I heard this today on NPR.  The story made me want to fucking puke.  Maybe if it hadn't had a 'happy ending', a phrase I primarily associate with getting jerked off at the end of a massage.  I don't know why I have to be like that.  I should take comfort(s) from the things aimed directly at me (my 'demographic') for such purpose(s).  But I hear that dude's voice dripping with appreciative empathy and I just want to smack the shit out of him and anybody else listening and thinking anything like 'awwww' (fuck you). 

After a couple days of jumping against the waves backwards and being water-blown back to shore, I said I fucking love the ocean. He says, This is a sea. Oh, I say, well…it’s salty…. Yes, he says, the Caribbean is salt water. Oh, right. (pause) I wonder, Where are we exactly? (Wait, don’t answer that, I don’t care.)

He can’t see with his glasses off, and doesn’t particularly like the sea (or ocean or lake…water with fish in it freaks him out by half), he goes in with me anyway, getting salt water up his ass and nose as I gleefully jump against crashing tides again and again and again. He pulls out what he thinks is 2 wet dollars from his shorts to tip the bartender for the drink he needs after that and accidentally tips the guy 40 USD, after which point we are known as JEAMBEAMCOKE! and LADY!, and are called to the front of the line at the beach bar whenever we get anywhere near it.

Well, he says, looking out at the water again as I sip a hospitably strong-ass Mojito, This is a kind of bay, I think. Attached to which ocean? Um, I dunno, I think it’s under California. I think that’s the Baha peninsula (?), I say…that thing that kinda comes down…but that wouldn’t be the Caribbean…and the flight would have been longer….right? I dunno for sure, but no the Caribbean is like south of where Cuba is …. or whatever. So this must be, like, the gulf of Mexico…right? Ok, right, I think so. I thought seas were, like, had land all around em. Yeah I dunno. We have no idea where we are right now. Nope. Ok let’s try to figure it out. Ok. So if this is the Caribbean Sea, and it doesn’t need to be surrounded by land, then we are, like, looking across at Florida. That’s Cancun across over there to the leftish. Oh. Where is, like, the Dominican and Bahamas and shit like that? Assuming we are not below California, it’d be over there somewhere. Behind Cancun? No Cancun is north of here, because we drove south to get here. Then we’re looking north?, cz um the sun comes up over there so that’d be east. Right, so, um, yeah I dunno. I don’t think a person can easily DEDUCE geography. Clearly not. This is All-Inclusive Available for Valentines on the Beach in Mexico Somewhere to Keep Your Woman from Committing Suicide Land, wherever that is exactly (hahahahaha….)

I leave in a couple days. I have been bleeding for the better part of a month. My lips are gray.

Mark goes into hospice this week. So does my grandmother. That is all I know about either situation, my sister informing me only to warn me to refer all issues to her, such as The Girl’s potentially wanting to fly there, etc., until I get back. “Don’t even leave the number with anyone, I could find you if I needed to, and I won’t.” I don’t talk to my mother, who is standing next to her during the call, I can hear her whimpering. My sister’s voice breaks. They are both just heartbroken for the baby lost. Everyone wanted that baby and it feels like the loss of the joy of it grows as other losses mount. (I think: I should have named her Joy. The next name I give will be Joy.)

Aa keeps me close, constant wrapping around me, can’t wait to get me to where the universe can hopefully stop finding me. To him, the world itself is like an exlover of mine, some kind of threat to my wellbeing ft. who is trying to get into my pants. He encircles me, growly. He would put me in a witness protection program if that’d keep God from knowing where I am. Yesterday he went to yoga with me, he’d rather be with me at all times possible and I prefer it as well (plus I very selfishly wanted him to know how hard I've been working to get better), so he whose idea of exercise is over work ala mainlining coffee and chain smoking bought a pair of shorts at Target on the way to the studio...  Halfway through the practice, he is filled with rage, overcome by it and feels like he is having a heart attack, wants to choke the teacher to death, sweat dripping into his eyes and he glares at her (hugely pregnant and not breaking a sweat at all) and at me (“It was good workout," he says gamely, "now that I can breathe again, but at the time I was thinking YOU ARE FUCKING MENTAL FOR DOING THIS”) and I’m aware of his distress and aware of the woman next to me, who just so happens to be one of our midwives. Later there is a voicemail from those midwives, asking if I’m okay, doubting it I can hear in her voice.

