Astrology 101: WHAT IS VIRGO LIKE? Virgos are the problem solvers of the world. This sign has the patience, analytical ability and mental tenacity to sort out the obstacles that would stop other people. Virgos take the necessary time to find the solutions. When most people would be throwing up their hands in defeat, Virgo is just getting started. They are the great improvers of the zodiac, always thinking of ways to make things better. Some would say that Virgo is critical, though the criticisms they offer are usually intended to be constructive. In an effort to be helpful, they point out the details that others don't see. This sign has a reputation for being freakishly neat and tidy. Indeed, many an organization gives credit to a Virgo for keeping the group on point and moving forward in a logical and efficient way. They are often leaders who demonstrate their leadership by leading themselves with integrity and discipline. The area of health, fitness and nutrition is one where Virgos shine. They have a natural affinity for living things and find it easy to nurture growth in others. Many Virgos have a green thumb, as well!

[that kinda makes me want to blow my fucking head clean off]

 

I send heart energy down my arms across his back.  I think recoiling, I’d hate to have my hands elsewhere or another’s hands on me, some(one) stranger, and I wonder if I’m projecting that or if in fact he sexually abused himself from May-July.

I know one thing for sure: I was (am) an integrated self-possessed adult, and yet I am a kind of shattered after just one big helping.  What does a steady diet of take-backsies love and intimate manipulation do to the mind of a child and across the arc of a lifetime?  When I think about it that way, it’s a wonder to me that he never committed suicide (more). 

sara lov - my body is a cage (arcade fire) (repost)

VIRGO  TODAY: "You'll say goodbye to a fantasy and come to accept that there really is no happily ever after — only a happy today over and over for as long as you decide to be happy."

To a word, that's almost exactly what my shrink said to me yesterday. Which to a Virgo looks like the most daunting of tasks EVER. What does it even mean? What is happy without some pursuit of an Ideal stirred into it? Happy is having Faith. And Faith comes into my existence materially in my relation to others, where it is tried and proven. Making pesto is a spiritual practice. Or so I believe(d). But. I put too much Faith in Aaron, not in the sense that he failed me but in the sense that I located my own Faith in another too much and I don't know how not to do that. I know (believe) that what people call God is actually indwelling, it is at the base of ourselves a little portal through which we are suffused with Everything more or less to the degree we can keep that open, the 'transparent eyeball'. And yet in practice, my own portal lies elsewhere inside others, outside my own control. I can control it when I am alone but then after a while it feels about the size of a peehole in the snow.  Is that a problem of motherhood? Of loverhood? Of idealized friendship? (Am I just retarded?) (I'm probably just retarded.)

"You decide how you will feel. Not him." What am I? The Dali Fucking Lama? I don't think so. "You know it's true. I'm not making excuses for him or letting him off the hook of work. But torturing yourself is a choice you're making." (And I think about my thinking, how the sound of his pants coming off then hitting the floor and the belt buckle clangs on the tile, that familiar sound sequence sends a wave of sickgrief washing over me, his hands about to be on someone else in my head, the time it took him to unbuckle are the seconds in which he might have thought of me and stopped instead...it's true, I'm making that up and torturing myself with it...hotel rooms are carpeted anyway...) I don't know how to stop. "You're rushing a grief process, which is only going to prolong it; accept your grief as grief, pure and simple, it doesn't have to take any other shape of thought, you don't have to put it in order so you can put it away."

OK so today is today. I'm going to make one of my sister's recipes for a late dinner with Aaron, which for me will only tangentially have anything to do with food as such, though the degree to which I will take care to make it come out delicious will be the degree to which I am drawing love/strength from my sister into me through that process, and the degree to which I will be deciding to be happy today pouring my love materially into Aaron and feeling good that it's there working it's way through his guts. I'm still not sure how to make that an "exchange of parity" (?), but I suppose I could at least be more transparent. From now on, the answer to the daily question "what's for dinner?" is: Idealization, it's what's for dinner. (Or pizza.)

walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in each his typical mood

“You know what a relationship is about to you. The other person has an entirely different set of reasons for being there.”

I’m on this committee (of course I am, one of a billion) with this guy I’ve known for forever.  We’ve worked together about 15 years, in various capacities, and the trajectory of our inner lives have been parallel in many ways.  I did yoga certs, he did Reiki.  We both have been quasi-Buddhist practitioners inside other belief systems, eclectic God+Energy theories self-invented systems of thinking, and failing, and rethinking. I took his head off this morning over something I don’t even care that much about.  Then he walked onto the elevator, the doors shut, he said “What’s up?” and I said “My husband left me….for starters…” and then he blew off his next meeting to kill lunch with me and listen.  Without judgment.  With discernment. 

