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, but you do not. It breaks them into multiple shitty personalities disorder. Just making you say it on command over and over and over, I love you too like a "speak!" trick, it's shitty and 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 the fuck out from under a woman'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 of potential mayhem, 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 stop moving like prey animals. 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, 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 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 it 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 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 mostly I just make that man (all men?) miserable. 

It's a shame, how much a man may want to be consumed, and how much he may sense my hunger to make contact, but the two just cannot assuage each other.

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 thew, it's just a body. And my body knows that (stubbornly), responds like my stomach does to wax fruit.

Nebraska will be here again soon; I will always be like this. Which feels increasingly untenable to me as an oft-repeated combination of facts. I can act loving, I can do loving things, my behavior toward him can be acceptable. I can be faithful, 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 ft I wanted offleash as soon as I was on it.

So. I am guilty of all this. But I am also fed up with feeling guilty. I mean, ya think I have liked this? No. Barking "I love you toos" on command (I will not anymore, No), not to mention all the yessing I've had to do at work (also not doing that anymore, No 🖕) surrounded by constraining behavior demands in every direction like a failing-to-be-domesticated 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, obviously. 

Nobody can.

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

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

Two of the world's most famous paintings are the Mona Lisa<>/i> and The Last Supper. Both were made by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), one of the world's most famous painters. Yet the brilliant artist left us with only 24 paintings in total, many of which were unfinished. Why? Here are two of several reasons: He worked slowly and procrastinated constantly. In the coming months, Virgo, I feel you will have resemblances to the version of da Vinci who created The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Some of your best, most enduring work will bloom. You will be at the peak of your unique powers. Halloween costume suggestion: Leonardo da Vinci or some great maestro.

Virgos always have horseshit horoscopes. They even leave the typos, like we're gonna clean it up ourselves. Maestro my ass, I'm going as neurotic, i.e. I seem to give a person pause 🐾 enough just as my own little self.

I hope we get to come back - jadea kelly from the reincarnation aspiration playlist

my tarot card advised me to be patient today

All Souls

Tonight, you can die a little and lend a little life to the dead so you can touch each other, like finger tips on glass.

How do you serve the sacrifices and suffering that all your dead took on to BE, incarnate and then dying then dead, so you can be here right now? They all had to go through this life, then be dead on top of it all. I wish they could help me sometimes. I talk to my grandma, ask her to help me hold it together when shit gets so rough. But they've already done so much. I want my dead to rest. Or listen to music. However joy looks once you're finally done, I pray for them to have it. I rolled them a joint. 

I want them to know it is appreciated, all their living and dying. And that I'm sorry I'm not better, more, worth all that. 

I'm sorry - Ziggy Alberts (acoustic) 

dirty prescott kids - outlaw state of mind from 'the world is ending in a week (or not)' playlist 

 

il mare calmo della sera - andrea bocelli ft chris ouch. do you have to be Italian to feel 😭 o solo mio lalalaaaaa (lol)

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). If you had a single wish for your love, it wouldn’t be for fame or riches -- although those wouldn’t hurt -- but it would be to live in emotional sunshine. Irrational confidence will pay off. The grind gets light. Ordinary days become adventures.

Yesssssss. Sunshine again, the whole glad to wake up to my ordinary life thing. The adventures of afternoons. All I need is "irrational confidence", which sounds like my wheelhouse, doesn't it? 🤔

"bed head"

 

118.2lbs exactly. The day my then- primary care doc in Lewiston weighed me in, all was about to be well again, I assured him, thus my looking wonderful in the black yoga outfit I was wearing (showing off), while he was dubious, sitting on the chair below and in front of me, the same as a lover might be to untie panty sidebows, and he questioned my judgment, suspecting that being too trusting might be an undiagnosed condition of mine, a comordidity. I thought about the sex I'd be having if I was right. I can remember his face perfectly, his posture, a semi manspread with the ankle on his knee, his shrugging and looking down at the chart to indicate that he understood that as always I was probably going to ignore anything he said. I noticed just then that our postures matched, I was sitting on one foot, crotch aimed at his face. He looked up for a second, right at me there, I felt sure he could smell me, I shifted a little, yea THAT, it's quite a handful, my vag. Concessions must be made to such a Goddess. He stood, conversation over, subject closed.

