That was just plain fucking awful. All of it, all the ways she "handled" her death, wow man she needed a death doula like hell. (Yes that is a thing because Dying is a Thing, like birth, reverse blink.)

She'd had an operation. To remove one tumor from her esophagus bc it was fucking w her inner ear and making her dizzy. Followed by a METRIC FUCKTON of chemo and radiation (somehow this is kidney cancer, or as she put it "interrupting kidney function". Her sodium levels are zilch.) I hear all this after the fact of it. I'm thinking palliative care consult ASAP. But nobody says exactly what it is in medical specifics or if they do nobody who hears it understands it OR is willing to accept it. 

And I totally get it. I wouldn't accept Dying either. 🖕

And I am not Dying, I can prove it, I used to be WAY SKINNIER. Look at the size of that Italian shnoz. This pic was on the always-present photo montage at these things. I still want my tits and ass back!, I need to get dick n pizza in me lol, but I'm also just small :/

But if we WERE, Dying Now, we would need help doing it better. Americans die horribly. It's a cluster fuck. Nobody can or will just be nakedly honest at all, terrified (physicians and patients). Nobody understands the actual science much, at least patients do not and drs hide behind clinical languages. Plus there are draconian rules like you have to live at least 30 days if you have surgery. It's like a return policy but prevents returns until AFTER 30 days. (Why?) Everybody sick is ashamed af (about?). And the end result is what I just went through:  20 bereft broken coworkers,  standing around saying nice stuff, which is all we ever do anyway. We're generally nice. April, faculty from OT, so nice that you think somebody droppd her on her fucking head, is as usual taking photos. (Why?) And I smile in a few. (Why?) And there are hot dogs, but nobody has the heart to cook them.

I made everyone cry once, that was my scope of practice under the circumstances.

"See ya Monday", hugs, like always. 

Except she's fucking DEAD. And we were it, she had nobody, no family left, those kids were a disaster, work was (we were) it.

These are the days I remember I do not drink.

Virgo new moon rising half way thru this day, pivoting now from ppt chores to (un)funeral chores, bathing btw bc one should (show respect) sending a spirit on its way. 

Thru it all I am holding your not-dying, thumb curled in fist. I wish you were not physically alone for this, so the thumb is "littlespoon". 

"vigil"

3 options, 1) tired (how is he NOT so tired that the SUGAR of booze is propping him up energywise more than the %proof is treating his anxiety?) 2) fine (which means his normal self, but without that sugar = utterly exhausted, even his organs, his sphincter, his everything just bone exhausted) 3) an animal 🤔

We are all animals; ones kept in the conditions he's been keeping would render any animal tired nearly to death. Nearly. Adverbs, like shamelessness, are underrated! So my parasympathetic math is 1+2+3=1

This part, it's not the fun part either. It's another hard part that will take more than a minute to take your body and mind back. I know. I asked for the song again but Alexa played this instead, TWICE. It took more than a minute to come undone. I've learned patience works more efficiently than punching myself down also while step-taking out of abysses.

And. Welp, I wouldn't have anticipated our little 🫂 story to be taking this turn right now, so much so that I can't help it: it makes me happy and seems painfully/playfully funny. Like dude, I figured at some point it might come up that the reason we end up in bed so much is because we just kinda love the shit outa each other, but I figured that could just be a weird me thing (ok with it!) plus we'd be busy rediscovering the upsides of being in bodies (ie you'd think with your dick). We can't even say lust drove us to it 🤭💞. Turns out we were too shitty-feeling and buried alive for that, so we invented Aspirational Lust for Life from time-mortared loves. A very specific brew.

By what you're doing, room is being made in our universes for Good and Beautiful (without asking Ma, I can assure you, Lust is a color without which you see worse, like a possum or whatever, you "don't even know") It's downright romantic in a certain light.

Our shared-parallel tomorrow. Day 1. It feels like another hurdle twat-threat type deal. And we are each gonna clear it somehow. Apx 9 am - 9 pm. Your withdrawal process. You changed the tires and arranged childcare, exactly the kinda shit needs done. My workday, teaching "Dying: How To" by Dr. Patricia Abbott at a late day picnic to which I am bringing the girliest rainbowishyest sprinkle glitter cupcakes I can find. #shameless

Lecture notes re "lowest of the low"

"The best part, though, is the work we do in words. The palliative specialist serves as a sort of illness interpreter, bringing the jargon of clinical medicine into the life and language of the patient who is living the experience." Our Long Marvelous Dying, A Novel, Anna Deforest, MD.

The way you talk to yourself right now is hateful bullshit that alcohol is. It is a liar. And needing anything at all (ie kids omg needing them will totally killya) can/could lead you to dark places. Human = the lowest of the low potentially at any point. And you shouldn't think that you are superhuman like a douchey doctor. It's not good for you or, ultimately, your patients. Who, as you know, are at their low not "the" anything but at a moment, a hard one. Another, usually.

Another example: "fighting cancer" all that pink ribbon bullshit just makes people who are dying feel like failed fucking warriors. Which shortens their lives and lowers quality of that time dramatically. And I can prove it. Stop talking that way. 👁 

Note - I used to say shit like that everywhichway, and bigger platforms for a while. But. I can't focus attention that way. Not like I want to.  

Yesterday my card was the Queen of Cups, her cup runneth over with love in all its forms, refilled as if by magic - the more she pours out, the more that's in it to pour, as much through her as in her. Of all the Queens, I find her the most daunting. The Queen of Swords, I could do that shit all day without breaking a sweat. But to pour out feeling, you gotta have it, allow it. I leaned in. And now keep a candle lit (vigil).

