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Coffee: Pike Place, Apartment Lounge Brew
I went walking in the woods and startled a black snake. She had skin like greased leather and a head like an almond. She was basking on a bridge. When she heard me, she shot off in the direction I was heading. She was candy, licorice, strings on the back of a dress. She stopped at the edge of the bridge. There was a wooden railing to wrap around. She kept her head out of view, but I could still see her tail.
I like snakes, but my heart jumps anytime I see one.
Besides the walk, I spent most of Sunday sitting inside under the ceiling fan. Even though it’s a cooler 89 degrees, that’s still too much for me. I listened to a podcast. An NPR anchor interviewed Colson Whitehead about his new book ‘The Nickel Boys.’ It’s fiction, but based on a real correctional school in Florida that had been operating for decades. The school was known for its abuses. They brought on one of the former boarders for interview. He talked about how he was brought to a small white room on his third day and beaten with a leather whip. Later, they mentioned the unmarked graves on the schoolgrounds, and how one of the bodies had buckshot in the bones. The school was investigated numerous times but only got shot down in 2011.
There’s this milky-white wisdom we all learned in kindergarten classrooms: snakes are poison, America has her amber waves.
What makes your heart jump when you see it?
Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller
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I could see the bird soaring away. And then I realised there was no more shutting of your eyes to the truth,no salvation in being blindfolded,no dream and reality,no being awake or asleep. Everything is one and the same continuing eternal day and world, coiling around you like a snake. This is when I saw vast , remote happiness as being small but close.
Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars
Livesay Writing 