Isn’t this book cover wild? Compulsion is based on the Leopold and Loeb murder (as is Hitchcock’s Rope), but the cover seems to suggest the horror is homosexuality (hand holding!).
BELOW: And another cover—I tore this off a New Yorker and put it up at work. My coworkers nodded when I showed them. (Substitute the thrift store for the garbage truck… though we are sometimes just a temporary stop—this week our truck had to make a run to the dump, full of unsalable furniture (broken, reeking of cat, stained, torn).
Some things survive. BELOW: the side of this little box says, “Eat Yeast Foam for Health”. Ass’t Man claimed this box before I could. After our fight last week, we both made peace offerings of thrift—“didn’t your wife want this book?” I said, offering him Michelle Obama’s Becoming (we haven’t got her new one yet).
“I know you like Dansk, do you want these?”—offering me four Dansk individual baking dishes. I didn’t really want them but accepted them for the bridge they were. We’re like a pair of bower birds doing mutual courting. Our problems remain but work is nicer if we get along. And we genuinely share a love of cool old stuff.
I’d mentioned John the Baptist here yesterday, and then at work I found this postcard in a book about him--Caravaggio’s “Beheading of the Baptist”. Lotta disturbing stuff going on here…
Staff meeting this morning—I texted Emmler this “life hack for work meetings” below. She looks and acts fierce but like so many young women she apologizes when there’s no need. It’s the other side of the coin from Ass’t Man blaming others.
When I was little, I was baffled by the saying The buck stops here. Why would you want to shoulder responsibility I wondered.
Now of course I get it. It’s one of the gifts of age, that understanding. It’s like—don’t order crap from Amazon that you’re going to pass along or throw out later. (What if everyone had to own—literally—everything we’ve ever bought?)
As a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago said to me, “You can have whatever you want. But you have to carry it.”
I’m carrying my sonnet writing materials this morning. 😉
