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Squid | Dec 08 2003

Gave a reading yesterday. I always say I’m happiest when I’m reading, and I suppose it’s true. Anyway the light was so bright, I couldn’t see anyone when I looked up. Just blinding light surrounded by black. But I’m good reader, so I looked up a lot. It’s all about connecting with the audience, even when the audience is a roomful of blackness.

A few times—does this happen to you?—I felt the compulsion to ruin the reading, really fuck it up good. This felt a lot like wanting to swerve into oncoming traffic. One idea I had was to jump up and down like a little girl in a tutu and shout, over and over, “I’m a squid, I’m a squid.”

Other times I found myself thinking about my left hand. There’s this thing I do when I read where I let my left hand do whatever it wants. I stand very close to the mic and hold the pages of the story with my right hand, while my left hand is off over there, being expressive.

This time, for whatever reason, I got curious what it was doing. Best I could tell (I could only take a few seconds here and there to check), it was making a lot of circular motions interspersed with an occasional turning-over gesture, or sometimes the two together, a circular motion that turned over.