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On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people […]

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Oh, Spain! Is so filled with amazing events! Walking home just now I saw a man busking with his telescope. It was pointed up towards the moon, a peach lying in dark glossy syrup, and his hand-lettered sign and the beast had attracted a queue of people eager to see the sky up close. His […]

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I was at a dinner party and came over all poorly. In fact I thought I might throw up and had to kind of bolt from the room. Must’ve been the Tramadol, an opiate fed to me by my beloved who had acquired it from his father, who suffers from extreme chronic pain. “They’re not […]

A sex offender or child killer gets convicted. Somebody posts about it on Facebook. Their thread fills up with eager commentary, almost lip-smacking: Got the bastard! May he rot! Hope he gets raped inside, hope he gets torn. There’s a self-righteous tone of “He deserves his victim’s fate, only worse.” This vindictiveness and the sense […]

Two boys scribbling either end of the dinner table. “What are you drawing?” 6yo: “It’s a diamond. With a rainbow inside it.” 4yo: “This is a machine for making everything dead.” Their mother, breastfeeding, laughs telling us how the 6yo asked her could they play “jumping over Amelia on the couch.” Amelia is three weeks […]

At the top of a very high hill yesterday, what in Holland or Denmark would be called a mountain, with a view over all of Switzerland ~ so it seemed ~ my friend taught me to peel dandelion stalks so that they spring into pretty green silvery curls. Behind us a family with very young […]

My host has Scandinavian taste and I love her house. The green river falls past the end of the garden. In my early twenties I visited and she and I ran down and flung ourselves in, again and again, fetching up winded downstream against the gravel island, hanging onto branches. You walked all the way […]