allsoðið

Boil everything.

This is my post-Yule plan.

Bedclothes, potatoes, the dog's well-gnawed cow bones. (I imagine that will stink.) Some festive hot drink. (To drive out the smell of the bones.) Onions and celery and carrots. (To drive out the remainder.)

Everything must steam before the New Year.

flugþjónn

That's some fire-some wine. The bartender had never poured a flight of whiskey before (whiskey and fine tequila, actually) and mistook it for a wine flight. (Good God, man!) That is my only explanation for this array of riches. Sombra - Macsomething rye - Lagavulin. I explain to curious tablemates that Lagavulin is Laphroaig once it has grown up and stopped being such an asshole. I tell people to whom I would never normally utter a sentence containing the word asshole.

This photograph is unremarkable (ómerkileg) -- of no particular quality -- but the multiple fingers of Lagavulin were excellent, excellent.

Oh, give thanks for óreyndir bartenders. I feel most tenderly tended to.

nætursýn

Recent dreams:

• The great whale, after museum hours, gets to swim languorously, carefully, about the exhibit hall.

• Glass shards in my soles. I hate that. I would have thought my calluses would have protected me, horny like hooves.

What do dreams like that say? Perhaps I am a Danish mermaid.

Meanwhile, his furred ears flick about, his feet (free of glass) and his muzzle twitch, his flanks quiver. I can see the white of his upward-facing eye, but I cannot say what he sees.

morgunspjöll

Every morning now, every leaf limned with white, every pace stiff and crunchy under the foot. Everything must be nosed over anew.

skín

The forecast: cloudy, and for once it is correct. I find the trick is not to look out the window.

uppsláttur

Ever and again trying to wean myself from Wikipedia. I have relapses.

Wiki - rapid. These are not so fast, and my shoulder squeaks when I reach to get one off the high shelf. Not even a shelf, but the top of the bookcase -- nothing between these and the ceiling.

Superior knowledge?

glipp

fly

by

night.


On the evening rounds, passing young women staring skywards. Is it supposed to be at 6:30? At 9:30? I don't know, I say. I heard I would need a 6-inch mirror on the telescope I don't have to see it. Really? Because of the atmosphere? Because it won't hit the atmosphere, more likely. It won't burn, so there won't give off any light. Oh. How strange!

I move off -- we move off. I feel him rising into a trot next to me. I forgot to fix the blinking red bicycle light to his collar before heading out, and I'm not sure they saw him at all.

ábyrgð

Today my upper arm jangles like the links hanging over the bicycle's crossbar, securing it to the porch pillar. Every day I crunch the little key into the lock, grind it against whatever crud has lodged in the works over two years of holding the cycles fast against kleptomaniacal, jersey-clad drunks. Then I ride off, holding myself on the heels of my hands, feeling wrists elbows shoulders -- one firm, one rattling over the potholes.

I imagine boney tumblers in the joint. Are they gritty? Frosted? Oiled too stingily or (I fear) too generously?

And where is the key? It must be here somewhere.

vetrarsúpa

some chicken
bit of beef
smoked sausage
cumin
paprika
onions
garlic
celery
bay leaf
cabbage
tomatoes
whole can good stout
(little cheap burgundy)

Put it in iron, put the iron in the oven over the flame. Time it right, and you'll have it in bowls by the time the first winter's evening falls.

rónahjól

Sunday morning, already towards noon. A rough Saturday night for the fellow passed out on the neighbor's lawn. Slept where he fell, clearly. Tippled and then tipped right over.

When he comes to, he'll still be unsteady, all Gahhd ... gears feel terrible and Hey, does anyone remember what happened to my seat?

stafir

Jón Þór Ármannsson?
Jóhannes Þórólfur Árnason?
Jóakím Þórleifur Ákason?

Jóhanna Þóra Ánsdóttir?

During an occupation, yes, but in a kingdom or a republic? At low tide, yes, but before or after June 17? Not long before June, anyway: it's cold on the beach, and the sea wind can be fierce even on a clear day. Maybe in high summer, in a fit of patriotism, in an independent land.

Ísland, vasahnífum skorið!

doppóttur

It had rained, just a little, the evening before.

heimerniskennd

Glitskýjabekk
Norðurá
Skróná
Sakandaá
Mylluá
Móhaukaá
Norðmannsgilsá
Morðaragil
Kattagilsá
Æsópusará
Rondóttaá
Kengá
Vapparalækjur
Kasparsgil
Fiskgílsá
Morðaralækjur
Krótoná
Syngjandi
Spargilslækjur
Sagamylluá

lyftarar

Increasingly, I am seeing them as a couple of birds, doubtless a nesting pair. God knows where they might winter. Clearly, though, they are summering here, having chosen to nest at a cliff base, as so many migratory species do. Huge fulmars or guillemots? Except these are belong to a long-necked species. Cormorants? They are fairly far inland.

