Looking for Ava Gardner: part 1

On the beach at last, after a sleeper-train ride into Boston.

As happens every summer, the storms of winter and spring have caused the tide to completely rearrange the Third Road section of the beach where we plant our towels, chairs, and coolers. Last summer it was all sand with no rocks bigger than your fist. Today, with the tide still coming in at 11:30, it's all huge rocks, like the Atlantic spent all winter throwing up the broken pieces of a reef against the sea wall. And the tide's higher than I ever remember it being, which makes sense when I see that the sand level is down about two to three feet. Melted away like an ice cap . . .

The full moon rose last night at 9:03, so my niece Alyssa and I went down to the beach and looked north and east for the next ten minutes or so, but we saw nothing except the dwindling sunset (must remember to come out an hour earlier tonight to get the best of that). Meanwhile the mosquitoes were all over us--or all over me, anyway, they completely avoided Alyssa. "They're not bothering me!" she insisted. "They must like you because you're old."

Ah, my niece. Alyssa is the classic type who displays affection by making a great show of rejecting, insulting, and joking about you. The people she really doesn't care about, she totally ignores. Me, she climbs all over like I'm the jungle gym and she's the Czechoslovakian gymnast. (She's 11.) She throws sand on me when I'm trying to sun myself, yells "No reading!" when I pick up a book, pulls my earphones away and asks "What are you listening to?" and then cries "Gross!"when I tell her it's techno, and then asks me to play badminton with her. Which pretty much describes the kind of female I've fallen for like a ton of bricks through greased air my entire life, so it's only fitting that I am now condemned to observe the habits of one of them in captivity, so to speak . . .

I didn't see the full moon until I was helping my sister bring a hassock to a cottage down the street--it was hovering over the house-line like a gold beach ball in the southeast sky. By the time I got my camera, the gold had been drained away by the moon elves and the moon's pale ghost was lighting up the clouds like an out-take from a Wolf Man movie. . .

Reflection

I have a new local . . . .

I also have a Simpsons avatar, courtesy of The Simpsons Movie.

The God Thing

The God Thing

Most of us tell God we love Him
The way a 12-year-old boy
Tells a girl he’s soft on her –-

By making a big deal
Of pushing her away
Whenever he's around his friends.


Most of us look for God
The way we look for food
In a half-empty refrigerator –-

Every five minutes we open the door:
Searching for the miracle of the loaves,
Blind to the miracle of the left-overs.


Most of us come to God
The way a fed-up wife
Drives to a gas station
After her idiot husband got them lost --

Never realizing that God
Like a smart woman
Will never give us the time of day
Unless He thinks our weakness is attractive.

--Matthew Wells

Democracy? What Democracy?

From an article by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker in Sunday's Washington Post:


Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.

Richard Cheney--doing his best to make Richard Nixon look like Jimmy Carter.

When does a New York City event jump the shark?

When the subway system posts directions on how to get there.

What my writing area used to look like

Things I thought about while running the Corporate Challenge

Why is everybody walking in the middle of the street? Walkers to the right, dammit!

Now I know how a car feels on the LIE.

Whoa—are all the girls on the Coach team gorgeous or what?

Look—it’s Lauren Ambrose trying to get to the Delacorte! Ha ha!

Nice T-shirt. (“I hope you’re not this slow in planning your retirement.” Of course, everybody who wore it was WALKING.)

Get. The Fuck. Out of my WAY! (I said this a LOT.)

This is like the Mermaid Parade for investment bankers.

Wow—I just ran a 10-minute mile. I bet I could have done it in 9 if these people walking would just GET. THE FUCK. OUT OF MY WAY.

Is the air really this thick or is it just the 15,000 hot sweaty runners who are making it this thick?

Ah shit—Abe just called with a free ticket to the Fab Faux at the Bowery.

Nice ass. (It was a girl on the Coach team.)

I’ll be damned if I let a speed-walker beat me to the finish line.

Water, please. With a water back.

And really--how fugly is this T-shirt?

Lenore

LENORE


The last coherent look my mother gave me
As she lay on what would become her deathbed
Was when I asked her, “How are you feeling, Mum?”

Too doped up on painkillers to do anything
But slip into a coma, she turned her head
And gave me a look that said, “How do I feel?
HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL, YOU LOUSY KID?!?!”

That’s the first thing that comes to mind now when
I think of her –- that wounded, dying look
That makes me want to cry: “Oh God, I’m sorry!”

But the dead can’t forgive, any more than
The living can stop acting like idiots.

-- Matthew Wells

It's About Fecking Time

Now if only this could have happened about a week before Civil War started . . .