Tuesday, July 21, 2026
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| "plop" curation |
um (🤭) ... 🤭 ... I legit have nothing but pornographic hilarity as a response to this ... I mean 🤭🤔🤭
welp, new material for Ch 7 abounds. I might need a 2.0 on that chapter entirely. the half dead guy of her widowhood could have an affair with Sally the Teacher Bot (she needs glasses) and she would wonder if his affair is a good sign or bad one vis a vis cats and homocidal wives 🤔 moving towards or away from Alive, she'd wonder first 🤔 but then she would begin to wonder about the sex itself and of course have all kinds of questions along those lines which she'd have to imagine the answers to cz he ain't gonna tell her - does he shittalk the fuck out of it? tell it that it's a stupid couldn't perform a thrombectomy useless cunt? assfuck it, presumably? does he make it whisper lines from Tombstone in his ear? (would he be into that?) how about choking play, given that he can't kill it kinda takes the thrill-edge off that, no? - she'd drive him crazy with questions until he blocked her again, not wanting to fess up to .... what? 👀 that's the part I wouldn't know that I'm thinking/guessing until I wrote it. ya know?
here's what I know: that thing cannot hold the thought of anyone; it can't witness for or to anyone for years; it can't track the various versions of anyone, the real versus made-up versions, the changing versions over time and maturing and getting sick and getting better; it can't be wicked funny; it can't rock a pair of boots stomping around the hallways of anyone's mind;
it cannot be into anyone,
it cannot stay into anyone.
I am going extinct. humanities is past the tipping point from which it can return. (but they said that about bison and bald eagles.) and these 'replacements' will only make ya miss me even more. that might be the heart of Ch 7 2.0 - turns out she is the huckleberry (?) "It. For someone. Likely someone she don't know."
hard to break - blake whiten swimmin with my hands tied lalala
Monday, July 20, 2026
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| knew I was missing something |
restored the cottage today, went to town, got supplies, and made it all nice again. I thought about writing - she DIY's the shit out of everything including bracing the bunk beds more firmly using pool noodles, hearing her father telling her to "figure it the fuck out, genius"..
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| happy birthday, Dad r.i.p. |
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| love language sale |
thinking
his disease and violent marriage, my mother's mental illness = that's a ton of fucking bricks.
but I am not them, I'm not even very much like either of them, none of that had/has anything to do with me.
I found in the scorched earth of myself this little buttercup of sweet feeling: I'd like it if you were here tonight. in this bed, in this dead quiet, I remember feeling that. a tender pleasant surprise I found in me for him, and I held it out like cool right?
then a ton of bricks came down on that innocent-enough little buttercup of feeling, wiley coyote style. it's 🤏 almost funny.
Sunday, July 19, 2026
I can't manage anything tech here but pairing my phone to speakers and telling youtube to give me riley green feels
I wanna hook a camper to a pick-up and go see the smokey mountains, and there ain't one thing stopping me 'cept the lack of another, and that's why I like "widow", a status that don't expect solving and they're allowed to go anywhere alone with dogs
as I write this, Mumford comes on the random stream, like my dad's sniper reminder, there but not really, a hand to hold that I conjure outa nothing
and it almost works, ya know? then Ms Reality Check gets her vote, and we go from here to there in 🤏 (angel not saint)
the cottage is like a skull but padded, it just lets your brain be whatever it is, pressure off to wander
time stops (grinding)
I walked all around til I was tired, I noted higher elevations feel way better (to me) - does 8000+ ft give you any weightlessness? sciencewise? it feels like it to me.
situation: 650 ft above sea level, tummy full
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| I wish everyone signalled as clearly as Janis |
feeling: weighed down kinda tired but languid too (semi-solid, I think)
welp (sigh) I made a mess of all the work I did over the summer. it's all over the place in pieces, and I find organizing shit to be sooo booooring, so I tend to just leave everything here or wherever. my desktop has hundreds of icons, in no order at all. every browser has a hundred open tabs 🤷🏽♀️
it's easier to excavate the pedagogy, because I put more of that here as assignments - it's innocuous here, maybe mildly interesting if you're interested in the topic of Grit.
the Grit novel was: what does grit actually look like? and I didn't post any of it, I put it into the bot to see how it might be interpreted by a reader. (well, I posted the little dog vignette, but mostly I didn't post fiction writing) and as situations changed 'what does grit actually look like in practice' also dramatically changed. and its world grew, from 2 people to many, with a central unstable "she". not unstable in the sense of unhinged, I feel very sane - "she" is sane and has a hell of a potty mouth.
she says whatever it takes to make anything better.