I can imagine their entry in some handbook: red body and underside, comparatively short black legs and feet, black neck, gray head. Call sounds like high-pressure paint sprayer with a humming or whining undertone. I see them nestled down in the evenings when I leave work, necks folded and heads resting on their breasts, side by side.

yfir holt og heiði

I take the shortcut, every day, even though I should turn down the street and walk along the shore while I have the chance. It's silly.

There's something charming about it, though. It goes over a patch of ground cut by paths. There is blágrýti spotted with lichen, birch both great and small, little grass. It's a spot of unbuilt ground and ungrazed. Völvuleiði í stórborginni? Álögublettur? No, because no one would think to mow it. It is a plot from the age of settlement. I walk there every day, footing it over a tiny, tiny heath to work.

dreki

Yesterday, the safety tape marking out the work zone came loose from one of the orange cones and it thrashed around like the cellophane tail on a dragon kite. It was nice having a dragon in the parking lot as I tapped away here inside even though he blew soot through the window all day. Most of the monsters here are sea creatures, though they do hazard the occasional foray onto dry land, scaring the sheep and terrifying the farmer. The wind-blown dragon was a pleasant change.

Today, the other end has come loose, and the dragon is gone. The cones remain, vörður on the tarmac.

ríkjamennirnir

Kalfyrningar
Wiscynsingar
Nýjorvíkingar
Minnsytingar
Hnetumenn
Washingar
Orgyningar
Nýhampsýslingar
Norðdakytingar
Suðdakytingar
Litmenn
Kansingar
Arkansingar
Pennskægingar

Nógu í bili.

bless

There's more than one ever-pure spring here, called from the rock in some earlier age by a man of the cloth. Guðmundr blesses the earth and a stream pours forth.

This water is plenty clean for pool water -- very clean for pool water -- but it's no Guðmundarbrunnur. If it were, what would you talk about? After commenting on the temperature (Þessi er sko ekkert heitur heitur pottur, þessi -or- Þetta er nú almennilegt!) you will see the inevitable hair go by, and you can say Djöfull er vatnið skítugt í dag.

Oh, and there is always politics. Tonight the conversation has already heated up before your arrival: the banks, deregulation, the crash, the villains in suits, helvítis útrásarvíkingar and who is to carry the blame. Thence to Western values, imperialism, human rights. Interventionism, isolationism, kugun kvenna and hverjum er ekki sama.

The one that looks like a biker is talking current events. The other -- older, with his bike club number (in the 1000's) tattooed on his shoulder -- is talking history. It's not his business, our business, if people are oppressed somewhere else. Let them sort it out. No people can be oppressed indefinitely.

But they can be wiped out, can't they, or nearly so? It's happened before.

Oh, but only if they let it happen!

Jæja. Time to hit the showers. Djöfull er vatnið skítugt í dag.

um öxl

Looking back already from the end of the road not yet stepped out upon, not this time. Soon.

skáli

Away from home, but the promised paradisaical valley was only just recovering some green. It pokes up through the black. The change was already begun. I imagine the local vættir will have taken advantage of the stuccoed changing rooms by now, the masculine beings on one side and the feminine on the other.

*heorcian

It's bright tonight. Listen:

beorcan
*berkanan
berkja

A star to every wandering bark?
A moon instead, coursing in the dark.

íshestr

Before this most recent slathering of icing came, I had found the one prior suddenly hovering an inch off the ground everywhere -- the whole town shifted out onto hanging ice. Treacherous. The earth must have contracted overnight, leaving its snowy girth loose.

I've met horses who do that, except they wait until after you've hauled on the buckle strap as hard as you can to cinch the saddle fast. Then they let out the breath they'd (cannily) been holding in their barrel ribs. Climb into that perch, and you'll find yourself listing dangerously as the beast takes to the trot over rocky ground.

On the hanging ice, no less slippery for its altitude, I can too easily see myself suddenly slung under the belly of the world like the hapless rider in the old paper puzzle before you've worked out the trick of it.

fast

That's interesting.

...

Well, not very interesting -- but a little interesting.

inni

wax
porcelain
bronze
glass
ink
tea

and fog on the inside of the window.

Stay in, keep warm. Have another cup.

...nýtt

Everything throbs, and you scoop them up (raw, still, the insides of a younger person) and press them, flat-palmed, into your dancing partner's warm hands.

gamalt ...

Always the first notes have you scowling into the flashing lasers, wondering what oldie it could possibly be, that you don't remember it, but with a few more bars the guitar line has caught your flesh under your ribcage, the hook piercing years of built-up shell and pulling the soft guts of your adolescence onto the dance floor.