Of the many things that have become clearer in the last 6 months, one is that Aaron and I have no community whatsoever outside of the kids. To some extent, my friends are supportive of him, but they're all shut-ins, and Aaron doesn't feel very comfortable around any of them anyway. Although the bonkers-jealous aspect of that has to GO, it's hard to blame him entirely for his discomfort - witches weird people out, and not even academics like academics much so it's hard to even call that a community anyways. My extended family used to be big fans of his, but that is obviously strained now, their grim sense of our relationship being wrong looming in such things as their quiet about holidays and their passive aggression (my dad pointedly inviting me and the boys ONLY to Florida this year, that kind of crap). But at least they're not disingenuous. For Aaron's part, his family were never supportive/fans of me / our relationship whatsoever. He still fields that with them, such as taking their calls when he's driving home from work so that I won't hear the drone of condemnation, the psychologically corrosive nature of which I fear and resent but they are not my people obviously, and besides, it's their voices in his head that's hard. Altogether, we have the kids as our tribe, and that's it, probably one of the reasons why we so badly wanted one more kid.  And given what else has become much clearer in myself and between us, well, what draws us to each other in our sexually-informed identities and outsider sensibilities means that we are just not enough alike other people to have a community much. We make other people uncomfortable, or they make us uncomfortable (?), and now that my extended family is in the mix of losses, even I feel the weight of that despite being long ago alienated from "belonging" and having actually come to embrace the degree to which I personally make people uncomfortable in my own right.  He has been half-sunk by the mis-fitting factor for some time, how we don't fit the hetero script and how HE doesn't ever and hasn't ever fit it and will never do so finally. At least academics are all to some degree and in some ways off-putting so that I can disappear in front of the drapes in my professional life (I'm not that odd in that world where misfits tend to pool). But he loses his job, too, in our reconciliation and in the process very publicly has rejected the more suitable mate choice that his mistress would have been. But you can't love who you don't love. You can't want who you don't want. And it didn't work several times over now - he kept trying to not love me in favor of younger women with fatter ovaries that his mother liked better the entire time I've known him pretty much, including this last mistress debacle.  But you cannot be who you are not in whom you do not love.  Even if you want to want to. And he really did want to want to not want me and not have to be with me. A lot.  And that hurts. A lot.  But I can also empathize some. It is rather lonely and confusing to be lamented.

Welp, our configuration of relation is on the rise, web-md has a support site for it now (sans the sexuality aspects except as a 'problem' - HA), so who knows, maybe we will be okay and someday too it just won't be a thing, and one of us will meet someone else at work or somewhere who is in a relationship like this, and we will make friends with them and their friends and laugh at mutually familiar things, like how he takes turns on the xbox with the kids and like how I say 'album' not cd but how we meet in the middles like both knowing who Bob Saget is because the sitcom that he watched as a kid and I hated as an adult (except maybe to ogle Uncle Jesse a little) makes Saget's filthy inappropriateness funny to us both..

don't threaten me, Cornholio

VIRGO Painful thoughts usually have something to teach you, so try to lean into them instead of rejecting them as negativity. Let those thoughts inspire you to act, resolve things or escape them. I'm inspired to do none of those things, but rather to be mostly still and often quiet. And to choose nostaliac television to watch.

throwback thursday

grief

Me:(sobbing)

Her: I wouldn’t say this to just anybody, but your brain is ramming into itself above your head right now.

Me: I’m sorry.

Her: Do you always apologize for being upset?  I AM a shrink, after all..

Me: I don’t know (sobbing). I have no fucking idea what I always do or don’t do or anything.  I don’t know if I ought to be upset or not or anything.

Her: Is there an OUGHT to being upset?  I missed that memo.  You clearly ARE upset.

Me:  I don’t know if it’s reasonable though, or when it is or not, or anything.  I don’t know what is happening to my mind.  I’m afraid of EVERYTHING.  All the time.  When I’m not fucking the actual life out of him, then I calm down.  Which, is that crazy??, I can’t tell that either, like maybe that is wrong with me too, because from where I’m standing I can understand how a person might want their skin fucked off to let whatever pain it is out or whatever…

Her: Short of permanent damage, no, fucking is fine as a coping mechanism in strained relationships, I wish my partner had more of that impulse (hahahahahaha), Aaron is a lucky man.

