9/30/04 - Modestly better today. As long as I get meaning out of the work I'm doing, it will all be okay: that's what I determined.

9/29/04 - Woke up (yes, at 5:15 a.m.) to find that my hometown's in the Times -- albeit through the glycerin-smeared lens of Odessa Piper's various endeavors. (Not that I'd complain about breakfast at the L'Etoile Cafe, which I actually have patronized on several occasions, whereas I only went to the restaurant once and was treated to dessert by a suitor with relatively deep pockets; the suit, sad to say, was fruitless, though the ill-recalled dessert may not have been.) For what it's worth, the East Side Farmer's Market on Wilson & Ingersoll was always superb, even "superior," I daresay, although much smaller.

There's a serious smell of rot in the office, like pasta gone bad. I've been awake for three hours already. This is not fair.

"Oh, hey. I haven't seen the Onion in ages." [checks]

Oh no, no, no, no. I shouldn't even blog it; that compounds the indignity.

[later, after a 2-hour-long panic attack] Okay: fuck the four-day schedule. I can't do this. Prescription: blueberries, cucumber, whole grains, a small amount of yogurt, and possibly radicchio and spinach and gorgonzola and walnuts, and thirteen hours of sleep to kill the deficit before it kills me. I'd say that I don't usually miscalculate like this, but I have no idea if that's true; this seems familiar enough, certainly.

I now have an apple. Can you help me, apple? You contain five grams of fiber, 80 calories, 8% of my RDA of vitamin C and 2% of the RDA for Vitamin A and iron; also 16 grams of sugar. 25% of your volume is air. I'm not sure about you, I admit, but there's probably no harm, and you're cheaper than the fancy pomegranate beverage by far. You can't substitute for human companionship or assurance that even though I am going to die, I can't imagine the alternative anyway, but you can give my metabolism "something better" to do.

9/28/04 - On the stretch of yuppie shops on Hayes off Market:

God damn
the stretch of yuppie shops on Hayes off Market.
And also yesterday's entry.

What falls through our fingers here
is dust; we see through it.
(Someone's throat is being cut
even as I type.

We will wear no diamonds; we shall not
offer up our jewels to finance wars;
we will not close the shades.)

We will ride the train again
and again
and again
and again

till our training is complete.
And we will keep watch, meanwhile.

On the razor's edge between consumerism and asceticism: that's us! Find the goods and burn 'em.

Caltrain: Apropos: I see you no longer smoke on the Caltrain platform, P., in deference to the signs.

Pica: Something in me is not right. Autumn curves back on itself like a Moebius strip, but slowly, and these objects change their shape, their benefits and costs. What once was food now is poison; what sustained us now repels; what sealed our heart against rust now hews it open to the air; what was knowledge is conjecture, what was creed is cant; what had volume, slivered.

The chorus: Does this mean you're quitting?

Pica: It might! "In deference to the signs," which cannot easily be read; I can say no more.

The BART trains, cadenza: But infallibly and with due diligence (f. Latin diligere, trans. "to cherish" in yr copy of Augustine), no timepoint missed or connection dropped, we have conveyed you citywise and thrice ploughed under the Bay to stolid Oakland, that you might sleep companionably, and without fear of Lethe.

Pica: Or nonentity.

BART trains: Or solvency.

Pica: Pray cast out all tobacco! I have no fear of solvency. Leaves' death in my wake; I wake to sleep, and dream of service fees, as autumn advances.

Laptop: This is twaddle. You need an iPod. We both do. There's no alternative. Get a high-value BART ticket and an iPod. How many packs of cigarettes have you gone through this year? How many Odwalla bars? How many black guitars? You can totally afford an iPod.

Pica: Thank you. I will certainly take the "you could just not eat" argument under advisement, as I always do.

Laptop: Consumerism and asceticism! Come on! I'm on your side! Pica pica piqued!

Pica: Ladies and gentlemen: el laptop picador. Indeed.

