Wisconsin looms. I never do well when I’m headed there. Days ahead, I feel like a 7th grader in the last week of August, doom approaching, counting down to the moment I have to be unaccountably undeniably ill at ease and psychologically vulnerable. Self + Conscious = Vinegar + Milk

I did not leave that place, I did not leave the people there, although to them that is probably how it was – to me, what I left was the person I was there, I hated that bitch. I just could not bear myself, insufferable. “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell." -- Matthew 5:30 I amputated my childhood self and homeland. I had to. And now I can go visit from time to time, but that’s like visiting a hand museum, it doesn’t make the fucker grow back or stop the phantom pain either, in fact it just increases the haunted itching.

I don’t sleep. Aa and I squabble. He says, “It’s like you left already.” To him it looks as if I’m flying off to rendezvous with an ex-lover for a weekend. (ha) I laugh, then grow irritated as if he’s trying to talk to me when I’m trying to pass a kidney stone. But if I didn’t know better, if the situation were reversed and if I still had all my pieces like he does, that’d probably be how I would process it too. It makes sense that way. It makes a lot more sense than the reality.

Sleepless, I am on that road that dips down out of Geneva west past the boggy end of Como, I won’t even slow down to mention Hilmore, just head right out of dodge – coming up past the wetland end, the highway splits to the left past the land my dad lost, goes straight to Como Rd past the doomed little school and my mom’s best attempts to make something beautiful (what is more ephemeral than child art?), goes left to the little house Dan’s mom died in and all the tiny frogs we’d catch in the basement…everywhere I look: loss, feelings of grief and my helplessness (my stature is impossibly tiny in the face of loss, about the size of a frog baby) (which always did piss me right off) (for which I am forever helplessly sorry).

Upside to everything: I know exactly how much a game of Pictionary (or a mom-packed lunch, or a cuddled sleep, or a good paragraph, or a clean bathroom, or a paid bill, or a shared joke – all those little things of a peaceful life) is worth. Keenly.

Life, it's fragile as fuck. 

I am having trouble with happiness. Sometimes, I don’t know how to be myself in it. I mean, I like it, not being fraught, don’t get me wrong – it’s just that I don’t know how I AM, how that functions, what the habits of contentment are. I don’t want to run 4 miles, so I don’t. etc. I don’t want to clean the shit out of everything, so I don’t, I hired a cleaning lady I can’t afford, but I don’t want to go shopping all the time either, or out all the time either, so I pay her the money I save instead to come once a month and make my house look as if I’m unhappy (i.e. mopped). Then I can’t afford books either, but then again I’m not dying to escape into one all the time, and when I do want to read one, I go to the library and I return the books on time, because I’m not too depressed to remember to do it – the librarians know me, not as a reprobate but just as a patron….

….I’m boring. Very boring. Was I always this boring? I’m pretty sure I was, I was just more prolific so the dust-up hid it better. Now I’m a slightly pudgy boring cheerful nymphomaniac in a mussy house with unshaved legs who sincerely enjoys playing Pictionary.

In one of the library books I read most recently, The Dog Stars, a man who has survived the end of the world (99% of the population succumbs to flu) has these moments of, say, fishing a creek with his dog, or of a breeze – and he is happy. Not YAY HAPPY kinda happy, just at peace in successive moments. It is then he knows that he is lonely. I understand that. I worked hard for peace in successive moments, all that yoga, such a clean comfortable home, and then I knew I was lonely. Now virtually all I want to do is play Pictionary at the end of the world, where it’s safe. I’m making these, that’s my "big plan" for the holiday break, with a spell cast in each one for “nothing / just light”. (Want one?)

People C Mon – Del ta Sp irit (high rec) all you soul searching people c'mon, oh la la la

there is this great scene in cunningham's The Hours when they blow out the candles and wish for the most impossible thing: endless days just like this one (that is my wish)

this is US, in my self - it is the place I already am

I wonder what/where WE looks like in Aa's mind. 

And I wonder if Childhood looks like a futon frame bunkbed, or like a shih tzu black and white, or like the ceiling over the bathtub - where are the boys when they are Here Now?

