The heartbeat. Then blood. Although neither yet technically, it was life and death in miniature, shrunk to fit inside a single day. I keep thinking of spirits, how and when they choose to come back (who is this lima bean, threatening to leave the party having gotten just inside the door like o neverfuckingmind, just like I would [I hate parties]-??)....

holy balls I'm tired :/

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension. What I felt wasn't pain but a place of hollow, like a drum with the skin stretched tight. -Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

sean hayes - 3 a.m.
edward sharpe & the magnetic zeros - man on fire (little daylight remix)
mofro - footsteps
dead weather - will there be enough water

leftover cuties - you are my sunshine (love the trumpet)
maura o'connel - stor mo chroi
mumford n sons - timshel

I had a ton of shit I thought and wrote about WI, coming and going, that didn't quite cohere into interpretation(s) I felt at all word-certain of. Then I looked at it all again from the distance of a mere 2 weeks spent mostly asleep, and it was entirely recast in my mind since as well. In my current mental notes/version, what stands out is a prior trip I made there 16 years ago and a pic the Girl showed me in passing of Mark and his dog when he was puppy, 6 years ago, in which Mark looked … (?). His eyes were closed.

---------

So/meanwhile, I am thinking about picture taking and the fragility of “restrospect”. For instance, if I had begun taking pictures of my eyes and gut when starting fertility treatments that would net me chronic pain and 30+ pounds and no pregnancy, and if I had kept doing that once a month, say, what would I have seen? I would not go back and change anything, don't get me wrong (What is the point in even considering that? Ever?). But maybe if I had a visual record, it would flesh out what to Accept in what I see now.

In yoga, you’re supposed to welcome yourself. Think about that for a second. Being Hospitable.

Holy shit. Fuckn a.

Soon, most likely, I will write again about it all. Meanwhile, I note that I have more need of peace than even I knew. I sleep, the siren of sleep. I think of the most boring peaceful things I can think of to do that: chairs. Chairs, looking at them, not buying. An ice cream cone.

Ouch

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

He takes one out of the package, asks “how do these work?” as he unpeels it. What do you mean, how do they work, you know how they work. “Well yeah but these aren’t like the hospital issue wound pads”, which are exactly like the little pad stuck to the underside of every chuck roast or steak, only bigger, your dinner for all intents and purposes a wound separated from the wounded and a pad stuck to it that needs no adhesive aside from the blood itself, sticky inherently. “What are these things?”, he asks as he finishes unwrapping the side tabs and sticks the whole thing to his forehead. Those are wings, ya know, like from the commercial, you wrap them around. “Ahhh”, he says, as he opens a bottle of wine and pours me a glass with a panty-liner stuck to his forehead, the wings flapping.

Later, whenever that is and however it turns out to be noted as such, such moments as these will be my memories of us.

Remember this?

update: Mark cleared surgery, 8hours and viola a tumor "the size of a volleyball" along w his spleen (wtf is a spleen?)and gallbladder etc. Meanwhile I am all cried out. For today anyway. No song. I think I broke my soundtracker, I don't have DmS fortitude, I can barely narrate anymore

Me: What’s the most common term for a vagina, like in your everyday usage?
Him: what do you mean ‘everyday usage’?
Me: ok let me rephrase the question, what’s the worst term, like the pornographic one you might think in your head when you’re having sex typa deal? Is that ‘cunt’?
Him: probably, or ‘pussy’, I try to avoid ‘cunt’ cz it might be offensive
Me: you try to avoid being offensive in your head?
Him: well ok no not in my head, I’m just saying, ‘cunt’ might be a bit much don’t you think?
Me: I don’t really have a problem with it, personally
Him: noted
Me: so like what’s the pedestrian term, when you’re just referring to a vagina but not in a particularly fuck-me kinda way?
Him:
Him: ummmm, ‘vagina’?
Me: really? That seems so clinical
Him: Ok maybe ‘box’
Me: (giggle)
Him: shut up, you’re the one asking
Me: ok ok, so what’s the worst term? Like, that you know of?
Him: worst like how?
Me: like worst, like I dunno ‘bearded clam’ or something
Him: (giggle)
Me: Seriously, what’s the worst thing you can think of?
Him: ‘meat curtains’
Me:
Me: (gigggggle) that’s awful
Him: it is. Ok so what’s the worst one for a penis?
Me: well there’s ‘schlong’ but that’s pretty meh
Him: yeah you can do better, c’mon
Me: um…..’heat seeking moisture missile’
 Him: lol, that’s awesome, where’d you hear that one?
Me:


vid/music from DmS (I think the chic is kinda hair-too-did but the dress is good)


Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know - SNL 4-14-12 by IdolxMuzic


memory pops in the weirdest of ways, have you ever noticed that? I can't remember almost anything I try to, and then again strange things just wash ashore like that eyeball, and I dream, like last night I dreamt I got caught snowed in at a hotel with John trying to get to Chicago and somehow Aa had arranged the whole thing like time traveling matchmaker slash temptor like the devil gives out tests ya know? and I knew it was a dream in a minute when J said he was really into having a relationship now that he was all good and open and well and love-ready and I snortled like o really? and woke up coughing actually then coughed my brains loose as his smell faded, which was the only thing that bothered me, that it was actually in the room when I woke up that smell - then I lost an hour's sleep worring it was a sign of something, and decided it was a sign that my Ex is going to get himself snowed in with my boys in the Redwoods on a camping trip this coming week and they're all gonna die :/ in real life, I'm going to Target after work to buy the boyz more winter gear and underwear, paranoid now that a snow squall of memory or ice could kill a person if they don't have long underwear enough or something like that.....

"Thinly Veiled Disguise," Ron Sexsmith

"Memories are like flies swarming around me and I'm not sure I want to remember." ― Agnès Varda

accounting

do a reckoning
list all your relationships
significant ones
then rate em:
1 better off if she/he hadn't met me
2 better off for having met me
3 a draw
4 they fucked me over, some kinda deliberately or none-the-less

not an entirely useful activity
but it lends a certain ambiance of perspective

from 9/27/12: Mark (Grace's father) is dying of [has?] pancreatic cancer.  I am personally stunned by this fact.  It feels when I think about it like a physical blow and takes my breath away.  I am serially awash in grief-disbelief.  Every time I look at Bruno, it is hard not to think "I met Mark when I was your age".

We've got the boys this weekend.  Ex is busy with work, which is fine by me - good excuse to see Finding Nemo 3d, though the boyz feel obliged to protest they're too old for that despite being easily convinced to don those glasses in exchange for a theater hot dog (so cute).  Only downside: 10 bucks says Ex finds it in his o so busy schedule to send me some kind of email diatribe, in anticipation of which we will eyespy my phone with a suffering sigh every time it buzzes, and in the time it takes for me to make 2 pounds of bacon to satisfy TJ's endless stomach there'll be some itemized list from him of "concerns" or even better some further commentary on my curves (omg, M at work nearly swallowed her tongue in horror when I told her that story, lol, the look on her face stoked my outrage I admit - like wow yeah I should be super offended, eh? hahahahh) or best yet a 'funky math how on the planet mars I would owe less childsupport' bullshit (o hell no - call my tits udders all you want, but don't bounce my damn check), and I'll think dude if you don't actually have to work can't you at least go get laid or some shit, ugh....Aa and I fight about this, he rightly pointing out that legally speaking Ex does not have the right to send me emails about my ass and I do not legally have an obligation to answer them, etc etc.  We don't get far with these fights, because even after all this time I can't discuss Ex for very long before I start to get a panic attack out of habit.  The last time we tried discussing it, Aa wanting to email Ex some defense of my honor and me thinking yeah that kinda relationship drama is so last lifetime, you ain't doing any such thing (this is middle age not the relationship wild west, ya know what I'm sayin?) we went round and round about it for maybe 20 minutes, and then a man started dancing like a lunatic in my chest.  Because Aa is an open heart nurse, I now have better and even visual knowledge of my heartbeats.  The "Ex specific rhythm" starts at 2:51, and is not at all pleasant:
I pressed Aa's hand against my chest.  And we went to sleep that way. 


