She had hardly done any writing lately – ... I asked her what the problem was. ‘I call it summing up,’ she said with a cheerful squawk. Whenever she conceived of a new piece of work, before she had got very far she would find herself summing it up. Often it only took one word: tension, for instance, or mother-in-law, though strictly speaking that was three. As soon as something was summed up, it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck, and she could go no further with it. Why go to the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up? And it wasn’t only her own work – she found herself doing it to other people’s, and had discovered that even the masters, the works she had always revered, allowed themselves by and large to be summed up. Even Beckett, her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness. She would feel the word start to rise, and she would try to hold it down but it kept coming, rising and rising until it had popped irreversibly into her head. And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people – she was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over. ~Outline: A Novel. Rachel Cusk.

"Humankind has come a long way since its beginnings and people of the future won’t be able to imagine the barbaric early days in which we fought with one another, in groups or individually, over little more than a cup of cocoa. But not even then will it be possible to soften the fate of a woman for whom no-one has made a place in their life." ~ _The Door_,  Magda Szabo

What is worse than Pearl Jam radio on Pandora at 3 am? Not much.  Except a fussy screaming baby who only shuts up for shitty 90s music. Thank Christ it isn't Morrissey that does it :/

"Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I…do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards..."

http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/nathaniel-rateliff-the-night-sweats-sob/2888764

Love the a capella

kissmyassolantern

Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. "Thanatopsis", William Cullen Bryant...I remember studying that poem in college, when I was smart and death was far away. I've done and been umpteen kinds of stupid since, and from here seems like dying just sucks balls

“So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.” Audre Lorde

Mark.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY (Aug. 31). The exploration you do in September helps you to join with your lost self – a process that opens the world to you. (I hope so) Next month features a group event that launches you as an individual.(eee) October will involve travel.(hopefully not a funeral) November will bring family into your business – and maybe you won’t like it at first, but ultimately it will help. (help what?) Pisces and Gemini people adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 5, 40, 1, 14 and 36.

29th pond

I swam the length and breadth of it every day at all hours under the various skies. Then stared at it the rest of the time. Quieting my mind so I could hear it again.

Life (Goes on) = Managing Ass(holes)

Today is day one of my vacation. Finally. A year ago today, Aaron and I met in a Greek restaurant, and we've been resolving to mend ever since. This morning, the day started with the great dane shitting all over the kitchen, because at 11 years old (dane lifespans are 6-8 years) her asshole just basically doesn't work anymore, the rubber band is worn out on it. I'm the woman, so project management of the dane's bowels falls to me. This afternoon, Jackie arrives for a 3-week visit, the first time she or anyone outside our immediate family has seen Aaron since last year. She will require constant meals and moderated but steady wine, otherwise she rummages in the back of the fridge, eats things that have been in their since the jurassic age, and sneak-drinks kettle one shots over frozen blobs of minute maid limeade, habits which are not advisable for her also aging ass presumably. Aaron is the man, so grilling food stuffs and keeping wine glasses full falls to him. Etc.

"If you did not want much, there was plenty."~Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

nailed it mothafucka

I've got a wee hate-crush on Gordon Ramsay

still excavating my office, discarding

huh.

I hear my mother coming out of my own mouth more and more, even by the voice in my own head. That's what she'd say about that article, "huh", as in "welp ya don't see that every day!" I'm sitting here drinking coffee, reading morning news feeds, internally clucking,  "huh" and "o my!" Then I'll think "I should exercise before I get ready" and I won't. Then I'll look for something to wear that's "comfy for me", I.e. that won't hug my ass so tightly that it reminds me to exercise all damn day. I'll forget to eat, then ravenous by the time I'm making dinner, I'll shove ingredients into my mouth raw, probably talking around them as I go. I will inevitably tell a story in which I come off as an idiot then I'll laugh at my own story. From dawn to dusk like that I morph into my mother over time more and more.

And so do you. Think about that.

too late - like the climate, human intellect is fubar

bears and food. I could seriously watch that bear and/or that dude eat a fish all day long.

"Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it." ~The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa.

By the end of work yesterday, I was pissed-weepy in my boss's office, bitching him half into the ground / pleading for either limit of or reward for workworkwork. But of course the rub with all the freedom I have in my job is that when it is killing me, I'm killing myself. "What do you need? What hole are you filling with all this work?..." I felt like a half gored angry animal. I am only doing this to keep my little world safe. "What world?" The one where you still get to read in it, that that's what you do with your fucking time, even though no fucking reading-is-fundamental trucks come around anymore, even though you, the Dean of a liberal arts school, probably don't even remember those trucks or give a shit, and the few people around here who do might only admit to reading Hegel or some other fucking dead white asshole and only do so as compensation like dickless wonders driving sportcarswhatever. "Some people might actually like Hegel." Armscrossy. "Ok, what is your GOAL, specifically?" I want full professor, I want when everything falls apart and I'm standing in the rubble to have a base pay and job description both that means I can at least go read, that I can at least sit amidst the wreckage and have the solace of time and a book, I want to have that so that at least cannot be taken away from me no matter what else might happen. Wa.

"At their core, literature and prayer each carry an element of faith. For me, it takes faith to write, just like it takes faith to believe that "the Word became flesh," that it was given its own skin and bones. Both, I would argue, are redemptive by their own accord."

