From The Witch, for us both.

I went back to yoga today, first time in just over one year. When I'd sweat enough to get to nothing going on in my head at all, least of all myself, it was perfect.

a wish for 2015

I'm updating my class site for contemporary writers in the coming semester. I haven't run it since Franco came out with the Child of God film, so I'm thinking I'll go with that one and freak everybody the fuck out, what the hell? So I'm looking around for interviews or something in which McCarthy doesn't come off like a total lunatic (he's brilliant, in my opinion, but ummm not a people person is putting it lightly), and I find this, which I wouldn't repeat except that Scocca parody did crack me up.  I know I know, I'm an asshole :/

bonus link: http://stronglang.wordpress.com/  TJ is going to love the fart-word story, as he is currently texting from a car somewhere in Indiana that he is 'ripping ass' to gas his brother in the backseat. The boys are on their way back from a long weekend in the midwest to see their grandmother with their father. TJ has been texting me cultural laments punctuated by raving food reviews (the way to a kid's heart is giant portions of waffles, but TJ's heart is a hard one, so before the syrup has dried on his shirt he will be back to 'is there anything here besides gas stations??).  Best text: We walk in and dad says to grandma "you've lost weight!" and she shoots back "you've lost hair!"  Wisconsin: Where passive aggressive ninjas come from. 

The kids always win dirty Pictionary (unless Jackie is playing).

"prostate"

http://www.box.net/shared/static/38oa4eqmuj.mp3

my idea of Christmas music this morning, gearing up to kiss 2014 the fuck to the curb and good riddance if ever there were a year to get past yet it was this one, will you release me from pain and worry ? lalala

probably a proper resolution would be more godly than what springs to mind, which is "to rather than pray or some shit, punch in the face immediately and with all my might anyone who causes me one nanosecond of unrequited grief" since I would have to punch myself in the face first of all, as I surely am my greatest enemy, plus it would be illegal if I bloodied Low Cunning soooo, yeah, I have to work on my resolution for the coming year, hmmm..

well, meanwhile, Merry Christmas, and for whatever it's worth I love you with all my broken heart

Gingerbread crackhouse, another tradition.

Tomorrow we'll add the Ho Ho Hoes...

Torturing the pets, a holiday classic.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/the-unbreakable-laura-hillenbrand.html?referrer=

 VIRGO Common decency perhaps isn't as common as it should be. That's why a certain person is now standing out to you — someone who continually takes the high road in even the smallest matters.

reading, horoscopes and book news, in the superquiet. even the dogs have stopped licking their paws. I can hear the snow-wind, a small whir. I am happy like this, grateful for these fragile minutes one after another when nothing [bad] is happening at all [that I know of] and I can quiet my mind of its compulsions to wince. it's such a luxury, that. If I could give everyone in the world a gift, it would be for a spell of Nothing, just a bout of quiet and the absence of material harm or fear of harm tomorrow or too-pressing memory of past harms

In a few minutes I will probably think of something, such as his walking into the OR at his new job yesterday to find his first d&c procedure waiting, without warning put into the memory of that having been me, us, not so long ago. "Really untraumatic," he said it was. For the patient, he meant. Objectively speaking. "No cutting. What's inside you isn't attached, it's not really part of you. Not really." I will think. Of something hurty. Or scary. Then I will stand up and clean something, or do something nice ..

One of the people I work with asked me about scrapbooking in the 19th century. First of all, how would I know that? And second of all, I did know. Aaron tells me all kinds of things about the difference between veins and arteries for instance. Veins don't have any muscles and arteries do. I hear: veins age and no amount of working out or not or botox is going to keep them sexy. Arteries could be sexier, but they're usually not, so then they get a face lift using veins turned inside out for the smooth faced side and then your heart doesn't look as shitty (?). He apologizes for how he tells me all kinds of useless stuff like that. I think, Dude I know the etymology of the word 'miscellany' through the 18th century until print media hit photography and Civil War news got pasted next to recipes leading toward the eventual recipe card system that predates Weight Watchers...point being: what the fuck could be less useful than my knowledge set, generally speaking? And here's the kicker, I also dabbled in Civil War era scrapbooking for a minute back when I knew that shit AND sucked at it (double useless), such that I could reach into a drawer and pull this out and wonder 'an instance of what Kerri calls what what?', having not finished that thought because the baby was crying apparently.

