the civil wars - barton hollow (love this)
Reignwolf – The Chain
laura cortese - I feel it all (feist)
johnny cash - ain't no grave (black opium remix)
richie havens - freedom motherless child
willy mason - the message (grandmaster flash) don't push me la la la
w ze von - my shit is fucked up
Sharon Van Etten – We Are Fine
bonus track - freedom (love this)


link

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.” - Sylvia Plath

Phosphorescent – Ride On / Right On first shirtsleeve riding around in the car with the window down song of the season

For Virgo this week: It's Soul-Searching Season: a good time to go in search of your soul. To aid your quest, I'll offer a few lines from "A Few Words on the Soul," a poem by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. "We have a soul at times," she says. "No one's got it non-stop, for keeps. Day after day, year after year may pass without it. For every thousand conversations, it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence. It's picky: our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick. Joy and sorrow aren't two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined. We can count on it when we're sure of nothing and curious about everything. It won't say where it comes from or when it's taking off again, though it's clearly expecting such questions. We need it but apparently it needs us for some reason too." (Translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.)

The post-funeral-trip case of shingles and trip the ER, that was a last straw of some kind. I’ve gone quiet and want to be. Aa finds this very upsetting, and we’ve come to that impasse I knew we would eventually: I am needful of a lot of time filled with nothing, alone. Not always a loner and not essentially; I made three humans and would have kept doing that if possible, so there’s that. But those humans are trained to be alone-with-me. I don’t like the world much, not the human world hardly at all and I'm not big on horseflies either, so there’s a kind of space of quiet between, on the one hand, talking and all similar human noise-making activities (meeting at work and jet skis sum it up, both pointless and annoying as fuck), and on the other hand nature in extremity (think endless months of fucking snow, ugh), and that quiet perfect place between is a nice spring day with nothing at all in it except maybe a book. And the book is a novel in which nothing happens except people think shit like this, about the interminability of workplaces and jet skis, and they too hate everybody and love everything, hate the world in its particulars and/but love an ice cream cone and warbler season. Aa wants to learn enough about baseball to go bet on it at the casino; I want to hold still so my soul will land on my jacket. I remind him that he met me when I assigned him Thoreau to read, I warned him, so it’s not like he didn’t know. True, he admits (but that doesn’t make it easy).

I don’t get birthday fuss for adults.  I more than don’t get it, it strikes me as patently weird.  It’s not just the aging factor (Why celebrate that? Why lament OR celebrate it?? Why remark it at all? Weird.)  It’s the infantilizing of adults by those around them ft. the self-absorption factors that freak me out.  Christ gets a fuss for his birthday, which is weird enough if you think about, and you’re not Christ, F Y I.  I start balking about birthdays when a kid hits, ooooh, about 5 years old or so. Up until then, you’re still “new”, so ok, YAY you turned ONE or whatever, and that seems ok through the years of a Chucky Cheese pizza party. That lasts until you turn, like, 90 years old, at which point a fuss is again in order. Once you’re too old for a Chucky Cheese party, then you’ve entered the age span during which birthdays are “here’s some money” and enough said, pretty much.  I’m in trouble this week for this attitude.  TJ turns 13 today, and I am making him a special roast chicken recipe and his favorite vanilla apple sauce cake (or some ice cream if I run outa time to make cake, which is not unlikely and which is what I’d do on any day, i.e. make a homemade dessert or buy ice cream) and he’s mulling over how to spend his 50 bucks. MAYBE I’ll get him a hamster…probably not….and no, no balloons, no party pack of fuss at an indoor adventure land (despite Aa’s mom half off coupon for it), and if pushed to fuss more, I will have to fight the urge to do something like say “think about what you’ve spent those 13 years on and ask yourself, is it enough?”  Aa’s brother also has a birthday this week, which feels like an onslaught, I can’t help it, I’m virtually appalled by the idea of a big bakery bought cake with that nasty frosting and 32 candles on my brother-in-law’s cake and we blow those party wooper things and stand around and sing at him like he’s just turned one year old.  I mean, I could do it, but the look on my face would be inevitably “this is fuuuuuucking weeeeeird”.  And since it’s always someone’s frigging birthday, I can pretty much spend the whole year in the partypooper dog house.  Aa does not understand my point of view on this subject, to say the least.