I am, undeniably, focused on my nuclear family to the point of near paranoia.  We are watching Homeland - no cable, we buy episodes one by one of whatever I can bare to sit still for, which isn't much - the Clare Danes character is paranoid psychotic but correct in her suspicions all the time. Can you imagine?  I can.  There is nothing I have learned so much as to trust my own mind.  There is nothing I have learned so much as to be wary of my own mind. It is an exhausting dual imperative for us all.  Meanwhile, I don't much care if the badguy character blows something up, I'm only interested in his plotline in so far as I projectingly relate to the wop milf wife whose career as a single mother is now considerably complicated by the return of her pow husband who is often cranky and who is the center of the universe of the plot and who doesn't fuck her (not at all often or well, anyway) and when/if he commits some act of terrorism I hope for her sake it's a suicide bombing so she can get back to doing everything herself, including herself, without having to deal with his pain-in-the-ass overbearing presence too.  So there.  The portrayal of that family as seemingly-ideal while suffocating utterly for the wife, whose parameters of control extend only as far as her haircut, strikes such a chord that I do believe it wore me out last night and I had to go to bed at 8 p.m. after only one episode, not caring enough who won the presidential election enough to wait to find out (cmon, it was going to be Obama, duh right? but still, lame).  On the other hand what really left me prostrate was the exact opposite of anti-family; it was one of our days, where we can carve out 4-5 hours and do nothing with that time but pour over one another.  These dueling emotion-sets are related, my aversion to the suffocatory threat of family life and my extreme pleasure in it ft. defensiveness of it.  So defensive of US are Aa and I both that nothing assuages our anxiety that something might "be wrong" than these spates of hours we spend reassuring ourselves about the US we both live at now, until it feels like such a very defended and stolid place to be that nothing and nobody else can impact it.  The Family is our Bomb Shelter and for no demonstrable reason we each feel as if the world has ended already, we are living now on the canned peaches of our closed private life.  We keep the kids close and each other closer.  In the cold, we get out and under every blanket and breathe beneath them in a humid tent, even light isn't invited unless it's filtered.  So, empty of all energy for worry/strife, I didn't have energy enough to even watch strife of any kind - I couldn't find it in myself to care, not for the wop-milf's troubles nor for the nation's, and I went to bed a husk.  I woke up later thinking about paranoia and putting aside the litany in my mind of all the things that have gone wrong, that I fucked up, that got fucked up in me, that got fucked up some kind way....sometimes this litany runs from childhood forward, sometimes lately for obvious reasons it starts at Mark, sometimes I stand at the side of the hole in my head that is where Andy used to be and now is a crater (I feel nothing, not even appalled by that), sometimes it goes backward from some future calamity to my childhood stopping at whatever karmic fault of mine that seems to explain the future calamity as a justifiable comuppance (those are the really crazy litanies), sometimes it's a only fragment that doesn't quite amount to a viable litany (I now realize that I never did think/feel John was dead/dying really, the feeling was only "I hope he calls" which was dead-unlikely, and that seems a very amusing emotional mistake on my part, like slapstick funny), sometimes it is a litany-tome that amounts simply to Mother Guilt.....etc.  I wake and seize up and then rub out the grooves in my mind trying to stop the mental-LP skipping.  Aa sleeps soundly yet senses every sigh or shift, instintively curling around me tightly so that getting up to pee involves minutes of extricating myself.  So I hold my pee and I lay there thinking the core thought that engenders all the rest: I so urgently do not want anything bad to happen that I don't want anything to happen at all.  It is such a common complaint that people have of their moms that they hadn't wanted their kids to grow up, that they always prefer the baby pics, that I think this "don't happen!" near-paranoid defensiveness of the nuclear nest must be a banal sign that once, for however long it lasted, there was happiness and she tried to dig her heals in right there and then.  And failed, of course.  At that too. 

So. What can I do if I can't keep anything from happening?  I guess I can make something happen, logically enough.  At 30 years old, Aa is built for forward movement.  His restlessness is as normal as teething in a toddler, I figure, so I can't keep letting it worry me that he has to keep happening as if that's inherently a bad thing (which given the fact of mortality, it IS totally a bad thing but say la vee), and I have to get on board with it instead.  Which is why I am again looking at landporn (when in doubt......).  I like this one because the castle (click thru the pics, the castle w moat is worth it) is so symbolically apropos that it appeals to my funnybone.  I'd be like, "Okay boys, get in there, I'm locking you all the fuck in!"

p.s. click satellite view to see the GIANT CLIFF at the back of the property, lol oye