what you cookin’, chicken?

what’s crackin?

hows u wee chick?

it’s zip’s birthday on tuesday. happy birthday zipper. it comes so natural to me to act unnaturally. sorry kiddo. happy birthday. sorry i didn’t tell more stories. you’re a good writer. breaks my heart.

is a relationship called a ship because it’s a form of transportation? hope you’re in a better time and space now.

this week was good, some unanswered questions got puzzled out and solved. 4 across, 1995 coming-of-age movie inspired by Austen’s Emma [8]. not everything with red nose and animal feet has to be so dear. it’s gravy; no tinted lenses.

on tuesday night i went out to the low stakes | high spirits event. i’d not eaten and i foolishly changed jackets just before leaving. the jacket change wasn’t foolish, it was the right thing for the look but the foolish part was that the babybels were in the pocket of jacket #1. during the event i slowly perished. everyone was great. agnes and kat were really a joy to watch. i wish i’d not been about to faint the entire night. it was a wonderful time even though the tight space, throngy crowd and loud noises conspired to provide me the distinct emotional journey i’d imagine of a house dog’s first time in the kennels during a holiday. oscar was never the same.

[Chaz eating his porridge] “Some magic is real you know mam”, [Me eating my toast] “Is it? like what?” [Chaz with a nonchalant shrug] “Buttercups”.

— the website of alice bartlett

i’m getting closer to understanding my place in the place i’m in now. no longer so near to climbing into a coffin and await collection by the reaper. remember how joel used to offer that as a third solution to every choice? “we could implement it in a way that isn’t supported in firefox, or we could ask Pre if it can go out without the spin, or we could close the curtains lie down and wait for it all to be over”. anyway. it’s all about the alley oop.

walk on by like the sun is shining
always smiling like you just fell in love

the body as a template

and i said “what is that?”

and she said “it’s a crown of thorns”

and i said “why do you have a crown of thorns?”

and she said “it’s for mitchell. i talk to him, OK?”

and a year later there they were in the basement. and i was in trunk of the car.

and a few years later he was dead in a different car in new orleans.

---

and on Saturday i went out to the newspeak xmas party which was a wonderful night. the party itself was fine. goblin oats was there in a longish coat, solid bloke. watch him go. lock ‘n’ load, rock ‘n’ roll. a night i would have been sort of low was awesome though for having him and who he’d brought in tow. chau pham is outstanding; we had a lot of fun going from place to place enjoying ourselves via strangers. good times. afterwards we three went to a sit down cocktail bar called equal parts and drank tomato water. highly recommend equal parts for its tomato water. it’s clear! tastes like eatin spaghetti!

anyway. it’s all about the alley-oop, is what i’m saying. what i’m trying to say.

this time last year i was “a ghost haunting my own body”. the year before that i was “gazing doe-eyed into the imagined future”. and the year before that i had the mexican fingernails and the 「ANTICIPATION」 and i was just about to make a series of extremely important choices. a choice can look like it’s bad or good depending on where you choose to start and end the window of its influence. if everything is good now, and it’s because of the bad times… that’s how you get to be lucky. you tell yourself that the good times is how it’s supposed to be and the bad times are the stepping stones.

It’s a single motion; as above so below; as the world so the soul.

night time, daytime, sunshine, blood. volume 1. “it’s the wanting”. bite the bedbugs. la belle et la bête of the ball.

twoticks

and the more i think about it, this all could have been avoided if they’d just let me be a girl in high school. it’s these two (it could be three) things or strands or strings; they’re tangled up together… and i can’t seem to unwind them. they’ve been threaded through so long in rain and snow and sun it might as well be one material, one strand. but they come from different sources, they are separate signals, multiplexed… and i can’t seem to demux, it’s too complex. misfiring, scruffy animals, sleeves pulled up so only the fingers and thumbs poke out. sparkle, tension, open, tense, intensity at tensile strength.