I cannot fully express how grateful I felt for that.  So I won’t try.

He understands things about me that most of my other friends just don’t. Examples: when I brush my teeth for two minutes or not, that is a spiritual discipline that I am either failing (usually) or succeeding to hold myself to, and to that end, I brush my teeth in the shower, then feel guilty (I should be able to do it without the comfort of warm water), then fail anyway (always in a hurry, and I also just flat out forget in the lull of the warm water) and feel worse, then buy an egg timer and take into the shower, then it gets wet and it stops working and I think “serves me right”; when I fill up my car with gas, I am always irritated by the now missing holder thingy that all gas stations have removed from their pumps because of theft drive-offs and so I’m stuck outside holding the damn thing, and I admonish myself every time for my irritation at that, and I say a prayer for the world, since it wouldn’t be like that if there hadn’t been more and more theft of gas, which is a clusterfuck of class warfare and climate slaughter, so the least I can do is pump and pray; I could go on like this all day.  Every minute of every day has a spiritual choice in it (that I am usually failing), and I am aware of that always, and am trying not to be an energy-asshole.  The main ethical challenge for me is being energy-charitable with my spirit.  Because if I am not able to do what Tom did for me today, such as be at peace in the face of pain and thus spiritually generous, then I have failed.  That’s how my mind works. And, I am now an Almost Entirely Failed Spiritual State. 

So, what IS a relationship about to me?  To help me to not spiritually fail, to be able to give and expect nothing and thus to get by virtue only of the other person's capacity for what they can give or not regardless also.  But in that case, it’s a prayer/spell for strength.  And ya know what wanting more strength gets you from God?  A kick in the face, that’s what.  And I’m out of wanting to be Better.  I want the other person to want to be Better.  I want them to WANT that, the work of it.  And I’ll be the challenge now. Stop telling me what you need, what you’ve needed, how you didn’t get it, how I’ve failed.   I got that part.  You, you pick ME up.  Every time you think “Gina could have given me” or “I wanted such-n-such from Gina”, reverse it.  For a while.  For a spell.  I want to be your cross to bear for a change.  We can switch back later, when I’m not mother fucking everything into the ground deep down where my spirit is broken and I can’t pray the pain away any fucking more.  And as is obvious from the Sams Club post alone, I’m not just in pain over Aaron.  There is a mountain of shitty in me I’ve climbed weighted down, by others’ disappointments in me, real and projected and compounded and heavy. As have we all, I know.  But I cannot carry any more or climb any higher without help.  So unless you’re bringing help, you should probably write me off, I’m not salvageable nor can I manage sorry-more.

And while we’re at it, for the record, it pisses me off that I’m pissed off.  A lot.  Because I’m long sick of outrage.  I don’t care if it’s justified or not. And no I don’t understand it better if you scream/beat it into me. (Think: T-bone)  And now I am outraged.  And I hate that in anyone, including me.  Over Fucking Come It, I think.  At myself too.  And I don’t know how.  And you’re probably not going to help me, obviously, the pissed leading the pissed (hurt leading the hurt, whatever, choose your lame-o-phrasing). 

This is more than the loss of a lover, we’ve all had lovers and lost them, Tom says.  Yes.  It’s more than a husband, you’ve lost that before.  Yes.  It’s a friend too, someone who really saw all of you (and rejected it).  Yes.  And you’ve felt that before, too?  Yess. That’s a thing.  Yes.  And family.  Yes.  And on top of all that, a child too, the one thing you could always get solace from, but not this time. Yes.  It’s a complete pain.  Yes.  And you’d never invest this much again.  NO, hell no, it’s this or I’m OUT.  Wow.  Yea.  So what would he have to do?  (Sigh.) Not want us to be happy more than he wants me to be whole again (or himself whole for that matter); I want him to save me, or at least want to, truly, not just as a way to get something out of it but regardless, the way you would have to STOP and pick someone up off the road before you could drive on, no matter what, not because of the consequences or any ulterior extrinsic motivators, but out of some higher more compelling JUST BECAUSE the occasion calls for it; I mean, he has not made me happier than he has cost me effort, all along, and THAT made me Happy because it made me feel Good, “loving even when tried” typa deal, and I was passing the test for once (I thought, anyway, wrongly [she says bitterly]).  And you don’t want to be Good now, you want to be happy, or something?  Kinda, I mean, you made me unhappy this morning, so I bit your head off.  (hahahahahahahaha) Right. Right; and ultimately, I don’t want that, I don’t want to think like that, honestly (I don’t want have the brain I have currently whatsoever!), I don’t need to be happy all the time, I’m not in a relationship to be unhappy but I’m not in it to be happy either, and I am pretty content with difficulty occasioning personal growth and all that fucking shit, buuuut not at the moment (hahahahhahaha/cry).  Right :/ I don’t know what to do with this juncture of my spiritual journey, and if I can’t talk about it that way, I can’t talk about it all, and I can't translate it into another paradigm, either, and in fact I think that I will not.  Right :/

hear fear

VIRGO TODAY: You know what a relationship is about to you. The other person has an entirely different set of reasons for being there. Getting clarity on this will improve your bond.

