I HAVE FOUND IT! the ratty old notebook in which i wrote a couple of my posts from last year IS REGAINED and you will know of, probably, some more excuses for why i haven't pitched my rambling creative nonfiction book yet! very exciting stuff.
yesterday was the first day of spring, and i have a gentle hope that the absolute mountains of shit that have accumulated outside the clinic have melted back into the universe. this week i set off for the farmers' market in head-to-toe malachite to signal that i was in a good mood and was open to longer days, the circle of life, etc, and was asked if i'm irish. it's just the best color, clipboard guy.
the self-imposed deadline of the end of march draws nigh for me and my sister and our goosebook, and i still haven't figured out what the devastating final section will sound like. we have the visual and i know what i want to say, but the part where the actual poetry comes up and out of me in the middle of the night is yet to come. i don't mean to abdicate responsibility for it, i don't think the muse is rooting around in the bottom of her tote bag for me, but there is an extent to which trying to force it just...i mean, you see what i sound like when i'm forcing myself to put pen to paper.
i have a truly massive stack of aviation-related books next to my bed. their titles are all combinations of like a dozen words, the muse is not speaking through whoever is finishing these things up, but i'd like to think i can do better with my own version (even though it's entirely possible it won't be my call). joe and i went to a new friend's birthday on the upper west side a few weekends ago and i met a woman who publishes nonfiction with a big old entity down in DC after years of being in magazines up here (we had several colleagues in common from my days at the ladymag), and in attaching myself to a wall and nattering at her for what felt like an hour about the size of early planes' fuel tanks (she just published a book about another luminary from the same time period) i think i might have accidentally networked? she offered at the beginning of our interlude to hook me up with her entity's magazine, and it's a great one, i'd love to write for them, and maybe i should be trying to do it now. i've mostly been treading water with day-job clients as we wrap the big goosebook pitch, though i did realize yesterday that i very much want to write for an indie mag that almost bit on a pitch of mine last year(?) and it's about time to do another piece about death...that they might want? some interesting legislation has come through recently and local corpses are doing spicy new things, surely that's something i need to cold-call people about.
i have finally been allowed to go back to the blood bank after three months in the wilderness, and they have made up for lost time. at my appointment this past tuesday the gal who stuck me hit the one part of my vein that isn't prolific and it was clear that hijinks would ensue; a more senior tech was hyping her up as she worked, she was new and looked nervous, and when the apheresis machine started whistling and singing about how my pressure was too low she panicked and mashed its buttons until it was barely running at all. the run time recalculated and i was going to be there for...145 minutes. i tried asking, gently, if the pressure might be revisited, but i think the system locks after it's been adjusted a few times, and it's not like i didn't have a good book with me. i was sitting in front of the center's biggest TV and caught two segments of syfy's st. patrick's day leprechaun marathon (bewilderingly, not called LEPRETHON), including leprechaun in space, my franchise favorite. trying to explain '90s horror boobs and the cronenberg and dune jokes to the bewildered gen z techs wasn't especially successful, but i was where i was supposed to be, probably.
pauline and i are meeting up in puerto rico at the beginning of may; i've booked us a rooftop in old san juan and a secret jungle fort near el yunque, as well as an evening of kayaking around in bioluminescent plankton. i have leaned into assembling the wardrobe of a monied septuagenarian widow for this trip and am soliciting tips from both a mexico-based guide i befriended in yucatan a few years ago and, apparently, my therapist, who lived there for a while. i don't trust most people's travel observations, but they're both real ones and i feel the island has plans for us. i am your tool, puerto rico! if your vengeance could involve a golden mongoose that would be especially grand.
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