Numb, I can’t muster any profundity whatsoever about any of it. If any of this is a sign system, I can’t read it. I just hurt all over so no pain is registering as particular, dread throughout me like deep tissue bruising. And I don’t pray for that to stop either. I don’t trust myself to know what would be “good” or “bad” to occur, so I’m afraid to pray. In my head, I sew curtains of beautiful lime green crewel, I have no idea why (maybe it’s some kinda spell).

" When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all." Rumi

Snowed in. Under normal circumstances, I might hate that. As it is, I think it is a gift from the universe that I cannot and thus don't have to even try. We go to the grocery store to stock up and we get separated and I run into to Tony and chitchat for a minute. Aa gets bent outa shape. I might hate that and do in general, snits over Johns stupid habs for instance (eyerollll), but as it is I find it heartening, his faith in a universe in which the problem of the day could ever be my flirting, if fucking only, my guts hurting like hell. Someone has to keep the faith and right now it must be him.

from the Circling the Drain (Again) playlist,
Wallpaper: "Rumor Has It" F. Danny Brown (Adele Cover) ... run the equivalent of 9 miles until I puke then lay down to sleep with a hat pulled down over my sweaty hair and face all afternoon....

http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/isnt-what-i-expected/201202/pregnancy-loss-and-depression and more and more I just want to be left alone

leveled

Recovery is a slow process. I wish it felt meaningful during. Having to keep faith in a future retrospect at which point having recovered feels meaninful ... uhh, that is awfully abstract. And abstractions, like just about everything and everybody, only get on my virgo fucking nerves.

When you are desperate enough, you will do this: http://www.bikramyoga.com/ every day for 10 or 20 or 30 days, all day. I started such again today at a new studio where nobody knows me. Used to be I would blank out for a few postures, nothing but the sound of my own inner patter. Now, I can hear nothing left of myself, painfully present the whole time with nothing to say to myself. I heard nothing but every word of the instructor, who said the whole class in Korean (I think).

my cold sores have cold sores. my nerves are shot to fucking shitstains, my body screaming about it. I want to commit myself to one of those old school hospitals for nervous exhaustion: jello to eat and doses of something opiate based and being wrapped in compresses and playing checkers.  thank god we're going to that resort soon.  and it occurs to me that maybe those places, where breakfast is a certain time and lunch another time and the menus all fixed and the booze all free and handed to you whether you want it or not, that that's the modern day equivalent of a nerve hospital.  I never thought I'd want to go to one of those places. I would wonder how people like Aa's parents, who are working class people without money to throw away, could or would send themselves to such places.  I honestly could not understand the appeal.

now I'm thinking "yes, I am fucking shot to shit, before my lips explode off my face in stress puss, please do lock me a room with softened lighting and give me a dose of something partially mind-obliterating and tell me when it's time for lunch..."

no song, obviously

his special vacation hat

update: he can't stand it, my misery, the cold cavern in me where there's too much empty sad space now, like an echo chamber in my gut. I say, grief has stages. He says, fuck that. He sells his most valuable possessions and books two flights to the soonest warm spot he can find like it or not. when I think of anything except what's right in front of me, I just want to keen. my body is busted to shit, my mind is boggy, my urge to keen constant. but. He's right. as all I am actively doing is "healing", waiting out the bleeding and the coughing and the shakes and aches, the stunning ouch of it all, I can do that in the sun as well as in the freezing cold eh? I am being taken to the shore, like I'm Virginia Woolf or some shit.

(I don't want to listen to music anymore.)

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Susan Sontag The anaesthesia woman was from Lebanon. She scolded me for crying. I don't know anything about suffering. From a political point of view, I could not but agree with her. So much for politics. I comforted myself biting her pinkie finger off, very slowly, over at least several days, maybe a couple weeks, tantric pain slow enough to feel like its opposite the way frostbite feels hot. In my mindmouth I could taste her blood, a gift to teach her the value of her other fingers, be grateful for the time you had with the pinkie now swallowed gone by me, as if I could be a goddess of small deaths instead.