Nice. Goes well with the Emerson quote. Which are both the opposite of the 'fuck a bunch of this' that I feel.

"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." Emerson

"I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all."
   --Anne Sexton, Self-Portrait in Letters

Couldn't have put it better. Which is probably one of the many reasons why I'm not Anne fucking Sexton. But I do know one thing: NO parts of me are functioning (what I would consider) PROPERLY.

Upside to everything, no place to go but up 

This Woman Took A Photo Of Herself Every Day For A Year. I Was In Tears When I Saw The Last One.

This Woman Took A Photo Of Herself Every Day For A Year. I Was In Tears When I Saw The Last One.



I feel the anti-selfie mojo, especially all that include anything in the conceptual neighborhoods of jello-shots or 'look at how well adjusted I am!', but if we could take pics of our insides, it might look like that. It might look like pictures of your abdomen pregnant then not then your spirit bruised. It might be useful to be able to SEE it, whatever it is, if only you could, so you'd be able to. To see.

She didn't tell him she'd known any mud engineers before or about the one she'd heard was killed by a pressurized hose. The hose had shot up into his stomach from underground.

The thought of that death, although she'd only been half acquainted with the man, always put a panicky, dry lump in her throat. It was the hose, she thought, snaking up suddenly from its unseen nest, the idea of that hose striking like a live thing, that was fearful. With one blast it had taken out his insides. And that too made her throat ache, although she'd heard of worse things. It was that moment, the one moment, of realizing you were totally empty. He must have felt that. Sometimes, alone in her room in the dark, she thought she knew what it might be like. -Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

I keep trying to get it together. To think rightly. But maybe I should empty out. I can't think at all anymore around this thinking I've got going. It's in my way.

"This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time." Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

http://trauma.blog.yorku.ca/2013/12/love-is-war-post-infidelity-stress-disorder-2/

it's 4:30 in the morning (again).  guess I'm at the 'hypervigilant' stage. and I don't see how I'm going to past it according to that treatment criteria, since you'd need to be able to know and discuss the actual simple truths in the first place in order to 'cognitively restructure' them, no? but we don't do that. I hunt what truths down that I can and (painfully) make up the rest, both solitary (lonely) activities essentially

Ah Facebook philosophizing. Words to not possibly live by, all day long, with and without cats and cartoons. Why would this be true? Wouldn't that be the first step towards realizing 'hey you're not just an asshole you're bath-shit crazy TOO!, as if just an asshole weren't bad enough!!'

:/ my mother-in-law is coming back from Mexico today. It's enough to make me want to sell Aaron a car so he can get a head start on her, running for his life. So imagine, I stop in at my lawyer's office, a family friend who knows all about it all, and I'm asking um is there a contract type of car sale for a separated bankrupt spouse to legally bindingly buy a car from his jilted wife? And I'm thinking this is going to sound insane. But he's just, like, 'yea'. 

No matter how bat-shit you go, there's a form of some kind to fill out for it ft. No matter what forms you fill out, there's no preventing the bat-shit you might go. Contracts, such as marriage, attempt to minimize collateral damage humans who "love" each other can do to each other. But they can very barely do that legally, and by definition not spiritually at all. They just give us all mostly false security. Trust me, if your life involves other people, you're not safe from the harm they can inflict on you if they choose to, no matter what. You should probably not even trust your mother (unless she's dead) (maybe). 

. . . a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; he is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires . . . The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification; and this trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. --Robert Lindner
Rebel Without a Cause

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. --Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Yea. I'd venture that Aaron was raised by a psychopath. But really. I don't even know anymore. Not just what to think, but how. Let alone do. Which isn't up to me, anyway. I'm not much else at this point but altogether tired of having the shit shaken out of me. (Can you get shaken baby syndrome in adulthood? A: yes)

 
 Bonus track

My shrink is a magician. Literally, she also is a witch, a referral from the Witch otherwise I’d not have gotten a slot with her.  Like me, she hides in plain sight, rolling what she is into what she does without any attention to it more than that, booked solid at the poshy mental health suite out by the university.  But man, it is true, a magician can work magic.  I walk in there just so fucked up and pissed off that I’m beyond adjectives, and I walk out sane(r).  