Me: (hahahhhaahhaa/sob), I really don’t understand what is wrong with me.

Her: I’m not sure I understand what you even mean, there is nothing WRONG with you that I’m aware of, you’re hurt, that’s not a flaw.

Me:

Her:

Me: Have you ever been cheating on? 

Her:  My husband is an alcoholic, and he cheated on me with the bottle…I’m not sure if he actually cheated on me during that time, nobody has ever asked me that before.  I think if he cheated on me, I wouldn’t take it personally, I’d think of that as a breakdown of his.

Me:  That’s exactly what I used to say. 

Her: Is that true?

Me: Yes, I actually have never even been jealous before, I never really understood that emotion.  And now that I have it, I still don’t get it.  In fact, I’m not even sure that is what I feel.  All I know is, I’m in a panic all the time, every minute of every day I am trying to quell it, and I’m wearing out.  I don’t sleep for days, I often can’t breathe, I try to sleep sitting up when I wake up in the middle of the night because it feels like I’m going to drown in feeling and I don’t know what the feelings are.  I’m LOSING IT.

Her:  You need to get back to yourself.  Your authentic self.

Me:  WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?  If you think I’m going to do yoga or read some shit about my soul some more, you can forget it, I tried that, and it only makes me more frantic as it fails. 

Her: I really think it doesn’t matter, that you need to concentrate on getting back to your own sense of grounded in yourself, but just for argument’s sake, what is it that he’s doing that upsets you?

Me: (insert 100 item list diatribe of worry here)  (sob)

Her:  Okay, two of those things were completely reasonable to be upset about.  The rest…

Me: I KNOW.  I mean, I have had relationship failures before, but I saw them coming, there was addiction issues or I wasn’t a lesbian or he was a relentless asshole or something kind of whatever, ya know, a visible thing coming in it, I could brace myself a little.  My brain just does not know what the hell to do now, from one minute to the next. Like yesterday his phone died, and I thought he’d left again, and I just happened to be standing in front of over 100 people as that went down in my mind, and I just watched my mind stop working.  I was very actually beside myself, and frightened of the level of frightened I was, and I really thought I might lose it right there.  Even though I know I would never do that.  But maybe I would. 

Her:  That list you just slid by me of all the other failures, first of all you realize they were not failures, they were losses – right?

Me:

Her:

Her: What do you like about yourself?  What’s your favorite quality in yourself?

Me: Wtf?

Her: You’re going to have to spend a little time with yourself in your own mind somehow, so let’s find something you want to be with there.

Me: I will ask you something and you answer me honestly, promise?

Her: Okay.

Me: If you were in trouble, and my number was the only one in your pocket, as little time as we’ve known each other, would you bet on me?

Her:  Wow.  Yes, I would.  Absolutely.

Me: (sob)

Her: That’s a good quality, you are loyal and dependable…

Me: That’s what I might have said once, but now I look at those same qualities and think: gullible or deluded or even arrogant. 

Her: I see.

Me: I hope so, because I don’t. 

Her: Your sense of your own worth has been deeply shaken and you have a couple good reasons to be insecure right now…

Me: I don’t even know that much. I look at myself, and I do not know what I’m looking at.  How can I judge it if I don’t know what I am seeing?

Her: Well stop judging it for one thing, but here’s what you’re going to do…you ready?

Me: Hit me.

Her: The couple reasonable things to worry about, give them to Aaron to worry about, and you stop.  Stop reading about relationships.  Let him worry about that.

Me: (sob)  I don’t know…

Her: You trust me?

Me: Yeah, I do.

Her: Then trust that Aaron will worry about what you give him to worry about.  You, you read about grief.  Deal with grieving. That’s all.  There are stages in grief, there are things your mind does with grief – you need to ACCEPT GRIEF.

Me: I don’t know how.