But he was right in a way. Not about the soon-returning love of my then-life, but about me. I can't shake the habit of believing in words. You don't have to talk at all really, to anyone, you can easily avoid it with "wow", especially if you're a man, you can pass for the strong silent type saying virtually nothing, so why lie about anything at all ever? What I have not been able to really absorb is that people lie to themselves constantly. And what they're doing by lying to you (often unconsciously) is getting corroboration, like an alibi. All people do this. I do it. We build a coherent narrative of our lives, hoping it's not pathological/unsustainable (but it sometimes is), a coherence of who we are that we can explain to others. I know this, as a fact, it is a constant necessary human foible, I teach the concept for christ sake, but I forget it all the time.

I suspect Nebraska has passed for boring af like Keyser Soza sorta. All he ever says is how much he adores me, NONSTOP, everything I do, on and on 🙄, and everyone (my mom) believes that/him. It's so boring!, you have no idea, like being forced to stare at yourself in a funhouse mirror all day. Now that I'm going amongst his coworkers, ie walking the halls of his world, what I'm learning about him is that he absolutely adores me. He says that and only that to them as well, for YEARS, that's all they know about him also.

All along my gut has recoiled from this. But there is no sense discussing it with anyone. I have tried. I just get the "you have to feel deserving of love" schpeel because of course all women have feelings of low self worth blablabla. So boring. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I am worth enough. Obviously I think so because I have taken the adoration of this man, and others before him, so for granted that I forgot it was bullshit. 

I asked my body her opinion. Very literally, I laid on my back in my sister's house and asked my body how she felt about it all, the brain to vagina via spine hotline (batgirlphone). And immediately got my answer: you've been here, caught in selfbullshit(s), it makes you very angry. 

Yessssss. 

first high - nikki lane

I was just in Lewiston looking at houses for sale. The village bake shoppe is as ever, mile high apple pie. And I weigh 118.2 pounds precisely. That's what we call in the witchbiz a "synchronicity". I don't know how to read signs like that tbh. I tried skimming blog entries in Oct 2014 and gave myself a headache - I'll spare you, kind reader, a linkback 🙄🤦🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️ -  but I found jealousy to be 1 constant 2 boring 3 bullshit. I didn't remember that, but yesssss. I put it something like "I spend my time wanting a piano to fall on his mother and he thinks I'm thinking about dick" which in a sense I was thinking about dick, HIS DICK 🙄,*I* was the jealous one for christ sake, everybody buying their own bullshit like slapstick. I am not bewitched by dick at the moment, so not the same. But. Nebraska's "affirmation" of me is 1 constant 2 boring and 3 some kind of bullshit. I'm just not sure what kind of bullshit and everyone around us completely buys it, whatever it is (masterful gaslighting). 

Since I don't know who or what all is not to be trusted to put any weight down on it, I'm toe tapping, kicking tires (possible lives) with bare feet, seeing what feels real to the touch.

past the point of rescue - hal ketchum 

Here it comes. I can feel it rolling in from a ways off, like thunder in the desert rumbling the ground and charging the air. 

nobody - niia

muffalotta

I think about it all the time if I'm honest, my shortage of passion. I keenly feel my lack of feeling. 

Everyone prefers this, my meh state/mood. And it does matter to me that the people I care for are happy with me. And it matters a lot to me that I rarely let anyone down and never from lack of trying, stability being helpful for that, feeling meh being helpful for stability. But. I'll go off the rails sooner or later just to enliven my existence. I've done crazy shit like disappear in New Orleans for umteen hours, for instance, for that very reason. What I don't understand is 1 lying about it ("maybe I was drugged" = maybe I was abducted by aliens = either scenario would leave you without your pants) and then 2 pretending it never happened by making me discuss your SANDWICH. At length. I finally turned the phone off. A kindness, forcing him to just shut up about what he is eating already.

