Mine.

Much like going to the grocery store, one should not attempt photography hungry.

I’ve been filling my head with too many Suggestions and Guidelines and Technique not to point out that the upper lefthand corner of the dog is too bright, nor that I couldn’t choose between blue or Red for the cut of beef, because it was just so cold.

It was weird unwrapping it from the freezer and seeing this (frankly) carnal thing so, well, frozen. It looked pink, like a blushing bride, not the wham-bam ma’am I demand from my meat. I expect butcher shop red blood and the whir of the electric knife, because I am many things and gullible is one of them.

Instead I got soft wrinkles in pumpkin-coloured paper and this brick/steak/thing, reminding me ice isn’t water and anything can be cleaned up.

I felt a little frenzied today to get out of work. I suspect it was the endless minute revisions of a simple letter, the way that you can never get a police officer to sit at a desk and answer your damn phone call.

Since my little silver traveler is sick again, I ate my oatmeal in the passenger seat next to a bleary-eyed, tight-lipped version of my brother, who drove. This always means a walk to the bus stop at quitting time.

I love these walks. Today I did a little experiment, because as I stomped around the world I felt my little execu-dress slide up around the knees. Walked normally, with speed, focused on the bus, and nothing. Slowed down, swiveled my hips, and stepped into it. In no time flat a truck sailed by with an obliging honk at the flirty little redhead.

(Of course, I’ve been honked at before, and could never quite make out if people were making fun. Sometimes in a city it’s just nice to see results.)

I felt my whole afternoon, go-go, with my green pumps and the green in my bracelet, the red of their brakes as they yield to pedestrian. I carry a lunchbag and still I can defy them not to look twice. Coming soon to a windshield near you.

White sun floods in through elephantine windows, tall and slim and flanked by narrow strips of wall, casting dark across the coffee brown tables. The carpet’s colors would be rich if they weren’t so grilled, a browned royal blue, some dark red. The ceiling races up like a cathedral; the walls are a soothing, fluted cream. There is nothing cafeteria about it, really, apart from the food, which is wan and usually little else. (Once or twice, I must have been suffering a fever, to make the grapefruits pulse that pink-red under the salad hood.)

Lunch just has a strange air about it.

Finding anyone: you have to cover your eyes and scan past the shadows, the laptop rectangles, and the skeletons of abandoned breakfast newspapers, until your gaze alights on a familiar face. At this stage, there’s a lot of smiling and nodding – even waving, if you’re feeling peppy – and internal calculations as to who has mostly finished eating and who will eat more, who is actually studying and who privately longs for a distraction. This is ordinary; this is life; this is lunch.

But there is something about the mid-day light there. Perhaps it’s because those giant windows face uphill, or the fact of their hugeness, or the simple angle of light at the time of day. It is both dreamy and stark; it is a noon-day cowboy showdown and a gauzy dusty lens. No matter where you sit, someone will squint: and maybe we will have a shootout, because the face just fits.

Mid-day stories always seem as overexposed and washed out as the looseleaf some poor homework-scribbling soul hunches over. Talk falls flat but the soup is shining (it’s a little scummy on the edges). Here we have the harsh light of day, and it is judging your sleepless night and your french fries to boot. When you chafe against the silence, your stark shadow shifts, and everyone can see you cross and uncross your obvious legs.

Dinner will be rowdier, easier. The big black outside those tall order windows won’t crowd you so much.

Somewhere in the vicinity of the Free Library of Philadelphia (MY FAVORITE). July 1st. I like the lines.

***

A novel (one borrowed, incidentally, from aforementioned Free Library) I read recently, Flight from The Enchanter, follows among many one character in particular, by the name of Annette. Annette has dramatically flounced out of her prep school and decided to submit herself for tutelage to the School of Life, and goes about sort of fucking everything up after that, and it’s fairly amusing even though it’s not a particularly funny book.

Believe it or not, I don’t digress.

Lately I am trying to learn things, things I feel I should have learned a long time ago, or maybe once knew and forgot. (I used to be very good at math, but I don’t remember a damn bit of it anymore.) I am trying to learn to be a good friend, but it doesn’t couple well with such forgetting.

I am forget-full, I forgot math and I forget where I am and I never remember jokes right and I missed your birthday, probably, or that you hate it when I call you by a nickname, and it has slipped my mind that I’ve already said this to you before. I’m a walking etch-a-sketch, for christ’s sake, and with every step something else shakes loose.

Despite my leaking bucket of a brain – or perhaps because of it – I don’t let people go, or I don’t feel like they’re gone. I loved you then and I love you now. I don’t call you for three months and I expect you to have forgotten that space like I would have, like I probably did at some point, and when was the last time you called me, anyway? I don’t care. I am the dog in the apartment who is just happy you’re back.

I forgive by forgetting. Don’t you?

This isn’t even a gimmick: I don’t remember why I brought up Annette, really.

Absurd!

***

“The trouble with you,” her father had said, “is that you want to be everywhere at once. One day you’ll just explode into little pieces.”

This weekend had examples of how summer can be both unbearable and charming, almost back-to-back.

I read this article about one half of this problem a year or so ago, and I identified with the author. Summer is a very hot season full of very long days with very giant hours, interspersed with tons of work you don’t really want to do for little or no money.* It’s a sluggish season, one where you wish you could survive on cucumbers and ice instead of taking heat from your food in warm, fat swallows; and it’s a lonely stretch, far more so than the time when people huddle for comfort, to block out the dead and dying trees. (I spot more people outside and in the parks, but it’s hard to see who’s in front of you when you’re squinting at the sun.)

Yet there is no other season where I can steal a friend’s t-shirt and tromp down the street pretending it’s a dress quite so comfortably as in summer. (Halloween was always worse when you had to wear a jacket over your costume.) My poetry teacher said he loves when spring comes because it’s like we all of a sudden have bodies again, and it was as though we had forgotten before, hidden away in our scarves.

The nights are easier, easier than winter nights and sometimes easier than days. The dawn is never that far away (a comfort to those of us with nightmares).

Summer also lends itself to gypsies, the genuine and the ones who are just practicing. (I like that part best.)

*argh, internship!

(Not since the dark days of high school xanga!)

Well, I thought this time it might be different…’cos this one will have pictures.