Laptop: What, you want a cupcake instead? Hey, I hear it's not National Interminable-Dialogue-Writing Month until November, sad to say--

Pica abruptly shuts the Laptop in a backpack, zips it up, and perches serenely on top.

Pica: Oh, I can end them.

9/27/04 - Attempted to earn my keep in Bk by getting up early, walking [how many? many, anyway] blocks to the Berkeley Bowl and Crixa to get soy milk, blueberries, bananas, freshly ground peanut butter, good dish soap and Crixa pastries and a New York Times for the ideal morning ritual, while my companion slept off the grape-juice-sweet Cabernet-Shiraz of last night's celestial potluck before his 10 a.m. appointment with Aristotle. I knew, but inconveniently forgot, that Crixa is closed on Mondays; I didn't know that the Berkeley Bowl doesn't open until nine; I had no idea whatsoever that you can toss four quarters into a NYT vending machine and botch it so as to relinquish both your money and your paper. I came back and the router was dead. End result: pastries from Peet's, homebrewed coffee, and the last banana consumed, hunger from errands satiated; router resuscitated and the NYT consumed via Laptop, yielding the wonderful news, from yesterday's paper, that Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 should hit this country next year, when we of course all will have fled.

Also wonderful (skeptics, avert yr eyes): Werckmeister Harmonies on VHS! Alas, no one has a VCR or TV -- for a woman whose upkeep once derived from video store revenues, once upon a mid-80s time, I have grown far from my roots. Turns out you can get Zanussi's Structure of Crystals too -- wonder if it's as good as I remember.

"To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying." MM, bk 3 ch 29 p 206 my copy

I have never seen that, or most things, put better.

9/26/04 - If you are in Berkeley
(as after some effort and the aid
of the Caltrain and BART, Pica and
the Laptop and a Book at present are
and were yesterday) and you walk

from MLK to Hearst up past Euclid
and the bodega in which the adorable
girl peremptorily conducts your transactions
to a Velvet Underground song and charms
your party, up another hill

to the "Cyclotron Drive" and beyond
to the hill behind the Greek Theatre
and to the ledge on the hill behind the Greek Theatre
where a fence topped with barbed wire fails to prevent
half a dozen young people from crashing the gates

of the show whose lights you can dimly discern
along with the smoke, and the sound at an entirely
appropriate bedroom-stereo volume, and
the spectacle of Berkeleyans milling about
from churro stand to Port-o-Lets,

you can hear the Pixies for free.

I was ridiculously happy. You can bet everyone who shared the experience is singing "Gouge Away" today, inexorably. I joined in on half the songs before I could remember their titles or source: this is what the Pixies do, and may they reign over a paradise as nice as this one for it.

9/25/04 - Modest alterations here to aid readability. The laundry pile has now been reduced by approx. 10%. A carob-walnut-banana-protein shake is a bad chaser for a petit dejeuner. My companion helpfully points out that writing the novel in such a way that it goes completely to pieces halfway through does not make my job easier. Life, bright and dark, continues--

9/24/04 - Our hearts are bright, our heads held high, and we feel almost strong enough to undertake The Laundry Pile tonight, before it overtakes us. Guitar's front tire is flat; the Laptop, charged, is momentarily happy and humming Leonard Cohen songs to itself; the trains are recovered from their various convulsions; the nice Czech art has made it at last to the Room (and, on our woeful post-Caltrain-convulsion excursion to the Stanford Bookstore we discovered a cheap book on immunology and also the photographs of Trcka, which pleased us greatly, although not enough to buy a book devoted as well to Helmut Newton, whose photos seem to differ from pornography only in not being titillating. That is our knee-jerk response to him. It's a nice tour of the decline of art, however, if you like to believe art is in decline! Now I will go write for the New Criterion! Okay, I won't; organized curmudgeonliness has no appeal for me, and as far as the politics go all you need to know is how much it made my day to see, on the wall of an elementary school, a list of "new words" the students were being asked to define and use in a sentence on which the second of the three words was "socialist." I don't remember everything verbatim, but: Definition: "A person who supports others' needs." Sample sentences: "A socialist can live in an apartment or a house." "My mother is a socialist because she looks out for everyone." God bless you, Left Coast!). All excitement here, alas, is parenthetical.

