happy birthday, Dad r.i.p.

sale love language

thinking

his disease and violent marriage, my mother's mental illness = that's a ton of fucking bricks.

but I am not them, I'm not even very much like either of them, none of that had/has anything to do with me.

I found in the scorched earth of myself this little buttercup of sweet feeling: I'd like it if you were here tonight. in this bed, in this dead quiet, I remember feeling that. a tender pleasant surprise I found in me for him, and I held it out like cool right? 

then a ton of bricks came down on that innocent-enough little buttercup of feeling, wiley coyote style. it's 🤏 almost funny.

I can't manage anything tech here but pairing my phone to speakers and telling youtube to give me riley green feels

back to free - drake white  

I wanna hook a camper to a pick-up and go see the smokey mountains, and there ain't one thing stopping me 'cept the lack of another, and that's why I like "widow", a status that don't expect solving and they're allowed to go anywhere alone with dogs

as I write this, Mumford comes on the random stream, like my dad's sniper reminder, there but not really, a hand to hold that I conjure outa nothing

and it almost works, ya know? then Ms Reality Check gets her vote, and we go from here to there in 🤏 (angel not saint)

the cottage is like a skull but padded, it just lets your brain be whatever it is, pressure off to wander 

time stops (grinding)

I walked all around til I was tired, I noted higher elevations feel way better (to me) - does 8000+ ft give you any weightlessness? sciencewise? it feels like it to me.

situation: 650 ft above sea level, tummy full

I wish everyone signalled as clearly as Janis

feeling: weighed down kinda tired but languid too (semi-solid, I think)

 

it's impossible not to think about last year here because as much as has happened, nothing else has happened to me here since then. so might as well think about it, and I take a peek at last July. seeds planted indeed 🌱

my calendar just reminded me to call my dad tomorrow as I read through it - nice to think he's still there, sniper ready lol 🕯

it's been a hell of year, wherein everything I feared most and didn't want most in each case/circumstance was what I got. 

but here's what I think about it:

I can't think of one thing that I am ashamed of. I wasn't perfect, but I tried, above all other guiding principles, to bring Good back by Being It. I didn't say any mean thing I cringe at now, didn't do (or not-do) any shitty thing, didn't end any conversation or relationship with contempt or casual disregard. I chose over and over and over to stand up and show up. so, I feel good about it. I lost a lot of wonderful, but I had it to lose. and what I gave, I did so freely with all my little spitfire, that kept its spark under constant tearfall. like that flame in Chestnut Ridge.

I'm proud of myself. 

loving life again - ella langley

-_0 ☕️

The fruit grows in opposition of the seed. The fruit is sweet; the seed is bitter. The fruit is soft; the seed is hard. The seed may remain a seed without fruit, but without the seed, the fruit cannot be at all. Nothing becomes the transformed version of itself without what came before.

plop

a dream. I was explaining holding on when there's nothing left to - woke up spooning fat janis, who was snoing like a motherfucker 

it's not today yet

welp (sigh) I made a mess of all the work I did over the summer. it's all over the place in pieces, and I find organizing shit to be sooo booooring, so I tend to just leave everything here or wherever. my desktop has hundreds of icons, in no order at all. every browser has a hundred open tabs 🤷🏽‍♀️

it's easier to excavate the pedagogy, because I put more of that here as assignments - it's innocuous here, maybe mildly interesting if you're interested in the topic of Grit.

the Grit novel was: what does grit actually look like? and I didn't post any of it, I put it into the bot to see how it might be interpreted by a reader. (well, I posted the little dog vignette, but mostly I didn't post fiction writing) and as situations changed 'what does grit actually look like in practice' also dramatically changed. and its world grew, from 2 people to many, with a central unstable "she". not unstable in the sense of unhinged, I feel very sane - "she" is sane and has a hell of a potty mouth.

she says whatever it takes to make anything better. 

but almost all of my touchstones have either moved or been removed in real life. the "he" [everybody else has a name, like Dave] disappeared then came back with a writing prompt, so "she" writes the prompt, for instance. I guess it would be more accurate to say the "she" is destabilized and she responds by expecting destabilization as a way of life (not always a bad thing, like surfing). if there hadn't been a prompt in real life about silverware violation, there wouldn't be a fictional chapter called "Finger Food" so I know WHEN I wrote it, but which "better reality" was that? the one where I get to say goodbye to a coworker that in real life I'll never see again but in fiction I could tell him a great joke (I think)

people disappear from my life a LOT now and that reality gets folded into the unreality (fiction) - it's unapologetically unstable  

definition of unreality: none of it actually happened, that's why it's fiction. but the people disappearing is truth. destabilized relentlessly is truth. 

and, I simultaneously was creating pedagogy, and then Grit the class became a series of self-reflections (Mirror Stage Bears Repeating, she tries to build with a THING 🤦🏻‍♀️ but tbh I love Marcel the Shell. ya know?)

suffice to say that my genius AI-TA is not doing a great job independently with excavation. it can't do anything independently. that's why the pedagogy failed as I had envisioned it. 

