Music for your Secret Balcony
Here’s some: I am completely obsessed with Nina Nastasia’s latest record, On Leaving. As you may already know, I am terrible at describing what music’s like, but I’ll venture a try. Acoustic-y and she has such a beautiful voice; singing these dangerous little stories in which women try to woo back dead husbands or convince lovers to just slow down, feel at all the beauty around them. There’s a yearning and a sadness underpinning it all, as there always must be in any honest look at humanity's regard for mortality. How we always forget and forget. The style of the music itself puts me in mind of a group like the Dirty Three. The recordings make you feel like you’re there in the room the moment this music’s being made and it’s just lovelylovelylovely.

Particular songs: “Why Don’t You Stay Home,” “One Old Woman,” “Bird of Cuzco.” Early false spring here now probably has a hand in my enjoyment. Kind. Real.

I have a secret balcony outside my own apartment. At one time years before I came to Beach Town, my kitchen sink window was no window but a door leading out to this balcony, but now it sits on the roof of the first floor, vacant, a remnant of the time this house was one home instead of seven or so apartments. The only way to really access the secret balcony is to open up my bedroom window real wide and kind of clamber over, which is just what I did late yesterday afternoon.

Went out there with my Rogue brand ukelele and sang and played, terribly, the Silver Jews song “Pretty Eyes.” Mostly, though, I just sat and sat and looked up as the vapor trails of planes filled with people who are strangers to one another, as they criss-crossed across the giant sky. The sky is so enormous, here.
The air smelled of spring and I felt lucky.

All Abuzz
Okay, so it’s taken me a while to get to it, but this week I’ve sent a number of essays off to small literary journals for their Kind Consideration. There. I’ve told you. And now you know, Henshaw, that if you don’t hear anything about this from me after this ever again, that I haven’t gotten published. Ah, yes. But that’s fine. ‘Cause life really is one big string of “No” upon “No” upon “I’m Sorry but No,” which is what makes it such a fabulous, sun-drenched moment when you finally get your “Yes.”

So that’s okay.
I’ve sent ‘em out and now I keep expecting to hear back, like, at every second. Which won’t happen. This feels especially paradoxical with the places where you submit your work via email. Rather than this painstaking business with the p.o. and stamps and a SASE and addresses in the right places and having the right names and the right paper without coffee stains on it—Instead of all this, it’s zap, and it’s there right away. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t speed up the turnaround time at all. It’ll still be months and months before I begin getting my “I’m sorry, but” and “Thank you, but” emails and slips in the mail, all delivered to me in envelopes with my own handwriting on the outside. Which is the oddest thing of all.

But again, it’s all right because doing is better than not doing. There’s a buzz in the air among us MFA-ers here in my program. Everyone’s gearing up for the AWP Conference in Atlanta next week, which is this big literary hoo-ha. And right now it feels as if everybody’s working extra hard to try everything out and push ourselves as hard as possible with our writing and everything related to it. We all want to feel like we’re missing zero opportunities, like we’re living the life we intended to lead in our short years here.

I lump myself in with that, but of course I also just can’t wait till I’m back at the Earl in Atlanta with a damn PBR in my hand and my old friends all around.

Intro-, extra-
I like you. I like you in the next room, but I like you.

She lives alone and a lot of the time, works from a little desk across from her bed, next to the wall which is
next to the kitchen table which is
next to the stove,
next to the front door.
An apartment you can do one cartwheel across. Exactly one.

And for exactly half the time, this solitude feels like An Experiment in Solitude. It makes her feel something like Amelie: a little eccentric and maybe even secretly aesthetically fascinating in that Why, Everything’s Tinted Valentine Red! way. Because anything can be true when you’re alone writing and sewing and decoupaging everything you own.
But half the time she feels more like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
[“Frylock, return Carl to the Home.”]

And she has had roommates who have driven her insane by trespassing on her precious personal space and good *lord* but this is a far cry better than that.

Now it’s her, her cat and her music. And much of the time it’s a big exhalation. She gets home and kicks her shoes off and goes to her refrigerator where she will see only her food she’s placed on the shelves of her choosing. And--yes, that old cliche--she drinks right from the container.

But, too: See how the cat runs out to greet whomever comes over? Greets, and flops down on the floor in front of said visitor, belly-up in blatant supplication? In her worst moments she knows that, as her familiar, the cat is nothing but an embarrassingly barefaced depiction of her. The cat is sick of her, wants someone else and so is she and so does she.
And see how the music also greets the people? How tired it must be, of the same set of ears attached to the same brain attached to the same set of memories and associations. It wants more ear canals and daydreams to travel through.
Next year she’ll find another roommate. For now there are moments of good and of bad and maybe it’s winter’s hard end that’s making the bad worse. Or maybe it’s the threat of springtime. Mostly though, she knows it’s just her memory and its irritatingly rose-colored tendencies.

A tad unsettling.
At the library, they have these desk-carrells that are attached to one another, four in one. When you first go to sit down, you get a quick view of the outline of the carrells from overhead. The damn things are shaped like swastikas.

Quantity wins.
Tonight an esteemed old poet came and did a reading. His final words drew a smattering of small gasps from around the auditorium. Then, applause and big loopy smiles all over. Afterwards, the poets among us went up to the card table in the corner and purchased slim volumes of the poet’s original books. The prose writers among us bought his collected works - two dollars more, fifty pages thicker. Because we go for volume.

La!
The sun is out! The sun is out!

I spent the morning out in the sunny sunshine on the campus quad with a colleague/friend and bucketsful of coffee, and let me tell you: That there vitamin E was like a freaking drug. That there vitamin E - and not the caffeine, I tell you - was the thing that reminded me of how to feel really darn happy for no particular reason, again.
Not to get all maudlin on you, Henshaw. Things just ain't. Well, they ain't been.

But now I see that spring is coming.
It is.

Too much

Dear young chickadee’ays,
A girl holds within her a burning fount of energy. Other people try to tell her she shouldn’t listen to all that music at top-volume anymore shouldn’t get tattoos shouldn’t let her real feelings show so hard shouldn’t disclose so much personal information shouldn’t open up up up so easily easily easily should work

to tone down that laugh of hers that she’s too old, now, to be out dancing at two a.m. should do something about that acne do something about that little pot belly, maybe reconsider her preference of beer over hard liquor maybe reconsider her Saturday bagel/coffee-w/-cream ritual because it’s in these little things all these little things that her faults lie so just pay attention to the little things to every little thing she secretly loves best about herself.

Young gals? Look. That cool old blue-haired lady down the street? With the abandon in her cackle that you can hear from your porch on still afternoons when she stops to talk with neighbors who walk their dogs by her house? Who goes braless and doesn’t give a fuck who notices? Has lived as long as she did for a reason. And that reason wasn’t worrying about laughing too loud.
Ever.

Love,
Alice

The Moon Rulez! #1!
...But not in Boston.

"It had a very sinister appearance," Coakley told reporters. "It had a battery behind it, and wires."