On the 16th, I was in yoga when a cramp began it. Within a couple hours, I knew the baby's heart had stopped and it was a fetal corpse. On the 18th, I had surgery to remove it, for it had been dead for some time already, days before that cramp, a couple few weeks maybe, and my body refused to give it up and kept feeding it and growing it anyway, a lifeless mass getting bigger with no beating heart. In all other ways except the lack of life, it was perfect, all my hormone panels perfect, the size of the uterus perfect. I was showing, I was glowing, I was happy. Then for 2 days, I curled around it dead, waiting and watching and promising not to give its name to another baby if ever we had one, saying goodbye. "But failure one conceals." - Virginia Woolf

"Waiting is an active and engaged process when you’re doing it right." Gestating is like watching paint dry and you can't see the paint.

I went shopping with Sun yesterday. She’s all into pimping the bump vicarious, so off we go to the mall. She’s got this friend, she tells me on the drive - they grew up together, born in the Falls projects together back in the day, and the woman’s parents are dead now so although they’re not close close, Sunnie is sorta like family, at least she’s that long familiar, so the woman tends to call her when she’s in crisis. She became a Muslim, got married, had four kids, and moved to Malaysia last year where her husband has a chiropractor’s office. So she sends Sun a message via facebook whatever, ‘calling the wa-ambulance’, and tells Sunnie that she heard a noise one night and went downstairs to find her husband fucking their maid. She’s very upset. Sunnie listens, incredulous, says to her “Nigger, you got a MAID?!” Every time I think of it, I crack up again.

"Reason to Believe (Bruce cover)," Aimee Mann and Michael Penn
"Faith" (George Michael cover) - Lake Street Dive

The heartbeat. Then blood. Although neither yet technically, it was life and death in miniature, shrunk to fit inside a single day. I keep thinking of spirits, how and when they choose to come back (who is this lima bean, threatening to leave the party having gotten just inside the door like o neverfuckingmind, just like I would [I hate parties]-??)....

holy balls I'm tired :/

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension. What I felt wasn't pain but a place of hollow, like a drum with the skin stretched tight. -Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

sean hayes - 3 a.m.
edward sharpe & the magnetic zeros - man on fire (little daylight remix)
mofro - footsteps
dead weather - will there be enough water

leftover cuties - you are my sunshine (love the trumpet)
maura o'connel - stor mo chroi
mumford n sons - timshel

I had a ton of shit I thought and wrote about WI, coming and going, that didn't quite cohere into interpretation(s) I felt at all word-certain of. Then I looked at it all again from the distance of a mere 2 weeks spent mostly asleep, and it was entirely recast in my mind since as well. In my current mental notes/version, what stands out is a prior trip I made there 16 years ago and a pic the Girl showed me in passing of Mark and his dog when he was puppy, 6 years ago, in which Mark looked … (?). His eyes were closed.

---------

So/meanwhile, I am thinking about picture taking and the fragility of “restrospect”. For instance, if I had begun taking pictures of my eyes and gut when starting fertility treatments that would net me chronic pain and 30+ pounds and no pregnancy, and if I had kept doing that once a month, say, what would I have seen? I would not go back and change anything, don't get me wrong (What is the point in even considering that? Ever?). But maybe if I had a visual record, it would flesh out what to Accept in what I see now.

In yoga, you’re supposed to welcome yourself. Think about that for a second. Being Hospitable.

Holy shit. Fuckn a.

Soon, most likely, I will write again about it all. Meanwhile, I note that I have more need of peace than even I knew. I sleep, the siren of sleep. I think of the most boring peaceful things I can think of to do that: chairs. Chairs, looking at them, not buying. An ice cream cone.

Ouch

Wisconsin looms. I never do well when I’m headed there. Days ahead, I feel like a 7th grader in the last week of August, doom approaching, counting down to the moment I have to be unaccountably undeniably ill at ease and psychologically vulnerable. Self + Conscious = Vinegar + Milk

I did not leave that place, I did not leave the people there, although to them that is probably how it was – to me, what I left was the person I was there, I hated that bitch. I just could not bear myself, insufferable. “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell." -- Matthew 5:30 I amputated my childhood self and homeland. I had to. And now I can go visit from time to time, but that’s like visiting a hand museum, it doesn’t make the fucker grow back or stop the phantom pain either, in fact it just increases the haunted itching.

I don’t sleep. Aa and I squabble. He says, “It’s like you left already.” To him it looks as if I’m flying off to rendezvous with an ex-lover for a weekend. (ha) I laugh, then grow irritated as if he’s trying to talk to me when I’m trying to pass a kidney stone. But if I didn’t know better, if the situation were reversed and if I still had all my pieces like he does, that’d probably be how I would process it too. It makes sense that way. It makes a lot more sense than the reality.