It's the garden show this weekend. Ligularia, always the star of the show. Almost everything I've planted has not turned out quite like I planned. Little things got huge. Stolid looking things spread like hell. Volunteers showed up. But nobody knows that but me, so I can pretend I intended it all. I think of the whole thing as a tool for seeing my days add up, a secret diary of mostly 'woops'. Yesterday we hid from the tourists, in the backyard mostly where Ears and I prepped a new bed for sweet peas that will barely produce in the mostly shade so we will eat them as one-offs. We like that. It was quiet. Ears said simply, "I like this." Then we took a walk in a very light rain and found discarded loaded mulberry branches and I plucked and ate berries by the side of the road. Today is father's day. I called Tbone a day early, and tipsy on beer in the late morning he launched into his all life is energy speech. He thinks about dying a lot, and when he does he thinks "all life is energy", then he tells you for the umpteenth time "let me tell ya something all life is energy". I handed the phone to Ears who told him about the black hole that NASA found that eats a nearby star and then spits it back out in pulses that sound just like a human heartbeat. I think, I should get a honeysuckle and train it up a tree trunk so the baby will have that familiar flower image in her memory -

- and I wonder, did anyone when I was a baby seed my early life with little scraps of history like that, shrouds for my own dead whose arms did not live to hold me(?).   Later tonight after we've planted peas and peppers, we are going to grill steaks, give presents, then watch the premiere of True Detective. I like the ordinary days best of all. I wish they didn't have to end.

this creased

"Ezekiel 3:1. Eat the scroll."

Still on a Dillard kick. I like how I wander in and out of her, distracted by and then lured into footnotes. Blessedly, Time Warner sucks, and thus I am trapped without Internet except for my phone (my kindle), waiting for the repair guy who never shows, and so I can read.

"You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise.” “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness…through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed." ~Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

I'm losing my fucking mind with all this work.  WHY AM I DOING IT?  I know it's some kind of stress response, that I'm trying to contain all the things that might happen by doing everything everwhichway to control the outcomes, that I'm worried about everybody going to college at the same time, Aaron in graduate school (what did we do in grad school besides lose ourselves and sleep with the wrong people? I discovered Derrida, which was not nearly enough of an upside), Ears and TJ getting hit with the first tsunami of Choices To Be Made, the Nun leaving me, all of that, so I work and work and work and the more I work the more work is given to me to do until I'm obliterated. But knowing all of that that doesn't make it stop. I always flee to books for answers but what if the answer I need is to the problem of not having time to read a book?

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier?intcid=mod-most-popular

"Thigmotropism is a movement in which a plant moves or grows in response to touch or contact stimuli. The prefix thigmo- comes from the Greek for "touch" (θιγμός). Usually thigmotropismoccurs when plants grow around a surface, such as a wall, pot, or trellis."

(I'm on a Dillard kick.)

I walked into a meeting late yesterday to find that I was in charge of it (again). Either I'm the only faculty member that the VP's know by name, or I'm the only one they're not scared of (I hide my crazy better than most and mine tends toward sad not mad). This time it's FERPA, about which I know utterly nothing except we've been caught breaking the law somehow, like when I looked up Aaron's record back in the day to advise him on this or that, I was breaking the law (who knew?). All I want to do is summer-read, but in five days, I have to submit a report of repentance and reform on behalf of the college to the state. In one day, my current class ends and the day after that two more classes begin. Last night, first dinner with the dreaded in - law in a year; they're still talking about what to do with the dining room set; my theory is that when the steel plants closed in South Buf, the trauma of change was so great that the people who live there counteracted it with statis in their beings and now find existential comfort in never changing the subject. I might find a niche in that, akin to the one I have at work, aka the 'mascot milf' in this case, discussed in the same hushed tones of disapproval forevermore, tsking that hints at but never outright says "she's got our boy by the dick".

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/all-possible-humanities-dissertations-considered-as-single-tweets?intcid=mod-most-popular

Teehee. I love "The name we’ve been using for this stuff is anachronistic. Here’s a better name." You have no idea how many minutes of my precious life that I'll never get back, spent discussing such things as what to call "appreciation" (in nervous hand wringing over what's measurable) or "minority" (in nervous hand wringing over feeling guilty enough about white privilege). Etcetcetc.  Not to mention the time I spent writing the dissertation itself (aka drinking genny pounders).

I love books. Why I can't just be a snob anymore about it, I don't know really. If I could, if we could, could say we read because we read and we think you should too or you'll be a boring dumbass, it might be off putting but at least the humanities might stop acting like the nervous fat ugly kid with daddy/mommy issues cutting itself in cries for help (armscrossy)

"Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. And more, moreover. Or perhaps not." —Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish

card of the day

Yeah I dunno. Work something, I think. But I just can't tell what. Dean and Mathzilla, they're going game of thrones on each other and it's not nearly as cool when there are no flying dragons in the plot. Plus it feels like that's just the beginning of the chum in the water power grabbing that's going to ensue as The Nun pulls up the stakes. What happens to the mascot in situations like that?, I wonder, because that's what I am.

Or maybe it's personal, the Tower. And I'll go insane (again).

