two naps, half a pint of ice cream, 4 left over Chinese dumplings, one article and half a novel later

A long time ago, when you were a wee thing, you learned something, some way to cope, something that, if you did it, would help you survive. It wasn’t the healthiest thing, it wasn’t gonna get you free, but it was gonna keep you alive. You learned it, at five or six, and it worked, it did help you survive. You carried it with you all your life, used it whenever you needed it. It got you out—out of your assbackwards town, away from an abuser, out of range of your mother’s un-love. Or whatever. It worked for you. You’re still here now partly because of this thing that you learned. The thing is, though, at some point you stopped needing it. At some point, you got far enough away, surrounded yourself with people who love you. You survived. And because you survived, you now had a shot at more than just staying alive. You had a shot now at getting free. But that thing that you learned when you were five was not then and is not now designed to help you be free. It is designed only to help you survive. And, in fact, it keeps you from being free. You need to figure out what this thing is and work your ass off to un-learn it. Because the things we learn to do to survive at all costs are not the things that will help us get free. Getting free is a whole different journey altogether. --Mia McKenzie

http://www.artpark.net/

I got the faculty of the year award. My brother in law had another seizure, flipped his car trunk over hood and slid the length of a city block in front of a school. I could go on for a paragraph like that of just this last week: the drastic up, the drastic down, reverse and repeat. Nobody died or was born so in a way it none of it worth remarking really. But we are brief and fragile, of which I am (unhealthily) hyper aware. I went to delete an unwanted email, but eerily hit some wrong button and got my old voice mail archives instead and heard my grandmother's voice, being a smart ass, "GUESS WHO?!". I'd try to upload it but am afraid I would accidentally delete it if I touched it again. So it sits there like an old friendship I'm too afraid would crumble upon access, in theoretical storage. listening to: fortunate son, peace queer ccr cover, cz it's Ears' current fave tune

woman versus walls

feist- the bad in each other

looking up, today: bonus track - ain't no easy way (out)

It occurs to me that what I miss about being a student is all the solitude I enjoyed while other people were paying attention.

I can't talk about it. Sex pleasure in woman, as I have said, is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken. ― Simone de Beauvoir

"Long-form describers of hamlets and trees, and short-form introverted mystics —", "Points of Depature", Joshua Cohen (NYT Book Review, reading it in the bathtub)

the irony is, I want a cigarette like a mother fucker for the relentless stress involved in his quitting (i.e. "quitting") #addictionisadrag john butler trio - I used to get high for a living

they're coming to town, as is Tender Avuncular (aka my new nickname for that fat bastard Morrissey). I am dreaming desperately of summer at this point, deeply sick of work and the cold both, anticipating the music fests and considering the Arctic Monkeys show, but when I looked them up just now I couldn't get around Morrissey popping right up, and it is all just so weird to me. Artpark artist lists are like carbon dating only different, layers of life soundtracks going all the way back to 80's era make-up experiments and forward through decades of regrettable haircuts and whatnot, until you get to the present finally, which then seems like the past waiting horribly to happen :( Mr Avuncular will no doubt stuff his face with a vegan muffin (tastes like saw dust) at Orange Cat and be flirted with by Whatshername Withthenosering who calls me "Mama". I wonder what she'd call him, with her penchant for nicknaming in situ. In the Cat line also that day, perhaps, contemplating the red eye shot or no, I'd studiously ignore him...or be tempted to suggest "Keep your shirt on." Meanwhile, the dream of a cabin continues to be dreamt. This is the reigning fave, but my tarot cards keep saying "nope".

from: grading stuff, the soundtrack

Fearlessness is not like a wild tiger or brown bear that is locked up in a cage and growls every time you open the door. Fearlessness is powerful but it also contains gentleness and constant loneliness and sadness. Wisdom and consideration for others are also part of fearlessness. When you are more fearless, you become more available and kinder to others, more considerate of others and more touched by them. The more fearlessness evolves, that much more available and vulnerable you become. That is why sadness and gentleness are part of fearlessness...In this state, your mind doesn't buck like a young horse. Your mind is flowing like a gentle brook. --Chogyam Trungpa Smile at Fear (I think I will frown at fear today, see if that gets people to leave me the fuck alone ...)

