"Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it." ~The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa.

By the end of work yesterday, I was pissed-weepy in my boss's office, bitching him half into the ground / pleading for either limit of or reward for workworkwork. But of course the rub with all the freedom I have in my job is that when it is killing me, I'm killing myself. "What do you need? What hole are you filling with all this work?..." I felt like a half gored angry animal. I am only doing this to keep my little world safe. "What world?" The one where you still get to read in it, that that's what you do with your fucking time, even though no fucking reading-is-fundamental trucks come around anymore, even though you, the Dean of a liberal arts school, probably don't even remember those trucks or give a shit, and the few people around here who do might only admit to reading Hegel or some other fucking dead white asshole and only do so as compensation like dickless wonders driving sportcarswhatever. "Some people might actually like Hegel." Armscrossy. "Ok, what is your GOAL, specifically?" I want full professor, I want when everything falls apart and I'm standing in the rubble to have a base pay and job description both that means I can at least go read, that I can at least sit amidst the wreckage and have the solace of time and a book, I want to have that so that at least cannot be taken away from me no matter what else might happen. Wa.

"At their core, literature and prayer each carry an element of faith. For me, it takes faith to write, just like it takes faith to believe that "the Word became flesh," that it was given its own skin and bones. Both, I would argue, are redemptive by their own accord."

It's the garden show this weekend. Ligularia, always the star of the show. Almost everything I've planted has not turned out quite like I planned. Little things got huge. Stolid looking things spread like hell. Volunteers showed up. But nobody knows that but me, so I can pretend I intended it all. I think of the whole thing as a tool for seeing my days add up, a secret diary of mostly 'woops'. Yesterday we hid from the tourists, in the backyard mostly where Ears and I prepped a new bed for sweet peas that will barely produce in the mostly shade so we will eat them as one-offs. We like that. It was quiet. Ears said simply, "I like this." Then we took a walk in a very light rain and found discarded loaded mulberry branches and I plucked and ate berries by the side of the road. Today is father's day. I called Tbone a day early, and tipsy on beer in the late morning he launched into his all life is energy speech. He thinks about dying a lot, and when he does he thinks "all life is energy", then he tells you for the umpteenth time "let me tell ya something all life is energy". I handed the phone to Ears who told him about the black hole that NASA found that eats a nearby star and then spits it back out in pulses that sound just like a human heartbeat. I think, I should get a honeysuckle and train it up a tree trunk so the baby will have that familiar flower image in her memory -

- and I wonder, did anyone when I was a baby seed my early life with little scraps of history like that, shrouds for my own dead whose arms did not live to hold me(?).   Later tonight after we've planted peas and peppers, we are going to grill steaks, give presents, then watch the premiere of True Detective. I like the ordinary days best of all. I wish they didn't have to end.

this creased

"Ezekiel 3:1. Eat the scroll."

Still on a Dillard kick. I like how I wander in and out of her, distracted by and then lured into footnotes. Blessedly, Time Warner sucks, and thus I am trapped without Internet except for my phone (my kindle), waiting for the repair guy who never shows, and so I can read.

"You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise.” “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness…through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed." ~Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

I'm losing my fucking mind with all this work.  WHY AM I DOING IT?  I know it's some kind of stress response, that I'm trying to contain all the things that might happen by doing everything everwhichway to control the outcomes, that I'm worried about everybody going to college at the same time, Aaron in graduate school (what did we do in grad school besides lose ourselves and sleep with the wrong people? I discovered Derrida, which was not nearly enough of an upside), Ears and TJ getting hit with the first tsunami of Choices To Be Made, the Nun leaving me, all of that, so I work and work and work and the more I work the more work is given to me to do until I'm obliterated. But knowing all of that that doesn't make it stop. I always flee to books for answers but what if the answer I need is to the problem of not having time to read a book?

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier?intcid=mod-most-popular

"Thigmotropism is a movement in which a plant moves or grows in response to touch or contact stimuli. The prefix thigmo- comes from the Greek for "touch" (θιγμός). Usually thigmotropismoccurs when plants grow around a surface, such as a wall, pot, or trellis."

(I'm on a Dillard kick.)

I walked into a meeting late yesterday to find that I was in charge of it (again). Either I'm the only faculty member that the VP's know by name, or I'm the only one they're not scared of (I hide my crazy better than most and mine tends toward sad not mad). This time it's FERPA, about which I know utterly nothing except we've been caught breaking the law somehow, like when I looked up Aaron's record back in the day to advise him on this or that, I was breaking the law (who knew?). All I want to do is summer-read, but in five days, I have to submit a report of repentance and reform on behalf of the college to the state. In one day, my current class ends and the day after that two more classes begin. Last night, first dinner with the dreaded in - law in a year; they're still talking about what to do with the dining room set; my theory is that when the steel plants closed in South Buf, the trauma of change was so great that the people who live there counteracted it with statis in their beings and now find existential comfort in never changing the subject. I might find a niche in that, akin to the one I have at work, aka the 'mascot milf' in this case, discussed in the same hushed tones of disapproval forevermore, tsking that hints at but never outright says "she's got our boy by the dick".

