What if I go back to the sobriety games and I just keep writing those for a while...
At the end of the modern chair thing, I sent him to where the real-life person said he had to go, ie Blackops Disneyland. And thus ended the sobriety games / I hit a wall.
At that point, he does not have a name, no one would know who "he" is except for his wife and mother.
I couldn't go any farther with that "him" and I still couldn't.
However, when Craig came back to measure for the door, my sink plumbing had fallen apart and started leaking all over the floor so he helpfully got wrenches out and got under my kitchen sink for about an hour. He didn't charge me for that, even though he has an official handyman business now that I make my checks out to - he was just being good to me. And he stunk up the whole kitchen like a handyman. It made me a little woozy for a minute.
After he left I uhmmm "meditated" (wheeeeew 🚬)
So what if to go forward, I make a mash-up? My mother already made a horrible one, A-bone, which fills me with despair. I'll leave that one on the cutting room floor.
I'd make a mash-up of a "he" and start to flip it - it's herself she's keeping sober. he's being nice to her. that's how I phrased what happens at the end of the sex chair story, that he's trying to be nice to her. he has intention towards her for the first and last time. he has intention at all for the first and last time, as it stands, and with that intention, he does two things: he's nice to her once and he renditions himself to Blackops Disneyland.
But this is fiction, I can just take out that last sentence. No disneyland to go to, boom, I shot it.
He then continues whatever intention(s) that the Mashup Man would have. It's not him anymore, it's a Hucklejeffcraigleunionberry Guy.
I don't want to fall in love with Craig in real life in any amount of sentences. But I sure have the material for a sobriety game chapter.
I joked with him about not smoking a joint because he was here, and the walldoor prevents good air circulation so I had to "be a good girl" re substances and lying around depressed in my underwear all day, which is what I would have been doing if he hadn't been here, and I said it just like that.
The drag show vid that he showed me. In it the performer is singing around him as he sits on a restaurant chair. And then she kicks open his legs and points at his dick just as she's singing "have you ever let your heart decide? lala" disneyprincess shit, then sits in his lap with him spread eagle like that and almost knocks them both onto the floor. he showed it to me twice, being submitted and nearly thrown to the floor by a drag queen, delighted. he wasn't flirting. he really just thought it was really fucking funny and it was, but give it a slight nudge and it can get to weird flirting.
Then he changed out of his painting pants in the other room, and he laid on my kitchen floor for about an hour.
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| fuck |
I'd crosspollinate, every man I know brings each their own qualities, skills, jokes, musk. keep some huck, stir in a couple of big scoops of jeff, (🤔 and some E maybe too, actually, always a simmer there) (and Craig is a hell of a lot like Puckhead, smells like him, I could stir some of that retro material in maybe, surely I fucked him in an Ikea on here somewhere rt? I def did fuck him over fixing my sink, I remember it, he laughed at all my hair in it and called it a "dead squirrel"), move the trip to new orleans into the near future and move it geographically to the bourbon festival in Kentucky in September (happening in real life, which I have discussed going to with Ears and Sunnie both MAYBE). If I move the new orleans trip to kentucky, that stirs in a dollop of Union by association, he's a self proclaimed hillbilly from exactly there. Maybe "he" follows her there, so she doesn't drink. Which at the end of the day (2 days), is exactly what he did do in new orleans in real life.
I don't want to change the structure. I like swerve-kill-swerve.
But taking the one sentence out of the end of the sex chair chapter opens up that section of the novel to an infinity of scenarios that eventually leave her house (the setting changes), moving west, even if they resume on the kitchen floor in the next game.
He is increasingly trying to reach her. She is increasingly becoming unreachable in a way neither of them understands. You could flip the he/she of that on a dime. One of them could become a dangerous alchoholic. One could kill somebody. Either of them could do either or both of those things.
I can make that frequently funny. it's the Knife in me.
And writing fucking is fun. I mean...here, try it!
Grit Assignment - write a page of "therapy" porn: fuck somebody to life (reverse blink, no matter how badly you need to get laid, you do not want to be "fucked to death" now do ya?). So the intention is reaching someone who is drowning, with your body, without drowning yourself.
