file these under–you can’t make this shit up or life is stranger than fiction:
Man ‘set Valentine suicide pact’
and (remember this story from yesterday? I wondered if this might be the case):
Tossed and found baby tale’s bogus
There are several dark patches of blood marring the snow underneath the bird feeder. I’m guessing that either a fox or a cat got one of the squirrels or that a couple of red squirrels got in a fight and tore each other up (which I’ve seen happen before). It kind of makes me feel like not putting any more bird seed out so as not to contribute to any future bloodletting.
Ah, nature!
I am starting to wonder if my politeness isn’t a form of passive-aggression. Just now I nearly got my arm ripped off and was pulled down my VERY icy driveway when I was bringing my dog out to pee. The reason was that my neighbor’s dog (off leash) was in our yard taking his daily poo (oh, sometimes he blesses us with his shit twice or three times a day!) and my dog lost it and tried to get to him (which is his right our yard being his “territory”). Anyway, after my neighbor heard me screaming (in pain! I now have a huge bloodblister on my thumb), she came out and yelled to her dog FROM HER PORCH.
Oh no, that’s right dear. Don’t trouble yourself by coming out in the snow to collect your crapping beast from my yard. That’s right, just call to him gently from your porch. Oh no, that’s okay. The pain will go away at some point. Don’t bother yourself with the fact that my dog was on a leash and yours was not and certainly do not trouble yourself that he was in my yard because, after all, the world is your oyster and I am merely here to serve you that oyster. That’s right! Crap away, good neighbors! Come one, come all and take a dump in our yard!
So when her dog finally left she called over FROM HER PORCH, “Sorry Myfanwy” and what do I say?
“That’s okay!” (god, I hate myself sometimes)
And then I stormed into the house and screamed my head off (so loudly that my poor dog actually started to shake! oops!).
Why does she think it’s okay that her dog come and take a crap in my yard every day? Well, probably because I have never said anything about it. Instead, I shovel up the poo and throw it into the woods next to their yard but goddamn it I’m polite about shoveling and throwing. I’m nothing if not polite!
and the winner is… Pride and Prejudice for most romantic novel of all time. Hmmm, I wonder if I agree with that?
Read Yankee Pot Roast‘s: How to Write a Book. My favorites are: #11, #14 and #18.
Say you’re a big, fat multi-national retail chain. What do you do when the workers in one of your stores unionize? Do you try to work with them? Hell no! You shut down the store and they all lose their jobs: Wal-Mart to shut Canada store–Labor leaders say chain seeks to avoid union
SmokeLong Quarterly has a gorgeous new look.
Last night, on a plane bobbing in the turbulence, I was not afraid. And when I realized that I was not, I asked myself, “Why? Here is a time when you might have a legitimate reason to fear and yet you are calm. Is it the wine you had in the airport? Is that you are too tired to care? Or is it that you feel safe here in the dark?”
What I understood was that since I could see nothing out the windows, there was nothing to fear. Now, had I been flying over the Atlantic, I would have been afraid (I hate transatlantic flights–where to land? Watching on the screen I only calm down when I see we are near Greenland and Iceland and then England–land. Can’t imagine going that way down into the cold and cold).
But last night there was just me and the dark and the rain lining up on the window and the wing. There was nothing below to see–no patchwork, no meandering stream, no straight-line highway, nothing. Is it possible that death is our own plane, lighted from within, making its way through the darkness? Or is that a more appropriate metaphor for life?
from two nights ago:
I’m in the restaurant my family used to own and I’m bartending (which is what I used to do). In the bar with me are my mother and George Bush, Sr (!?!?!). We are all looking out one of the large windows which looks across the road and into a field and forest. It is night.
George pulls out a flash light and starts flashing it on and off, into the field. He says he is trying to catch animals. As he flashes we see a fox dart into the woods. We see a rabbit. Then he flashes into a copse of trees and we see a deer. George and my mother want to go outside to see it closer up. I follow them. We don’t cross the road, though. Instead, George uses his flashlight to get the deer to come to us. He flashes it on and off and the deer comes towards it (which, if you know anything about deer, is the most unlikely thing to happen).
My mother and George get behind me and sort of leave me up front to deal with the deer. George tells me to hold my hand out and as I do he keeps flashing the light in my palm. The deer gets closer and closer and I realize that I afraid. As it closes in on me I see that it is sniffing the air in huge, exaggerated sniffs (its face looks cartoonish as it does this). Just as it is about to sniff my palm, I wake up.
Okay, if you can interpret that I will be totally amazed.
The new edition of failbetter is live and in it you will find two great interviews: Pam Houston & Mary Morris discuss their new novels.
Also, read Mark Budman’s Conversation with Lydia Davis at Web del Sol.
myfanwy collins 