Email from Adam just now

Like I said, you're 100% you. Landa, inescapably.

This weekend's work

Tina couldn’t just reach into the tackle box where she kept her beauty potions. She had to give me the academia behind image.

“They say put your best face forward. It’s true,” she said. “I mean, do you want to score Matt or not?”

I pictured myself winning him in a game, poker maybe, or something more physical like badminton. Matt as prize, Matt as reward. All you needed to forfeit was your pride.

“You make it sound like a fucking lottery ticket. He’s not a Scratcher, you know.”

“He’s a dude,” she said. “He might as well be.”

I hopped up on the granite countertop and swung my feet against her bleached-wood cabinets. I didn’t know dick about home design, but I did know that the 1990s called and were demanding their elements back.

“Anyway,” I said.

Adam, on looking at a picture of Barcelona

"Didn't we bang on that balcony over there?"

Heartbreak

Being an animal advocate means tears -- both shed and unshed. It means thinking about those who were unwanted, walked to The Room, and killed. The sweet beating hearts stopped unceremoniously, the eyes with death-shade drawn. It's sometimes too much to bear. Like today.

Bobby G's Pizzeria

One of the fucking awesome guys who works here snapped a few pictures of us and came over with a grin. "I showed this to my staff and some of my regulars," he said, "and I said, you see this family? This is what it's all about, you assholes."

Biergarten, Hayes Valley

Annie Proulx, "Postcards"

Marcus said this passage reminded him of me:

"When she turned the ignition key and steered the car out of the drive, the gravel crunching deliciously under the tires, she went dizzy with power for the first time in her adult life. The radio played 'Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White', and she was glad. She felt she was young and in a movie when she drove. She had never guessed at the pleasure of choosing which turns and roads to take, where to stop. Nor the rushing air buffeting her face and whipping her iron hair as though it were child's hair. As though they had given her the whole country for her own. Did men, she wondered, have this feeling of lightness, of wiping out all troubles when they got into their cars or trucks? Their faces did not show any special pleasure when they drove. Men understood nothing of the profound sameness, week after week, after month of the same narrow rooms, treading the same worn footpaths to the clothesline, the garden. You soon knew it all by heart. Your mind closed in to the problems of cracked glass, feeling for pennies in linty coat pockets, sour milk. You couldn't get away from troubles. They came dragging into the mirror with you, fanning over the snow, fillled the dirty sink. Men couldn't imagine women's lives, they seemed to believe, as in a religion, that women were numbed by an instinctive craving to fill the wet mouths of babies, predestined to choose always the petty points of life on which to hang their attention until at last all ended and began with the orifices of the body. She had believed this herself. And wondered in the blue nights if what she truly felt now was not the pleasure of driving but being cast free of Mink's furious anger. He had crushed her into a corner of life.

"Coming back from her journeys, from seeing houses set in a hundred positions, some beside the road, some back in a knot of trees like a brooch on a hill's breast, her own house showed up as a slatternly lean of paintless clapboards, the porch slipping away like melting butterscotch."