i'm perfecting my long-distance jumps.

heads
Originally uploaded by juniper pearl.

james joyce drank. a lot.
not that it didn't work for
him, but there it is.


i *heart* neil halstead. i also seize any opportunity to incorporate photographs of doll parts into clothing designs. this one, for instance.

for those of you who might not know about it, having a day off in the middle of the week is stellar. i'm the only one in the coffee shop at eleven in the morning, the only one who can hear the very loud music coming out of my room all afternoon, the only one laughing at me when i dance with the parrot on the couch . . . dy-no-mite.

so, apparently there are some people with some misgivings about some things. i'd like to tell a story for the hecklers.

my grandparents' first date was a double. they arrived with different people, they left together, and they stayed that way. they've been married for, i think, fifty-three years, maybe fifty-four. they raised four children in a one-floor two-bedroom house. my grandfather held down at least three jobs at a time all his life and has never said a mean word about anyone. my grandmother claps her hands and squeals like a preschooler when she's excited. i never understood how they managed it.

last summer my entire family went out to dinner. at one point my grandmother leaned across the table to scold my grandfather, who was holding a plate in the air and scraping some kind of sauce off of it with his spoon. my aunt told her to shush, at least he wasn't licking it off like he would have been at home. grammy conceded the point, but not without making a series of disgusted faces and noises at the idea. "what, you've never licked a plate in your whole life?" my aunt asked. my grandmother is like me and won't lie if she can help it, but she wasn't happy about having to admit that, well, perhaps she had, when she was very very young. my grandfather, who had been laughing silently to himself the whole time, asked, "maybe when you were nine or ten?" "no, charles," she sighed, "i'm sure if it happened i was quite a bit younger than that."

my grandfather became suddenly serious and said to his wife, "i wish i could have known you when you were nine or ten, dorothy."

"why," my aunt asked him, giggling, still their baby, "so you could have gotten together and licked some plates?"

"no," he said, not smiling even a bit, "i just think she would have been a very nice little girl to know."

my grandmother blushed, lifted a hand to her hair. she was seventy-three years old. i am sure that if something happened to either of them, the other would follow over the edge of the world inside of a day.

don't you tell me it doesn't happen. it does. i've been watching it happen all my life. it's everywhere.

it's everywhere. look closer.