"I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out." Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

"Inspiring faculty" reads the strategic plan. Someone asks the Planning Douche, what does that mean? He begins to explain inspiration, that "feeling to be more...do great things". Headtilts, like confused dogs, across the room. Someone else asks, "But who is inspiring what specifically?" This goes on for a long tedious set of minutes, maybe just 5, feels like 30. Asshole math chair is behind me talking on her cell phone, Dean is pouting in the corner, we are in charge of people's lives who will borrow thousands to learn from us.  I raise my hand. Planning Douche looks relieved, like I'm going to explain inspiration. "That's a present participle, Ken. It suggests that faculty will be inspired TO something. You don't mean that." Blank stare. "You don't want us to be inspired. You want us to be inspirational. Right?" Yes!! Then say inspirational?, someone suggests in a questioning helpful tone. "That's just semantics," he says. Okay. (What's semantics?, someone whispers to me. "It means fuck you.")

"The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones." Cheryl Hughes

I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I’m melting away. I can’t explain it to you but I do know when it started. It began after he said, “You not the woman I want.”
 “Neither am I.”   
~God Help the Child, Toni Morrison

everybody knows lalala

"But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter, will remind you that you are not who you once were, for that person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an out-grown garment."

 --Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost

 "The Information: During the last seventy-two hours of a person’s life, there will be a discoloration of toes and kneecaps, a marked coolness of hands and feet. There will be mental confusion, and a mottling of the skin, which will start at the feet and progress up the legs. When mottling reaches the upper thighs, death is imminent. Two minutes after the heart stops beating, the person is still aware. This is what happens during the course of a natural death, an easy death. There are other scenarios—a bleed-out, for instance. If there is bleeding from the mouth and nose, we are to cover the blood with dark towels. There will be a large quantity of blood, and we want to spare the family the sight of it. If there is an internal bleed-out from a tumor in the esophagus, say, or a tumor in the lungs, there will be no visible blood. The instructor says if this is happening, we hold the patient’s hand and wait. Death will take only a few minutes. Hold the patient’s hand and wait. The simplicity is so moving. It strikes me that the physical details of the dying body are as intimate and predictable as those of the body making love." 
--Abigail Thomas
What Comes Next and How to Like It

"I do not want anything stirred up that I can’t handle by myself...but now, instead of being safe and sound and insulated against desire (shudder), I was suddenly thinking other kinds of thoughts, having other kinds of memories. I went and bought Guitar Town by Steve Earle instead of listening to my better self, and I even played it indoors because when I got home the kids were out. After a bit, and despite my new relationship with time, I began to experience impatience. One song at a time was taking too long. I began to wonder if there wasn’t some way I could cram all this music in at once. Oh hell. That’s called fucking." ~What Comes Next and How to Like It, a memoir by Abigail Thomas.

This book is pretty god damned funny, so I actually bought it after the kindle sample ran out and I'm now sitting in a half filled half fixed tub (o hot water how I love thee), giggling.

When my son listens to music, he looks down and his eyes move left to right as if he is reading. He is watching sound. There things like that about you, which only your mother observes and keeps.

"These notes have no intended audience, except for my conscience and God...It was if I had been flayed and my bowels exposed, inspected, groped, found wanting. It was not the judgment that had been passed on me, it was the fact of the exposure that disturbed me so. What was internal had been made external." ~John the Pupil

"weekdays"

"....it shook her to realize that some things, even those things far away from her in space and time, and especially those things that she loved, continued to exist, continued to endure. That anxiety and that wonder, mixed as they were, must be what love was." ~Prudence, David Treuer

   "According to the Biblical stories, Peter was Christ's closest disciple, but acted like a traitor when trouble came. After Christ was arrested, in the hours before the trial, Peter denied knowing his cherished teacher three different times. His fear trumped his love, leading him to violate his sacred commitment. Is there anything remotely comparable to that scenario developing in your own sphere, Virgo? If you recognize any tendencies in yourself to shrink from your devotion or violate your highest principles, I urge you to root them out. Be brave. Stay strong and true in your duty to a person or place or cause that you love."

"It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming." A Prayer Journal, Flanner O'Connor

"If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings." ~Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine.

the growl at 2:10ish, the CourtneyCox-esque side shuffle dance near the end, all of it

"If friendship has a cost, then perhaps it is that at its heart there is always a burden of guilt." ~ In the Light of What we Know, by Zia Haider Rahman.

I woke up in the night thinking about that quote (from the book I started yesterday after I'd finished, finally, the painfully accurate Abandonment - yup, bonkers lock changing and painful extraction of self bits from idea-of-self like shards of glass from a cheese, I did all of it except stick my ass in the face of a weird neighbor thank god). For the eclipse, I had thought yesterday to doublecheck that I have no Gemini in my chart, and no, I have no air anywhere of any kind. Just Virgo (mutable earth) all day long with big dollops of Pisces (mutable water) and Leo (fixed fire). I am hot mud. You cardinal and air signs make no intuitive sense to me whatsoever. You are Other. You get mad, or sad, any kind of upset, even abruptly happy/moved, and just blow around so it seems to me, hot or cold air in my face. Like a stuckcrust I feel you all over me but it's on the outside, and I stir myself inside out to internalize it, a process that is often uncomfortable, occasionally/inevitably painful. To you, I must seem like a vast plain, my fluidity hidden from view, a distant threat of lava under quiet. You would have to be highly motivated to stick with me (on me), waiting as I churn. But blow away from me, and how does it feel? You leave me baked fetid, wanting your breeze. Do I go with you even as you think you're over me, grit in your veins?