He isn't lying to me because I don't care. I soberly faced down the lies I cared about (what is actually possible) (not much). So he's talking to himself not really to me. What is the point of that?, I often wonder. Does everybody talk every day about the nothing they mostly did then the chicken they mostly ate? Maybe everyone else gets the point of that [?] 

I experiment - if I just don't say anything at all, how long does it take him to notice? If I say only the avoidant phrases ("wow that's crazy") that TJ taught me, I can do that for days. Maybe forever! That's marriage, saying shit like "wow" forever and serially agreeing that the kids/dogs are adorable. Maybe that's why everyone seemingly wants to get married all the time, so they can retire conversationally to "wow", the intimacy equivalent of assisted living.

I crave the intimacy equivalent of a muffalotta but different.

(sigh) (the radio game in Earline, see if it'll cheer me up:)

Play me a song.

miles on it - marshmello

Play me another one.

thinking bout you - dustin lynch

Play me another.

I'll make love to you - boys II men

Ok, that was kinda funny 🤭

Nebraska went missing shortly after midnight in New Orleans, on a trip with college buddies all named something like Jeff (Dave). I joked that everybody has to get hammered and do something regrettable with somebody named something like Jeff in NOLA. I wasn't really joking, more like slightly daring him, go on dude, do something unacceptable. One of the many weird things about Nebraska is the truth of him is obscured by his insistence that he be taken entirely at face value. He "loves G...", that's what everyone knows about him because he says that over and over and over and over. Being the object of that sentence, I can assure you he's just blowing smoke, a cloaking device in the form of words.

After 12:18, nobody could find him til late afternoon, when he turned up beaten and disoriented, doesn't remember anything and/but is "sorry". The apology compulsion. Instinctive camouflage and (notreally)apologies constantly. I do not judge it, everybody is crazy somehow, but I know it isn't benign. Lying all the time makes a person feel physically stressed and chronically shitty, like chewing your nails down to bloody necrosis risk levels. And I'll just let him do it, let him be whoever whatever however he says he is. 

I think about it all the time if I'm honest, my shortage of passion. I keenly feel my lack of feeling. 

I already know what I will say ("wow that's so crazy" "so glad you're alright" "you should try to enjoy the rest of your trip" "where are you going to have dinner?") I am very glad Nebraska is OK, I was quite worried when he was missing, but I won't press him on the bullshit story of it because I don't care to know his truth(s). 

19-2000-gorillaz (soulchild remix)

Update: Sure enough, the next text I get is about what he is having for lunch. Oysters and ginger beer.

Phoenix, yesss

Being in front of 100+ M1s and M2s, a duck to water ❤️. Teaching smartypanties is my sweet spot. It's female physicians who are my keenest audience now vs "male nurses", which makes sense. I'm always talking to the people with a qualifier attached to them. One student shared with me what she is currently reading 

I ordered myself a copy

view of pool ft morning coffee

It's gonna be 106 degrees today, but still, it's hard not to like Phoenix 🤔
 

right back to it - waxahatchee hmm 🧐

I'll be right back to you, boy

Where have all the cowboys gone? - Lola kirke ft kaitlin Butts where is his shiny gun ? lalalaaa

girlfriends night out - halfway thru one of them asks what venison is (?) like what part of the cow is that (?) 🤣 #gamemeatlove

Off to Phoenix, where it is 104 degrees today. How does one look good in that temp while sort of interviewing for a job (an endless series of awkward howdy's with deans)? With Nebraska a mile up my ass saying annoying stupid shit like "see you like me" if I so much as like my fucking salad? 

Meanwhile my dad rented his upstairs apartment with all my stuff in it, then sold the place with the tenant and my stuff in it, then announced he was coming here "for a visit" since he has no plans regarding where to go. I haven't lived with my father since I was 16 for a lot of reasons, chiefly his being an asshole and the author of every urge I have to punch men in the face at hello. So I told him I was going to Omaha, let him go visit Nebraska, they can bore each other while stewing in mutual hostility while watching PBS at top volume #twobirdsonestone

Yesterday my tarot card was The Lovers. But nothing happened. Not even a slightly flirty meme text from a friend, nada. So I made up a story about a middle aged professor who, after pulling a pointless Lovers card, donates a meager amount of money to a local deaf school so that she can be invited to their fundraisers where she hopes to find a lover who can neither hear her nor speak, who is as brimming with frustrations as she and as thrumming with things unspoken.

