Mark is still dead. I don't think about it for days and days. I'm busy. Then I remember and I think, STILL dead? Patti Smith, she says to Fred after almost 20 years, You've been gone long enough. But he can't come back. Aaron isn't dead but I think of his absence like that. All the time, to me he is gone, and I think of it as I am doing now. Absence drives us to lament, to want to wail ENOUGH, for even death feels like a choice. But our minds must walk off from it after awhile as if from a show after the credits. 

Then, after he left me, the beginning was not only the first, happy occasion, opening into an infinite number of happy occasions, it also contained the end, as though the very air of that room where we sat together, in that public place, where he leaned over, barely knowing me, and whispered to me, were already permeated with the end of it, as though the walls of that room were already made of the end of it. ~Lydia Davis, The End of the Story: A Novel

VIRGO Unlike zoo animals, people often get to design their own cages. It sometimes takes them a while to realize this, though. You have more freedom than you think. Current boundaries are either illusory, self-imposed, or both.

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.~M Train

The temperature was dropping and a light snow was falling. I sat before Brecht’s grave and hummed the lullaby Mother Courage sings over the body of her daughter. I sat as the snow fell, imagining Brecht writing his play. Man gives us war. A mother profits from it and pays with her children; they fall one by one like wooden pins at the end of a bowling alley. As I was leaving I took a photograph of one of the guardian angels. The bellows of my camera were wet with snow and somewhat crushed on the left side, which resulted in a black crescent blotting a portion of the wing. I took another of the wing in close-up. I envisioned printing it much larger on matte paper, and then I would write the words of the lullaby on its white curve. I wondered if these words caused Brecht to weep as he wrung the heart of the mother who was not as heartlessas she would lead us to believe. I slipped the photographs into my pocket. My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now.~Patti Smith, M Train.

"I thought of everything and noticed almost nothing around me." The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mark died this morning. I was dreaming about Danniel. Kerri was with her like for some get together to which had come uninvited. I said, let's all go on vacation, before it's too late. Dan was immediately game (lol), then I opened my eyes and the phone rang. I hope Mark is on the beautiful beach we were (are?) headed to :,(

"More than anything else, I realized, it had to be boring to be crazy, to think the same sequence of thoughts and come up with the same set of bizarre conclusions, to voice those conclusions using the same words, several times an hour, day in and day out. It was hard to get people off their tracks." ~The Reptile Garden, Erdrich

Aaron works now at the ER in downtown Falls. The Falls is a third world country. Buildings and roads bombed out, the stink of landfills always pressing down on your face there, rooming houses are the residences and there you'll find the highest density of sex offenders on the planet - the township is paid to take them, and the garbage, and the money is pocketed by who knows who. Every woman under 30 and over 13 there is pregnant and a heroin addict. Even my friends from there, Sunshine whom I had dinner with last night, they're given opiates for nearly every ailment from an early age at urgent cares and ERs, God only knows why, 10 pill packets for free from Medicaid; their babies born addicted to one thing or another is just expected; their having to repeatedly lose jobs and lives then stop taking prescriptions long enough to feel what hurts and think straight again, that's just phases of life along with the other phases, turning 40 or getting divorced whatever. It is all the same, as Sun rightly put it, just hard then better then hard again, but the hard is a little harder the poorer you are.  Yesterday Aaron and I went shopping before she came over, wine and whatnot to serve her, and we bought powerball tickets. We argued about what we would do with the money then we decided to split it, not agreeing. He would figure out how to provide free medical care in the Falls. I said, just about everyone there is a Piece of Shit. He reminded me I have friends there. I said, yeah but they want out and antibiotics doesn't get you out of anywhere. What does? I dunno...books. For me, books. (I'd help Ears start a small press for graphic novels in the back of a bookstore I would open for all 3 kids to run, full of excellent reading choices and hippie soaps whatever that The Girl would make.) (I'm not a particularly good person.) He is there now. The ER is full of homeless people escaping the cold who were made homeless last week when someone burned their rooming house down for being full of pederasts and 1000 ft from an elementary school. They came in first for smoke inhalation, now they just have nowhere else to be they say, so they complain of made up ailments. Why don't they go to the mission?, I ask. They would have to empty their pockets and shit, and not be high. I think about this, and struggle not to think 'Pieces of Shit'. I think, if I were Louise Erdrich my minds eye would perceive characters rather than charactitures in what he is looking at. So I'm reading Erdrich all day.

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

"Advice to Myself", Louise Erdrich

I set up a record player. Ears got paid in a box of LPs for a moving job. I sifted through, saw Patti Smith and thought 'it's time anyway.' The Girl keeps worrying where Mark's records will go to be safe for the time being. So. The boys are downstairs now playing the soundtracks of my earliest memories. The LPs came from a man who died, my dad's age. Ears looks intently at the LP covers. Who is that supposed to be? The 10 of wands, Zep 4. A funeral for a close friend last night, then I got to come home to a full house and hold a baby. I understand so much better now why Woolf called the book "The Waves". Feel happy ft. cry inconsolable.

Speaking of WI. I watch it for landscapes more than not.

At what point do we develop schtick? Like, smiling on cue, playing to crowds, hedging our bets, making devils bargains? We will contest it on our own behalf, armscrossy and all, but we might not realize we demand it in turn. Do you know how much your approbations and allegiances cost for those who bank on them? Too much.

don't tell me to smile

Huh. that's the first thing I've ever not found on wikipedia, ever