we sat on the couch eating adderall and watching romcoms for about an hour before he asked so uh you know billy? and billy came home and i met monica and i met ipa. and we got 40oz bottles of miller and budweiser and i couldn’t believe how fruity and delicious american beers were in america. “they taste like chemicals back home”. and later she was driving down a busy road. we passed a bottle of jack back and forth. she parked and asked me to watch her pee, and then we went into the store and she stole a tshirt. maybe i wish i’d never boarded that greyhound.

but

life is good now too. right? you’re a star; my trailer, your car. but i was there once. in chicago with an orange julius in my left hand (listening to freezepop), picking up red jelly dextromethorphan at the k-mart. playing sega on the sheet against the wall with the projector from best buy and i end up in the upstairs neighbour’s talking to the dog. but then i woke up in des moines, and then i woke up in denver, and i woke up in the desert on my birthday. and now home isn’t home.

i’ll be back. two years later i’ll wake up in des moines. two years later: chicago(mgs3), rockford, denver (crying in the cold over cigarettes), vegas (did we break up again?), san francisco they put me up in the tenderloin, bethany bridges, sydney, paris, portugal. we could have killed each other.

but. life is good now too. maybe better than it’s ever been? i cannot fuck this up. everything i’ve ever needed, i think. when i tell it to my friends they even say “oh so everything you’ve ever wanted? you should have been all along?” and i’m like yeah. maybe. maybe burning body fat releasing hidden chemistry; alchemy in the bloodstream. the ritual with the shrine still kept folded in the kitchen drawer. hermetic order of the frozen song — you have to let go, you have to let it go. field disturbances, september 2023, christmas party perfume baby belle of the ball — make no mistake it’s cyclical.

deerly behoovèd we are gathered here today to take an asprin, thin the blood. a pouch of powdered collegen; connective tissue from the blade at your left wrist to your face and your fat lip to that pinky finger that doesn’t bend to the “sid and nancy”, shifting angst, the broken sink in maida vale, the loathing, love and beeps museum.

it’ll never be the same. or, we’ll never be the same. it’ll be the same but we’ll be other people.

next week it’ll be a year since i last drank alcohol. a glass of red wine in florence in italy. remember when i dropped that bombay saphire and it smashed all little chunks of turquoise glass and marty asked “oh chee what happened” and i told him “she called me her little mango” and he understood. it was unavoidable. and drinking shards of glass is a small price to pay.

that’s not the last time i lost a bottle of gin after a long midnight walk like that trying to save the party: razzmatazz jumped up so excited i was home — that dog did not know how long she was… and she was so very very long. or was that tequila? anyway, alx put doritos in the microwave with grated cheese and pasta sauce and it tasted just like the nachos i’d eat 10 years later on the sleeper train.

and as the days go by in these long weeks and short months, this month (of weeks so long they lasted my entire life) is over. we made letters, everyone. drew them on canvases with mathematics. next week maybe we’ll even listen to them sing. “life’s incredible”.

what was i saying? oh yeah so that’s a year. a year since

it’s torture that nature made us love in different ways.

to expect love the way we show it.

to show it how we want it.

and love people who love different.

another year. and that was a year too, on pause. happy and peaceful. feeling lucky. i’ll say happy birthday next time.

it’s very late and i’m lying to the blog about the time because i don’t remember if it handles it correctly when the week is on the wrong day. it probably does and i think i’m misremembering something misconfigured long ago on some wordpress and emacs org-mode setup from another lifetime.

there’s an episode of clarissa explains it all where she says “I’ve seen the future of poetry and its name is PC Poem”. she gets the computer (a “multi-megabyte mind”) to write her one.