Her: Clearly.

my favorite word

I've been talking since 8:30 this morning non-stop except to have questions put to me or the 10 minute break I took to eat half a tub of yogurt and look up German midwife faces. And every day is made much longer by my fucking nerves are fucking shot, always. Chairing little meetings and running the giant 100 person open faculty meeting and every damn configuration of groups of PhDs you can bear to imagine, words words words, privately my nerves shot shot shot. Earlier in the day, again my boss, a pretty good sport yet he is a boss, so let's face it, they often make life harder (too), suggests to the VP that to solve the space crunch perhaps from now on professors might not need personal offices.

It is true. I am fully aware that it is an immense luxury in this very unfair world for me to have this door that slams shut (this used to be my ex-husband's office space, and his relentless ill humor finally broke the hydrolic hinge, so shutting my door is deafening), behind which I can be alone. And sit here. And shake a bit. Breathing back the ever readiness of crying that now lives just behind my face.

I told him, deadpan, "Well, you can do that, but I will eventually fucking kill somebody."

So now, the day is finally over at work, and not yet started at home, my summoning between what I think of in my head as Buckwheat's voice: Everything is Otay! And into my email pops this from my boss. Like I said, he's a pretty good sport, and he gets props for giving me the two small bits of levity that this day mustered. I'd put it on Crackbook if I still had an account, but all the energy I have for Outward Facing is consumed in the mere practices of my everyday life. If anybody reads this post and still has the personal capacity for social media, repost it for me somewhere because I don't think you could ever say FUCK enough next to everybody's mother fucking tit-selfies, memes and dinner photos.

bonus track, sent from my would-be office mate next door with whom I've made a murder-suicide pact if we have to move into together, who watches it for hours (because her nerves are also shot)

My boss just told me that I run meetings like a mean German midwife in boots.  "I think I come off as harmless and friendly - no?"  NO.  More like Vee are Goink to Bear Down und Get Through Dis face.  Aaron tells me all the time lately, Don't make the face.  I wonder if it's the same face.

He pulls the cord, the toy shakes its ass, repeat repeat. The toy's name is 'Twirk' and it's endlessly amusing (as if this is a lunatic asylum)....(giggle)

“Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment.  Before that it was something real.”  – Lynda Barry, What It Is

I’d reverse that logic.  Before disillusionment, you had uncomplicated faith (if you were capable of faith).  Faith, 1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. 2
. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. Origin, Middle English: from Old French feid, from Latin fides. (OED)

Sometimes (more often than you’d imagine), it is useful to have been a Latin geek.  It’s like knowing the secret identity of words, and to some degree that’s a secret decoder ring of what people mean when they tell you something whether they fully know it or not.  If you look up fides in an online dictionary, it will usually give you an incorrect post-Christianized definition of faith.  But the word is more of a verb than a noun, and means to (be known as) act(ing) in good faith, from which we get words like fidelity and confide.  It very much does NOT mean believing in things that are beyond direct knowing or reckoning.  Quite the opposite.  So to say that you have faith, such as in Jesus, would mean that you act (not just speak, but judge, behave, think – all primary human activities) as if you have that faith, and your consistency in that action would be the strength of your faith.  If you don’t do any of that, you don’t have faith, you’re just full of shit more or less.  In that relationship, you’d have to assume Jesus is also acting in good faith with you, and that indeed might be as hard to prove as it would be to disprove.  Hence why I can’t have any faith in Jesus at all.  The spiritual principles I have (had?) faith in are the ones I’ve seen again and again act with the reliability of gravity, such as you get what you give.  That seems like Truth, reminders of which can be delivered daily to your phone via a Dalai Lama radiance app, to help you out when (if you’re like me) you feel like a crabby asshole a lot.  If you walk around projecting crabby asshole, chances are people are going to treat you like you are one, and the reality of that will be reinforced everywhere constantly, until indeed you will have full faith in the fact that you are a crabby asshole.  The way you act will be the way you are treated, the way you think will be reflected back at you like pinging, and you will create your life this way, in how you think and how you act and the peace and love or lack thereof from which you proceed at the center of your Being (and Jesus will not intervene).  Beyond that, having faith in actual human beings is tricky business, not an uncomplicated thing for me these days.  I have lost much faith in words at all, since many times the person using them doesn’t know what the words mean actually even if they are using them as ends (truth) rather than manipulative tools (lies).  An English professor's staple advice: show, don’t tell.   