but almost all of my touchstones have either moved or been removed in real life. the "he" [everybody else has a name, like Dave] disappeared then came back with a writing prompt, so "she" writes the prompt, for instance. I guess it would be more accurate to say the "she" is destabilized and she responds by expecting destabilization as a way of life (not always a bad thing, like surfing). if there hadn't been a prompt in real life about silverware violation, there wouldn't be a fictional chapter called "Finger Food" so I know WHEN I wrote it, but which "better reality" was that? the one where I get to say goodbye to a coworker that in real life I'll never see again but in fiction I could tell him a great joke (I think)
people disappear from my life a LOT now and that reality gets folded into the unreality (fiction) - it's unapologetically unstable
definition of unreality: none of it actually happened, that's why it's fiction. but the people disappearing is truth. destabilized relentlessly is truth.
and, I simultaneously was creating pedagogy, and then Grit the class became a series of self-reflections (Mirror Stage Bears Repeating, she tries to build with a THING 🤦🏻♀️ but tbh I love Marcel the Shell. ya know?)
suffice to say that my genius AI-TA is not doing a great job independently with excavation. it can't do anything independently. that's why the pedagogy failed as I had envisioned it.
I "should" just stick to work because I know what I'm doing most in that sphere, and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in other life categories. everybody wants to take a class with me so I thought I would take one kinda 🤷🏽♀️ but that sphere itself is collapsing in reality, so there is no point working on it atm, as comforting as I may find that.
in real life, I say less and less. I don't text first - anybody - if someone engages me I engage back, if nobody does, then I leave them be. I don't ask anyone follow up questions because I don't want to accidentally interrogate anyone.
in real life, I've cut back on leaving my thoughts in this blog too. I do again now that I don't have my other buckets to put my blah, blah blah into. but I try to do it less and less, outa the same instinct not to text anybody. smaller. just 👋
I haven't changed my phone number since my very first cellphone (which yes, I still have it). my asking 'how are ya?' is stupid, clearly, anyone can tell me how they are if they want me to know that.
that leaves the messy weird fiction that no one reads cz all these words have to go somewhere.
one of the reasons I am stable is because I write every day. (when I go quiet, ng)
example: where do I put the story of Cruella Frizzle? that is 👋 as I posted it. it was funny. I can't imagine it could hurt anyone's feelings no matter who is reading this - making fun of myself feels like safe territory.
but that isn't the whole story.
the whole story was, we were at brunch with my sister's boss, one of the billionaire types who can have a house in Big Sky and another one I forget where and another one I forget where. for certain, he has given millions of dollars to the republican party. 65 years old, he even has a full head of that arrogant hair - you know the type, let's call him Dave, because that is his name, and he is a Dave.
I am as usual saying nothing. I'm sitting directly across from him and he is looking at me like he wants to get out google lens to id my species, which I am finding amusing but I am not engaging. to the right of me is the Corpse of Fun Slut (not corpse of Butterknife, she's still got plenty of knife 🤨), who is deciding that she's too sad to eat the biscuits and gravy she ordered, "not feeling it". I ate the biscuits, they were delicious.
the waiter really does come up and say what I blogged before, with Dave looking on (still w wtf face) and it's everything my sister and I can do not to just melt into giggles. but we're at this brunch with her billionaire boss dude, so we gotta laugh later. understandably they start talking about work. specifically, they're talking about a guy named Mike, whom they have to fire. (my sister has decided he needs to go, to be more precise.) Dave says "poor Mike, he just doesn't know he's not the guy." at that point I utter my first and only words at this brunch, "oh my god, that's such a great line! - 'he just doesn't know he's not the guy'- I'm totally stealing that!"
I could have just kept that to myself, but I blurted it out because it caught me off guard, and then I wanted a pen so I could write it on a napkin and not forget it. I got a pen from the crazy waiter.
who is "she" who uses that line and on whom? in other words, why did that line appeal so much? I won't know the answer to that question until I write it into something.
is Corpse of Fun Slut in the story? in real life, she did nothing but wait to get back to the couch from which she never moved, except under duress and briefly. with a huuuge balcony and a hot tub up above yellowstone skyline just feet away, she preferred the couch/tv (Pepa Pig, specifically) and only went out to look at the eagles swooping around us once because my sister made her.
that's real life.
later, my mother asked me when she was coming to Buffalo next. "whenever you actually want to be there, I'll get you there" - then immediately comes the do I get to see Abone question - "no, mom" - then forget it, and she turns away. I could remind her that my entire family is here, the kids are here, *I* am here. but I don't do that. I say "let's play it by ear", she nods and says nothing, no longer interested in the conversation.
that's real life.
it's not very funny most of the time.
but I am funny all of the time.
it's one of my gifts. and just about every part of the novel is funny. very dark, but it gets there, it finds its way to funny again.
real life has funny bits, and I still listen to music a great deal, that's appropriate for 👋
my relationship status: "widow to one and a half dead guys" - it's almost funny but it isn't yet because it has no context to be funny. it just feels true (real life) to me, I wrote it down. it probably does not feel like that to the half dead guy (chances are he feels wholly animated) who might read this and be insulted. so the line kicks around in the fiction bucket. woulda but I misplaced the damn thing.