I want Aaron’s mother dead, gone, obliterated.  Which is what she wanted for me, and thus I know just like with anything hate, you become it, and now I am Maureen, which SUCKS.  It’s making me crazy-ass.

Meh, I hate my mother-in-law too.  She doesn’t really matter anymore, he’s an adult.  The sooner you accept that, the sooner it’ll be true, and that will help make it true for him also.  And she clearly hates herself, people who love their own selves and their own lives don’t cripple their kids, so you’re being redundant.  She’s emotionally ill – it helps nothing for you to become as ill and full of hate.  You know that. 

Ok, but HOW do I stop hating her? Cuz I rip her throat open in my head, like, constantly…

I have a mother-in-law and son-in-law who are my “lessons in patience”.  Just set your boundaries and keep to them.  That’s sane.  And when you start stabbing her to death in your head, just remind yourself: “this is a lesson, it is to make me a better person”.  Keep doing that. Forever, it sounds like.  And when you have a really bad day and act out, forgive yourself too, and go back to plan 'sane boundaries', repeat repeat.

Ok but he has internalized her bullshit, and he wouldn’t know a healthy boundary if it bit him in the ass…

Meh, that’s why he needs you.  And as long as that comes out to be that you get things you need too, that you achieve equality in the end and on the whole, you can mother him through that now – what’s so wrong with that?  You’re good at mothering things through things, by all accounts. No?

Ok but he has all this crap hardwired in there, like he’s homophobic at himself and doesn’t even know it, and lets it get under his skin when they insinuate we are an “alternate lifestyle” and a baby on the other hand is some hetero badge of real grown-up manhood whatever…

Meh, first of all, we are all attracted to all kinds of people, and most humans are bisexual and need to get over their weirdness about it, so that’s hardly rare.  Plus, sexuality has nothing to do with monogamy. Monogamy chooses A person, regardless, and character not sexuality determines fidelity.  Plus if it were really a baby he HAD to have, he’d not have chosen you in the first place, he’d have chosen someone younger.  Even if he half believes that heteronormative shit, he must at least half know it’s also bullshit, so why not believe him when he says YOU are what he wants? Working out the heteronormative blackmail of his upbringing is his shit to deal with, not some truth you should deign to fear.

Ok but Aaron can dissociate from his feelings, it’s scary as fuck, it’s good for a critical care nurse maybe, but not in an intimate relationship…

You’re right.  Definitely .  BUT that could be good too, he can use the ability to dissociate from his mother.  And then once he recognizes all the thoughts and self-doubts that aren’t actually his, he can dissociate from them too.  Every weakness is a secret strength, you know that.

Ok but TJ hates Aaron, he just won’t relent at all, and I don’t call him TJ for nothing, he is THE JUDGE…

Meh, we all get we need for our soul on our Journey.  Forgiveness doesn’t come naturally to your son.  So this is what he probably needs in the long run.  It won’t kill him to learn people are fallible, and then later he won’t be so shocked when he is too. Tell him that. 

Ok but Aaron is paranoid, sexually PARANOID, which given circumstances is insane first of all, and it drives me crazy, all he ever asks is if I’m thinking about fucking so-n-so and until now he’s not been able to even believe me and I’m still not sure he is able to trust, plus to be honest it’s BORING.  I mean, I’m trying not to kill that cunt mother of his in my head all day, not thinking about other dick, and if I could think about something more interesting than either of those things, to whom would I tell it? God damn it…

Meh, that’s your fault.  I mean, ok, his paranoia is not good, and he has to get over it, but which again is HIS SHIT to deal with in marriage counseling, that’s on him.  What would you rather talk about, about yourself?

Jesus, fuck, ANYTHING, like seriously any fucking thing that grants that my inner life doesn’t exist just to hide terrible shit from him, God fucking hell so irritating…

Ok then for every time he needs to ask you if you fucked the plumber or whoever, he has to ask you some other question too, about your inner life, one that is more interesting to you.  Again, you never TELL HIM WHAT YOU WANT.  How do you get to equality doing that?  You are the teacher of yourself to him.  We all are teachers of ourselves to our partners. He did a terrible thing, but it taught you allllll about him now didn’t it?

True enough, I guess, the fucking hardest way (armscrossy)…

What you both lack in this relationship primarily is parity.  You need to be equals.  You have such strong attraction to one another, you know the Law of that, so you have what the other needs, but you don’t know how to tell him what you need and balance those scales.  That is YOUR SHIT to deal with.

Right.  Right….

If you can do that, and get to the other side of this mess, you’ll be best friends for the rest of your lives. He needed to make all this shit visible so he could get past it, his shit especially (granted), but you have some work to do here too.  That’s all. 