I am mulling my shrink's insistence until my last visit that my ego, wounded, is temporarily in charge of me. Not my spirit. Which is beginning to  reassert itself apparently. Finally. I do a lot of nidra, watching my mind until it looks like Kansas, all empty electric water air smelling, like Toto is about to go flying. I say to her, My power was stolen. She immediately jumps to defending Aaron. I'm not talking about that, about his motivations, I understand all that, I'm talking about something underneath all that, a siphoning that occurred. It's hard to describe. I use what language I have but it's not right. I'm casting a spell, I say. Because I don't know how else to describe how words write themselves in my mind let alone this, the wordless swells.

Meanwhile I think; God, is there any end to what you all wanted and thought I would be enough to provide? What made you think I was so HUGE in the first place? Give me a fucking break. Except Aaron. He is the one person who ever thought "you're not enough" at me, and then changed his mind. That's never quite happened before. So I am puzzling it out. Slowly, obviously. Trying not to make the same imposition.

He lies next to me sleeping, throwing off covers in the work of dreaming with his poolball boxers all bunched up,

and I watch him and half-grieve, which is not at all the same thing as grief-rage, wherein I let him go in my mind (bitterly but pretending it's nonattachment) knowing somewhere he is putting me away in a drawer in his soul where discarded things are stowed. Half grieving is closer to pulling a child back from nearly getting hit by a bus, a scolding frantic love-ill. 'Schadenfreude', he says, laughing at me for what I would imagine him engaging in. Somewhere about me over drinks with someone new, making myself mad to imagine the furious I'd feel to be imagining him doing that if he were now doing that and I were being forced to imagine that. Pissing myself off. If you throw schadenfreude shade at me I swear to Christ I will hunt you down and shove my tragic up your smug ass etcetc. 

In other news, Marilyn Robinson's new book redeems the others between Housekeeping and this one. I've slowed it way down by switching to reading it aloud. I love every word although there are losses galore and some of them of babies. (She had thought a thousand times about the ferociousness of things so that it might not surprise her entirely when it showed itself again. She wished she could warn him, even though he knew about it, too, and dreamed about it. This child must know about it, because it lived there under her scared, wild heart. It might not want the world at all.) When I read this author I remember I'm a Calvinist by at least half (TJ didn't come by that name for nothing).


He cleared his throat. “So. ‘Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.’ My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself. If there is such a thing. God is born of obedience,’ that’s Calvin, ‘and obedience has to be constantly attentive to the demands that are made of it, to a circumstance that is always new and particular to its moment.’ Yes. ‘Then the reasons that things happen are still hidden, but they are hidden in the mystery of God.’ I can’t read my own writing. No matter. ‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed.’ So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time to another. ‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.’ Because I don’t mean to suggest that experience is random or accidental, you see. ‘When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore we have no way to reconcile its elements, because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize as ourselves.’ That’s always seemed remarkable to me, that we can do that. That we can’t help but do it. ‘So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.’”

I believe all of that except the God part :(

The wife makes insomniac proclamations to herself in the dark, "People who can talk things out, they use their ability to articulate in order to win. Not widen, but win. Every conversation is won or lost. That gets very boring. At best. People who don't know how to articulate, how to think out loud, well they just come out with conclusions, fuck knows how they got there. And if you lost, or were lost, or let go of, in their minds along the way then say la vee. At worst. Which you'd do well to expect, the worst. Either way, people are weapons. And more than not their souls have no licence to carry..."

Since it's too depressing to believe all that, and since I myself can be both those kinds of people that the wife thinks ought be put out of their misery, I proceed as if I do not and am not. I try to be happy. Which I can be, actually, a lot of the time. It's pretty quiet when I'm happy. The house is clean when I'm happy. Bills paid. Nothing making me nervous. Nobody pacing the length of my life like a cage. Including me.

The wife, her inner pablum patter, "Renee Russo is looking great these days, I wonder what moisturizer she uses..."

