I can’t write about last week+ quite yet, though I’m trying and I’m getting there. The boys and I spent a lot of time at churches, lighting candles, trying hard to hold firm and fast and care-for, while walking into the wind frankly. So we talked about it tonight and decided we’d start Sunday school again for them at the Unitarian on Elmwood, where they learn about all the religions they have affiliations with, at which point Ears said to TJ “ya know, EVERYTHING counts, so if you’re mean you could wind up coming back as a flea on a dog” and TJ promptly responded, deadpan stare: “Spitty. Tennis. Ball.”

"Aurore," Hot Club of Detroit

I don't know what the town's name is, in the south, across from Athens by ferry something whatever, where he is, or was

the friend he was with should have been back by now to start a new job, but I wouldn't know one way or the other if he is or isn't now would I

I'd try to write to something, some THOUGHT that isn't just feeling, but my dad is rounding his first mean bottle of wine for the night after being sick all day after etc etc . . . and I don't think I can feel a thing besides the choked back urge to keen, loud and alone

Aside from the mounting panic,

nothing.

this

AMALIADA, Greece (AP) A fire official in Greece says blazes are burning in more than half the country. "Dozens of charred bodies have been found across fields, homes, along roads and in cars, including the remains of a mother hugging her four children."

I have officially failed to not-be-watching this story.

I had hoped for catharsis

The opening assembly of the semester was today. The nun-Prez (Big D) gave her homily as per usual - there is always a theme for the year (oy), the most of amusing of which in recent years was "Pass the Salt", we being the salt of the earth and thus should pass ourselves around more, to students, or something like that. (She's cunning, yet retarded - a strangely common combo in my experience.) Today she read from the book of Luke and the upshot was, as Jesus told Simon, "Don't worry - from now on you'll catch men. - Remember that, and know that miracles happen every day."

(pause)

Meanwhile, I killed time reading Esquire [shut up], and I found this hilarious. And I went with a ruched polyester skirt from the Suzanne Somers collection paired with a little girl's shirt from the school-uniform line at Target, fyi

My bro-in-law suggests that occupational downsides could be worse.

for Virgo this week: Are you ready to leave the past behind, drop all your assumptions, welcome the return of your innocence, adopt a beginner's mind, and start fresh everywhere? I hope so, because that's what the universe will be nudging you to do. Here are some words of wisdom to incite you and arouse you. (1) "You don’t know what you can get away with until you try." - Colin Powell. (2) "Never underestimate your power to change yourself." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (3) "If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." - my friend Lucy Spinner. (4) "God calls you to the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." - Frederick Buechner [never heard of him].

I think I might have come out of the womb with (1) tattooed under my hair like 666. I’m going for (4) these days.

My sister called at nearly midnight after a night out w her friends from work. She’d had an epiphany: academics suck. (lol) “I mean, I have 8-10 people at work every day that if I want to I can stick my head in their cube and they’ll show me something stupid they found on u-tube or tell me a story about one of the asshole bosses coming out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to her stiletto – and what do you got??” Pulease, tell me about it. I like my job, the job itself, a lot, but yeah it’s hard to feel glad in a social environment where Britishy accents get stronger/weaker depending on how far the pole is up somebody’s ass. It’s like a teacher’s lounge that fell into a vat of toxic chemicals cartoon-bad-guy style. I feel as if there’s a tentacle of evil seaweed around my ankle pulling me down toward the cold water of the semester, an attitude that is cracking my mind open like a walnut and really just not helping matters generally speaking.

So I’m putting my foot down. I’m going to turn my attention now to what nutty thrift store ensembles I’ll wear this season, and the rest can just bite me. [armscrossy]

Dylan [Mark Ronson’s Remix] - Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine).

My garage was broken into and emptied of all things of value, my tenants’ collection of antique bikes in particular, every one of them. The neighbors saw it, a hoard of teens leaving on bikes, called the cops, etc etc, which was all waiting for me when I got back from yoga.

