I get up, write a little / make mental notes / go for a walk writing in my head / get a smoothie at the juice bar noting the owner in detail, the defensive quality in her cold aging beauty, making a mental note of it / come home lay out chores jump in the shower / grade papers and read the resumes I have to for my afternoon meeting / get dressed and check my liptint before heading out.... / realize I am still wearing the same outfit as yesterday, as in from the photo yesterday, as in from 20 years ago, and since I am so STAYED I wouldn't be surprised if these jeans weren't originally Mark's, the same, so long have I had them that I have just always had them.... /I don't know what there is to see in that. I dunno.

VIRGO From time to time, even the most exciting people get bored of their own stories and skins. Being around the people who love you dearly will help you see yourself with the adoring eyes that they see you through.

Like...? My mom? She thinks I'm a Goddess of Indestruction. (lol)

the memorial is today

I looked at a man-boy that way twice in my life.  Once then, when I was 15 years old.  And then after many years of pain and anger and lonely struggle, I looked again and wrapped a cord worth two lives around myself for him, hoping it would stick this time and my heart would hold together.  It didn't again, of course.

Mark would understand that.  Did understand it.  There was a woman after me, many years of pain and anger and lonely struggle later for him too.  Her name was Evelyn.  She loved him, and he surely loved her.  But she was erratic, troubled, selfish, left him a time or two, came back, then abandoned him finally and he died alone.  One of the last things he said, and I believe he said it to me who would understand it because he said it to my mother because I couldn't be there (wasn't there, chose not to upset Aaron by going), was, "Don't let them say anything bad about Evelyn." Those last words he spoke about Evelyn say nothing about her at all; they say everything you'd want to know about Mark.

Now two of the four people in that photo, he and by beloved grandmother, are dead.  And I'm next.

r.i.p.

inspiration

"This is the mark of a really admirable man: steadfastness in the face of trouble." ~Beethoven.
  "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." ~Hemingway.

I'm surprised by how much the DNC is getting to me in places. Like Biden. I need to have faith in the tried and proven, that that's a real thing, I guess.

"Wolves in shells are crueller than stray ones." GASTON BACHELARD, The Poetics of Space

The boys and I watched Gone Girl. It looks like a murder mystery but it's really a study of a marriage. Of what marriage is and does to people. I said something like, If you're not already convinced it's a bad idea...I didn't even finish the thought before they were both like MARRIAGE IS FUCKED UP NO FUCKING WAY etc etc. Well, probably not fucked up for everybody (your grandparents have a good marriage for instance) but I've set you an extremely terrible example, so you'll probably struggle with it some. I'm sorry. "It isn't your fault. But yea, just the thought of marriage makes me feel sick, like here", says Ears, putting a hand to his guts where I often do too. If I were to come anywhere near anything looking like a romantic plotline in front of them again, they'd be coping with a sickening feeling of dread over it immediately. So hey universe, condition #1, until they're grown no romcom plotlines! I ain't nobody's better half, I've got to be whole. Then we switched over to the DNC some more, and TJ read us an article speculating about the role of the 'first dude' and how every time Bill has time in his hands he makes trouble so Hillary has to keep him busy, so TJ starts interjecting inuendo as he's reading about how Bill owes her head in the oval office so like 'get under this desk and get to gettin or I'm calling Cory Booker', and had me in stitches.

What are the biggest life lessons you learned?, I imagine their shrinks asking. That marriage is like playing Russian roulette while drunk on hope, that men wreak havoc on women and children, and that the most valuable life skill is extremely inappropriate humor at the ready at all times.

They'll be really pissed at me, I imagine, and rightly so.

10 years I've been keeping this blog.  Comes in handy for a retrospect.  Though ... eeesh .... long before Trainwreck, what the fuck was up with all that kitten bullshit?  I hate cats :/

I removed every picture with my whole face clearly in it from the entire 10 years.  Why?  Because even that much, seeing my face ever again, is conditional. I'm thinking: maybe if I set a conditional on giving anything, I'll start having people around who can nut up and meet an expectation for a change.  And they'll have the opportunity then to be(come) those kinds of people by extension.  And if not, fine, go look into someone else's eyes then.

On the upside, I got to see all the faces of others since I keep them eh? Am the keeper. And regiggle at jokes.

For instances,

(I still don't know why this is funny - but it is)

VIRGO No one is ever alone in a feeling. However complex it may seem, someone else in the world has gone through or is going through something very close to your emotion, but you have to reach out to know the truth of that.