9/23/04 - Maybe I'll survive long enough (these are, except the fish, my favorite foods anyway!) to see the Rite of Spring performed again, after a restrained and precise and luminary treatment by the SF Symphony last night.

Laptop, brimming with fury: I can certainly attest to its subtlety and grace from the bag check!

Pica: Now then. I left you my copy of Middlemarch and half an Odwalla bar.

Laptop: [guilty silence]

Pica: And a great many Shostakovich and Mahler mp3s.

Laptop: [dreamily] Shame they're not doing the former's 8th this season, eh?

Pica: Agreed. They are doing the latter's 9th, but I'm fairly certain you don't have anything to wear.

Laptop: Sequins.

9/22/04 - An entry on politics is under construction.

First day of fall?

9/20/04 - They gave you a hazelnut mocha to make you stop. To make you stop and think: it was no error, no accident, although wicked. You thought about money, and time; you thought about energy and direction. You thought about using the last few unused pronouns here to keep the reader on his/her toes. You thought about Guitar and the blameless Train, and that entry you must not have saved which read Herr, es ist noch nicht Zeit, wart' noch ein bisschen laenger or something equally ungrammatical, and of your love for autumn anyway, and mid-century lit crit (and Wm Hazlitt's Shakespeare essays) and elliptical orbits which lead back to a single point. In theory. In practice, it's all different.

Statistics! Statistics will save us. We may stop at the library before quitting San Jose this evening and find some treasures, although it is not clear how they will fit in the backpack as it contains the Laptop and the Various Other Treasures from the weekend's immoderate excursions. Green Apple Books, you must go farther still away: the Richmond is devastatingly accessible, where Power Bars can power it, apparently. This is fucking Eden and all knowledge and danger signified by fruit. Keine Schoenheit...

The trains, en masse: If language were liquid
it would be rushing in
instead here we are
in a silence more eloquent
than any words could ever be
These words are too solid
They don't move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
That flies by, and is gone...

Pica: In two years I'll be thrice the age at which those lines first reached my ears, and with my eyes cast heavenwards I longed for New York.

Laptop, with pointed cynicism: You longed for everything; so what? So we all do. Now we are materialists.

Pica: "Screw you for your solitude, and again for your loneliness, screw you for your optimism, a hundredfold for your pessimism, for your naive ideals, for your bitter resignation, for loving again and renunciation, for your childhood and your maturation, for your euphoria and your grief, for your sore shoulders and your nimble feet, for your malaise and your inspiration, for availability and remoteness, for intelligence and torpor, for lacking all conviction and for passionate intensity, for your one true theory and your many false ones, for gathering me under your umbrella and for casting me out into the rain, for waking up and falling asleep again, for my faithlessness and my remorse, for my solitude and my loneliness." Did I miss one?

Laptop: My battery's dying again. It's cold in the backpack. The masking tape over the CD drive itches and I want some orange juice.

Pica: Orange juice!

Laptop: You asked.

Pica: Gott im Himmel! I am not giving you orange juice.

Laptop: I can still want it, can't I, with no hope of reward or satisfaction?

Pica, with pity: Is it the riot of orange sunlight that you miss?

Laptop: In Berkeley.

Even the laptop misses Berkeley. Irrefutably.

9/19/04 - An update:

We could read Kierkegaard

and we did read some vexing papers on textual analysis

and we should continue with Middlemarch although our copy is away

and we now have a German copy of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften at last

("at last," we say, about a book we have read twice and know so well we don't need a German copy really at all)

we are in fact staring at a wall of books

but we are afraid the blog audience is comparatively impoverished

and consequently, we "input" drivel.

