A fleeting smile, whether from an arthritic octogenarian stumbling off a bus, or from a neighbour glancing at you over a picket fence as you dig for weeds, can really raise your spirits.
They’re not always easy to come by, however, and there was a time when I was perpetually surrounded by weary faces and paranoid scowls. I worked as a bin man alongside monosyllabic migrants, living in a squat full of stoners ensconced in their own gloomy dream worlds. I felt close to ending it all.
the thing is – we need to accept it.the rich have the timeto develop their art. I speakas a worker, on behalfof some workers, and my fellows are notas the world would decide to imagine […]
The wedding cake looked like a coffin
for an infant, all pink and white fondant,
under a smother of snow white blooms.
The groom wore a chalky blue tuxedo
that weakened his chin and tinted his skin
and gave him a generally terminal bearing.
The best man’s hair looked amniotic,
his lip-licking eye-popping manner lubricious.
The bride resembled a wild mad bird,
flapping her wings and squawking
about the flowers, the flowers—there
weren’t enough flowers: two sombre violinists
stroked out a contrapuntal Bach thing
and bridesmaids in yellow chiffon singsonged.
Today Sib told us that London has been named the Greatest City in the World and then we all laughed.
On the way home from the office my phone broke and I held back tears on the Northern line. Just this morning I told El I didn’t think it was normal how tired I was all the time and then I googled is it normal to feel exhausted all the time in January. Thomas and I went to sleep at half past nine all week and we didn’t even have sex.
I’d been here a few weeks in relative peace but now the park was being dug up all around me, and I was having trouble finding out why. At first I thought they were going to excavate and replant the flower beds and shrubberies. I panicked then about being displaced from my comfortable abode in the heart of the ancient rhododendron, which was larger than my last apartment and rent free. Would I have to go back to the west side tunnels? I couldn’t do that. Peggy was probably still marooned over there and she wanted, understandably, to kill me. But I couldn’t go to a shelter either. The city’s shelters bring out my claustrophobia worse than any tunnel ever could.
Sit outside cafes
let conversations drip,
settle on skin,
seep up nostrils,
become voices
chattering small storms in heads…
threads of thoughts
captured,
managed into
Man/Woman-Fridays.
Her co-star had been in the middle of his line, but she couldn’t help it. The instructions were to sip from her glass, right at that moment. Yet as soon as the liquid passed her lips, it burned, and by reflex she sprayed it all over the table – and the actor across from her.
“Cut! Cut!” shouted the director, in that inimitable accent of his.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, as a costumer dressed her co-star in a new shirt.
“Quite all right,” the co-star said. “Far from the worst response I’ve received.”
Being a werewolf is horrible. Being a useless werewolf is worse. At night you are crazy and unstable. Why did you let this happen? You wouldn’t be a werewolf if you said just said no. Why didn’t you deny it? You don’t remember being asked. You didn’t want this. Why are you complaining? Everyone nowadays claimed to be turned, you are not special. You are nothing. You hear your mother on the phone earlier, you heard it too clearly with your trained ears.
“These fake werewolves are destroying the lives of who turned them, why would you expose if someone was turning people? That’ll cost them their lives.” Your mother hates the new trend, as she calls it, of involuntary werewolves calling out those turned them.
I don’t remember the first time I heard the term “shelter-in-place.” Like many expressions that come out of nowhere and get repeated ad nauseum, turning into clichés, shelter-in-place probably entered my consciousness from the local nightly news. Until the coronavirus began to dominate TV news coverage, reporters in my area, which covers San Francisco and its sprawling suburbs, focused on grizzly car accidents, house fires, and of course, shootings. From time to time, a shooter would be pursued, and residents warned to shelter-in-place.
The term has been used more frequently in the past two decades with the rise in school shootings. Students practice active shooter drills, in which they shelter-in-place until first responders arrive and the danger has passed.