Sleepless, I am on that road that dips down out of Geneva west past the boggy end of Como, I won’t even slow down to mention Hilmore, just head right out of dodge – coming up past the wetland end, the highway splits to the left past the land my dad lost, goes straight to Como Rd past the doomed little school and my mom’s best attempts to make something beautiful (what is more ephemeral than child art?), goes left to the little house Dan’s mom died in and all the tiny frogs we’d catch in the basement…everywhere I look: loss, feelings of grief and my helplessness (my stature is impossibly tiny in the face of loss, about the size of a frog baby) (which always did piss me right off) (for which I am forever helplessly sorry).

Upside to everything: I know exactly how much a game of Pictionary (or a mom-packed lunch, or a cuddled sleep, or a good paragraph, or a clean bathroom, or a paid bill, or a shared joke – all those little things of a peaceful life) is worth. Keenly.

Life, it's fragile as fuck. 

I am having trouble with happiness. Sometimes, I don’t know how to be myself in it. I mean, I like it, not being fraught, don’t get me wrong – it’s just that I don’t know how I AM, how that functions, what the habits of contentment are. I don’t want to run 4 miles, so I don’t. etc. I don’t want to clean the shit out of everything, so I don’t, I hired a cleaning lady I can’t afford, but I don’t want to go shopping all the time either, or out all the time either, so I pay her the money I save instead to come once a month and make my house look as if I’m unhappy (i.e. mopped). Then I can’t afford books either, but then again I’m not dying to escape into one all the time, and when I do want to read one, I go to the library and I return the books on time, because I’m not too depressed to remember to do it – the librarians know me, not as a reprobate but just as a patron….

….I’m boring. Very boring. Was I always this boring? I’m pretty sure I was, I was just more prolific so the dust-up hid it better. Now I’m a slightly pudgy boring cheerful nymphomaniac in a mussy house with unshaved legs who sincerely enjoys playing Pictionary.

In one of the library books I read most recently, The Dog Stars, a man who has survived the end of the world (99% of the population succumbs to flu) has these moments of, say, fishing a creek with his dog, or of a breeze – and he is happy. Not YAY HAPPY kinda happy, just at peace in successive moments. It is then he knows that he is lonely. I understand that. I worked hard for peace in successive moments, all that yoga, such a clean comfortable home, and then I knew I was lonely. Now virtually all I want to do is play Pictionary at the end of the world, where it’s safe. I’m making these, that’s my "big plan" for the holiday break, with a spell cast in each one for “nothing / just light”. (Want one?)

People C Mon – Del ta Sp irit (high rec) all you soul searching people c'mon, oh la la la

there is this great scene in cunningham's The Hours when they blow out the candles and wish for the most impossible thing: endless days just like this one (that is my wish)

this is US, in my self - it is the place I already am

I wonder what/where WE looks like in Aa's mind. 

And I wonder if Childhood looks like a futon frame bunkbed, or like a shih tzu black and white, or like the ceiling over the bathtub - where are the boys when they are Here Now?

