quotes for every occasion

[radfrac_archive_full]

"It went away? 'I dwell in darkness without you' and it went away?"
--Sorsha, warrior-daughter of the evil Queen Bavmorda, in Willow (1988)

I have a new notebook waiting. I haven't quite filled the old, despite finally getting back to my writing routine today. Starting a new notebook always fills me with a sense of possibility. There are at least three ideas I quite like, plus adjuncts to the old, in the current/passing-away notebook that I haven't had time to develop because of, well, All That.

Trying to read my notes: Maybe I should try waking the hounds from their slumber-- "No, that can't be right," he muttered.

I've been making my own coffee in the mornings, mostly out of Frugality Measures, but I find I like the routine -- the Bodum and its plunger, the table in the window. The space for this meditative morning-ness is brought to me by my father, who took away a heap of cardboard boxes and a box of crumpled paper on Tuesday, and brought me all my parents' surplus glassware. I could run a bar now, if I had anything to serve other than cherry brandy.

Oh, yes, cherry brandy, right. A friend of mine, a poet (a poet whose poems I actually like! Very Rare Creature) wrote a memoir about first moving away from home, and how he bought a bottle of cherry brandy and put it on his shelf, symbol of adulthood and the future. I can use all the symbols I can get, even other people's. I was given a horseshoe that goes to the newly (and not necessarily happily) independent who need luck the size and shape of a hoof. (That's not mockery, friends-- many useful entities come with hooves. Fauns, satyrs, and other of my favorite ambiguities.) I bought the cherry brandy. I like it, actually, though certain of my acquaintance suggest it tastes like cough syrup.

I'm saving up for absinthe. Wouldn't be Paris of a Certain (Almost Entirely Fabricated) Era without absinthe. I could never take myself quite seriously enough to be a Goth, but I seem to have acquired a few of the trappings despite myself. Though my skull-shaped glass stein was a gift. And came from Las Vegas.

--rf

Comments

Under the Volcano

[(Anonymous)]

I think it was in Malcolm Lowery's Under the Volcano where the protagonist is stumbling around his backyard looking for a bottle of absinthe that he threw out the window in a fit of drunken rage.

But you won't be like that.

You will sip it elegantly and think Fine Thoughts.

Re: Under the Volcano

[radiantfracture]

Although something about that image appeals to my current sensibilities. I think it's the mindless self-destructive craving.

Blind worms, we.

Elegant ones. With Fine Thoughts.

--rf

Re: Under the Volcano

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, and I sort of mis-quoted. He didn't throw the bottle out the window in a fit of rage. He was trying to quit drinking, and so threw his half empty bottle into the garden. Which is actually more depressing than rage, because you know he doesn't succeed and dies at the end of the book anyway. Blind rage is much more healthy and cleansing than abject addiction.

Re: Under the Volcano

[radiantfracture]

Hmm. I like your version better. It's still abject, I think, but, er, well, can you have abject grandeur? Anyway, you should put it in a book. Or I might steal it from you. Actually I just thought of a place to put it.

I love mishearings and misrememberings, because they feel like they come from outside, but they belong to you.

I think the excitement of having a new comment-er is making my prose a little hyper(bolic/active/adjectival).

--rf