Halloween...some funky vibes been around my place yo, Samhain big time...can't help but think something just changed some kinda way

This is a great time to share some of your deepest and most vulnerable feelings with your close partner Virgo. If you can truly open up instead of telling half-truths or even lies to cover what you think are major faults, then you will also do yourself a really big favor. It will bring you real peace of mind and a feeling of serenity.

Liiiiike??: "Soooo, I have this blog on which mostly I talk to myself about myself and my love life about you without you knowing it...."

Um, I don't think so. I process enough of this in front of him as it is. I talk more about FPH than he does about his exwife, and more about my fear-thinking than I should altogether. The other day, EX hassled me (again, eyeroll) and it was a relief to discuss someone from my past notgreek and about whom I have no lingering ambivalence. I could see the happiness in his face over it, the unequivocality of "we're not friends, I don't miss him and he doesn't miss me".

Meanwhile, Mark Erelli - I'll Follow You Into the Dark, he hummed this to me - beautiful song - I looked up a cover so I won't start hearing Death Cab guy in my head.

The planetary alignment may create a situation in which you find yourself confused as to which lover you would prefer to be with Virgo. Many would call this a wonderful dilemma, but because you have such a strong sense of loyalty, you find it hard to cope with this problem. The answer to this may not be resolved in one day, but you can begin by asking yourself what you really want in a relationship.

I am not confused, but I am still processing, feeling stuff.....

Aaron switched to ICU nights as of last night. Awake for 24 hours, he tends a woman with end organ failure all night long, 42 years old and determined to die, bleeding from everywhere inside herself, shitting blood endlessly like a river of life-into-death. I know nursing is historically a female occupation, but I can’t personally fathom that. Men have such stronger stomachs. He and FPH both have infinitely more patience than I do as well…And I can’t help these uncanny moments of seeing similarities between them. Paralax is the distance between your eyes. Look at something with one eye, then close it and look with the other, and you’ll see that it seems to shift the object left to right. The object is not really shifting, you are measuring its distance from yourself using the distance between your two eyes as a kind of visual sound-bounce, your eyesight literally a think that you are throwing against that object and bouncing it back to imprint on the retina of your other eye. Something similar happens sometimes when I look at Aaron and he reminds me of John and I know that actually I am looking at myself and measuring my distance from the perspective of them-both. I bring in a lamp, put it next to the bed, change the sheets and clean everything up, do laundry and put it away, fresh fluffy socks, and I lay out a local police blotter (omg so boring, but he likes it), the Dick’s ad (I just knew) and Science Illustrated (he loves facts, most of which are way more interesting than useful). Funny shit on youtube. He does not tell me not to do these things. That is a big difference (distance) between my sense of him and any other man I’ve known up close. He neither expects that I will do for him nor does he abjure it. He is neither a tyrant nor a phobe. He simply likes the Dick’s ad. He is thrilled that I’d just know that. He is looking forward to chicken and dumplings later, a lot. He says “you take such gooooood care of me”, and he is pleased. Not gratified as if OF COURSE I would, nor freaked out as if BESET by it. He just….goes to sleep. It is garbage day. I make room in the freezer. I throw out soups I had made which have since gotten freezer burn. For a split second, it feels as if someone has reached through wall of my stomach up under my rib cage to grab my heart in a fist and squeeze as the neglect-wrecked soups hit the garbage can. I "want in a relationship" not to have to hit the garbage can, wasted.

bill withers - use me

I have only one prior experience of a hot tub and it wasn't my experience ft. it wasn't a good one for me (someone I loved banged someone else in one, cementing hot tubs in my mind as something belonging to any other woman but me surely). I never in a million buttgillion years saw this coming. Any of it. And I am at this moment literally exhausted by the emotions of it all. Happy, a lot. Bracing myself for the end of happy too, a LOT, until every muscle is sore from the effort. He says "Never doubt that I love you". I don't doubt it. I just know that sometimes doesn't matter worth a god damn. People hurt you, they hurt themselves, they even kill themselves and/or you passively or actively. They sometimes have to do those things. And on top of all that, pianos fall on us all from time to time. There is no way around it. This will rip my heart out sooner or later. He reads my mind. He says "If you're going to chew me up and spit me out in little bloody pieces, I'd still choose this, like o well then that's what'll have to happen".

A nasty cold makes its way through the house. Aaron brings scary dreck, like a kid going to daycare only bigger and worse. The kids get it, I get it, and then Aaron gets it again. We spend a lot of time simply caring for each other. Comfort foods and hot toddies. Vicks vapor rub.