"..We don't get what we want, we get what we think we deserve." ~Sarah Silverman @ the DNC

"Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?", A Single Man, Christopher Isherman

A man is hard to find, good or otherwise, but guys are everywhere now. Meanwhile, I know way more women than girls. ~I Don't Care About Your Band, Julie Klausner

What I deserve: Men. Not guys. And certainly not boys.

girl crush

I want to be like her.

Thunder down the gorge. First real rain of the summer.

“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” ― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score VIRGO: When you can't say it in words, or emojis, you'll say it with the way you move.

tree canopy out my bedroom window lit by fireworks tonight

VIRGO Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and blurt out what's on your mind, but this is not one of those times. If you feel nervous and wordless on the subject, wait it out. Nothing needs to be said just yet.

“I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.”~Jeanette Winterson, Wrtten on the Body

My new shrink (I got one because I wanted to yell at a shrink about how lame the last shrink was) drew a lifespan on a piece of paper, circled 5-15 years old, and asked me, What is the number one life lesson you learned in those years?  I thought about the bonkers they were, the knot in my stomach all the time, the crazy it drove me, "That I'd be better off on my own."  Well then, that's why you do it, get on your own.  "But HOW? When I tried so hard not to?"  I don't know how, just why - what you resist persists, you know Jung.  Then she went into a thing about maybe trying some yoga, getting in touch with my spiritual path, and I thought O for fucks sake she's about to recommend a book with relationship diagrams in it I'm so over this shit...And she sure did, then told me a story about her and husband being complementary personality types, completely oblivious to her Partner Privilege.  Jesus >:/

But I thought the Jung bit was pretty good.  I'm sitting here, well sit-lying as per usual, drinking coffee, listening to the birds, thinking about that.  And about him, to be honest.

more self help

I let the boys crack me up keeping me anchored to the present moment.  TJ suddenly likes really shitty 80's music in the car, such as (occasionally a scrap of the refrain sung in Mike Tyson's lisp), which slays me:

bonus track, for whatever reason Aha gives him the giggles. We take turns and I sing Megan Trainer, "if I vas you I'd vant to be me too, lalala" him laughing despite himself.

Plus, it's Cards Against Humanity expansion pack season.

self help

The subnarrative of the healthcare providers makes this hilarious even more, to me. (Which means today is better, not as raw.) The AMPED paramedic is my fave (!). Followed by wish-i-was-on-smokebreak nurse, inhumane doctor literally, and finally just-sad resident.

It is a nice clear Capricorn full moon tonight btw - look up.

Today was hurty.

"It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear. For a moment there, I was able to step outside that, to hear.." ~Imagine Me Gone

...what would happen if you

say what you wanna say la la la...

bonus track - this dude is hot, no diggity

"Painting #1 The first thing that catches your eye is the light, or rather two lights angled toward a single focal point, becoming a figure-eight flare at the center of the canvas. It is big, this painting, eight feet long and five feet high, the once white tarpaulin transformed into a smoky gray glitter. Or maybe what you see first is calamity, two dark rectangles slicing the frame, jackknifed, their metallic skeletons glowing in the moonlight. There are flames on the edge of the picture, as if the story doesn’t end just because the painting stops, and people who view the image have been known to walk to the far edges looking for more information, microscoping the framing wood for even a hint of added drama. The lights that flare out the center of the image are the headlights of an Amtrak passenger train, its caboose having come to rest almost perpendicular to the twisted iron track that bends and waves below it. The first passenger car has disconnected from the caboose and now makes the trunk of a T, having maintained its forward momentum and smashed the engine dead center, bending its bread-box contours into a vague V. As with any bright light, the headlight glare here obscures much of the image, but upon further examination a viewer might discover a single passenger—in this case a young woman—dressed in a black skirt and torn white blouse, her hair tousled across her face, matted by blood. She is wandering shoeless through the jagged wreckage, and if you squint past the illusion of light you can see that her eyes are wide and searching. She is the victim of disaster, a survivor of heat and impact, cantilevered from her resting position into an impossible parabola of unexpected torture, her once placid world—gently rocking, click clack, click clack—now a screeching twist of metal. What is she looking for, this woman? Is it merely a way out? A clear and sensible path to safety? Or has she lost something? Someone? In that moment, when gentle rocking turned into a cannonball ricochet, did she go from wife and mother, from sister or girlfriend, from daughter or paramour to refugee? A fulfilled and happy we to a stunned and grieving I? And so, even as other paintings call to you, you can’t help but stand there and help her look." ~Noah Hawley

-----

VIRGO Life is going fast. In the blur of events, important details could get lost. Stop a moment to calm down. Also, remembering the lessons of the past will give you more power going forward.