Today, my job begins again. First meeting is re a class I am coteaching with a BIO faculty about whom all I know is she gets lip plumper injections, which she claims is life changing, and I've never had the gumption to ask how it impacts felatio. We will be working together for 3 months. There's no way I will be able not to ask for 3 whole months. Basically, today "work" begins again, but I am so wholly rearranged into grit in the shape of a woman (more or less), now serially overflowing with feeling, that I cannot and have no desire to imagine stepping back into my last known identity costume. And I have no clear idea of what that will look like going forward.

I am carving down to it, like sculptors do, chipping away what is not part of her, until the shape emerges. Having faith that the carving away does leave a shape of some kind (Alive) and not just rubble. 

That is more comfortable to do alone. Painful, full of errors (oops, I think I stuck a chisel in my liver), my hair in a frazzled messy bunish mess, slap some liptint on it and turn up the 'appearance improver" setting on zoom. You can even pour bourbon into your coffee cup, who'd know?  

Today, all that visibly ends. It has been closing as a window for a year+ where nobody could see, and now it SHUTS in plain sight of everyone I know. I have to walk onto campus, in the very few clothes that fit, all eyes on the ghost ft. workwidow of Patti, a much tinier person burning much hotter. By tomorrow afternoon, to cap it all off, I give the eulogy that officially "opens the semester" with a touchstone directive to guide the year. I have been writing/rewriting/doodling that eulogy for weeks. There is no one exemplary story that sums up a whole person, nor even what that person was to just you (not after 30 years), so telling a story isn't it.

She always believed that if you couldn't find ways you could be doing better, you weren't looking hard enough. But what are you looking for?, I would insist. Better compared to what? Seriously, you're going to insist on a searching moral inventory every day, and it ends with more organized desk drawers? And we would fight like that, like lovers might, like sisters do. It took us 3 decades to finally land on our respective essential stance: I shamelessly want to live, she wanted to live blamelessly. And for now, at least, I won our eternal argument. 

What am I going to do with that? And by tomorrow, what am I going to say about it that will lead these people into the burning building of Living, rightfully afraid but doing it anyway? CPR breaks ribs, the sound is not one you can unhear, even practiced on a corpse with nothing left to lose, the birdbone fragile that we all are just under the skin, and it very often doesn't end in saving life, never undamaged if it does, and yet we do it, instinctively willing to break ourselves and each other for another chance. If I could, I would give them all just one firm compression to demonstrate how fiercely they do want to BREATHE. They just don't know it because they didn't die (quite) yet. 

Patti did. And more than she was willing for anyone else, she walked with me through the thoughts of it until the very end when she emphatically wanted no hand to hold after choosing simply "thank you" as the last thing she wanted to say. I am not going to tell "positive remembrances" as requested. I am going to punch them in the chest with a sentence. I just have no idea what that sentence is yet, and I won't know until it comes out my mouth.

Like how my mother says that funerals
Have the timing down all wrong
You say so much to a person
Only after they are gone

So I never will stop grieving
Everything that's yet to die
I think I'll love after I'm dead
And I'll grieve while I'm alive

grieving - leith ross (reverse blink repost)

ghosts that we knew - mumford and sons

Wow I am sure glad I waited til I could sit alone on his couch and listen to that. Until after I had had every thought experiment I could think of, such as: What if he sobers up, that'll come with some form of psych support, someone like mine (not an idiot this time), so he decides marriage counseling is worth a try? Okay. Whatever he wants and needs to be a healthy happy man, that is my desire. It's the same answer no matter what thought experiment question I put to it: Yes. I mean, some yesses make me feel some kinda things, and I was following my sniffer to the source of Want, wanting to Want, and kinda tripped over him with my nose to the ground, and instinctively wagged my tail (unapologetically shamelessly, I would add, because shameless is a healthful feeling in many contexts, such as when seeking help -  shameless is underrated imo), but he's hurt bad too, and that makes me feel a whole range of things, capable of that range of feelings, because the core is as my mother harpooned it (🙄): I love him. It is impossible for me to risk "doing that again." That's why I am not worried about it. It has just been true now for maannny years, together and apart, often just plain too busy to actively think about him at all. It just is. And we are going to be alright. And one reason why we are going to be alright is that we have each other in our lives again, one wound healed/healing now, whatever that looks like. As long as it's Alive. Really fully Alive. I can ❤️ it.

This is one of those posts that I would unblog in a heartbeat hahaha totally, but, it's those sloppy wet kiss posts that I am like 'god this writing is terrible and I shouldn't put this/that in writing at all' that kick up Alive dust. So fuck it, I'll walk around nakedly honest for a spell.

babies are honest

I am gonna unblog all this shit and leave just the oracle and the song (changed my mind, fuck it)

VIRGO 

In Mesoamerican myth, the god Quetzalcoatl journeys to the underworld not to escape death, but to recover old bones needed to create new life. I propose you draw inspiration from this story, Virgo. In recent weeks, you have been gathering pieces of the past, not out of a sense of burdensome obligation, but as a source of raw material. Now comes the time for reassembly. You won’t rebuild the same old thing. You will sculpt visionary gifts for yourself from what was lost. You will use your history to design your future. Be alert for the revelations that the bones sing.

I can't help but think about him/you, reading that. We didn't have a future. We had a hell of a present. Then an end.

I am not dead. It is not time yet for me to haunt. I am here now. And unexpectedly so is he. I live somewhere, but not for long, and him too, and kinda everybody I know too. This shit ain't the fun part yet for everyone (lalala). I am trying to absorb changes like that into my body so the feeling of change feels Better, more like flying (falling with style). Or like swimming. Freedom has to become something Better than nothing left to lose.

He and I have come to be parallel, a different kind of "together" entirely.

