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".

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Baby-Body-Found-Teen-Bag-Victorias-Secret-Herald-Square-228225441.html

"..doing that shoplifting with the baby in her bag the entire time certainly suggests a little bit of difficulty following society’s rules.” uh huh. The other barely mentioned 2 yr old, that one'd be heading to foster care...but she will probably get the kid back...

So we go partway through the foster intake process and quit. The very day that we were supposed to start the day-long actual training, we bolt. What we want(ed) was a baby, not a psychoneedy teen, not even a preteen. And fyi, there are a buttzillion of those, psychoneedy kids, in foster care and in “normal” families, everywhere you look. The more I look, the more all I want is to stop looking at other people.

Have we covered this? I hate people. I can’t help it. I just cannot help it. And this isn’t helping it, not at all.

Then that very night of the very day we bail, we go to a surprise birthday party for Nunu. Her partner, an extremely pretty dark Cuban girl (wow), is crazy about her and is throwing her a party. The eclectic guest list I try to anticipate, like the antisocial partyphobe that I am (the exlovers will be there, they’re all very close very strained friends now, ignore the subtle angst if you feel it, it’s just…it's like damp), plus Milagro’s family about which I know nothing except that they’re helping throw this shindig and I’m picturing a quinceanera. Nunu’s stiff resistance to such displays of affection cannot be overstated, so I’ve got the nervous coping giggles just imagining how weird this might be. At the door, the mom greets us, a clearly NOT Latina, more like Irish, grandmotherly woman, who must be into Latino-Black guys (?). No, that’s not it. The house is filled with gay couples by half, VERY coupled couples, it’s hard to describe the in-your-face coupledness of each pair, the proprietary vibe – I mean, I know about the WE syndrome, where the first person singular is seemingly wiped out of the English language, and here it is on some kinda steroids. Everyone had a hand on his/her shoulder, or is the shoulderhander, at all times. Shutting me out, which I already am, in any room, of any kind of people, especially couples (I know, it’s unjustifiable, but in general couples weird me out). The other half of the guest list is M's family, all Irish and very north Buffalo, working class, sawed off flannels, beer can caddies. The walls are so covered with inspirational quotes and family pictures and clocks that I’d need weeks to catalog it all – if it weren’t so tidy in general, I’d think this was some kind of wall-chachki hoarding. Nobody belongs to any minority I can see except Milagro…and a very tiny very quiet Black baby being handed around. She’s the “newest”. This is a foster home that Milagro grew up in. The baby is, o, something like half a year old and her name is something like Siraya, but nobody knows either fact for sure, even the baby’s own bio-mother doesn’t remember the baby’s name. Everything in the scene is weirding me out except the baby and Van, the guy who started a clothing business for fashion-conscious MS sufferers whom I’ve known since then, which I remember because I gave him a tarot reading – he had wanted to know when he was going to get laid again, but the cards said he should go into business. I sit next to Van, he tells me outrageously dirty stories like about fucking the man who designed my boots (Frye). And I take the baby. I don’t give her back. By the end of the night, the baby (Ray, I’ve begun to call her, the “drug baby” so diagnosed by the utterly saintly foster mom, has a premie hernia the size of a penis and a personality that Aa describes as “I got over crack at 3 days old, why get upset at anything after that? That shit teaches perspective”) is attached to me like glue, has my earrings in both fists and is saddled on my hip, asleep with her nose in my armpit. By Monday, we’re back at foster intake, this time with the county DSS, in the building with the food stamp line downstairs (I have been in that line) and upstairs we watch videos of foster families caring for children shaken into brain damage. Etc. (It is hard to capture just how odd one week of a life can be sometimes.) The process of approval, the FBI background checks and nightly coping classes and all that, would take us into next summer before we’d be on the call list for a drug baby, probably coming home on a ventilator. Stand by for updates.

(Maybe.)

But, what do I obsess over really? That’s the real spell I’m casting, I know. What spells I truly cast, stirring the pot of myself endlessly, those things come into being. And it is this: Getting off the grid, away from people, just trees. Parties of trees.  Every time we circle in for a close brush with people in these ways, the cycle is followed by a corresponding retreat. We were deep into the woods and peeing on dirt repelling off the wall of that party, the last weekend allowed for camping in the nearest state park, cold or not fuck it pack up the marshmallows, I herd us all right Out of Range. I have mapped the entire Allegheny region in my head now too since then. Seriously.

(Almost inevitably:)

http://youtu.be/AMt0nQ4mVCI pugs are the foster babies of dog breeds (honing my fucked up sense of humor for this...)

Let's review. How fleeting.

And so, I want to make sure that when I'm dead, they know how to make themselves chicken dinners, and so rather than show them "here is Tops, buy a chicken", I overshoot all that and take them to learn how to raise and kill a chicken, just in case....as insane as that is, that's pretty much my mojo laid bare. I often feel as if I'm going to die, and my response is that I better get a lot done. I have always felt that way. Which is why they exist at all. Because I would die soon, so I better get some kids out of me. And now that they're all here, I squeeze them close and want them to know how to build shelter and kill chickens and whatnot for when I (me, being the world of course) am gone and they remain.