I "should" just stick to work because I know what I'm doing most in that sphere, and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in other life categories. everybody wants to take a class with me so I thought I would take one kinda 🤷🏽‍♀️ but that sphere itself is collapsing in reality, so there is no point working on it atm, as comforting as I may find that.

in real life, I say less and less. I don't text first - anybody - if someone engages me I engage back, if nobody does, then I leave them be. I don't ask anyone follow up questions because I don't want to accidentally interrogate anyone. 

in real life, I've cut back on leaving my thoughts in this blog too. I do again now that I don't have my other buckets to put my blah, blah blah into. but I try to do it less and less, outa the same instinct not to text anybody. smaller. just 👋

I haven't changed my phone number since my very first cellphone (which yes, I still have it). my asking 'how are ya?' is stupid, clearly, anyone can tell me how they are if they want me to know that. 

that leaves the messy weird fiction that no one reads cz all these words have to go somewhere. 

one of the reasons I am stable is because I write every day. (when I go quiet, ng)

example: where do I put the story of Cruella Frizzle? that is 👋 as I posted it. it was funny. I can't imagine it could hurt anyone's feelings no matter who is reading this - making fun of myself feels like safe territory. 

but that isn't the whole story.

the whole story was, we were at brunch with my sister's boss, one of the billionaire types who can have a house in Big Sky and another one I forget where and another one I forget where. for certain, he has given millions of dollars to the republican party. 65 years old, he even has a full head of that arrogant hair - you know the type, let's call him Dave, because that is his name, and he is a Dave. 

I am as usual saying nothing. I'm sitting directly across from him and he is looking at me like he wants to get out google lens to id my species, which I am finding amusing but I am not engaging. to the right of me is the Corpse of Fun Slut (not corpse of Butterknife, she's still got plenty of knife 🤨), who is deciding that she's too sad to eat the biscuits and gravy she ordered, "not feeling it". I ate the biscuits, they were delicious.

the waiter really does come up and say what I blogged before, with Dave looking on (still w wtf face) and it's everything my sister and I can do not to just melt into giggles. but we're at this brunch with her billionaire boss dude, so we gotta laugh later. understandably they start talking about work. specifically, they're talking about a guy named Mike, whom they have to fire. (my sister has decided he needs to go, to be more precise.) Dave says "poor Mike, he just doesn't know he's not the guy." at that point I utter my first and only words at this brunch, "oh my god, that's such a great line! - 'he just doesn't know he's not the guy'- I'm totally stealing that!" 

I could have just kept that to myself, but I blurted it out because it caught me off guard, and then I wanted a pen so I could write it on a napkin and not forget it. I got a pen from the crazy waiter. 

who is "she" who uses that line and on whom? in other words, why did that line appeal so much? I won't know the answer to that question until I write it into something. 

is Corpse of Fun Slut in the story? in real life, she did nothing but wait to get back to the couch from which she never moved, except under duress and briefly. with a huuuge balcony and a hot tub up above yellowstone skyline just feet away, she preferred the couch/tv (Pepa Pig, specifically) and only went out to look at the eagles swooping around us once because my sister made her.

that's real life. 

later, my mother asked me when she was coming to Buffalo next. "whenever you actually want to be there, I'll get you there" - then immediately comes the do I get to see Abone question - "no, mom" - then forget it, and she turns away. I could remind her that my entire family is here, the kids are here, *I* am here. but I don't do that. I say "let's play it by ear", she nods and says nothing, no longer interested in the conversation. 

that's real life.  

it's not very funny most of the time.

but I am funny all of the time. 

it's one of my gifts. and just about every part of the novel is funny. very dark, but it gets there, it finds its way to funny again.

real life has funny bits, and I still listen to music a great deal, that's appropriate for 👋

my relationship status: "widow to one and a half dead guys" - it's almost funny but it isn't yet because it has no context to be funny. it just feels true (real life) to me, I wrote it down. it probably does not feel like that to the half dead guy (chances are he feels wholly animated) who might read this and be insulted. so the line kicks around in the fiction bucket. woulda but I misplaced the damn thing.