“why wrack my brain when i can let the computer wrack its hard drive?”

she types in some words.

the computer computes.

it prints something out.

her and sam just cannot decide if it’s the worst thing they’ve ever read or if it’s, like, pretty good.

after contemplation she decides it feels like cheating, not like writing, and it seems like she might throw it away.

wave or squeeze? like kat hepworth, nokia 3210, fastest coldest texting fingers in bow street. program your own ring tone. winnie the pooh and the blustery day. snugglepuss or rabbit, and everyone in the shop heard about it too. disappear with no goodbye when it’s time to go, just slip away when no one’s looking. on the bridge when the dark night gets darker, orange light all shining off the water.

and i met astrid who also likes ladybirds and there were two foxers wearing necklaces made of dental floss and shoe clips and then it was 2am and i felt so lucky again and now it’s 4am and i’m looking at my notes and they seem so sad and strange and unbefitting. i hope i wake up soon. i hope it’s another one like the other one.

and there’s another thing that never did exist before, and it’s with us now. and it’s been a long week. and every day as well. long weeks and short months. did i tell you that i got ID’d buying a can of red bull? she said she’d not believe “in a million years” that i was over 25. one of the top 19 highlights of my week. another was a tweet. another was “treat of a lifetime”. and alex doesn’t like it when trees grow arbitrarily in unexpected situations — like jack and the beanstalk. we laughed until we cried. it was a thousand years ago. maybe it is time to let go

i love being alive sometimes.

i had one of the nicest, most exhausting, funny, beautiful days at work. felt as though i’d been passed through a victorian clothes mangle. it’s hard to explain why that’s a good thing.

the next day was good, packing. and the night was intense and funny and near and good. the social had great talks. it was so nice to see the people it was so nice to see. dr basman was there with his vibrant sparkling eyes that seem strong enough to cut through metal and so gentle and precise and so joyful. he brought along an issue of his father’s chess magazine (rabbits review). me and mimi read through it with considerable delight.

and then we hopped on the Caledonia Sleeper. yes, wave goodbye in KC, up to Euston, on the night train. i ate haggis at midnight (my first food of the day). couldn’t get to sleep because i kept laughing myself awake. d in the morning i went to wh smith and i bought some babybels and text lily. we walked down to the Royal Scot’s Club and checked in. out for breakfast at the new town fox. back in the lobby we talk patchwork until grjte arrives and it’s time for lunch. pvh gave us a breakdown of the programme. i had salami and cucumber. we went back to the hotel where i lay in my bed feeling desolate and bereft until i received an SMS and bounced readily, full of energy, resurfaced and further discussed patchwork.

and so then everyone went to dinner. i find it hard to be hungry in groups, so i stayed behind. some dentists sat down beside me and started to talk. one of them said “it’s gotten to the point where i’m going to work to do my hobby. yep. you get to a point with dentistry where you just want to enjoy it”

the days were long and interesting. maybe i’ll get into that a few paragraphs from now i’m not strong enough at this second but imagine living in a world where everybody speaks a language that sounds exactly like english, with the same structure, but shares none of the vocabulary.

on Friday i guested on sweet lily’s radio programme at noonish. it was heaps of fun. i managed not to swear for an hour which i did not know was possible. it was quite the event. talking with lily is such a breeze. she described it like when a dog comes in and shakes off the day. i’ll jump three points ahead and she’ll be right there. it’s like solving tricky puzzles from memory. wired to the moon.

we talked about:

• how i was greyfriars bobby in a past life
• a spirit child that was freed from a microphone and is terrorizing the studio
• the night we met (one marked in the stars with an undying light)
• a man who who was eaten by wild boars who confused him for a large strawberry
• my hobby of orchestrating an orca hating and orca culling campaign
• that time i strangled a penguin while dressed as a penguin
• crawford on the ferry, a horseman full of wisdom
• my love for all animals, particularly marine life

several other items. it was only an hour but it had so much time in it.

another good day.

lily and me having matching tattoos now.

i’m in a place where people use acyclic hypergraphs to represent morphisms in a symmetric monoidal category and they aren’t even ashamed

i love it though. it’s cool being around people who really care about stuff, and it’s fun talking to people who think so much about something i didn’t even know you could think about.

sitting in these rooms. people pull out paper draw boxes and lines and say “i think this is it” and everyone agrees and asks questions about the boxes and thinks for a while and someone says “and this line is the write?” and the person says “no that’s the ability to write” and everyone says ahh and is satisfied.

