maybe I was this lady in a prior life

 



 

buried here

 

 

which would explain why I want this (on John Brannon Rd in Minerva NY) and sew curtains for it in my head

vanessa peters, all that I want (the weepies) actually what I wanted was the Reach out and Touch faith cover from the Klondike trailers, but I couldn't find it and settled for the weepies, which felt appropriate today anyways Mikey Chuck Rivers: Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Silent Night bonus track

I went to Florida.  I hate Florida.  Disney of all places, which is a monumental birth control advertisement, a screaming kid flanked by miserable fuckless parents every few feet.  Awful. It was a conference on e-Learning.  I emailed my boss mid-session to tell him I want to be appointed assistant dean (rationale: most of these people are so fubar’d that I’m shocked, and undervalued, even for someone with a humanities background [who thus doesn’t deserve a paycheck at all, of course]).  He put in a budget request for the position….I just might get that….which would help, because I still want to buy that cottage, in which my father wants to live (with me) as it turns out….

Dad lives in Florida in the winters now, so I rented a car and booked down there for a night to check out his digs and to hang out.  Aa got a last minute stand-by seat in first class for $200, and flew down to join me for a 24 hour dinner date.  I wish I had taken a picture of the mobile park, but I didn’t.  I was overtired, thought as I always think about Florida, “this is so weird, like a movie set of a comedy starring Alan Arkin maybe, or a B horror film” and then I crashed out for a long nap before dinner.  But dad was SOoo excited we’d come, he trotted out the array of booze he’d gotten for “the party”, and proceeded to drink an entire quart of scotch in a few hours.  By 5 p.m., I was pushing dinner as fast as I could to soak some of that up. Dad had also bought a new grill just for the occasion, and steaks, and he melted the siding off his trailer with the grill then served us raw steak. In between all that, we talked about my endless cottage/cabin obsession, and his plan to live there once I find it (ha, didn’t see that coming). He’d put on a room addition, and teach the boys how to kill a deer with a double lung shot before he died. Well. I agreed: having all the young men in the family learn to hunt before Tbone’s too geezer to teach them seems like a reasonable goal.  I showed him all the cabin links on my phone.  We gamely cut into the tartar and added salad.  Tbone took one bite, then he threw up like mad.   Aa and I finished dinner.  Then Aa wiped down his bathroom hazmat style and stayed awake with him, lest he pull a Janis Joplin – Aa is in an odd newly created position (aka assistant dean) in the family vis a vis Tbone, longed-for son and certified health professional, willing learner of double lung shooting and hall monitor.

Then home, and Thanksgiving right on our heels, and my sister and her whole family including my mom arrive for a 4-day stay, amazingly. She said she was going to come, but it’s such a long drive, and through a snow storm, but damned if Jen was going to be daunted.  Holidays are for family god fucking damn it. We drink, we eat, we eat more, we talk, we laugh and laugh and laugh.  More talk about the cottage/cabin.  I realize: off the grid is out of the question. Her kids are maniacs. And she’s planning week-long summer stays, at least. I tell her dad is planning to live there.  She says, “No.” (ha)  She rattles off the stipulations: he can park an rv, but has to sleep in it, he’s only allowed inside sober and in spurts, if he wants a toilet he can dig a septic container…etc etc.  She is very firm with me that I am to be very firm with him.  “He’s still dad, don’t forget it. Last year he beat the shit out of someone and got kicked out of his last park, that’s why he has a new one.  He waited all night, pissed off, and still drunk in the morning, went over to the other guy’s trailer and beat him senseless in front of his wife.”

Tbone had said to me as he served the steak, “I love every single thing about you, every … single … thing.” 

This Friday, Aa and I make our first official shopping trip to the Adirondacks.  Eight cottages and cabins to see by appointment with a real estate agent to whom I emailed this entire story as it happened.  As I went from “I’m looking for something off the grid one room in the middle of 40 acres where I never have to see anyone” to “scratch that, I’m looking for something near water in which my sister might ‘accidentally’ drown her kids and my mother, and it should need a room addition but not really”.  The agent says he thinks I’m hilarious.  Either that is actually so, or he thinks I’m insane and is taking pity, or he thinks this is a date.  He says, “I almost hope you don’t find anything, because what will I do for comic relief when your emails stop?”  Aa is excited for the cabin and the shopping trip, though he notes growlingly that I’ve not mentioned his existence to the agent (Rick).

I just want everyone to love me. Which is tricky business.

I should be doing about a million things, including reading a stack of titles like "Spirituality and the End of Life", but it keeps making me afraid I'm dying. me me me, it's all about me.  every horrible story, 'omygodthatcouldhappentome', until I'm utterly bored of myself.