Me, I feel like I got dragged behind a moving vehicle, flung around here there and everywhere, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, passing the butter like a motherfucker - career building, getting taken to events and interesting places, giving my mother accomplishments to brag about. Keeping them all alive through a fucking pandemic during which one had a cf baby and another one transitioned. Try that parenting shit on. It worked until it just did not. The last couple years, more and more, No. There is just no getting around my being IN PIECES. I don't want to take it back, I learned a lot (grew up), but it is hard no anymore. Ya don't kill what is truly valued, or watch it die like "meh" either. Kinda all at once in Phoenix, half my hair just fell out like one of those weird scared to death things. Made me so mad. I threw it at the walls all over their workcondo in wet clumps. That's one way to leave. If I doubt the trustfall faceplant pivot I am pulling right now and get scared, I go back to that again, throwing my hair. And leave more.

I don't know what metaphor he would use, how he would to describe the heart of how he came to be in pieces. My tendrils feel like something came flying apart when the kid got sick, something in him already, held together but fragile like a fabragie (sp) egg. And like my partner would watch me die and suck at the bones, what he is in would do the same and convince him he deserves it as punishment besides. 

My mother's Good and Beautiful solution of welp he had to have kids so now he got them just resume the honeymoon, while not bad for masturbating, overlooks every reality, such as all these kids we have holy shit and a Denise drone and pretty shattered mental health affecting our physical health because we have (amazing) drama queen bodies. (I have loud orgasms, upside/downside ya know? I am not doing so currently. Even when you do, are you ever inspired enough and free enough to be really loud af?) 

Welp. Now that I am thinking about all this - another luxury he has little of, time to think - the NEH grants were about him and me, at the root. About what happens to students who have his barriers,  how they get put into chutes of failure altogether or successful moral injury. And I am right there for both/either. And I am not the only one, there are hundreds of us. Many of them are practioners of a high end kind writing these experiences down, and how the traumas land in their real lives. Sometimes they die like When Breath Becomes Air guy. Sometimes they are sexy af, like The People's Hospital guy, whom I got to hang out with and talk about FRAHME. All things I wouldn't have gotten into without an "important white guy" ticket. But I taught those book to students, or a case study or whatever it is, how I would do that Thing. Like I did with that yoga guy. With my full attention. 

And now I have taken that off the market. Doing me. It's not for sale. In any form. Only if I really want to can I do so, maybe even on demand (aspirationally).

Somehow saving his ass works to save my own, that much my mother has right, I feel that too. But how?  Theory: he has to see me as needing comparable Rescue and turn on / get turned on by being the only him. 

mistakes - caamp

fainting while conscious

Back to realities. 

I am buying a house before labor day, then selling one 30 days later apx, broke as a joke between with a ton of repairs to manage and finance. Yesterday was day 1 of "the closing areas", the banking voodoo phase, so so many forms.

I said house, not home. Making HOME is a whole different kind of magic. 

I have landed (hard) in various ways on a group of friends who have taken me in like a ward of their state(s). My reator friend, KQ, is now a life-longer for sure. Now that she has seen it ALL, she understands why I got so skinny. Sometimes that's what is needed more than anything, to be SEEN. She offered to help with the little ones if they have to come to me for a while. She's licensed foster-to-adopt so is part of a network of people our age raising Littles like she is. 

As all this starts to be WHEN for me now, the moving the money the worry the want, I get little bracing waves of humility and gratitude toward the people helping me, going out of their way not just to answer a cry for help bc I don't know how to, and they know that, so they just show up and show up and show up. I am used to being Fine, I don't need anything (!!). But you can't be your own hero. That's what these hands to hold are reminding me. If you were your own hero all the time, you'd be a douche (like so many surgeons). Rescue (little r's adding up) is a pass-it-along exchange economy. Like microaggressions reversed. 

Inevitabilities that rely heavily on others, that I would not or could not have set in motion without trustfalling at folks: 

1. I will live have shelter.
2. I will move a ton of shit, lotsa books and boots. 
3. I will give away a home, couches and tables and desks and a safe (opened by Nebraska unbeknownst to me until I fetched the bear mace and found the shotgun dismantled into pieces in a heap, I suppose to make me feel stupid and defenseless)
4. I will teach 2 classes starting next week, one of which will be mostly covered by another friend 

And I have no idea how the physical moving gets done and by whom. I haven't packed one box yet. I am just falling into tomorrow facefirst, not even trying to break my fall, full on damsel for now. #existential#slapstick

For a creative outlet, I started making a playlist for jumping off cliffs. Mood music. Between jumping and landing, there are a LOT of moods in a fall. 

motel room - bob sumner the dancing mustaches cheer me

a single day back to it

He's been so quiet, the dick pic could have been a suicide note. If so, once again I got it wrong.

Brain Dead - Papa Roach 

Tawista 2025 fini ft home

As long Cindy lets me, I will come back now again every year. Others may come and go, but this place owns a piece of me.

The writing I did there belongs on paper strewn all over a desk, not trying to be in chronological order or to make sense (yet).

The biggest pile of (mental / half blogged) paper is probably Transformative Fucking, but everything is connected. Writing is for *thinking shit down* into words. All the Things. 

Rule of dick pics: they either really make your day or they really don't. It made my day, and created another night/day. I looked at that pic like I was standing before a Jackson Pollack. The very subtle pigmentation shift one inch from the top of the shaft is distinctive, as far as I know. So it is him, but he looks so happy (he has not been very happy of late unless something has changed ?) Very groomed whereas we've tended toward some jungle. It might not be a recent photo. It might be an aspirational photo, what he wants to feel but does not (cannot) (yet). But who cares! (flabberghasted art student style), I think. I have seen him that dickhappy (to see me) many many times, and it always made me happy. I have never ever once thought "I hope I never see that again." So right in the middle of Tawista dropped a happydick pic, past present or (aspirationally) future. Ya know that saying "it's beer:thirty somewhere"? It's happydick time somewhere. 