I went to see a woman who runs a banner/button business out of her home – union buttons. Her walkway was lined with bowling balls instead of flowers. It made me wistful – they like to bowl, I thought, and logically speaking nobody bowls alone. Then since I was in Hamburg (Bumblefuck) anyway, I went and lit candles at the Basilica; I bought enough candles to light one at the feet of every Our Lady Of Life is a Trade Off statue. And I didn’t pray anything in particular – I don’t think prayers should be Christmas lists. I just said “please whatever”. And I dipped my necklace in the basin of holy water. Then I went to sweat and a man asked me “Are you going up Delaware?” and I said No Sorry. I was going up that street though, it’s just that No’s come easy, automatic, whereas Yes’s I gotta separate from the pocket lint. I turned back and changed my mind and then gave him a ride home because he’d broken his neck, he tripped, and so he didn’t like to walk that route anymore from his apartment to the gym. He’s been married 61 years, has lived in the same apartment for 27 years, walks on a treadmill every day, can’t turn his head to the left very well. His name is Phil and he told me I was pretty and that he liked my car cuz it was up high to see out.

girls aloud – rehab (amy winehouse cover)

"I Won't Hurt You," Anja Garbarek

Joni Mitchell, Just Like This Train.
The Delmore Brothers, Don’t You See That Train.
Peggy Lee, Waiting For the Train To Come In.

"Blue and Sentimental," Ike Quebec (tenor sax), Grant Green (guitar), Paul Chambers (bass) Philly Joe Jones (drums)

this is gonna be me if I don't get that vehicle back soon (NUTS) - and the mechanic just called and he said the thing is FUCKED to the tune of $800 and it'll be at least another day so I had to call my X-in-Laws! and Borrow Their Car! grrr! I hate everything so much right now I could just rip my own eyeballs outa my head

update: the x-in-laws were awfully nice about it; in fact they seemed relieved to see me [still here]

back-to-back CSI:Crime Scene Investigation episodes

The van being in the shop for days is royally bumming me out. I am a small-town country girl about vehicles; mass transit my ass, I am STUCK. X then has the kids bc they have karate and all that and I ran outa groceries bla bla, and their absence is nice for a day or two (a breather) and then another one if something is going on or whatever, but after that I just develop Pointless-Collie-Syndrome. I’m not sure how to shut down for the night if I don’t have to pack next-day lunches for anybody. I almost bought this, just to be an asshole to myself basically.

...for at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important of things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

--Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet

lala(wa)

No bones about it, you're a loyal, nurturing Collie. A sensitive breed, you're always approachable and very in tune with others' feelings — just like Lassie! (omg LOL) Because of your empathetic nature, you tend to be the group psychologist to your circle of friends. Your faithful, easygoing, steadfast personality makes you a wonderful confidant; people love to come to you with their troubles. Bottom line? You're a star at interpersonal relationships and have a knack for making new friends and acquaintances wherever you go. (what the?) After all, what's a Collie without a flock to look after? (oooo, the PUPPIES, right gotcha)

What Breed of Dog Are You?

[unless it's me] buffets suck

The Dears - Lost In The Plot

love love this:

Jim Bryson - If by the Bridge (Where the Bungalows Roam)

[I love bungalows.]

Showcase of him on PRI’s the world here.

bonus track – Pissing on Everything

website

this

not this

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence...I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

--Susan Sontag, "Simone Weil," NY Review of Books [from Dms]

There is a dichotomy here in Sontag's summation of Simone Weil that is bugging me. And there is one underneath that one, I think, that is what’s really bugging me.

I’ll leave the Greeks alone for a minute, let’s imagine an Amish community instead because that’ll be more familiar: If you walk around in a romantically-linked pair then you’re courting in which case you’re considering marriage in which case unless something bad happens you’ll get married at which point you can’t do absolutely anything autonomously ever again in which case you shouldn’t have started in the first place unless you were willing to surrender your autonomy utterly in the first place. If you so much as share popcorn, maybe you can never anymore blow your own money on ugly shoes or play soccer 4 nights a week or putter or go out with your friends or . . .

It’s simple logic. If A = B and B= C then A = C. So if C = blowing your head off and A= going through a grocery store together and buying sandwich meats, then saying “Hey want to go get stuff and make sandwiches?” = “Hey can I blow your head off?”