...after struggling every day for the better part of a month just to meet my standing work obligations, including trying to adjudicate a college-wide facult-on-faculty slap down (think West Side Story, but no songs or snapping, and I can't pull of Carmen Miranda), I remember at the last minute I'm to be interviewed today about how narrative forms... I have no idea how narrative forms. I realize that when we get to the part of my life when my friend Danniel and I spend a good portion of every day writing to each other in spiral notebooks that we fill and fill and fill. Why?, asks the interviewer. I don't know. What were you accomplishing by narrating your lives to each other in that way, writing it down? I don't know. Do you have any theories? Nope. Maybe if I can get a minute to think a thought about narrative at the end of life, I'll get a theory that will apply to my own adolescence. Maybe we were dying.

So, I got named to lead faculty on this big grant...palliative care and spirituality and the humanities....the local nursing care organization expanding to mindfully cover the end of the life as its own discrete stage...with its own soundtrack typa deal, which is where I come in....

I think I can safely say I'm dangerously out of my depth....

(loving this)

http://youtu.be/IJNR2EpS0jw

I almost bought this.  It went on and on.  The lady who had owned it was named Hope Well, no I'm not kidding.  She had o what I would guess to be two dozen feral cats, a semi surreal colony of slinking sneaking fur out the corner of your eye everywhere.  The bank has the house now, but no it doesn't.  Nobody has it, it has itself, or the cats have it.  Whenever I'd get close to be able to buy it, no again.  No survey to be had, no insurance possible without it, no mortgage possible without that, and on and on with it consuming my mind like spells do, I couldn't get the damn thing to stop, even in my sleep I dreamt of it alive and reaching.  In the end, the realtor deemed it unsellable, un-have-able, and left it to itself on its hill. 

At work meanwhile, I put in 14 hours days, one after another, one crisis after another, with the only explanation for that being this weird energy AT me - like, am I about to get fired?  promoted?  is the school going to burn down?  It feels like it.  I wasn't surprised when the biggest tree out front of my building blew over and crushed two cars earlier today.

Then I took a walk.  I went up and down village streets all abandoned mid workday, trying to feel what there would be to feel on this day of the year when the living and the dead are separated by the thinnest degree.  And on a dead end street I cut into from its dead end side, up an embankment I never scale but I figured never doing it normally was a good reason to do it, I passed the little driveway of another house spookily sitting on its hill with a get off me vibe, the kind I like.  I caught a glimpse of one of those zombie dolls people toss into their yard for Halloween, face covered in blood, a big mop of white blond curly hair.  Then it moved.  And I realized I had just found a half dead woman, still very much alive. Gretchen, she said slurrily - she seemed to have knocked out a tooth, she really didn't want the ambulance I called (not at ALL, no no, no help, fuck that, fuck everything no no no), and I could relate of course, I don't want anybody to help me either.  So we sat and commiserated, with her begging me to call off the ambulance and me having to remind her that she was unable to get up and bleeding to death on the ground.  O right, that.  Right.  So, might as well chit chat to keep her mind off the ambulance.  What else is on your mind Gretchen?  Her husband Jack.  He's dead.  He died three years ago.  She met him when she was 40 and he was 61 and they lived together 30 years and he died at 91 right there too, fell down just outside the pretty house that she wants desperately just to get inside of again.  She likes only the house, she lives WITH it not just in it, it keeps her.  Finally, the emt's show up and take her, and she gives me her banking to do, the errand she was going to run this morning when she fatefully left the safety of the house.  I went back after with the receipts to put them in her mailbox, and I looked through the windows and thought "wow, your lace filtered light".

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Baby-Body-Found-Teen-Bag-Victorias-Secret-Herald-Square-228225441.html

"..doing that shoplifting with the baby in her bag the entire time certainly suggests a little bit of difficulty following society’s rules.” uh huh. The other barely mentioned 2 yr old, that one'd be heading to foster care...but she will probably get the kid back...

So we go partway through the foster intake process and quit. The very day that we were supposed to start the day-long actual training, we bolt. What we want(ed) was a baby, not a psychoneedy teen, not even a preteen. And fyi, there are a buttzillion of those, psychoneedy kids, in foster care and in “normal” families, everywhere you look. The more I look, the more all I want is to stop looking at other people.

Have we covered this? I hate people. I can’t help it. I just cannot help it. And this isn’t helping it, not at all.