On Berkeley: The cafe that sells classical CDs has very good salad, but the CDs are overpriced and they ghettoize the woman composers and the ECM New Series CDs (the latter partially) so on the one hand they're segregated from the Canon but on the other they're altogether perhaps too easy to find all at once and snap up if you are making a hundred grand a year, which we Are Not. Beside it is the university press bookstore. Everyone knows that a university press bookstore is an awful, awful place for magpies. We will not mention the university press bookstore again. There was a little rain in Berkeley this morning, although it had gone off by the time we got back to the house to fetch an umbrella. Naturally. We cannot report on the quality of breakfast at La Note or Venus, although we speculate that in both cases it is to be revered.

Laptop: The Caltrain and I are in collusion

Caltrain (sotto voce): I AM AN UNWILLING BYSTANDER NO ACCOMPLICE TRULY

Laptop: to punish you for your indiscretions by holding your novel hostage and divorcing you from your worldly effects.

Pica: Oh, marooned in the East Bay! How I suffer!

Laptop: [glowers]

Pica: I took you to Berkeley Espresso and to the park. I plugged you in and sang you aubades. You have no moral high ground and terrible strategic sense.

Laptop: Read that last paragraph of prose--

Pica: All genius and laptops must sleep.

9/18/04 - Nora's Cafe gives you the Internet, les croissants chocolates, and waitstaff who call you "madame," much to your delight at having achieved apparent maturity after a quarter-century; they also give you two double espressos, because "another" takes precedence over "coffee" in their parsing.

Laptop: Pica! Don't fall in love.

Pica, sleepy: Hm? How can I help it?

Laptop: There are mountains to climb. Pyrenees, Alps, Cascades even--

Pica: Can you not climb mountains if you've fallen in love?

Laptop: (sagely) You could fall off.

Pica: I do not grasp your meaning.

Laptop: --

Pica: Furthermore, you throw me off balance when I am walking down the street, so I don't think you ought to tell me what burdens I may carry over great distances and uncertain terrain.

Laptop: This is hubris!

Pica looks at the sidewalk, uneasily, and considers.

Laptop: We all have bitterness in our chosen thing.

Pica: Did I plug you into the wrong outlet last night? Wherefore this black comfort from you today?

Waitress: (with check) Par la madame, merci!

Laptop: If you want to add your voice to the chorus of voices who tell of falling off mountains, ecstatic, shouting the name of the beloved into the crevasse, then shout away and we all will mourn the loss. I prefer to have you whole and bitter as nutmeg, or as the cafe down the street puts it, "nugmet."

Pica, understanding: You are jealous!

Laptop: (sulks)

Pica: We'll have the whole Caltrain to ourselves! Really, you shouldn't be like this. Of course nothing could replace you.

Laptop: Oh, how gauche.

Pica, gaily: Merci!

They walk off towards the train station together, fueled by the eerie twin powers of too-much-espresso and too-much-data-reception.

9/17/04 - I always forget that even when I wrote really terrible papers in college, when the professors handed them back with the word "disappointed" figuring prominently in the comments below the graduation-threatening letter grade, they were not the worst papers ever turned in for credit at a university level. It is up to me to grade some papers, this weekend, which are significantly closer to that lower echelon; I'm not quite sure how to do it. What I want to do is hand the worst ones back and make the students rewrite them until they are good, to grip their wrists as they type and make them stand before me and recite the draft until it flows with the tightness and coherency of the Gettysburg Address or a first-rate hip-hop anthem and then never to force me to read creaky, obsequious, unconscious prose again, but who am I to these people anyway? What kingdom can I rule?

Guitar: Be still, and look deep into things: your tiredness and trials are not your life. Last afternoon, asleep

The 300 bus: on your backpack in the sun I conveyed you to Quarry Rd and when you disembarked you felt alert, delighted, sure in yourself,

Pica: and in the benevolence of the built-up world, the temperate air, potential all around; and after that brittle skipping CD that night the Kodaly overture was so pristinely lovely...

A room: And the night and the season creeps in over the hills, knows things you only guess at,

Pica: but I guess well...

