MY FURRY MADELEINE

"The Skunk Is an Attractive Little Animal that makes an excellent pet, despite the fact it can emit a very disagreeable odor when it is attacked or frightened by enemies," says my encyclopedia.

Also, "It walks like a person whose shoes are too tight."

That I would have liked to see very much. Instead, I saw just a haze of white vapor puff up in the woods, then evaporate, followed by this:


And smelled something like napalm.
Which ripened into this:

Especially in the 15-minute car ride home.

However: when I came out of the pet store and got back into the car with my giant bottle of Skunk-Off, I was immersed in this humid, warm, doggy, skunky moment. And I instantly thought: summer!
The smell was straight out of my kidhood in Minnesota.
And I felt for the first time today--which has been a total rainy cold seasonal-dissonance wrong-side-of-the-bed kind of day--really happy.

SATURDAY IS COMING

and I made this this morning.

I'm going to read an Arctic story.
Reading Frenzy

TRANSIENT GLOBAL AMNESIA

Fr: Dad
Im better and going home . It was transient gjobal amnesia very wierd! Love dad
May 8
6:53 am

At first I think about it as maybe like when you wake up and your eyes are all filmy, you can't see and you keep rubbing and rubbing them, and finally they clear. But it's not like that at all. It's more like hypnagogic thought--where you're not sure if you're awake or asleep, if what you are experiencing is real or a dream, and both are happening at once, the real and the dream at the same time. And then you do wake up, and the dream part vanishes, and you don't remember it, just have the residual feeling of it.

Except Transient Global Amnesia inverts that.
Instead of the dream feeling real, the real feels like a dream.
Then you wake up and the real vanishes.

This is how I understand it at least, from when it happened to my dad last week, and it scares me marrow-deep.

ANOTHER HOLOCENE POSTER

Originally uploaded by chelseyhotel.