You think?...

Yes, I have a sense that is so. 

(exhaaaaaaaaaaale….)

I still want to see my mother-in-law nailed to a post in the desert

 (but I’m working on it) playlist:

I fucking love this song. Repeat repeat indeed.





And weirdly, I was NOT listening to the Django Unchained soundtrack when I took a shine to these tunes separately. I’m just in that mood, I guess, to scythe a (son of a) bitch’s head off (but I’m working on it). And they're great songs, so there's that.

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."

Between rounds of shrink appointments, we just are.  We float in the hot tub and talk.  He hates therapy like he hated yoga, but just like that is/was supposed to work, as the exertion pain ebbs the benefits flow, and so in successive delays he absorbs them.  He says many times about various things, “I see it now”, and seems to move through epiphanies at a steep rate.  It alarms me and heartens by turns.  I’m not sure.  I want to be building a life but still wonder if I’m just a way through to somewhere else for him, that will not have been me and/but will not be the storyline that I interrupted either.  And he has learned that “mostly” he “doesn’t know”, proven again and again by how much he is now thinking “I didn’t know that about myself a minute ago”. 

My own shrink appointment again looms, and I know she will not be interested in any of that except in so far as it pertains to me.  What am I doing here?  With a man so unsure of himself that he cannot (in good conscience) make commitments, can he?  I can’t answer that question so much as describe it: I’ve never felt so substantively present as I have with him, except for the simple facts of my children, so like that he simply IS and when he is not, it feels like mounting panic and I can’t stand it for forever.  I can stand it for days, I withstood it for 7 weeks, but in the end, I reel him in and put my arms around him and becalm myself.  And I know that is not necessarily a safe place to be.  Aaron dealt me a blow that was the most violent I’ve ever taken and withstood.  It was violent.  It was purposeful, selfish, conscienceless, merciless, calculated and cruel.  It gave him a rush to do it, then sickened him, a sickness he then counteracted with a rationalization that mimicked some higher moral duty to ‘his own family’, which then sickened him again, until no matter how he thought about it and no matter what he did in the day to sustain it, the truth was only sick.  And what I am certain of is that that blow to me was repercussive.  It came through him, and thus hit him first, and he’s been taking and passing on that violence onto his own life always.  From his parents, at everything he was and wanted and loved, exploiting every shred of self-doubt to do it, so that it looked to him like “support” for the self-doubt they’d themselves built to a large enough proportion to do him in (and anything he loved/wanted put asunder) time and again, the violence came.  And when I think about it, I recognize it because it has been so with every other person who has ever loved me also – each that I look on in retrospect had what I had not growing up, i.e. a “good family”, loving parents, a “happy” childhood, that upon closer inspection occasioned by trying to love me and failing, turned out to be a kind of abusive-to-the-self upbringing to some extent.  (What is it in me that drew you, and me to you, I wonder? Karma, says my shrink, which I thought I understood the definition of, but no.) 

Aaron’s family is not merely abusive to some extent, though, it is a systematic violence so large that I had to be punched in the face back from it far enough to even glimpse its proportions.  How he made it this far, I don’t know.  (His brother didn’t.)  And what I’ve inherited from it is the shared experience of it, because he now has given me a kind of love that feels like the safest place to be exactly when it is not that at all.  With love like that, who needs hate?  It feels almost not survivable except by a counter measure of equal heartlessness, a kind of going dead.  

So, I understand indeed. But I'm far from gone-dead. 

Justice ft & Problem - On Mamas

Add exercising like a maniac between the wine and cigarettes + some dubious flinging of witch energy at both his dick and his mother, and yep, that's about what it looks like. Nostalgia tears, gut-punched lurches forward onto the floor, retaliatory bonfires, and damn good outfits when I'm rollin' okeydokey (a newly stress slim body and all). I look fabulous. And am about half psychologically dismantled.

currently between paradigms

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. --Louise Erdrich The Painted Drum

That hasn't worked out so great lately playlist

Florence and the Machine - Kiss with a Fist
White Stripes - Blue Orchid
Black Keys - Run Me Down

bonus track from FaintedInk
(I like her dress)

I sure ain't shaving my legs for this

Thank god yesterday is over.

I hate birthdays. Holidays of all kinds are iffy but birthdays especially. They have all the sins of forced cheer plus a gross dose of self-absorption. My (ex)mother-in-law loves her birthday. "I love when it's ALL ABOUT ME", she says.  On Aaron's birthday, my mother-in-law hung out with his mistress drinking wine coolers while he and his father came and got his stuff. (I cannot overstate how thoroughly that fact has rendered his parents my mortal enemies for all of this life and the next, and no matter how many lifetimes it takes me, I WILL drink and eat cake while they writhe and sob so mote it be.) Aaron had asked if the pick up time could be earlier in the day so as not to interfere with his party. I remember that I read that text and went into the boys' bathroom and threw up. I did a lot of throwing up and shitting my brains loose then.

