half moon bad news curved lights and sixteen henchmen ready to destroy the earth

Janae and Adam and I spent Thursday afternoon winning car races and escaping the clutches of Fidel Castro and his Cuban henchmen by chartering a yacht and sharing lemonade with a cop. 

We got lucky pulltabs. I mean, we're just lucky.

Friday I found treasure: exposed brick walls, hardwood floors and french doors. There's only one catch: in five weeks it will all disappear.

This morning Lenah and her brother and sister and I sat in our living room eating omelets.  

The music theory book I found at Bruised Books was fascinating until I fell asleep for an hour.

I'm going to see the Hangover with Javier and Ted. 

Also, I have decided to limit my capacity for long term grudges. Any grudges, really. The only ones still in effect have been held for a minimum of four years and I'm not sure I even remember what they are. 

Still, you can't teach a middle-age dog new tricks.

 

even the hangman has friends

thought for now

my skin looks scaly

i really would sleep in that rabbit water hole

ready to make beats in a graveyard

my grandma was watching her funeral today and sometimes she laughed 

ain't we got fun? 

at least I do and I like people who do and you don't and the whole thing went helplessly rotten

but i still listen to songs about sailing and dancing and northwestern girls.

late night train car dance party: see you at midnight in sequins 

I think incomplete secret stories are the best kind.

Last night we went cupcaking and sleuthing. 

First in the parking lot behind the bar where we spied on everything while we crouched behind the car and then jumping up we scared Friend so funny. I chased J chasing me followed by my cape I kept stepping on and flapping behind like bat wings. 

"you crack me up"

But we almost cracked, we parked across the street from a farmhouse and ducked when every car that couldn't see us at all drove by/almost done for when faces floated on the porch/rolled across the road and almost smashed the cupcakes but kept the whiskey safe/crept across a field and laughed out loud because the sticks kept cracking like gunshots and we were trying to be so sneaky/stealthed up behind a barn and into the dark to leave everything on the hood.

Finally: we flapped down the driveway, two big birds dressed in black and one with a cape.

"you should check on your car!"

samurai stories are out of this world and pinochle appropriate. ask about it sometime, but only if you get scared easily.

i've run out of capital letters

four day delays make for ninety six hours of writing unfinished stories and un-sendable letters, procrastination and list making. 

i have tangible and virtual boxes of nice things i've been meaning to turn into pictures and poems on a blue background but those will have to wait until sometime soon. i plan on spending the next two hours sprinting at a standstill.

before then here is the only part of tuesday i want to talk about in real life.

i didn't touch the water because it wasn't water, it was shiny green and gooey and probably had a ph level that would have melted my fingers off and provided food for a million invisible sea creatures that will someday grow into krakens, every one.

magician on the dock

he caught a starfish

today is going slow and even the cars are keeping tempo with the music on my headphones.

thursday night bar fights in hollywood while charlie chaplain stole hat tricks and houdini disappeared.

(This is a Hat)

these are our ideas in our hat:

buy donut holes and throw them at passerby while hiding behind bushes.

Buy slingshots for previously mentioned donut holes.

Go for runs. Multiple runs all at once. Around tracks and around lakes and through parks and over hills and by swing sets.

Go to a park and swing on swings while pretending to be astronauts.

Have dance parties in the back of Janae’s truck.

Have dance parties in Josie’s bedroom loft.

Watch Harry Potter movies.

Have a tea party with little tiny cupcakes that we’ve baked and pretty tablecloths and candles that DON’T smell like anything.

go to the spunky monkey for Janae to sing karaoke.

Buy bouncy balls and play the bouncy ball game in empty parking lots after midnight.

Blow bubbles and shoot people with squirt guns.

Make macaroni faces on paper plates.

Cover our hands in elmers glue and peel it off when it dries.

Jump a rope.

Bring people pancakes for breakfast.

Play on the train tracks and take pictures.

Gross each other out with nasty popping noises.

Play scrabble or monopoly.

write love letters to anonymous recipients who live on nicely named streets like irving or klickitat. 

make prank phone calls like we used to.

oh no you just did not

but i did! I set up a flickr account!

check it: www.flickr.com/photos/ciancaandbjord

 

and Janae's and my website will be up and running hopefully sometime soon, so save the address:

www.ciancaandbjord.com

in the meantime watch this:

love letters and eraser fights

I collect ridiculous items, both tangibly and imaginarily ("imaginarily" belongs to my collection of useful made-up words). This morning around 8:49 I began a mental list of eraser shapes I would make if I were an eraser manufacturer or a rubber mechanic for Archie McPhee's. 

top 2 eraser ideas

(actually they were the only 2 I had before I got distracted)

a no. 2 pencil, authentically sized, shaped and colored, already sharpened

a chinese take-out box with white grains of rice-sized erasers

otherwise, in other words, speaking of exacerbated explorers

Marian is back, after a two-month distraction to someplace I wasn't invited. This time the weather has changed and she hasn't exploded into a million calico pieces yet. Instead, she is sitting curbside on an empty road because no one drives on the pavement in this city. Round water babies slide down her green umbrella, aging with gravity and dying in silent crystal firework splashes all around the rubber soles of her shoes as if they had been stars of silent films. (partial excerpt of a partial paragraph)

I wrote the last chapter before I had the beginning...and this is more or less somewhere in the middleish...so the glimmer train submission department will have to wait just a little longer for Marian to be bundled into their mailbox, courtesy of the U.S. Postal service.

chapter of fascinations

water bodies, especially ones with crashing waves that wish

 they were dragons and wolves and scream with magical starvation

 until i am coerced into martyrdom and leave soaking wet. 

case in point: camping on the Northwest coastline of Scotland.

beach storms in Lincoln City, when Nell can't sleep 

and the ocean tries to spit her body onto shore

but she can't stop diving for the shipwreck she doesn't want to find. 

mcrae ghosts and secrets and quirks and the intricacies of the general insanity 

my clan is adept at theatrically flaunting

pistols

revolvers

cowboys

bedtime stories: bartleby the scrivener

graveyard haikus

lithography in the dark:

i would like to haunt something.

maliciously.

(poltergeist)

this word was made for me

my head:
it's that scene from Pride and Prejudice (the new one) where they are dancing and everyone else just disappears, only in this version the room is soaked with red, and taciturn and sociable have become synonymous.

stubborn:

–adjective

1.	unreasonably obstinate; obstinately unmoving: a stubborn child.

2.	fixed or set in purpose or opinion; resolute: a stubborn opponent of foreign aid.

3.	obstinately maintained, as a course of action: a stubborn resistance.

4.	difficult to manage or suppress: a stubborn horse; a stubborn pain.

5.	hard, tough, or stiff, as stone or wood; difficult to shape or work.

---

[Origin: 1350–1400; ME stiborn(e), styborne, stuborn < ?]

—Related forms

stub·born·ly, adverb

stub·born·ness, noun



As in: "She stubbornly refuses to participate in this farce out of turn--and it has been his turn for quite some time."

As in: "Her stubbornness will not prove an asset."

i discovered treasure