speaking of character or lack thereof, The Girl is (maybe) hooking us up with respite foster care, for which we'd take a 10-week class and get home inspections. if we passed the sniff test, we'd get emergency temporary foster placements.  so we had a little family summit about it, covering such topics as "Cal, you can't call your brother a cunt-nugget in front of home inspectors or in front of any foster kid old enough to talk".... we are not sure we can make the cut or would even like to try.  we would like to have tried at some prior time and already succeeded at passing inspection, but that's not the same thing now is it?  that's the same as my having liked to have volunteered for meals on wheels a long time ago and have brought food and a bit of emotional sustenance to many elderly shut ins by now, years of karma work would I have liked to have achieved the only way I could, i.e. by feeding people, which I could do, as in I could have already done, which clearly I have not enough :/

life was much easier before babies died in me, I see that now, but am now sure what to do about it, not sure what to do that I won't fail at further and hurt myself worse, which doesn't do anybody any good.  as it is, I am clingy and remote by turns in ways that stress out everyone around me for the affect it has on them and for the suffering they still see in me and can do nothing about.  like a flood plain just receded enough to look fine, but something better start growing to stabilize it and it'd better not rain more for a while :/

still, I dream of babies and toddlers, like the one last night that was like a little friend and we were visiting other people with kids too and there were all kinds of toys and activities but we grew tired of it and went back home to an all-white apartment where there was nothing but quiet and familiar things like our shoes and we liked it and I thought "I can't wait until everyone else is busy and has forgotten we are here" and the baby wordlessly agreed. I wake up from these dreams feeling like they are messages to which I should respond, but I don't know how.  meanwhile, Aa told me a story of a baby who was abandoned one day at the hospital, about 5 months old, a little girl with a deformed arm/hand that had a pincher in place of fingers, so someone who didn't want her dropped her off sick with an ear infection and never came back for her (this happens more than you'd think, to old people even more than to babies/kids, people just check them in and then leave and the hospital eventually has to discharge them to the state), and she cried incessantly until Aa, as the student at the time on rotation with no real assignment thus, picked her up and carried her around for his whole shifts, her grabbing at everything with her bad hand, shoving her pinchers up his nose to inspect. 

Shawn Colvin: I Don’t Want To Live On The Moon (orig. Sesame Street)

let's just say that having my entire liberal arts department over for an end-of-the-year bbq party was an extremely bad idea.

that was Sunday, and it's Thursday now, and I'm just starting to revive. the only obscure upside is that because I threw my phone into a wall nolan ryan style (among other things), I had to go get a new one finally, which was long overdue (being opposed to learning new phones, and to new shit in general in such categories of life, I had had that one long enough that the keyboard was worn OFF and I texted on the querty via finger memory alone), and which in turn led me to something called my "cloud" player installing a link to itself and me suddenly finding 182 songs that I have purchased from amazon over the last several years when they came streaming out of my new phone last night and I was like wtfhowcoolisthat?? I'd post some of the songs, buuuut I can't figure out how to get them off my phone (or out of the cloud whatever) yet, and can't risk my fragile recovering temperbrain by trying tooooo hard to figure it out lest I wind up whipping this nifty fucker out a window or whatever. as Aaron rightly points out, it is a bit of a psychological cluster fuck for a person's reaction (mine) to other people's anger (anyone's of any kind about anything, pretty much - but his especially) to be thermal nuclear meltdown that takes out me and everyone around me for miles and days. 

sigh >:(

tangleeye - worksong - I liked this one enough to buy it again just to post it

..but then again maybe people just generally royally SUCK..

and then there are some who
believe that old
relationships can be
revived and made new
again.

but please
if you feel that way

don’t phone
don’t write
don’t arrive.

--Charles Bukowski

my alter-self's gardening style is exuberant, forthcoming to a fault

 

Dave emails, says he wants to stop by and see the roof and say hello.  Aa goes bonkerinos and actually emails Dave with something like “stay away from my woman” (lol, that’s so gansta of an impulse that although at the time I was FURIOUS, frankly now it all seems just ludicrous).  This resulted in a huge fight with his position being “that guy wants to fuck you and you still have feelings for him bla bla” and my position being Wronged ft. Righteously Enraged (o that pride and wrath combo is a doozy, boy howdy).  The jealousy was uncalled for and offensive, which he abjectly admitted once he’d calmed down after a full day of tantrum, (“you’re 99.8% right”, he qualifies, ha).  But that’s beside the point because the dust up too quickly obscured what I was actually thinking.

For a moment, I did hesitate, not just for the loss entailed in that friendship but for that in almost all of my friendships to one degree or another over time.  Is it me or is it inevitable?, that you go to a place with people, and edge of understanding, and then you can’t go any further.  Love and talking, if you follow the path it always seems to lead to a gap between people that neither words nor love can bridge.  Once, Dave and I talked so far down the path of talking that we’d have to go wordless to continue, and we could not do that anymore than siblings could or people whose orientation is not to each other etc., so we went as far as our relationship would take us and then we were done.  End of story.  So it seemed to me, anyway.  Sex is so limited that way, it’s so rarely applicable actually, people just resort to it out of desperation to keep connecting and can think of no other options. (Like what, pies? ok, but still, all metaphors are limited …).
 
(….Or do I just not want to keep connecting? Or do I give up on words too much, too soon? ...) 

So Bale emails and I hesitate, maybe I should let him see the roof and say hi?, but No. I didn't need to be coerced into that decision, Aa's jealousy (although it would have been enough to dissuade me) was unnecessary actually.  Because here’s the thing: I give up on people.  That’s what I hesitated about, a momentary sorrow that I do that in general, that I give up on people.  I get frightened of the gaps, leery lest the other person’s inability to have me understand something will lead to louder or dangerous attempts to do so, a filling sadness weights me, and I retreat back into the safer silent solitary wilderness of my own mind, terribly relieved just to give up finally, like a dying. 

And. Words fail Aaron and me, only occasionally but then drastically.  Thank goodness sex is applicable as a mode of communication (!) between us.  And I am much more frightened of the giving up than of anything else. Even so, I go terribly quiet sometimes, even here. (Heartsick? Heartdisabled, more like. Heartretarded.)

Meanwhile in my head, I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

--Anne Sexton

 

 

 

 

 

 

the civil wars - barton hollow (love this)
Reignwolf – The Chain
laura cortese - I feel it all (feist)
johnny cash - ain't no grave (black opium remix)
richie havens - freedom motherless child
willy mason - the message (grandmaster flash) don't push me la la la
w ze von - my shit is fucked up
Sharon Van Etten – We Are Fine
bonus track - freedom (love this)


link