mahalia jackson - I'm going to live the life I sing about in my song

I had a day at work.  That means I spend the day being the person that people expect and accept that I am.  Mostly, I actually am that person.  Sometimes I’m just wishing everyone dead and have my game face on like wearing period panties.  But after all these years, I’m mostly just who I turned out to be, which in this case is someone associated with distance learning best practices and college strategic planning and academic program assessment.  I had my best work bud, Patti, in the mix and my next best one too, Marta, in successive meetings, making eye contact mid boardroom typa deal.  I need to spend about 150k on a learning management system, which is a thing you put classes on and run them out of.  Every class that we migrate over to that new system costs money.  So only the ones that are halfway decent can go, and everyone else gets busted back to a classroom in the real world.  And let’s be clear: many educators are getting paid to teach classes that they do not at all show up for, and as long as students get an A in those, mostly they don’t complain.  There are classes that have no syllabus, no grades, no evidence of interaction whatsoever.  Then there are the “best practices” standards, which my name is equal to, but I do not meet them.  I know what they are, and I do not meet them fully.  I do not engage with my students daily any more than I eat the right amount of vegetables per day, drink the right amount of wine, think the most productive of thoughts – I do not meet them any more than I meet ANY standard, which is not at all in any case.  I say this.  And people pause and I can see them thinking “whew” or “wtf”, either of which is fine by me. I teach like I (would prefer to) live; I would rather you read some stuff and I read some stuff and some of it was the same but some of it was different (but similar, like, ya know, ABOUT SOME SHIT really, some kinda way) and that we just trusted that was so of each other, and that in the aggregate it was adding up to some measure of an introspective life respectively, which included trying not to be a total asshole if at all possible and sometimes even better than that - so, go read/think some stuff and I will too, and we’ll talk sometimes about it, when that would be useful, and sometimes we’ll talk and it won’t be useful, but that impasse might be useful to one or both of us, and it will go on like that until the end.  I say to the e-Learning monitor, “As for assessing my courses, it’s like asking if I look fat in this, I don’t want you to answer me honestly at all.”  She nods.  Patti laughs.  But she knows I’m serious even as she is dead-set on idealism.  She has to be, she has told me.  The three foster kids she adopted engage in behaviors for which they are about to age into ‘could be tried as an adult’.  About that, I can’t comment further in detail actually.  But the point is that she and I have come to a kind of crossroads: We can’t heal people nor they us in that process.  She cannot heal those children.  She can provide them a context in which they might heal, but that’s it.  And I tell her, truly, in my opinion that is not a failure of adoption, it isn’t a failure of any kind, every person’s life belongs to him or her ultimately.  Even children you have made inside your own body, once they leave it, their lives are more in their own hands than anywhere ultimately.  And they don’t owe it to you, it is not in existence to affirm yours, and they can end it even if they must, and you will die over it maybe, but tough titties.  That’s the way it is.  She can still TRY, of course, and feel obligated to do as good a job as possible of course, but that’s HER life, not theirs, and it’s a decent one as is.  As I am talking to her, I know, this is true of me too.  I cannot heal Aaron.  And if the context of our relationship could have aided that, it probably might have done so by now.  And regardless of whether he is what caused me damage or not, he cannot ultimately heal me of that damage like a magic trick.  He can TRY of course, which might enrich his own life, and it MAY help me (it couldn’t hurt, for sure), but it would probably help him more, and I’d still be in possession of my own life and how it feels and what it means (if anything).  I show this to the kids, finally, and we debate its merits.  Then I say to Ears, ‘You know what I’m really talking about right?’  Yup.  ‘Do not use people [women] as a means to an end, it's fucked, and you will surely not be able to gauge that correctly in any case.’  Yup.  ‘You okay with that?’  It scares the shit out of me really, either way, your being in charge of me or my being in charge of me.  ‘Fair enough.’  My having loved Aaron as best I could did not result in what I wanted for myself or what I wanted for him, did not succeed in effecting either, so by either measure, selfish or selfless/idealistic, it failed.  I would have to measure it differently, some third rail, and I don’t know what that would be at this point.  Patti has a little scrap of paper taped to her desk that reads “faith”. 

