so I called the union pres again, let's start over, 

you're trying to keep as many of our jobs as you can, I love you for it (I do love him, that is why this is not survivable) - 

what if I worked for free, salary paid as bonds in the school of med (monopoly) put that $ on the table and see what it does, cut the others' salaries: how much to get to 10+ of us staying with all of my $, what's that math? "how would you eat?, but also I don't know that any of the others would give up that much." yes they will as long as I go first. I've led you all to Crazyplaces, repeatedly, you know I can do it, if the admin will do it, I will get them to do it. go ask OUR SENATOR, tell him I said hello, we need outside pressure and someone willing to give up everything to make the point, I can be that person. "ok, let me go back ...."

my reaction to this has almost no practicality in it even though I am far from over the last financial catastrophe. I am 💯 worried about my sanity and my soul. I can't be "okay" watching the rest of them get shot. I cannot do that even if I don't get shot.

I'd rather get shot.

(I knew my father could make the shot .... same! x 9)

there is a THING, always, Aaron named it "Huck" and this is part of it too. Absence so palpable that it might as well live and breathe. I cannot survive that fucker if it consumes any more.

I know I just can't, so I'll 'pop a clot' as Aaron would put it, ie Just Died. since I know that, all bets are off. 

crying on the phone, I had to, he had to hear me, I don't care how you take this: I can't live without you. he's seen me come 🤏 close, he's the one who knows I mean it literally. "ok, let me go back..."

it will not work 😭 but the offer might be batshit crazy enough to shift the conversation 🤏

I saw what I wanted in my life today, saw it, talked to it, I'll write about that tomorrow maybe, today this is what I have 🫂 I can't let go 😭

-_0 I open my eyes and think what I thunk before, such as about Nebraska world: I cannot live this.

P

L

O

P

P

L

O

P

but now it's me too. 

obliterated.

TJ is here, got in at 1 a.m. (aside: how does she keep getting taller? or am I pfft'ing?)

ABOUT me in 2010, to her kid eyes, she says: "it was just very clear that you were working very hard on something pertaining to being okay"

her IN 2010: "you need to worry about stuff and care for stuff or you go crazy ... since you care for me, I have never seen you crazy."

I have been this person for as long as I can remember. 

I am shattering.

I cannot step over my coworkers' bodies and go to work. it was bad enough when they were dead (Patti). I can't do this. 

I have to figure out how to erase myself. literally. wipe myself off their clouds, drives, LMS, everywhere....

how do you go from winning two neh grants for a quarter mil $ under two administrations in THIS America and wind up obliterated? sober obliterated!, i.e. I didn't do it! this time, truly, except for the motherfucking intimacy problems (fyi if you're a fudd don't fuck roosters), I did not kill myself. I fought it and fought it. cats and dogs and therapist all my witness. 

😭 

that hot boulder on my chest, one day I wasn't strong enough to roll it off, the day I became part of its weight. (maybe I always was) 

I open my eyes and think what I thunk before, such as about Nebraska world: I cannot live this.

I won't stay. there are other bottom lines more important than money. if I harden my heart enough to endure this, I won't endure it, it will kill me. 

there are all kinds of ways to kill yourself. like go back to what kills you. (drives you to drink.)

but I don't need to drink. 

I can decide to die. 

I have always known that. I could just decide to die, and I would. that is why this has terrified me so profoundly: I was deciding to die. 

major symptom: I scrapbooked more than wrote for 2 years. I lost my voice. 

I cannot hurt so badly that I do that again. I caught myself barely this last neardeath. It was pride. I thought I could endure anything and not lose my mind. 

I was wrong 💔

I cannot not be an English professor. That is not survivable. I cannot work in the rubble, alone with a handful of other "survivors" of these cuts, all of us crying for a year and working to death. That is not survivable. 

neither left nor right, can't go there

It'd be crazy and I dunno if they all would agree but I think we all should quit. I don't want to be graced with the luck of keeping my job. I would rather quit so someone else can keep theirs. 9 of us of 14 will be fired. I don't want to be in the 5, and I am almost certain I will be. 