Play me a song.

grassfire - mike mckenna from the #badtimes playlist

I do need a pedicure

 VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Many mistakes get made in the relentless pursuit of external validation in the form of money. As the ancient poet Horace wrote, "All for a seat down front at some bad play?" You'll avoid the mistakes as you let love be not only your purpose and fuel but also your reward.

pretty archie - familiar feeling

My heart propelled into place by a massive force and left here, a lonely erratic. ~ The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich

Today, 27 years ago, my son was born. I can still see his face clear as anything, not crying, just looking intently at me, such a piercing looking of trust I have never seen on any other human's face. It cracked my broken heart. 

 

VIRGO

 (August 23-September 22)

Here are my bold decrees: You are entitled to extra bonuses and special privileges in the coming weeks. The biggest piece of every cake and pie should go to you, as should the freshest wonders, the most provocative revelations, and the wildest breakthroughs. I invite you to give and take extravagant amounts of everything you regard as sweet, rich, and nourishing. I hope you will begin cultivating a skill you are destined to master. I trust you will receive clear and direct answers to at least two nagging questions.

Two nagging questions. 🤔  

• Second Murderer. I am one, my liege,
  Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world1125
  Have so incensed that I am reckless what
  I do to spite the world.

• First Murderer. And I another
  So weary with disasters, tugg'd with fortune,
  That I would set my lie on any chance,1130
  To mend it, or be rid on't.

~Macbeth

sturgill - breakers roar

scrapbooking ft #offleash(again)

Update: resignation terms accepted, then they offered the $ to a friend I picked out to take it. Very smart guy, and decent. I went from scorched earth to helping him behind the scenes 🙄 Just as well, better for my karma, and that friend isn't the one I want to understand better, the one who comes from Outrage, a little town in Kentucky.

My boss remains in the acursed universe (of which I am the center, of course lol). I'm writing hexes into pulp novels in which Witches fuck whoever they want and are unruly, and the central witch-damsel casts a spell to make the bad man capable of erections but never able to cum again, not EVER. And he pops huge boners around his bosslady too. 

Spite fantasy fiction, that has to be a thing.

______________

There is something in me that will not bend. It's not my finest quality. It's why I break. And when I break, I break shit, logically enough I would argue. 

When I was just an actual teacher, everything came together there for a spell and I was happy.  But then I was flung from one intrusive need after another, impositions on my wellbeing. And all the successes at work, "the personal growth", since then has been, well frankly "pretty good for the money" as Times New Roman used to say.  A person should not marry / stay married to "pretty good for the money" because, well for a lot of reasons, but topping the list is that the other party, the person/thing you've married, expects stuff from you all the time. And every time you give in, give over, you resent it. Then you seethe. Then you leave. Or, you cannot leave so easily, you're stuck (tenured or equivalent), in which case you growl, then bite, because you are not a dog. Maybe you don't lose your mind and you don't start to go murdersuicidey, maybe that's just me 🤔 (🤨 you don't?)

I do wonder what this all will get me / is getting me. More fun, would be great  🤔 I wonder how you get that 🤔

medicine - grace potter and the nocturnals

my name ain't mercy

His forms of madness are mildly fascinating except when she remembers she is supposed to find him a sufficient object of all her attention, as she is for him. She is the center of his universe, he says. She's not quite sure what the universe is. She thought she knew until she tried to put it into words, but her words for it were nothing like his nor like the words of that nice condescending black physicist on television. In her words, the universe is the planets and our guts and dirt and thoughts and time and everything hurdling in sweeping circles tethered to a cosmic center that is surely awful on a scale too bright to fathom without burning the eyeballs of your soul to smithereens. It stood to reason then, she supposed, that he could not see her at all. He insisted on her attention when at the same time it did not seem like he needed her there, that she could warm him as a thought from a guzzillion lightyears away just as well. Better, actually. A million miles away, he was free to imagine Her as anything without having to close his eyes. What he would say if she were physically present would be the same: "I'm really looking forward to my sandwich", he might say, while she was on fire right there in the kitchen. Because a person cannot look directly at a sun. 