Meanwhile, the funeral … my family is nuts, first of all, as in half my relatives are SSI for mental disorders, my several favorite aunts have thorazine shakes in their hands, my aunt Mu gets an “asthma attack” i.e. a panic attack over, o, pretty much anything, the smell of jolly ranchers might send her into her “allergies”, and she’ll be huffing the albuterol like she needs a stiff drink.  So I’m willing to suspect our funerals will be a little weird…though, I dunno, people wailing away and looking at old pics and overcoming their lifetime estrangements at least for the span of overwhelming grief, while little kids run around and don’t understand why they’d have to be quiet around a box of ashes … that’s a standard funeral, right?  People get up and say things, or try to as they feel gripped by urges to sob, and the things they say are woeful in all sense of that word.  Plus poems, “I am my mother’s garden” typa deal.  An entire life, one more impactful on all these people than could ever be captured even if I were Virginia Woolf and had 2000 pages, reduced to this small sad fuss and someone (my sister) organizes a buffet.  Then back at my aunt’s house, we popped grandma open so we could take a bit of her, those who wanted that (including me), and I did the honors, both because she and I were especially close and because, well, because I have a high tolerance for weird.  So we popped the little urn open, which looked just like a Bose shelf speaker, with a screwdriver and a wire snip, and I dug into the ashes with a little silver teaspoon and portioned her out into ziplock sandwich baggies.  Aa was fearing that I’d run into a knuckle or something, “incomplete combustion”, but I knew about that risk, and rather than avoid it, I dug down.  Like when you make Quik milk, ya know?  Ya gotta stir from the bottom, death being similar I figured.  I dug down with my little spoon to get a scoop of the heart of grandma.  My cousin Georgianne, after discussing the possible amount she would need to have a small glass bauble made (you can do that, render human ashes into glass) with my sister, came back for a couple more scoops for her ziplock just in case.  Aa was a trouper through all of this, holding the ziplocks open for me, though the look on his face was “this is fuuuuuuucking weeeeeeird”. 

On the way home, we decided that there are certain ways in which we feel like we married into other cultures entirely, which must be respected as far as we are capable, but which are fucking weird to each of us respectively.  I call these occasions “Vietnamese Celebrate Your Foot Day”, on which maybe your in-laws would sacrifice a goat (or hamster), and which you would show up for if you married into it (but it’d always seem weird).

Now… what is Easter?  It’s got a (re)birthday in it, of Christ (and didn’t we celebrate his birthday just a couple months ago??) and a funeral more or less since he also died necessarily, with a dragg-ass-to-a-cousin’s-house  fuss event at the center of which are colored eggs and a butter lamb.  How weird is that? It seems pretty weird, but I might just be overtired.

welp off we go to Chicago for the memorial in a 36-hour turn around drive. the winter of 2012/13 will have been "the year of going back and forth to the midwest ala ft. carrying life and death, with a lot of sex in it".  all that makes me feel truly at peace is the paramount present moment of sex.  I'm a mourning nympho. the bleaker shit gets, the more I want only to fuck Aa's brains loose, and crabbily.  "grief gives you some kinda wicccccckkeeed PMS", he laughs.

schöne Töne von Mine: I Am The Spring

raised on gallow's humor

How’s it going?

Well (sigh) it’s all done all arranged even though poor Shirl she it’s been so much on her she called and got the other place that arranged everything in the end but in the meanwhile the first place had come and got her for the cremation ya know because we weren’t going to be doing anything but then the other place showed up and were so nice and arranged everything but they said it would cost us an extra 750 to go get her from the first place but ya know Ma always did like a ride in the car so she took the scenic route HAHAHAHAHAH

Soooo grandma’s dead, I take it…?

O yeah sorry ha I forget who I’ve talked to yes last night at about 9:30 or so, it was peaceful.

Annnnnd then you called Jen twice to tell her….?

HAHAHAHHAAH yeah I musta!

Well I’m sure she appreciated that, very thorough of you.

