I have bangs now like Bette Davis as Charlotte

I did it because of winter hats. Thought a little fringe would be cute, you know, and it is pretty cute in an aged child sort of way

Too cold out there for Daisy these days. She won’t budge. She looks Bette Davisesque herself – all eyeballs and tragic – and she will only go into the backyard if I go with her. Otherwise she fakes it and stands on the deck just around the corner where she thinks I can’t see her and so I have to throw on my coat and boots and accompany her while she does her business(es).

Among other things, I have noticed that in a certain depth and density of snow, her poo does not fall over upon exit.

It stands up like a little Prairie Dog instead

Fuck. Sorry. Hush, hush Sherry.

I try to look at least acceptable when I go out, or maybe just kempt or at the very least on the human side, but when I get out there I let my low standards slide and the second I get too hot – and keep in mind that I haven’t been truly cold in like ten years – all bets are off and so is the hat and I wonder what I must look like when I run, you know, in my big black coat and boots and creepy old child bangs/face combo.

Nevermind Bette Davis, I bet I look like Mrs. Fucking Rochester

And by the time I get back to my street like an hour and a half later I am boiling over and singing out loud.

Today it was Go-Go Round by Gordon Lightfoot that I listened to over and over again because the melody is just so fresh and solitary and consistently surprising which you can’t say about too many songs on repeat, can you?

So I was in great company

We’re all a little crazy these days. I mean I have friends and neighbours who don’t give nearly the fuck they used to and just the other morning somewhere around five, the people next door who have been pretending to be sedentary all this time, had a pizza delivered and I guess the guy across the street had been pining for his Christmas lights because they were all fired up again and I swear I heard Abba.

It’s a fucking carnival around here

Also recycling bins are gaping and more glassy and I seriously doubt an eyebrow is raised at my antics so I think I need to amp it up a little, see what I can drag out of my disorderly conduct piles.

Maybe we’re in Our Salad Days all over again, you know, except they’re not quite so green or so cold

I’m gonna bard it up while I can, you know, explore the energy and enthusiasm and confidence and invisibility of youth especially when it comes to writing stories which has maybe become too serious an endeavour if not drudgery of late because my current characters are uncooperative which is not really their fault, is it?

Anyway now that Daisy’s Charlotteing more than usual and I’m on my own for walks, I go down the big hill to the lake, mostly, instead of going across to the forest she loves.

All shorelines are exciting and like Gordon Lightfoot, they get me every single time, but in the winter there’s a riotous and disorderly joyfulness at play which is maybe exactly what I need in my story-writing

I saw the lake from the edge of the forest yesterday, which is at the top of the bluffs and the waves were HUGE and just now walking along the shoreline there were rocks all over the place, and sizeable ones, too, like curling stones and I thought wow those waves did a lot of work yesterday hauling all those rocks up onto the sand, and there were great big piles of them and the great big disks of pancake ice knocking around in the water last week were gone.

Anyway I kept walking – amazed at everything everywhere allthetime – and suddenly I realized that the rocks were actually pancake ice that had been smashed into smaller pieces and worn smooth, tossed onto the beach, and coated with sand.

Which blew my mind and I said to everybody I saw that’s ice, you know and they were pleasantly-to-overwhelmingly awed which is also a nice little homonym

Do you see how Bette Davis sort of looks like Maria Von Trapped?