"Suffocate Isolate"

see

40 lightyears away - lee harvey osmond

bonus track - if I could I would ❤️ + still want a chicken

VIRGO (Aug. 22 - Sept. 21): It's time to jettison the stuff that doesn't really matter. This allows you to direct your energies to where you want them to go.  

NO ft yess🐍

cut you to pieces - the matinee

NO is powerful and can mean yesss when it means NO to anything (body) that gets between a woman (me) and what she wants, now, not someday. 

I want to shoot a god damn gun. 

Hotter - Lu Kala

Play me a song? shake it for me girl - luke bryan 🙄

You have probably heard the platitude, “Be cautious about what you wish for. You might get it.” The implied warning is that if your big desires are fulfilled, your life may change in unpredictable ways that require major adjustments. That’s useful advice. However, I have often found that the “major adjustments” necessary are interesting and healing—strenuous, perhaps, but ultimately enlivening. In my vision of your future, Virgo, the consequences will fit that description. You will be mostly pleased with the adaptations you must undertake in response to your success.

Say Something (smib) - Timberlake ft a wanted man

 

bad times - mo kenney   for you version

the jeans 

There was a defining moment, I remember it, a tense detante meeting of sorts. I was wearing my favorite of his jeans, the ones he left behind. I remember how my body felt at that moment, fatigued by what we had gone through. And incandescent with winning. 

I haven't put them on in years, wouldn't be able to fit my curves, no way. But I couldnt bring myself to give them away. They are a uniform I wore to war once, kept at the back of a storage closet. Lately, I could feel my ass wanting them back on. Feel my skin wanting to pull them along my thighs, how it felt to don them, jiggle hop in and button. I didn't think they'd fit. But my body knows things. I'm learning to listen to it again. My body has a lot to say.

Welp, so much for banking the ol' temper. #title9levelmad

Megan Trainor - No.

Can you spot him? Showed up today.

from Lunar playlist:

Hole - Gold Dust Woman (current mood)

julia holter - gold dust woman (aspirational mood)

Now that my $ has moved to Phoenix, I find that I have very little desire to go there at the moment. I watched the moon rise as I drove southeast. I coughed terribly, singing in the jeep alone to clear my lungs. 

I used to do the lottery test on myself. Try it:  if you won the lottery would you still want the life you're living, same lover, same job, same home, same body? 

If the answer is no, then you must stop living that life, lotto or not, you only have one life. If the answer is yes, then keep doing what you're doing (even if it is hard, which it sure can be). 

I stopped doing that test because the answer was no but I wasn't in control of it, I wanted things that could not be bought with any amount of money (still often do). I wasn't trapped, I just didn't know where to go. I was just reaching the point of Do Anything Different, and I was perusing options. I let someone fall in love with me. I went to New Orleans to blow some shit up for the fuck of it. I was moving towards...

Then the pandemic. We all froze. 

My point is, we've been probably living out that life since, back when we got the babies and the puppies and the prepper supplies and we still have all that stuff. We defined our relationships by whom we could keep safe and how we would do that. And now here we are. In these relationships and situations. 

So let's take the lotto test, shall we?

I'm afraid to report I got nothing but "fuck no" as the answer in most categories. 

I'm trying to make decisions one at a time to address things:

Would I want the same body? No. So I changed it.

Same job? Fuck no, I'd quit my job today if I could, so I took the first step in getting a divorce. Ugh, divorces are such a pain in the ass. I've never divorced a job instead of a person before, but divorces just inherently suck, I know it will. 

Same lover? This is a tough one. Maybe. Right now, since he's tied to Phoenix and since he does looove me maybe it'll work, he certainly tries hard. But. He thinks we are living happily ever after now, which tells you what the problem is: he's clueless. 