Right, HAHAHAHAHHAHA. Well it was very peaceful, she just stopped doing that gurgling breathing ya know, and but she was still there like her diaper was cutting into her funny and Shirl arranged it took it off her actually and heard her say “you’re a good girl” real quiet and she beamed at Mikey when he came, Doug didn’t come though he needs meds or some shit I dunno and he was taking that stuff ya know PROZAC! but the girlfriend said she didn’t want to be with a drug addict (sigh) I don' t think she heard you on the phone but ya never know she loved you like hell, but anyways it’s been as good as you can expect ya know the hospice people were SO nice and they came and asked all about her and I dunno how they realized she was Irish by half so I come back into the room one time when we had been out on a break and one of the hospice women was singing Tura Lura Lura by her bed….and I could just imagine Ma’s bony little hand if she had had the strength reaching up and choking the shit out of the woman, Ma hated all that Irish sentimental bullshit, drunks and poor as dirt in real life whatEVER, but how was the hospice lady supposed to know she was being so nice, so it was nice, more or less

(hahahahahahah)

What? It’ll be a nice thing too at the place it’ll be in the basement of the place and Shirl can’t take any more at her house like food and shit, no, so bulletin board whatEVER bring a picture if you have a picture and Jen’ll make texas cav-ee-ar and we’ll call it a day.

No tura lura lura obviously.

Nooo, we’ll have some music she liked.  Maroon 5 was her latest.

Grandma liked Maroon 5??

O yeah, she loved it, we’d put her earbuds in there and her little head would bop.  She was so little by the end, like a kid, her hands, so liTTle. And then guess who called, you’ll never guess.

Dad.

Your dad.

Right.

He has a sixth sense, like a cross between a son and a vulture HAHAHAHHAHAHA she’s at death’s door and he’s just calling cuz he felt the draft HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHA.  Then I told him I was at the nursing home with Ma, and he goes “enough said” and hung right up.  So what are you doing with the garden this year? Tell me something about flowers.

Uhhh, well I dunno, I still like the idea of a pond now that we seem to be outa toddler hazards, I guess, but they're expensive.

OOOOOOOh ponds are so worth it!! Shirl has these ducks that land in there ya know and they were courting and we got to see the whole thing out the window with coffee they’re billing and cooing and wrapping their necks all around like swim dancing then he gets on her ya know…

Yes, I know….

And he kind of holds her head up out of the water isn’t that considerate like while he’s pounding away on there but she won’t get water up her nose, or bill whatEver, which is good cuz it ain't quick let me tell ya! and ya know they mate for life did you know that?

Ducks do?  No I didn’t know that.

O yeah, and the females have a flap in there, in their area, and if another duck tries to stick it to her she can just close the flap like a garage door against rape.

Wow.

Yeah, so that politician musta been thinking about ducks when he was blowing his mouth off.

(hahahahahahhahaha)

What? Ya know what I’m talking about, “legitim…

“legitimate rape”, yeah I get it Mom


HAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHA
(hahahahahahhahaha)

rereading Virginia Woolf, I'm always rereading Woolf, making my students do this, you'd think I was giving them an anal probe for all the fuss they make, it's just a friggin pot roast jezus h christ...wanting to make beouf en daube as an intellectual enterprise is embematic of my career issues (which I am suffering from lately to a truly crabby-fying degree), my idea of what thinking is

“I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe; it will be exquisite by September.” —Virginia Woolf

"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”
Marilynne Robinson

tamara williamson - spookin the horses

I take him to Bikram – he calls it “concentration camp yoga”. He has to stop smoking and cannot, so that I can stop sneaking his cigarettes which I started doing when being the woman broke me. He volunteers to take Chantix and admits to preferring a vasectomy over quitting smoking. I know only one treatment for bonkers like that, so off we go, him looking a lot like I’m dragging him there behind the car. “Yes, let’s go do half-moon pose in a crematoria, that sounds like a great fucking idea!” He practices behind me where I can keep an eye on him in the mirror. He wants to kill me then appears utterly abject, accepting his sentence. I should have let him wear the Cougar Bait t-shirt to lighten the mood, but it probably wouldn’t have helped. I think: even when the man is good and there is nothing to lament in how we act towards each other and we are careful of that, still life comes and it hurts a lot sometimes and so these moments arrive when I look at you and feel love as a stab wound. And this is a great blessing, I believe, to have come to that ouch-I-love-you rather than the stab being the first sign like huh I’m doubled over I must love you or some shit…right?

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.