WEEKEND LOVE FORECAST: VIRGO: Love is mostly guesswork. You guess right, or you guess wrong. Support yourself, and be on your own side either way. 

watching npr vids instead of grading papers....thinking deep thoughts like "maybe I should get bangs"....

not so new category

Ex got a look at me briefly a few weeks ago, taking out the garbage when the he was dropping the boys off after a weekend with him. And since, he has been obsessed with my tits/ass. It started with an email that bet me a year's worth of diet coke that I'm about 4 months pregnant (I get the coke if I'm just fat, the thinking on that went, as far as you can call what goes on in his head THINKING), to which I didn't respond at all (duh), followed by long haranguing assertions that he ought to know why I have such big tits because the reason(s) he can imagine might possibly affect the boys in some way.....no, seriously, he writes things like "for the sake of our children's well being I need to know what they know" (about the state of my tits the causation of their current protruding factor). I'm ignoring him utterly while he grows indignant.

I thought I'd post this on a Monday in the spirit of show and tell as the work week gets started under the category of having to deal with insulting morons, stories of.

Eef Barzelay: Bad Girl

update: Mark has what killed Steve Jobs...and that is the sum total of my knowledge base on the subject...............

We had a little blog breakdown….backhandedly, it is a good commentary on my writing, that it’s ummm moving. Freedom to write whatever you want to and freedom from having anyone ever read what you write are perfectly conducive to each other, but neither is compatible with intimacy much. I’m mulling all that over. Quietly.

radio citi zen - the hop (high rec)

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. Thereis no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of myactions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand. --translation ThichNhat Hahn

"Holy Spirit," Ben Reynolds

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0684842017

I could conjure possibilities all day and still never see it coming.

For virgo: In the creation myths of Easter Island's native inhabitants, the god who made humanity was named Makemake. He was also their fertility deity. Today the name Makemake also belongs to a dwarf planet that was discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune in 2005. It's currently traveling through the sign of Virgo. I regard it as being the heavenly body that best symbolizes your own destiny in the coming months. In the spirit of the original Makemake, you will have the potential to be a powerful maker. In a sense you could even be the architect and founder of your own new world. Here's a suggestion: Look up the word "creator" in a thesaurus, write the words you find there on the back of your business card, and keep the card in a special place until May 2013

everyday life

everyday life

End of cycle. Pregnant only with pain.

"the reason for living [is] to get ready to stay dead a long time" - William Faulkner

I'm going to start keeping this blog again:

I am appalling. (That's all I've got so far... I'm mulling that over....)

"you don't feel like someone I used to know, you feel like someone I know now and I'm not speaking to you anymore"

the bad part is that my ass matches (or, coversely, the upside to my fat ass)

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Both eyes now. It will be 2 days in er with a whatthefuck emergency dermotologist visit between this week, w 2 sick kids and my mom in my asscrack (also sick, btw, arrived that way like a trojan fucking horse). It is not epidural (grr), just pure sinus infection as inconveniently unorthodox as that is for us all. I feel like that is a metaphor. I am inconvenient. I defy diagnosis. Nobody is more put out by that but me (so fuck you).

Sinus infections can get so bad they bust through your eye sockets, fyi

Update: spent the day in the ER w a sinus infection so nasty that snot came out my tear ducts.

He looooves weddings. The whole polish schlomole. One very convenient and yet ultimately unendurable things about the "greek situation" was that I was not a suitable date to weddings. So. Of course, for that reason on top of all the other reasons, it was a big deal that I go, to everyone concerned, especially me. Me, who had the flu. (And nightmare cramps too, cz god has a shitty sense of humor.) I was so pissed at the effect on my hair of ill health that I beat up the bathroom light fixture, busting it to shit a few minutes before we had to leave. Then I drank wine on top of a mountain of cold meds once we were there, while his ma in all her short polish mama glory drank with me and then we all danced. His dad, the stoic workingman dadtype dude to perfection, kept her glass filled as Aaron did for me, then good naturedly donned glow stick jewelry (deadpan, like a noble beast would wear it) while Aaron danced with us to 'poker face', laughing his dick off pleased as punch (giggle). Now I am sick as a dawg (and am headed to the ER in the morning if this keeps up..). But it was worth it.