VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). This is your time. In the weeks ahead, you'll catch breaks, attract luck, belong to a team that works as hard as you do, and be rewarded and reciprocated at every turn. You've earned this, so enjoy it.
That'd 👆 be nice.
I can't remember the last time I lit a candle for myself.
I still won't. I have reaped enough "leave me alones" to leave most folks still breathing as alone as I can. And to be as alone as I can.
I woke up thinking about Bitchbark Books. Her bookstore. She owns it, her kids work there between ventures/times of their own. She does not do anything like I did, travel to make "gig money" - she opened the store instead, which is a small world of its own, where writers come not her going anywhere. Unless she wants to.
Eventually, the pandemic. But lets not rush. I know when the store enters the books, we'll get there around 2022ish. She opened the store long before, a few years after Dorris' death, a "family business" and she celebrates its anniversary randomly, as if it's repeatedly been around 10 years - by now it's more like 20? 30? “a hundred years and no time at all” is how she counts it.
She had one more kid, late in her 40s (why I thought I could, I was 4 years younger). No husband involved, the father was a lover who comes and goes and whom she visits up in the boundary waters once, driving her astro van there on a route I have wanted to trace, to the cave paintings - she takes the baby with her, stays in a motel, holds the toddlers foot as she falls asleep, thinks "maybe this is enough" but she's talking about writing, not a man. Could a baby's foot be enough to replace writing? But she's writing the question, so no.
The man thing - her erotic writing, the eros that suffuses her writing, never fades and in fact becomes more everywhere as her novels continue. Lulu slips her narrative boundaries and becomes something like a dye, seeping in. Sex is everywhere and nowhere, like a magic.
But women are alone mostly. They repeatedly choose alone, for many reasons and in many permutations. They long, they seethe, they fuck. Plenty. But like with my sobriety games, turn the page and they've ceased / whoever "he" was locked out. Once literally - she listens as he tries to get in, listens to him realizing the lock's changed, listens as he gives up. From her bed. Only rarely does it "work out" between a woman and her dude, and always only when he is very determined, very steady in what they want, which men are not prone to be in my experience.
I don't remember if there's a cat. We'll see. Dogs are almost never 'pets', they're characters in their own right, and they sacrifice themselves for love, as dogs are prone to do. But now I'm tracing a different path. What wasn't obvious to me before? What slinked in and out over time?
This writerly reader project is a solitary one.
linear: worry, absence, disappointment, explanation, empathy, endurance, repeat
I am so very tired of walking that road. And it's just fucking boring anymore. Disease is linear - it progresses to death. Awful. Dull. The End.
I do not want to ever go to another meeting. I will have to, work is work, but less and less will I. I'm slipping out, it's just inside my curriculum design, where nobody sees what I'm doing but me: I am leaving right in front of you (reverse blink).
palimpsest: something is written over, while what was there before remains consequential and sometimes becomes newly visible through the later layer.
That isn't just continuing to trudge.
