Atticus Quench carried a carton of orange juice in his left hand. A lit cigarette twitched between the fingers of his right. The Humphrey St. morning was a gallery of flat geometries.
Days of Our Lives, Part 1
5 Dec“This is like a sophisticated game of bingo…I’ll try to do it without shouting out who the winner is.” – 11/4/2010
“‘Talk to me’ as they say on TV.” – 11/5/2010
“My style of lecturing is sort of ‘Find the sheet, Days! Find the sheet!’” – 11/12/2010
“I have wicked peripheral vision.” – 11/16/2010
“You all are hopeless. I’m hopeless.”- 11/16/2010
“Do corporations have gender? I don’t know.” – 11/16/2010
“There was dancing in the streets and chambers. Sometimes without robes on.” – 12/2/2010
“One is sometimes a fly on the wall with judges’ discussion of the difference between summer and winter robes and what they wear underneath them.” – 12/2/2010
Quench Orchard
1 Dec
quince
He was the kind of man who looked to see if a ladder was properly shod. He had a felicity with objects. Split: doomed to unhinge things. A schismatic by name and by nature. Atticus: blessed with the ability to hold and to heft; burdened with the weight of what he held. He split quinces from the branches with a tug. Branches snapped back.
Oh sure. Biplane in the underbrush. He gives smart momentum to the propeller and there just happens to be a leather helmet filled with quinces and a sassy set of goggles and he puts one hand on the cedar rigging and vaults the papery side of the fuselage and turns the terrain into a calico of harvest and tumbling klutzes. Gant photoshoot much? Swift all growed up. “I’m barfing in my own mouth,” he said biliously.
ooo
Cardozo on Contracts
16 Novwhat a card.
Facts: Two whales fart in the South Pacific.
Cardozo: Maritime contract.
Facts: A man imagines himself in the arms of a woman.
Cardozo: Contract. He’s the father.
Facts: Sun comes up.
Cardozo: Contract. World would have ended without agreement. Ever heard of reliance?
Facts: I like corndogs.
Cardozo: Me too. Contract.
Psst. Your universe is open.
7 Nov
Because 12:05 AM just ain’t tonight. It’s suspended in some cavity in this open universe: a nameless nocturnal breach between now, night, and the next song.
Dereliction of duty is our favorite way to spend Sunday night. In da club. Strobes turning you into a stop-motion Adonis, David epileptic and liquid-ankled. There is a three-prong test for instant compulsion and you are passing with lysergic colors. Put some black letter on my tongue and let’s make it a red letter night. You can whisper tart nothings and I’ll squeeze sweet somethings. THESE ARE DANCE LYRICS.
We didn’t need to cite the James Brown case – we had to. Judge Walker – I don’t know karate, but I do know crazy. You can find all the controlling precedent you need in the Dancefloor Reporter, Volume 11.
In the morning, currant scones and sunslit drapes. But it’s 12:05 AM. Tomorrow is five minutes young and you are of such an age that your temples carry etchings. What else, really, are temples for?
Midweek, when hours turn happy, we will wring rain out of our pantlegs at the home of the Benevolent and Protective Order. The amber in the glass will collude with the umber of the paneling and we will have a nagging sense that home is a futile concept. That same nightmare of the yellow jacket trying his damnedest to sting you through the bottom of the pillow. Venom puddling on your eardrum.
I remember when I was eight and I believed you really could save daylight. I remember when she was religious and she thought we could really save each other. Saint Paul holding exploding piggy banks of protons. The resplendent logic of Justin Timberlake on a 4/4 of Timbaland in Timberlands of music videos with chair dancing. Work it till yer stomach hurtin.
Juxtapositions
26 Oct
from one haven to another
Atticus considers whether a lemon or lime zest would be the best garnish for a Gin and Housatonic. Lake Zora is an elegant countertop. The Cabildo’s cheeks ripple backward with the breeze, disclosing a goblin smile and a black tongue. S/he will be left in the hatchback of the Hyundai for 2.5 hours. Change a decimal and a unit and you’ve got a sentence.
Webbed shelves of color and shadow scaffold Route 34. Trees as Louisiana kitchens smuggled upright to New England: concatenations of butter and flame standing tall in the gloaming.
The luxury of freedom is in the continua, the juxtapositions of grey and grey and grey until nightblack or daylight commence. On the inside, you are murderer or rapist, black or white, CO or inmate. A room is flooded with fluorescent light or locked and dark. You are alone in a cell where no one hears you breathe or you are crammed in a room where you could be stabbed, befriended, or bitched out by any of 100 others, guards included. Everyone knows your business; who knows you? Your mother…and that’s if you’re lucky.
“What goes through your head right before you go to sleep?”
“That’s easy. I think on the past. It’s all I’ve got.”
Knees nearly touching, we can smell each other’s breath. Colgate and baked bread. Two hours here yield more direct human contact that two months of happy hours on campus. I allow myself to loathe Yale Law School. Then I remember that Yale Law School is the reason that I am here in the first place. Then I wonder if what I really loathe is myself, or my station, or my belief that I can escape either if I so choose.
On cue, the facilitator in the green jump suit asks me to tell This Incarcerated Stranger* what I love most about myself. I am supposed to talk for one minute without stopping. I am not allowed to interrupt eye contact. We rotate. I see Split across the room. He is laughing. He is always laughing. Humor is his shtick and his shiv.
I have told a man with a neck scar and a wisp of a smile that my favorite superhero is Batman. Between the plainspoken memoirs of the first half-hour, he was one of two who stood and gave a pitch for Citibank. The commercial, denuded of customers and context, was surreal. It’s this combination of global reach and local insight that has made us an industry leader since 1902.
…
It’s dark in New England and we slip quietly from Haven to Haven. A fugitive elite, eating candy bars, meditating on the power and cruelty of EXIT signs.
-Lucinda Whitney, 10/10
* We can’t name names. Is it better to invent them?