Today was his father's birthday party. Of course I was not invited and wouldn't have gone anyway and nobody wondered how all that might make me feel, today or as an echo of the last birthday horror, either one. I tried to choke it down. But I failed. In the end, I took his face off. I try to understand. I'm going for dispassionate comprehension. But I only manage nauseated circa homicidal.

Shattered. Heart ill. Making a wish

(and then another on the second blow, just for me)

Tj says my mysticism goes upward with my distress in a relation he could write a math equation for if he knew how. He's right. I believe unreasonably in signs and reasons for everything, lessons I squint to comprehend, all that (which might be crap, I don't know). That child is sleeping at my feet right now, stung to near shock

by wasps the Witch says I'm summoning in pain relentlessly. Five exterminator visits later, poison dust lays everywhere

and still they come, now into the house, chasing us like Amityville. I will have the walls gassed next week through drilled holes...but if it is me, what good will that do?

Meanwhile Aaron's car, on the thruway loses a tire, it comes flying off entirely rim and all,

grounding the thing onto its belly, collapsing the gas tank, and against all odds nobody dies. For the next few hours, he is returned to himself. What you lose in a relationship is the ability to be your actual self, always presenting instead a portion or version that you think is the right one for the role you're playing. When I was nothing to him, and he to me, we had nothing to lose, and it was then, those people, who were the real ones. Those people fell in love. Then we became US. And he at least certainly ceased to be the underneath actual self anymore in relation to me. I became the surface. His real self by definition then was looking for a new me to disclose itself to. We all do this, to some degree. Traumas of various kinds hasten the disfigurement of relationship. The more "normal" the state of trauma, the stronger the homing beacon to it. Maybe a near death experience can shake that mask back off for a moment, when what do you have to lose if by rights you should be dead anyway. And then there he is. There we are (I died long ago, I don't need to be god smacked to be honest). And sure enough, in different shapes than I imagined but still, there are reasons indeed, all that day becoming clearer like a mountain out of mist.

By the next day, he's mostly gone again, and he's depressed about his car. It's totalled. I don't blame him but I'm quiet, thinking it was a car well spent. (A reason for everything.) Like in "A Good Man is Hard to Find", he'd be okay if someone held a gun to his head every day of his life. If only he knew (believed) that gun were actually so, which it most certainly is, with or without me.

And me, I'm in pieces still and don't know how not to be. My understanding increases daily and that does almost nothing to assuage my pain. I don't know what to do with that. Or how I will figure it out.

That's my pond. Circled is a baby fish, born to the white big fish you see on the left, whom we named "Jimmyhoffa" because she hides so well.  And so does baby, whom I had not spotted at all until Aaron came over for the first time last night and he spotted the little guy right away.  He said "I dreamt there'd be a baby, and there he is".  The endless baby thing.  If I had to call it at this point, both getting back together and him leaving me again in basically the same manner feel inevitable. I don't know what to name that feeling, which is very close to the feeling I have about my mortality - a kind of granite-weighted acceptance, shot through with joy and sorrow.

So, I won this grant for 100k to work for 2 years with a team of 5 people, 2 of us from the school (my dean and myself) and 3 from the local largest retirement/assisted/nursing/palliative complex to develop a curriculum to teach care staff how to add ‘spiritual wellbeing’ to the types of wellbeing they were responsible for providing, specifically to the imminently dying population of their residents.  I have no idea how to do that, of course.  But meh, neither does anybody else, so … in the end, if we succeed, I become an expert (i.e. a consultant) for this work, might go to palliative care facilities regularly, who knows.  But we have to succeed first. 

The basic parameters of the project is this: survey staff about what they know/think about spirituality now, teach them some higher level of attunement to spiritual wellbeing, then study the resident populations to see if it has beneficial effect (fewer anxiety attacks, for instance, fewer stress illnesses, etc). 

