Poem for a Hot Friday

Hola. You know where I've been, write?  Wink wink.  I'm not supposed to bore y'all to death by talking about it, but on the other hand...

I'm raising a glass to myself this week, for finishing a piece for the first time in...oh, a decade? It's a personal memoir essay, and could've been longer, but I edited it down to about 4,400 words.  There was a deadline involved, as I'd seen a call for submissions online, which is why I worked hard to actually finish and submit it in time. 

It's about...shopping. Specifically, the lost era of great department stores, the ones unique to Southern California. But it's also about the women in my family, and me, and how our relationships changed (and not for the better) over the course of my childhood & teenage years. I wrote of bygone places where I spent hours and hours of my life, like here:

Image via.

In other news, the past two days have been wonderfully hot and toasty. On Tuesday night, the stiff  breezes from the ocean pushed in the clouds inland, and I sat in my car during Tucker's soccer practice because it was so chilly. And also,  I wanted to finish typing the essay into my laptop, and would feel like a pretentious twat doing that in my folding chair on the sidelines, with the other moms who actually talk to each other. 

But last night, I wore shorts and basked in the setting sun, and read a magazine. The golden light was beautiful. Mmmmm....heat wave.

Finally, here's a Google Search poem for you. Have you heard of them? You create them all the time, when you enter a search term into Google, and see the drop-down list of some of its more frequent searches/suggestions for you. They are often unintentionally eloquent.  On Wednesday, wrapping up my essay, I did a search to find out when two favorite department stores closed for good. 

And here's mine:

When did The B
Berlin Wall Fall?

When did the
Beatles break up?

When did the 
Big Bang occur?

When did the
Black Death start?

A little dark, but it's got a good rhythm. (And if you're from around these parts, you can probably figure out what store I was typing in.)  If you'd like to read more of these poems, written by all us Googling chimps at a billion keyboards, check out this Tumblr page, Google Poetics.

Happy Friday! See you next week.