Aoife O’Donovan: Hearts And Bones
bonus track Colin Meloy: Summertime it's still cold as balls outside, but hope springs eternal and I'll be seeing The Decemberists next week at UBCFA

Beautiful moment late last week when I realized this week was spring break. I gave the cuddle buddies a bath last night in anticipation of the nothing I'd be doing today. "Nothing", that's what most people call *reading*. I'm catching up on listening to some music at the moment (I love this version of 'Fever', but to be honest I love every version of it, like every kind of chocolate covered anything), still lying naked in bed, sipping coffee and reading the illustrated Thought Forms (Bessant) and trying to get through The Days of Abandonment (Ferrante), which gets a mixed review of it being too good to bear it more than a few sentences at a time, the narrator's mind trapped in self-referential habits of loss, dismantling itself. Meanwhile, Aaron just texted the news that he's losing his job by way of the facility he is at being closed.  Say la vee, I think. The Witch told me that would happen, more or less (FYI if you're a Gemini, a lunar eclipse is gearing up for a hit on 4/4, at which time you will abruptly lose something that you probably started getting rid of last year around this time, consciously or not - if you have Gemini in any of your houses, it will apply to you in that area of your life. If you forgot how to check that, refer back here for a basic natal chart.) Change scares me, everything scares me, but I wasn't always this way and it can't stay like that - he hates that job and so I must have faith that the universe is leading him (us) somewhere better. He cast his beer and I also cast my spell yesterday, I wrote it all over him like grapherotica, my intention to strain fear out of my lovethinking by handing over the power to him to heal (me), like agreeing to the surgery you've long held out against, and viola he loses his job before noon. Sooo, yea.

"And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself." ~ Days of Abandonment

"Affirmation"

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything. 

~Donald Hall

if these (inner) walls could talk..

I'm moving. New building, new office. I've had my office for, like, most of my adult life or something. Since before I bought my first house in Buffalo. I have tree rings of life in it, all that will be thrown away. So I spend an hour here and there, looking in a drawer.

the be good tanyas - in my time of dying (dylan)

"Whoever travels without a guide needs 200 years for a two-day journey." That's an old Sufi saying sometimes attributed to the poet Rumi. I don't think it's accurate in all cases. Sometimes we are drawn to wander into frontiers that few people have visited and none have mastered. There are no guides! On other occasions, we can't get the fullness of our learning experience unless we are free to stumble and bumble all by ourselves. A knowledgeable helper would only interfere with that odd magic. But right now, Virgo, I believe the Sufi saying holds true for you. Where you're headed, you would benefit from an advisor, teacher, or role model. 

Hmmmmm.

I went looking for the entry below, which I had unblogged as it turns out, I don't remember why, maybe trying to erase some of the damage done me by the final picture wherein my ovaries were kicking out 4-8 eggs per a month and exploding when I wrote it, when actually I became too sick to remake that trip. I just booked it again finally, which is why it's on my mind.

I didn't take the trip insurance this time.

_____________________
3/5/2012:
redux

That pic was taken by me, alone in a palatial hotel suite in Boston at the American Literature Association. It was half gambit, that trip. By half, I wanted and needed to attend the conference, to begin again to think academically, to write ... the other half was John, who seemed when I booked the trip months earlier to be finally willing to try to function, drive in a car together, stuff like that, and who by the time I needed the ride was long gone (again, and amazingly enough, finally). I took that pic to mark the time, my alone time, staring at ceiling and doing nothing but thinking. About all that I was missing in my life, which was not John actually. And I thought of all the people who had partnered and how I would not; I thought about Aaron, in Mexico that weekend, for instance. I thought about how the fact of not partnering was not, in itself, overly troubling to me. It was reception I was missing, an interlocutor .. I had lost the will and ability to build meaning on my own for everything, to tell the story of myself to myself alone, to decide everything and set the value for everything. I was not suffering from "o woe is me, I shall grow old alone", I was suffering from writing such a thing either as a joke or serious fear depending on TO WHOM I WAS WRITING, which had become, well, nobody. I mean, maybe someone is reading this, but nobody immediately implicated in the content or outcome. If I set my hair on fire, your pillow won't scorch. I don't need an audience so much as someone to wrestle with, to write for not just at. Otherwise, I can't keep from going to/too quiet. Now, Aaron does not read this blog, the writing I do for him I prefer to be in midair (alive). Does that count? (Am I writing?)

I am going back to Boston. Same conference. Only this time, I will have a partner with me and I will be giving a paper. I will have someone listening with interest to a paper I'm going to give about the concept of mating versus marriage, in literature ostensibly, my favorite author to whom I return for solace endlessly, whom I reread (this) again last night. I have yet to write that paper, I don't know what it will say, I don't know what it will matter that Aaron exits vis a vis what I will say, what I'll decide I think. I don't know more than I do know about many things. I don't know how it will turn out. What will my intellect do with Aaron with me there? How will that not matter, also? Everything has changed inside me since the last time I wrote and read aloud a 'treatise'. On this subject in particular, how mating and the spirit are entwined and at odds, every single cell in body has turned over since I left a husband who tried to kill me, passed through years with a lover whose indifference and chronic absence was infinitely gentle by comparison, and now to this place I am now, with much more that I cannot say (that I cannot write about at all, at least not yet) than I can in words I've found.