Okay, so first task: survey what they currently think.  This has to be a quick survey, not some long abstract thing, as they’re subject to just 20 minute training sessions at the longest.  Plus, and I didn’t think about this ahead of time, they read/write at a 4^th grade level overall.  This is what they RN leaders inform me of as I’m trying to write a 5-question format.  Some of the CNA’s are higher functioning than that, but I can’t bet on it.  So I can’t ask “Your spirituality impacts your work?” then give them a likert scale because the word “impact” is above the 4^th grade reading level.  Go ahead, try to find a synonym….Five questions took me days of going round and round about it.  It just strikes me as very odd work, a strange challenge, of taking my Spirituality in Lit course, wherein I throw everything from Emerson to Ginsberg at my students, and getting it into APPLICATION terms and then making those terms accessible to people who are way smarter than I am about all aspects of dying and/but who can’t read hardly.  When I’m not obsessing over my own personal life, I’m obsessing more and more over this project.  So let’s introduce the cast of the team, whose names I have to conceal due to IRB restrictions:

Reverend – she’s a Unitarian, apx 70 years old, formerly a nurse this is her second career and second marriage, both of which she’s been in/going for about 15 years.  Mid-meeting one day, she took a call from her ex-husband, their son was in jail again, about which she sighs and says “he converted to Islam, but apparently Allah isn’t getting his back”

Nurse – she is responsible for adding the care planning codes for spiritual wellbeing into the current system used, so that there are “diagnoses” and then “treatments indicated” for them.  She has a LONG list of everything that could be wrong with you spiritually, such as purposeless hopelessness loneliness etc, which all look like one word to me: Shitty.  Then a short list of symptoms including things like listlessness, to which I added about 25 symptoms that I myself had exhibited in the last few months (that cracked her up, but she took notes just the same).  We haven't written treatments yet.  But her first suggestion was “needs a gin&tonic”

Baptist Lady – she’s an RN leader for CNA’s and another kind of layperson-reverend as well, of the sings in church powerful black woman in the room variety.   She will be overseeing how the CNA’s get talked to, trained, and evaluated.  She is quiet and demurely imposing - she some kind of scares the shit out of me.

DeanJ – he’s my boss, to the extent that I recognize authority, which is not at all except by brute necessity.  He’s a philosophy PhD who hates philosophers for all the reasons he can’t help but be, such as snooty smart and disapproving constantly (reminds me of Ex, a bit, which is fine since I always liked Ex at WORK, just not at home at all).  I think we’ve actually become authentically friendly at this point.  I’m so “what the fuck ever” about everything now, like if your hair ain’t on fire I probably won’t bat an eyelash, which in the arena of academic hysteria is welcome.  I’m back to being work-yoda, basically, by virtue not of meditation and mindfulness so much as by the brute force of life having beaten me into a pulpy stillness.  DeanJ is in charge of measurement, will be running the stats and numbers on the results, etc.  He drinks half a dozen diet mountain dews a day and loves caffeinated play with excel spreadsheets.

We spend umpteen go-rounds on 5 simple questions, then to celebrate finishing the initial survey, we go to the in-house dog show, wherein the staff brings their dogs in and dresses them up in dog fashion outfits (tutu’s and Sherlock Holmes get ups, etc), and then walks them around the “run way” which is walking around the room stopping at each parked wheelchair and wagging tail at each elderly resident.  There is one old man there, so like my grandfather, so fucking happy to be entertained by the littlest shit, and every time a dog comes around to him, he shouts out “well will ya look at that?! Isn’t that WONDERFUL??!!” By the time he’s done it the 5^th time, I’m crying. 

blame it on me

A dream: I reach out and connect myself to Aaron through what I know to be a spirit bond but which looks like a Chinese finger puzzle. I take a deep breath and blow my spirit at him through it. My thought is that I will see where he and our connection are broken in this way, that my spirit will leak out the cracks so I'll be able to see them. There are none that I can see. Then I look down and see that I'm standing in a puddle, and it has all come pouring out of the cracks in ME.

(He should be reading articles on how to unbreak your betrayed heart-battered wife. http://m.wikihow.com/Rebuild-Your-Spouse's-Trust-After-an-Affair)

 

You're killin me, Smalls

From "The Taxonomy of Ghosting"

We have all heard of ghosting (or the fade away, as some call it), probably – that thing when a person you're dating [married to] just disappears. But like real ghosts (which are real, as I just said), there are many different types of relationship phantoms. And fortunately for all of us, these types correspond to famous spooks. How lucky! [such as]..

Bloody Mary: This is a ghost you really believe will reappear if you just try hard enough. Stay chanting in front of that dark bathroom mirror all night if you have to...

 -------- (sigh)

Although I'm hopelessly unprepared for the semester, I'm sure glad to be back at work. Holy shit, thank god for books. Thank you thank you thank you god for books. In fact, I think my main thought increasingly is "thank you". I think it at my shoes, a patch of sky, my growling stomach, almost everything/anything I can. Thank god for meetings, even that - it beats going home smelling like a whopper. I always want to pull back against being dragged anywhere, as to self pity relentlessly. Be thankful for your breath, for legs that work, for something. Have you not noticed that the way you think has not served you well at all? So duh, TRY IT IN REVERSE. I'm digging my heals in the more he tries to yoke and drag me into believing that only his pain counts, that his discomfort of today trumps everything else and everyBODY else. No. It doesn't. I swear to Christ, he's going to start running through the streets hitting ice cream cones out of kids' hands out of all consuming resentment that anyone might have a feeling that isn't conforming to his certainty that his own unhappiness is the sole irrefutable center of the known universe. And what really drives me crazy is that for all his self-absorption, he doesn't really care about himself at all either. What IS that?

