yesterday i asked my cashier at trader joe's if he was having a lot of danger-lettuce conversations in light of the cyclosporidia situation in the midwest. EVERY OTHER CUSTOMER, said he, but he himself wanted it; how else to lose those last 30 pounds? i told him i preferred victorian tapeworm pills but a staycation is a staycation and we wished each other well on our journeys. it's still canadian-wildfire hazy this morning, though not as peachy-apocalyptic as it's been this week, and i think the AQI is around 170, which my soccer teammates and i would have killed for in southern california in the late '80s and early '90s. i sincerely hope the anti-abortion protesters at the clinic don't bring actual infants as props this morning, as they are wont to do from time to time. i appreciate a good prop, i do, but you don't have to make it so obvious that you don't care about babies once they're born. on journeys, we'll be seeing the odyssey at our favorite indie theater tonight; i saw that it got a rave in the new york times and is nearly three hours long, so i'm both hyped and thinking strategically about my beverage consumption. if memory serves, les misérables remains the only movie i've ever had to dash out of for a bathroom break, and i was only seeing it as part of an oscars-related feat of endurance/completism; little was at stake here, what am i talking about, but even so.
we're leaving for something like two and a half weeks in california and alaska on wednesday and i've bought my first john mcphee for the occasion; i might also take the closet apart for the occasion, as i would like to bring a backpack for hikes and feel sure that i caught a recent glimpse of the one i used to take to volunteer at the wild bird fund. would my smelling like new york city pigeon poop and chicken dander increase the odds of being mauled by a bear? would wearing a WHAT WOULD HERZOG DO? tee? hard to say.
i just finished janet malcolm's the silent woman, which my past self seems to have added to my library queue so i'd have to think about biography theory (it's about the first half-dozen sylvia plath biographies and assorted plath-adjacent memoirs and, among other things, what it's like to engage with what she left behind when the people she left behind are alive, litigious, and epistolary freaks). the book i want to write about the overlooked aviator won't have the same concerns, exactly–i think most of her children have died and i am in no danger of being a post-structuralist–but i certainly picked things up and have been thinking about how mealy-mouthed i would rather not sound. in malcom's telling, (plath's sister-in-law) olwyn hughes was a hydroelectric dam, ted was a manic pixie dream dude, and everyone else was either attractive or portly. i guess when you don't want to make assumptions about your subjects what you see with your own eyes when you have, like, pizza and olives at their acquaintances' houses becomes extra important? i am also technically reading a book about how to write and sell nonfiction, but the 5%-10% i've gotten through so far leads me to belive that the nonfiction writing i'm already doing is serving me there. part of me is interested in a creative nonfiction MFA, it would be nice to have that community and those contacts, but maybe i should just pitch more and trick myself into picking things up on the job again? it turns out that a lot of being a writer is tricking yourself into doing things; maybe all jobs are like that. the book doesn't recommend an MFA, mind you, it's just a thing that sounds attractive.
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