

Published on July 26, 2011 in Museum of the Weird, stories, this judas of a body and THREATS. 2 Comments

My stupid spine. I go to a good anusara class to help fix it but it makes my whole ribcage hurt because you’re supposed to focus on sinking it or opening it or something and just trying to do those things makes my whole body do a slow-motion spit-take. Anyway I’ve got this scoliosis. I am working from bed. I’m like a pissed off adult-age Robert Louis Stevenson, all writing A Child’s Garden of Verses. Please someone get that joke despite its poor quality and reference to children’s literature.

  1. My story “The Heart” is out in Pear Noir 6
  2. Do you ever have a day when all you want is a box of donut holes
  3. I’m working on a story that puts me in such a mood
  4. We almost have a cover for THREATS, just you wait

Big Big Big Big Big Announcement

Published on September 5, 2010 in Cooking and this judas of a body. 6 Comments

I made two quiches this week. The first was made with heavy cream, yielding a very dense custard through which the cheese rose, in which the spinach seemed to vanish. I decided I hadn’t beat the eggs and cream enough and that doing so would create a thicker suspending kind of emulsion. For the next attempt, I subbed half and half for the heavy cream, added more spinach and less cheese, and mixed the cream and eggs in the blender for a minute. The material of the quiche became  like a savory flan, with spinach and the little bits of bacon rising directly to the top. It tastes good but the emulsion is all wrong. I can’t figure out how to fix it. Quiche tips welcome.

everything is fucked

On Friday I went ice skating. Rental skates are twenty-pound weights balanced on two halves of a steel dinner plate. There were girls practicing their routines in the center of the ice, and boys with hockey gear going very fast and then skidding to an ice-shower stop. There was a guy wearing an orange safety vest skating over to the little kids sitting on the ice and asking if they were okay. I lost my locker rental quarter under the candy machine. A ten-year-old kid said “I think your hands are smaller than mine are” and walked away.

I haven’t been ice skating in 18 years. I spread my arms and tried to make my body as large as possible for balance. I went around a few times and felt like I understood it better. I realized that going faster over the pits and grooves in the ice made them less perilous to my balance. The ice skating rink music was piped in from a wedding reception DJ’s playlist. I watched some of the hockey players and tried to mimic their movement when taking the turn, putting one foot in front of the other and leaning instead of pushing with a wider stance. I tried lowering my arms and immediately raised them up again.

I took a break to re-tie my skates. When I got back on the ice I was feeling a little braver. Wiping the ice off the blades made my skates feel sharper. One of the guys started skating around me, skating backwards, looking behind. He seemed like kind of an asshole. I came up with the theory that dudes who go by themselves to skating rinks are half into hockey and half into unaccompanied minors. I tried to get a read on him based on his facial hair. He had a ponytail, which suggested one, and a soul patch, which suggested the other. Maybe the other way around. I got distracted. I lowered my arms. The curve approached. My slower skate found a pit in the ice.

My book comes out Tuesday.

Plantain life

Published on July 8, 2010 in road trip soundtrack and this judas of a body. 4 Comments

I’m on the ass-end of a whirlwind here on the fifth floor of the Larchmont in NYC. The bed is on casters and the shower is down the hall. The style of this hotel room is “cozy institutional.”

The A/C works great

I always rip my feet up in this city. Yesterday I got my toes done in the cheapest place I could find. I started walking down the hallway to go to the bathroom and a woman got in my face and asked me what I was doing. I said I was going to the bathroom. She was mad about it. There was a language barrier. The soak water was so hot it started parboiling my feet. Another woman touched my toes. She asked if she should cool the water down and I said no. She asked if I wanted the razor and I frowned at her and she said I only needed the stone.

I met a new friend named Emily and we had adventures. The food we ate was so pretty I wanted to photograph it, and she said the restaurant’s sister restaurant experienced that so much they had to ban the practice. They served sliced scallops mixed with spicy red and crunchy green bits. We drank a tequila cocktail with a long pepper afterburn. The train stopped while we were underneath a river.

I read at Happy Ending, which was fun like a Lynchian dream sequence, accordions followed by Shane Jones reading a story about a hair monster making love to a handicapped girl followed by Audrey “the time traveler’s” Niffenegger reading Finnegans Wake backwards, I shit you not. Then we ate late-night treats from Central Mexico, I think, shredded meats in corn masa pockets and a plate of fried plantains. I signed a copy of AM/PM by squirting salsa into it.

My dad wanted me to go check up on Bleeker Street Pizza, an establishment he has not visited since 1973 but thinks fondly of. I walked an hour, found it, and drank some water while sitting next to an oven and eating the most perfectly crispy slice of mushroom pizza in the middle of one of the hottest July days on record. Fine, New York. I give in. I love you.

Body

Published on June 12, 2010 in Raekwon and this judas of a body. Closed

Hefting a 40lb bag of cat litter improperly out of the truckbed, I bent my wrist in a bad direction and now it feels wrong. Raekwon says, “Fucked up my writing hand, that’s my check.” I wrote two more articles on the importance of CDL licensing for truck drivers and wrapped the sore part up. It feels nice with an ice pack so I decided to write some more. It’s fun to learn new things about truckers and write about them. I think the most dangerous job in the world might be contract truck driving in Iraq.

I got a massage last week from a woman named Aileen. I had a coupon and my shoulders were sore from bench so I went in. It was a pretty good massage though not quite as good as the one other massage I’ve had, in Singapore, where the woman got up on the table to try and press through my body. I found myself thinking each time about how strange and good it is that people spend time learning how to touch one another in professionally comforting ways. I thought about telling Aileen this but decided against.

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