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

She had hardly done any writing lately – ... I asked her what the problem was. ‘I call it summing up,’ she said with a cheerful squawk. Whenever she conceived of a new piece of work, before she had got very far she would find herself summing it up. Often it only took one word: tension, for instance, or mother-in-law, though strictly speaking that was three. As soon as something was summed up, it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck, and she could go no further with it. Why go to the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up? And it wasn’t only her own work – she found herself doing it to other people’s, and had discovered that even the masters, the works she had always revered, allowed themselves by and large to be summed up. Even Beckett, her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness. She would feel the word start to rise, and she would try to hold it down but it kept coming, rising and rising until it had popped irreversibly into her head. And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people – she was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over. ~Outline: A Novel. Rachel Cusk.

"Humankind has come a long way since its beginnings and people of the future won’t be able to imagine the barbaric early days in which we fought with one another, in groups or individually, over little more than a cup of cocoa. But not even then will it be possible to soften the fate of a woman for whom no-one has made a place in their life." ~ _The Door_,  Magda Szabo

What is worse than Pearl Jam radio on Pandora at 3 am? Not much.  Except a fussy screaming baby who only shuts up for shitty 90s music. Thank Christ it isn't Morrissey that does it :/

"Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I…do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards..."

http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/nathaniel-rateliff-the-night-sweats-sob/2888764

Love the a capella

kissmyassolantern

Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. "Thanatopsis", William Cullen Bryant...I remember studying that poem in college, when I was smart and death was far away. I've done and been umpteen kinds of stupid since, and from here seems like dying just sucks balls

“So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.” Audre Lorde

Mark.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY (Aug. 31). The exploration you do in September helps you to join with your lost self – a process that opens the world to you. (I hope so) Next month features a group event that launches you as an individual.(eee) October will involve travel.(hopefully not a funeral) November will bring family into your business – and maybe you won’t like it at first, but ultimately it will help. (help what?) Pisces and Gemini people adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 5, 40, 1, 14 and 36.

29th pond

I swam the length and breadth of it every day at all hours under the various skies. Then stared at it the rest of the time. Quieting my mind so I could hear it again.

Life (Goes on) = Managing Ass(holes)

Today is day one of my vacation. Finally. A year ago today, Aaron and I met in a Greek restaurant, and we've been resolving to mend ever since. This morning, the day started with the great dane shitting all over the kitchen, because at 11 years old (dane lifespans are 6-8 years) her asshole just basically doesn't work anymore, the rubber band is worn out on it. I'm the woman, so project management of the dane's bowels falls to me. This afternoon, Jackie arrives for a 3-week visit, the first time she or anyone outside our immediate family has seen Aaron since last year. She will require constant meals and moderated but steady wine, otherwise she rummages in the back of the fridge, eats things that have been in their since the jurassic age, and sneak-drinks kettle one shots over frozen blobs of minute maid limeade, habits which are not advisable for her also aging ass presumably. Aaron is the man, so grilling food stuffs and keeping wine glasses full falls to him. Etc.

"If you did not want much, there was plenty."~Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

nailed it mothafucka

I've got a wee hate-crush on Gordon Ramsay

still excavating my office, discarding

huh.

I hear my mother coming out of my own mouth more and more, even by the voice in my own head. That's what she'd say about that article, "huh", as in "welp ya don't see that every day!" I'm sitting here drinking coffee, reading morning news feeds, internally clucking,  "huh" and "o my!" Then I'll think "I should exercise before I get ready" and I won't. Then I'll look for something to wear that's "comfy for me", I.e. that won't hug my ass so tightly that it reminds me to exercise all damn day. I'll forget to eat, then ravenous by the time I'm making dinner, I'll shove ingredients into my mouth raw, probably talking around them as I go. I will inevitably tell a story in which I come off as an idiot then I'll laugh at my own story. From dawn to dusk like that I morph into my mother over time more and more.

And so do you. Think about that.

too late - like the climate, human intellect is fubar

bears and food. I could seriously watch that bear and/or that dude eat a fish all day long.