We have had countless conversations that go like this

Me: Do you want to . . .
Him: No.
Me: You didn’t even let me finish.
Him: Whatever it is, if I say yes then it sets a precedent. So no.
Me: You might like whatever it is I’m about to suggest.
Him: Nope.

As insane as this makes me, and insecure/rejected (duh), I have to admit an affinity for his instinctive unwillingness to give anything of himself away without a fight. I worked up to that in my life, he starts there. The real reason I don’t have a shower is because not having one meant that I had to be ‘allowed’ the time it took to run a bath in order to get dressed. (Please, I’m the one who thinks a blow dryer is a torture device eh, I’m hardly high-primp.) X would routinely stand outside the bathroom door if I was in there for longer than 5 minutes and rail at the door, often throwing his voice through the kids like “yes I will get you a glass of milk since your mother is the Persian princess in there” stomp stomp slam the cabinet door etc. And then there was walking by the bathroom door and kicking it hard BAM sending me flying like someone jumped outa the bushes at me, so that a shower was out because it masked the sound of his feet coming. In the last years I had separated our work schedules so we were just never together because not only could I never ever do anything right, my doing anything at all was the Not-Right – once, I was done with work and I sooo didn’t want to race home but he was always on the phone before I even had time to get to my office after class and I had my lunch stuff sitting on my desk and there was a fork I’d brought and I went out into the parking lot and tried to stab my own tire with it like it was student vandalism so I could sit there for the time it took AAA to arrive (a fork isn’t sharp enough, fyi). I didn’t even tell K this stuff because it was humiliating. And (here’s the point) as miserable as he made me, I also believed him that I was a bad mother and bad person and that I shouldn’t have gotten married because I was selfish and immature with shit like writing on a blog, running, talking on the phone to my mother even (5 minutes, then cabinet slamming, relentless). Before I withdrew from that too, he made fun of my wanting a kiss first . . . “god, you’re like a 15 year old” he said. I wonder if I'll ever not feel I need to pay for a cuddle up front again, deep down.

I wanted to be one of those people whose maternal grace radiated, like K’s mother, one of those. And I was wincing and furtive instead, bracing-myself-frigid over dreamy-detached, so clearly yes I was all all wrong . . . .

In therapy, it became known as the tethered-dog syndrome. Tied in a shadeless yard, un-petted but screamed at any time I chewed the leash off. Until I just sat there, looking potentially rabid and hardly moving a muscle.

Ok the thing that’s bugging me about that Sontag thing initially is that asceticism is the enemy of communality. That is, you can’t withdraw yourself and be in a ring of happiness too. And you can say that you’re going to stay autonomous individuals too in a committed relationship bla bla, but it doesn’t get underneath to the real thing that’s bugging me: the presumption that some people shouldn’t or can’t or don’t deserve a life-loving life—with others arrayed around them, families friends ties all of it—because of their taciturn natures. It’s not enough to say that everyone has a right to stay autonomous – duh - that doesn’t address the fact that culturally speaking we assume there is something wrong with people who enjoy being alone, who need to be apart some of the time in order to be good when they’re with. It’s not the constant time together that some of us want to share, it’s the meaning of that time, some of which is spent apart and some of which is spent on others and some spent alone, and all spent trying to love-life live with minds that were born craving quiet time to calm the inner reflective pools clear.

I don’t believe that being that way is ‘wrong’ [life-rejecting] anymore, and I think although I’m in the minority culturally speaking, if I started a “nuns and priests types have love/relationship/reproductive rights too” club that just about everyone who reads this blog would qualify for at least a junior membership card. I’ve read the letters she wrote to that priest, and Simone herself would have a membership card.

I wouldn’t post this with FPH around bc I don’t want to encourage him to be even more emotionally unavailable than he already is – I want to go with him outside the city to get to clear air to lay around near a fire and look at the sky where we can see the constellations. I want that, and want it not to mean that we counted off ten paces and turned and shot each other dead in his head. And there are too many nights, too long of time stretches, when after the work is all done and such, I want and can’t have the musky anchor of my man there to curl against to sleep implicitly watched over/safe. But there are many nights, when I’m sitting here with an ugly oatmeal mask on my face (like now), writing or reading something like “Yoga Anatomy”, thinking that I’m glad he is there [as in for me] and glad enough that he's there [as in over there, for his ‘rents, and with himself]. That's not what kills me.