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/all-possible-humanities-dissertations-considered-as-single-tweets?intcid=mod-most-popular

Teehee. I love "The name we’ve been using for this stuff is anachronistic. Here’s a better name." You have no idea how many minutes of my precious life that I'll never get back, spent discussing such things as what to call "appreciation" (in nervous hand wringing over what's measurable) or "minority" (in nervous hand wringing over feeling guilty enough about white privilege). Etcetcetc.  Not to mention the time I spent writing the dissertation itself (aka drinking genny pounders).

I love books. Why I can't just be a snob anymore about it, I don't know really. If I could, if we could, could say we read because we read and we think you should too or you'll be a boring dumbass, it might be off putting but at least the humanities might stop acting like the nervous fat ugly kid with daddy/mommy issues cutting itself in cries for help (armscrossy)

"Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. And more, moreover. Or perhaps not." —Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish

card of the day

Yeah I dunno. Work something, I think. But I just can't tell what. Dean and Mathzilla, they're going game of thrones on each other and it's not nearly as cool when there are no flying dragons in the plot. Plus it feels like that's just the beginning of the chum in the water power grabbing that's going to ensue as The Nun pulls up the stakes. What happens to the mascot in situations like that?, I wonder, because that's what I am.

Or maybe it's personal, the Tower. And I'll go insane (again).

"I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out." Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

"Inspiring faculty" reads the strategic plan. Someone asks the Planning Douche, what does that mean? He begins to explain inspiration, that "feeling to be more...do great things". Headtilts, like confused dogs, across the room. Someone else asks, "But who is inspiring what specifically?" This goes on for a long tedious set of minutes, maybe just 5, feels like 30. Asshole math chair is behind me talking on her cell phone, Dean is pouting in the corner, we are in charge of people's lives who will borrow thousands to learn from us.  I raise my hand. Planning Douche looks relieved, like I'm going to explain inspiration. "That's a present participle, Ken. It suggests that faculty will be inspired TO something. You don't mean that." Blank stare. "You don't want us to be inspired. You want us to be inspirational. Right?" Yes!! Then say inspirational?, someone suggests in a questioning helpful tone. "That's just semantics," he says. Okay. (What's semantics?, someone whispers to me. "It means fuck you.")

"The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones." Cheryl Hughes

I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I’m melting away. I can’t explain it to you but I do know when it started. It began after he said, “You not the woman I want.”
 “Neither am I.”   
~God Help the Child, Toni Morrison

everybody knows lalala

"But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter, will remind you that you are not who you once were, for that person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an out-grown garment."

 --Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost

 "The Information: During the last seventy-two hours of a person’s life, there will be a discoloration of toes and kneecaps, a marked coolness of hands and feet. There will be mental confusion, and a mottling of the skin, which will start at the feet and progress up the legs. When mottling reaches the upper thighs, death is imminent. Two minutes after the heart stops beating, the person is still aware. This is what happens during the course of a natural death, an easy death. There are other scenarios—a bleed-out, for instance. If there is bleeding from the mouth and nose, we are to cover the blood with dark towels. There will be a large quantity of blood, and we want to spare the family the sight of it. If there is an internal bleed-out from a tumor in the esophagus, say, or a tumor in the lungs, there will be no visible blood. The instructor says if this is happening, we hold the patient’s hand and wait. Death will take only a few minutes. Hold the patient’s hand and wait. The simplicity is so moving. It strikes me that the physical details of the dying body are as intimate and predictable as those of the body making love." 
--Abigail Thomas
What Comes Next and How to Like It

"I do not want anything stirred up that I can’t handle by myself...but now, instead of being safe and sound and insulated against desire (shudder), I was suddenly thinking other kinds of thoughts, having other kinds of memories. I went and bought Guitar Town by Steve Earle instead of listening to my better self, and I even played it indoors because when I got home the kids were out. After a bit, and despite my new relationship with time, I began to experience impatience. One song at a time was taking too long. I began to wonder if there wasn’t some way I could cram all this music in at once. Oh hell. That’s called fucking." ~What Comes Next and How to Like It, a memoir by Abigail Thomas.

This book is pretty god damned funny, so I actually bought it after the kindle sample ran out and I'm now sitting in a half filled half fixed tub (o hot water how I love thee), giggling.

