face down in the moment - nathaniel and the sweats  from the "Posting From The Bathroom" playlist

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Someone is out there right now wondering what you're up to, hoping they get to meet you. Picture them having their own little moments of daydreaming about someone like you.

🙏

left and right - a bunch of boys

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). The concepts you find simple are challenging to others...

We'll just leave it there 🤨 And God knows the reverse is also true. 

 

What could be even more fun than Thanksgiving while navigating multiple families and a relationship on the rocks (wawawa guiltguilt) and spastic kids and a dog already barfing at dawn (playdoh)? Clearly I am not on the brink of getting married - upside to everything: no mothers in law. But my dad is God knows where atm, having made himself homeless with no plan, and might show up here! Nobody knows, but Tbone trumps mothers of any maddening variety, so dodging a bullet today is approximately as likely as peace on earth. 

I just ordered frozen waffles from walgreens, abandoning cinnamon roll intentions. The apple pie intentions are already dying in my heart. If I still drank, I'd mos def be day drinking today. Kalua in my coffee already.

My sister takes her whole family to Mexico for this holiday. I can't afford that shit. But I might could afford to GO ALONE 🤔 Let's put a pin in that thought 🤔

my card of the day - it's almost funny - by the end of the day, it's bound to be darkly funny right?

#songless :(

new religion - tiny horse obsessed with this song

Mercury just turned retrograde, fyi

love is such a hard thing - noah derkson from the "hopelessness can be sexy" playlist (maybe it's the mustache)

maybe we should try it - do anything #wthmagic 

The problem of resources: the ones you need the least are the easiest to get.

I can only act upon / control myself. But that looks made of at least two, maybe three components. To give it (give), to receive it (take), to rejoice in it (make). 

energy raising (trying)

Trader Joe's has bitches on the merch-branding staff, for sure

freedom - george michael (MM studio) first track on the home alone dance mix - they're each alone (and one sounds like the Despicable Me guy), but it doesn't feel that way

 Cleaning list: 

• my job is the enemy of my work, which is prize winning; 
• my job is the site of increasingly violent harassment the more prizes I win, grinding my career to a stand still; 
• I can't stay living where I am in a 4 story house alone behind Wendys;
• I have to move God knows where, alone to figure that out; 
• I'm in a relationship, technically, which does nothing to change any of the shit I have to suffer and figure out alone.

Up until last summer, I rationalized staying in the relationship because at least there were fancy dinners and functional orgasms, neither of which makes life worse. But then 1 gave up drinking so NO. to fancy wine pairings and 2 my orgasm capacity ground to a halt in the face of that whole long shitty list. 

I am essentially made of f-uck. F-uck you, f-uck off, f-uck this, f-uck me. My f-uck cannot break or I'm f-ucked!

In my work, I rely on people wanting to do what I am asking of them. For me they will talk, write, cry, laugh - whatever somewhat strenuous activity and/or emotional outlay I request. So it's not just my sex life I'm talking about. I mean all of me. To do me, I gotta be feeling it. 

And I am not feeling it. 

My f-uck power, my inner driving force, my dilithium crystal, my magic, is blocked up or off. How am I going fix my life if I have no lust for life?! So first things first, I have to fix my f-uck. 

I tried self-help, looking for representation(s) of sex to get some juice flowing, a vision of a way to be. But there is so little sexy sex on TV that I can tell you episode 3 of Disclaimer has a hot sex scene. High rec 🔥 But I remember that because it's an anomaly :/

I tried books. Hard to find a good one. Lousy sentences are toxic to the clitoral wellbeing of English professors, 50 Shades of just too stupid. If you don't know what "niggardly" means, we are not going to get very far. Susan Minot is a prize winner, however, and Rapture is a blow job. The entire novel from start to finish is one single act of fellatio. I can relate to the woman who is giving the blow job in Rapture. But. The male character's very different experience during the blow job perplexes me. Perhaps Unknown Font wasn't thinking/feeling what I thought when I was giving literary-level blow jobs like that. I have no idea what it was like for him. Someone worshipping your junk, humming OM and other sensation experiments to bring your orgasms closer to God, that's a lot. Maybe too much.

Rapture only left me wondering about that some more. 

I passed every most recent physical w flying colors and my hormone panel is aglow, flowing like a desert river, deep and bracing. The new therapist and psychiatrist both concur as well: I am fine/healthy/sane, but I am unhappy, unsatisfied, unwilling, alllll the un's. 

So that's that. Nebraska has got to find some other woman. I went to AZ with that having been settled in my mind. I've got to start fixing my shit. I scream it at him, NO MORE!