I have a pile of books in front of me right now. I'm looking at them, anxious not to be speechless.




redux (internal view)

"I will not wait to love as best as I can," says writer Dave Eggers. "We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love." That's your keynote for the coming weeks, Virgo. That's your wake-up call and the rose-scented note under your pillow and the message scrawled in lipstick on your bathroom mirror. If there is any part of you that believes love will be better or fuller or more perfect in the future, tell that part of you to shut up and embrace this tender command: Now is the time to love with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind.  (armscrossy)

where do we begin the rubble or our sins, lalalaa

"Art is long; life is short; opportunity is fleeting; judgement is difficult; experience is deceitful." Hippocrates (sounds like a Virgo horoscope)

bonus (better) track

In 1962, Edward Albee published his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It won numerous awards and is still performed by modern theater groups. Albee says the title came to him as he was having a beer at a bar in New York City. When he went to the restroom, he spied the words "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap on the mirror. I urge you to be alert for that kind of inspiration in the coming days, Virgo: unexpected, provocative, and out of context. You never know when and where you may be furnished with clues about the next plot twist of your life story. 

Today's running mix started with and I think, 'she'll probably be better after a bout or two of [failed] rehab,' which brought me to
eyespy chet faker in the audience of that one (sitting to the right, in his knit hat), so repost: (that dude is hot) ...cool down

channeling some Annie magick

When she conjures the harmonica mid-spell - nice.  If I could do that, I'd be tempted to conjure an alligator-filled moat while I was at it, but she doesn't even need that. That look on her face at 5:26, hell, nobody in their right mind would fuck with her. 

M. doesn't live here anymore so I rarely get to see her. My loss. I'm grateful she still works here by proxy anyway from Bloomington. When she comes to town we begin talking mid sentence. The relationships you count on. Maybe or maybe not a number of people would call me if they needed bail. Who would I call? She'd be topping my (extremely you're-probably-not-on-it short) list. I have a torrent of words for her: ... there was the dog fashion show and a man there reminded me of my grandpa because he truly loved it but the rest clapped when the clapping time came and I was wondering my god when does the requirement to affirm the world on cue end (??) while at that time I was so frightened that I'd stopped feeling frightened, that's how acute it was at that point, like an ice burn, and I could feel Aaron buzzing my phone in my pocket worried about me running late and what that might mean but I couldn't respond because I was middogshow and the pug was wearing a tootoo and I needed to concentrate on what I was doing because I do not offload the problem of dying onto low wage workers to relieve (!), even though I'm there here in this job to get more of the dying to clap, and oddly they're right that I'm the right person for that job, though I have yet to convince my mate that the existence of an untangled inner life is not a wrong nor is rubbing salve-of-pugs on it for that matter. We are all going to die, none of coping with fears backwards is a failure, I like a crock pot stew and there's no crime in that. No crime in loving the pug in drag or not, either damn way, or a non pug related Way entirely if you can find a Way to authentically Be and inevitably Not Be at all. And it has zero to do with the normative narrative of marriage in our culture for God's sake that what I want is to actually be with the man and have access to his inner life(s)... She laughs and understands what I am saying, so little appetite anymore for sorting anything to judge it rather than to just *get it*. Once or many times, small or big things happened to him, a can of spaghettios he hammered opened and ate cold (or whatever), made him (like M.) anxious in particular ways. And that's all. There is no guilt in it. If you're guilty or believe you're not either, condemnation on your lips, frankly that entire framework seems too beside the point to engage with at all. Language fails me in ways it didn't used to or I didn't notice, then I might bawl. Like a baby. Maybe that's a kind of rebirth, she wonders. Yea, maybe.

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"According to your questionnaire responses, your attachment-related anxiety score is 4.22, on a scale ranging from 1 (low anxiety) to 7 (high anxiety). Your attachment-related avoidance score is 3.44, on a scale ranging from 1 (low avoidance) to 7 (high avoidance).  We have plotted your two scores in the two-dimensional space defined by attachment-related anxiety and avoidance. Your approximate position in this space is denoted by the blue dot.

As you can see in this graph, the two dimensions of anxiety and avoidance can be combined to create interesting combinations of attachment styles. For example people who are low in both attachment-related anxiety and avoidance are generally considered secure because they don't typically worry about whether their partners are going to reject them and they are comfortable being emotionally close to others. Combining your anxiety and avoidance scores, you fall into the region of the space. Previous research on attachment styles indicates that preoccupied people tend to have highly conflictual relationships. Although they are comfortable expressing their emotions, preoccupied individuals often experience a lot of negative emotions, which can often interfere with their relationships."


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I'm teaching myself attachment theory. (You can take the test yourself here.) So I can go to the principles office today and teach it to her. Because although they teach you that stuff in shrink school, they don't stress it because mostly nothing can be done about how you feel only how you act, so says Patti, who has little defense of these facts of her profession. (I can't defend my profession either, but still, grrrrr). Those feelings can change a lot - this I know because my blue dot has moved significantly. Our marriage has rewired me. So I'm putting my foot down. Give me ANALYSIS, whether it's "in" or not in counseling these days (armscrossy). My anger used to scare me and is still one of the things in myself and others that I least like to be around. But it's nothing compared to Grief. If I was difficult back when I was a standoffish beotch with my 'dismissive avoidant' blue dot, I'm 'anxious preoccupied' hell to pay now.  I go looking for Aaron's unconscious like a woman looking for my pair of tweezers at the bottom of a drawer.  

But there are definite upsides to the work of intimacy! I now actually like Valentine's day, for instance, aka do-something-together-that-make-you-nervous day.

Find that because you're doing it together, it's not scary at all!

