Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

  One still needs to gear up to come sit on the balcony in July; I don’t recall when it was last this cold for this long in the summer. The soil is so soft and wet from the constant rain the county worker’s lawnmower leaves large trails of brown on the green, as if the entire vast lawn is suddenly striped. I was given some hard advice about you. I have always been headstrong, but the advice I got has given me pause. The worst damage from the storm was the age-old aspen ripped from the ground in one fell swoop, with the roots now exposed and an enormous chunk of soil still attached to them, with the majority of the tree now in Lake Pyhä. The sight was simultaneously devastating and magnificent. The littlest damage was my scarf leaving my hiking provisions bag unobserved as I was down there on my walk, my smoky pink silk scarf, I loved it so. A token tribute to the gods of weather, most likely also now in Lake Pyhä, since I followed loosely the bike trail, that is my hike now...

Some years ago, I wrote a piece on this blog on my secretly harbored love for country music in general, and Dolly Parton in particular.  After the release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter last Friday, I revisited what I had written so that I wouldn’t repeat myself any more than is my signature repetitive streak.  Beyoncé hails herself the Queen, and why not? For she is the most, the wildest while also the most controlled, and the most extravagant popular singer in the world today. When she releases new music, the world stops. As it did this time, too. She is the most important artist right now to voice her opinions on any given topic, because she is widely revered and extensively heard. You cannot ignore Beyoncé if you tried. She doesn’t have powerful friends in high places; she is the place of power incarnate, and what she has already done, her body of work, will not be equaled or ignored, ever. No one can erase her or take her place. She has mythologized her persona and her famil...

I was standing at the counter of my local record store, basically monopolizing the entire table as well as the attention of my favorite salesperson. He is my peer and has manned the counter for as long as I have been shopping there, so we practically have the same profession. He also has the whole High Fidelity-Rob Gordon-Championship Vinyl Owner -vibe about him, without the superiority complex or the raging fits, that I know of, and since Nick Hornby’s modern classic is one of my favorite books, I always look for signs that the story in the book is all true, and therefore notice such things. I had come down to check out birthday gift possibilities for my girl Roberts, and let’s face it, when at a record store, you don’t just get the one record and leave. So, the man was doing his best to help me out. “So, I mean what do you have in CD format?” “Oh, I have a bunch of stuff here, in the Used section. Let’s see now.” I waited, all my stuff spread across the counter, whi...

1. This time of year, I always think of my home girl Anna Karenina. There is something about the oncoming winter months, the gorgeous melancholy of the turning seasons, the endless cups of rose and strawberry scented tea, the Russian dolls on my mantelpiece, and of course the late fall wardrobe consisting of gold and deep hues of green and burgundy that make me long to be on the pages of her misfortune. A lot of people say that the first time they read Anna Karenina, they loved her story, and were all but flipping the pages forward, hurrying through Konstantin Levin’s babblings on the working class and ideas of happiness and the great Russian escape, the bliss of the countryside, as opposed to the superficial values and evil siren calls of the great cities, because who cared about these boring issues, right? The second time was all about Levin’s story, and the reader started to see how important he was for the whole unraveling of events, as Anna’s mirror, her counterpart, th...