-----

Yeah, everyone is always in a hurry - especially at work, it's deadline this and that, hurry up and grab it, power to be had blablabla. Get what you want, everyone tells me.  But: Unless you're awful careful what that is, it'll be a curse to get it.

I think, we wrote a story with an apocalypse clause in it.  That part was my doing, mostly.  I only had a single condition for staying with him.  The 'don't lie/cheat' clause.  So in any single moment, the time it takes to cum, a hard pull to the brake line and the whole thing derails like blam.  The outcome might have been different if I had had more conditions than just the one - I certainly wanted more things than that and wasn't getting them. So why didn't I?

I don't know why, but I am trying to do the opposite now, trying it at work, being very conditional in my love of it.  I do love it, but still.  I put forward proposal in response to the project they want me to take on next: double my raise and I want an apocalypse clause so I can just bail if I don't like the work. They'd be pretty crazy to take it.  But if it has to be me, well then, pay up and hope I don't fuck you over or simply fail.  And if it doesn't have to be me, well then fine, then get somebody else (shrug).

And meanwhile, since my personal story, had that derailment on page 222 of my life, it is as if the narrative stopped mid-sentence.  Then you turn the page and see this

and I like this page, actually, in so far as I don't feel in a big hurry to turn to the next.

Sitting here, just sitting, is the STAY version of being in the wind.

I am pondering my "best attributes". How do you know what those are without the mirror of other people? And do you listen to what other people say of you or witness your impact on them? Most people take words as truth. 'I love you' as simply true when someone says it, and to mean 'you are lovable' as well. And that seems dubious to me now, either assumption, about those words.

I prefer concrete reaction categories instead at this point. For instance, I know I am funny because the other person laughs, not because he says 'you are funny'. For your attributes, you would have to have evidence like that to be able to make a real list, I feel like.

What is the appreciable impact of you? How do others feel after they have come in contact with you, and how do you really know what that is? How can you know in what ways you left them better or worse, or nothing at all, for the minute or hour or year(s) you spent?

I am sitting here, also working. Among my (many) blessings: it is my job to think stuff. Next week a class starts. Personal Disasters, a short story class. And I will open it with these questions about personal attributes and the results of them. I am writing the questions down in my mind, staring at my feet in the tub.

VIRGO The idea that "everything" could hinge on one thing is usually an overstatement. But today it rings true in some way. Your "everything" — that is, however you feel about yourself — becomes magnified. Take an inventory of your best attributes.

(headtilt)


Bonus track

Update:  I tried unblogging this into a distilled version...The closest I could get was Our Plotline Failed Us.

"You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale." ― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

A decade ago, I would drive to work past the Peace Bridge every day, and I would think about EX getting stuck on the other side of it somehow, in another country, away from me. Every day, I thought that. Then he got a job offer in Canada and left me and my country. Like a miracle. But there are no such things as miracles.  There is intention.  In a million little ways that I myself do not know and couldn't recount, I created the conditions to get that wish to come true. I believe that.

This is wiser than the counseling Trainwreck and I got. I remember just once our counselor asking me why I found life with him valuable. What was the GOOD in it? Aside from my schpeel about commitment, why would I WANT to be in the life?  And at the time, I had a long list of what had been valuable to me, in our first life together. Stuff about how we nurtured each other, trusted each other in the everyday to get our backs, were friends, laughter, home. And that list outweighed the hurt.

Hurtling myself back in for our second life ('the next'), I amped up the sexual affection by a factor of 100. I thought that would fill it in, the air pockets between us, where his discontent holed up and festered. But it didn't work. It wasn't a sex problem in the first place, so sex couldn't fix it. And we didn't break up over sex, either, not really.  Sex I can handle, can understand, (a better word than 'forgive', for what right does anyone have to forgive someone else's sexual orientations?). The essential problem under that was that I had lost the list.  The reasons, the valuables, didn't move back in with him. And I was toughing that out for a very long time before the hotel receipt.

