Last night, lightning cracked an enormous tree very near to the stump and felled it, as if an axe had cut it down, one block south and east of where I live, at 30th and Calvert. It smashed a Hopkins van and blocked the street. No one was hurt. A crowd gathered, taking cell phone pictures, and muttering “Facebook” to themselves. N and I walked past. It seemed like bad luck to look.

Duck!

I was in a yoga class the other day, and the teacher, in between us sweating in the B-more humidity, was saying to us, “You don’t need this. You don’t need that.”

And I heard him say, “You don’t need a blog.”

And I was like, WTF? I do need a blog! I love my blog!

But then he went on to say, “You don’t need a strap, you don’t even need a mat – all you need is your own body and your own practice.”

And I realized he was saying, “You don’t need a bloCK.” Which is a little styrofoam yoga prop.

Yeah.

I am sleeping at such weird hours. Still jet-lagged. I took the Western bus from Montrose to Division this morning at 6 AM. This morning, like yesterday, was marked by more interactions with the sentient beings we classify as pests.

Scene One:
Guy at Bus Stop: Have you EVER seen a cockroach that big?
Dara: (investigating) Actually, I’ve seen many larger cockroaches. In LA.
Guy at Bus Stop: Well, yeah, me too, in Atlanta – but never here.
Dara: I guess it’s a pretty big cockroach for Chicago.
Guy at Bus Stop: I haven’t seen a cockroach that big since I was like ten, twelve years old.
Dara: Really?
Guy at Bus Stop: And that was a LONG time ago.

Scene Two:
Dara: Hi.
Bus Driver: You have such nice eyes.
Dara: Uh, thanks. Is it still $2.25?
Bus Driver: Yeah.

It’s nice to see you, too, Chicago. But not for long. I can’t wait to go. Although I have nothing but good feelings about this city, nothing in living here has become me, or it, like leaving. What I’ve tried to do here is done, and the rest will happen better somewhere else, with less pollen .

I’m going to have brunch with relatives this AM, then go to see the run-through of Robert’s show, an adaptation of Macbeth called “What the Weird Sisters Saw.” It’s from the POV of the witches. He’s playing M himself.

of eating pancakes, we are going to kill a mouse. (By “we,” I mean Robert.) Happy 4th.

I figured something out on my flight from Warsaw to Chicago, reading footnotes. I’ve been figuring a lot of things out lately.

I have felt weird for a long time about the number of multiple notebooks I keep – one more personal, one fit for public viewing, and so on. And I have to carry all of them around with me. It feels disjointed. I’ve always wanted to just have one brilliantly written universal notebook, like Da Vinci or Boswell or Wittgenstein or something…Of course, not writing as well as any of them makes this difficult.

But I have decided it’s okay, and have devised a system of footnoting between them. I also have started carrying a third blank one to draw in. And this is all fine.

When I’m not writing about you, I’m writing about me. And since I am doing that, I need to have all these different places for the writing. It just helps me keep my head straight between what is true and what is not, what is public and what is private. I have never been able to just have one notebook, and I’m never going to.

There’s nothing wrong with that. And more separation between the different parts of my life is probably a healthy thing: otherwise I start to feel like I could write anything into anyone. Or, any one.

In slight rebellion, however, I’m going to stop categorizing posts. I never use that feature. there’s no point.

Ketchup:

I spent my last day in Poland, after packing and moving my suitcase to Rachel’s apartment, at Mlezcarnia and Sarah’s with R, N, G&O&B, and our new friend J, a Canadian import who also happens to work with Song of the Goat.

Meeting another member of that company on the night before I was going to leave the country was a little on-the-nose. The part I especially didn’t need was this line: “You’re leaving tomorrow??”

Flight from Wroclaw to Warsaw at 7 AM. An eight-hour layover in Warsaw, during which I read more of the GROTOWSKI SOURCEBOOK and spent about half an hour crying by a window, for good measure – about the work ahead or the work behind me, I don’t know, but it was clearly something I needed to do. There is nothing like crying in an airport. You’re not alone, and yet people are afraid to speak to you.

I slept on a row of empty chairs – my first time sleeping in an airport.

Flight from Warsaw to Chicago at 5 PM, during which I sat next to a former Texan who engineers oil rigs in the Ukraine. I asked him what my problem was – this is something I like to ask strangers on planes. He told me what it was, but I’m going to keep it to myself for the moment.

Favorite line from plane: as we flew over Iceland, the woman behind me: “That’s not Chicago!”

And, as noted, met Caitlin at O’Hare.

My roommates B and K from the US Artists initiative have made it safely back to the US, although K was delayed a day by a bomb threat on her Wroclaw-Warsaw puddle-jumper. Very glad that didn’t happen to me.

We are going out to find enormous American pancakes now and get fat. I dreamed this morning of the (name of that movie about Roman food orgies-esque)* brunch X and I ate at that cake-colored Vegas hotel. When in Rome, &c.

* I seem to have left all the words in Poland. I am getting as bad as the guy from Indy who couldn’t remember the word “editor.” I made fun of him at the time, but it’s coming back to haunt me.

Caitlin picked me up at the airport Thursday night, despite my having left several messages to the effect that she shouldn’t because my flight was delayed. She showed up anyway, because no one passed on the messages. I was very happy to see her, but I thought, in my tiredness, that she must have showed up to pick up someone else. But no. Me.

I haven’t left Ravenswood except to do laundry. Yesterday Robert’s dad BBQed for us and we swam in the pool. Swimsuits, ground beef, lawn care, hair care, corn-on-the-cob: welcome back to the US, where everything seems slightly too large and too extravagant. Freeways! Salt silos! SUVs! Flats of poppies!

Despite telling R&C hours of Tales of Poland, I still feel I am not conveying the essential feeling of what it was like to spend three weeks in an environment where theater is respected. I must (verb) this. Is that what I mean? Like when something not evaporates but the reverse. A powder. In chemistry. Arrgh.

We are going to go find more food and drugs and set stuff on fire.

in the U S of A.

Vrat-suave.