I couldn't ask clarifying questions, even my "nice to see you" whatever reply just spun. I decided that was deliberate on his part, knowing I couldn't text back. And tbh it was a bit orgasmic to just lie around naked even on the porch and think up smut in which the central characters are having existential meltdowns and are working it out erotically. They dare each other to walk around naked for a couple days, for instance, #trustfalling, she dares him by starting it. I did this for the rest of whatever day that was and the next. I hope my tendrils reached far enough.

I kinda thought through one Thing after another, about Everything. Once I told him that he seems more motherly than most fathers. That was why he was so easy to be around from my perspective, he actually liked doing mundane kid shit, my version of which has a lot of down time, days on which the goal is to maybe slowcook some piece of meat. And he liked to play, making kids laugh and me was fun for him, omg that stupid Adam Sandler bit with the goat. I don't know what he would say to my thinking he has a mothering orientation to fatherhood. But even if he would dispute that whole conceptual framework, we'd talk about it. Like that, I wrote about two people talking and fucking, and the fucking and the straight talk are both sexy. 

If rewrote it, I would probably tell it as story about a woman going feral alone in the woods, word vomiting on ghost dick. I wonder if that's a genre? Medium-specific adult fiction? Like, people who can bring back the dead to fuck them to death 🤔 and then but she wants to fuck the Living, one in particular, and her magic temper tempter gets the best of her. (Snort.) Would anyone wanna read that? You'd have to be the Alive guy... We could have an only fans whatever ficfans 🤔 ha #leanint#craycray Holy Ghost - Mavis Staples Mavis slays.

Once Ears arrived, the other half of these conversations was filled in by him. Except for the fucking factor, the topics of conversation were the same or similar. Especially "home". We kept coming back to that topic. What is it? (You told me the first night we saw each other that you wanted to "fuck come home" me. But pancakes. I didn't bring that into the conversation w Bru but I am thinking about it.)  Shelter isn't entirely sufficient, and many people do not have even shelter let alone a PLACE that is home. You could have a place to stay that's safe enough but that is not home / belongs to someone else. My eldest child has been homeless with a cf kid since 2020, and just had baby. Grinding poverty relentless. That's the hardest of all our scenarios to fathom unless I try to imagine passing butter to Ex for a year. That's a new very odd level of hell 😬. In any case, in every case, everyone is shifting around, and in each instance there is some relief in the 'finally moving' but also 'this feels like jumping off a cliff'. Across the board, you me him her the other her and them, All of Us. 

Ears and I smoked joints and talked and laughed and took many long deep breaths. And ate and ate and ate. Swimming, like sex, makes me hungry. 

And now, I have to jump off a cliff for a couple months straight. Relentlessly, I shall be a damsel in hell awaiting rescue hereforth. Quickie-leaning vignettes, maybe, as a writing phase? Or selling suicide notes as a side gig again? 

Some visual highlights. Playlist forthcoming Holy Ghost - Mavis Staples 💓

why? 

a gift

I don't know who healed who, but by the time I left I could float perfectly and indefinitely, my pond husband's changes required me to Just Be in a different way, different balance, different breathing, different tip of my hips. If I could do that every day, I would live forever. 

Tawista 2025 v 4

forever feels - calvin love  👀  My mom did pick it.

Early morning, the heat broke and left the water warmer than the air, and now I can float better. Was I holding my breath when I got here? (Yup.).

Went to town again to buy more milk now that Ears has surfaced. They're fixing main street, I park and walk in, the man in the hardhat bowed to me, deeper than a nod and not a dog whistle, I don't know why. It was notable because his belly, like men of that age often, was a large hard watermelon - what IS that, and why do so many men have it? I don't find it unattractive, it just reminds me of my grandpa, which reminds me of my mother. Lately everything reminds me of my mother.

(Aside. Town = signal. Iffy but 1 bar. Enough to find that blogger itself broke my promise and took the harmless tits of my last post down. That's a new wrinkle. Hey Elonia, we know you're gay, honestly you're the only one who thinks THAT's the problem.)

I have been trying to learn how to be more like my mother, who had none of my delusions about herself (invincible, for instance) and had instead a will to see the Good and Wonder-Inducing Beauty in things. But how do you learn that? It can't be by DOING. She rarely does anything, old now, can't move easily, will soon need a wheelchair, and I will build a ramp, I hope in time for her to need it and before it is just another thing that will remind me of her, about which I will have to chuckle anyway because even in her prime she'd be like, why take the stairs if there's a ramp? 🤣 I think of her as Light, and I want to be Lighter. But. Maybe I have it reversed, as I have most things. Maybe what she is essentially Not Afraid of The Dark. 

Trying to follow my mother through the Dark, then, into the Better. But I am not gonna (re)write the rest/worst of what she said. And I can't repost the thought experiments re what might be needed or wanted depending on mood and circumstance, any of which might trigger blogger to cancel me. I could post all the hate I wanted, because Hate is not the scariest word in English.

Everything I wrote and lost, the good and the hard and the filthy- sweet, it is better twas unsaved than censored. Guess that content is analog f2f again now, #oldschool

Experiment - hey Ma, play us a song? (Will Sirius or FM work here? For her, apparently yes.)

forever feels - calvin love

Tawista 2025 v 3

Thursday a.m. What I wrote in the last two days (v 2) disappeared, far as I can see. The clouds here are just actual clouds.

On Tuesday, I ran into town, which published what I had written until then. Then I realized I couldn't take anything back or even reread it. There is no take backsies here. It kind of unnerved me. But maybe we would be better off if instead of trying to not-say or un-say, we just SAID STUFF without curating.

