Procrastination? I’m guilty. So, so guilty. The past seven days have come together only through a pronounced force of will. But a copy of Nintendogs for the Nintendo DS recently came into my life and it’s gone totally ignored. In the interest of lightening some burdens—my writing, your reading—the next few days may be a little filler-y, to save time so I can do some actual reporting.
Today’s offerings were lifted and edited from a journal kept from 2018-2019. Their original numbering is intact.
63.]___ At like five am I could hear the trains squelching and squeaking and howling from up the street, where the tracks are. The windows were open. I was thinking about something gay. I dunno what. Babe was asleep so I stifled my laughter. The hellish screeching seemed so endless it became funny.
172.]___ Smell of donuts. Muffins. Balancing them in a loosely closed box atop a bunched up towel and my Adidas duffel bag with the neon orange trim.
176.]___ The Dutchman Jan Weenix painted still-lives. Almost by default this genre involves mortality. Objects are arranged not only to demonstrate an artist’s technique but also to remind us that we will all—well, no need to get morbid so early in the morning. Dead Game and Fruits with Landscape finds the artist succeeding brutally at his task. Like many of Weenix’s paintings, this one contains meat. Meat with fur and meat with feathers. This is not a painting for animal lovers. The grotesque, violent evidence is not only metaphor, but pyrotechnic, alerting us to Weenix’s sumptuous and full-bodied handling of oil paint.
There is spectacle beyond flesh here, too: consider the bowl of bright, curvy, spilling fruit, or the background scenery plotted across a smaller portion of the canvas. Life goes on.
Having no choice in the matter, animals yet to be food inhabit the limbo of props. Weenix paints them with a regality reserved for the dead. Athletic but lifeless. These animals have weight, form and muscle; they take up space. What Weenix is trying to show us is unavoidable. Look away, if you can. Otherwise, dinner is served. Even a carnivore becomes uneasy.
208.]___ People talk about the process of writing as ‘finding oneself.’ No. Writing is meant to get us so irretrievably lost, so outside oneself (ekstasis), trembling in the fear of the fire, that one cannot possibly entertain the thought of being found.
279.]___ This week’s adventures: Wednesday — The Cumby’s cashier stared blankly into oblivion as she assaulted the receipt with a red PAID stamp. Sorry, it’s just one of those nights, she said.
313.]___ I remembered vividly just now the light that would fill the parlor on Saturday mornings. And how I probably ignored its yellow for cartoons.
343.]___ My husband told me people can see in our windows at night. I often ignored this fact. Naked body visible, possibly, through a slat of light in open window. To test my husband’s theory, I’ve been looking into people’s houses at night when we drive by. You really can see so much. A big painting. A man changing his shirt. A Valentine’s display sparkling with tiny points of gold. I’m learning to close the blinds.
