even*cleveland: birthday gifts some 44-year-olds might enjoy

In a digression at the end of The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog trains his cameras on a group of albino crocodiles basking in pools of runoff from a nuclear power plant and muses on crocodiles staring into the abyss of time. For this reason, the image of mortality in my mind is a white crocodile, and the crocodile of time feels very near at my birthday, when I wonder if this is the year it eats me. And maybe because I have spent past few weeks thinking of ghost crocodiles, I misread a sign the other day as "ghost lobsters" and suddenly had a hilarious and terrifying vision of what it would be like to be visited by the ghosts of all the lobsters I have ever ate, hearing the ghost-rattle of their exoskeletons, their ghost eye-stalks observing me, an army of the crustacean dead trailing ghost butter and clouds of steam. And then I half-remembered hearing Edna O'Brien describe a bad experience with LSD, which seemed to involve years of seeing her phone as a lobster, and apparently Jean-Paul Sartre, too, was plagued with visions of lobsters. He kept seeing three or four at a time after a mescaline trip, knew they were not real, but saw them there just the same. So maybe the lobsters are waiting in my psyche with the crocodile.

Fortunately, I forgot all of this on my actual birthday and had an uncommonly nice time.

Some gifts:

A tool for measuring the blue of the sky, based on blue skies in Ukraine.

Monogrammed rose-scented lip balm by Officine Universelle Buly.

A matching Sayaka Davis scarf and sweater.

A book out of print: Sam Stephenson's Love and Work: Lyric Research on Jason Molina.

A Marcie McGoldrick ring that doubles as a family portrait.

A butterfly hair claw (or a cloud barrette).

Bright Himukashi wool socks.

A pleasingly wobbly hairbrush by Y.S. Park.

Ithell Colquhoun's Color as Taro.

Porcelain lady apples.