Evil Queen Magda

Wan and shivering, she retreated to her bed. When Captain Rutherford told her that taking the Cure...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:32:00 -0800

Wan and shivering, she retreated to her bed. When Captain Rutherford told her that taking the Cure in Lausanne was out of the question, she drew the blinds, gathered her animal in her lap and took comfort in the flickering lights of motion pictures. Soon, the laudanum would take her away from this.

Let’s compare and contrast the faces of the NYC Marathon. ...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:57:00 -0800

Let’s compare and contrast the faces of the NYC Marathon. Beginning of the race vs. end of the race. Or, as I like to call them: Face of Moderate Discomfort vs. Face of Death.

Eclipse V

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0800

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

The worst part was that she was so young. I hadn’t walked in on them fucking, but the way S looked at her told me that he had thought about it. Was probably thinking about it at that moment. This was my breaking point, seeing his hand reach for a strand of the girl’s hair. The girl all but spat at him – I imagined her hissing at him in her mind – jerking her head away so that his stubby fingers wouldn’t come near her. When I asked him what was going on, she used that moment of distraction to scurry into the back room, leaving the rags she’d been using to wipe down the bar in a heap on the wood.

“She can’t be more than 14.”

“I didn’t ask. She shows up on time every day.” He took a straw from a caddy sitting on the bar and popped it in his mouth. “Stop blinking at me like that. Why does everything have to be so dramatic with you?”

I swung at the caddy, sending it to the floor. It rained limes and napkins.

“Jesus. Calm the fuck down. Come here.” He grabbed my elbow and guided me to a booth at the back of the bar. It was early and the bar was still mostly empty, but the few customers present stared at me, at us.

“I’m done,” I managed to say without my voice breaking, but when S didn’t argue, I burst into tears. It wasn’t the girl, it wasn’t his arrogance, the way he dismissed me. I felt so stupid, realizing I might have constructed him completely in my mind. That person didn’t stare at teenagers with unconcealed lust, with hips that edged forward as hands reached for something they felt entitled to take. I thought about him touching me with that same hand. I had looked into his eyes at those moments and thought they were unreadable. They weren’t. I’d recognized the look and then convinced myself that I hadn’t.

“Sweetheart, this isn’t news. We were already done. But you…you still came around.” He shrugged his shoulders and absolved himself of responsibility.

This only increased the volume of my tears. I knew it appeared to him that I was distraught over our break up (this would be our third rupture), but really my tears came from a place of horror. Horror that I had given anything genuine to this poor reproduction of a person. I looked at him and felt like I was reading an x-ray, a film negative, something two-dimensional and in need of further development. I gave a sharp laugh and he sat up straight, startled. The image of him as a dancing skeleton, a cardboard cut-out taped onto doors and windows during Halloween, had popped into my head.

Eager to leave, I nearly fell out of the booth as I left. Down the street, the band would be playing and he would be there. He would be there and I never had to worry about him – his eyes were his tell.

"I can’t talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:06:27 -0800

““I can’t talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. ‘Out there,’ I called it. You want to know what ‘out there’ means to me? Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.””

- Dorothy Parker, The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Issue 13, 1956)

Is it strange to post a quote about LA while I’m in NY? Possibly. But I’ve now lived in LA for longer than I did NY and it’s strange to be here.

Nice try, asphalt.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:52:00 -0800

The feeling of an impending loss of consciousness is a very specific one. There’s a queasiness, there’s a clamminess, there’s the darkness creeping into your peripheral vision. So imagine my concern when this feeling announced itself in the terminal for the Staten Island ferry that would take me to the start of the New York Marathon. I’m literally lurching onto the ferry, hoping I can get to a bench before I hit the deck and I do, just barely. I sit with my head between my legs for a few minutes until I can see again, all the while hoping nobody notices, because I suspect I would have been advised not to run a marathon shortly after almost passing out.

This is how my marathon morning started, and it didn’t get much better. My body had no interest in running, let alone running 26.2 miles. At mile 5, I was on pace, but it felt awful. At 10k, 15k and the halfway mark, I was on pace, but it felt awful. My calves were tight, I had no energy. The headwind didn’t help. The mile-long low-grade hills that came at us every other mile didn’t help. The dodging and weaving you have to do in a field of 42,000 didn’t help. The foot cramps that started at mile 16 really, really didn’t help.