Break ups are so much work. You have to make a bigger mess to clean one up, ugh. I have been TRYING to be decent to the father of my furkids, someone I will run into at work, etc. Be civilized. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? 

I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

Nebraska books a few days in Sedona. He knows I cannot resist that. I want to sit on a vortex like it is a sibian made of the Oversoul. He books me a 90 minute session with a vortex healer. The only type of physical that I fail miserably, my fitbit registering it as workout of some kind even though I am lying on a massage table. My poor throat chakra!!! And what else might help me feel better? Libido medicine has to be highly specific, like gene therapy. I no longer have the brown boots that I wore with that skirt. So I say "boots" (armscrossy). Out of all the shoe and boot places in Sedona, he picks the perfect ones, in a window display, the last pair and in my size. 

He corners me like this. Over and over. Like appeasing a furious zoo gorilla with really great bushels of bananas, which she takes because she's in a glass cage anyway, so fuck it. I love the boots (bananas). Zipping them up, that smell, it's powerful magic 👢. 

Welp, I could try a reverse rapture, sit on his face for approximately a novella. I get him a small journal so he can record his cunnilingus stream of consciousness. For real. I am exhausted, my f*uck is busted, I don't want to fight anymore, and I do not want to hear any more bullshit, so what other good options are there if those lips are moving? Keep yourself busy.

While I think. 

There were convergent points of desire between Unknown Font and me, and I think about those a lot lately. To what extent were those desires mine to begin with and what did I absorb from him? And vice versa. And where did those desires go in each of us since? What forms taken?

I don't have fantasies at all really anymore. It's more like a disorganized hodgepodge slide deck of smut that I click through, looking for something that'll do the trick. Like, just get it done ya know? 

What happens if I stop doing that, what if I stop making it work?, my vagina wondered one day.

A disturbance in The Force. 

(I am only guessing, but I suspect something similar happened to Font. Did something snap? Was his dick no longer willing to "be present"? Does that happen to men? If so, would he would tell me? Inside my head, where I'm not supposed to be able to hear it? Like via The Force, a fuck-jedi bat-signal type deal?)

When I met Nebraska not long before the pandemic, I needed to find a new dude, a chore needing done -_-  I was at my favorite academic event of the year, so more likely to find a member of my species at least. I wanted to do what I always do in hotels: order room service and eat it naked while watching Law&Order SVU. Kinda like eating oreos while watching The Biggest Loser only different. But I made a deal with myself to stand next to the bar for ONE minute of "openness" before I could skedaddle. And a stranger handed me a glass of wine in that one minute.

I asked him a question: what is something a person needs to know to really get you, something nobody knows? I was not expecting an interesting answer and figured that would get rid of him, but he said "I am a spanker of women." (🤔) And you?, he asked. What could I say at that point? "I'm into long fervid cataclysmic affairs." He decided he was in love by the next day. 

Since then, mostly he has behaved like a cardboard cut out of a person. No writing inspired much. I figured the "we" would just bleed out eventually. But it didn't. And I can't afford this anymore now. I am not okay this way.

He holds me off. He's like the woman in Rapture. He doesn't want it to end. He's grown afraid of me, of displeasing me. Of what I might do. I push against the resistance, I might do anything smib As I come back into my skin, seething and starving, I find that my desire is to demand what I want and get it. 

I go to the leather store. I buy a whip just for the leather smell, aroma therapy. The lady ringing me out flirts with me a little. It feels like the gun class. I was expecting, oh I don't know, to feel less unprepared for the end of the world by taking that gun class. But what I actually felt was joy. Childlike joy. #shebang! 

I take the whip back to the work condo complex. I manage only to accidentally smack myself with it a few times. Nebraska is in the other room, he comes in and takes the whip, he says I have to let it do the whipping, just bring it up and let it snap, which he demonstrates and makes a humongous whip CRACK sound. He goes back to what he was doing. 

I practice, working up a sweat, getting it a few times, then a few more, delighting myself with the sound when I land it right. I think of it as a magic object, raising my energy, helping me heal. #witchplay

I take the whip into the next room. I send my energy flying through it and then pull it back. CRACK! "You got it!," he says. Yes. I want you not to bullshit me as you answer some pointed questions. "Or you're going to hit me?" No. 