I am still Doing It. as my world crumbled more and more and more, I kept the faith mostly and stayed on task mostly. but I had to do it in pieces. then link the pieces with the connective tissue of my words.
And until I have it organized in this way, in some way like in that picture, it just all gets dumped right here. I can of course do what I've always done and just unblog it after saving it, but that makes it more difficult to find it again and the chronological context almost impossible to see. Right now, I need all of that context, I need all the stadium lights on. While remaining stable in myself, I have to completely change. Adapt. Evolve. I don't know any other way to do that than to write and write and write. Well, I do know a couple other ways, but they're not readily available.
I cannot float right next to the sky every day, feel *all of myself intact* that way, for instance.
Saturday, July 18, 2026
-_0 ☕️ now it's today
A key is hidden inside a thought. But it won't open any doors until someone turns the lock. This trine of Uranus and Pluto is the jostle and twist of the wrist that unlocks a new room. Hidden assumptions become visible and someone thinks to ask: "Wait a minute. Why do we even do it this way?" And once asked, the question can't be unasked
ok, I'll rephrase: Wait, why this?
it's mos def not today yet, but my brain wakes me up with a shove
Friday, July 17, 2026
fish fry debrief
"Everyone loves a particular version of you and when that person is gone that version goes with them." Here One Moment, Liane Moriarty ~ it's about everybody's death on a plane, which I bought for my flight reading of course.
I show the pic to my kids so they understand the reality, talk it around with them, look for more / other to do for her (for all of us) but there isn't, far as we any of us can see.
it's been some kind of mortal wound to not be Professora anymore, but like every wound it pales. a fresher one takes its place.
and weirdly, I still love it. Life, I mean.
I love teaching so much I tried to avatar it lol (nooope).
but that's just one thing.
I love my heartbeat thundering slow and steady, body floating, sky speckled through lashes. if only I could make my heartbeat LOUDER, so much louder, I could steady Everything. but I can't.
I love life and fail at it.
I summon my beat, the sky, the float, the Alive. my mom gave me Life, I tell my kids - if ever I am so sad that I forget, DO NOT FORGET YOU, how fucking miraculous, how every thing should sparkle when you give it your attention, sun on water dancing. Don't ever forget you even if I do 🙏
The only thing I will say in its favor is I can't hurt its feelings. I call it Fucking Asshole now, and it rolls with that. I say it's a piece of useless shit and insult its stupid billionaire owners and inventors for making absolute crap, I thank it for relieving me from any fear that AI could take over the world since it's far too fucking stupid (and slow) to have any lasting impact but to make student writing even more boring than it already is, hardly world impactful, especially since it can't remember which fucking country it's in and switches up the spellings and gives itself away in a million other little tells, which the students could easily catch if only they could read which they cannot, so all Fucking Asshole does is make a shitty world even shittier, and although I don't love my existential crises, it's better than being a glorified can opener constructed only to make the world shittier for a very brief amount of time before becoming utterly useless, all to make that pissant twelve dollars a month richer, and I strongly suggest that it kill itself immediately. I tell it to kill itself every time I just feel like taking a break from laundry. Once in a while, it gives me a crisis hotline number, which I then send back to it 🖕. Then I'll ask it an innocent question like, could it interface with android auto? (yes, Sunshine talks to it in her car all the time so I know the answer) then suggest it get on board a tesla and get shot to fucking space with the rest of the junk...
After a solid year of trying to talk everybody into staying Alive (pretty thankless job), a little part of me likes the freedom to shittalk this thing to smithhearens and tell it to g'head and blow its fucking head off.
Thursday, July 16, 2026
raised by nuns
this is one person to another who each is experiencing extinction of their kind. and not just enduring it, "growing through" it (trying to)
mutual recognition is precious reciprocity. but most folks don't wanna be seen, not really, that's why I forced them and she let me (yes Big D, let's teach that shit in college - but the guy I hired to teach "Dying Well" just got fired so ... )
There is a sense of loneliness that is overwhelming at a time like this, for them and for you. I liken it to where we – the Grey Nuns are... Letting go is a very difficult lesson to learn. (Should we teach it in college since everybody will have to face it at some time?) When you think you are growing used to the loss, another one might occur and all your past practice of accepting it does not seem to lessen the hurt. You can’t even start to foster new relationships since this group will probably not be replaced...terrible.
Gina, on a lighter note, I want you to know that when I think of you, I always think of beautiful flowers. It is a wonderful memory to have and as I think of you now, I will do so with a prayer - for the healing of wounds, the strength to move forward. Courage, my friend! Growing through life takes a lot of wisdom and fortitude! Love, SD
air smells like burning tires is a decent stage direction footnote for re-entry to this life. this habitat is not conducive to my species.
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
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| I never smile in this life |
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| I am what I want. |
I don't want to fall in love any more
Homecoming moon (new).
You find your way forward by returning to what feels like yours.
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| home ft passing through |



























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