(I was once so in love that I was suuuuure it could work, and I tried soo hard = I was likely fucking clueless. Live and learn.)

Action steps:

1 move half my job to Phoenix, the fancy hard part (grant), bring in the priests to shame everyone in my honor, flipping off my boss feels delightful, savor that.

2 let Nebraska consider step 1 as his argument for my staying in this relationship - I want other things but that's what's he's got, so I'm trying to value it.

3 keep focusing on my body, it is of UTMOST IMPORTANCE to feel WELL. If I don't want to be inside this body, feel in this body, fuck in this body, trust this body, then nothing else is worth shit.

4 be a total fucking cunt about protecting my time for item 3 🖕

5 sell the damn duplex (move from frozen to fluid [assets], literally and metaphorically).

6 go the cottage, dig my heels in, not fly to Phoenix next week at all, make them wait if they want me so badly, I'll go when I feel like I did 2 weeks ago, healthy and horny.

 7 bank my temper, this relentless painful cough is a form of infuriation, it feels like burping smoke after breathing fire. 

The lunar eclipse is at the "fuck no" end of the spectrum, energy wise. It removes things from your life so new can come. It's for what fails the lotto test.

I have lost the equivalent of her weight since June. I have shed one entire Janis Joplin, like stepping out of a suffocating macott costume. #notateamplayer

Respect viruses. And Hard Change. Never underestimate worthy adversaries. Important rule.

Let Me Breathe - action bronson, from Scorched Earth playlist 

It just keeps getting better, the 9/11 call wooooooow!, by the time we get to IKEA I cannot stop coughing but it's worth it. 😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️🤣😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️🤧🤣😶‍🌫️

It's remarkable that we continue to reproduce so much, honestly. Sperms must be ninjas, leaping over tall (tallest!) buildings of stupid, getting couches pregnant if they can, anything, hail marys all over fuck.

scorched earth [playlist in development]

I am more physically ill than I have been since I went to China in 2006, when I threw a punch hard enough at Ex to punch my own self in the face, coughed just like this for months, and wound up divorced from that asshole and with his job as my own to boot. A job that I am, finally, shedding - an admittedly discomforting process but also deeply satisfying, not unlike getting at that persistent itch at the very back of my throat - leaving a coiled empty snake skin in the exact shape of myself behind, a ruse, a warning sign of Curse.

Thank you, my grandmothers, for your fortifying incandescent rage. My rage. 🙏

Shirley's ashes ft. Hidden Voice recorder 

My mother said there would be days like these, indeed. I tried to avoid it longer, to get to the cottage safely, Ma, but I didn't make it. Days like these always really suck. I've left men. I've kicked men out. I've left whole lives behind a couple times. I've (temporarily) relinquished the care of my children twice when I have been forced to do so by the men and the lives. I've rarely left jobs, and never changed career fields, so I am in new territory on that; I have been poor, I hope that counts as experiential learning. I am familiar with the prickly back-of-the-neck sensation of a hostile evironment being enjoyed by someone in power over me, the chilly shadow thrown over my body of sanctioned menace. Yes, I am quite familiar with that. I cannot say that I feel unafraid or that I am not bereft. My body is certainly doing its bereft routine, dropping weight like a stone, the flight/fight response, hardening right before my eyes in the mirror as it prepares, muscles tight, carving themselves into what looks like hours spent at a gym but it is actually the result of a million clenches like my molecules are each doing squats, and I feel like utter shit ft. resplendent, an inverse proportional resulting in looking fucking fantastic as if by dark magic. My body and I recognize the sensation of my back against a wall and the man in front of me must be made to move, to make a hard choice about which way he will jump as I come out of cornered right at him, and what that choice will likely be (regrettable). I have never forced several to jump at once. That'll be new today.