 

a pentagram above me ft beaver moon - Sedona, AZ

I gotta be the only crazy bitch could use a cigarette in fucking Sedona - but it looks like somebody is listening, I pray 🙏🌪

bad for me - teddy swims ft meghan trainor (acoustic) from the 'my nerves are shot' playlist 

Another thing I've kept all these years. My black leather trench coat. Even though I couldn't move my arms in it after those god forsaken fertility treatments. I put it on this morning and it not just fit, it has all its magic, like a hug made of pure badass. The closest I can get to a hug from my grandma from beyond the grave. She always had complete faith in my power 🙏

move like jagger - maroon 5 watch and learn, I won't show you twice 

Her choice for the last song she listened to on her deathbed. That's who I come from.

 

Ears: is that..??

Me: yeup

Ears: 😳

Me: it is somethin' to see him again

Ears: he looks ... 🤔

Me: like something cuddly wearing a nazi disguise?

Ears: is he okay?

Me: good question - my guess is he would angrily respond to the suggestion that he might not be, but 🤷🏻‍♀️ 

Ears: you have a lot of practice being scary af when you're not okay

Me: I'm doing it right now

Ears: so we might be projecting 

Me: we might be

Us: (looking at the photo again)

Ears: I can't square the cute socks with the nazi vibe

Me: hahaha ya and if that's supposed to be a Hitler mustache, um 

Ears: that's 1970s porn stache 

Me: I love it 🤭 - except "maybe I'll put you in a mass grave face ft I give great face rides ft toasty toes", I can't quite land the plane 

Ears: what happened to him?

Me: life 

Ears: when did he send that?

Me: around 1-2 a.m. from a hotel somewhere full of hockey women in a lobby 🤷🏻‍♀️

Ears: what does he want? I don't mean that in bad way, just (?)

Me: again I'm just guessing, but maybe a really really good laugh (?)

Ears: you are really funny ❤️

Me: ❤️

Welp (so many of my thoughts start with "welp" lately - siiiiiiiigh), can't keep mulling the nazi duckling for a spell, I am about to have to save my own ass some more.

Nebraska lands within hours to fetch me for Phoenix, and to prime that pump I laid out a few hours worth of painfully honest shit that turned him into a sobbing mess, a rocky 'can we cut the crap?' start/end.

Some things are deal breakers with me. Not being able to stop pretending everything is fine/whatever is near the top of the list. I get it, everyone wants to live happily ever after, but acting like you are doing so when I am VERY CLEARLY NOT LIVING HAPPILY EVER AFTER RIGHT NOW is intolerable.

Gaslighting me. Deal breaker.

For happily ever after to be real, you have to be real. DUH. If you were trained to be inauthentic, I dunno what to tell ya, figure out how to fix your shit like a grown ass man. 

I will not perform (fake) anything for anyone for any reason any more. No phase! And while he has a keeptryingdobetter somethingsomething meltdown, I gotta work.

I have so much expertise running rooms of 100+ people while looking scary while I am not okay while at least one man is driving me fucking crazy, I should start a consulting business: how not to be full of shit in front of people who are judging while your own world comes apart. I can do that backwards and in high heels (boots). 

How come it seems so challenging for others to keep it real just sitting in their own living rooms? 

I intend to hold steady. I am going to kick this fucking life-mess of mine in the twat like a grown ass woman.

protection - colin james (ft lucinda) for me, LOUD 

Feelings are just one of the many ways the mind processes information. This day before the Venus change recalls how each person inhabits a unique experience of the world. We all feel things differently. There is no feeling more correct than another. Likewise, it is impossible for a feeling to be wrong. Your feelings, whatever they may be, are acceptable — so accept them.

🤔 I'm gonna hold off on deciding the song for that ...

heaven made the darkness - ruston kelly

I'd had a very long and, for me, good day. I cleaned, I walked several miles, I met with my grad student and landed that like I'm made for it, I listened to a friend closely and gave her what I think might help her. I shit you not, a little girl rode by us on her bike bare legged, no shoes, "All summer she rides her bike naked" says my friend. All of that was using my powers for good, good for myself and good for anyone else I touched.

I'm thinking at him the whole time. I am writing, in other words. To him or about him. All the things I did were a way of writing. House clean bills paid everyone getting what they need and nothing they don't from me - I don't know why this feels important - but I can just sense that it is. Or that it is a reply of some kind from him. Salt of earth.

Then there he is. A few words like bubbles to the surface. He comes up for air, then goes under again. This is his current pattern. Like a mammal in choppy sea.

I can't help myself, I honestly can't because I don't know how I'm doing it, but it feels to me like I can actually feel him. Those little strings, landing all over him, like a physical exam by tendril. And he doesn't feel entirely well to me. I know what he says about eating my pussy or whatever, but it feels like the last thing in the world he needs more of is a woman. (Not this woman, anyway.)