I am, undeniably, focused on my nuclear family to the point of near paranoia.  We are watching Homeland - no cable, we buy episodes one by one of whatever I can bare to sit still for, which isn't much - the Clare Danes character is paranoid psychotic but correct in her suspicions all the time. Can you imagine?  I can.  There is nothing I have learned so much as to trust my own mind.  There is nothing I have learned so much as to be wary of my own mind. It is an exhausting dual imperative for us all.  Meanwhile, I don't much care if the badguy character blows something up, I'm only interested in his plotline in so far as I projectingly relate to the wop milf wife whose career as a single mother is now considerably complicated by the return of her pow husband who is often cranky and who is the center of the universe of the plot and who doesn't fuck her (not at all often or well, anyway) and when/if he commits some act of terrorism I hope for her sake it's a suicide bombing so she can get back to doing everything herself, including herself, without having to deal with his pain-in-the-ass overbearing presence too.  So there.  The portrayal of that family as seemingly-ideal while suffocating utterly for the wife, whose parameters of control extend only as far as her haircut, strikes such a chord that I do believe it wore me out last night and I had to go to bed at 8 p.m. after only one episode, not caring enough who won the presidential election enough to wait to find out (cmon, it was going to be Obama, duh right? but still, lame).  On the other hand what really left me prostrate was the exact opposite of anti-family; it was one of our days, where we can carve out 4-5 hours and do nothing with that time but pour over one another.  These dueling emotion-sets are related, my aversion to the suffocatory threat of family life and my extreme pleasure in it ft. defensiveness of it.  So defensive of US are Aa and I both that nothing assuages our anxiety that something might "be wrong" than these spates of hours we spend reassuring ourselves about the US we both live at now, until it feels like such a very defended and stolid place to be that nothing and nobody else can impact it.  The Family is our Bomb Shelter and for no demonstrable reason we each feel as if the world has ended already, we are living now on the canned peaches of our closed private life.  We keep the kids close and each other closer.  In the cold, we get out and under every blanket and breathe beneath them in a humid tent, even light isn't invited unless it's filtered.  So, empty of all energy for worry/strife, I didn't have energy enough to even watch strife of any kind - I couldn't find it in myself to care, not for the wop-milf's troubles nor for the nation's, and I went to bed a husk.  I woke up later thinking about paranoia and putting aside the litany in my mind of all the things that have gone wrong, that I fucked up, that got fucked up in me, that got fucked up some kind way....sometimes this litany runs from childhood forward, sometimes lately for obvious reasons it starts at Mark, sometimes I stand at the side of the hole in my head that is where Andy used to be and now is a crater (I feel nothing, not even appalled by that), sometimes it goes backward from some future calamity to my childhood stopping at whatever karmic fault of mine that seems to explain the future calamity as a justifiable comuppance (those are the really crazy litanies), sometimes it's a only fragment that doesn't quite amount to a viable litany (I now realize that I never did think/feel John was dead/dying really, the feeling was only "I hope he calls" which was dead-unlikely, and that seems a very amusing emotional mistake on my part, like slapstick funny), sometimes it is a litany-tome that amounts simply to Mother Guilt.....etc.  I wake and seize up and then rub out the grooves in my mind trying to stop the mental-LP skipping.  Aa sleeps soundly yet senses every sigh or shift, instintively curling around me tightly so that getting up to pee involves minutes of extricating myself.  So I hold my pee and I lay there thinking the core thought that engenders all the rest: I so urgently do not want anything bad to happen that I don't want anything to happen at all.  It is such a common complaint that people have of their moms that they hadn't wanted their kids to grow up, that they always prefer the baby pics, that I think this "don't happen!" near-paranoid defensiveness of the nuclear nest must be a banal sign that once, for however long it lasted, there was happiness and she tried to dig her heals in right there and then.  And failed, of course.  At that too. 

So. What can I do if I can't keep anything from happening?  I guess I can make something happen, logically enough.  At 30 years old, Aa is built for forward movement.  His restlessness is as normal as teething in a toddler, I figure, so I can't keep letting it worry me that he has to keep happening as if that's inherently a bad thing (which given the fact of mortality, it IS totally a bad thing but say la vee), and I have to get on board with it instead.  Which is why I am again looking at landporn (when in doubt......).  I like this one because the castle (click thru the pics, the castle w moat is worth it) is so symbolically apropos that it appeals to my funnybone.  I'd be like, "Okay boys, get in there, I'm locking you all the fuck in!"

p.s. click satellite view to see the GIANT CLIFF at the back of the property, lol oye

He takes one out of the package, asks “how do these work?” as he unpeels it. What do you mean, how do they work, you know how they work. “Well yeah but these aren’t like the hospital issue wound pads”, which are exactly like the little pad stuck to the underside of every chuck roast or steak, only bigger, your dinner for all intents and purposes a wound separated from the wounded and a pad stuck to it that needs no adhesive aside from the blood itself, sticky inherently. “What are these things?”, he asks as he finishes unwrapping the side tabs and sticks the whole thing to his forehead. Those are wings, ya know, like from the commercial, you wrap them around. “Ahhh”, he says, as he opens a bottle of wine and pours me a glass with a panty-liner stuck to his forehead, the wings flapping.

Later, whenever that is and however it turns out to be noted as such, such moments as these will be my memories of us.

Remember this?

update: Mark cleared surgery, 8hours and viola a tumor "the size of a volleyball" along w his spleen (wtf is a spleen?)and gallbladder etc. Meanwhile I am all cried out. For today anyway. No song. I think I broke my soundtracker, I don't have DmS fortitude, I can barely narrate anymore