Cambridge

Last week, Cambridge flirted with us: she was beautiful: precocious trees blushing and burning and frisky in brisk air, the sky blue and stuck with pearled clouds, clotted paint, and the wind perpetually moving, blowing, so that you can never smell the smoke when you walk by another bundled pedestrian with a jeweled, glowing cigarette in his hand. It was one of those quaint New England nightmare perfect scenes (and thanks to my short fiction class, I have learned that with Lizzie Bordon and Chappaquiddick and John Cheever to its name, New England is full of nightmares).

I recently read a piece of short fiction that described a man this way: "He looked like a veteran of middle-age and wore the trappings of his compromised taste in fashion like battle scars: short-cuffed pants and creepy Italian leather sandals." I liked the phrase immensely: "his compromised taste in fashion." A compromise forced upon him by middle age; his clothes the trappings of age, can you imagine?

Now, Cambridge is dark and gusty, blustering with fury because Wilma upset her, and now the precocious trees have lost their pretty leaves, which are extinguished, flattened, plastered wet to the ground. The last thing I read was Joyce Carol Oates's Black Water, a novella loosely based on Ted Kennedy's adventure in Chappaquiddick. I use "adventure" in that stupid ironic sense, since he killed a young woman. Oates writes like a record whose grooves are all wrong and keep leading you back to the same point, or more accurately perhaps, a terrifying funhouse with all of her banal and overused themes reflecting back and repeating and never relenting and only because of their oppressive repetition are they made terrifying.

I have a headache (I think I thought it up, because I was fine 20 minutes ago), and it's not piercing, thank goodness, just a hard, tumic sensation. It's been growing for a while; I hope it's not a caffeine dependence. I feel like the end of the beginning is coming soon, and I have no conclusions about college life--all I know is that it's cold, windy, I've got a paper to write and things to read, and I haven't smiled in a long time.