Then that very night of the very day we bail, we go to a surprise birthday party for Nunu. Her partner, an extremely pretty dark Cuban girl (wow), is crazy about her and is throwing her a party. The eclectic guest list I try to anticipate, like the antisocial partyphobe that I am (the exlovers will be there, they’re all very close very strained friends now, ignore the subtle angst if you feel it, it’s just…it's like damp), plus Milagro’s family about which I know nothing except that they’re helping throw this shindig and I’m picturing a quinceanera. Nunu’s stiff resistance to such displays of affection cannot be overstated, so I’ve got the nervous coping giggles just imagining how weird this might be. At the door, the mom greets us, a clearly NOT Latina, more like Irish, grandmotherly woman, who must be into Latino-Black guys (?). No, that’s not it. The house is filled with gay couples by half, VERY coupled couples, it’s hard to describe the in-your-face coupledness of each pair, the proprietary vibe – I mean, I know about the WE syndrome, where the first person singular is seemingly wiped out of the English language, and here it is on some kinda steroids. Everyone had a hand on his/her shoulder, or is the shoulderhander, at all times. Shutting me out, which I already am, in any room, of any kind of people, especially couples (I know, it’s unjustifiable, but in general couples weird me out). The other half of the guest list is M's family, all Irish and very north Buffalo, working class, sawed off flannels, beer can caddies. The walls are so covered with inspirational quotes and family pictures and clocks that I’d need weeks to catalog it all – if it weren’t so tidy in general, I’d think this was some kind of wall-chachki hoarding. Nobody belongs to any minority I can see except Milagro…and a very tiny very quiet Black baby being handed around. She’s the “newest”. This is a foster home that Milagro grew up in. The baby is, o, something like half a year old and her name is something like Siraya, but nobody knows either fact for sure, even the baby’s own bio-mother doesn’t remember the baby’s name. Everything in the scene is weirding me out except the baby and Van, the guy who started a clothing business for fashion-conscious MS sufferers whom I’ve known since then, which I remember because I gave him a tarot reading – he had wanted to know when he was going to get laid again, but the cards said he should go into business. I sit next to Van, he tells me outrageously dirty stories like about fucking the man who designed my boots (Frye). And I take the baby. I don’t give her back. By the end of the night, the baby (Ray, I’ve begun to call her, the “drug baby” so diagnosed by the utterly saintly foster mom, has a premie hernia the size of a penis and a personality that Aa describes as “I got over crack at 3 days old, why get upset at anything after that? That shit teaches perspective”) is attached to me like glue, has my earrings in both fists and is saddled on my hip, asleep with her nose in my armpit. By Monday, we’re back at foster intake, this time with the county DSS, in the building with the food stamp line downstairs (I have been in that line) and upstairs we watch videos of foster families caring for children shaken into brain damage. Etc. (It is hard to capture just how odd one week of a life can be sometimes.) The process of approval, the FBI background checks and nightly coping classes and all that, would take us into next summer before we’d be on the call list for a drug baby, probably coming home on a ventilator. Stand by for updates.

(Maybe.)

But, what do I obsess over really? That’s the real spell I’m casting, I know. What spells I truly cast, stirring the pot of myself endlessly, those things come into being. And it is this: Getting off the grid, away from people, just trees. Parties of trees.  Every time we circle in for a close brush with people in these ways, the cycle is followed by a corresponding retreat. We were deep into the woods and peeing on dirt repelling off the wall of that party, the last weekend allowed for camping in the nearest state park, cold or not fuck it pack up the marshmallows, I herd us all right Out of Range. I have mapped the entire Allegheny region in my head now too since then. Seriously.

(Almost inevitably:)

http://youtu.be/AMt0nQ4mVCI pugs are the foster babies of dog breeds (honing my fucked up sense of humor for this...)

Let's review. How fleeting.

And so, I want to make sure that when I'm dead, they know how to make themselves chicken dinners, and so rather than show them "here is Tops, buy a chicken", I overshoot all that and take them to learn how to raise and kill a chicken, just in case....as insane as that is, that's pretty much my mojo laid bare. I often feel as if I'm going to die, and my response is that I better get a lot done. I have always felt that way. Which is why they exist at all. Because I would die soon, so I better get some kids out of me. And now that they're all here, I squeeze them close and want them to know how to build shelter and kill chickens and whatnot for when I (me, being the world of course) am gone and they remain.

"One of you is getting voted off the island," jokes TJ.

And don't forget to remember how fucking beautiful everything is.

view from Owls Head Mtn

And go to college here where I can send you, so at least I will have done that and you'll remember that.

view of Paul Smiths campus pond

On the way home, we saw this and stopped and I stood in the yard and imagined the chickens and the fruit trees I'd plant. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a cottage. It was sold for them to live on the money in Florida. It has been in my family for about 60 years, maybe longer. I've lived a lot places since, but there has been nowhere so much like homehome as that little shitbox place in Delevan WI, where every spring we'd open it and chase the nesting animals out and live the long summer season amidst the leaf mold smell. I'm starting to have lived just long enough to want to build things that'll be remembered as lifelong for grandchildren not yet born or married into or adopted - all the ones coming, hopefully, down the lines. Even if I'm not around, their parents could take them to "the house in the 'dacks", and then later when the grandchildren in their turn fell in love and lost their minds and got fired or in other ways inevitably lived and failed, they could go there and find some peace where the dishes were always those same old ones migrated there from everyone's kitchen upgrades over the years and years and years.