[If he comes back w/ fiance-material in tow, and if I ever have the oomph to give this much of a shit again, my bets are on something like a Reclusive Menonite Trucker.]

"Gravity," Sara Bareilles

p.s. I reposted the anti-anti-procreation thing below too just because it came before this, spurred by the same Sontag post, and is part of an mounting unspoken ticker tape in my head in general lately that is one thing after another that comes down to “there isn’t something so wrong with people who are wrong so there" typa deal.

re DmS's rant against human procreation - I have to agree that most people probably shouldn’t have kids because evidence suggests though some mutual resentment is natural in ANY human relationship, that most people who have kids don’t even like kids AT ALL and then eventually don’t like their children as adults either soooooo, well the logic does escape the big pic on all that. I dunno. Her own instinctive affinity toward the vulnerable and away from armed-with-power suggests to me that DmS herself would have some talent at observing small people unfold into bigger ones – I feel like she’s parented me in that way quite a bit. But parenting and procreating aren’t the same thing, they just often overlap. I can see the Global Warming reason against there being more humans, but I always think “Let’s kill all the mean people who have ever cruelly struck a child for instance or laughed at someone in pain and wow I bet the planet would get a lot less overpopulated fast!” When we stop letting Assholes run around willy nilly, I’ll consider donating my ovaries to the save the planet effort. Until then . . . not so much.

More locally, I’ve seen my sister a couple of times since her kid was born but otherwise I don’t know anybody in an intimate way who has kids except for D. Occasionally D. has an anti-anti-procreation rant. Disapproving of all the people who spend their time building stock portfolios and then decorating their fridges with pics of their pets etc. I don’t feel much allegiance with that rant either. Cats need love too, as do spouses, nephews, neighbors, selves . . . do we all have to put on diapers to count as love worth accomplishing? Nobody I work with has kids at all – not infrequently someone rants and calls it a lecture about procreation as proof of anti-intellectualism. Once a student got pregnant mid-semester in a class I was co-teaching and the other prof could not quell her visceral disgust even slightly, told the woman she should quit school until she ‘could concentrate’, which she did. Standard academia. X wrote his dissertation about how marriage/procreation is the antithesis of articulation and that you could either live in words (write) or not (thus, procreate) – then he “fell off the wagon” hanging out with a bad influence. That hurt once, as did the nickname “Breeder” that he and his family gave me to go along with it. A lot. Mostly because it took aim at who I loved; nobody wanted to hold TJ but me for a couple of years, a shunning for which sometimes I still find it hard to summon forgiveness – but I do, because now he is the most beloved, and it would hurt TJ for me to keep a record of the other time instead, and love finds ways to make the world safer for intimacy and if it doesn’t do that it’s not love, it’s something else.

Last night, as we often do, I fell asleep near Ears – he likes to hold my right hand in his left and draw in his journal with his other hand until he gets tired. I wake up and re-cap his markers. I have really loved very few people, fewer via sexual intimacy as a principal means of expression, and if you subtracted the ones who shared my body by coming from it, wellll my love life would have tumbleweed blowing around I guess. This is not a love-life path that most people have taken, though it’s clear that just about everybody feels able to have an opinion about it. People think they know everything about me if they know merely my full titled name and that my children exist. It’s one of the most consistent ironies of my life, since I chose the largely solitary life and ‘childish’ love affairs that I did mostly because me and strangers and intimacy do not mix instinctively at all, and what I feel that I don’t really know repels me if it gets up too close. [And I assumed if I wanted something I’d have to do/make it myself (selps).]


Maybe there should be a conceptual umbrella to cover this public-property problem, under which many phobias would share some territory. Intimacy-Phobia, with huge obvious portions like homophobia and also subdivisions of various kinds, all having this in common: that people think they know something about you by who/how you’ve loved (or not), and that their “knowledge” just amounts to fear that there’s something wrong with THEM that your ‘difference’ can assuage because they can kick it around.


armand van helden - you don't even know me

Welp, the Last of the Famous International Playboys is officially off to the cradle of Western Thought and the native-born bride buffet. Upside to everything: I get to talk about him behind his back. Although a wa wa wa –ish soundtrack was up overnight, I managed to restrain myself from posting “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as FaintedInk suggested,

I spent the morning lying around thinking about the last 2 Augusts trying to back up from the immediate moment – this is our 3rd August ‘together’ i.e. floating together in some same karmic boat.