Tgif, yo. And one week closer to the end of 2014, a steaming dog turd of a year. Every day the primary thing I want to happen is nothing much. When I say I want nothing for Christmas, I really mean it, please Lord give me no more 'opportunities to grow' for this year.  I've been summoned to the President's suite for lunch today and the budget is a million dollars underwater so I hear. My boss looks like he's had a diet mountain dew enema most days, increasingly scrawny and grim. I think selfishly, "I don't want to know what's wrong." But say la vee, they're gonna tell me anyway. (And my card of the day is Death, the card of evolution, oye.)

'Death' - (repost)

Nice of them to feed me an apple and blue cheese salad for lunch while they do, I guess :/

"Snakes, knives, strangers, darkening in the sky—you felt some things with your whole body. What they might mean. It could be they were on their way to do harm elsewhere and you just saw them pass by, but how could you know?" Marilyn Robinson, Lila

(You don't.)

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” Keroac, Dharma Bums

Some things do not make sense to me now. They might if I allow it. Or they might not. It's hard to say.

Each time there was a spell during which the children were very small before they could speak to anyone but me with their eyes and need of me. Then they grew on, started talking and became people, inside of whom is the secret of who they were before they began to take their shape and harden into their identities. I know that secret better than they do, as my mother knows mine before my memory begins. When I die or lose my memory of their secrets, those secrets will go with me, and I think we all mourn the loss of those as much as we do the sound of our mothers' laugh fading.

These are very elemental things. Like a b c. I'm not talking about relationships, their complications and all that. Our perpetual becoming in them. Transaction that happens in words. I'm talking about simpler things, underneath that.

All of what I've done and has been done to me, all the transactions, they push me out into a shape. Like a play doh fun factory. Mother being one. Friend. Daughter. Professor, even. It is damn difficult to balk the shape you're in once you're in it. Having an identity is a bitch. Even if it doesn't suck, it is certainly constraining. And let's face it, it often does suck. Friend. Daughter. Etc. But if you try to put it down, you're a shitty friend, an estranged daughter. You've accomplished nothing but acquiring an adjective. Cheating husband. What did that accomplish? Might as well pick an adjective like "sane" or "good", and try for that, logically speaking. Sane daughter. Good wife. Take that shape. Whatever it needs to be.

My daughter is once again obsessed with having (acquiring) children. Foster kids, her job like a shopping spree off and on, her imagining each as her own and trying them on as such. This happens when she takes a lover and doesn't love him. Last month she was thinking of moving to Seattle, where she would like to open a bakery, and I thought hmm maybe she could open one here as I walked by a for rent sign. But then a man, and almost immediately and counter-intuitively she seems like she needs to get laid something fierce, wound tight as hell, and the foster children mania begins again. Talking without taking breaths. Almost as to herself up and down the street in need of a cigarette madness. Talking right through you like you're not there. Because to her, you are not. The man is not there, not really. I can relate. All she can know to do is love a kid instead, so she wants to do that.

Did I teach her that? I might have thought so, but Aaron makes me doubt it. He also has a version of her madness. It wants more identity. Parent. To be called by that name. Like a solidifying agent to offset the runny (manic) nature of their beings.

I never wanted that. To be called mom, I mean. I didn't not want it. But I WANTED what they gave me before they could talk to call anybody anything. I paid that back trying to be a good mother, a consequence of having gotten something prior, something elemental. They could have called me whatever. Tbone. Luckily for me, I enjoyed mothering. A lot of it. And I really like them, too. They're all incredibly funny people. My family is a small mob to which I belong as a consequence of several times having indulged in the extreme pleasure of putting my nose behind the ear of another human being for as many hours in a row as I wanted once upon a time before they all started talking.

I now do that again. Not child. Husband. With the same ferocity of need. Plus something else. Plus sex, I guess. But sex is just a Way. All the work I did between having children and becoming a wife. The sitting still. The breathing up my spine and over my head and back down my abdomen and around and around. Open. And quiet. I pulled him through me when he came. I take his secret unworded self in, and spit it back. There is no part of his body I do not know well, calloused heel to asshole to hair follicle, with all my senses. I know what his arteries sound like inside him, the squishy humming of his sleep. Where words begin is where he, separate from me, starts. As a consequence, I have to relate to him, because here he is. I try to be a good wife. It's the way I pay it back, the more elemental thing. Lover. That's what he calls me.