"We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars... We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time. We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed to reach the body within the body." ~"Tear It Down", Jack Gilbert

give me things that I wanted to know lalala

.... was facilitating with a couple I will call Alice and Eric. Alice had had an affair, now over, and Eric had recently found out about it. Their purpose in therapy was to restore their relationship—that is, to rebuild trust. The therapy had been making it clear to all of us that it was extremely difficult for Eric to trust his wife again, even though she had voluntarily ended the other relationship and had made a sincere commitment to fidelity and to working things out. Enough time had elapsed so that it did seem reasonable—to all three of us—that Eric could at least begin to trust Alice again. But that was not happening, even after some rather intense therapy sessions. During a particularly poignant moment, Eric was crying and I suddenly realized that his issue was not about trusting Alice. It was bigger than that. It was about his inability to trust anyone fully. Eric’s grief in that moment was for all the betrayals in his life from childhood until now. His tears were about how each one had shut him down so that now, when trust was appropriate, he just could not summon it up. The fear that is natural in all grief had, for him, become more like a phobia. [ya]

For Alice it was a history of not being trusted—what became our next focus—in Eric’s presence. When a partner is sitting silently in the room where our personal work is being addressed and processed, we feel accompanied by her, and intimacy progresses in abundant ways. Within each session, I turned to the other partner and asked how she or he was feeling and what she or he saw in the work the partner did...The work for this couple was so primal, so basic, that it was like starting the whole relationship over again, not just recovering from the recent infidelity. I wondered how many couples are at that ground-floor level and don’t realize it...We all found out that the real starting point was opening the wounded trust from long ago and working toward healing that too. ~Daring to Trust, by David Richo, author or How to be an Adult in a Relationship

(The wife's truster was cracked and his was kinda fubar entirely.~from There are No Safewords in Real Life, by Wantdogski)

Fatty snorting like a creature. ~ A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

..angrily, "Even a cow has horns."

I began praying whenever I thought of it—at my locker, during lunch, even in the middle of a quiz. I prayed more than I had ever prayed before, but I found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into the nightly conversations with God. How could chanting and burning incense undo three minutes of a sunny August afternoon? It was like trying to move a sheet of blank paper from one end of a table to the other by blinking so fast that you started a breeze. [love that analogy]

I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on television in the living room. To me, the movie meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness.

Why hadn’t people been nicer when it mattered? I wondered. [right?]

The quietness made me feel that the home was not as good as the hospital, that the nursing home was where the world put people who were not important, people who could be put away someplace and forgotten

The realization disturbed me. I saw that one day I would be nothing like who I was right then. I felt all alone

The sight of my mother in the kitchen caused my chest to hurt. Her belief that Birju could get better made me feel that she didn’t love us, that she valued believing something ridiculous over taking care of us, that she was willing to let us be hurt so she could have her hope.

I wanted us to be close, and so I began believing that we were.

At school, the guilt and sadness were like wearing clothes still damp from the wash. Whenever I moved, I felt as though I were touching something icy.

'I lie in my bed and listen to her cough and am glad she is coughing because this means she is alive. Soon she will die, and I will no longer be among the lucky people whose wives are sick. Fortunate are the men whose wives cough. Fortunate are the men who cannot sleep through the night because their wives’ coughing wakes them.' Writing the story changed me. Now I began to feel as if I were walking through my life collecting things that could be used later: the sound of a Ping-Pong ball was like a woman walking in high heels, the shower running was like television static. Seeing things as material for writing protected me. When a boy tried to start a fight by saying, “You’re vegetarian—does that mean you don’t eat pussy?” I thought this would be something I could use in a story..

As I wrote, I felt proud at my toughness for taking whatever was happening to me and turning it into something else.

Passing through the marshes covered in snow, I would have an aching sense of nostalgia. I was convinced that things would get worse and that one day I would look back on this period with longing. [right]

~all from Family Life.  I'm not sure I'd have given it the Booker, but it was pretty good.  

I didn't feel well all weekend, so I started rereading book 2 of the Harkness witch trilogy because book 3 just came out, so.  I wanted comfort reading, like raman with an egg.  Those are the books about witches written by an historian who throws in backstories to Marlowe plays etc, total schlockporn for PhD's in which I can wallow, going in and out of (simple) Latin and obscure references (I love a footnote!) to Malleus Maleficarum etc.  It strikes me reading it this time that book 2 is all about whether they're "really" married or not, the witch and the vampire, what constitutes that, whether a promise made to a witch is binding in itself or if his vampire-family has to approve. The witch moves through continents and centuries, staring down one vampire in-law after another, getting more and more pissed off, and then stronger.  Reading it, I feel like I did when I used to read those novels in which girls murdered their enemies and fed them to the rose bushes as mulch typa deal, when I was little-and-outraged.  Patti and I were just talking about this the other day, what it means, the series that tweens want in any given historical moment, which is now the Hunger Games series so it's all about resisting the state for tweens now, but when we were 12, it was all about personal disempowerment, and the longing for belonging punished cruelly and then wammo you were sorry you'd been such an asshole. We had read Carrie like it was the book of revelation.  

