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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


07.13.15


Ok, 5 things.

1) Last night, I spotted oystercatchers along the beach, upbraiding sea gulls that got too close and drilling for mussels and cockles. Their Irish name translates to Servant of St. Brigid, for they guide sailors to safety.

2) In the rain, the landscape acquires a flatness. The beach, the bay, the hills of the Burren, the sky are all washed in shades of silver. A mirror for the flatness in me, I think, in a fit of self-pity.

3) I am reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I find it difficult to enjoy wholeheartedly, despite her gender-bending, time-defying heroine and beautiful, surprising, humorous turns of language. I think it's the way otherness is used to exalt Englishness by contrast, so it interrupts my pleasure by pointing to the ideological work set up by the text.

4) I am also reading Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, which is splendid: "Sometimes you think there must be an easier way to do this. Sometimes it seems to be getting easier all on its own. Now you have boots and a reindeer, but you still aren't happy. Sometimes you wish that you'd stayed at home. You're sick and tired of travelling towards the happily ever after, whenever the fuck that is—you'd like the happily right now. Thank you very much."

5) I listened to PJ Harvey's Rid of Me for the first time in years. It reminds me of my early 20s in the Bay Area, running around in slips and tattered converses, with a short bob I cut myself and a semi-smirk from shyness set permanently on my face. I was a naïf, and a jerk, sometimes to women and usually to men, unless they were the boyfriends of friends. When I start to think of babies and cats, I think about that girl, and wonder what the fuck happened. (Time, that's what. And a lot of tears.)




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