(And why am *I*, not he for himself, trying to figure it out all the time? Reading 'Psychology Today' articles like it's my job.) (While his mother - whom we've dubbed Low Cunning - while Low Cunning tries to get him to hook up with his landlady, who in turn makes him meatloaf dinners. Which is fine, whatever/eyeroll, but can we at least thank god for meatloaf then?)

Loving Aaron feels at this point a lot like loving my kids at two years old felt, when at the end of the day all you can do is hold them and thank god they're alive anyway, and think 'wow I love you, wow you suck'. And pray they move on from this stage of development before you crack.

I got this at the Mary - I've prayed it a lot lately - folks usually leave off that last part

Thank you Master for my Soul, Donny Hathaway 

"Why Your Marriage Sucks":
http://www.salon.com/2009/06/24/vindication_love/

No matter what I read, it makes no sense to me. Marriage to begin with, logically speaking. Nor how ours broke, which defied every reason for marital demise listed in that article - by those measures, I'd done everything right, including the downsizing and re prioritizing etc. And/but listening to him (trying trying), why it broke is that I'd done it right and NOT put the institutionalization of marriage higher on my list of things to do every day. Thus/but it had not been enough about acquiring mutual debt, it hadn't been contractual enough, there wasn't enough to "show for it" to him. But everything I read about the reasons marriages fail amount to the contractual/transactional being the killer of love. So it would have failed anyway.

I don't understand much of anything is just about the only thing about which I feel certain. 

So I will go to counseling. Will do the homework. Will submit. And see if it gets me any closer to what I wanted out of this relationship in the first place, which wasn't ease or status or stuff, it was GOODNESS. I wanted to be GOOD to someone, for no other motive than to do that as far as I could in the everyday, having faith in the transformative possibilities of that up close and personal. I'm surrounded by people who are very good people in the abstract. Their outrages are rightly placed, their political sensibilities are moral, their writings and actions bespeak their decency of mind, they clean up rivers and go to rallies against fracking and model thoughtful citizenship (or at least feel endlessly guilty) .. we are all "good people" more or less. Theoretically. But we usually just suck, utterly, at giving a real shit about the people right in front of us. Up close, even good people are routinely awful. And it's not just a matter of blood - we are no better inside our families and intimate spaces than we are to our friends than we are to our acquaintances. In fact, I'd say we are shittiest in that order of succession, kindest at greatest distances. (Like I was yesterday, by accident: I took that old man's hand and said sincerely 'you've been so blessed in such a long marriage', my voice cracking a little with admiration for him really, and he held my hand a long time and cried. Afterwards, Witch and her family were looking at me like I was some kind of materialized aberration. What? He NEVER has held a hand, not even to cross a kid across a street, cold always, "he's emotionally retarded - what the hell did you say??") I wanted to reverse that just once with all my spiritual might, an experiment in radical intimacy. Wherein the constraint of monogamy would drive me into invention in order to achieve a more concerted mindful beauty, like writing a sonnet.

And now I feel cored like an apple a lot of the time, nursing a crying headache usually, wondering if I am still mid that experiment (keeping the faith) or if it just failed miserably (in denial). Or some other non binary option that I'm too blind and hurt to see at all.

()

Half a day at marriage repair therapy, hashing facts and dates that I know by heart and that he'd just as soon forget, us in agreement only that we both hate and suffer every detail.

The second half is now at Roswell with the Witch, holding her dad's hand, her mom riddled. I ask him, How long have you been married? He says, Oh I don't know, she keeps track of all that, facts and dates..

If I could have, I might have just stayed there. Taken up recluse residency, kept the temporary library card indefinitely, walked off the human grid entirely..

But among other things, I've got kids to raise. And when Ears nearly drowned in Minera Lake, where the distance is about 20 ft to the raft, from anxiety and weakness, I felt myself beneath all this shit as firm and welcome as when my feet felt lakebottom and pulled Ears back to shore. Bottom line: you either want to be well, live uprightly, fulfill your karmic duties, love as unselfishly as to break your back, tell the truth to yourself and to others, push yourself to think deeply and carve out an inner life big enough to hold your existence in reflection, to try and try and try again according to those values, or you do not want to walk with me in any capacity.