Later that day, a photo came in. There is no way to tell when it was sent. It felt like a response, I read it that way, and I responded like my writing itself had gotten a Yes. So I wrote us a series of pillowtalk conversations, his parts sketched in as best guesses. About life, work, kids, sex, pain, pleasure, time, words, beavers (not a metaphor) and birds, about broken bodies and climate change both here, hair (ingrown and thrown in handfuls respectively). We talked about Anything. As if we had that time to lie on a creaking bed with eternally green sheets. I think the best parts of that writing was the series of "Mood Swings", how we might  through a series of moods we often each feel. I believed he could hear me in his mind and feel touching tendrils. 

Then all of that writing was just gone this morning. Maybe he took back the photo - people do that, unsend like I unblog, tho I don't know how - and all my 'reply' went with it. 

Late tonight / tomorrow Ears should arrive, though with him (also) you never know if you will see him until you do. In case, I will go to town to get bread for dip, and I will wear some clothes. I stayed utterly naked here til now, inside and out of the cabin, trying to just be a Living Thing along with Everything Else here. I didn't look in any mirror, didn't even occur to me, and until last night didn't even take a (half-assed) selfie. Maybe this will publish. If so, I won't take it back even if I want to. 

>imagine removed by blogger<
 

The week @ Tawista 2025 - tagging it bc I will unblog everything I write / file it away.

Sunday. I don't feel afraid. Beyond that, I don't think I have words. It is gobsmacking beautiful here and dead silent beyond reckoning. It hurts (knife emoji) that my mother can't ever see this place again. I could not safely get her onto the porch. That isn't a hurt from the past, it's a hurt in the present and, worsely, in the future 💔. I am glad I did all that I still could while she could still see me do it. More than anything, for her to see me well is the reason I am trying so hard right now to be. "If I have to die worried sick, I just don't know Lord..." I heard this countless times. And FAIR, I have been an absolute fucking mess in every life category except maybe parenting. Out of pure endless boundless love for my children, I mostly did ok parenting if judged by how LOVED they know themselves to be. Very. They, in turn, will do everything they can to be okay, for my sake alone if life reduces them to that. But I pale in comparison to my mother. She has pure boundless love for all things Good and Beautiful, and I top that list for her, always, even when I am a clearly broken person. Maybe even especially then. I am Good and Beautiful, more now than ever for the struggle visible on me. SMIB! 

Talk about a powerful witch. 

In the wee hours. I take a photo of the Sturgeon (surviver) moon. I am not afraid of snakes or bears or coyotes. It is so quiet that I think I am as utterly alone as a person can be, with not so much as a frog croaking.  

I wonder if he feels me as a void. 

Tuesday wee hours (I am bouncing around in time. It's all about you so far so try to follow 🤷🏻‍♀️). Misses me, I meant, by "feeling the void". We have unexpectedly (to me) broken through the veil of this blog so that we are talking. He started using the comment box, so to speak, and then it was like a switch was thrown, and I was free to feel whatever and words started flying out my nipples.

I have no way to leave anything for him/you (good thing I am adept with mutable pronouns), blogwise, while I am at Tawista, which makes me feel surprisingly unsettled. Old feelings of being helpless to make him happy, turning over in their grave. This is different, though. I'm not what is making him miserable. Not directly. But I think I am making him uncomfortable, that I am doing so right now by being here. I am showing him that he cannot do that. He thought he could, but he cannot. I am not trying to upset him. But I am shoving him toward happier, pulling him towards me to fuck every miserable bastard in his head, tempting him, delving into his Dying, bothering if not stopping it. Trying to throw increasingly accurate monkey wrenches into this whole Dying by Butter thing he's got going on. 

I dunno all the reasons that I am Dying. But one reason could very well be that I am starving drooling maniac. 

"I know both the problem and the solution, and I know how much brave solutions like these require." 

"When I asked him to do this with me he said yes, seemingly without taking the time to feel the weight of 'yes' on the decaying cartilage that barely holds life together." 

But he had felt the weight of it. Mulled it, stuck to Yes, added Please. And I am figuring out where the 'yes' can get in edgewise, in real life/time (Virgo). I will free him if I can figure out how to get a bobbypin into his cuffs.  "After all, everything we are afraid of has already happened."

All quotes from same source below, which was yesterday / earlier, when I "sang" to you. 

"I find riding the edge of taking it too far pregnant grace. People who are just learning how to walk are not afraid of taking things too far."

--- 

Monday. Wake up 9 a.m. to phone ringing, water raining in the dining room at home, where my kids are "house sitting" while I get the septic that they fucked up pumped out / repaired at cottage. I love my kids obviously, they are my community. But they are my kids, even as adults, and kids crash into shit. Kid math, eldest kid = 5 kids for that ONE. I wouldn't trade them "for all the riches of Denmark," another funny phrase I have adopted, funny cz for kids you'd need all the riches of someplace richer than that.

The sale of my primary home makes it possible to pay myself back $ loss upon loss, and come out even ISH. You know the drill: work ceaselessly, allow people to abuse you for the right to work yourself to death, and stay barely above the water line. Treading water, one of my strongest skillsets. Want less, another strong suit. That is just money and there is never enough of it. This is America, also not a rich enough place.

What is much harder to quantify is human cost, such as what fucking Nebraska as part of the abuse I took just to work myself to death, what a year of that did to me. "I approach my vagina as a decolonizing project." What it is gonna take from me and break inside me to move AGAIN all by myself, reliving every other time in the process. I can't catch a break long enough to assess what all is broken in me, but it's a lot. I can afford to want less, but wanting nothing is a death sentence I feel breathing down the back of my neck. Death. You always personified it like a conscious enemy, and now I feel it like that. I do not smell like it (yet), I smell like decolonizing pussy, but I am not underestimating Death's cunning or its lurking presence anymore. 