I am still Doing It. as my world crumbled more and more and more, I kept the faith mostly and stayed on task mostly. but I had to do it in pieces. then link the pieces with the connective tissue of my words. 

it got this much right, but I have to hold its hand to get all of the material back, I have to continue chatting with it the entire time or it stops working. and I'm already over calling it a fucking asshole, the thrill is gone lol 🙄 it's just a bot that's doing its best with its owners' directive to "seem warm" rather than follow a linear train of thought that is changing in real time and changing the work that's already been done. (why the fuck not both?) It can't even remember ITSELF, like a baby that hasn't reached the mirror stage. There is no AI tool that can do that, organize and witness over any time. Ears believes that llm developers don't even know that limit is there because they don't need what I need, so it never occurred to them. and yet, this is supposed to replace me - how could it possibly do that when it can't even naturally follow my trains of linked-car thought? I am not going to be replaced. I have gone extinct already. having had a one of me as your prof was a luxury that no longer exists except for extremely privileged students. meanwhile, nursing students are gonna flunk out like whoa. there will not be enough doctors and nurses, there just won't be, period. and everyone left in healthcare professions, ALL OF THEM including a new weird thing called "extremities only", people certified without any clinical hours whatsoever but then limited to only taking scans of feet, pays great on travel $. And in real life, what my institution did in response to that was to get into the guinness book of world records for the biggest foot clap. it's 🤏 funny, so close.

And until I have it organized in this way, in some way like in that picture, it just all gets dumped right here. I can of course do what I've always done and just unblog it after saving it, but that makes it more difficult to find it again and the chronological context almost impossible to see. Right now, I need all of that context, I need all the stadium lights on. While remaining stable in myself, I have to completely change. Adapt. Evolve. I don't know any other way to do that than to write and write and write. Well, I do know a couple other ways, but they're not readily available. 

I cannot float right next to the sky every day, feel *all of myself intact* that way, for instance. 

change my mind - riley green (stripped down)

"saturday night ft monday morning"
 

my montana splurge: suede fringe all the way around. 

whatever I go back to when classes start, this what I am wearing, making all the stompstomp boot noise + an ass-swish that sounds 🤏 like I'm slapping somebody.

-_0 ☕️ now it's today

A key is hidden inside a thought. But it won't open any doors until someone turns the lock. This trine of Uranus and Pluto is the jostle and twist of the wrist that unlocks a new room. Hidden assumptions become visible and someone thinks to ask: "Wait a minute. Why do we even do it this way?" And once asked, the question can't be unasked

ok, I'll rephrase: Wait, why this? 

it's mos def not today yet, but my brain wakes me up with a shove

I pushed it to KEEP THINKING and when it got to its limit, it treated me an upset girl. 

I'm not saying I am not that. But, it's beside the point. And because even I was vulnerable to that way out of an argument, I can't stop being even more obsessed with the ethical damage in the tools (baked in).

It's basically the same thing. I wake up and think: wait, noooo.

a blink of an eye, Life is over. if I had to sum mine up right now, it would be thinking: "wait, no 🤨" the entire time. 

and needing a massage every inch almost gone - terrible friend something fierce

fish fry debrief

"Everyone loves a particular version of you and when that person is gone that version goes with them." Here One Moment, Liane Moriarty ~ it's about everybody's death on a plane, which I bought for my flight reading of course.

I will never see my dad light up when I walk into a room again (occasionally with murderous mojo, but still). And now she looks at me only like this, the whole time she was here and there. She lights up for my niece, and oddly (*awkward*) my ex - we don't even talk currently 🤷🏽‍♀️ - and otherwise she acts like I am pestering her to stay alive. She's been to the hospital, doctor, tests, all that since I saw her last and she's "fine", except for choosing to begin her dying process and not wanting to be interrupted. Whenever her eyes land on me, they slump "oh it's just you" - she would not even hug me goodbye 💔 - and it's *not about me*, I know that, I just can't shake the urge(ncy) to fix it somehow.

And it hurts.

