Entries centered on the humans in Oliver’s life and their baffling behavior.
There is a towel. I want that established before anything else, because the towel is the whole reason today went the way it went. It is a plain towel, faded at one corner, the color of weak tea, and it lives folded on a shelf in the bathroom doing nothing for weeks at a time. … Read more
A large flat box arrived on the porch this afternoon, thin as a cracker and much too big for its own good, and I want it noted for the record that I was consulted about none of it. Not the ordering, not the delivery, not the decision to drag it through the hallway leaving a … Read more
Something happened to the kitchen today and nobody asked my opinion of it first, which I want on record before I explain the rest. It started with a smell. Not a bad smell exactly — I want to be fair about this — but an aggressive one, the kind that doesn’t stay politely in one … Read more
I want it on the record that I have made that jump before. Many times. It is not a difficult jump. The bookshelf is not especially tall, and I am not especially small, and the two facts have always balanced each other out in my favor. I have landed on top of that bookshelf with … Read more
I want it on record that I was awake first. I am always awake first, technically, in the sense that I never fully stop being awake, but this morning I was awake in the specific, aggrieved way of someone who has been personally wronged before the sun has even finished coming up. The alarm went … Read more
I want it on record that I heard them before she did anything about it. A voice, male, unfamiliar, coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen table where she’d set up her laptop, laughing at something in a way that suggested he found himself very charming. I was on the floor at the … Read more
Something was wrong with her today and I want it on the record that I noticed immediately, before the sighing even started, back when she was still just standing at the counter holding her phone like it had personally disappointed her. I have a very good nose for the ordinary chemistry of the house — … Read more