phantogram - when I'm small black keys - act nice and gentle (kinks cover) franz ferdinand - no you girls bonus track: you no girls trentemoller remix

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.--Yevgeny ZamyatinA Soviet Heretic: Essays

 

maybe I was this lady in a prior life

 



 

buried here

 

 

which would explain why I want this (on John Brannon Rd in Minerva NY) and sew curtains for it in my head

vanessa peters, all that I want (the weepies) actually what I wanted was the Reach out and Touch faith cover from the Klondike trailers, but I couldn't find it and settled for the weepies, which felt appropriate today anyways Mikey Chuck Rivers: Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Silent Night bonus track

I went to Florida.  I hate Florida.  Disney of all places, which is a monumental birth control advertisement, a screaming kid flanked by miserable fuckless parents every few feet.  Awful. It was a conference on e-Learning.  I emailed my boss mid-session to tell him I want to be appointed assistant dean (rationale: most of these people are so fubar’d that I’m shocked, and undervalued, even for someone with a humanities background [who thus doesn’t deserve a paycheck at all, of course]).  He put in a budget request for the position….I just might get that….which would help, because I still want to buy that cottage, in which my father wants to live (with me) as it turns out….

Dad lives in Florida in the winters now, so I rented a car and booked down there for a night to check out his digs and to hang out.  Aa got a last minute stand-by seat in first class for $200, and flew down to join me for a 24 hour dinner date.  I wish I had taken a picture of the mobile park, but I didn’t.  I was overtired, thought as I always think about Florida, “this is so weird, like a movie set of a comedy starring Alan Arkin maybe, or a B horror film” and then I crashed out for a long nap before dinner.  But dad was SOoo excited we’d come, he trotted out the array of booze he’d gotten for “the party”, and proceeded to drink an entire quart of scotch in a few hours.  By 5 p.m., I was pushing dinner as fast as I could to soak some of that up. Dad had also bought a new grill just for the occasion, and steaks, and he melted the siding off his trailer with the grill then served us raw steak. In between all that, we talked about my endless cottage/cabin obsession, and his plan to live there once I find it (ha, didn’t see that coming). He’d put on a room addition, and teach the boys how to kill a deer with a double lung shot before he died. Well. I agreed: having all the young men in the family learn to hunt before Tbone’s too geezer to teach them seems like a reasonable goal.  I showed him all the cabin links on my phone.  We gamely cut into the tartar and added salad.  Tbone took one bite, then he threw up like mad.   Aa and I finished dinner.  Then Aa wiped down his bathroom hazmat style and stayed awake with him, lest he pull a Janis Joplin – Aa is in an odd newly created position (aka assistant dean) in the family vis a vis Tbone, longed-for son and certified health professional, willing learner of double lung shooting and hall monitor.

Then home, and Thanksgiving right on our heels, and my sister and her whole family including my mom arrive for a 4-day stay, amazingly. She said she was going to come, but it’s such a long drive, and through a snow storm, but damned if Jen was going to be daunted.  Holidays are for family god fucking damn it. We drink, we eat, we eat more, we talk, we laugh and laugh and laugh.  More talk about the cottage/cabin.  I realize: off the grid is out of the question. Her kids are maniacs. And she’s planning week-long summer stays, at least. I tell her dad is planning to live there.  She says, “No.” (ha)  She rattles off the stipulations: he can park an rv, but has to sleep in it, he’s only allowed inside sober and in spurts, if he wants a toilet he can dig a septic container…etc etc.  She is very firm with me that I am to be very firm with him.  “He’s still dad, don’t forget it. Last year he beat the shit out of someone and got kicked out of his last park, that’s why he has a new one.  He waited all night, pissed off, and still drunk in the morning, went over to the other guy’s trailer and beat him senseless in front of his wife.”

Tbone had said to me as he served the steak, “I love every single thing about you, every … single … thing.” 

This Friday, Aa and I make our first official shopping trip to the Adirondacks.  Eight cottages and cabins to see by appointment with a real estate agent to whom I emailed this entire story as it happened.  As I went from “I’m looking for something off the grid one room in the middle of 40 acres where I never have to see anyone” to “scratch that, I’m looking for something near water in which my sister might ‘accidentally’ drown her kids and my mother, and it should need a room addition but not really”.  The agent says he thinks I’m hilarious.  Either that is actually so, or he thinks I’m insane and is taking pity, or he thinks this is a date.  He says, “I almost hope you don’t find anything, because what will I do for comic relief when your emails stop?”  Aa is excited for the cabin and the shopping trip, though he notes growlingly that I’ve not mentioned his existence to the agent (Rick).