I had thought maybe if you showed up, we might climb Goodenough again, find the geocached little book, and add the names of 5 children born between us since then. It's a hell of an achievement, those 5 adorable faces. And these years also cost(s) us dearly. Breaking us down like cardboard boxes. We are not made of cardboard. I dunno what you're made of; I am flesh, nettle, and bone.

It's a big R rescue needed. And that feels like resetting a bone, maybe a multicompound fracture.

I am scary, maybe, because I will break a life (rebreak it to reset it). I am good at that terrible thing. "I don't know how to leave." Yes you do, you loved me and the kids and left. Twice. But you did suck at it, hated it so much you'd get a return address tattoo, and technically I kicked you out last time, which broke my heart but you had to go. I remember you telling me that I had caught you too soon, you "weren't ready" but when would you have ever been ready to be gone? Ya couldn't just "ready, set..." forever, blowing through Samanthonies while I stood there - that's not healthy, and as you now know, you owe healthy (enough not to die like a drama queen) to your kids (if not to our mothers). And now you have to leave again. And here I am again, this time helping you the way I help myself. That'd scare me too. I AM scared too. I might do any fucking thing to climb out of this SHIT. 

If you are standing in SHIT, do ANYTHING but sit down. From rules to Live by.

"I am a bobcat that's not been fatally shot with a .22 and I'm still being pursued..How could he not know this about me by now?"

I will put an entire home inside your apartment so it is no longer solitary confinement, which you crave. If you can take it. What's that song, when I drink alone I prefer to be by myself lalala. I half expect you'll get rid of that apt to get out of taking the couch and blame it on the landlady by the time I get back. I will also put Tawista in front of you, yours for the taking or not - even harder than the furniture, cz here you'd be naked and far from the comfortzone of the hamster wheel. I know cz that's why I am here, standing in discomfort. And this time you are going to keep the kids, they are not just hers. Neither was Ears. It's all about the kids, right? One of yours is all grown up now and a lovely warm hearted young man, one of my favorite people; maybe if you get some Ears, the "I can't leave my kids" injury gets some remediation. Hence why he only is coming here and knows that you might-but-won't turn up.

My mom said you hugged her like a drowning man and instructed me to not to let go your hand. I mind my mother, and even a cunthair away from dead, I can keep throwing "whens" at you like dodgeballs. 

If you had a blog, what would my blogname be, Huckleberry? 

I go back to sleep a lot today. Still not sliding into my pond husband. I feel too weak yet. Not to swim, I can do that easier than walking, but of being submerged in all these feelings I am allowing, that I will drown in them in the lake, which is at this moment is glistening, sexy af. And I want to drown in my pond husband. Oh to finally want something could be more than I could resist. 

I am grieving. Just like when you cried and cried because ur daughter did NOT die. I am not dead but I am sick with the things I have gone through. Full of sick of it, head to toe. I am so full that I am never hungry. 96 pounds when I left, that's what all my sadnesses and fears and wraths weigh. If I can't figure how to add some Good feeling back in, my next step will be into the grave. I need a happy ass, and I just do not know how to.

Suddenly texts makes it through. Random fleeting satellite dump so no telling when it was sent, and there is no way to respond. He cannot come. I get it. I cannot eat, fail even want to a lot 😶, so am here trying to get some can into me. I will not text back "bummer maybe next time" to the stuckpain I know he is in. I refuse him only having to play full of shit games like that. (And anal, def on the fence.) 

I could drive out to text him back but no. Been there done that. I left the phone number, if he wants to talk he can call. 

i'll stand at the foot of your lake

i'll wait in the grass while you take it too far

i'll give you the keys to all the canoes

i'll sing to you, until you sing back

i'll sing to you, until you sing back

~This Accident of Being Lost, Leanne Betasamosake Simson

I read that today and thought of him. This blog, what is it atm if not singing? 

Tuesday. I walked into the lake in the underwear I slept in. Realize I could never drown, I FUCKING FLOAT duh, plus Disco insists on sitting in the baking sun nonstop on the dock despite the shade cover I built, STARING at me intently, preventing harm. Gonna note, naturalist Thoreau-style, even here there is algea, killer red. And no beaver. No loon. Many crows. My pond husband is getting sick too 😪.  Now my attention is on him, floating and listening and watching and trying to feel what is wrong. My feet keep sinking, and that isn't me bc they floated as usual on pink bathing suit day. Oxygen, the tiny bubbles usually all over my skin, they're not here. I am so sorry, I think at my pond husband, with what is left of my whole body.

This. 

I was 'a woman scorned', I could have talked him into this tat, then ghosted him. He could have done a lot of things, but he chose indelible. Rescuing each other by trust fall. Repeatedly. And the bigger the fall the more dramatic (sudden, indelible, exposed) the Rescue. Historically, I mean. I've been thinking about this because it's another cycle (repeat repeat) and we both need another Rescue now = begs the question of what this one is gonna look like 🤷🏻‍♀️

I am going to Tawista because we said I (we) would. I would not have decided to go alone, but maybe that was a shove I needed. (I honestly have no idea how this Yes/Rescue works yet.) I spend much of my time in soliude, but I have never driven to Tawista / anywhere that remote alone before and I am afraid that I will be afraid, fearangry, pissed about the pistol permit / smallfeeling. But. Whatever I feel, I will just feel it. And eat. Or starve to death once and for all - I packed no nutritional shakes, just food. 