Tbone built me a playhouse (ie a potting shed, which for a grown woman is a playhouse), just like he did when I was 6 years old.

I went to get the permit and by the time I got back the old one shed was smitherines. The lady in the inspector's office told me to keep at least 50% of the original so that it'd be a "repair" and not a rebuilt.

 

 This is Tbone's idea of 50%.

 Corrugated PVC is the roof. I wanted to old school fiberglass that my Grandpa always used on every porch I can ever remember, which always had a greenish tint, but the PVC is the modern replacement for that.  It's clear, with a UV filter.

 Finished except for stain and a rain barrel.

 The "old soul" shed was the hangout for the ghost and his dead cats.  My phone disappeared half way through the job, gone for 3 days and we looked everywhere - stuff disappearing is always the sign that the ghost is peevish.  I gave him a beer and a smoke, and the next morning the phone was sitting under my purse.

Then off we went to the Adirondacks again.   I took a nature writing workshop at the ADK Writing Center, held hear at Nick's Lake Campground.  I wrote a prose poem about moss.  I'll post it if I can get it to suck less with revision....I kept freaking the other participants with stuff like adding miscarriages into musings about humus :/ 

 

We found this by "car hiking", our phrase for driving up super scary unpaved roads to see what's up em.  This is Stillwater NY, which you get to after about 10 miles (feels like 3x that!) of omg I hope the car doesn't die road through 75000 acres of state land, at which point you find a dinky "town" of a boat shop and restaurant (both for sale) and a cluster of houses on a damned expanse of rocky islands.  I'm still into the high peaks over the majestic water views, but this was a beautiful spot.
 

 

 Meanwhile, our frog hooked up.

"Dying. Not dying. Either way, it tires you out." - Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

I'm like this book. It's about a woman who is really pissed off a lot of the time, surrounded by people who can bear or not bear being pissed off themselves and thus her either. Most people can't bear it or her. And finally, she can hardly bear it herself. And then her bearing it is what she can do and it seems heroic inherently (to me), to be a really pissed off really old woman Then everyone dies (or has a baby, same difference).

Meanwhile, my father arrives today. Unless he gets pissed off about something and doesn't come, which is entirely possible. He was supposed to come yesterday but he was tired (which is right around the corner from pissed). He is to stay a week, unless he gets pissed... I am very happy he is coming. Which is odd. Which is aging. Even people who have been almost unbearably hard on my nerves take on increasingly value for merely remaining, some any kinda way. If you're on my books at all anymore, you're in the black, fyi.

"She took a deep, quiet breath and thought how she did not envy those young girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too."

I am always up this time of the night still. The witching hour. Currently plotting a strawberry patch while mulling ... I should write more but...I am applying for a nature writing workshop thinking maybe I can embed all I might say into the description of the smell of a lake... A lake smells better than just about anything, almost.

there

so, I think this year I'm going to try really hard to build my cv and get extra work, so then I can move.  there.  I mean, why am I here and not there?  bc my job is here, but why am I in this job and no other? I got here following a trail, to grad school, then family ties made here, then a house near someone, etcetc, none of which is necessarily relevant anymore more than anything else anywhere else.  That is the thought that comes clear on the top of a mountain: I could just choose.

Ya know that feeling when your clothes don't fit anymore? Like you've shifted? I've given 5 full wardrobes (albeit sadly skimpy) away in a year. Like a refugee camp experience for one.

I am going to the mountains. My mom just arrived to go with.  She is stupified by my sister's running.  The self sustained injuries. I am not. (Makes me miss my sister.)

 I want to lose these girly swells not because I mind the way it looks but because I don't want to be soft in the middle as if I'm soft in the middle which I don't want to feel like

 

 shawn lee ping pong orchestra - kiss the sky

The bower is now a healing pond, and the "paths" are now a wall.  Properly dug paths are to follow, ones that won't shift underfoot.  (I'm sure there is a metaphor in there somewhere.)

beck - black tambourine (film version)

"I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes...I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me" ~Cheryl Strayed, WILD: From lost to found on the PCT

Hugo - 99 Problems (high rec)

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real.  Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him. - Lydia Davis, Break it Down







I break out in horrible hives, again and again and again.  This time on my ass, and so finally I get angry (about this too, as if I weren't generally pissed enough) and insist, there is something wrong with me, something that got broken during all those treatments, something that has not returned to normal, something that is not returning to normal, something that is making this how I am now seem to everyone but me that this IS normal and is just me, but it is not.  I remember me.  I do not weigh 30% more than I have for my entire life, I do not trudge through days half awake only to want to chew baseboards all night long, I do not get shingles again and again, I do not bring to me offense and upset as if by force similar to that of an abandoned can of coke on bees.  This is not me.  I am under this.  Waiting for a miracle to give back to me the last two years bodily misspent unto catastrophe.  But that is an unreasonable hope, that a miracle of revision will occur.  What would be a reasonable hope then? For a doctor to listen to a woman?