Hmm. What is the soundtrack ... 🤔 

hard time - seinabo sey 

cleaning my gun - mark knopfler

14220 is Mercy adjacent. Does anyone in that zip not work in healthcare some kinda way? Just saying, there might be a link between our healthcare workworld and despair 🤔 (Duh)

They say medicine is an art. That's what I'm there for, to tell them that, make them write, teach them an artform. But medicine is more like magic. Alchemy. "If you cannot curse, you cannot cure."~ Sabrina Scott

I'm on 5 meds - steroids, inhalers, antibiotics, etc - to combat whatever this very nasty bug is (not covid), which took me down in less than an hour from first sneeze to nasty cough to wheezing face bleeding ear infected mess. My primary was so happy to see me, she feels bad but I'm always so funny when I'm unwell! I want her to laugh, that helps her work the needed magic. 

Moving back to the cottage to heal and rest up for Phoenix. Finally submitting my pistol application on the way. (Jesus, that process is bonkers. You can get married a hell of a lot easier and that's more deadly! You don't need classes and character witnesses for that shit, and you should!). By doing so, I am trying to start wrapping up this "sonic boom HELL FUCKING NO" phase (protracted tantrum). Having dropped 15 pounds and reanimated my hair like a pile of slither on my head via the vitamin shots, I want to at least be open to a float in the Rise pool before I seduce the fuck out of med students in front of a bunch of priests. Which I fully intend to do (yesss). 

ane brun - to let myself go (keyham DM rework) 

"Maenad", 'vi:tɔld ˌpruʂ'kɔv:ski

Bonus track - name is BURNS, only in Buffalo lol 🙄, we are so droll in the face of loss(es)

My mother loves this house. Every time we pass it on our way to the 100-yr-old little grocery that makes sausage to die for (marjoram and blueberries, omg), she says "my my!, this town is so lovely!"

It would be a thrill to get that house just because she loves it so, to give her the Benjamin Moore color wheel and let her go crazy with the cheese whiz on it. It'd be like I'm magic, which I am (just ask my mother). Then I'd create a line of credit for her at the "antiques mall" in town with the billion stalls of old lady shit that makes her gasp with memory. "Do you remember?!", she asks about the vintage butter hen, which oddly I do kinda remember, some genetic memory of a great grandmother feeling well enough surrounded by milk glass in her kitchen. And I could do that. If I were mad enough.

It would be quite mad to go to Phoenix to guest lecture as part of my recruitment this month, while simultaneously buying another huge fixer upper in NY, while simultaneously trying to land the duplex sale around squatters, while simultaneously readying myself to sell my current home (probably) despite it being now covered in murals that my mother painted - and what if she dies (!?) then I'd be bereft of all these touches of hers (!!) - while simultaneously brewing a pheromone miasma so strong that I think my bare feet might spontaneously sprout leather boots. 

I should be thinking about a condo in Phoenix. But I am not. In the first place, I'm not sure I want to work in Phoenix - they're test driving me, but I'm test driving them too. 

Plus I'm sick, planted on the couch with a nasty cough, my body pressing the pause button for some much needed rest after pulsing for months with gameness = incandescent with feeling(s) + silent + self determining. Trying to crack myself open to let in what wants to come to me, and to let out some of the steam. Putting distance between myself and everything, working my body as a tool to get that done, carving myself into my own Galatea. I don't want to spend any unecessary energy on condo (beige) thoughts. Wherever I go, there will be a bed, I trust.

Fun fact I am learning: health humanists could work kinda like travel nurses, demanding more money for less commitment. I wonder if working that way requires being a person who could throw their lives into bags with little warning, or if working like that turns you into a person who can do that (?). Nature v Nurture (?)

There is something so planted in me that it's difficult being mutable. Until I lose my temper. My tantrums reverberate far beyond detonation, waves of consequence beyond what can be known at ground zero(s). My mother put her foot down only once in her life, the day she left my father, and 38 years later they both still think about that every single day, think about each other every single day, living out the significance of that moment, both of them endlessly mulling it as if it might be relitigated even now. 

Be careful where you plant a foot. You might later wish to root out just what you planted. But maybe that's part of the process, the effort it takes to yank yourself freer showing you what power you still have. 