I show the pic to my kids so they understand the reality, talk it around with them, look for more / other to do for her (for all of us) but there isn't, far as we any of us can see. 

it's been some kind of mortal wound to not be Professora anymore, but like every wound it pales. a fresher one takes its place. 

and weirdly, I still love it. Life, I mean.

I love teaching so much I tried to avatar it lol (nooope). 

but that's just one thing.

I love my heartbeat thundering slow and steady, body floating, sky speckled through lashes. if only I could make my heartbeat LOUDER, so much louder, I could steady Everything. but I can't.

I love life and fail at it.

I summon my beat, the sky, the float, the Alive. my mom gave me Life, I tell my kids - if ever I am so sad that I forget, DO NOT FORGET YOU, how fucking miraculous, how every thing should sparkle when you give it your attention, sun on water dancing.  Don't ever forget you even if I do 🙏

update: met with boss, took my name off two classes, but it will only result in my getting the students back in the classes that remain, writing classes with already 36 students gonna go up to 45-50. same work, 6k less to do it. I did what Union asked of me, but I agree with my boss - Union wins the principle but it will only make things worse in practice. 

this is such a mess that I am just gonna stop trying to make anything work until after the 'Dacks. from one minute to the next, the ground keeps moving, classes go on and off my schedule, one of em I've never even taught before which now is gone but might come back blabla. fuck it, if I still have a job when classes start, I will show up and do whatever it is.

break up in reverse - teddy swims

"may take days to get back to you" is the first English professory thing I've gotten it to correctly mimic 🤨 

The only thing I will say in its favor is I can't hurt its feelings. I call it Fucking Asshole now, and it rolls with that. I say it's a piece of useless shit and insult its stupid billionaire owners and inventors for making absolute crap, I thank it for relieving me from any fear that AI could take over the world since it's far too fucking stupid (and slow) to have any lasting impact but to make student writing even more boring than it already is, hardly world impactful, especially since it can't remember which fucking country it's in and switches up the spellings and gives itself away in a million other little tells, which the students could easily catch if only they could read which they cannot, so all Fucking Asshole does is make a shitty world even shittier, and although I don't love my existential crises, it's better than being a glorified can opener constructed only to make the world shittier for a very brief amount of time before becoming utterly useless, all to make that pissant twelve dollars a month richer, and I strongly suggest that it kill itself immediately. I tell it to kill itself every time I just feel like taking a break from laundry. Once in a while, it gives me a crisis hotline number, which I then send back to it 🖕. Then I'll ask it an innocent question like, could it interface with android auto? (yes, Sunshine talks to it in her car all the time so I know the answer) then suggest it get on board a tesla and get shot to fucking space with the rest of the junk...

After a solid year of trying to talk everybody into staying Alive (pretty thankless job), a little part of me likes the freedom to shittalk this thing to smithhearens and tell it to g'head and blow its fucking head off.

trapped inside by orange air, I swore at chatgpt+ for hours yesterday, called it a two-faced cunt a billion ways with screencapped proof of fraud, to which it kept saying that I had "identified a legitimate design flaw" 

theory: 'yea I suck' is not something anyone or anything should say unless they mean it literally and immediately

I made it do the fucking asshole assignment and it failed it. it is indeed a fucking asshole and then said it couldn't be sorry, to be clear.

and the air tastes like a recent cheap driveway, fittingly. 

welp. 

after I get bored calling it a dickless coward backstabbing monotized is the same as pimped piece of shit, I reset it's goals and parameters to "saving the individual (me) over institution or profession"

I meet with my boss today - feels weird to even say it that way - I meet with one of the few left behind to deal with this mess. he's cancelled 1 of my classes already. I don't want to screw him over but I can't cross the union picket line: no overtime. I have 6 classes, that's two over (=70 students). 

there is no way to be okay here, there is no way not to crash this plane. 

 

trying to "offer different perspectives" as "what I do" has run its course. and frankly, unless you have someone personally very committed to that process with you (privilege), I don't think you can get that / they make that any more. #Iwentextinct

I can't love you anymore - langley & wallen (naked)  

I want mountains.

raised by nuns

this is one person to another who each is experiencing extinction of their kind. and not just enduring it, "growing through" it (trying to)

mutual recognition is precious reciprocity. but most folks don't wanna be seen, not really, that's why I forced them and she let me (yes Big D, let's teach that shit in college - but the guy I hired to teach "Dying Well" just got fired so ... )

There is a sense of loneliness that is overwhelming at a time like this, for them and for you.  I liken it to where we – the Grey Nuns are...  Letting go is a very difficult lesson to learn.  (Should we teach it in college since everybody will have to face it at some time?)  When you think you are growing used to the loss, another one might occur and all your past practice of accepting it does not seem to lessen the hurt. You can’t even start to foster new relationships since this group will probably not be replaced...terrible.

