Dear Bill Ray,

Please love me. Just love me. This is all.

Yours,

Lucy B. Saner

omegabus! happy new year.

two thousand and eight has arrived, through a shoe rack and into a cantonese animal-print basement lair/lakeside estate. marilyn monroe, propped up on a brash little easel in the master bedroom, seemed to approve — i posed seductively with a boar’s head and traveled around the bar circuit a million times, bouncing between hardscrabble old sports and imports, sewickline, beloved, and otherwise. people were very badly behaved on the glassed-in porch, but everyone was gorgeous. some of them did it in a bed. ben and i danced briefly at the adult party (oh, most superb of clauses). they had preposterously oversized wineglasses and simply could not get their guests to go home. elbows coda. when carl woke me up at eleven to announce that it was three in the afternoon, it was snowing wondrously and there were five thousand bottles of beer in the hall; i ditched my bearskin and ran outside (and to mrs. fisher, due credit for the largest and most demanded pot of coffee in human history).

it was a good thing i’d brought my adventure boots.

snow all over the place. no complaints here: and the catastrophe team baking sessions yielded twenty six inventively fill pies and one blue cobbleresque pastry. gluten-free crust in a bag, to boot. peter bean was our fearless leader in sport utility, playing by the cut-throat, narrow-eyed rules of size, and we owe him one deliverance from danger. some issues with traction (/lack thereof) prompted underpants snow-shoveling and the services of one older brother david, equal parts squirrel-killer and chassis-rocker — all cars escaped eventually, troops from hermitage and my old scarf came back around to play. i do love you, ohio, though, you know.

and how i’m in it, to the tune of tugboat hearts and all of the wet fall foliage. fuck, she says, ow.

octobers are basically made and broken by lunar alignment. this year the full moon comes on the twenty-sixth, which gives me bioassay tingles all over the place. we went to the ‘fway last night, after dark, for weekly casserole-cooking extravaganza supplies. stephen is to create bite-sized squares of macaroni and cheese, deep fat fried in peanut oil. the recipe calls for 18 eggs, and requires an intermediate day to congeal. andrew filled the dutch oven with his usual array of quality ingredients, because he has high standards, immense patience, and a penchant for bolognese. the rest of us looked on enviously and tried to capture the errant splatter of bacon fat. constrained by a recent dirth of glass ovenwear, i filled my aluminum stock pot with roasted vegetables, which may become soup-impromptu at some point midweek. by midnight, the kitchen was an eighty-degree garlic steambath. i am not one to complain on a rainy night.

the house next door is making goat noises now, and we are nearly all in attendance. i am sure that this will compliment their backyard rooster, whose body clock is reasonably well-tuned but sometimes falters in the light-polluted hours between two and five. as dinner-time approaches, everyone is decked out in long sleeves and tuning up the collective record of common sense in the face of exploding grease. not even the ethical violation of health food’s very most basic tenets will discourage me from being included. note: deep fat fried cinnamon-sugar rice cake. note also: intense skepticism. there is no shortage. my head is a vinyl outbuilding, and it hurts. delta(chairs) [the change in expectations]. 

mogadino. mogador. medolphinol. bupe. we like to take tolman street in the dark and feel the crater wake on the frame of the car. it shakes like a cookie sheet, bounces like a diving ring. roadways unimproved speak softly, require no left turns, brush the car with things in the shape of mountain laurel. the rain returned last night, and with the new season, i tried to recall everything i know of brazil. geny gomez seems so fragile at my height. i am glad we left the city before this happened, though i wanted nothing of the sort.

now we want a few more place settings and a complimentary covey of dinner guests before november first. we want spencer’s weakness, and we want better manners. we want we want an open-air element. what we want are perfect, non-Ballardian globes of snow pea and sweet corn, liquid but for the strength of a sphere. last friday, post RKSK, i woke up with a bruise on my knee that looked, in the haze of my rousing moments, just like the cover of the third no man’s land trade. we want to save 10% at safeway and identify the quirk.