Yeah right.

I put the rose quartz phallus into the pond and a crystal into the falls with the skimmer box between, making my own sexual healing filtering system. As crazy as that is, it seems less crazy than thinking that thyroid test chicken pox culture whateverwhatever will finally result in "o yes, you're right, you got fuck-ied up by us royally, so sorry, here's a magic new shot/pill to take that won't fuck up your endocrine system even more..."

Yeah right.

I'd be as well off putting my faith in the healing power of pond fish.

I've been fighting TJ on watching this film...but he was right.  My inner child looks like a middle aged man in a thrift store shirt who wants to shoot people, starting with his neighbors...


Ooo about 3 minutes in, building to the look on his face at around 3:50, yup that's me alright :/

bonus track (yes that's an exploding baby fantasy): http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xti5z5_i-hate-my-neighbors_shortfilms


bonus bonus track, great song

"What is the fastest growing hideyourawfulneighbors thing a person can plant along a fenceline, I wonder, preferably messy....hmmmm...crab trees? It occurs to me that someone got rich marketing those conifer row things as basically "your neighbors are assholes" trees, and that THAT was a good use of rage, because Goddess knows the world is short on green-space and very long on assholes. That’s my prayer for today: Please, let my rage transmute into something useful and life affirming."

That was my facebook status this morning.  And it's a baldfaced lie.  I don't want to be life affirming in the least.  What is true is that I walk out into my front yard, walk to the property line, and look up into their 75+ year old Silver Maple, and stand and hold my hand up to slice the air above my head, a good hundred feet up, straight up, a wall of death that is legally my right.  I can feel that fucking bitch watching me out the window, sweating it.  I nurse the ball of rage inside me, so DENSE after that hard winter of grief, and I think at her and at that tree "die" with all my hurt little might.

I turn and stare at their window, behind which I know sits MilknCumshot (Cal's new name for her) and the hamster, "Queenie" in her cage near the ledge.  Yesterday, I taught the fosterkid yoga again.  I wouldn't say it was a respite from my rage, it was more like a shifting of it into another color range for an hour.  I remember my hamster, "Hammie", which I had as solace through 5 long shitty childhood years.  I remember the foster kid who lived behind us whom my sister let hold my hamster one day and she threw it hardcore at the ceiling and watched it dropped.  I remember screaming.  I remember very vividly the sight of Hammie, spine snapped, dragging himself forward with this front paws (before my mother put him in the freezer for the mercy killing).  I think about those little faces yesterday, so serious and devoid of credulity, as they put their hands in prayer at the end of class and we bow to each other, "Namaste." 

I stare at my neighbor's window.  I think, "die".

Yesterday my neighbor chopped by big silver maple almost in half.  I'd post a pic, but I left the house and haven't been back in the light, in an effort to quell my rage (to no avail).  They hired a crew with a cherry picker to hang over my property and cut all the branches that grew long enough to reach their yard.  It was illegal as well as awful, but suing won't bring it back.  It reminded me of the time Lamb's landlord cut the pussy willow half to death.  Myself, I'm not going to try to "understand from their point of view", propellors in their pool and whatever.  I wish I could, for MY sake, for what is left of my equalibrium and ability to sleep whatsoever (not much is left of those in my life these days), I wish I could stop hitting their trees (much bigger than my own, insult to injury) with lightening and them with cancer of every kind. I can stop short of imaginging terrible things happening to their children, again thank goodess for MY sake, but that's as far as my equanimity goes (and barely).  Otherwise, it's this and this and ... a pint of urine and hours of sleeplessly wishing them in pain, basically.

I try not to.  But I do.  I hate people. 

after attempting to spend myself down by digging up half my back yard down 3-4 ft ("I just can't kill your libido, no matter what I do...or are you unhappy...?"), I taught yoga today to a room full of little foster kids. I left there thinking 1. I want to teach kiddie yoga and 2. why/how are those kids labeled "extremely emotionall disturbed"?? most of them were about as big as a minute, first of all, and they all were...they were KIDS.  of course they were rolling on the rolling chairs, duh if you don't want them to roll don't give them chairs with wheels! jeezus. The Girl says this is why I should do foster care, because what looks like insanity to most people looks well within the range of standard pain in the ass to me mostly.

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

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.” - Sylvia Plath

Phosphorescent – Ride On / Right On first shirtsleeve riding around in the car with the window down song of the season

For Virgo this week: It's Soul-Searching Season: a good time to go in search of your soul. To aid your quest, I'll offer a few lines from "A Few Words on the Soul," a poem by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. "We have a soul at times," she says. "No one's got it non-stop, for keeps. Day after day, year after year may pass without it. For every thousand conversations, it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence. It's picky: our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick. Joy and sorrow aren't two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined. We can count on it when we're sure of nothing and curious about everything. It won't say where it comes from or when it's taking off again, though it's clearly expecting such questions. We need it but apparently it needs us for some reason too." (Translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.)