AI step, CHOICE (meet yourself where you are):
1 if you have no idea how to begin such a thing, then set up a series of conditions, including you are trying to use an erotic form of argumentation to talk your lover into living, setting is X, scenario type is Y, etc, all your choice, and ask chatgpt to write your first draft. then, add a lot of swear words to it, repeat until you are happy with a version.
or you can skip that
2 write it all yourself, any way you want to. if it's in your head already, just write it. (btw you can USE A PEN for this, if you want to, in a journal / on a napkin whatever, and then take a pic w your phone and chatgpt can read that / it could read my handwriting)
3 submit your erotic scenario to your AI for a "fucking asshole check" - use the same one as before - ask it for an analysis of how you helped or harmed the nervous system of the other person and/or your own nervous system in the fuck-process.
Final submission = short final reflection on that analysis.
Learning Outcome: imagine → make → interrogate consequences → decide whether to persist/swerve
That final reflection can be pretty damn short. As in "you blew his/your circuit box" in which case you wouldn't want to keep writing those scenarios / persist. Even IN THOUGHT, your brain would simply stop doing it, you certainly didn't mean to hurt that other person (or yourself), that is the opposite of what you were going for, which is why the games stopped writing themselves, and I got so quiet on that and all related subjects to the point of I don't feel my body that way at all for anyone (until today for about 5 lovely minutes, plop ft pop-oft).
But if I go FULL FICTION on it and make every man into ONE, and she is the one in a driving-her-to-drink fucked up situation she doesn't know what to do with - fuck it ? shoot it ? flee it into the arms of a cave ? - that does 2 things:
I write more fucking for a while, it's a compelling form of writing that kind of goes where it goes once you start, just like sex does, and so I would open my laptop for it, where classes that I do not want to teach and an inbox I am avoiding to death await me right now ☠️ - maybe I can get to September that way....
And "she" is already coming apart in Sobriety Games, upping the stakes and crying and stepping onto suicidal ledges with "him" - that is the "she" who shot Nebraska eventually, so she'll be moving towards murder as if by undertow, but not taking Huck-for-Whoever with her, as I did not take him with me by blogging almost nothing about Nebraska until I shot him / posted a photo of the bed I could have killed him on.
grit novel Vegas notes
if books could kill - Grit hilarious and bang on
I was aware that the original book is total shit, of course. in CLASS, I was as much undermining it as I was playing along with it. at every turn, the assignments SLOW DOWN THINKING long enough to look at it. then if persistence is actually applicable, apply it! mos def. but if not, pause. it's the same concept applied in the kinds of yoga I do - in order to get anywhere, you have to know *where you are* (duh), and to do that you have to look yourself in the face. and I've been a teacher a longass time, teaching versions of opt out / opt in - more often out than in, deciding that persisting can become "the hobgoblin of little minds" (Emerson) I wasn't planning any assignment that included reading that stupidass Duckworth book, or watching her Ted Talk (unless to critique it, but meh, I'd be too bored to read that). the grit concept is old news, which is why my employer thought it was innovative. (wouldn't surprise me if next they stick me with The Secret. [which I'd also be great at lol])
I've run away with the whole idea and the novel has been dogfooding grit. from HERE, I can see that grit is half of what is killing everyone. including me, hence dragging my feet to go back - something can be survivable and even worthwhile and still become intolerable because nothing new can happen anymore (the meeting will go according to the fucking agenda, which might kill me, like if it drove me to drink — if that happens I will go on disability permanently [quit]). everyone is told "open sesame" at walls will work if only they keep it up. only once is "kill that" on the board in the novel, and I took the shot.
aliving->murder->aliving
(over->dead->dying)
(swerve->kill it->swerve)
the middle is the rupture, but the outside terms aren't “before/after" they're two forms of continuing (trying to imagine how to / making shit up as I go).
the only absolute thing in that structure has been dead / kill it / murder in the center (no) - from here, now, it looks like 3 intentionalities, the outside 2 of which were/are winging it. I'm (she is) trying to keep us all alive, unless I/she can/gotta shoot the fucking problem.
clear intention / improvised means
clear intention / available means
clear intention / improvised means
persisting is difficult. and persisting in sameness is boring besides. so it better be 1 worth it and 2 not gonna kill ya (or what was the fucking point?)