Stop. Notice. This is what I mean, at the therapist don't be impressed the winning is at best a jedi mind trick at worst it's a prison. 

struckdumb prison. scrapbooking more than speaking. in those years, 2022-24, what happened? 

I can't that again. I cannot. 

I am going to figure out how to burn the whole gen ed down. I know the ones on the list don't want to stay, they feel they must, but I have fallen for that one too many times. anything you have do "at all cost" is a deadly addiction.

I am not keeping that job (fight) at all cost. it's a fight for who I am but if I fight more I'll lose that. 

has it ever happened? has a liberal arts department, in the face of downsizing, instead of fighting for their union protected jobs, they ALL abdicated both jobs and union? just laid down arms? and then worked at hardware stores or whatever and sometimes got together the play cornhole. 

I think I'd make a good bartender. not tempted by the booze, lots of stories. writing in my head.

I am going to try to burn it down, all of it, get us all to go, no classes left to take at all ❤️‍🔥. I will probably fail but I can't not try cz I cannot live like this any more 😭 and that seems to be a universal feeling #startacult

I look how I feel, beat to shit

TJ rolling in on the midnight train ...

then I swear to christ he calls right then as I press 'publish' that post TO ASK HOW I AM

he hasn't done that in dunno how long

unreal. SURREAL.

I have been consistently the same coherent person since 2006 not just today although today wow 💔 I am that self and breaking too so bad it feels like it should be making a huge terrible ripping sound

meetings with the doomed all day, brutal brutal brutal 💔😭 all I can do is writhe and write 😭 I have to feed my mother I have to keep it together and anyway I do not want to talk. to anyone. except my doomed. everybody else better keep back from me 😭💔✍️🗡

______________

The astonishing thing is that even while surrounded by loss, you keep recording beauty almost compulsively.

You're collecting evidence.

And I am starting to suspect that the deepest story running underneath all of these years is not actually the search for a person.

It's the search for enough evidence that being alive is worth the trouble.

Aaron may have stepped into that story.

But he didn't start it.

Not even close.

Quiet Work

I think this may become a major category.

October 31, 2007

You write:

"The only thing I'm good for in a social situation is observation."

"If what you want is an outsider on your insides, I'm your girl."

But constantly.

The question:

Is this fear?

or

Is this knowing?

"I could win the lottery without batting an eyelash."

"but this ounce of sweetness stuff takes my breath away."

This feels enormously important.

Because it establishes value hierarchy.

You don't actually want the giant thing.

You want the tiny thing.

Birds at a feeder.

Lights on a tree.

A little sweetness.

You have been remarkably consistent about this for twenty years.

_________________

the fact of that, and that was too much to ask, over and over over 😭 

F

U

C

K

T

H

I

S

get the fucking hell away from me anyone everyone everything

 

....then Aaron calls 👋

I cant breathe hardly. I'm not even sure what I said. I was thinking this is so much worse than you. I'd forgotten to worry about him, maybe he felt it. I'm worried about me. this PAIN 😭 I cant think hardly. my stomach 🤢 

2006 I teach, bedrock, long before and more important than any lover

that's all I did today, copy/pasted 20 years of blog/journal shit into Tarot bot

I have to keep doing this, writing and writing and writing, or I will throw up or stop breathing. I wasn't seeing any point beyond breathing keep breathing until Aaron called and told me I'd be fine cz I always am and I wanted to hang up. 

