Your Beauty Is Beyond Compare

Josh's sister and some of her people came over Saturday. We had beer, mostly, but Josh had hard cider. There's not much reason to get drunk in front of strangers, so I was done after a few. Someone wanted more, though, so we walked to the liquor store in the cold. There was a woman at the counter paying for a brand of vodka she'd never tried. She promised the clerk she'd report back. She said, "I drink a lot of vodka, so I'll see you tomorrow and tell you how it is." The clerk said he didn't work Sundays and the woman looked destroyed.

There are sometimes attractive clerks at that little store. I can't imagine what they'd be like without the glass divider, though. They all have red eyes and dirty fingernails. It's this attraction to really dingy people that tells me everything I don't want to know about myself. Josh isn't dingy unless we've been eating Indian. Then his fingers are orange from the tandoori chicken and both of us have body odor like curry. It's a controlled sort of dinginess and it works, but sometimes I see a man smoking a cigarette and I want to know what it's like to have that sort of kiss, too.

It snowed this morning. The road was slick as snot even though there wasn't much snow. It's possible I need new tires. It's possible I need a new car. The other day when it was raining, I tried to brake at a yellow light but my car just slid on through. I think Josh thought we were done living. Ha ha! We are still alive.

I have a friend who is being paid a little to go crazy in the woods. I'm so jealous, I cannot tell you. This friend is writing a novel in a cabin and getting her lunch delivered in baskets. I'm writing a novella in my house, laid out on my bed like I'm sick, and my lunch is usually a fried egg. Sometimes, the big dog upstairs barks and walks around and I think someone has broken in so I grab the scissors.

If you paid me to knit something, I'm knitting it today. There's only one of you, so you know who you are. The hints to your identity are as follows: pizza, pizza, pizza.

I have two stories out. I imagine it's like when your kids go to summer camp. The longer you don't hear from them, the less they seem like yours.