All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > No Man's Land > Status Update

“It suddenly became vital to me to steal a peacock feather for you, on first thought because I figured it would make me seem more butch, and on second because if the first thought failed, then at least the feather would be a memento of the day, of me inside the day, its gas-flame eye unblinking and and absolutely disallowing oblivion.
I couldn't get close enough to the peacock.”

“Things have got to the point with pigeons where their presence in the city is popularly resented but privately ignored, like daylight savings or another country's war. The reason for this is ubiquity. Pigeons in your day are punctuations in a block of text […]; and of course it's the words of the day that call your attention, not the commas that fuss between them.”

“These are the colours a river can be: blue; black; off-blue; universe blue; the colour of an orange; rain black; rain brown; home-, love-, folksong blue.

The river doesn't laugh from the mouth. It laughs from the mountain.

[…]

By the dam on the river they purify water. Think: to bring water back to itself; every day to say water, and write water. Not just to imply it.”

“What's left to be desired:
the slap of wet shorts on rock,
more unprotected skin than
we know what to do with.
Humans at the beach are animal
in the best way — all movement is
the least effort for the most reward,
and from hunger to fullness
is as the crow flies. The poster is right
to show words and not grammar.
At the beach there's no grammar, no restraint.”

“When they scroll past on long bus journeys, I can translate them into any caliber of metaphor —
cardiograph of the country, cloud-scourers, bird-botherers, nature's cuneiform, village gossips, barcode of the sky —
but never into English. I forget and I'm stumped — I wish there was another word for it.”