The post-funeral-trip case of shingles and trip the ER, that was a last straw of some kind. I’ve gone quiet and want to be. Aa finds this very upsetting, and we’ve come to that impasse I knew we would eventually: I am needful of a lot of time filled with nothing, alone. Not always a loner and not essentially; I made three humans and would have kept doing that if possible, so there’s that. But those humans are trained to be alone-with-me. I don’t like the world much, not the human world hardly at all and I'm not big on horseflies either, so there’s a kind of space of quiet between, on the one hand, talking and all similar human noise-making activities (meeting at work and jet skis sum it up, both pointless and annoying as fuck), and on the other hand nature in extremity (think endless months of fucking snow, ugh), and that quiet perfect place between is a nice spring day with nothing at all in it except maybe a book. And the book is a novel in which nothing happens except people think shit like this, about the interminability of workplaces and jet skis, and they too hate everybody and love everything, hate the world in its particulars and/but love an ice cream cone and warbler season. Aa wants to learn enough about baseball to go bet on it at the casino; I want to hold still so my soul will land on my jacket. I remind him that he met me when I assigned him Thoreau to read, I warned him, so it’s not like he didn’t know. True, he admits (but that doesn’t make it easy).

I don’t get birthday fuss for adults.  I more than don’t get it, it strikes me as patently weird.  It’s not just the aging factor (Why celebrate that? Why lament OR celebrate it?? Why remark it at all? Weird.)  It’s the infantilizing of adults by those around them ft. the self-absorption factors that freak me out.  Christ gets a fuss for his birthday, which is weird enough if you think about, and you’re not Christ, F Y I.  I start balking about birthdays when a kid hits, ooooh, about 5 years old or so. Up until then, you’re still “new”, so ok, YAY you turned ONE or whatever, and that seems ok through the years of a Chucky Cheese pizza party. That lasts until you turn, like, 90 years old, at which point a fuss is again in order. Once you’re too old for a Chucky Cheese party, then you’ve entered the age span during which birthdays are “here’s some money” and enough said, pretty much.  I’m in trouble this week for this attitude.  TJ turns 13 today, and I am making him a special roast chicken recipe and his favorite vanilla apple sauce cake (or some ice cream if I run outa time to make cake, which is not unlikely and which is what I’d do on any day, i.e. make a homemade dessert or buy ice cream) and he’s mulling over how to spend his 50 bucks. MAYBE I’ll get him a hamster…probably not….and no, no balloons, no party pack of fuss at an indoor adventure land (despite Aa’s mom half off coupon for it), and if pushed to fuss more, I will have to fight the urge to do something like say “think about what you’ve spent those 13 years on and ask yourself, is it enough?”  Aa’s brother also has a birthday this week, which feels like an onslaught, I can’t help it, I’m virtually appalled by the idea of a big bakery bought cake with that nasty frosting and 32 candles on my brother-in-law’s cake and we blow those party wooper things and stand around and sing at him like he’s just turned one year old.  I mean, I could do it, but the look on my face would be inevitably “this is fuuuuuucking weeeeeird”.  And since it’s always someone’s frigging birthday, I can pretty much spend the whole year in the partypooper dog house.  Aa does not understand my point of view on this subject, to say the least.

Meanwhile, the funeral … my family is nuts, first of all, as in half my relatives are SSI for mental disorders, my several favorite aunts have thorazine shakes in their hands, my aunt Mu gets an “asthma attack” i.e. a panic attack over, o, pretty much anything, the smell of jolly ranchers might send her into her “allergies”, and she’ll be huffing the albuterol like she needs a stiff drink.  So I’m willing to suspect our funerals will be a little weird…though, I dunno, people wailing away and looking at old pics and overcoming their lifetime estrangements at least for the span of overwhelming grief, while little kids run around and don’t understand why they’d have to be quiet around a box of ashes … that’s a standard funeral, right?  People get up and say things, or try to as they feel gripped by urges to sob, and the things they say are woeful in all sense of that word.  Plus poems, “I am my mother’s garden” typa deal.  An entire life, one more impactful on all these people than could ever be captured even if I were Virginia Woolf and had 2000 pages, reduced to this small sad fuss and someone (my sister) organizes a buffet.  Then back at my aunt’s house, we popped grandma open so we could take a bit of her, those who wanted that (including me), and I did the honors, both because she and I were especially close and because, well, because I have a high tolerance for weird.  So we popped the little urn open, which looked just like a Bose shelf speaker, with a screwdriver and a wire snip, and I dug into the ashes with a little silver teaspoon and portioned her out into ziplock sandwich baggies.  Aa was fearing that I’d run into a knuckle or something, “incomplete combustion”, but I knew about that risk, and rather than avoid it, I dug down.  Like when you make Quik milk, ya know?  Ya gotta stir from the bottom, death being similar I figured.  I dug down with my little spoon to get a scoop of the heart of grandma.  My cousin Georgianne, after discussing the possible amount she would need to have a small glass bauble made (you can do that, render human ashes into glass) with my sister, came back for a couple more scoops for her ziplock just in case.  Aa was a trouper through all of this, holding the ziplocks open for me, though the look on his face was “this is fuuuuuuucking weeeeeeird”. 