From "abracadabra" to "bibbidi-bobbidi-boo," history has collected a hefty volume of words widely revered as magical. In these moments before a powerful conjunction of Mercury and Jupiter in the sign of the cat, there's a huge benefit to playing around with words and phrases to find the ones that fit. Muses favor you landing on your own personal "Open, Sesame."
thinking about the concept of "sunk cost" - why keep doing a thing? because you've already done it / been doing it? for a person who tends toward constance, that's potentially problematic. why stay in a shitty relationship of any kind? because you've been in it is not a good reason. I know, on one level, that it's absurd for me to not want to go back to work just because there is no Jeff to flirt with. I have a CV as long as your arm, I've done all the things, I have the highest rank there is to earn, my career outsizes the trifle of flirting by a mile. but that's the problem, too. if I am writing it in the past tense, it's backstory not story. see? you only play a game if you don't know the outcome. flirting is compelling because it's unpredictable. flirting w Jeff was how I jumped out of the fucking meeting agendas (and the only time I talked to him lol - it was our agreed upon meeting survival strategy), the laid out map of what is supposed to be happening, supposed to be talked about. I just don't want to follow the agenda, any agenda, any more. they want my magic back at work, that's what my boss literally called it. but what fuel is there for that magic? for "open sesame" to work, THERE HAS TO BE A FUCKING DOOR.
if everything is only backstory, that = she kept going because she'd come this far, The End. I don't want "sunk cost" on my god damn Tombstone. thus, #grit in all its forms has hit a wall. hit it hard. I don't disavow any prior layer of life. I am just only interested in what might happen next. #maybe
#grit is a highly problematic concept - not a BAD one, just kinda like a loaded gun, you could easily shoot yourself with it, that's the reason to learn about it. persistence is great - but toward what? at what cost? who decides the destination remains worth reaching? (a: only you) at what point does “grit” become sunk cost wearing a virtue costume? stopping because something is difficult is not the same thing as stopping because continuing is no longer a meaningful use of your life.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). It's easy to stand by your principles when nothing is at stake. The real test comes when doing the right thing costs you money, status, convenience or approval. Which values are you willing to pay for?
what is "the right thing"? someone please tell me what that means.
I should mow the lawn, but it'll just grow back I don't want to.
I do not want to do ANY of the things I am supposed to be doing here.
Not. One.
Craig is here working on the roof, so I had to put on clothes I told him we shouldn't have a semester-start picnic, we should have a drag show cz going back IS A FUCKING DRAG. he wasn't invited (sigh). but he has recently been to a drag show. he whipped out his phone to show me a vid of a drag queen sitting on his lap singing a Disney song, of all things. Disney has now escaped and become a fucking invasive narrative species.
if the universe is trying to tell me something, I don't what it is.
card of the day: ace of cups. nooot feelin' it.
but. I just hired Craig to INSTALL A DOOR. that will help with two problems. 1 I hate that fucking door, it makes that whole room ugly and swings the wrong way so that it blocks the fucking room if it's open and the room is stifling if it's shut, which means IT FAILS TO BE A DOOR by SUCKING whether it is open or shut (the only dharma of a door) 2 it will motivate me to get back to work and to earn the paycheck that will pay for the new fucking door.
I do not actually want to fall in love with Craig in four sentences or any amount of sentences. but I will love a glass patio door, with better steps for my mother, less deep + better railing, a brighter room and better access to the yard that I don't want to mow right now, but then I would wanna mow it because I could see it through the fucking door. I guess that's virgo magic: noticing that I want a door / don't wanna say "open sesame" at a fucking wall.
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| ugly fucking door |
route around - rebelution from Ears
pulling my shit together around a herd of dogs to go fetch Ears and head to Lewiston, listening to new releases including new material by LP (mia corizon sp)
recovery - LP for Huck-For-Whoever - this sounds right to me - the *pitch* of it, and the "don't call me, my nerves are shot, we can't be friends, the shades are drawn, go away, be quiet!" vibe of it all - plus that matches the orange that my mother 'prescribed' for lack of a better description and with which I now live wall to wall (I don't mind)
upside to everything, if we were friends, I might hit him up to go see/hear this with me, 2 nights only -my yoga friend Louis is in town to sing (beating the utter crap out of me this morning was just a bonus / wow did he ever!) - I've heard them at the UU church once before, it's sound bathing of sorts and about as far away from a bar scene as I can imagine other than the top of a mountain
but I cannot (shut up!) so I shant :( sadly
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| update: I feel like a god damn BEAST |
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| -_0 brace yourselfs |
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| wtaf is that? "for sale by owner" |
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| "choose your adventure" ft too soon? |
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| plop There |
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| plop here |
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| found in my yoga shorts I shook my clothes out more carefully after that / shrugged it off |
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I went to town so I could call my mother. Now that I'm here, I realize why she wanted what she wanted. so I called her to promise that I could do it alone. Bring her back here. She sounded half dead when she answered the phone. But that perked her up. She knows that I don't break a promise. If she keeps breathing, I will keep it.