and i don’t know half the nouns. and the ones i recognize are living in exciting new habitats. but a picture starts to form from little pieces of how i can be of service. and i don’t need to know the nouns as much as how they move around.

i feel so lucky to be here, among these people i work with who i love and cherish and respect. i feel so lucky to be in the room. and to occasionally feel as though there is the possibility that i might one day say something worth hearing.

you get to a point with dentistry where you just want to enjoy it

when i start these entries, i copy the file from the previous entry because my blog system is a practically unusable astro site instead of something beautiful like wordpress. these past few weeks when i see the opening line of the previous i CANNOT believe that only 7 days have passed since that ancient time.

should i move to Ladywell because it rhymes with Babybel?

let’s rock and fuckin roll.

read the tea leaves.

feel the sea breeze.

have you ever listened to the song Someone’s Missing by MGMT?

it’s like 120 seconds long.

it spends the first minute and 15 just building tension.

there’s a change in the bass line that implies a diminished chord, right at the precipice, a rising snare drum roll,

and then it bursts; resolves to a perfect major chord with a loud bright descending bass line

it’s heavenly

but that moment just before, when all the tension is built up, and it’s just about to explode and you can’t take it anymore? isn’t that just where you’d like to pause the record?

when you are leaning back on a chair and you nearly fall but then you catch yourself

but just as you catch, before you know you’re not going to fall

when you’re just about to kiss someone for the first time, and you can taste their breath, the electric on their skin

and it’s inevitable, and you can feel it with your whole body

but before it is over

that is life

chicken, but we never back down

just tension, no release

we could crash into each other and explode

right here in the middle of the road

i love this time of the year. and i love you. and you look just like a wicker basket full of strawberries. and your emotions are a millimeter away.

it’s a big week. i’ll be going up to 🐞 ladybird land with the 🔬 laboratory, maybe see 🐞 lily. but before that there is 🔴 another day.

and i’ve learned i find it quite relaxing to close my eyes and picture myself on a plane that is nosediving and soon to crash into the ocean.

with all the beeping and emergency lights and the weeping and i am quietly sitting, gentle, smiling and waiting.

anyway. to bed with the rabbit. early start.

and the only strings anyone will be thinking about are the ones around babybels and the ones surrounded by quotation marks.

happy hallowevening week. i hope you are enjoying your the day after el dia de los muertos. from work at a place with long weeks and short months, to a party where the girls dance like loose fireworks — and i got misgendered so many times tonight and i shall not leave the house again:) can your gender too wash off in the rain?

and now i’m off to meet a colleague who just arrived from austria. i’m doing cannon over bridge, because the Northern Line was originally conceived of as a form of punishment for petty thieves and vagrants (the Central Line for more sinister criminals) and this way there are more pleasant snakes.

someone took a disliking to me outside a train station and told their friends they were going to smack me but they never did.

what else?

i’m sure there’s something.

who knows.

this really is my season

october rabbits

all twinkly inside

skies are dusty orange and hot purple

though today

sleepy rabbits

sppooky rabbits

• feel it, what you’re feeling; let it go
• even if you need it: let it go
• breathing, keeping even, letting go
• even if you need it: let it go

brother, can you spare a sigil ?

---

my week was working, and occasionally i would eat some tuna fish. and then sometimes i went outside and walked around.

big week next week.

did you know that Request has a .destination property that you can look at to know if the request is an import() in a js file, or a in a stylesheet context, or the src of an iframe? and you can look at that in a service worker. so you can, say, detect if the person has done import "./file.css" in a js file and if so send rewrite their css into a bit of javascript that injects it into the head.

it’s extremely cool!

you know what else you can do? you can postMessage the bytes of a request from the service worker back to the main thread so that the kernel gets smaller and the all the power you could imagine lives in userland?

anyway

it’s nice to have an anchor, or a magnet.

i hope you enjoy the song