Ok but just in case, a refresher: Go to North Creek, then take 28N off 28, head north to Minerva past the biker bar. The driveway is to the right if headed north, marked by a cairn on a boulder at the end, just before the stony pond trail marker. If you see that, you've gone to far. Phone # 518 251 4644

No one song cuts it today playlist. My everlasting lover, someone cut the brakes.

trying something new - leaving in a bar vino esque skirt boot combo 

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). This is the time to tweak part of your routine because the new way will stick. Daily rituals can be art. Then the joy won't just be in the outcome. It's in the grace of doing it well, again and again — the elegance in repetition.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zg98LfSuWafKmKfk6 

like clockwork

Ears has weighed in, planning to come up next weekend. So I added another treat. 

borrow my boots - tami neilson

Medical humanities case study: Patti. In addition to the previously mentioned details that handed me human composting as a topic of inquiry, she left me a trail of encouragements. Literally. They start on the hallway downstairs and end in a cluster in our shared office suite, basically ending at my doorstep. She even left her signature with the last one. But nobody else knew her handwriting, so they didn't even see it. 💔

Think about that. She's dying. "Filled head to toe with it," you said, which was exactly right. Died of Dying. That is a real thing. And sometime during the very end she had snuck onto campus alone to do this. 

I found it when I had to go to campus today for the first time since. 

Question: what medicinal course of action did this person need? 

"blooming lotus" - mural draft

Making my mom happy is a core guiding principle for me, always but especially now. She wants to paint a new mural while she still can. On the side of the new garage / a backdrop for the pond (of course there will be a pond!). I watch the lotus bloom, working on its 4th now (never needed more than 2, but his life is heavier than just his own now by a factor of 2x humans). So how about we paint them, HUGE, feet wide each (like "GILF" in hot pink on black pavement)? Yes, Ma. "I AM SO EXCITED!" That's the road that leads to still excited at 83, so I go down it.

Closer - Scenic Route to Alaska

I was gonna unblog all this, but again I am choosing to leave the trail of thought-crumbs. I ran to my own cottage today to get my hiking hat, bare summer minimums that I've not needed once yet, too busy climbing out of the grave to do anything else all season. The septic there is overflowing, another mess/expense to deal with 🙄.

good thing I was crazy enough to move one of my trees to the cottage, and that I braved their mess to take a piss and flush the toilet 🤦🏻‍♀️

I am running around buying compost and cantaloupe seemingly (life), but I am trying to unbreak in reality (Live). "We should fix each other." Yes, please. 

-----

The appraisal came back on my new house. Upshot: my sister is right. Everyone ELSE is invested in everything going smoothly now. Sellers, agents, brokers. Nobody gets anything they want/need if it does not go smoothly. So unless called upon to do A Thing, I am going to let them all handle it all for a spell (let that spell work itself now). 

Attention turning to next steppings. I need to pause ordering skirts that look good with boots, summoning drool days, because I will need to move anything I buy but moreover I just put in a mail hold (no deliveries) Sun-Sun. 

Considering I haven't been able to pry any time at all out of his web of obligations (my mom could better than I lol). Considering that Ears doesn't know what PTO his job gives him if any (that kid is SO like me, jeezus). I have no idea how to "plan" for Tawista; it's not really up to me anymore. I did my bit. I suggested a do-over on that time we were not there together tho he wanted to be. That broken looks easy to mend in retrospect; Tawista heals, always has. "Yes!", he said. And if I could get that, even though they no longer rent it, would Ears want a day or two.. "YES!" So, I summoned Tawista back into our lives.

Now here it is, another "when" that I get to say, starting Sunday.

If he can. If he can. Two men, two wild cards.

So I am gearing up for what I think will be like a portal I've opened. It'll remain open for 7 days. I will be on the other side, maybe alone the whole time (?) Or maybe fucking and playing games after dinner. Or maybe some combo of those things on some subset(s) of days. I am thinking of what to take with me, like a tiny version of the radical downsizing choices ahead. I shouldn't bring too much, of food or loungerie, the kinda things that I would need them there for to need it. But not none either, because at any moment, either or both COULD walk through the portal. And I am a person too.

Are either men likely to tell me when or if or for how long they shall be?, she wonders. I know what "say when" means. They both know me, so that I would figure out how to say it should be no surprise. But. This little Virgo is all about reality, how it really is/feels (mouthfeel!). Especially in the case of Huckleberry, fantasy doesn't exist unless he brings it into my equation (yes, please) and he's maybe still (re)learning that I can only mean what I say. But Ears knows that when he steps through that portal for even just day, there will be waiting... 

Johnny's meatballs

Flavor of the year ice cream from Stewart's

Beaver Bite beer, also from Stewart's 

Me swimming through witchmate waters in my underwear (if anything)

🤔 so that's all I will gather, plus books/writing/weed for my own little self. I could bring other things, such as enchanted cock rings or ingredients for dip, if requested (?)

every chance I get I want you in the flesh - dan aurbach

Update: Sold. Not the HUGE payday that got me hot n bothered for a second, but I am not disappointed by that - it's enough - and entitled motherfuckers write checks with their mouths that their asses can't cash. But tiz worth noting that I am no longer the only person who thinks like that. EVERYONE in this ENTIRE process has come down to "who do you trust". Nowhere on any contract does it say that, but that's the new economy. I see it everywhere. People find jobs, work, housing - all the Maslow things - through friend networks, reverting to trading/barter economics. When offers came in, we reviewed the WHOs in Whoville and made the final decision based on the WHO factor. We accepted the offer made by and through personally trusted folks, even though the other offer looked better on paper. Since we don't know the WHOs of the cash offer, we only can imagine how that person might fuck me over. There is no benefit of the doubt anymore.

He said that for me it matters TO WHOM. He is 100% right. And that still might just be a ME thing when it comes to intimacy. My problem only (?)