"That Uncertain Feeling"

friday is only half over

love home trust body idealism faith scrutiny ability sorrow joy past future present ... I've given all I had of all my concrete and abstract nouns. spent and still coming up short. and unable to quite imagine how to replenish myself. it's nobody's fault, really, the newborns or the husbands or the friends. nobody's but mine. but still, I can see how a(n even) weaker version of myself, drained like this, might be tempted to weep if someone just threw a song at me. ya know?

Rose Polenzani & Rose Cousins: The Book Of Love (The Magnetic Fields)
the decemberists - angels and angles (repost)

The Decemberists – Of Angels And Angles

The Decemberists – Of Angels And Angles

The video is stupid of course - don't watch it, just play it LOUD, really loud. And run a mile at daybreak. High rec

http://m.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29545469 and http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/07/27/love-hormone-oxytocin-tied-to-social-anxiety-fear-in-mice/57652.html

That pretty much explains everything. Why I alternate between fucking his brains loose and feeling like he might murder me. My brain is sad toast :/

I remember the first time I saw Danny's work, long before his first show and I started to buy it then more of it, a piece that resonates and then I meditate on why then I just like it. The Girl didn't like this one, said it was too desolate. I loved it immediately. Scott said it was one of his favorites too. It was really good to see him. He and I have a state of distant friendship after years of layered memory that makes seeing him feel familiar totally yet he's at a distance that he cares but not get bent out of shape type cares. I mean, if I put my arm in a wood chipper he'd be like that must really hurt and he'd really mean it and that'd be it. 

Him: You're like the horse in Animal Farm.
Me:
Him: Ya know? Dropped dead? "Everything can be solved if you work harder"?
Me: LOLOL, um no, I don't remember...(I look it up)...what does that make you?, I ask, reading  the character list.
Him: Are you looking up a synopsis? Seriously?
Me: Well? What? The pigs killed the horse, so.
Him: See what I mean?!
Me: Says here the horse was the donkey's only friend.
Him: Jesus, you're such a dork. The horse was a control freak work happy dork, that's really all I remember.
Me: Sounds like what a cynical donkey [jackass] would say.
Him: Just saying. Work might not set you free.
Me: You got a better idea?
Him: (sigh)
Me: So, I'm going to make you a flowchart of your related jealousy and fidelity issues, by the way - that way you can see clearly how they're connected, for when you see the counselor.
Us: haha haha haha haha
Me: You have driven me insane.
Him: I know.

"You know greed has nothing to do with money right?" (She didn't know.) Iyanla then explained to her that greed is taking more than you give. Oh ok, Shoya said, seeming relieved and suddenly pointing out a million things she'd done to make the project work. But as Iyanla pointed out, all of her examples were of her doing things to invest in the outcome she wanted. She did this and this and this because she wanted this and this and that for herself. She was investing in her agenda. 'That's not giving,' she told her." ~from I Knew But Still

(duh, lol.  and that shit is as funny as it isn't easy, cuz you think you've thought around that corner only to be investing in an outcome of your being able to knock that shit off, and you then you suck at that for a long while ...)

"The fact that man senses his finiteness everywhere and cannot be satisfied with any of it points to a hidden possibility in his nature.  He must have another root of his Being than that of his finiteness.  If he has no pre-knowledge of the unknowable he would lack the urge to enquire.  But he seeks after Being itself, after the Infinite and the Other.  Only this can give him satisfaction." ~ from General Psychopathology

