Once Desire Was Off The Table

Snow adjacent to the Horning's barn looks pink, sunlight reflected off red walls. Woke up to gems of ice on the edges of branches everywhere, Song and Jake nosing through the backyard, duck tracks frozen in the snow. Jeremiah's bean plant was tremulous in the kitchen while coffee brewed and the computer whirred starting up. Email, including a kind one from Michael, synchronistic (is that the right word?), thinking yesterday of how I miss talking to him, particularly about the fine line between literature and hack fiction, and how that discussion plays out differently as writer or reader.

Gut twisted as if filled with nails, and fatigue. Rolling through dreams again, this time of containers (for text), and the word "contours". "Does that help to hear?" Whatever one hears while reading, but yes. Pick ten pieces and write them, ten containers say, and call that a novel. But right now the whole point is hack fiction (really? It is?), the joy of a good detective, and who cares about Roland Barthes, John D'Agata, Nabakov, et cetera.

Lists: groceries ("get spinach - we seem to be eating a lot of spinach these days") and Staples (turbo tax, also laser toner, must be two separate transactions in order to fully benefit from relevant coupons). Tim's for pet food. We're going to try regular trash bags instead of litter box liners.

Certain keys stick - the T and the E most noticeably. D. and his boyfriend have a dog named Maggie, making me think of Maggie O'Ryan in was it Galway, and was it nineteen years ago. "I think I'm in love," utterances over beer, and how easy that was for both of us, after, walking, once desire was off the table. Maybe that's the objective, how to be easier with desire, or manage it somehow. Sex does seem to work as a metaphor for writing.

Kathy Acker essays, Best of Friends, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg. Yet another pigeon club meeting blown off (ask yourself what you're avoiding then why). How tired one gets from just a glass of wine.