On the island. I will talk to you all in a week.

love,
alex

1) Solely because my mother had a migrane and the family left for vacation a day later, I DON'T HAVE TO STAY HERE FOR THANKSGIVING! Poor Mother! Lucky me!
2) Too much to do too much to do too much to do.
3) It cracks me up that horrible looming task #1) is: memorize rest of Yellow Submarine in sign language, and sub-task #1.1) is: find pirate hat.

Wish me luck, yo.

4) Too much to do because yesterday I went to church where we ate a lot (Denali was the night before, so not only was there turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and so forth, there were FIVE BAZILLION little Denali cakes that contained nothing but sugar and ghee and cardamom. My poor pancreas.) Afer going to church to eat a lot, I went back to the dorm and spent the whole day sitting on my bed reading Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies. Today I spent the entire day till this point reading Red Mars. Math class? What math class? But I do know more about the 1940s in the Dominican Republic; also Martian geology.

happy thanksgivings,
love,
alex

It's been a year. It was on a Thursday, in a street under an office building with the buzzards and the helicopters circling overhead. I was brave, and I was not brave. I spent a morning in the street with the sting and smell of pepper spray on me, and the afternoon in a deli watching the riot cops go by outside. We live in interesting times.

love,
alex.

P.S. I saw him - the one from the alligator river, my marching partner - in the grocery store today. A year later, he still smells like safe. Alongside the loudest sound and all the fear of Miami comes the fact that I fell in love, not with him, but with the sky and the noises of the kitchens and the hope in the air. I fell in love with the smell of him, and with the sun going down over the city. Maybe that's enough.

love again,
alex

His name, it turns out, is The Chief. He says it's because he's native american; he looks like an irish coal miner to me. He's a wispy little hobgoblin of a man, his brown-gray hair matted into a thick solid sheet across his head and down his back, like an extra hat. He sells polished rocks in front of the sandwich shop, mostly polished semi-precious things and usually the same ones for several months. I traded him a pita for a peice of what he called albite, a dirty white shard of stone that gleams in the light. He fished it out of the bag with his long dirty thumbnail, at least an inch of it, and reported my pita a satisfactory trade as he had a lot of albite and it didn't polish well. He was very clear today. Some days he rocks and mumbles; some days he's asleep. When my town tried to pass an anti-vagrant law he got a business license for the three square feet of sidewalk he occupies. This is the first time I've talked to him; we all know everyone, in this town.

and then I walked home, under the dissolving clouds and the sliver moon and the violet sky. And here I am.

love,
alex

Summer in the mountains is a dark, heavy season, full of peculiar shadows and green underwater light. I like it fine, of course - even in the summer the high rocky hills are fierce, and quiet, and full of wind. But winter, winter is bright and sharp, even in the vallies. My mother used to call the furred brown winter hillsides the bones of the mountain. Down in the valley (between one parking lot and another, where the stream still runs) the light through the rhododendrons is golden, and dazzling.

Happy November,

alex

It could be the frenetic energy that I get right before being sick, or it could be a wee little plea for some POSTMODERNISM ALREADY dammit. But I now 1) sleep under the bed 2) use the bed as a desk and 3) use the desk as a kitchenette. The sad thing is, this is working so much better for me than the previous model.

And the sick hit right after I did all the furniture wrasslin', by the way. So don't be surprised if I don't post for a while. I recently sent J an email entitled MY BRAIN IS FULL OF FUZZ AND ANGRY PUPPIES! THEY ARE DOING THE MAMBA AND SNEEZING.

So by not posting, I will be sparing people a lot of hyperbolic capitalization. And that is good. Post-ironic Hometown hipsterisms should be used with more discretion.

love!
alex

Well, fuck.

alex

Dear world: How is one supposed to concentrate on schoolwork on a day like this? It could be the Best Day Ever. All this madness could be over. Gone. Vamoose. Say it with me: Former President George W. Bush.

I will be up fairly late tonight.

love,
alex

I have to go write a paper; I've put it off long enough. But I wanted to say - sitting in the graffiti and crepe paper front room of the collective, with a three-month-old baby (the child of a dredlocked girl washing dishes) in my arms - he walked in (the old man, the last one) and shock registered on his face. It's been almost exactly a year since I went to Miami and fell in love; that baby could be mine, right now. When I gave the (now squalling and rooting) baby back to its mother to nurse, he hugged me, and said, I've missed you. just interesting, in that room, the choices I didn't make and the wild tangents my life might have taken. I am something different now than I was.

love,
alex