"Intense experiences of a spiritual type may occur during prolonged periods of isolation, physical deprivation or emotional stress.  Spiritual awareness is also said to arise from contemplation of works of art or intense concentration on a task, such that the separation between subject and object becomes less apparent [i.e. tantra].  This includes retreat and religious worship and ritual.  Ecstatic mystical experiences may occur spontaneously but periods of intense reflection or indecision have often occurred beforehand.  There may also be a link between such awareness and an ability to replace the usual focus on oneself with a concern for and interest in others. Religious and secular systems of morality (in contrast for narrower concepts of moralism) concur that we flourish through our ethical and loving actions towards others.  This suggests that although spiritual perception is not usually the result of an effort of will, certain states of mind may favour its appearance.  It also suggests that spirituality is a response to the world.  Rather than cultivation or improvement of an illusory self, it may involve being moved by what is other than oneself.  It is communication of something within a relationship, an interaction." ~ from Conceptualizing Spirituality for Medical Research and Health Service Provision

Now that I don't have Facebook, I have to put my stupid(er) shit here too

Update: I saw my shrink.  And yeah, No.

(armscrossy) 

I feel bone-ass crazy anymore.  I can’t tell what is reasonable or not, I can’t tell if it’s me or is it him, can’t tell my own ass from a hole in the ground.  Even if he is crazy, now I am too anyway so how would I know? Or what would it matter?  Or…I have no idea.  I tried to hang on to certain principles, all that shit about what energy you put out blabla.  Then I tried to hang on to moral bottom lines: some things you just don’t do (“True friends stab you in the front.” Oscar Wilde, indeed).  But that’s just a thing, you don’t have to believe that and it is not a Truth despite Kant’s vouching for it (I got that vid below from JDean who noticed that in just about all ways, even if we’re talking about course caps and student parking, my mind is stuck in extreme deontology, so he thought I should have the word for it, and I passed that along to Aaron because his word is consequentialism, but he had no interest discussing philosophy (fair enough), and would only be interested in getting bent out of shape over JDean because Aaron seems intent on driving me insane…unless he’s right and I’m already insane and more apt to commit adultery or any atrocity known to human behavior and just am too stubborn to admit…), so to hell with that too.  People fuck each other over, marriage is a 50/50 crapshoot, and if it fails he’ll break up with me the same way probably but he thinks he never will.  (Is that NORMAL? I mean, I have to admit that’s probably TYPICAL…I guess….) All I know is we go round and round about such things as John friending me on fucking Facebook (I wish him no ill, but talking to John was like talking to a brick anyway so why the hell would I do that since I already have a cinder block right the fuck in front of me after all?), and that is utterly beside any point, the point is I’m sick to death not only of this betrayal hangover not to mention having been worn out in the first place even before that by Aaron’s irrational jealousy about EVERYTHING but he won’t listen just JohnJohnJohn until I killed Facebook altogether having really not much but antipathy for the social media which was only serving the purpose of keeping my father from calling me directly on the phone (God forbid) and which had become a means for me to turn around and stalk my own husband just like he had always always stalked me because I AM NOW CRAZY.  So fine, fuck it, have it your way. 

(pause for about second of peace….wait for it…..)

And then he wanted to talk about Bale.  At which point my head blew the fuck off and I gave up all hope of sanity ever reentering my life ever.  And if I could keep to that, I think it might be just the ticket, I’ll just kiss my fucking mind goodbye entirely as a useless pile of neuroses and just ignore everything it tells me about anything more important than what do you think we want for dinner.

If I had to “think”, which I cannot anymore, I’d say that I had it wrong all along.  That I’ve been the crazy one, and that at the moment when he said “I don’t love you, I just thought I did”, the buffer around my  self, my “identity”, disappeared, and I was left staring at the basic truth: I am a shrieking soul.  My mind is fucked, my body resonates with that always sleepless and hive prone, and under all that, for no good reason (I don’t belong to any tortured club, after all – I’m straight and white and middle class, so fuck me), my spirit is SCREAMING.  I came into the world not crying but SCREAMING. 

