Bird

A bird flew in the house through the open sliding glass door and I spent most of the morning trying to convince three terriers not to kill it. I know nothing about nature but I do know that the bird was of the same variety of birds that the big dog killed right in the yard a year or two ago. For weeks after, its mate would perch on top of the patio overhang above the spot in the grass where the murder occurred and engage in some truly pitiful and prolonged tweeting. Call me cold-hearted, but if I'd been that mate, I'd have stayed much farther away from the assassin. The mate was practically begging the big dog to do it again. Not so high up on the evolutionary chain these birds, whatever kind of birds they are.

But I digress. Today's bird was in the house for approximately 5-7 minutes. It flew around wildly, crashing into windows as it looked for an exit. I followed it with a kitchen towel to try to escort it to the open slider. I screamed the whole time, not at the bird but at the three terriers who were circling and jumping on the couches and windowsills after the bird in question. While fleeing the three terriers, the bird shit several times right in mother's house. Do not tell mother. Please. I'm thinking of calling in the Mexicans for an emergency cleaning.

Eventually, the bird flew so hard into the kitchen window that it knocked itself out. It fell from the glass straight into the dish drain, on top of dishes I'd just washed. Not eating on those dishes ever again. I thought the bird was maybe dead already but I wrapped it in a towel and took it outside to a bush. Birds like bushes, right? The bird didn't move and I watched its chest beat like crazy and its eyes follow me and then close and then open to follow me again. Did you know that even small dumb birds who are not very high on the evolutionary chain have eyelashes? Tiny fuzzy ones. The fuckers would be almost cute, you know, if they weren't just rats with wings.

I let the bird rest for a while. I guarded the bush because the three terriers were circling like sharks. I nudged the bird with the towel and it moved a little. Hooray for the un-dead. I gave it a few more minutes, watched its breathing slow to something like normal, and then because I was totally tired of my new gig as bird-security guard, I nudged the thing again with the towel until it flew away. It went straight up into the tree where its previously murdered brethren once came down and never went up again, but oh well. It was out of the house. The dogs' hands remain bloodless for yet another morning. I can return to my cold medicine and hot tea. Suburban victory.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Redux

Like so many other classics force-fed to me in junior high and high school, To Kill A Mockingbird was a total blur to me. When it was assigned, I read it quickly and bitterly and then promptly forgot it. Yesterday I picked it up on a whim--I'd watched a documentary on Harper Lee and found myself interested in the book again mostly because people were saying that the character Dill was modeled on a young Truman Capote. Capote wasn't force-fed to me in junior high or high school and I've loved him solid for the last 15 years.

My reread of Mockingbird now really feels like a first read, and I can barely begin to explain how much I enjoyed it. The narrator's character is plucky and relentless and a hundred years before her time. Lee's plotting and pacing are the stuff that manuals should be written from. Sadly, the story of a white community's racist and classist ugliness is as relevant now as it was fifty years ago.

My one major gripe is that too often it's clear that different narrative orchestrations are meant to advance the author's purpose. Though there's almost always some grounding in the children's slow and thorny journey to understanding an intractable problem, that alone can't keep the narrative from feeling oppressively preachy and heavy-handed at times. Still, it's a fucking remarkable story.

I'm left wondering what should be done to school reading lists. I know that, at minimum, this book and The Great Gatsby were lost to me for years simply because they were thrown at me when I was too young. Then again, what should we be telling teenagers to read? Any ideas?

Cheese Ball, Day 6

Here she is six days later. Yesterday I began to enlist the dogs' help. Still no end in sight. Sigh.

Cheese Ball, Day 4

I had some friends over for lunch on Christmas Eve and decided to cook like a smartass: with a nod at various white goyim stereotypes. I made things I'd never made or eaten: meatloaf, two kinds of casseroles, an actual cheese ball. What I learned from the experience is that bourbon really does in fact go with everything and that one cheese ball can probably feed an entire Los Angeles suburb. Here is the cheese ball at day four. It is one pound of cream cheese mixed with one pound of cheddar and a heavy slug of worchestire sauce, all rolled in crushed pecans. A dent has barely been made on one end. As you can imagine, the rest of the week is going to be one hell of a dairy battle.

Following

I've been watching Miranda July for the past 15 years, but I'm going to have to start stalking her for real. Her work is rarely super polished, but there's something about the angle of her mind that I fucking adore. Love, love, love what she recently said about pursuing strangers. I think she's asking the right questions, poking around in the right places that others overlook or even purposefully ignore. Among my friends, it's no real secret that I've been following various strangers all my life, and I'm a little bit pissed off that Miranda July thought to do it in a more organized fashion and document the thing as the thing, the product. My following strangers has mostly been about process, not product. That Miranda July is one smart cookie.

Seriously, There Is No Talk Of Trannies In This Post

So I just got an "almost" letter from another journal regarding a different story than the one which was accepted last week. The editor emailed to say that the story caught his eye and he wants to see something else in the future. It's a good sign. If I could just figure out how to get over the next hump and take my stories a step or two further, I think I'd be in decent shape.