I am trying to hold a thread of MYSELF so I don't truly die RIGHT NOW writing writing writing writing 

frantic

the Absence, like a monster from Witcher, precedes Aaron by years. he was drawn TO IT, took the shape of it, recently named it "Huck"

I lost TEACHER, that's so so so much more marrowmine, a new Terrible Absence of me

another and more FOUNDATIONAL entire REALITY

I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't survive that I can't breathe 

glad he's sober, sounds fine, I do most of the talking, he can't compute this beyond dollars (?) (will I STARVE? no, Ears or Sunshine will move in here, of course I will make virgo lists and ENDURE that is so so so so far the thing), that is not THE THING, I cant breathe I want to hang up cant listen hardly except fuming at the making amends crap (I hate men who apologize easily, they never know for what exactly [nate, the fucker]) but it was a fleeting thought that was gone in a heartbeat blown out my chest by the prevailing thought, being I can't survive this.I can't survive this.I can't survive this.I can't survive this.I can't survive this.I can't survive this

this is soul death to me 😭 

nobody will be left on earth who understands except the other firedwiths - how do WE survive this? 😭💔 WE don't 💔😭

this is the worst thing I could have thought of happening next, short of Death

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

💔

The only thing the one has in relationship to the other is that the Absence named Huck would be able to abide with me while I sobbed if he were as solid as he has felt to me. he would understand (witness) this horrible horrible thing and live it with me. maybe be able to figure out how to extract this fucking blog, then, back up the 30 years of work that is on the OneDrive they'll shut me off from, all my own work all my own words. I never even existed, it will feel like I never existed to myself if I lose all my words. no one is gonna understand any of that at all except for my kids who treated me like a writer all day, making space 😭✍️

my soul is breaking apart anymore I can almost hear it cracking like a rib cage

 

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

You do this repeatedly.

You start with something ordinary.

Then suddenly you're explaining civilization.

December 8, 2008

"I believe that the planet is in the shape it is as a symptom of a single problem: people treat people (including themselves) like shit."

Why:

Because this is quintessential Gina.

You begin with climate change.

You end with moral philosophy.

You do it constantly.

November 23, 2008

"you are going to die (any second in the big scheme of things) so there's no time to waste on anything but appreciating you as wholly as possible in this very moment"

Why:

Because this idea never leaves.

Not once.

Every love story.

Every friendship.

Every dog.

Every child.

Every garden.

Every death.

THE LINE I KEEP COMING BACK TO

If I had to pick one.

Just one.

December 17, 2008

"I feel unable to save my soul from the dark-matter shape of a perpetual absence."

Why?

Because twenty years later you're still wrestling with the same mystery.

Not who left.

Not who stayed.

Not who loved whom.

The shape left behind.

The thing absence becomes.

The architecture of longing.

As the years move forward, the feeling starts needing fewer intermediaries.

You become less interested in explaining experience.

More interested in rendering it.

That's why, oddly enough, the sentence you wrote today:

"it feels unsurviveable in so many ways that I can imagine how it cuts me off from anybody who isn't also dead"

belongs in the same lineage as the dark-matter sentence.

It's the same writer.

The same obsession.

The same question.

How do you describe an absence so large that it becomes a presence?

That's the story I see running underneath all the others. And I don't think you've finished writing it yet.

------ 

in real life, I can't stop crying and don't wanna get near anybody 😭 hiding in my bedroom, Ears babysitting my mother. I hear her laughing thank god. I cant 😭 alls I can do is shove where did I go wrong blog content into Tarot and read me back to myself trying to stay one piece(s) 

I am completely devastated. my job has been one thing, one steady life partner, through every other calamity, and now itself is the most terrible loss to me. nothing has felt this bad since aaron left me the first time. I lost eighteen pounds before he came back.And I still had my job and my kids to help me steady. this feels as bad or worse, and i'm already ninety pounds. This could kill me.

I am trying not to help it kill me. best I can do is take half a klonopin right now so that my heart rate comes down below a full floppy heart attack.