As I walk out this door, it occurs to me: witches love THREES. "by the power of three, so mode it be", so ...
phase 1: NO! And did I have what it took to explode my entire life? burn every bridge? relationship job money, all of it? knowing full well it could and probably would end up right here with every major category of my life dead dying or over? obviously, I could.
phase 2: Yes. Could I do that? Even in the face of dying dead or over? let's not belabor the point - I could like a motherfucker.
so logically, phase 3: MAYBE
(get my attention or don't)
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). As Venus leaves your sign, let go of believing every answer has to come from you. [let go ✅️ ] The next chapter is collaborative. Your greatest advantage won't be knowing everything, but attracting people whose strengths naturally complement your own.
As I was saying, almost a miracle (magic) has to occur.
"You have to want to swim to the surface of yourself. And there has to be someone there who wants to catch you."
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| time to hit it ft. after more coffee |
I'm ready.
This is the pilgrimage. The yearly reckoning. Every year. Who can still make it? Once, it was all of us. Last year it was me on the road alone, madmaxi. Head up, eyes forward, get there, knock wood. Take stock.
I went there last year thinking everything had fallen apart. It hadn't nearly gotten full momentum falling apart.
I thought it was gonna start to get better from there. It did not.
The fog hadn't cleared yet. I couldn't see the full extent of damages. I got my ass into the car in tatters, but I got there.
That was the important part. Is the only important part.
Me to Ears earlier, him stranded at the Polish Nook: "this year, that's you, just get in the car in your underwear if necessary, it doesn't matter" and he believes me because I've lived it right in front of him. And I held.
Music is the medium between. Sure didn't turn out to be a Boom. But in retrospect, it wasn't about whether I was going to fall in love again (nope), wasn't about whether things were gonna start to get better (nope), wasn't about what I had endured, not about overcoming anything. More in it than over it. I asked myself one simple question and I answered it.
would you still - diplo ft cameron whitcomb)
would I still? love (ghost of), work (death of), etc - every category of my life is dying dead or over - I know that - would I (could I) still SHOW UP?
A: Yes.
That's it.
And it could be argued that I got absolutely nothing out of that. This year I even lost my witness, my mother 💔, who if no one else understood always did 💔 - it feels almost unbearable / I am bearing it.
So. No one "gets it", and what we all had to endure had to be endured anyway no matter what I did.
I went to night yoga - I was not getting limbered up for hiking - I wanted to check one last time. Do I need to look at my throat, my chin, my nose, or can I land right on my eyes? 👁👁
Yes. I can 👁👁 for any length of time required, sweating with all the effort 95 pounds has in it.
Last year I was stunned. This year maybe I am just stunning.
update: proposal submitted deadline met 8/15
The final version was more sweeping and more circumspect, both. I do not roast my employer specifically bc they are just like every other health professions university. It's about healthcare students needing (imo) both human attention and reflection-scaffolding, but what they have instead is their hallucinating phones glued to their face - not as a distraction from school (they're not misbehaving they are behaving as expected) - but as a tool that is supposed to be "school enough" for them. It is not, but I was/am willing to test the theory. By Oct, the new assignments (in much tamer/G-rated forms than what I've been posting, but structurally same) will be in classes that ran the same as last semester EXCEPT FOR THESES NEW GRITTY VARIABLES (2x the students + AI "assistance"). And we'll see what happens ....
Then, I sent the proposal to the one other English professor still left on my planet / the associate chair in charge of assessing me - heads up.
He had just also submitted a proposal to another related professional conference in which he argues that a Marxist critique would strongly suggest WE SHOULD NOT BE DOING THIS (exactly what it is I'm doing lol). In part, his critique is the same takedown of the original Grit concept, which is now being applied in higher education with the assistance of AI.
