At my high school there was a sign that said: “The world belongs to those who read.” That’s a lie, I thought, a lie, a lie, a lie.

she copies down sentences that tell one how to live, which have the undeniable weight of truth because they come from books

They say willingness is what one needs to succeed. They say one needs to succeed.

Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room. He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life, that’s how we bring Dad back.

I care for Henrietta Lacks and all the names whispered in my ear by the live oak trees. I don’t care about the father of modern gynecology, honored on South Carolina’s golf course capitol.

Because this mess I made I made with love. Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured. Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.

I have been blogging for twenty years. How about that.

I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.

I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.

E, for empire—a thing to impale, kill, break
Breach.

I crave a ferry to San Francisco and a dead phone full of messages.

I could not lay down the grief I carried, but I could name it for what it was, and by naming it ease the burden…

Me: Well, that was an intellectually productive bath.

Jeremy: Oh yes?

Me: I figured out existentialism.

Jo: Well done!

Me: You know how I was puzzling over Camus’ “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”? It’s not a thought experiment, it’s an imperative.

Jeremy: Right.

Me: Oh so you knew this all along?

Jeremy: Yep.

Jo: It means that Sisyphus has a simple job to do and knows how to do it and even though it will never be finished, that’s all you need to be happy.

Jeremy: No, it means you have to give people agency, even if what they are doing seems pointless to you.

Me: No! It means life is pointlessly hard work that will never be finished, but you have to invent ways to be happy anyway.

In this family we interpret Camus in ways that reflect our highly individual temperaments and perspectives TILL DEATH COMES FOR US

…the blueprint for building a worthwhile, authentic life already exists within you.

To enact an existence that is always love and resistance demands of us a deliberate and conscious decision to find joy – not away from the fight, but in the fucking fight.

Wait. Wait and see. The world is not always cruel.

Mind filled, emptied, filled again with brilliant things I’d write if only I were brilliant.

My niece and her excellent husband safely married, we flew home (via shenanigans) to find our little home and our pride of housecats lovingly tended by yarnivore.

Driving to the barn last Friday I had to brake from 65 to a dead stop in the fast lane. The physical shock of deceleration meant I didn’t panic when the BMW that had been tailgating me had to drive up onto the soft shoulder to avoid hitting me. The traffic crawled for twenty minutes around the golf course near Crystal Springs. No one got impatient because as fire trucks and ambulances pushed through us it became evident that whatever had happened was very bad.

The highway patrol was letting one lane through. As I drove past I saw a tarp covering something instantly recognizable in the middle of the empty lanes. I saw a red hatchback crumpled up against the middle divider, and I think I saw the driver’s face, a woman, bereft.

i found a news story afterward that said her passenger had tried to cross the four lanes of 280 to get help, and that he had not survived.

He has haunted me all week. I rode Lenny that afternoon. His coat is like satin over hard muscle. He looks like a war horse. I’d be scared of his vigor if I didn’t already know how to dance with him. My garden is putting on a last glorious show before the heat. My Matilija poppy and hummingbird sage are flowering for the first time. Last night I cut two Frog Hollow peaches into rough cubes and put them in Hendricks and tonics to drink out on the deck while my friends the crows serenaded us.

The world is changing and I have never loved my life more. I feel them all around me, all the dead, and I try to make sure their deaths mattered. I feel him too, trying to get across the freeway to Crystal Springs. What they whisper is that this coffee, this little garden, this breath of wind, life, is a gift.

The further away I am from Australia, the more work I have to do to explain the geographical situation of the place I grew up in.