When you are desperate enough, you will do this: http://www.bikramyoga.com/ every day for 10 or 20 or 30 days, all day. I started such again today at a new studio where nobody knows me. Used to be I would blank out for a few postures, nothing but the sound of my own inner patter. Now, I can hear nothing left of myself, painfully present the whole time with nothing to say to myself. I heard nothing but every word of the instructor, who said the whole class in Korean (I think).

my cold sores have cold sores. my nerves are shot to fucking shitstains, my body screaming about it. I want to commit myself to one of those old school hospitals for nervous exhaustion: jello to eat and doses of something opiate based and being wrapped in compresses and playing checkers.  thank god we're going to that resort soon.  and it occurs to me that maybe those places, where breakfast is a certain time and lunch another time and the menus all fixed and the booze all free and handed to you whether you want it or not, that that's the modern day equivalent of a nerve hospital.  I never thought I'd want to go to one of those places. I would wonder how people like Aa's parents, who are working class people without money to throw away, could or would send themselves to such places.  I honestly could not understand the appeal.

now I'm thinking "yes, I am fucking shot to shit, before my lips explode off my face in stress puss, please do lock me a room with softened lighting and give me a dose of something partially mind-obliterating and tell me when it's time for lunch..."

no song, obviously

his special vacation hat

update: he can't stand it, my misery, the cold cavern in me where there's too much empty sad space now, like an echo chamber in my gut. I say, grief has stages. He says, fuck that. He sells his most valuable possessions and books two flights to the soonest warm spot he can find like it or not. when I think of anything except what's right in front of me, I just want to keen. my body is busted to shit, my mind is boggy, my urge to keen constant. but. He's right. as all I am actively doing is "healing", waiting out the bleeding and the coughing and the shakes and aches, the stunning ouch of it all, I can do that in the sun as well as in the freezing cold eh? I am being taken to the shore, like I'm Virginia Woolf or some shit.

(I don't want to listen to music anymore.)

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Susan Sontag The anaesthesia woman was from Lebanon. She scolded me for crying. I don't know anything about suffering. From a political point of view, I could not but agree with her. So much for politics. I comforted myself biting her pinkie finger off, very slowly, over at least several days, maybe a couple weeks, tantric pain slow enough to feel like its opposite the way frostbite feels hot. In my mindmouth I could taste her blood, a gift to teach her the value of her other fingers, be grateful for the time you had with the pinkie now swallowed gone by me, as if I could be a goddess of small deaths instead.

On the 16th, I was in yoga when a cramp began it. Within a couple hours, I knew the baby's heart had stopped and it was a fetal corpse. On the 18th, I had surgery to remove it, for it had been dead for some time already, days before that cramp, a couple few weeks maybe, and my body refused to give it up and kept feeding it and growing it anyway, a lifeless mass getting bigger with no beating heart. In all other ways except the lack of life, it was perfect, all my hormone panels perfect, the size of the uterus perfect. I was showing, I was glowing, I was happy. Then for 2 days, I curled around it dead, waiting and watching and promising not to give its name to another baby if ever we had one, saying goodbye. "But failure one conceals." - Virginia Woolf

"Waiting is an active and engaged process when you’re doing it right." Gestating is like watching paint dry and you can't see the paint.

I went shopping with Sun yesterday. She’s all into pimping the bump vicarious, so off we go to the mall. She’s got this friend, she tells me on the drive - they grew up together, born in the Falls projects together back in the day, and the woman’s parents are dead now so although they’re not close close, Sunnie is sorta like family, at least she’s that long familiar, so the woman tends to call her when she’s in crisis. She became a Muslim, got married, had four kids, and moved to Malaysia last year where her husband has a chiropractor’s office. So she sends Sun a message via facebook whatever, ‘calling the wa-ambulance’, and tells Sunnie that she heard a noise one night and went downstairs to find her husband fucking their maid. She’s very upset. Sunnie listens, incredulous, says to her “Nigger, you got a MAID?!” Every time I think of it, I crack up again.

"Reason to Believe (Bruce cover)," Aimee Mann and Michael Penn
"Faith" (George Michael cover) - Lake Street Dive