3/8/26 - 3/11/26: I want to eat bread all day.

3/8/26

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” -Anne Sexton

Why are some people just so comfortable to be around and they make life better and you can’t get enough? I was thinking about that today. And why does one have gargantuan chemistry with one person, and absolutely none with someone else? It’s all incalculable. 

Today felt large. An enormous Sunday, but no enormous sundae in sight sadly. 

 

I got to go to the beach unexpectedly with a friend. And I even managed to finish a drawing in their backyard as they repotted some of their plants. Their backyard felt like a calm oasis. They’re rich in fruit trees, and hummingbirds were buzzing about. 

 

It’s cool how many drawings I’ve been finishing. I’m all of a sudden in finishing mode. It feels remarkable.

My friend reminded me of this saying today by Gertrude Stein: “If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.” I enjoyed this reminder. 

A billboard on the drive back from the burger joint tonight said “I’ll see it when I believe it”. 

 

3/9/26

Moist Anxiety

 

Moist vicissitudes hang off my old
bones,
hands made of broken straw
wrap around my
throat,

 

weak from limp, loud agony,
raging river-like through
the countryside of 
a dream at night
that an anxious man has of
my body.

So, am I just supposed to keep being a human that’s embarrassed and clumsy and making mistakes all the time? I never get to change form into a pangolin or tortoise? The amount of time I spend hoping for this kind of change is enormous. I especially think about it when there’s conflict in my life. “Okay, tortoise time”, I think optimistically, crossing my fingers, closing my eyes, and tapping my ruby red slippers together three times, hoping against all odds the transformation will actually occur this time.

Here, yet another poem if you can believe it. (Believe it because here it comes.)

 

Tongue Shards

 

Lost to the stretchy lip marks of 
the moment,
hurdled toward 
some seeming ending
sharply confused in a trap,
geodesic and not general.

Fed to me in delicious drips,
I was scared of the delicate 
shards of
mutterings
that would split open time
and add a brick wall
in place of infinity.

Passion is the villain
and softness is a collage dancing
on its tongue.

 

Prance, prance, prance
and you’re home
in a delicate hurry.
Eyes cut in half,
kneecaps exposed,
the brain a mash of oatmeal.
You are my catalyst, 
alive and pulsing.

 

3/10/26

Hope feels like a plant that grows inside me and when that gets snipped it’s upsetting. It gets me off track. It makes me stumble. 

Being locked out of a beautiful connection with someone feels to me like being locked out of a garden. A big one full of Possibility Flowers. And I just keep pondering those Flowers. It hurts.
 
I don’t like anger. It’s so draining. I definitely felt snippets of anger at the confusion and disarray that transpired between me and this person, but empathy always overshadowed it. I imagined what they were feeling and going through. I wonder if this empathy was reciprocated. Or maybe, instead, I simply vanished from their mind in a puff of ethereal smoke. As if I never existed in the first place.

 

I got feelings for them pretty quickly and I haven’t’ seen them in three months now, and I’m feeling really stupid. And lately I am ferociously moved to make more art than I ever have before. Maybe this is coincidental but it feels related.

 

 

I close my eyes in quiet, and what do I think about? Gibbons, of course, and a particular man.

 

 

I just want to eat bread all day. Nothing else.

 

I had time this morning to make banana bread. What else was I going to do with 3 excessively ripe bananas? 

 

3/11/26

I had fun talking with someone in class yesterday. They're a florist, and they were telling me about a flower that smells like tootsie rolls. It’s called a chocolate cosmo. 

The cancer drugs have been making my mom feel extra lethargic lately. She wasn’t able to go to Costco with me, which she normally does. It's one of our traditional outings together.

I ran across a word the other day that I love: apricity (autocorrect wants to change it to apricots). It means the warmth of the sun in winter.

 

 

Pouring my drip coffee into my large thermos is one of the most beautiful moments of my day. It tastes wildly spicy today in the best way after the very strong ginger tea I just drank. 

I was lying in bed this morning thinking about making another big vase. Another slab one. A lumpy, loopy, wild one. An extremely emotionally improvisational one. I’m going in later today to start it. I want to use it as the surface to practice on in my new surface design class. She’s covering slip trailing at some point which is something I never practiced in my last surface design class. I am quite interested in slip trailing.