And that point, mile 16, when you come off the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan on 1st Avenue, was the only point I can remember having any fun whatsoever. The most awesome song came on my iPod, on which I hit repeat pretty much until I got to the Upper East Side, when the crowds that were 8 deep thinned out a bit as we headed into the Bronx. But my body kept betraying me. I wanted to run hard, but every time I pounded down a hill after struggling to the top (because there’s no way I’m walking any part of the New York Fucking City Marathon, especially the hills) my feet turned into twisty-ties and I had to slow my roll so as not to have to stop altogether.

When I hit mile 20, I looked at my watch and saw that if I ran my best 10k time, I could meet my goal of 4:00. But at 21, I looked at my watch again and saw that I needed to run 8:00 min/miles until the finish I knew it just wouldn’t happen. (Mostly because I was running with my left pinky toe curled up under my other toes.) My internal pep talk went from “You got this” to “It’s okay. You will be fine. This pain is temporary” until I finished, 9 minutes slower than my goal but 15 minutes faster than at the LA Marathon.

A funny thing happens to me after the finish: my brain stops working. I don’t know if it’s the dehydration or the exhaustion, but I don’t really do well with “words” and “complex thoughts” for an hour or so afterward. Which is why this video is funny to me. (Tumblrs, this embed doesn’t show up in the dashboard.)

The person filming is a friend with whom I did my carbo loading the night before. At that dinner, he misspoke, talking about his dogs and these bones that he called “restaurant grade”. I, of course, pounced on this, as is my way, and this spawned an entire series of jokes about asking the waiter for his finest bones, the bone list, special free range farms where they inject bones with calcium, etc. So vigorous was my skewering that he said he couldn’t wait for me be a broken shell of a person post-race, so that I wouldn’t have the wherewithal to keep up with the verbal jabs. And if you watch closely, you can see this moment of confusion on my face when he references the “restaurant grade bones” because I could barely tell him where to find me, let alone remember the substance of our conversation from the night before. So he got his wish. A huddled little mass of hurt that was all sassed out, shivering on the sidewalk wrapped up in a glorified piece of tin foil.

But after he heard how I ran the entire race on vapors, he gave me a hug and even restrained himself from commenting (too much) on the dried salt and dirt on my face. He then carried me up and down stairs so I could shower and then get to the veggie burger, onion rings, fries, vanilla milkshake and Guinness that was my reward for not letting some stupid asphalt break me.

Marathon runners are regular people too. We put our pants on one leg at a time, using our hands to...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:26:37 -0800

Marathon runners are regular people too. We put our pants on one leg at a time, using our hands to lift and lower that leg into the pants leg because our thigh adductor muscles aren’t interested in doing it alone.

A lot of things went wrong today. I started struggling at mile...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:39:00 -0800

A lot of things went wrong today. I started struggling at mile 5, which, as you know, is a ways away from the finish. So the 4:09:22 I managed (15 minutes faster than LA) was through sheer force of will, because that run was ROUGH.

When all else fails: rely on stubbornness.

I had to get up at 5:45. No one said I had to wear pants while...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:16:13 -0800

I had to get up at 5:45. No one said I had to wear pants while I got ready.

It’s on.

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:58:25 -0700

It’s on.

tylercoates: Sleigh Bells - “Crown on the Ground” HOLY....

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:41:04 -0700

tylercoates:

Sleigh Bells - “Crown on the Ground”

HOLY. SHIT.

Holy shit thank god I found this in time to be included on the marathon mix.

"Hey, here’s a idea. Instead of being that Slutty Bee this holiday, be A Regular Bee. A Regular Bee..."

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:21:19 -0700

“Hey, here’s a idea. Instead of being that Slutty Bee this holiday, be A Regular Bee. A Regular Bee who is also the President of a successful non-profit and a four time winner of the pulitzer prize.”

- wrongcharlie (via sarahlane) (via david)

Eclipse IV

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:30:00 -0700

Part I, Part II, Part III

I knew someone who lived in this building once. This was years ago, when saying goodnight to the sunrise felt rebellious. Now it just felt like something I should have seen coming. At 2, I knew the sun would rise and I still knew it at 3, 4 and 5. But I kept making the same mistake, refusing to turn around and go home so I could approach the morning the same way everyone else did. Feet forward. Instead, I kept going backwards, ending up at this building, walking up to her door.

I’m here again. I’m here in her tiny apartment with its creaking floors and mismatched plates. She’s looking at me with those eyes, dark like coffee grounds and equally sedimentary. She’s drained and buried and I take consolation in the fact that I had nothing to do with it. I lie down on her mattress, separated from the floor only by a box spring. It should feel at least a little uncomfortable, lying on her tangled sheets, fully clothed, but it doesn’t, which makes me wonder if I’m fighting the wrong battle.

