Reyka vodka tonight... And a sudden longing to visit Reykjavik itself with a lovely clever lissome girl. Even beyond a 15-inch MacBook Pro, I do want to travel again with a lover. The girl I'd most like to see Iceland with would have to pack her own pashmina...and her own McGill hooded sweatshirt.

Reading Richard Dawkins' new book and then reading Janet Browne on Darwin's voyage--- suddenly Stuart Kauffman's name came into my mind. Reading about Darwin "opening a notebook" on some new topic brought up Stuart Kauffman's "Investigations" and "At Home in the Universe". I was always fond of Kauffman's work about complexity and emergent order, and in "Investigations" he always talked about "opening a notebook". I really do love that phrase--- and it may have a role in explaining why I have a couple of dozen Moleskines stashed away.

There was a time--- back in her _iwenthome days when Miss Lissy would scan and post pages of her print journal. Lovely melancholy introspective writing, lovely little watercolours. I really missed it when she stopped doing that at emigree. Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo wrote a few times about her own print journal, about the things she kept in her print journal. I do wish she'd post entries from it--- memories, stories, poems, essays. Just as as I wish Lissy would post Stories from her own Moleskines--- that carriage house in Silver Spring, the Adulterous Spring Break Affair in Stockholm. Miss Ginny wrote once that, when she was with her Older Lover there in her teens, she'd neglected her print journal for a year or so and lost all her memories of the affair. That's a sad thing, really. I'm an historian by training--- the past matters, Details Matter, and I hate the thought of memories lost.

Katie at wheat has a Tumblr for her stories and photos and thoughts, for her ongoing and unfolding story of her alter ego Vanessa. I've been reading Katie's entries off and on since...well...the Year Four. She's a fine writer, and I do want to read her whole archive of short stories and memories. She wrote once about Vanessa and her own Older Man that, once she was legal and could be openly with him, that "The world would be perfect. It would be sepia-toned, it would smell like honey and summer rain, it would sound like a Simon and Garfunkel song (at sixteen, Vanessa could think of nothing more beautiful than Simon and Garfunkel)..." Sepia-toned.... I really like that. Miss Ginny imagines her own world as David Hamilton-lit. I like considering the difference between sepia-toned and filtered-light.

A quote at Katie's Tumblr:

Young women and the Richard Ford brand of middle-aged men have an awful lot in common. Both are alone in a crowd, too smart for the room. Both feel trapped — by school on one hand, suburban obligation on the other. Both are uneasy with responsibility, newly unsure about what they want to do with their lives. And both confuse sex with love. In short, both are fantastically lonely. So is it any surprise that, in spite of progressive society’s disapproval, they so often fantasize about — and even occasionally wind up with — each other?

That's a quote I really do want to offer up to Miss Ginny for her comments and consideration. If the beautiful Genevieve reads this, I really do want her to comment. It's a sentiment that I do agree with.

Miss Ginny is a great fan of Anthony Bourdain. I like him, too--- like the Travel Channel and Food Netowrk shows, like the snarkiness, like his memoirs. I do want his job. I really do want his job. Bourdain and I share tastes in things, but we're opposite physical types. He's tall and lanky, I'm not so close to six foot, and I'm broad-shouldered and deep-chested. A curassier's body and a chevaux-leger attitude--- isn't that my line? Miss Ginny is something like five-one or five-two. I'll never have the Jeremy Irons look so many BRDYTW girls fancy. I hope Miss Ginny at her petite size finds me...relatively...tall. Well, Anthony Bourdain--- I do love "No Reservations". I want his job.

And, yes: I will be watching "MadVentures" tonight. Call it a substitute for being in Marrakech or Mongolia or Tallinn with a lovely bright wicked panty-free BRDYTW girl. Call it a substitute for a life and a lover.