I dream: I’m in a house and a cocker spaniel runs by, jumps into the kitchen sink and down the disposer, grinding itself into nothing, and a fat black cocker tries to follow but gets stuck and dies half ass sticking up out of the sink.  Then I look around, and everywhere there are souls trying to get the fuck out of wherever we are, and this domestic space is just a mirage of haven, and outside are more souls wandering around like this, either lost or mistakenly assuming they’re alive and many are simply desperate, slamming themselves into anything that looks like escape.  I’m supposed to help these souls get out of here but I don’t know how, I’m trapped myself.  Aaron calls on the phone to tell me he has found a new job – are you coming home? Yes, later…but I suspect he is also stuck in one of these places and is one of those mistakenly assuming he isn’t dead.  I hang up the phone, look around at the spirit carnage as if I have to clean this shit up, and I SCREAM (myself awake).  And I laid there, and truly believe(d): That is real.

Or at this point, my nerves are shot and I’m just plain crazy. 

I must be.  Because at the end of the day, if he wants to (re)marry me so badly, then don’t I get a big diamond ring and shit (armscrossy)?  And he’s thrilled with that idea.  And I think, Welp then at least you maybe can focus your energies on that instead of on making me crazy and that might be good(!), for all I know.

Koan

Relationship Koan What is holding us together, in some ways closer than ever for the exposure in it? Sex. What is ripping us apart, inexorable as mortality itself grinding us into dust? Sex.

Answer: I'm going to buy a new purse today.

And in the end, I'll probably give in again to being stalked in my own life (some more) and I'll get off Facebook, but only because actually I use FB mostly to keep an eye on him and I'm bloody sick of that shit addiction I've picked up from him at least as much as I am sick of the smoking. I don't want to look see ponder infer or deduce what he is doing behind my back or right in front of my face with whoever is the selfie titcrack addict

example: Django Girl, like a shih tzu, pet it and regret it

 of his today anymore...etc.

If he's not going to tell me, it isn't worth knowing; because in that case, we are not together.

Ollabelle - Get Back Temptation

I got us both a self-disclosure journal so we could practice "deep listening", ala Thich Nhat Hahn.

came and I opened to this page

Answers: 

It sucked.
It sucked.
Should avoid each other like the plague.
At least we're not niggers.
It sucks/you do it.
Italians: we will kill you, and each other, and we cook really well.

I don't know when or how (when we got married I would say but he would disagree) being with Aaron became the same thing as being. But it did (a fact, one of the few, on which we agree). It is as unthinkable that we are not together as it is untenable in its current state of togetherness as it is laborious to amend that state into something sustainable. And I'm tired of trying to both put back it together and somehow be my own person and all this pressure to be FINE everywhichway allatonce, "working on myself" as my contribution to the wellness of our relationship, all of it, I just want to stick a fork in my eye a lot of the time. And what's worst is I'm the one insisting on all this oppressive wellness because I don't know how not to drag myself/him/us through what's required like it or not because that's one of my jobs in this relationship (another fact we agree on, and both hate).

But really, I want to lie here instead and smoke and jerk off until my bills are overdue and a mile high and my body doesn't worry me because I don't care (my wrinkles could be unabashedly unmoisurized, fucking yay) and I've fallen into some hole in myself where nobody knows what I'm thinking not even me and I won't care because I won't know about it.

I don't want any of that really, but I feel like I do. It's not an option, though, whether I feel like it or not. There are kids here. The conditions of our relationship are the conditions of their childhood. So I have to want what is right, which is ultimately what I *do want*, even just for the adults' sake too, whether I *feel like* doing the work of it or not (which I often do not). Try to hold that thought why dontcha? We have to. Both of us. Whether we fucking feel like it or not.

For Aaron, who doesn't much care to read my writing if it's about him, because what threat is there to uncover in it if I'm not writing about sucking Dave's (or whoever, pick a phantom, any phantom, dead or alive) dick?, and what is the point in reading for anything but threatening phantom dick sucking secrets?, but whom I love anyway (I feel your pain, baby):

"Reconciliation"

Fuck it
let's be terrible together
broke and sick
bill collectors calling unanswered
like your psycho mother relentless
and my dad after happy hour
flowers dead in the boxes
us buried in butts, Marlboro man's bitches
fucked fat and pretty happy
let's leave ourselves
well enough alone
untended and unvoiced, mostly
gone to worried-mind seed
just let it be til death do us part this time
Love of my life