The girl’s mother lived here. The girl – my girl. My daughter. I don’t even want to say the words. That’s the battle I should have fought or at least lost more gracefully. But she had been determined and I didn’t know what I was up against. The girl – my girl ran away, maybe up against the same thing. Now I looked for her everywhere, in every face, but I probably wouldn’t recognize her if I met her. I hadn’t seen her for two years and the school photo her mother provided to the police was of a stranger wearing black lipstick, her hair in her face. I comforted myself with the thought that someone who pushed her resentment through the lens of a camera so intensely might have known what she was doing.

But this girl, the one people think is mine, pretends to sleep while I try not to think about these things. I speak to her forehead, asking about the cut on her scalp, where it came from.

“The corner of a table,” she tells me and I part her hair to inspect it. When the scab forms, it will blend in with her dark roots.

“You shouldn’t see him. You know it upsets you.”

“Tables have sharp edges whether I’m upset or not.” This was an impertinent answer meant to keep my advice at bay, advice she insisted she didn’t need because she’d rather figure things out for herself, but she burrowed under my chin as she said it.

She should tell me to go. She shouldn’t have even let me in considering I only come to her when she doesn’t ask me to. So I try to summon any telepathic power I have, willing her to tell me to leave her alone. But instead I feel her arm grow heavy across my waist and her breathing slow. She twitches once, but uses that moment of wakefulness only to push one cold foot between my legs.

She's right, I'm a mega bitch.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:31:00 -0700

People like to say that LA is full of wishy-washy flakes with commitment issues. This can be true. But! They’re really committed to hating pedestrians. Like the bus driver that yelled “bitch” out the window at me after I had the audacity to cross at the crosswalk, on a green light while she was looking at traffic going the other direction and nearly hit me.

In re my possible death/rape/mugging while on my way to the start or while running the marathon

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:16:00 -0700

Mom: You should photocopy your driver's license and put it in your shoe.
Me: But there's a number on my chest. My name is connected to that number, as is the phone number for a local friend who is serving as my emergency contact.
Mom: You're taking the SUBWAY to the FERRY to the start. What if someone attacks you and rips off the number?
Me: Least successful mugging ever. Besides, when I run at home, I have a little Post-It in my shoe pouch with my name, address and a friend's phone number in case I get hit by a car. That will be in there.
Mom: Oh, okay then.
Me: Wait, you don't think the official NYC Marathon bib with its attendant information will be able to identify me, but a crumpled Post-It in my shoe makes you feel better?
Mom: Yes.

Him: What should I be for Halloween?

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:06:00 -0700

Him: What should I be for Halloween?
Me: Orly Taitz.
Him: But I'm not a woman.
Me: Orly Taitz.
Him: ...
Me: Get a cheap-looking blonde wig. Wear it slightly askew. Find a nice polyester shell and cardigan in a pastel color. Don't shave. Get drunk. Slur comments about CERTAIN PEOPLE who were born in KENYA who want to make us all SOCIALISTS.
Him: No one will get it.
Me: About four people will. And to those four people, you will be a god.

59 is a perfect running temperature. I could do without the...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:43:49 -0700

59 is a perfect running temperature. I could do without the showers, however. Of course, the likelihood of this 10-day forecast coming to fruition hovers around pi percent. It will probably change 10 times. Snow and/or hail will be predicted, directly followed by a sun wearing a pair of sunglasses and ultimately, on the day of the marathon, I will probably run through every conceivable weather pattern over the course of 5 boroughs and 4 hours. Viva New York.

This part of today’s daily tip made me smile: “At mile 15, you’ll reach the Queensboro Bridge. It’s a challenging uphill and a steep downhill to a right turn onto First Avenue, where you’ll be welcomed to Manhattan by the largest, loudest crowds on the course.”

Precious little 4-mile run this evening. I’m spending all the extra time I have during my taper impatiently tapping my foot and mapping free wifi in the area in which I’m staying.

Love in the Cathedral, Miller Williams

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:14:38 -0700

poetry365:

“…except you ravish me.”