On the way home, we decided that there are certain ways in which we feel like we married into other cultures entirely, which must be respected as far as we are capable, but which are fucking weird to each of us respectively.  I call these occasions “Vietnamese Celebrate Your Foot Day”, on which maybe your in-laws would sacrifice a goat (or hamster), and which you would show up for if you married into it (but it’d always seem weird).

Now… what is Easter?  It’s got a (re)birthday in it, of Christ (and didn’t we celebrate his birthday just a couple months ago??) and a funeral more or less since he also died necessarily, with a dragg-ass-to-a-cousin’s-house  fuss event at the center of which are colored eggs and a butter lamb.  How weird is that? It seems pretty weird, but I might just be overtired.

welp off we go to Chicago for the memorial in a 36-hour turn around drive. the winter of 2012/13 will have been "the year of going back and forth to the midwest ala ft. carrying life and death, with a lot of sex in it".  all that makes me feel truly at peace is the paramount present moment of sex.  I'm a mourning nympho. the bleaker shit gets, the more I want only to fuck Aa's brains loose, and crabbily.  "grief gives you some kinda wicccccckkeeed PMS", he laughs.

schöne Töne von Mine: I Am The Spring

raised on gallow's humor

How’s it going?

Well (sigh) it’s all done all arranged even though poor Shirl she it’s been so much on her she called and got the other place that arranged everything in the end but in the meanwhile the first place had come and got her for the cremation ya know because we weren’t going to be doing anything but then the other place showed up and were so nice and arranged everything but they said it would cost us an extra 750 to go get her from the first place but ya know Ma always did like a ride in the car so she took the scenic route HAHAHAHAHAH

Soooo grandma’s dead, I take it…?

O yeah sorry ha I forget who I’ve talked to yes last night at about 9:30 or so, it was peaceful.

Annnnnd then you called Jen twice to tell her….?

HAHAHAHHAAH yeah I musta!

Well I’m sure she appreciated that, very thorough of you.

Right, HAHAHAHAHHAHA. Well it was very peaceful, she just stopped doing that gurgling breathing ya know, and but she was still there like her diaper was cutting into her funny and Shirl arranged it took it off her actually and heard her say “you’re a good girl” real quiet and she beamed at Mikey when he came, Doug didn’t come though he needs meds or some shit I dunno and he was taking that stuff ya know PROZAC! but the girlfriend said she didn’t want to be with a drug addict (sigh) I don' t think she heard you on the phone but ya never know she loved you like hell, but anyways it’s been as good as you can expect ya know the hospice people were SO nice and they came and asked all about her and I dunno how they realized she was Irish by half so I come back into the room one time when we had been out on a break and one of the hospice women was singing Tura Lura Lura by her bed….and I could just imagine Ma’s bony little hand if she had had the strength reaching up and choking the shit out of the woman, Ma hated all that Irish sentimental bullshit, drunks and poor as dirt in real life whatEVER, but how was the hospice lady supposed to know she was being so nice, so it was nice, more or less

(hahahahahahah)

What? It’ll be a nice thing too at the place it’ll be in the basement of the place and Shirl can’t take any more at her house like food and shit, no, so bulletin board whatEVER bring a picture if you have a picture and Jen’ll make texas cav-ee-ar and we’ll call it a day.

No tura lura lura obviously.

Nooo, we’ll have some music she liked.  Maroon 5 was her latest.

Grandma liked Maroon 5??

O yeah, she loved it, we’d put her earbuds in there and her little head would bop.  She was so little by the end, like a kid, her hands, so liTTle. And then guess who called, you’ll never guess.

Dad.

Your dad.

Right.

He has a sixth sense, like a cross between a son and a vulture HAHAHAHHAHAHA she’s at death’s door and he’s just calling cuz he felt the draft HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHA.  Then I told him I was at the nursing home with Ma, and he goes “enough said” and hung right up.  So what are you doing with the garden this year? Tell me something about flowers.

Uhhh, well I dunno, I still like the idea of a pond now that we seem to be outa toddler hazards, I guess, but they're expensive.

OOOOOOOh ponds are so worth it!! Shirl has these ducks that land in there ya know and they were courting and we got to see the whole thing out the window with coffee they’re billing and cooing and wrapping their necks all around like swim dancing then he gets on her ya know…

Yes, I know….