My friend Patti adopted three children. She was their foster mother. She was the stepmother of girls that we called The Daughters. Ears dubbed them that because in his typical way he could not remember their individual names. Maria and Lauren. Patti's daughters. They called her Patti. When they grew into teenagers, and after Patti and her husband had given up on the fertility treatments, Patti went through classes and set out to adopt. I remember her telling me, I want to be called mom. Just like Aaron said, why he had to hurt me. Besides, what else is there that matters? Parenting matters, she said. Fair enough, it does that. Now the girl she got when she was 5 years old is 10. At the rate that girl is going, she might herself become a mother at 12. To say nothing of the two boys. Just the girl and her attachment disorder. She needs to pet Patti constantly or she cries and carries on. She's my size trying to ride her mother's hip like a toddler, exhausting Patti completely day in and out with no respite, turning her into this shape: hates to be touched. That is Patti's shape now. Mother, Wife, Professor, Recoiling. Guilty. Anxious. Committed. Admirable. I ask her, how is your marriage holding up? She says, 'It will survive, we are nothing if not loyal, but I hate going home and I couldn't have sex if my life depended on it.'

What if you're wrong about what you assume to be true and your life does actually depend on being able to do what you cannot? That's what I'm wondering.

The Girl comes for family dinner. Aaron enjoys these evenings a great deal. He is not as easily exhausted as I am, for one thing. I wish she'd shut up and make earrings with me (let's melt crayons), but say la vee. She says at one point that of course we too will have to go through foster parent certification classes to be able to babysit for her. Aaron readily assents, can't wait, little kids are so great. I say, Of course we will do whatever is needed. He seems a better stepfather than I am a mother in this. Perhaps I am a better spouse, if that is measured in suffering, it's hard to say. Here's what I do know: no part of me wants to take foster parent classes whatsoever. I do not want to take that shape at all. I do not want to sit through youcanthaveababy classes weekly. Not even ONE week, let alone months' worth. Pure Torture. I probably will suffer that (try to) because they both want it of me, and I respect that, and I understand I have an obligation to try to be good in my relationships to each of them. Mother. Wife. I will try to allow whatever that might mean for me. But I absolutely do not want to, and will be summoning all my faith in the forces of a benevolent universe that anything but more pain will come of it. For myself, I do not desire a troubled foster child. And truly, I cannot really make myself want a different baby either; I want the one I had, have, who did nothing to regret. I do not want anything between me and that baby, obliterating her like she doesn't count. I would have preferred her alive longer, but kids aren't obliged to fulfill your wishes. Say la vee. If a baby falls out of the sky like an Eli, it would be in my arms and I would surely want it, and then have to face the consequences of that fact, which at that point would be a home study classes whatever it is to be able to keep the baby behind whose ear my nose is already parked. In which case, fine. Otherwise, no.

I was up all night,
thinking: no. Other things DO
matter to us both.

I want nothing more getting stuck between myself and Aaron like a poppy seed between gum and tooth. Hurting. I want nothing between my skin and his. Not now. I want nothing forcing me to contort to fulfill something else. Lover is a new shape I've taken. A lover has desires and that is what shape she takes, the shape of herself.

Finally morning is near enough. I turn towards him and breathe. And breathe. Quiet. I think: yes. I want him. I wake him up.

The half-life of love is forever. Junot Diaz, "A Cheater's Guide to Love"


I got eyebrows waxed yesterday and the wax was too hot and took the skin of one of my eyelids off.  I'm nursing my eyelid (ouch), grading a mountain of end of term assignments the content of which I decided back in August, hence the Diaz (sigh), while listing to an Adam Sandler album and/or reading books on my kindle phone app as my students sweat out their final exams. 

Your life’s work could be scrubbing piss from a toilet bowl. Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it. Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

She had to get through her life one way or another. No reason not to take any comfort the world seemed to offer her. If none of it made sense to her now, that might change if she let it. If none of it meant anything, after all, no harm done. Marilyn Robinson, Lila

VIRGO Instead of looking to relationships to make you happy, look to them to make you conscious of what has been weighing heavily inside you at an unconscious level. 

Jackie smoked us at Cards Against Humanity. Xmas is almost here, making me nostalgic.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/03/hands-up-dont-choke-eric-garner-was-murdered-by-police-for-no-reason/ that video, heartbreaking

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2014.html?referrer=