And we buy a hot tub. A Jacuzzi. The strangest purchase I have ever made by far. I could no more imagine myself doing that than I could imagine myself having a jet boat or a pony dog. But achy and hopeful and tender and embracing the goofy factor (a t-shirt from the gap, “Cougar Bait”, cz he knows that if all else fails and a fear of mine cannot be mastered any other way, humor will probably get the job done as I have no resistance to a good laugh), we go comparison shopping and listen to schpeels about LED lighting and numbers of jets and oxidation. The showrooms smell like chlorine. The smell is the same as the Schaumburg public pool I grew up in until my life exploded forever into a shit splatter pattern of my parents’ manias and economic catastrophes – until it exploded into the person I became. Smelling chlorine again, I walked around the showrooms and watched the cascading LED lights and stuck my hand in the warm water. I can remember the hot sidewalk under my little feet as I ran the 8 blocks or so over to the pool, the pool pass a giant baby pin with my number on it attached to my bathing suit, right hip. My sister’s adorable boingboing curly hair, her polka dot butt bikini bottoms and the halter top forever coming untied and flapping loose around her neck. My best friend Mickey and I would go to the pool every single day, sometimes we’d pick up Sherry, sometimes we’d duck out the north door and go to the strip mall for candy, giant chewy sweet tarts were my favorite. Pixie sticks. Sherry’s cat had kittens on the chair in her living room, and we paused to see the squirmy wet pile of them. Mickey took dares to pull her bathing suit bottoms down in the pool, then dive to up-end her bare ass at the life guard, a maneuver she repeated often and which I found stimulating to contemplate at the safe distance of being me not her. Slightly older boys egging her to flash them her vagina in the stairwell tubes of the giant jungle gyms of the parks with no trees in our squat flat poor new subdivision. She cleaned my room for me and worshiped her older sister. Her mom and dad hated each other and kept the drapes drawn always, her house always dark and over air conditioned. Not mine. My house was awash in sunlight, nothing but flowered valances my mom would sew herself, like fabric bangs across the foreheads of the windows. She liked yellow, and shades of it were everywhere, as on the giant round area rug with long gold tassel fringe at the edge. My father had a component stereo system, box speakers near the real-wood fireplace that had a brass curtain I’d open and close endlessly. Led Zeppelin loud on the weekends. My parents nzling each other next to the sink in the little kitchen while she made the nightly salad, vinegar and olive oil and too much oregano always. They kept bells on the doorknob to the bedroom in case one of us got up in the night and might disturb their fucking. The end tables by their bed and next to the couch were all giant empty wooden wire rolls that my dad hauled home from work and my mom made gingham tablecloths for. My favorite gingham was (is) blue, the same material my grandma used for curtains; everyone was always sewing something, nesting nesting my mom would paint walls colors like “chartreuse”. My dad built me a playhouse on the patio and blasted music out of his van while he tended tomato plants and a little grape arbor. I can see the line of orange day lilies along the garage, happy hippie color splash against the shit brown siding color that my mom said was “earthy”. She took yoga classes at the Slim n’ Trim, which ironically was the storefront between the candy depot and a Baskin Robbins in that strip mall. Before his dissatisfaction with his work and the stress of sole providership broke my father’s will into deadly shards hurting anything close enough to catch their random flying trajectories, before my mother’s fragile mind and strong spirit collided and she disappeared into herself to watch the sparks fly, before I memorized the Book of Ruth to win a stack of white bibles and looked for a Larger Meaning to Suffering, life was good. And now it is good again.

Aaron looks at me worried about my worrying, “You really think I’m going to disappear or something don’t you?” Or something is about right; I worry about what I can’t imagine not so much about anything that I can. I rub his head, press my palm to his mind through his skull, promise to care for it, make bargains like a giraffe caught in quicksand only different, “I’ll do anything, take on anything, just don’t take leave of yourself my man, please be happy….” He has a stuffy nose and snores a little; I like it, that’s how I know he’s still there even if I close my eyes. Then I dream of John who shows me a healing scar on the back of his head where his cranium was pried open like a walnut down the middle. He tells me there was really something wrong with it, his brain, a connection capacity was blocked by something like a recurring tumor. I think it was me, the Recurring Tumor Girlfriend. He tells me no, it wasn’t. “It wasn’t you.” I ask him if he is going to die. He doesn’t answer me. I wake up and listen to the quiet house, breathe in the smell of apple sauce I have slow-cooking overnight in the kitchen.

smells like everything will be okay feist - mushaboom

yesterday was the most contented connected happiest day of my life so far

buckcherry - crazy bitch

bonus track from DmS: (I'm a sucker for funny animal vids)

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I wrote all day (again). Now that I'm done with the tantrum, I think Story's return to the exchange could be good, and besides which Aaron is a Reader of mine, coming towards me rather than away when I boil over, then bending patiently over my foot at midnight to remove a tiny blade of glass using my pink eyebrow tweezers, slowly proceeding despite the precious few three hours of sleep he will get before having to go to work for 12 grueling hours. And today was his grievance too, his one chance to have removed from his file a permanent written reprimand he got for using the word 'niggardly' in the OR, the definition of which his surgical support medic did not know but it sounded some kind of bad to her. While funny to me, it was serious to him, for a reprimand in his file means he can be fired without cause, ie he loses his union rights, for two years. Exhausted, having had to call in crisis counseling (again) and paramedics for his bonkers exwife and deal with that all weekend, having wanted to come towards rather than away from me for "our first fight", having been up half the night with the estrogen tsunami of one woman throwing a weepy tantrum ostensibly about having been flirted with (that's a sore spot, being flirted with as if a man of mine doesn't exist cz he's never around) but really about the endless bonkers tantrums of another woman, he kept a man with stage-4 cancer in 5 places alive all morning and then walked into a grievance hearing with a dictionary and walked out with a letter of apology to him from the director of critical care. And through all this, I sat here and wrote, another chapter, this one about John and G-spots and Botox and Seratonin. And although it was about another man I fell in love with repeatedly and once because he smelled like a stag party and called me Golden Griddle, Aaron smiled to read it, said simply "I love your writing"

when I got done laughing, I threw a temper tantrum ... I haven't done that at a man, to and in his face, in a loooooong time, like years ... it felt okay, actually - it felt honest

clear copy (not live)

how come