{ Dear World: WHATEVER. }

I had a post here but sometimes my laptop moves the cursor and just erases all my text so fuck that.

{ Update attempt #2. }

+ The ceiling caved in at work last night. Yeah.

+ The plus side is that the office is beginning to look festive. I still think it's too early, but it's nice.

+ Next week is the Admin Christmas lunch! Love it.

+ Tonight I'm going to see Grimethorpe Colliery Band play in town. They put on a Christmas concert every year and I haven't been since I was 10. The local primary schools used to bandy their choirs together, and we'd sing at the concert. I'm more excited than I have any reason to be, but I get in free because The Dad is a Rotarian and it's funded by the local Rotary Club.

+ I have a pretty blue dress to wear but it shows way too much cleavage so that's probably not going to happen.

+ The Flatmate, T and N were all in London last night, at one of Regina Spektor's shows. Let's not talk about my woeface, but instead of how N sent me a picture of the concert in medias res, and how The Flatmate spent most of the day texting me with: ALAN! ALAN! ALAN! AL! AL! ALAN! ALAN! andhearts, guys.

+ I wanted to re-watch last night's Spooks but the iPlayer doesn't load it until it airs on BBC1. Alternative methods are available, but fuck that.

+ Don't tell anyone; today I'm wearing leggings. !!!!

+ I have new icons for the first time in absolutely ages. Will be loading those soon.

+ I finally got dreamhost to do what I wanted it to do! Why so complicated? Now I just need recs for FTP clients. Anyone?

+ I have written a LOT of letters in the past week. This year I'm sending Christmas cards which is the first time in nearly 7 years. This is not one of those do you want one? posts because I don't believe in that invitation for anything that isn't a postcard.

--

That was terribly yawn but at least I now have all that off my chest.

{ Marie Howe: The Promise. }

The Promise
by Marie Howe

In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,

he looked at me as though he couldn't speak, as if
there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn't break.

His silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,

as we do, in time.
And I told him: I'm reading all this Buddhist stuff,

and listen, we don't die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass through. We go on and on

and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we'd pass

across the kitchen table when Dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,
in a crowded room, something important, and can't.

{ R. T. Smith: Shades. }

Shades
by R.T. Smith

When Odysseus descended to the underworld
and crossed the dark river to learn the key
to his destiny, he poured the ritual milk and honey,
the wine and barley and blood to summon the dead,
but he never expected to find his mother among
the shadows who were filled with mist and sifted
with the wind which had no source. He had thought
her alive and back in Ithaca expecting his return.
He had assumed the worst ordeals were his own.
But, when he reached out, shivering as he wept,
to embrace the ghost, that wanderer found
no substance, no flesh nor blood nor bone,
and he must have felt as I did that first time home
when my mother’s mind had begun to wander
and she disremembered not only the laughter,
the lightning-struck chinaberry, the sunset
peaches and fireflies and the sharp smell
of catfish frying, but also her name and the fact
that she was sitting in her kitchen of fifty years
beside my father who stood there straining
not to wring his hands or surrender to the tears
welling around his eyes. She gathered her purse,
her hat and wrap, then said, Please drive me home
before strangers take every damned thing I own.
Her eyes glaucous with terror, she was exhausted
and desperate, almost herself, "an empty, flitting
shade," as Homer says it, uncertain in her haze
whether she was moving toward or away
from what might be called the Great Dream.
When she sobbed and cried, Where is my son?,
I, too, felt bewildered, and not even a seer
from the land of night and frost and smoke
could tell me what words would amount
to comfort, nor which constellation to steer by,
nor where all this heart-sorrow might end.