I'm not wonderfully well, let's face it. I'm seething. And starving. So I'm trying to be very careful. Deliberate.

He was married the last time I made him miserable. He said she made him unhappy. But. I was also starving. I didn't give the slightest shit about that little wife once I got a taste of him, in fact I was offended she existed.  The relationship I had with that man's body was religious. In my mind, it was just obviously right. He had come out of nowhere, dropped out of the fucking sky knowing me already as if paying attention, and wanted me as-is, as known. And I knew him too, had been reading his inner monologues for years, a fixture in my peripheral vision that I had gotten used to. It was, I believed, actual magic. I absolutely believed that I was going to fuck him as a constant fact of how the Universe intended things to be. It might even solve climate change!, righting the world itself. We had figured it out, how to be Wrong together made a Right. I mean, I had us bound for life with witchcraft for christ sake. I can see the humor kinda now (slap stick always slays me lol 🤦🏻‍♀️). 

But it is also true that I'm not less dangerous than I was then. I've grown more confident. More powerful. I've been in this body longer. If I felt that about anyone again, I would be even bolder. And I am not in a good place. Fed up as I am utterly 🔥

But 🔥 is not a risk between us, I do not believe. It feels more like he needs a bowl of soup. No (closing my eyes)...needs something sweet. He is 🤔 bitter? (Close my eyes, focus on taste). 

Bile. 

Why? He is leaving her, but bitter bile comes from being left. Abandonment fills you up brackish. You drown in it. It's a very painful way for a selfhood to die.

I just sit a while, smoke a joint, sink into my own body. Go over myself with the tendrils, use myself as a mirror, how it is reacting tells me something about what it is reacting to. 

I don't think I believe him; I don't think he wants to get near me actually. Of course, I can't know, I am having a telepathic exchange with a sea mammal caught in a south Buffalo haboob of some kind. But. If he's getting divorced because he had an affair, he isn't telling me that part / it didn't go well / there is a missing cause for this bile. He's in there, I do feel him in there, but it's underneath something else, a shell of 🤔. I dunno. Entrapment is the word that comes to mind.

Ok, welp, with the information I have, I am tentatively concluding: Something is making him feel mean, has maybe made him mean; he doesn't want to be mean to me. Maybe he thought he did, but when it came down to it, no. Using me is not going to make him feel better.

I'm not people. I've never been people. For all my many faults and shortcomings, I am not that.

 

VIRGO

I wish it were true that the forces of darkness are lined up in opposition to the forces of light. Life would be so much easier for you. But I'm afraid it's not that simple and clear. In my view, a more accurate metaphor might be that the energies of smokey grey are squaring off with the energies of dusky beige. Each side has a touch of both wrongness and rightness, a bit of ugliness and beauty. So what is the most honorable role you can play in this showdown? My suggestion is to develop a third side, an alternate way.

Theory: Not being "in love" back makes people shitty. They can sense you want to mean it. That breaks them into multiple shitty personalities disorder. Just making you say on command over and over I love you too like a "speak!" trick, it's fucked up.

Case study: (gray) beard v beige (heart)

At Como Park, chasing kids, the place filled with men, dispatched there with children to get out from under women's feet. As the only woman there, pretty soon I'm watching all the kids - the little boys are insanely going up all slides and making girls complain about mud on their skirts, toddlers of every kind are accidentally almost killing themselves variously, girls have quickly clumped and exchanged names and are whispering plots, my little psycho is patting and talking to a tree by herself dangerously near a treeline into which I know she will disappear if given a moment's chance (as I would). 

The men are all looking at their smart watches. I am texting my daughter but have my hands full, so I switch to voice and loud enough for all these men to hear me, I say (truthfully) "I am so sick of every damn thing, I'd go with with the first lumberjack who carried me off." I feel them all hear me, smartwatch guys freeze like prey. I read my daughter's response, a woodsy quiet type would be right up your alley, but are there any of those? I say out loud, laughing with purposeful volume, "good point, where have all the cowboys gone?!" 

Men are everywhere, they'll send you dick pics just like "p.s." I assume if I had a penis, I'd maybe want to show it to everyone (?) (I'm not the judgey type). It is irritating, though, how everywhere men are, but try getting into one. I've long suspected authenticity is trained out of them. Trained to think/be one thing and do/say something else. To go down the slide properly and shut up about it. 

I want to march up a slide, stepping over the offending boys and complaining girls, then turn around and slide down, getting all my own mud on my own ass. THAT'S HOW YOU DO IT YA LITTLE SHITS. (My urge is always to teach). 