First it had been Ysabeau who's wished me out of her son's life.  Backwin has made no effort to hide his disdain.  Matthew's friend Hamish was wary of me and Kit openly disliked me.  Now it was Phillipe's turn. I stood and waited for Matthew's father to look at me.  When he did, I met his eyes squarely.  His flickered with surprise. .. ~Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness

Vanishing into books, I felt held. ~from Family Life, Akhil Sharma

I should be grading papers about Lydia Davis. Or I should go to yoga at noon.  I could be working on my story about the couple who buys a blow-up doll to play the part of the counselor in their DIY marriage therapy sessions, or writing an entry about this week's adventures with Low Tzu. But what I am doing is reading this book.

I cried so hard that I lost my breath. When this happened, I became detached from myself. I walked and gasped and, as I did, I could feel my unhappiness walking beside me, waiting for my breath to return so that it could climb back inside me.

In the mornings I prayed, and at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping but couldn’t, I spoke with God. One rainy night, the room was gray with light from the street and my mother was lying nearby, her breath whistling. I was on my strip of foam and I asked God whether he minded being prayed to only in need. “You think of your toe only when you stub it,” he said. “Still, it’s better to pray just to pray.” “It’s human nature. I don’t mind it.” God looked like Clark Kent...

I loved my job today. I knitted word socks. It's cold, in general mostly. People need good socks. You don't think that's necessary, maybe it's even a decadence,  but you're wrong.

"Complete relax. Always remember one thing, you have nothing to lose because you never had anything at the first place, life and death is the same thing, just struggle and try to kill yourself, the more you suffer you must be happy...is like Indian marriage, no choice." ~Bikram Choudhury

LBJ buys pants from his white house phone - the burp right before the word 'bunghole' suggests that TJ could actually become president after all. Come to think of it, his shopping at his desk at work for clothes that will fit his ass right and thus running late for a funeral (in his case MacArthur's funeral, not literature's) suggests I might have been president, ha.

And after, no one will really ever remember it. Like the greatest crimes, it will be as if it never happened. The suffering, the deaths, the sorrow, the abject, pathetic pointlessness of such immense suffering by so many; maybe it all exists only within these pages and the pages of a few other books. Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not. ~ from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan.

For breakfast, I had blueberry crisp that I made last night. And nobody died or even cried. That's enough. If I were Virginia Woolf, I could write that properly.  The woman would stand in her kitchen feeling keenly that she is not suffering, feeling it so fiercely that it would double her over except that the lack of suffering's beauty is that it is not a punch to the gut, wishing for the world to stop and value toast properly, thinking that at many times and in many places a woman can make herself toast any time she wants it. She knows how to bake and crisp and butter if only for the grain and safety that are required for the task, and that wherever there is a smell of crisp there must also be flour, and safety, enough. And what a wonder that is, enough to cry over anyplace and any time a woman cannot have it, which is also common, she knows, and that at this very moment that she is rubbing crisp into the roof of her mouth with her tongue, another woman is somewhere without grain or too full of grief to swallow, and for that woman she cries as she stands in her warm kitchen looking at the frozen pond through the laced window, praying nonsensically please and thank you at god knows what, swallowing blueberries and a mouth full of teary spit.

for my father/the throbbing in my head

A couple of years ago I printed the contents of this blog out and at that time it was about 3 reams of papers worth. Why do I write all this crap? I don't look back at it ever. I remember some stuff, like trying on ugly shit at am vets just for a hoot or whatever, and I have no idea if I wrote those things down at the time, and there's no relation between what I remember and what's in all the records of various kinds. I remember the day my hamster died because I remember it, not because I wrote about it my 5th grade diary, which only my mother has ever reread (eyeroll). I don't remember ever going to the bon ton for anything nor imaginatively castrating certain persons though I kept a pointless record of having done both apparently (shrug). I guess at the time I write, I do so just to process, a kind of thinking out loud as if in conversation with someone, like talking to a friend on the phone: "Girlfriend, why do I keep old records of my inner garbage? Well I don't know, why do I keep jeans that don't fit anymore? I know right, that's stupid, we should throw all this flotsam away, divest ourselves of our former first person singulars. OK let's do that and while we're at it let's drop the first person for a while altogether because I've been thinking about it and ya know how other people don't write down what they're thinking and doing all the time? Yea. Well like so nobody knows what they're thinking but them which if you think about it is amazingly free. True, in that case if they say shit like 'I did such-n-such for some awesome enlightened generous reason', nobody can pull out an old journal and be like o no you didn't and prove you were thinking like an asshole right? Yea exactly, if you're not carving a tablet as you go you can forget about it or revise the whole story in retrospect. Right and also, think of Ears he never writes down what he's thinking and doesn't say either which is like his own private island of inaccessible selfhood. Yeah man, I've always wanted my own island. Totally! On my own island I could get a weave and buy a glitter dress then later be like o no I didn't if I felt like it, like if it turns out St Peter disapproves of whitegirl weaves then I can be like 'what weave?' Lol, right, a journal is like a dead body, better not to have one lying around at all and if you do then you should at least burn that shit. Lol, YA. And lets face it, you're not Anne Frank recording significant history, you're just horny and/or hateful on paper mostly. True that. The glitter dress is bangin, by the way. Thanks. But however many years from now it might probably look like your 80s pennyloafers would look to you now. Exactly, I'm going to rock it then FORGET IT. Good idea, don't be blogging a picture of that shit. Lol. Seriously, and try third person writing or not at all, go back to just posting music links that may or may not be referential. Right, and then nobody will play the music in either case. Right, of course. And the third person character who may or may not pretend castrate whomever and/or who thinks about pointless stupid shit all the time AIN'T THE WRITER. Right. Post fucking quotes without explaining why. Lol, right right..."

