This morning I woke up at 7 (late!) and trekked to Auburn and Parkdale concentrating very hard on not falling in the slick melt. Harrison made good eggs and we formalized and inaugurated our blog of creative writings, which I will post a link to here sometime soon, when I am feeling less closed-form about my words. Kevin asked us if it was a secret and Harrison said, "Well, secret is maybe the wrong word. I would say "low-profile." Now it is noon and having Accomplished Something already today, I am back in my bed with Tulip on my lap. Tulip is sort of a different cat than the one I left behind. She is very particular, only wanting to be picked up on her own terms, and spending just as much time sitting and staring judgmentally at me as playing raucous games that cause messes.

In keeping with the sea of nostalgia that I am swimming in, here is something else I wrote this time last year.

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today i met jim. he grabbed my arm and said "is that a BUFFALO skyline?"
he traced it with his finger and said, "creeley, nice."
he said, "for your next tattoo you should get BUFF-ALO! across your knuckles!
he said, "look at my pitchfork! i grew up on a farm. my friend did it with a sewing needle dipped in india ink. which was, you know, excruciating"
he was 22 and balding.
he always wears a hat.
he listens to klezmer and tribe.
he put a holiday sticker on my arm and made me eat turkish delight.
we talked about being depressed by young geniuses.
he asked, "so, have you befriended any boy prostitutes here yet?"

also today, i found out that tleaves main is housed in "the first self-service grocery store in buffalo, maybe the world."

today, i met tina, who moved here because of our rich poetic and media history.
it reminds her of home, specifically the post-communist landscape.
she is going to grad school for english/gender studies.
she is writing her statement of purpose about stone butch blues and the (dis)empowerment proferred by not h(ir) s(he) style pronouns, but rather the words anything, nothing, something, everything.

i waited on a crazy man.
he gave me his coat and backpack, he was very tall, he had wild hair and the bluest eyes i have ever seen.
"YOU!" he shouted.
"you have blue eyes. i have blue eyes too. our eyes, they are like THIS!"
he gestured two disparate lines drawing together in the air between us.
he asked me if i had put something dangerous in his bag.
he asked if it would bite.
i said no i didn't think so.

a facebook profile search for "rust belt" yields 12 results, including:
10 buffalo residents, including:
one of my friends (you, miss chrissy. ps. house of leaves is on my list! also i have never read any JSF - a travesty, i know!)
a boy whose profile picture is his transparent self in a sabres jersey, lookin grim, layered over the night skyline (i am tempted to friend this boy just because of his profile picture.)
a girl with a wet underpass as her profile picture.
a girl with a bright blue stencil of buffalo as her profile picture

within buffalo, heart of the 'belt, we also have the "fruit belt."

i love it here.
sometimes my mental whirlwind crashes into the edges and i am too big it is too small i need to get out.
sometimes i count my blessings and stars that i can be from a place that gives me so much to feed on, and wonder how i could possibly wind up anywhere else.
this happens once twice three times a day, week, year.
it's no fun to live somewhere if there's no struggle.
"builds character."

alex's father said to her, "go to buffalo, baby. real people there. really know how to eat, really know how to drink."
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Also, I am reading The Importance of Being Iceland. I started it before I left and even packed and unpacked it a few times, before leaving it behind, but now I am reading it for real. Here are some things from it that make me jump up and down inside:

"In general I think writers are not smart. They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is."

"You know how you can't just meet someone in their country a few nights and then your country. You have to repeat the experience a number of ways, to begin to compare the person to people you know, to have that aha, and then realize that that impression is also wrong. Slowly the new friend begins to appear in your imagination like a kind of geological event you've never encountered before."

"I've been kind of obsessed for a few years now with this thing Robert Smithson liked, an idea which he lifted from an anthropologist, Anton Ehrenzweig, that cultures can generally be divided into two types - ones with a buried god, and the ones with a strewn one. I'm thinking about sex here in place of god and in the case of Sadie thinking that though there are artists who might actually bury their sexual content in their work (like a dog buries a bone), other artists let the sex be strewn throughout their productions."

I was already endeared to Eileen Myles, but really, now I feel a number of other things too. Perhaps most that she is exactly the kind of writer I would like to be.