The little couple downstairs are fighting again. I’m on a forced-bloom-manic spring-project binge, and am now sitting here with a sunburn and sore ass muscles, listening to her yell over the Fleetwood Mac they play to hide it. She’s an ‘environmental phenomenologist’ [i.e. a grad student who skips seminars a lot and spends most of her time in thrift stores], and has read a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh, walking around barefoot softly on the earth and not fighting w her partner bla bla—which was somewhat easier when they didn’t live together, weren’t in grad school, and had nothing better to do than have sex all day long. And as it turns out, the hippie in her goes thrift-store deep, under which is a somewhat high maintenance moody headstrong bossy bessy [i.e. she made him move my console stereo (remember that phase?) down to her apartment from the attic while the Sabres were playing]. Yes, NOW. Okeeee then.

Earlier today, she rode along to get garden fencing from Home Depot that I installed on the upper porch after Jasper tried to kill himself and I caught him by the scruff mid-plummet. I was already buzzy with adrenalin from a morning nightmare and then that, so my stomach is lsdjaldjadlkafdarkly fretsoup, and she’s yapping cheerfully about peephole shoes she found on ebay, when she turns and asks, Can you hear it when we’re fighting? No, I lie. We never used to fight, she says, We went the first two years without a single fight, and now we kind of fight all the time—you think that’s natural or a bad sign?

She’s asking me? (lol) I think, whoa nobody could have made more babies and more breakups and less intimacy out of a list so short that that in itself is probably a syndrome of some kind than me. I suppose that might make me a good reader of bad signs? I know I’m supposed to say “o it’s fine” all big-sis like, of course. I think about it for a long minute. I think of fighting. Of all the times, most of the time, that I curled silent in a corner and then retreated to a hard bunker in my head too and simply waited for them to stop, stop yelling, stop bullying, stop being, stop wanting something so much it had to be wrung out of me and I never knew, not once really, what the fucking hell it was. So I say, When a woman stops fighting with her lover it’s a bad sign, because then she’s actually left and it just doesn’t show yet—fighting with is kind of fighting for. I thought that sounded pretty good. Pithy. Buuuut now she’s yelling her head off at him down there, hahaha—O well, sorry Dan. :/

Clare Burson – Blue Pearl (web) [high recommend]
Bonus - Audioslave - One and the Same