Amy assigns me the making of lists of what to be grateful for. That's my insomnia treatment. It's nearly 3 a.m. and I can't sleep. So. Grateful for: a sturdy spirit. Life is a kick in the head a lot of the time. If my spirit broke every time, that'd be a pain in the ass. Like having a hand that you could only use to lift nothing more taxing than a tea cup.

Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognised and stable individuality. Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession and heralds it, will hide; particularly if the erotic act follows, consummating it. ― Georges Bataille. Death and Sensuality.

I blog and unblog, blog and unblog, whenever anything hurts me. I don't know why I do that, write and unwrite. Because I want to understand and settle on a version before I commit to it, or something. And mostly, for a long time now, I just haven't written a word, here or anywhere. He was jealous of even my words, so I gave them up. I gave up speaking to all male friends, and gave up writing anything down, and pretty much anything that might be a different me that he could not see. I never understood his jealousy and thought it would fade, as he would come to know clearly that the last thing I ever do is fuck around or hide shit. I've always stuck too much and shown too much, not the other way around (duh). I do now understand the jealousy now though, I think, and it was never really about me. People able to betray other people expect that everyone is so able and will do so. Nothing can talk them out of that belief. To them, it is as real as air. As real as they are to themselves.

Maybe everything works like that...? Like, if a person is afraid you'll get clingy, does that mean they're liable to be clingy? Etcetc. Maybe. I really don't know.

Here's what I know: Aaron was good to me, made me feel loved, and he was present in small ways that I most wanted, like to bbq stuff and to watch television (Game of Thrones, episodes of things, to wait for each week, are the one I like best) and to laugh at the kid's jokes, which are raunchy and endless. Simple daily things are what I like best. He never raised his voice or a hand to me. He never was anything but playful with the kids, a good kind of paternal that was brotherly mostly, not overbearing, with the boys, who are such good boys, such good gentle decent men coming up...Aaron never did anything to harm or undermine any of that daily beauty possible here, and added to it by seeming to enjoy it so much also, enriching our sense of ourselves as a good thing/place to be in this wide world.

And then at some point, something happened, and I don't know what it is and I will never know except the most basic fact of it, like an accidental death: he fucked someone else and disappeared one day. And traced back to when/how that happened, it was that he got a new job, and the next day pretty much (literally) he started texting-nonstop/fucking someone else who worked there also, and lying when he was here about it, that he had to work longer hours for training, my gut telling me something was off, but ... what?? I can only report all that in retrospect. In the moment, a man looked through his girlfriend's phone, called, and Aaron walked out the door and disappeared before I could even get the story from his point of view. All I had was a man's mother, the grandmother to a woman's children, hysterical and wanting me to stop a family I'd never heard of from coming apart because of what Aaron and she were up to. And when I turned around, I found my own life had come apart. That fast. In minutes. We'd been talking about what to have for dinner. I wish with all my heart that I had kept writing and had written down what we did that day, the day it started, the day he might have said he was taking out the garbage and maybe I would have been surprised at his uncharacteristic helpfulness and noted it in a journal and it would have been then, the first texts, when he was outside (?) ...but like I said, I'd given up the recording of days to be in days instead, so I believed.

And there will be no better fuller version than that. The details of my family packing his things and his family getting them are incidental in terms of illumination; they included no conversation whatsoever. I can think of many versions of what caused what Aaron did, but I will never know really. He is simply gone now. That is all I will know with certainty. So I can stop blogging and unblogging now. At least that part of it. The dead don't talk. He taught me that. "Dead is dead, get over it because we need the bed" is what nurses say. Since then, well you can imagine, I've been doing whatever people do when something happens to them like a sudden death, a terrible accident, a loss of control in a moment of how things were and no pre-planning for how anything should be afterwards. Sometimes I am livid, others sad, sometimes numb, I DO A LOT when I can, clean shit, burn sage, go to the doctor, act responsibly. My friends, my KIDS, wow, they are fucking awesome, their there-ness, their solid simple there-ness. Stalwart is my new favorite word.

And for my own understanding, MY version, all I can say at this point is that in every story I tell myself, we are both imperfect people of course, and he is a sympathetic character who when faced with a temptation did the wrong thing about it. People do the wrong things all the time, lamentable but human. But then he did much worse than a bad thing: he acted without any integrity about that thereafter as well. Hit is one thing, hit and run is another. So in my mind, I sort now: people who have personal integrity and people who do not. There are no other categories of humans or relations to me right now than those two.

You've got the Crossfire - Florence and the Machine and Brandon Somebody Whatever.

In the midst of it all, the day, this and that to feel but mostly to do, tuna casserole I'm making, TJ corners me in the kitchen and out of the blue says, "I did the math. I was birthday sex wasn't I?" And it all comes back to me, that day, the one time in months and months, Trojan Horse sex, a "gift" hiding a taking really, I took TJ himself for me. And I couldn't help it to hide it, I busted out laughing. "Yup", I say, in my new commitment to radical emotional honesty, laughing my ass off.

Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. ― Toni Morrison (any explanation is better than none at all) another Artpark gig coming up, to which Amy is making me go, unless it too cancels, like the last one, for relentless rain. If I were a Superhero, it'd be Storm, booming down the gorge

That's my father's response to grief, like look, things aren't all bad, you can still make fun of Canadians....

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself..."― James Joyce

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, so that they may have existence."  --Léon Bloy

I keep rereading that. It sounds good, a good take, so I reread it. Trying to feel, ok now I'm ROOMY. But then I imagine a weird real estate agent lady in a Chanel knockoff, clicking around inside my chest cavity, cheap heel sounds echoing, observing cheerfully, "look how ROOMY". And I think, Got anything SMALLER?

"Gargle my shit ya curly haired freak" he says from the back seat.
Jesus, Wtf?!
Giggle, snorts the other one.
"Not you Mom" he clarifies.
Gigglegiggle, snort them both, slapping the shit out of each other...

"There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well." Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

"There was a gurgling in her left breast, a creaking of bubbles from an ocean floor to which she felt she was inevitably being returned as if weighted and her strength to ascend despite the weight ebbing. She imagined going to the doctor, which would be the sensible thing to do until she would report 'I feel fleeting' and would be diagnosed as ridiculous. She could self-diagnose that much, after all." Etta

don't let me down

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 ...)