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow



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VIRGO: Have you been tapping into your proper share of smart love, interesting beauty, and creative mojo? Are you enjoying the succulent rewards you deserve for all the good deeds and hard work you've done in the past eight months? If not, I am very upset. In fact, I would be livid and mournful if I found out that you have not been soaking up a steady flow of useful bliss, sweet revelations, and fun surprises. Therefore, to ensure my happiness and well-being, I COMMAND you to experience these goodies in abundance. [I do love a good command.]

(8 months. That'd be June.)

…pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

We went the principal’s office.  That’s what he calls going to the shrink.  A ‘boner killer’.  I laugh at both these names for counseling.  I laugh at many things he says. He has different kinds of laughs.  I suppose we all do.  I was thinking about that part of the time, about our different amused sounds.  I have a snort when I’m surprised by something that hits me as funny, and I also have what he calls a patronizing sound, a kind of “o really?!” laugh.  I think about that when the shrink starts in about my capacity to forgive (not so much) and then he says something like my mom can be difficult and I make the sound and I hear myself make it and it sounds like “difficult?!-that is a euphemism like relocation center is to prison camp” kind of laugh.  He has a laugh that sounds like “I know you want me to laugh right now”, which sounds like ha ha ha unlike his real laugh, which crinkles his eyes shut. 

Thing A: nostalgia for childhood.  I don’t know what that feels like. He does. Most of the people I have loved, many friends, they do have it too.  Then there was a coming of age for them, during which their adult selves came on and their people didn’t like them or didn’t like them being adults at all or both, and that was hard because it felt like being exiled, and struggling with that exiled feeling and making peace with it was a thing.  People like that still ache sometimes, it seems, for what it felt like to be a completely happy kid eating a certain kind of food at a certain place, etc.  I have none of that whatsoever.  I don’t know what that kind of nostalgia for a preconscious self feels like or looks like in the mind. 

Thing B: nostalgia for the future, and the value that will be in the ever shortening time between now and dead. My exiles came in adulthood, from such things as tribes to which I thought I belonged because I picked them, but lo that didn’t mean they’d pick me back. Friends, in-laws, professional pockets of people. This latest rejection by my husband’s clan was nothing new, and so that’s not what hurt(s) about it.  My nostalgia is mostly forward facing. It’s for a life I wish for, in which I eat foods in places and built good memories I will be happy to have made, and sometimes I cry for those which haven’t happened yet, and I grow very angry lest my in-laws threaten that future space of nostalgia by crippling my husband’s ability to face forward with me.  My best friend. 

What I learn in counseling: What I’m actually pissed off about.  And then I’m not so much anymore, like locating a wound and putting proper pressure on it. Experience and natural arrogance shield me from most of what would hurt about Aaron’s people rejecting who I am and that I am.  And what that doesn’t cover, an overweening sense of justice does (you can’t watch a woman half kill herself mentally physically and financially to have your son’s child and then drink beers with the mistress whom he clearly laments and then retain any personal value in my eyes, even if that woman had not been me).  So, upon reflection, I’m not hurt on my own accord really.  I’m hurt on our accord, and on his accord. And thus, by proxy I think I might be feeling Thing A.  …   If so, it’s a wonder he’s not pissed off at them, I think  ….. Then I wonder, wait, maybe he is, but I’ve been feeling/doing it for him (?) 

The boys and Aaron all got Bestbuy cards from my mom for Christmas, and he’s bought out theirs so that he’s got 3 now to spend, and he likes that.  It’s the same as having $150 but better, because to him a giftcard feels like to spend on something he wants rather than needs.  Again, a kind of charming way that he retains what must have been great about being a kid. So I ask him what he’s going to get.  He blushes and says “maybe a camera”, and we both laugh our real laughs.  Adults can like toys too, he’s taught me, and to play. 

You teach me how to play, baby, and I’ll teach you some do-not-disrespect-me implacability and we’ll both be making significant and necessary contributions to one another’s adulthoods. 

"The year you were born marks only your entry into the world. Other years where you prove your worth, they are the ones worth celebrating." ~Being Mortal

"Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them." Richard Strauss, on conducting. ~ from A Wife's Guide to In-laws, Jenna Barry.  (snort)

The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self. ~ from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande.Ya, I'm reading this one for the grant work on nursing care, but I gotta say, it goes well with the whole in-law thing too.  Indeed, we shifted away from old people centeredness a while back, a generation back.  In other words, THEY did that, the generation now that wants you to come back and kiss their asses after they spent decades squawking about getting out from under their own parents' guilt-producing life-swallowing machine of being and spent a good deal of time also ruining your life by going bonkers any number of times and projecting their own bullshit fears of having not "achieved" enough by expecting you to do it for them and not even telling you what the fuck that even meant really since it would routinely come with competing (false) statements of virtues (that they didn't believe for a minute) like "money isn't everything" and "I just want you to be happy" (so you better look like some kind of happy I can underfuckingstandgoddamnit) until you were a crippled narssissist with shit like failed relationships and student debts and kids you were raising by necessity in the "benevolent neglect" model stacking up all over your life like a motherfucker.

I'm probably thinking like a total asshole right now, I fully admit my head is a mile up my ass all of sudden (as in all of a sudden I can't help but notice, ala 2014).  But, it is also possible that baby boomers suck.