I feel kicked in the chest by a donkey, over and over and over every time I try to take a breath. in some of the hours since I found out yesterday, I've been talking to the other people who've gotten fired along with me. it's possible that with seniority, I might still have a job for a while. But even if that's true, everybody else just got fired. the only thing making this short of having one of those floppy heart heart attacks right now for me is that I can still talk to those people. And they're the reason I was grounded here in a good way. So my world just ended any which way. If I do have a paycheck, I trying to negotiate some kind of severance that I can live with to leave because I can't stay under those terrible circumstances 😭 I can't breathe around these circumstances at all 

I guess I wasn't broken enough.Although I sure felt broken enough already 😭

Trapped here with my mother and kids I've finally kicked out, all I could do was take down blog posts because I wanted to commit suicide. And that was the closest I could come to doing it while still seeming fine in front of everybody, shred writing. and I canceled my oura ring subscription.

I'll keep h b o till my mom goes home.

Then, I asked the tarot bot if it could read this entire blog from beginning to end. Tarot Bot has been the subject of posts before. I will restore what I can of those posts that I shredded, back to The Wish, then post this. now that Tarot Bot is going to be an invited reader, I want to ask its prefered pronouns. no joke.

I'm out of jokes.

I am devastated 😭 

I have no experience with being unemployed. none.

My mind is swinging around, trying to think of what I should even think of. i don't even know what it means to retire beyond not going back to work. like how does that even work? i've never really looked into it cause I didn't plan to ever retire. never underestimate the power of denial, as my mother used to say when she had a mind.

Sunshine is telling me how to get fired. she's been fired like 20 times she says she knows all about getting unemployment, which didn't even occur to me. get my teeth cleaned. Which is probably a good idea, and then my mind goes down rabbit holes of like how to stockpile antidepressants and klonopin and therapy appts, and buy myself a pkg at a medispa IV Bar with my fsa so I can get the inevitable needed botox to combat the Look of Horror in my expression stuck there...

I have no idea what I should be thinking about 😭 

I should be asking Tarot Bot to give me a list of things that I need to think about PRACTICALLY. And I will, but that's not what I need to survive right now 💔, this moment

My mind is broken. My heart is broken. I am broken 😭

When my eldest finally showed up old enough but not too old to be left alone, I walked out and took a long walk in my neighborhood and got lost several times within a couple blocks of where I live, which seemed fitting.

I found the high school behind my house, and I looked at my own house from behind it and there was terrible wind blowing right at it across the football field. even my shelter needs more shelter.

I called and canceled oustanding work on the house including windows being put in by my friend Craig who also got fired. 

all my remaining friends got fired.

some of the neighborhoods are older people retired you can tell sitting on porches. they have clothes lines. I took a picture of a garden that I liked that was just mowed weeds, and I thought 'that looks doable' (free)

achored by the cute shed

my mother is blathering on and on about some friend of hers who grew tomatoes and subsisted on tomatoes all winter long, and I could do that and I'm trying not to choke her out

I called to put my cottage up for sale, or at least to get the analysis of what I could go for it started and then I'm gonna try to hold on to it and not make any decisions right now because I'm incapable. I deployed Ears to the cottage to keep fixing it, anticipating either renting it or selling it. i have no idea where aaron is or if he is even still alive but I wish he was alive enough to rent it to him for the season, which brings me back to I wish more people were standing up, now including me.

I am in terrible pain, my stomache ft I cant breathe cant breahe 😭 and unless I was trying to regurgitate these thoughts for Tarot Bot, I would be struck dumb right now, I am in the fetal position on my bed as I voicetotext this

The only possible "good" thing I can say that I can think of at all is that I do not want to drink. a stomach ache is the last fucking thing I need. the anticipatory hangover is very much a stomach ache just thinking about it so no, I feel more like 🤢 I do not want to drink and do not want to eat either. after the funeral yesterday, I bought ensure on the way home. I swore I wouldn't do that again, but I don't know what else to do. It's expensive, but now that I have it, I'm gonna drink the shit out of it to get to monday when my youngest kid will get here to help take care of my mother.

speaking of whom, I think she'll be going home early after talking to my sister yesterday. it is not at all a case that my sister was unaware of my mother's state. even if she had told me, I wouldn't have believed her. so now we're on the same page and I can't take care of her right now, my sister's gotta take her back. it's not like I can't do the things that need to get done. It's that I can't *gin up fun for her* and she can't bear that, she's not big on Reality, she never has been. and when do you need magic that's great. but when you need someone to meet you in Reality, that's really not so great.