Now what?

[Stop Thinking.]

I’m wondering if I can/could be as good w the wife buffet thing as K. is being with the Doctor thing. MAYBE. It’d be better than no brother, for sure – I always come back to that. I don't acquire people easily at all, as in BARELY, so write-offs are extremely expensive. And using the kid-love model, letting go is often what’s required (unless you’re Greek ha ha) soooo ya gotta be prepared for that . . . But shopping with him for his stags and does outfit might be beyond me. I dunno. Then I think yeah but who is going to make sure she knows the 100 meanings of “get bent”? (AH!). That part is just realllly hard, no getting around it.



"This Too Shall Pass," Danny Schmidt

ache for what goes away

Stumble to my feet already in another room through doors
Before I’m awake
Waking in motion
Saying something like Hi I’m Here and reaching
Pulling him towards
Smile automatic even if I wanted to kill him
A minute ago and a minute from now
Hold still
Or move
Walk us around liking the night in its composed blue
Count toes count fingers map the skin inch by inch
Any flaw any pain everything known anything new
By eyes by fingertips by sense of smell along every line
Watch the most basic thing intently without blinking
A long time while the time is there
Watch it: that thrum pulse along his throat
Means he does exist, alive and everything
Somehow that gratifies and somehow it hurts
But mostly that One Thing just has to Stay So

[bargain with God]


All of that is fine and makes perfect sense to me, if we're talking about one of these:


.

Otherwise, it’s a bit unfamiliar and unnerving. Which logically speaking sometimes generates insecurity as to how to proceed (duh). He says he’s immature. Thank god! Two introverted fond kindergarteners in an impromptu (glass?) tree house are evensteven. We hung a “Keep Out” sign, for instance, then stood there and wondered if it applied to us too. He says “I’m going on a trip [away]” -- to a different country, one that scares me (AH!) . . . . . And I try to simply walk into the next second but find that I just walked into that second through some kind of sharp sieve that turned me into itty pieces. Rule of thumb: Don’t lie. It’s one of the abstentions in any orthodoxy, a definite No No. So, well, come unglued briefly, try to be tidy about it, a modest pull-in bout of unblogging, no freaking out far flung nutty splatter pattern. DoyourbestLaLaLa




I take the kids to the pool all day, stick my legs in the sun, rub little squirming bodies with spf 45 while they bitch about it, adjust goggles bright orange for one bright green for the other, gleeful boy-Martians with water streaming off in ruts along their lotiony backs. Granola bars for snack. Peanut butter. A terrible Disney flick, which they love, when the sun is going down. Happy meals with chocolate milk is a comfort zone. I drop them off with their brine shrimp kits in tow. By then I know I just need to take a sadness-leak, slowly in a bubble bath soaking break aches and crying a little while. Calming Mantra: we’ll all be dead eventually and wonder what the big fuss was about over any one second anyway. [A very flawed mantra, a tide-me-over mantra, I’m looking for a better one since a single second and a moving vehicle could make a good reason to fuss (duh).] I get outa the tub and look in the mirror, realize I didn’t wash my face very well, a fuzz of blue smudged around my eyes and my face doesn’t look like my face at all hardly anyway, it looks undressed down to plain timid. I wake from dead-asleep just after midnight on my feet, half way down the stairs in my underwear and my instincts to answer the door.


hem - The part where you let go? (home again) [buy]

"sweat" (image credit)

A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray (ricky rouge mix)
Wait 'Til You See Him (De-Phazz remix) - Ella Fitzgerald
Roll My Body(Jimmy Cauty remix)

Creeper Lagoon – Here We Are
Hot Hot Heat - “No, Not Now”
Hawksley Workman - Jealous Of Your Cigarette
Morrissey – He Knows I’d Love to See Him
Lovage – Archie and Veronica