voice that starts to mumble
SECRETED BY PREDATORY SEA SNAILS
Briefly, because I keep my real dream journal elsewhere, but I had a most magnificent literary dream last week where I was writing a novel (in the dream, literally dreaming the text and the dialogue), of which the first lines were:
When I was borned my mama named me Air Fryer. I guess on account of I looked like an air fryer.
In the dream-novel there were other humans named after household appliances, and truly appalling Southern dialect, and other Faulknerian cliches like Spanish moss and sweet tea and secret dark pasts (Roomba was murdered by his own sister at one point). So…I guess a mashup of Demon Copperhead and The Brave Little Toaster? I wish I were an actual novelist with an agent. I would send them a proposal and a sample on April Fool’s Day and see if they believed it.
The less-spectacular dream in the dream journal from the previous week is one in which Elon Musk’s head fell off. Someone official gave the public statement about the head falling off, but refused to confirm if that meant Musk was dead. The news reported this with very little detail, and the internet was wild with speculation and jokes and drama. I woke up thinking that maybe the only thing worse than an unqualified buttmuch running around ruining everything would be a headless, unnerving-neck-stump, unqualified buttmunch lurching around ruining everything.
YOU DIDN’T NEED TO KNOW
Oxalic acid is the reason why you shouldn’t eat rhubarb leaves and it is also the active ingredient of Bar Keeper’s Friend. LT is a very big fan of Bar Keeper’s Friend. I believe him that it works great (I wouldn’t know; I dislike “wet” chores so our division of labor means I have not used it much) but I also know that he likes old-timey products automatically and on principle. See also clove chewing gum, Fisherman’s Friend cough drops, Clubman (a beard and shaving brand from like 1810 or something). Also if I mention rhubarb in LT’s presence he will reference Rhubarb T. Rhubarb, who is the inventor of rhubarb and who we wholly made up. I realize I am not giving you a very good advertisement here for staying married 30 years. Or maybe I am. I don’t know your life!
MAYBE IT’S OKAY
I think I have been fundamentally misunderstanding the phrase “do the best you can” for…my whole life? When I hear that I think “the best you can possibly do.” As in “the absolute best you’ve ever done it.” In the past, in the future, in some arbitrary thought-experiment where there exists a Platonic ideal of you doing it so, so well! I picture myself getting the Bradley Cooper Limitless pill and doing it the best! I can! As in the full amazing potential of my capabilities!
So because no one is ever doing that, I considered myself to be pretty much NEVER doing the best I can. It literally never occurred to me that there was an implied “right now” in the phrase “your best.” An implied “under these circumstances.” Huh.
ACTUALLY THE BEST
Not that I have any control over it, but one thing I totally did “my best” on last week was having CLEAN MOTHERFUCKING ARTERIES, as evidenced by CT scan. My cholesterol has been borderline high my whole life, even back when I was a teenage vegetarian, and my doctor has usually been like “meh” but this year she was suddenly like, “let’s get some data on other risk factors and see if you need to take a statin.” So I went to the hospital and got supine in the big tube and followed the bossy computer man’s instructions on when to breathe (submit to the patriarchal overlords of BIG IMAGING!) and the news is that my arteries are perfect and I STAY WINNING.
MECHANICS
We went to another baroque concert and it was an excellent program but I might have ditched a few of the Purcell songs. One song in English on a program is enough for me. What the heck are vocal soloists supposed to do with their hands? She had a rose to fiddle with at one point, but otherwise it’s a lot of bosom-clasping and beseeching gestures, I suppose.
Speaking of hands, the other distraction for me was one of the violinists whose bow hand was the most cramped-up frog-shape Nosferatu claw I have ever seen on someone playing at a high level. Who am I to argue with success—Mr Croissant Hand is a professional touring musician—but my violin teacher from back in the day would have had an absolute stroke.
RECOMMENDATIONS
A book called The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya.
Aloha bars in the Peanut Butter Cup flavor–14 grams of protein but doesn’t taste like a protein bar (you know what I mean). Vegan if that matters to you!
Stocking up on the good teas before some new bullshit trade war means we are not allowed to have nice things.
Getting a calathea roseopicta crimson, rapidly becoming one of the loves of my life. They like high humidity and it is fun to mist the shit out of her every day. While I love and care for all of my plants, I love the ones I’ve chosen for myself with special intensity (as opposed to the gifted plants, the plants found in dumpsters or on the curb on someone’s moving day, the plants foisted upon me by others).
—mimi “ghostwoman” smartypants