In the distance is a dog park, my people! (The dogs, I mean.) "I'm going on that naked bike ride later, so I'm taking it easy right now", I say loudly at my phone. There is no naked bike ride, I'm just idly daring anyone to have the balls to ask where to find it. A little boy stops in his tracks, "Do you ride your bike NAKED?" It might be a little cold for that today actually, what do you think? "I would!" 

His father calls him back, says "sorry" in my direction. I look the man over from under my hair, I can see the outline of his dick through his tracks pants and I like the peppery stubble. He stands up straighter. I close my eyes a moment and pull it up my spine, this power that you left me with. I open my eyes and throw it at the man, like silly string made of plastic intention. He starts to walk towards me. I don't smile, I don't look directly at him, I just roll up the strings, my spine like an anchor spool on a boat winding in. "Cmon, lunch!" A woman's voice. He stops. Now I lock eyes with him. His son runs past towards his mother, "I like you!" he calls to me as goodbye. I cut the silly strings (NO ✂️) and go back to watching kids play. His father follows the boy to his wife, I presume.

See how easy this is? But it doesn't work. Even if the man responds, even if he is a fan of cunnilingus and his dick works 👍, even if everything works it still doesn't work. My magic works on them, but theirs does not work on me. If I really really try, if I let the man get close enough, then technically executed orgasms may be had, good for my pelvic floor. I even let a man get an engagement ring onto my hand in exchange. But I just make that man (all men somehow?) miserable.

This process makes me feel guilty, inevitably. I'll create a need inside someone that cannot be met, and I will let him and everyone down (again). If I can't (don't want to = cannot) explore each molecule with my tongue until all his life force has gathered and is responding to my witchy sexthew, it's just a body. And my body knows that, responds like my stomach does to wax fruit.

Nebraska will be here again soon; I will always be like this. It feels increasingly untenable to me as an oft-repeated combination of facts. I can build up some love type care, I can act loving, I can do loving things, my behavior toward him can be respectable. I can be faithful (in deed), dutiful, supportive. I could even marry him and make him very happy for a minute, until it inevitably turned him into some kind of asshole and I would want offleash from that.

So. I am guilty of all this. But I am also fed up with feeling guilty. I mean, ya think I like this? No. Barking "I love you toos" on command (I will not anymore, No). Not to mention all the yessing I've had to cough up at work (also not doing that anymore, No 🖕). Surrounded by constraining behavior demands in every direction like I'm a failing-to-be-domesticated-enough animal. Brimming with love that I cannot feel except for my kids. And the kids cannot take from me the other brimming(s) I am/have, obviously. Nobody can. 

So, what is the "honorable third alternative"? Even if I knew, which I do not, the words would probably get stuck in my throat like chicken bones. 

CTRL + ALT + DEL - Revè

thinking

 

sis doesn't find brother-in-law memes funny 🤷🏻‍♀️🤣

crush - billianne (from 'love in the living room' playlist)

My daughter observed that Nebraska "does not seem to know you very well, even still". That really struck a nerve and stuck, cz I realized: I have done that. I have loved a LOT but/while not understanding my mate very well. And now I know how that feels.

Not being understood = my needs do not get met. And that feels a whole bunch of confusing kinds of shitty. Because they looove you, so you're the "bad" one for not being enough. 

I just mean I've fucked that up before, too. 

Ideally, on a long enough time horizon, exlovers become friends so that they might gain insight(s) about themselves with someone who knows them well and now that there's no reason to be full of shit with each other. (And they may still get each other's jokes, humor being vital and scarce 🙏)....

"What a night", he says, processing the space between how fucking cool the tech specs of the body are and how fragile its soul. Confusing me with the cath particulars, looking for the best metaphor for THE thing: the potential inability to save/protect what is most precious and the complexity of what/who that altogether is. Picking up there, where we left off. Leave off, repeatedly. Unable to include one another as precious enough.

So, let's amend the 'exlovers are valuable friend resources' opinion piece. I am still PRO that but include the following guideline: don't fuck each other. Especially if you've already tried that every which way - as forbidden love true love spiritual practice make up lust big spoon little spoon post-apocalypse casual passion apology compulsion ecstatic learning curve - especially if the casual category failed the most miserably ft sex too good for that.

love somebody - post malone and morgan wallen

chemistry probably unavoidable, possibly quite enjoyable, and feeling fuckable is great  - but I'm going through a NO PHASE

 

Boy poison - a boy's kisses were like a poison, which infected you and after you were exposed you craved more, like an addict.

Susan Minot, Rapture