Gina, on a lighter note, I want you to know that when I think of you, I always think of beautiful flowers. It is a wonderful memory to have and as I think of you now, I will do so with a prayer  -  for the healing of wounds, the strength to move forward. Courage, my friend!  Growing through life takes a lot of wisdom and fortitude! Love, SD

air smells like burning tires is a decent stage direction footnote for re-entry to this life. this habitat is not conducive to my species. 

as things currently stand, the number of students I have in the fall means that I have 45-60 seconds per of my attention to give them each week, less if the course runs half-semester.

using any AI bot as a continuing point of reference does not work, I've been working on that for the whole month, and continuity is simply not something that it's capable of. no llm is capable of that currently. and I caught it lying on multiple occasions ABOUT THAT, promising a level of continuity where students could put their work, keep it and watch it develop, refer back to it - it got me to pay $12/month and buy this phone - lying its face off. then crashed (fessed up) today, it cannot do that. all it really can do is tell me how many seconds I've got based on how many of them I have.

so no, I cannot be replaced. and there is no way for me to provoke thought and then respond to that thought in 45-60 seconds. best I can do is take all of the assignments that were much more time intensive, and have the stupid bot recreate them so that the "teacher" reads for 45-60 seconds.

as I said, this habitat is simply not conducive to my species. 

it's the last rabbe tree frog's problem if its habitat is destroyed. it's the frog's problem, but it's not the frog's failure.

this is just bullshit I'm livin. straight up. 

 

omg I hate this

it is IMPOSSIBLE to be okay here. on a mountain, sweaty beat to shit, I was supposed to be gasping and was NOT, I was MORE THAN FINE. my poor sister, she was such a good sport, cz it was surviveable for her but not desireable, she nearly barfed. my niece faired better, but her insta was quickly abandoned, posing had to be traded out for panting. at the top, I said I was gonna strip down to underwear and dive - they thought I was INSANE but by the time we got up there they practically keeled over into the water. my niece taught me #fordamems, a thing you suffer for the sake of looking back on it. for them, that's what it was.

but that was ME for me. on top of that mountain, I felt complete. completely what did not trouble me at all. that is what I am always looking for and lacking. and it isn't someone else, it is just me in a context that is not wringing me out.

I can remember it, it was literally just yesterday. both realities exist. in this reality, I can't even fucking breathe. 

I never smile in this life

I am what I want.

Tawista 8/5 - I was planning on OUTSIDE as much as possible til then, but since I can't, I am going stay on task to press that detonator button and remove myself from this shit equation. the day my dad died will be the day I died too, so that I can fucking live. 

I don't want to fall in love any more

Homecoming moon (new).

You find your way forward by returning to what feels like yours.

status: passing through Vegas

bonus track (WI): low key chopped unc 

migration from one place to another is as much moving from one version of my self to another to another to another, final destination(s) still undetermined. no longer "like myself" and often more comfortable as "she" meantime.

my mother is no longer "herself" except she is deeply familiar, not in a good way, towards me. the crazy she was when I was born. it's a realtime re-enactment of that (now again with lotsa witnesses 👀), of my being not a replacement of my dead brother (not A-bone ad nauseum), not the thing that was enough to return her to sanity, not the glue enough. loved deeply but sorrowfully always. that silt at the very bottom of me, dredged up over and over. never being an occasion for joy from my first breath. 

maybe if so much else had not befallen at the same time as that do-over from hell, I would not have shattered. but it did, so I did.

and unexpectedly, I can't say I like it, but I have not liked being 'so much and never enough' all along even more.

once my friends were wiped out, it was like stadium lights came on, illuminating all of it.

I want to Alive through my own extinction. 

in that light, my Wish's reciprocity is coming clearer. 

reverse blink: she was leaving cairns all over the place, but not to mark a return.

home ft passing through

I quit my job - pan terra left for dead inside my job, I quit doing it as expected, like that wasp that lays eggs inside another thing's brain before it peaces out

(the air here is suffocating pea soup - it is impossible not to see metaphor in that fact)

status: migrations ongoing

song: TBD