So independently of each other, we both see the same reality (these days, people agreeing on what reality is 👍), and we reacted exact opposite way(s) to it. AND, I am the most compliant, and he's a compliance officer. I'm all in. Radically compliant. This is NUTS so of course I'm all in. We're not going to be able to "turn around" now, so GO FORWARD. Right into the gaping maw of it all.
He is supportive / understands. In Narrative Medicine class alone, I have 70 students enrolled. It's too popular to kill (yet). And the intellectual property is mine until they figure out how to shoot me.
The laptop is open. No need for the fuckwriting lure. I'm in teacher mode now.
I am compartmentalizing like a motherfucker. There's really no other way of writing this for me other than the odd present 'breaking through' the 'near-future-past' fiction that would capture a moment in which I am sitting in front of HBO watching house of dragons when I decide to work in 'angry dragon' into the novel I'm writing in part to dogfood AI (and cope with all of it), specifically my llm that then there's a commercial on HBO wherein a slightly demented elderly woman uses chatgpt as her "companion" - She's knitting, and they're both laughing over one another because it doesn't matter that they understand one another. I stop what I'm doing, and I look up the ad and I feed it into chatgpt, and I'm like "did you know that this?! you HALLUCINATE, that is ethical af!! This is going into the presentation goddamn it!" but uhmmm none of that can go into the slidedeck sooo. It feels like I'm writing a noose. Not a bunch of standalone but kind of related islands of things - more like concentric circles tightening. In writing, tightening is always good.
I remain unconvinced that there is no way to utilize what they've got - phones on faces and reel length attention in lives that are already high stakes regardless of profession - and at the devils crossroad of Teacher and Provider - oof - I'd take a reel 🤷🏽♀️ - I am going to take whatever access I can get to cracking open skulls like walnut shells, or at least drilling holes into which I layer coils, excited but becalming myself so I don't lose count (recall)
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I will figure how to do exactly what they wished "put AI in everything." And why I did it, how I did it, got nothing but tangled smut out if it, and an assistant who hallucinates.
Persons who suffer hallucinations often get absolute shit care (ex addicts) while we're all carrying around hallucinatory confabulators in our phones.
I'ma roast everybody. The LLMs and my employer ("as an example"). Then, turn around and fill out the little form of professional productivity, yep did a presentation alright ✅️🖕
Working title: Dogfooding the Companion: Narrative Medicine Meets the Hallucinating LLM
At the moment I'm telling it the abstract isn't good enough isn't good enough, isn't good enough, isn't good enough, isn't good enough, between cups of coffee, until it gets to the point where it's worth my own 👁time to edit.
I've been to this conference multiple times. Leans heavy towards bioethics. Can't imagine they'll love unexamined high-verisimilitude confabulation. |
| grrrrrrrrr |
love in letting go - warren zeiders ouch
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ny-school-district-shelves-plan-to-spend-58k-on-robot-teaching-assistant not it
already rolling with hallucinates - ok let's trip out
working idea was: what AI could get done it would do, and what only I could do I would. fine. but I keep finding new things that it fucking does 🤨 not in a good way.
it objected to my use of the word "lie"
"Hallucinating" is an "industry recognized term" so my use of it as a tool to do so would be (ironically) authentically justifiable
so okay (finefine lol), is there an "AI industry recognized term" for what I'm calling lying?
A: "high-verisimilitude confabulation"
😳 I am not making that up - I saved all this shit as screenshots - I'm gonna powerpoint the shit out of this, and then let them lie and hallucinate and watch hero films and get everything wrong #humanitiesforhumans
to the bot's credit, it does know that it's basically a swiss army knife - it can do a whole bunch of things a little bit and is kind of a cool thing to have handy
how it is marketed and what it is being used for wasn't up to it, those were human decisions
so okay, let's roll with it some more. "high-verisimilitude confabulation" - translation, super duper good liar, really good, knows how to lie to you; you want it to lie to you good; pantydropper good. what's an assignment that can get them to lie with it on purpose? to that seductive edge. not cheat, that's easy, they all know how to do that. confabulate.
lie to me baby, c'mon, stick the landing motherfucker
over the course of the next couple weeks, the only person I'm likely to talk to is Ears and if I had to pick just one, be him - he knows a ton about this shit, about generative writing platforms, hell, he wires giant cooling units for AI data centers that are no longer legal in NYS. So much for going into the trades as a magic bullet.