But I see it applying across other vectors of life now, more and more. Blowhard is creating an ecomomy of VIRGOS. So here we are, at the first "when". I have done what it took to say when about one thing to one person. As promised. 

objectively speaking, covered head to toe in magic dickbutter atm, including thru my hair with macadamia oil, no make-up, no photo-smoother ... I think I look Aliver, little by little by little (?) - wish my mom were here to confirm 

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Your mindset has shifted. Your emotional energy has changed. Because of this, the world looks different to you. It's evidence that reflects the work you've done internally.

So I've been told. Mostly as an accusation. Yes.

Today is the aspirational "review offers day". Either this strategy worked or it didn't. If it didn't, I lost a 5-digit bet. If so, I'll survive, one way or another, but I am not going back to a 'way it was' that broke me, regardless. 

My kids are all adults now, yet with me in this waiting. If you wouldn't wish your life on your kids, don't model it for them - a touchstone rule of mine. I am praying 🙏 today is a happy one, but it might very well give me nothing but more shit. So, it matters most that my rudder is deep enough for storms. Because life hands you a lot of storms, the worst often of your own making.

My youngest kid, who does not believe in private property in the first place, is waiting it out while visiting her father. EX has not changed. He's living on a bucolic farmette that M inherited. My daughter is texting me true heartbreak about his divorce from reality, feeling sick, in real time. Your parents matter allllll your life. So no matter what, bravely and soberly is how I have to face today. And even if the strategy does work, it's not a "success", it's a successful way to face how much/many I have failed. And my children are all as aware of that as I am.

Fight is exhausting, flight has been exhausted. 

song tbd

A wave of panic washed through me, but I grabbed the feeling and pushed it down, felt it fall through my body, pool on the ground around me and evaporate. Fear could not help me. Magic might. ~Sycorax

I unblogged all (below) after writing it last night, not happy with how short the words fell to capture what it feels like to send myself out of myself like that. I'd have to be able to paint, like my mother, because tendrils of intent streaming out of me doesn't have words. It's healing - which goes both ways - and makes everything else recede to the background. 

With almost no warning, I had to flee because the buyer my heart wishes to lay a hand on, want this take this from me, suddenly reappeared at 12:20 wanting in at 12:30. So I threw on clothes (...wait did I remember underwear?),

Yes.

jumped into the truck w dogs and just DROVE. Found myself at a nursery, no shade, so sitting in the AC looking at a pink flamingo of all things. Guess I would have to buy it. 

I tried "play me a song", hit the radio button - it opened to an ad about healing hearts at CHI cardiac. 

So I'll pick. 

one more dance around the sun - great lake swimmers

Not for nothing, the man last night looked (in peripheral vision) kinda like the Mr Potential in my house atm

------------------

Last night, putting it back up for now because I was spellcasting with no purpose except pure intention:

I get there, but it's not her, the schedule just hadn't been updated to account for her leaving (it's hard to keep up with all the ghosts). The new teacher, graceful tall blonde around my age, is nervous. She's not NEW new but she's not used to a whole clutch of newbies ("home from college") who uh are about to a get a not-relaxing yoga experience and not be able to do it by half and maybe barf. The teacher asks me to practice in the center at the front so they can watch me. Sure, no sweat. Behind me is a clutch of college girls (Groupon, prolly). Flanking me are two young men, bearded both, furry - you get the picture. They are not new, they're injured. The teacher has told them all to watch me and do what I do. But they can't, I don't know them or why but they have modification blocks which are like prosthetics sorta that you use to do something for you that you cannot do. 

So. I have to do the whole class perfectly. Any winging it I might allow myself on the reg, I can't do that or I will risk injuring them. I mean, I woulda kept to the traditional practice just for the girls, but they're like green twigs at that age, you can't break em, all they need is an encouraging smile. But these dudes aren't that young, old enough to need a fix-it. They need more than a smile.

This isn't, believe it or not, an erotic story. 

It's not lost on me that they are beautiful and that's probably part of why. But it isn't lust that comes over me. A STRONG urge to be PERFECT, as far as I can be, and RESPONSIVE in the peripheral, try to understand the injury(s). Understand: perfection and responsiveness are opposite, like 'by the book' v 'what works'. In a perfect practice, you only look at your own two eyes in the mirror. That's the whole point. All the sweating is to help you beat yourself as hard as you gotta to be able to do THAT. So I can only look at me. They're shadows that I can see just well enough to know the broad strokes. So I can only utterly control myself and offer what they can follow. And I am flawless - it's been 19 fucking years doing this, flawless is the easy part. What is difficult is sending all of it outward toward them with all my attention, and to make micro adjustments as I go that might make it possible for them to do without the prop-ups. By halfway through, I have honed in on the guy to my right. Pain btw shoulder blades or maybe a chest problem, one or the other is fucked up, and it's the same problem either way: constricted. Either convex or concave. 

I can't explain the practice itself, like the specifics, except one way: with my own body. That. That thing. And it works. Small example, changing my breathing and slowing it and willing him to match it. And he does, and doesn't give up the mod but does get back up off the mat and tries again. The more he breathes, the less he gives up. And I am focused completely, everything else falls away. I am willing my body into the perfect expression of the postures, slowly, methodically, STOPPING when he does, taking another breath (I could always use one too), and so on. I do this with all my body (like how other people would say "with all my heart"). At no point am I thinking about fucking this guy, he is not in a fuckable category right now. But what I am doing is the sexless version of sex. I am talking to this man, about pain and when to back off it, push but not to breaking, find that line and accept it. You can't move forward if you don't know where you're at, and the only way to know is to push yourself until you hit your limit for today and accept it. I say all that to him with my body.

took this earlier, first of a "building back" series

We never exchanged a word, respectful curt nod only.