I just want everyone to love me. Which is tricky business.

I should be doing about a million things, including reading a stack of titles like "Spirituality and the End of Life", but it keeps making me afraid I'm dying. me me me, it's all about me.  every horrible story, 'omygodthatcouldhappentome', until I'm utterly bored of myself.

...after struggling every day for the better part of a month just to meet my standing work obligations, including trying to adjudicate a college-wide facult-on-faculty slap down (think West Side Story, but no songs or snapping, and I can't pull of Carmen Miranda), I remember at the last minute I'm to be interviewed today about how narrative forms... I have no idea how narrative forms. I realize that when we get to the part of my life when my friend Danniel and I spend a good portion of every day writing to each other in spiral notebooks that we fill and fill and fill. Why?, asks the interviewer. I don't know. What were you accomplishing by narrating your lives to each other in that way, writing it down? I don't know. Do you have any theories? Nope. Maybe if I can get a minute to think a thought about narrative at the end of life, I'll get a theory that will apply to my own adolescence. Maybe we were dying.

So, I got named to lead faculty on this big grant...palliative care and spirituality and the humanities....the local nursing care organization expanding to mindfully cover the end of the life as its own discrete stage...with its own soundtrack typa deal, which is where I come in....

I think I can safely say I'm dangerously out of my depth....

(loving this)

http://youtu.be/IJNR2EpS0jw

I almost bought this.  It went on and on.  The lady who had owned it was named Hope Well, no I'm not kidding.  She had o what I would guess to be two dozen feral cats, a semi surreal colony of slinking sneaking fur out the corner of your eye everywhere.  The bank has the house now, but no it doesn't.  Nobody has it, it has itself, or the cats have it.  Whenever I'd get close to be able to buy it, no again.  No survey to be had, no insurance possible without it, no mortgage possible without that, and on and on with it consuming my mind like spells do, I couldn't get the damn thing to stop, even in my sleep I dreamt of it alive and reaching.  In the end, the realtor deemed it unsellable, un-have-able, and left it to itself on its hill. 

At work meanwhile, I put in 14 hours days, one after another, one crisis after another, with the only explanation for that being this weird energy AT me - like, am I about to get fired?  promoted?  is the school going to burn down?  It feels like it.  I wasn't surprised when the biggest tree out front of my building blew over and crushed two cars earlier today.

Then I took a walk.  I went up and down village streets all abandoned mid workday, trying to feel what there would be to feel on this day of the year when the living and the dead are separated by the thinnest degree.  And on a dead end street I cut into from its dead end side, up an embankment I never scale but I figured never doing it normally was a good reason to do it, I passed the little driveway of another house spookily sitting on its hill with a get off me vibe, the kind I like.  I caught a glimpse of one of those zombie dolls people toss into their yard for Halloween, face covered in blood, a big mop of white blond curly hair.  Then it moved.  And I realized I had just found a half dead woman, still very much alive. Gretchen, she said slurrily - she seemed to have knocked out a tooth, she really didn't want the ambulance I called (not at ALL, no no, no help, fuck that, fuck everything no no no), and I could relate of course, I don't want anybody to help me either.  So we sat and commiserated, with her begging me to call off the ambulance and me having to remind her that she was unable to get up and bleeding to death on the ground.  O right, that.  Right.  So, might as well chit chat to keep her mind off the ambulance.  What else is on your mind Gretchen?  Her husband Jack.  He's dead.  He died three years ago.  She met him when she was 40 and he was 61 and they lived together 30 years and he died at 91 right there too, fell down just outside the pretty house that she wants desperately just to get inside of again.  She likes only the house, she lives WITH it not just in it, it keeps her.  Finally, the emt's show up and take her, and she gives me her banking to do, the errand she was going to run this morning when she fatefully left the safety of the house.  I went back after with the receipts to put them in her mailbox, and I looked through the windows and thought "wow, your lace filtered light".