Since he has been gone, I put myself back together as if after a long slow beating. I remember he had a split lip that wouldn't heal and I worried about it, my stomach knotting, because as a lifelong smoker his oral cancer risk was high. And I thought, I will love you and care for you if you lose half your face, so not to worry. The dramatic irony of that detail isn't that the lip problem resulted from his using his mouth on the lips and bodies of other women, the irony is that I was already caring for a man with half a face, and it was draining the life out of me. I barely noticed anymore, I had grown so used to it. He required constant care and attention, would otherwise go crazy, eat nothing or worse than nothing, get into trouble like a kid who likes the taste of paint, break things, hide messes to be found later rotting food or shit it would be impossible to tell, need his miseries witnessed to nonstop minute by minute at work, or worse disappear into habits of 'happiness' that would spin him into manic episodes of sleepless shiftiness for exhausting days on end. Even with his mother surely up his ass, and a couple women whose attention he has (2, I'm pretty sure, a red head is in the background noise somewhere I sense), at least one of those a vegan farter and thus health conscious, even with all that surrounding and supporting him, I know his meals come from vending machines and he is smoking at least two packs of cigarettes a day and he mainlines as many emergencies as he can find to trick his body into vigor. I don't need my third eye to tell me that, I just know him.  Trying to keep him alive against his tendencies otherwise was like holding a door all the time against the pressure of a clambering hoard. The lying to me to convince me I was crazy and treating me like a disposable/replaceable maid were insults on top of all of that injury-drain already.

So it is little wonder that now the scaley patches on my skin are disappearing again. The bad dreams come less frequently (Stella licked my face last night), and I don't wake up yiping so much or go days with no sleep at all. The skin around my nails has stopped bleeding. The house stays clean, so much less work, my back not always sore from stooping. Since I started eating again, it is simple and the food of my own people - I take the boys to the good Italian place in town, now their favorite snack is bread with a dipping bowl of olive oil. So yeah, I look a little better day by day.  But.  I came out of the (clean) bathroom and there is an antique mirror there and I was stunned by a thought when I saw my own face in it looking back at me like someone else. Now granted that mirror is speckled and very grainy, so it doesn't reflect very truly  - it is put there to be a flattering play of light not an accurate portrait. Plus my camera is crappy so it is like being looked at my someone who is nearsighted. But still. I look like I am 'not dying', like I stopped getting chemo and my entire palette shifted from gray to pink. And it occurred to me: he was wishing me dead. Not like in anger, just ... GONE'd.  He didn't mind much of the life, it was me and my grounding him in it that he was sick of. If I had died, he could keep on rolling, live here as The Girl was instructed by the will, hire an actual maid. How many times did that cross his mind as he looked at me? How did I die, I wonder? I think maybe to him he wasn't really lying to me so much as he had killed me off inside himself so thoroughly that I wasn't even there anymore, to him. Not flesh and blood anymore.

My guts still hurt. That is the only real symptom left of of being worse for the wear of it all. I put my hand protectively there all the time. And now praying it wasn't cancer he killed me off with in his thoughts. Praying that the affair(s) were his way of leaving what was left of me alive.  A last ditch scrap of kindness towards me, in its way.

Tick, tock: The second hand becomes more significant as this Virgo moon aspects different planets throughout the day. Waiting for what you want can seem like agony. If it's really worthy of you it will still be worthy of you next week and next month. Time is a test. Time is also a wise counselor, healer and teacher. Time illuminates the best path.

long hot afternoons, one way to spend them

Reading. Working. Thinking. Un blogging schtick.

Though amusing, it is inauthentic - Shrill I am not. Nor a sanguine snarky either.

My real hutspa is a quiet, a 'to scry'. For what it is worth.

Apparently I am dangerous. That is a heartening thought. I like the idea of being a scourge! Who wouldn't? And a privileged scourge at that. I'm not only redefining the nuclear family as a single parent institution, changing the contours of home ownership in America, and freaking out religious conservatives in the process (while working for nuns, which if you knew any nuns would not strike you as ironic at all), I have the rare benefit of being able to afford all that AND new shoes (a lot).

I'm a little dubious, though, on it being likely that I ever meet a man who knows how to do laundry AND use a drill. Doubtful. Even ONE of those skills in a man is rare anymore. And I'm not sure about how sexually liberated/satisfied we all are, either. I've personally seen little evidence that women like me are changing men/relationships for the better in any of those ways much (yet?)

<: br="">

VIRGO. It's an ideal day to assess your current status in concrete measures. Whether it's counting your blessings, children, money or body stats, size up the facts and find out exactly where you're at.

I received by certified mail today a promotion to the highest rank of my profession. I celebrated by cleaning the [Dahmer-disgusting] fridge in peace (I like chores) then putting the letter on it. (And according to my physical last week, my BMI is now a dead center perfect 23.)

It will be ok, I will be ok, I AM ok...