"One of you is getting voted off the island," jokes TJ.

And don't forget to remember how fucking beautiful everything is.

view from Owls Head Mtn

And go to college here where I can send you, so at least I will have done that and you'll remember that.

view of Paul Smiths campus pond

On the way home, we saw this and stopped and I stood in the yard and imagined the chickens and the fruit trees I'd plant. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a cottage. It was sold for them to live on the money in Florida. It has been in my family for about 60 years, maybe longer. I've lived a lot places since, but there has been nowhere so much like homehome as that little shitbox place in Delevan WI, where every spring we'd open it and chase the nesting animals out and live the long summer season amidst the leaf mold smell. I'm starting to have lived just long enough to want to build things that'll be remembered as lifelong for grandchildren not yet born or married into or adopted - all the ones coming, hopefully, down the lines. Even if I'm not around, their parents could take them to "the house in the 'dacks", and then later when the grandchildren in their turn fell in love and lost their minds and got fired or in other ways inevitably lived and failed, they could go there and find some peace where the dishes were always those same old ones migrated there from everyone's kitchen upgrades over the years and years and years.

Tbone built me a playhouse (ie a potting shed, which for a grown woman is a playhouse), just like he did when I was 6 years old.

I went to get the permit and by the time I got back the old one shed was smitherines. The lady in the inspector's office told me to keep at least 50% of the original so that it'd be a "repair" and not a rebuilt.

 

 This is Tbone's idea of 50%.

 Corrugated PVC is the roof. I wanted to old school fiberglass that my Grandpa always used on every porch I can ever remember, which always had a greenish tint, but the PVC is the modern replacement for that.  It's clear, with a UV filter.

 Finished except for stain and a rain barrel.

 The "old soul" shed was the hangout for the ghost and his dead cats.  My phone disappeared half way through the job, gone for 3 days and we looked everywhere - stuff disappearing is always the sign that the ghost is peevish.  I gave him a beer and a smoke, and the next morning the phone was sitting under my purse.

Then off we went to the Adirondacks again.   I took a nature writing workshop at the ADK Writing Center, held hear at Nick's Lake Campground.  I wrote a prose poem about moss.  I'll post it if I can get it to suck less with revision....I kept freaking the other participants with stuff like adding miscarriages into musings about humus :/ 

 

We found this by "car hiking", our phrase for driving up super scary unpaved roads to see what's up em.  This is Stillwater NY, which you get to after about 10 miles (feels like 3x that!) of omg I hope the car doesn't die road through 75000 acres of state land, at which point you find a dinky "town" of a boat shop and restaurant (both for sale) and a cluster of houses on a damned expanse of rocky islands.  I'm still into the high peaks over the majestic water views, but this was a beautiful spot.
 

 

 Meanwhile, our frog hooked up.

"Dying. Not dying. Either way, it tires you out." - Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

I'm like this book. It's about a woman who is really pissed off a lot of the time, surrounded by people who can bear or not bear being pissed off themselves and thus her either. Most people can't bear it or her. And finally, she can hardly bear it herself. And then her bearing it is what she can do and it seems heroic inherently (to me), to be a really pissed off really old woman Then everyone dies (or has a baby, same difference).

Meanwhile, my father arrives today. Unless he gets pissed off about something and doesn't come, which is entirely possible. He was supposed to come yesterday but he was tired (which is right around the corner from pissed). He is to stay a week, unless he gets pissed... I am very happy he is coming. Which is odd. Which is aging. Even people who have been almost unbearably hard on my nerves take on increasingly value for merely remaining, some any kinda way. If you're on my books at all anymore, you're in the black, fyi.

"She took a deep, quiet breath and thought how she did not envy those young girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too."

I am always up this time of the night still. The witching hour. Currently plotting a strawberry patch while mulling ... I should write more but...I am applying for a nature writing workshop thinking maybe I can embed all I might say into the description of the smell of a lake... A lake smells better than just about anything, almost.

there

so, I think this year I'm going to try really hard to build my cv and get extra work, so then I can move.  there.  I mean, why am I here and not there?  bc my job is here, but why am I in this job and no other? I got here following a trail, to grad school, then family ties made here, then a house near someone, etcetc, none of which is necessarily relevant anymore more than anything else anywhere else.  That is the thought that comes clear on the top of a mountain: I could just choose.

Ya know that feeling when your clothes don't fit anymore? Like you've shifted? I've given 5 full wardrobes (albeit sadly skimpy) away in a year. Like a refugee camp experience for one.

I am going to the mountains. My mom just arrived to go with.  She is stupified by my sister's running.  The self sustained injuries. I am not. (Makes me miss my sister.)