In the beginning I couldn’t speak to you.
Not because the words wouldn’t come;
it was because they might. Not words like love,
blooming where they fall; words like come here.
When once you turned to look straight at me
out of a crowd, I thought I must have let

the sounds inside my head come out, like “let
us all go home.” I wouldn’t say to you
the wet, small words that moved inside of me.
I have thought that faith and patience would come
to no good end, that you would say, “See here!”
and never say, “Well yes, I think I’d love

to follow you home; to tell the truth, I’d love
to have some wine, then talk awhile, then let
you pleasure me.” Expelled to suffer here,
John Milton wrote of us. I look at you
and in my mind your awful kinsmen come
around every corner, looking for me.

You once talking about the weather with me
and that was something, but it was not love,
did not resemble love. Love ought to come
in recognizable clothes. One day I let
my plain and earthy self talk to you
most gently, saying plainly, “Please come here,”

but everything went wrong, a bah-bah here,
a bah-bah there. You have bumped into me
by accident, I have bumped into you
on purpose on the street where talk of love
was inappropriate, then I have let
my heart hide in the cold and watched you come

laughing and blind. No matter what may come,
give me this: that all this time I stood here
ignored to death and loved you while you let
every chance go; say your glances at me
suggested almost anything but love;
say I know you cry in bed, poor you.

Believe in love. You know that I am here
to let you loose. Here is my flesh for you
who ay abide with me till kingdom come.

Eclipse III

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:30:00 -0700

Part I, Part II

It was morning when I clanged up the walkway to my apartment, the nail in my loose heel ringing like a spur. I wasn’t quite sure where I left the remaining hours of the night; probably under grease-covered plates and on sidewalks I would have been advised not to walk alone at 4 a.m. Some days time peeled off of me like sunburned skin. That’s why the bed remained unmade – I’d always come back to it. Sooner, later, it didn’t matter whether the covers were pulled taut or twisted at the base of the mattress. I’d get under them either way.

Already in bed, I remembered the wound on my scalp and the bathroom mirror showed me the war paint on my face. I splashed water on both until what dripped off of my chin ran clear in the sink and took the few steps required to cross the tiny studio to get back under the covers, back to where I could close my eyes and not feel guilty when I thought about him. It helped me sleep.

Well, usually. But this morning I stared out my ground-floor window at the brown lawn in front of the complex and the stray cat weaving in between the garbage and recycling bins. My thoughts turned to the possibility of adopting that cat, bringing it into bed with me this morning and all other such mornings. Then I remembered I had managed to kill a cactus not three months earlier, which meant keeping a cat alive would likely be an impossible task and my thoughts turned to him again. But this time for a more legitimate reason – he too had woven in between the bins and now mounted the steps to my front door.

I opened it before he had a chance to knock. Cool air rushed up my bare legs and into the t-shirt I wore, inflating it like a pair of lungs. I leaned my head against the door; he leaned into the doorway and we stood that way for a moment, mirroring each other. He was close enough so when my shirt billowed outwards, it brushed against his jacket, but we didn’t actually touch. I filled my real lungs with air and rolled away from him, back into the apartment, leaving the door open. He followed and shut it. Now we both stood deflated in the center of the room, and I again thought of the cat, thought of it weaving between our legs, giving me something on which to focus besides the smell of the outside world that he had brought in with his jacket. Car exhaust and autumn air, the sour tang of last night’s beer and the slightest hint of soap – he tossed them all on the couch before laying down on my bed, fully clothed, his shoes hanging off the end.

File under: things I have been spending an inordinate amount of...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:53:35 -0700

File under: things I have been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about.

It’s all just numbers and words in my head, which is pretty uninteresting to everyone,...

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:28:00 -0700

It’s all just numbers and words in my head, which is pretty uninteresting to everyone, I’ve found.

13 days until the New York Marathon. 10 miles yesterday at 8:45/mile, which is pretty fast for me. 20 miles for the week, down from 30-35 in earlier weeks. 10 miles is 1200+ calories burned in one workout and then I have to cobble together a 4:1 carbs:protein dinner so my body doesn’t start feasting on my muscles. (See? Boring.)

Then 2 glasses of wine because I made the mistake of consecutively working on all 3 of my writing projects yesterday - the short fiction that may turn into long fiction as a warm up, the TV pilot and (hopefully) the last round of manuscript edits. The last is driving me insane because I have a multi-page email with notes for changes to specific paragraphs and finding and replacing 2 weak paragraphs with 1 stronger one feels like grabbing fistfuls of sand underwater. By the time your hand is above the surface, you’ve lost half the sand. (See? I’m pretty sure that analogy doesn’t even mean anything. Hence the wine so I could stop thinking about words and numbers and let a Hulu’d episode of Fringe pleasantly confuse me with multi-dimensional time travel.)