bullet-point the blue sky

• Hey! I'm going to New York City! (Guitar across my shoulder like a 30.06.) I'll be there from June 11-15. Where will you be then? If you'll be there too, why don’t we be there together for a while?



• Leory is recovering nicely from his ordeal on Wednesday. (I think I will refer to it from now on as His Ordeal, in manner of Victorian Spinster.) So far, he seems to be not especially different. Still big, still black, still fluffy. Maybe a little quieter, but who knows if that'll last?



• I went end-of-season shopping last night, and bagged $130.00 worth of sweaters for under $20.00, which :D:D:D:D. But also there was this adorable jacket, a cropped swing which is going to be dated instantly in a matte mulberry satin which is going to be terribly impractical for wear, in a size which is going to be (I hope) too big for me by next year anyway. So I didn't buy it even though it was only twelve dollars. But now! Now I am regretting it so heartily that I am considering driving all the way back across town for it -- assuming it’s still there by the end of the night -- and finding occasions to wear it, as in the romance novel I read many years ago in which the heroine's mother wore ancient evening dresses to garden because she loved the dresses and couldn't bear to retire them even though they were hopelessly unstylish. Mulberry satin to work! To the Wendy's drive-through! With my plaid flannel pajama bottoms!
  
  I totally think it would work, right? Would you go back for the jacket or not?



• Then there's this heartbreaking and lovely interview with Lynda Barry. I don't mention enough -- to be fair, I don't think I actually could -- how deeply her comics and to a somewhat lesser extent her novels have affected me, and how profoundly they've influenced the way I write. Not that I write like Lynda Barry, no one does, but if there's anyone, ever, whose entire body of work I wish I could have produced, it's hers. Her writing is funny and harrowing and melancholy and insightful, so personal that often you don't even perceive its universality until you take a breath and step away. If you haven't read her, I recommend starting with Ernie Pook's Comeek, her semi-autobiographical tour de force, produced over three decades. It's episodic and scattershot and plotless and one of the most painful and unflinching and lyrically beautiful accounts of childhood I've ever read.
  
  I've adored her since college, and when I read the article linked above, I was shocked to realize how little love -- never mind the money -- she's received for something so generally huge, and so specifically resonant in my own life. It's kind of jarring to realize that not everyone is reading her the way I read her, that not everyone wants to stand up when she speaks publicly and tell her how important she's been to them over the years.
  
  Because everyone should. Everyone really, really should.