things move around

Balls!*
Balls!
Balls not working.
Duck these dawdlers, get in quick,
up the best ramp in Vancouver and into the thick of it:
The Scary Hippo - a wide berth,
the out-of-nowhere animal noises,
Shadows!
Red shadow blue shadow one shadow two shadow
gree shdaow threen shadow
Daddy shadow!
Hang on, here comes a boy,
well that’s the end of that.
Magnets! Toy animals! Real animals, geckos turtles frogs
corn snakes conrcrakes mammoths
megatheria stegosauruses
bluebilled Iguanodon and twenty-toothed T-Rex
but I’m bored of this book,
let’s go and see the Bubble Show!
Slippry floor!
No way I’ll volunteer
HE PUT A MAN IN A BUBBLE
pretzel
HE PUT A MAN IN A BUBBLE
pretzel
glug juice
HE PUT A PERSON IN A BUBBLE
toy animals, penguin raven crow
ark ark
ark ark
ark aryes that’s what a crow sounds like
skytrain bus home lunch
mum leo
HE PUT A MAN IN A BUBBLE
three hours’ sleep

*there is a fascinating contraption outside the entrance to Science World consisting of an infernal machine endlessly recycling balls.

The flat is silent. L is sleeping in the hallway, in his bassinet. E is sleeping in her usual flat-out way, in another world entirely, and Kate is also asleep. All I can hear is the clock we bought recently, ticking above the door with E’s pictures on, the door to the storage cupboard. It makes quite a difference having a ticking clock in the room.

Having a son does feel different from having a daughter; sometimes the caveman parts of my brain light up and do a fiery dance of self-satisfaction. When the medic yanked him out, covered in oily ooze, writhing and pissing, my Y chromosome hopped around ecstatically and I had a little cry. But I declined to cut the cord this time. I was surprised at how different it felt.

There are some people who have an innate unknowability about them, an inward strangeness which puts them at odds with conventional understanding. People who are in some way more or less real than they ought to be. I think of these people as ‘jokers’, in the sense that they’re outside the game, and they’re often very funny. Metaphorically, they’re always wearing dark glasses.

There are more of these jokers around than you’d think. For example, Mitt Romney. Whenever I see a picture of Mitt Romney, I think of an Easter Island statue. And it’s not because of his moronism. This idea of the joker transcends religion, which is a mundane thing. In my mind, Romney is always there on Easter Island, jutting out into an ocean vastness, the winds of reality swirling past him in a crosscurrent.

Or Grant, with whom I work. With most people, we empathise, naturally. In the course of dealing with people our brains form an idea, right or wrong, of the brains of others. But with Grant, it’s as though his inner being disappears from radar for long periods - or goes down a rabbit hole - and only pops into view again rarely and momentarily, sometimes in unexpected places. Now I’m sure this isn’t the case with Mitt Romney. But he’s a politician, and Grant isn’t.

Mitt Romney. Mitt. Romney. It’s a funny name, when you think about it.

I’m having the usual for lunch today - plain old tofurkey bagelwich with scungilli.

Irrational fear of Slavoj Žižek.

E.g.

- “There’s a long weekend coming up, dear: how about a city break in Ljubljana?”
- “Darling, I’d love to - but you’re forgetting my žižekophobia.”

Coined on Wordie.

I imagine the years of me life as a string of sausages, with Januaries the thin, gristly tubes of skin connecting one to another.

In Delaware
they’re unaware
of etiquette
in Connecticut.