Forget Me - chris klaaford (kitchen version) what the close captioning lyric robot does with "vitriol" (great word) is hilarious 🙄

"gameness"

"against jesus"

Woke up sick oof 🤧 Disco and I are watching Interview with a Vampire

Killing Myself - Kevin Welch ❤️yeet

I've got to see you again - norah jones (alternate version - the allaire sessions) 

newly minted, smib

nothing compares to you - chris cornell

It is the new moon in Virgo tonight. Every augurie good. 

labor day

Being in public for no reason other than to be among my herd. Humans. I chose a coffee shop which might be frequented by a friend who lives in this burb (last I knew) whom I have not seen in person in a while though I have seen his cock umpteen times, sending dick pics being how he loses his mind. I’d like to see him again (the rest of him). 

I’m wondering: what is the relation of a fetish to a compulsion to a slow motion psychotic break (?)  Diagnosing a psychotic break sounds like a pretty easy thing once the psyche is visibly broken, bringing to mind men walking around without pants seemingly unawares, raving at passing cars and the like.  But I don’t think that’s how minds and hearts break mostly.

A couple next to me is discussing the oppressive tipping situation, which seems to them a harbinger of the end of days, a vignette I want to share as an amusing observation with another friend who is right now marching in a Labor Day parade, surely chanting something worker affirming, but I cannot share that story because I am at this moment enjoying a chai latte after tipping the barista merely the change from a $10 for a $9 muffin, the privilege of which would disgust as much as amuse him, and that’s not what I’m going for, “going for” being illusive with that friend already as I sit here in my bedazzled New Orleans t-shirt.

I bond with people who border on madness, more men border on madness than women in real life, in literature the maniacs are all women who are wild-tressed sexually unhinged brunettes, which I suppose is what attracts the somewhat troubled men to me, as if their cocks are homing pigeons to my trope. 

I am told that I am quite funny. Inappropriate is the marrow of my humor, to be safely shared with a meeting of eyes, an unspoken understanding calling attention to something they should not be thinking but which they are thinking, tamping down a giggle behind a cough. Think "sweater pants". Bam, intimacy sparked.

My instinct is finding something absurd to deflate the stated agenda, whatever that agenda may be, because although there are countless agendas in gatherings of humans, typically someone is in charge and the goal is absurd (to me). If I were marching around and picnicing in Caz park for workers’ rights today, for instance, I would be doing so, on the face of it, because I believe baristas should get dental coverage (I don’t have dental coverage – does anyone actually have dental coverage?). But. I can imagine the march from here, a stimulating mix of diverse folks chanting lustily, one of whom is my friend, his earnestness rendering him something akin to a grown boy scout ripe for defiling. I’d be all about the rights of workers while actually observing the body of my friend, who has come back now (mostly) from losing his mind over the little wife who left him for the man she was sleeping with when she married him. He has gained weight how men tend to do that, I've noticed, a hard ripe tummy, the kind of weight people put on after they have been molested, a protective girth. I tell him that he needs a dog, and I send him petfinder ads every morning. But. He needs an affair with a married woman, needs to shave that tummy right off with the nervy energy of illicit desire, and I might even suggest that course of action, a perfectly innocent proposition from me as I am not (yet) married.  He might say that such an affair would be unthinkable, given that he was torn asunder by infidelity – if so, he’s not yet to the later phase when you find that it didn’t kill you / it isn’t fatal.

They are probably together, my friend and the coworker I threw down with once (twice maybe) (those were dark cloudy days), whose attendance at worthy marches is a given. The coworker’s ass ranks number one in drunken ladies room confessionals and, despite the public do-gooding, he has a susceptibility to doing no-good that I personally tested (epic fail).  We never have spoken about that incident, but since then he occasionally quips that I might puke, as in ‘don’t tell her that gross story or she might gag’, comments that invariably make him blush scarlet. What I can't remember I can well guess, so clearly sticking in his mind that he has a Pavlovian response to my putting so much as a carrot stick in my mouth at picnics. 

I leave it simmer.

I am contemplating: the relationship between desire and stress.  Not a little stress causes too much online shopping typa deal.  I’m talking about the duress of life:death:meaning:need colliding like fusion, unearthing desires buried in drums that were never supposed to leak.  But they do. 

part time lover - vladimir buiakov (adorable version)