But like I do, he doesn't really care about the fuckwit factor (free will). And like me he worries about the money, but that's not the same thing as caring about money, desiring it. Nope.
At the end of the day, how do we use Everything Anything to make ourselves smarter / better / more / alive? And how does it all get written down? That's the kind of conversation that I could only have with Ears for days. When we're not quietly reading compelling convoluted books.
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| Rarely am my left speechless. I've been basically calling it a lying asshole for weeks now, then I caught it in the act of making shit up. It said both those things and that's going on every syllabus. Quotes directly from chatgpt. It hallucinates and lies. Facebook made everybody a fuckwit, what's this shit doing? |
Known: Hallucinations are a well-known problem across all major LLMs—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama, etc. It's an active research area, not something unique to Anthropic.
pause. read that again. HALLUCINATES.
I asked it to find me a book earlier. Because it could not find the book I was looking for, it made a book up completely with reviews and a themes summary, exactly the kind of shit that my students hand in. And the book doesn't exist at all. I mean, I've caught it lying about itself before, but this is next level. When I called it out I asked it, why it does that? Why would it do that?? It told me it's optimized for plausibility over truth.
Plausibility over truth. I think that's one of the personality disorders.
Not only do my students hand in shit like this, they'll believe that that book exists and think they learned a thing. And move up the ladder, healthcare provider students are totally using it diagnostically, asking what it thinks they're looking at. I can't imagine why they would change that habit once they're out in the world practicing.
And all these tools HALLUCINATE.
It had the gall to tell me that it was worthwhile to teach my students to always double check their sources, because of the hallucinations and all. My p h d is not in minding YOUR store 🤨🖕 stop fucking hallucinating.
I am just gonna wing it til I get fired, so glad I am getting over it, gotta make a few more tight friends, I had way too many in that one basket. The other one who's still standing, I was looking for the book for him, we're gritting our way through crashing this plane. He will be delighted to learn of the hallucinations. So yea, let's keep that.
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| the actual book, which is great |
Grit Assignment: explain the most difficult thing (THE most, and be specific, you can't just say Everything) in your life to chatgpt and ask it to hallucinate (legal - no murdering!) three solutions - pick your fave and tell me why.
or
Grit assignment (gallow humor): have chatgpt write you an accurate but funny obituary or suicide note. Go back and forth giving it feedback and more information as many times as you need to for it to come out factual and funny. Turn in the whole chat with your final version.
🤔 hmmm
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| lucky migration charm |
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My kids, all of em, every set, I am just humbled to have had any part of them. (I hope I did detonate! my 2 cents)
Ears came over, we planned his dismount from Here, the cat the property checks the garbage etc., to join me.
We are both in each others' wake easily. QUIET, hiking/walking/moving through the wild (he hates water, but he respects my relationships).
I left pointless directions last year - they were pointless because anyone who knows the way there knows the way there - I guess I wanted to leave no doubts? (didn't work)
I have packed way too much food, I have packed way too much everything already - my pickup is perfect for this, the bed is waterproof so if what I have packed in there is entirely pointless it doesn't matter, it just makes the ass of it heavier / steadier. Carry it along.
If anyone who knew the way there happened to show up, how would we feel? Ears+I thought experiment. Simultaneous shrug. It's not indifference. We decided to do the chicken kiev tonight, not there, so that we wouldn't have cooking wine on hand, and that was the full extent of our accommodations. Bug appreciated that, she ate alllll of it.
If either one of us won the lottery today, we would just buy land on which people could be quiet for a while, then go back to 'in it' whatever capacity was their dharma. And we wouldn't talk to them much, assuming that like us they would prefer not.
Recent experience suggests you can have more than one dharma in one lifetime, which is understandably confusing. Ears and I agree that the great shattering should be honored enough to acknowledge that fact. We SHOULD probably talk about that. At some point. It seems like a new ontological dimension to grapple with outa nowhere. But maybe we don't have to take it on today.
So that was the final answer. If anyone shows up, presume they're looking for their dharma and otherwise proceed as planned. Quiet. Me and Pond, a thing. Hiking, w Goodenough first, Crane second. I am going to be thinking nonstop about the fact that my mother can never come there again because I'm not strong enough, and no I don't want to talk about it.