9/16/04 - Not sure it's going to be Mills: but my amusing story about the campus visit was eclipsed by a 50+ - block trek down MacArthur Blvd to the beleaguered BART station where an offline computer confounded the trains and their passengers, and while I was trying to get my bearings somewhere south/east/west/? of that my mother called to tell me my uncle had finally died of cancer. He was -- they always say this, but so it should always be -- a devoted and loving husband & father & grandfather, a kind and peaceful man, cheerful and industrious and funny, and probably should have forgone those packs of Old Golds as I should toss the Nat Shermans no voice from beyond dissuaded me from buying yesterday. So far, without bearings, without direction, thousands of miles from Harshaw Wisconsin and the winding roads off 51 and all the birch trees turning golden over the lake and the hawks and the crowcalls and smell of distant fires, I am numb. My cousin had meant to move, with his fiancee, out to Oakland/the Bay Area roughly when I did, but he stayed to care for his father through the end. I walked from one end of Oakland to the other and stopped to get my coordinates at a bus stop advertising an American Cancer Society relay, and if this minor impromptu physical feat compels you to send, say, a dollar per block traversed to the cancer-fighting charity of your choice, it can't hurt.

Other books with "March" in the title: there's The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth, which I never did read; maybe that should be next. I've got the scholarly background for it, anyway, in theory. I found this and was intrigued -- the world changes, and convulses, and nothing is certain or secure and so is there really any reason for me not to go to Europe for Christmas this year? I could.

9/15/04 - Mmf -- supposed to be writing, not blogging -- oh wait, no, supposed to be at work, not writing -- hellfire, which way's up again? The Borders? The Kurtag CD? (Slept through the night even! To the pal who called me yet again at Coupa: hope you did too, with yr 3-hour handicap.) Ack. I know one thing: oh, God, folks, Middlemarch is outstanding, astounding, or both. I can't tell if all readers are supposed to identify both with Dorothea and Lydgate (following the author's lead?), or if it's just me. I also don't know if anyone but me sees the (circumstantial) Eliot-Musil connection; despite obvious differences I keep getting similar impressions from MM as MWQ... I'll leave y'all to fight over who's the better writer, though if it isn't obvious already how you'll vote you can send me the ballots.

For the foreseeable future (i.e. next 2 months or so) I will try to decide whether I want to attempt the premed studies at cheap, proletarian SFSU or premium, cozy Mills. Vote on that too if you like. Obviously intentions are heavily skewed towards the former, but concerns other than the price tag come into play, like "community" and "commute" and the fact that I never have tried the liberal-arts-college thing, which some people swear by. Maybe it would do me good. So far, following the money fucking hasn't.

9/14/04 - We brave terrible terminal emulation to bring you the following message: Sprint PCS is the bestest cell phone company in the world, for when I called woozily last night begging them to reconsider charging me all those overage fees they actually, actually reversed them all. Yes every last one. We will be loyal to Sprint until we die, which will now be after we see the Black Rider, pay October's rent, buy groceries and retire to Coupa for the process of coupa-sition for the first time in altogether too long, and having learned our lesson well we will steer clear of the many shiny, shiny art books at the P.A. Borders and we will not buy that Kurtag CD no no no. Not until we know how to say "despite the clear virtues of Hungarian composers our pocketbook cannot encompass all of culture" in fluent magyar. "Nem ertem" is about all we can manage at present, although we are pleased by the vowel harmony in both "Palo Alto" and "Berkeley."

Although the job is not a proper opera topic I will add that after a brief nosedive prospects for the year are improving. Thank heaven. Maybe the horrible incompetence dreams will stop soon, especially when they give way to fearful visions of La Llorona at 2 a.m. and force me to quell the adrenaline curled around a pillow with all the room's lights on, cursing whoever sealed that mirror onto the wall with paint.

9/13/04 - Of course I am a fool, and the only real title for the novel is "Precision." You all knew that. It still needs an unthinkable amount of work. I have assembled my mountain-climbing gear and now I have to climb the mountain. And actually, not all the gear is assembled even yet: there are holes in the plot which the stochastic-composition method seems unlikely to fix: leaving aside what will require visits to foreign countries to complete (grant, anyone?), there isn't an ending yet because, hell, I always figured that was the last thing you write -- but now I'm not sure -- don't I need some idea of how it ends, of what's drawing it onwards, or do I want it to end up like that other book?