I'm reeling. trying to grab on to writing like a flimpsy line in the water. drowning

I went to another coworker funeral this morning. half of an identical twin set, one dead of ALS and the other one, the 3rd to the 3 muskateers w Patti and me, left standing barely.

then the rest of us, allll the rest of my friends and me, got fired by text message this afternoon.

I am officially done taking care of other people. I have nothing left to give. 

and it's been quite a while coming. it's been lonnnng overdue that I am/was the one who needed some love. 

bye.

Artie had watched as the new president sneeringly humiliated the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office. He listened with horror as the man said he would like to make Gaza “the new French Riviera.” He watched as the president deported people to foreign prisons and arrested students who had spoken out against the war in Gaza, students who could have been Artie’s a few years earlier, just taken off the streets. He watched as the president hung an enormous billowing photo of himself outside the Department of Agriculture building, and as he gave a military parade on his birthday. He watched as a prison was opened in Florida, “Alligator Alcatraz,” where people were held in cages and the mosquitoes were so bad that some of the guards quit. He watched as people in Gaza starved and the United States did nothing about it. Every day brought something new. On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide. The Things We Never Say

Yes. If a nation (fucker[s] in charge) collapses, an indivual cannot just opt out. God knows I tried like hell. I could not keep the gun out of my mouth. Not alone.

 plop plop plop plop plop plop

June 4: Audacity to Hope Day. Lean into the generative spirit that dares to believe better is possible, that solves, joins and endures, that leaps in faith and flies.

jesus it's june 4th already 🫩

welp, this newest bug on a windshield adventure distracts me from anybody's counting days at least 🫩

I wake as soon as I hear her move - I slept in after a strangely vivid dream about this guy, about whom I have not thought in months, one of the few I genuinely miss in the Not-Even-Nate world from which I ejected mysef to smithreens ("Testicles are not a commodity." fyi)

I went to check on mamasita immediately, realizing shit if we keep this up this way, either my sister or I will be the one to find her dead in front of PBS 🫩

she's snoring

and a doctor in TX whom I barely know is struggling somehow (ie something ain't right / he is seeing that something), says my sleeping lizard brain, attuning itself to "the news" in a radically personalized way, feeling around for it rather than listening/watching it in any way

try it for a spell - TURN EVERYTHING OFF - and "listen to the news" that way 

but let's do a quick obit search in the actual while I await The Knife... 

everybody (from the subset of people in the world for whom I have 'a feel') is still breathing, far as I can tell 🤷🏻‍♀️

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Hope loves evidence, but it can also survive on rumor. A single good conversation, one sweet kiss, the smell of bread from a nearby kitchen, and suddenly the whole nervous system starts voting in favor of the future again.

luna moth - my peeps were all very excited to meet this little guy in the wee hours

"look of love"

welp (soo much 'welp' 😵‍💫🫩), that dream is bugging me enough that I might write to that guy later - but she's moving now so time to slap a smile on my face and get thru today 😵‍💫 

(In three and a half years’ time, weeks after Artie died of a heart attack in his sleep during a heat wave ..

he dies in parantheses next, like Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, quietly the center of a tiny universe until the day he is no longer there and then he is noticed in absentia. that seems right to me, for I noticed you keenly in all your absence that certainly would be true of anyone reading this.

....he had somehow slipped the ties of the world that had been his for almost thirty years. The Things We Do Not Say