And he kind of holds her head up out of the water isn’t that considerate like while he’s pounding away on there but she won’t get water up her nose, or bill whatEver, which is good cuz it ain't quick let me tell ya! and ya know they mate for life did you know that?

Ducks do?  No I didn’t know that.

O yeah, and the females have a flap in there, in their area, and if another duck tries to stick it to her she can just close the flap like a garage door against rape.

Wow.

Yeah, so that politician musta been thinking about ducks when he was blowing his mouth off.

(hahahahahahhahaha)

What? Ya know what I’m talking about, “legitim…

“legitimate rape”, yeah I get it Mom


HAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHA
(hahahahahahhahaha)

rereading Virginia Woolf, I'm always rereading Woolf, making my students do this, you'd think I was giving them an anal probe for all the fuss they make, it's just a friggin pot roast jezus h christ...wanting to make beouf en daube as an intellectual enterprise is embematic of my career issues (which I am suffering from lately to a truly crabby-fying degree), my idea of what thinking is

“I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe; it will be exquisite by September.” —Virginia Woolf

"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”
Marilynne Robinson

tamara williamson - spookin the horses

I take him to Bikram – he calls it “concentration camp yoga”. He has to stop smoking and cannot, so that I can stop sneaking his cigarettes which I started doing when being the woman broke me. He volunteers to take Chantix and admits to preferring a vasectomy over quitting smoking. I know only one treatment for bonkers like that, so off we go, him looking a lot like I’m dragging him there behind the car. “Yes, let’s go do half-moon pose in a crematoria, that sounds like a great fucking idea!” He practices behind me where I can keep an eye on him in the mirror. He wants to kill me then appears utterly abject, accepting his sentence. I should have let him wear the Cougar Bait t-shirt to lighten the mood, but it probably wouldn’t have helped. I think: even when the man is good and there is nothing to lament in how we act towards each other and we are careful of that, still life comes and it hurts a lot sometimes and so these moments arrive when I look at you and feel love as a stab wound. And this is a great blessing, I believe, to have come to that ouch-I-love-you rather than the stab being the first sign like huh I’m doubled over I must love you or some shit…right?

I heard this today on NPR.  The story made me want to fucking puke.  Maybe if it hadn't had a 'happy ending', a phrase I primarily associate with getting jerked off at the end of a massage.  I don't know why I have to be like that.  I should take comfort(s) from the things aimed directly at me (my 'demographic') for such purpose(s).  But I hear that dude's voice dripping with appreciative empathy and I just want to smack the shit out of him and anybody else listening and thinking anything like 'awwww' (fuck you). 

After a couple days of jumping against the waves backwards and being water-blown back to shore, I said I fucking love the ocean. He says, This is a sea. Oh, I say, well…it’s salty…. Yes, he says, the Caribbean is salt water. Oh, right. (pause) I wonder, Where are we exactly? (Wait, don’t answer that, I don’t care.)

He can’t see with his glasses off, and doesn’t particularly like the sea (or ocean or lake…water with fish in it freaks him out by half), he goes in with me anyway, getting salt water up his ass and nose as I gleefully jump against crashing tides again and again and again. He pulls out what he thinks is 2 wet dollars from his shorts to tip the bartender for the drink he needs after that and accidentally tips the guy 40 USD, after which point we are known as JEAMBEAMCOKE! and LADY!, and are called to the front of the line at the beach bar whenever we get anywhere near it.

Well, he says, looking out at the water again as I sip a hospitably strong-ass Mojito, This is a kind of bay, I think. Attached to which ocean? Um, I dunno, I think it’s under California. I think that’s the Baha peninsula (?), I say…that thing that kinda comes down…but that wouldn’t be the Caribbean…and the flight would have been longer….right? I dunno for sure, but no the Caribbean is like south of where Cuba is …. or whatever. So this must be, like, the gulf of Mexico…right? Ok, right, I think so. I thought seas were, like, had land all around em. Yeah I dunno. We have no idea where we are right now. Nope. Ok let’s try to figure it out. Ok. So if this is the Caribbean Sea, and it doesn’t need to be surrounded by land, then we are, like, looking across at Florida. That’s Cancun across over there to the leftish. Oh. Where is, like, the Dominican and Bahamas and shit like that? Assuming we are not below California, it’d be over there somewhere. Behind Cancun? No Cancun is north of here, because we drove south to get here. Then we’re looking north?, cz um the sun comes up over there so that’d be east. Right, so, um, yeah I dunno. I don’t think a person can easily DEDUCE geography. Clearly not. This is All-Inclusive Available for Valentines on the Beach in Mexico Somewhere to Keep Your Woman from Committing Suicide Land, wherever that is exactly (hahahahaha….)