Poverty, of a sort, is compelling me to eat unpopped corn kernels. They taste much like the popped kind, but harder and more fibrous. Anyway I haven't had that dream about my teeth all falling out for a while.

Update: biting your tongue with that degree of force is no fun. Oh you sweet, sinister Bay! You with your wiles, with your trains and trestles, your gleaming twilight through the fog! I give you heart and soul, but must you defang me? I need my defenses.

Caltrain: I ferried you today for free, through an accident of scheduling.

Guitar: I shielded you from the conductor and made diversions, and last night conveyed you across the Oregon Expwy under very dangerous circumstances without incident. What defenses do you need?

Pica: I debarked with a bike, a bag and a backpack and, still far from home, stopped to ponder. At length I removed the U-lock from the bike, locked the bag to the backpack and balanced the lock over my right shoulder, with the bag hung fore and the backpack aft, mounted the bike and set off as slowly as possible (avec my helmet, M & D) down California Ave towards home. I rolled up my slightly shiny pants to keep them free of the pants-loving gears. I turned down Bryant, sped up, saw no traffic, and in this ludicrous and listing posture fled a sudden rash of onrushing cars through a red light (mine) and down to placid Colorado, the warning flash of my headlamp making eerie patterns on the sleeping lawns. The murkiness of the terrain gave me pause and I slowed again, recalling my thin luck and broken tooth. But home, as you say, without incident. What defenses do I need, tell me?

The Bank is not a character in this opera and is silent.

Guitar: I'd agree, you need your teeth.

Room: Here's a toothbrush, and a coffee pot. They oppose each other. If you would make use of the colossal stash of calcium & magnesium supplements, they are yours as well, and the soy flour from the bag of groceries with which you are to make soy "milk" which does, I suppose, taste like a slightly grittier version of the "Silk" you so adore but might be improved with vanilla extract or, er, Kahlua.

Pica: My piebald life: the black coffee, the white flour, the darkness over Palo Alto, the whitegrey Berkeley morning sky, the white laptop in the black backpack, a light heart in an exhausted body.

The black guitar: A magpierrot lunaire!-- Quotes a bar or two.

Voice, offstage: The white cigarettes and the black lungs.

Pica: Hush! A lot you know.

9/9/04 - All calculation is risk

but all the same, I need a plan. I need momentum. Testify, research.

9/8/04 - all I can think is how much I'd like to walk off a cliff

but that seems dire

so let's start a new blog instead

and watch it convalesce.

I think the theoretical backing of the current various chickenshit impulses is that I can't watch it go down again after it's gone up this far; that seem fair? A coworker was prescribed meat by her doctor to solve various maladies which resemble (undiscussed) problems of my own. I asked if the meat had done the trick; it hadn't -- so much for meat! A lot of fruit goes to waste in PA, and probably all over this part of the country -- I keep thinking of the people who sell electricity back to the utilities when they run their wind generators and wonder if an analogous buyback could not be instituted by, say, mid-sized producers of "natural" foods. The trouble is that you could have some pretty unnatural oranges growing in your backyard. I ate a lemon I found on the sidewalk today. How much harm could the sidewalk do the lemon? When I start to glow, I'll get my answer.

a partial explanation

The players:

Pica pica nuttalli (lyrics, vocals, and erratic evasive movements)

The shiny objects band:
Guitar, a bike
The Laptop, a comfort and a goad
The Black Guitar
[Bike, a guitar (unseen)]
A room in the back of a house in the back of a verdant lot in Palo Alto, CA
A chorus of trains and buses:
    BART
    Caltrain
    VTA
    Muni
A lot of books

Is it a blog? Is it a rock opera? Is it a blog opera? Is it readable? Is it compatible with Pica's obligations to the federal government (no, not those obligations)? Will there be cake, creme brulee, or suet pudding?