When my son listens to music, he looks down and his eyes move left to right as if he is reading. He is watching sound. There things like that about you, which only your mother observes and keeps.

"These notes have no intended audience, except for my conscience and God...It was if I had been flayed and my bowels exposed, inspected, groped, found wanting. It was not the judgment that had been passed on me, it was the fact of the exposure that disturbed me so. What was internal had been made external." ~John the Pupil

"weekdays"

"....it shook her to realize that some things, even those things far away from her in space and time, and especially those things that she loved, continued to exist, continued to endure. That anxiety and that wonder, mixed as they were, must be what love was." ~Prudence, David Treuer

   "According to the Biblical stories, Peter was Christ's closest disciple, but acted like a traitor when trouble came. After Christ was arrested, in the hours before the trial, Peter denied knowing his cherished teacher three different times. His fear trumped his love, leading him to violate his sacred commitment. Is there anything remotely comparable to that scenario developing in your own sphere, Virgo? If you recognize any tendencies in yourself to shrink from your devotion or violate your highest principles, I urge you to root them out. Be brave. Stay strong and true in your duty to a person or place or cause that you love."

"It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming." A Prayer Journal, Flanner O'Connor

"If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings." ~Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine.

the growl at 2:10ish, the CourtneyCox-esque side shuffle dance near the end, all of it

"If friendship has a cost, then perhaps it is that at its heart there is always a burden of guilt." ~ In the Light of What we Know, by Zia Haider Rahman.

I woke up in the night thinking about that quote (from the book I started yesterday after I'd finished, finally, the painfully accurate Abandonment - yup, bonkers lock changing and painful extraction of self bits from idea-of-self like shards of glass from a cheese, I did all of it except stick my ass in the face of a weird neighbor thank god). For the eclipse, I had thought yesterday to doublecheck that I have no Gemini in my chart, and no, I have no air anywhere of any kind. Just Virgo (mutable earth) all day long with big dollops of Pisces (mutable water) and Leo (fixed fire). I am hot mud. You cardinal and air signs make no intuitive sense to me whatsoever. You are Other. You get mad, or sad, any kind of upset, even abruptly happy/moved, and just blow around so it seems to me, hot or cold air in my face. Like a stuckcrust I feel you all over me but it's on the outside, and I stir myself inside out to internalize it, a process that is often uncomfortable, occasionally/inevitably painful. To you, I must seem like a vast plain, my fluidity hidden from view, a distant threat of lava under quiet. You would have to be highly motivated to stick with me (on me), waiting as I churn. But blow away from me, and how does it feel? You leave me baked fetid, wanting your breeze. Do I go with you even as you think you're over me, grit in your veins?

Aoife O’Donovan: Hearts And Bones
bonus track Colin Meloy: Summertime it's still cold as balls outside, but hope springs eternal and I'll be seeing The Decemberists next week at UBCFA

Beautiful moment late last week when I realized this week was spring break. I gave the cuddle buddies a bath last night in anticipation of the nothing I'd be doing today. "Nothing", that's what most people call *reading*. I'm catching up on listening to some music at the moment (I love this version of 'Fever', but to be honest I love every version of it, like every kind of chocolate covered anything), still lying naked in bed, sipping coffee and reading the illustrated Thought Forms (Bessant) and trying to get through The Days of Abandonment (Ferrante), which gets a mixed review of it being too good to bear it more than a few sentences at a time, the narrator's mind trapped in self-referential habits of loss, dismantling itself. Meanwhile, Aaron just texted the news that he's losing his job by way of the facility he is at being closed.  Say la vee, I think. The Witch told me that would happen, more or less (FYI if you're a Gemini, a lunar eclipse is gearing up for a hit on 4/4, at which time you will abruptly lose something that you probably started getting rid of last year around this time, consciously or not - if you have Gemini in any of your houses, it will apply to you in that area of your life. If you forgot how to check that, refer back here for a basic natal chart.) Change scares me, everything scares me, but I wasn't always this way and it can't stay like that - he hates that job and so I must have faith that the universe is leading him (us) somewhere better. He cast his beer and I also cast my spell yesterday, I wrote it all over him like grapherotica, my intention to strain fear out of my lovethinking by handing over the power to him to heal (me), like agreeing to the surgery you've long held out against, and viola he loses his job before noon. Sooo, yea.

"And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself." ~ Days of Abandonment

"Affirmation"

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything. 

~Donald Hall

if these (inner) walls could talk..

I'm moving. New building, new office. I've had my office for, like, most of my adult life or something. Since before I bought my first house in Buffalo. I have tree rings of life in it, all that will be thrown away. So I spend an hour here and there, looking in a drawer.

the be good tanyas - in my time of dying (dylan)