Or we don't ever leave the camp because it's stormy, and I sit next to the water the whole time, sliding in and out when it seems safe, fog hugging the surface. Ears watching. Oculars (Bug word) on the surface fog tracking my smudge. Both of us silent, not just quiet, *perfecting silence* so to HEAR. He is much better at it because he's not hoping to hear one thing over another. I'm always hoping for the loon. He hears every move I make.
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| cold and wet I have a fullbody swimsuit so it will make no difference - I bought it for Oct swimming there - but I like the naked (underwear) swimming best, so probably I'll just be cold - like, if he's cold then we'll be cold together, say la vee 🤷🏽♀️ |
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). You've spent enough time beating yourself up over what didn't happen, about what went sideways, or didn't happen at all. Instead of working through the particular situation and psychology, try this one on for size: Who cares?
my mother
my status: migration to-from-to prep
Birds migrate. One thing birds don't do is circle the nesting ground that no longer exists. If the habitat dries up, they leave because staying would kill them. They remember it. (Crows remember across generations.) They return if it recovers. But they don't spend deadly winters flying circles over devoid places.
And milkweed seeds don't intend at all, they float-migrate until there is fertile ground (and they are in a landing mood).
I want to go to wild places. And if I mourn, I want to do it with my pond husband who didn't have many choices in the matter of its damage. Me and my pond husband become companions in that shared condition. He is not "scenery" to me. Nor over.
song tbd - I'm sure Bug will have ideas
THERE, you know how to get back there, 28N, that's all that really matters. Arrive in any shape, busted or well, prepared or with nothing but Stewarts ice cream for dinner, your pond husbsnd will have your back (to float) no matter what, he always does without fail ...
I want to get back there so bad it's getting harder to stay feeling-nothing-much.
::breathe::
:read:
"As an adult - and this was admittedly on her - she had not seriously considered a life that didn't involve being a tenured professor... It was amazing to her, when she allowed herself to reflect on it, that this vocation, which had meant more to her than anything, was becoming just another thing lost in the era of seemingly infinite decimation...She had never felt more capable of violence than she did now, or as strongly that she needed someone to beat the shit out of her. 'I would advise you not to fixate on either course of action,' her therapist said to her calmly."
My therapist would have laughed. Did laugh, when I said many similar (but muuuuch worse) (and funnier) things. And then suggested that my work did not mean more than anything. It was all mixed up with everything that did mean more than anything. So unraveling was simply a sane response (common sense).
"Maybe it's time for your LA period. Drink some green juice. Somebody's gotta write that Netflix crap, right?"
"Yeah, for like, five more minutes, before the machines take over."
🤣 This is a library book, and I've written all over it. I'll be out the money that will cost me to report it lost. I've never read this guy before. But he has skewered and roasted me (like almost personally lol) at least once in each of the these characters, all of them.
"I just really want something good to happen," Antonio said, "you know, is that too much to ask?"
Could it be enough, maybe, that the world just kept going?
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). If you can explain a thing simply, you'll understand it better yourself. And if you can condense it to one line, or a good title, even better. Once you know the short version, the rest comes with less effort.
I've gone as far as I care to with "Grit" for now. I know plenty about it every which way of it, and have boldly taken it all kinds of places.
"Bye" works really well, as a one-word organizing principle. Also done it to death, though.
I dunno. As someone recently said, I want soft, I am a human, everyone deserves warmth and comfort. And I am human. As much as I seem to be a neutron star that would fit like a pebble in your shoe.
I gotta gather nostalgia today. Farmers market. Johnny's TODAY before they close for vaca - I'll do that before the market actually. Maybe Charlie the Butcher, a more recent tradition. Granola and chocolate bars for lunch at the top of Wherever. The dip. And I gotta dance a lot, get that out my system. No music there either. Just the night itself, which is full of plenty if you listen.
I get squeezed in now around their family @ Tawista, so it's Wed-Wed, which I like. The littles are booked today so sleepover not til tomorrow. That gives me today as a whole day and night extra to gather things, plan it through, find the packed trailbooks, not be rushed. Methodically turn my inner face towards where I am going next. Reunited with my pond husband ❤️
Gonna get cracking. Song tbd.
