The universe is trying to tell me something

Last night, I had a dream that I was doing dishes. Then I woke up. I drove out to Augusta for running and found the trails entirely covered in impassable deep snow and ice. So I drove home. And I did the dishes.

Secret facts

I don't drink soda. I don't like a lot of sugary or strongly-flavored drinkthings. I don't tend to buy myself junk food. But I have a weirdo little thing for root beer. I bet it has to do with my weird childhood or my mom or something, and if this was a better, more thoughtful blog I would unpack all that. But every now and again, things get to feeling a little off in my life and I start to want it. I feel it coming on. I notice having a taste for it for days before I finally indulge. 

It's kind of my limit break. I know that sounds dumb, but a strangely-high proportion of the sad breakdown scenes in my life involve sitting in my car, crying into a flipping root beer. Today wasn't quite like that with the crying, but it did involve me making a paltry excuse to leave the house and company and drive to Food Lion to buy a fancy root beer and proceed to taking too long sitting in the parking lot drinking it alone. Run-on sentences. Dazzling composure.

I like all root beer, but especially I like the dippy fancy varieties that come in detailed bottles like they're hipster microbrews. The summer I worked as the office manager/lifecoach for the washed up, druggie landscaper, I got turned on to the nicer varieties that he used as a place-holder to make himself feel better about his shaky sobriety. Dominion brewery makes a type that I like. Some of them even come in fourpacks with cute names. There's even one with a bear. (A bear.) Really, they all taste the same---I mean---at the end of the day, it's all just root beer.

It's so oddly comforting. It makes me so simply happy. I feel just like a kid. It's like, fuck yeah, I don't even know what this flavor is. Things go as they go, but at least there's the small, plain fact that I can always sit in my car, drink a dumb kid's drink, and think about the couple of things that make me happy.

So there's my confession and the resulting documentation and yeah, my shirt is about a dragon.

*I know you will be pleased to note that I'm now once again packing camera so I can fulfill this blog's primary function of posting stupid pictures of things in my life.

**Ominous announcement/notes for myself: soon, end-of-year recap, soon, resolutions.

grumpmeister general

I had a lot of blog to blog, letters I wanted to write, and even pictures, but the holiday went downhill in a hurry and now, after a five hour crawl home in an ice blizzard, I don't really have any good words in me. So I think I'll just fold the laundry and drink this wine until my hands finally lose all feeling and I collapse unconscious somewhere in my untidy, fifty-degree house. I don't know exactly how I'm getting to work tomorrow, since my car is currently stuck in quite a bit of snow, but we'll keep our fingers crossed and see what the morning brings.

Migraine spinning

Does something in us secretly want the world to end? Is that a part of it? Ugh. I want to be picked up and put away somewhere.

I got the words but I can't speak

Let me paint a perfect portrait of exactly what I am doing right now, which is nothing, sitting and waiting for spaghetti to be brought to me and drinking a pbr with wet hair and just seething about everything including but not limited to the rain, my fucking slippers, how much I hate all music just now, that I can't run as fast as I want to run even if I can run pretty good for a girl and how I wish I could say motherfucker like somebody who really means it.

Walk straight home. Talk to no one. After that, be sensible.

Almost ten o'clock and I'm just now sitting down for the first time since I got home from work. My mind has been very occupied...mostly with, you know, sweeping and also the bleach.

I am remembering certain witchy herb lore tonight, maybe because it is so cold and otherwise remembery in here. Specifically, that the wood of the holly tree is supposed to keep lightning out of a house. I have some tied up over the back door, and I supposed it has worked very well for me so far.

I'll go there everyday to make myself feel bad

A handy trick I use sometimes for reasserting dominance over my own healthy sense of perspective is to tell myself the story of my upsetting situation complete with all the most honest, embarrassing, and reluctant details. It's usually something like "you're in a bad mood because you hit yourself in the eye with some toothpaste and the feelings of your inner imaginary party dragon were recently hurt which was really probably an exaggeration on your part and then some man coldly told you he didn't want your swedish meatballs after you had gotten excited about coming home and making him swedish meatballs which was a stupid thing to get excited about in the first place. You gotta make your own meatball expectations of happiness, bitch!" and okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, and they usually don't have domestic meatball morals, but you get the gist. It kinda resets my calibrations, even if I don't feel... you know, regular-better.

So anyway, today, I am in a bad mood because I thought about how I lost my mjoilnir 4 months ago and got sad about it, and I feel so unattractive these days, and because I was allergic to the brownie that served as both my only breakfast and lunch and my face turned bright red and splotchy, and because I'm really worried about work stuff. And even the worst of those things really aren't that bad.

In lighter news, I've had this blog about a year now. Wow, a year. I know that mostly this is a rambly, melancholy little thing, and I wanted it to be funny and insightful and have more pictures but my camera broke and golly I'm really having a weird couple years but I must be getting something out of it and I'm still in, okay?

Something licks us up. December.

I do this thing over and over again where I check out the same four goddamn books from the library and let them get overdue and then pay the fine and then check them out again. I don't really read them, I mean, they're not the kind of books you read straight through for hours on end, but I need to just have them around. They are three Charles Wright poetry books and one dumb dictionary sort of guide to tarot cards.

Here is part of one of the Charles Wright poems, from Black Zodiac, the poem: Disjecta Membra, page 79. I assume it's one of his many poems about 'being sad and thoughtful in Charlottesville,' which, of course I really get off on.



Lord of the broken oak branch,
                                                   Lord of the avenues,
Tweak and restartle me, guide my hand.


*

The only card I can seem to draw upright these days is the Knight of Swords. Knights of Swords, Knight of Swords, Knights of Swords. Shut up, already.

*

I came very, very close to dying Friday--maybe as close as I've ever come. I was coming home on 81, boxed in by heavy traffic, and this double-trailer Fed Ex truck straight up merged into me. Not like, drifted fleetingly into my lane, but put on the turn signal and drove into me. I swerved entirely off the road into the grass, but the thing wouldn't move, and there was a concrete barrier coming up. My certain death seemed to take a long time and I considered it at some length as I tried to keep my car from flipping. I felt pretty calm and matter-of-fact--I thought, "oh, wow, this is it?-okaaay." I'd like to say I thought about the significant or sentimental things I'd never do again--sleeping in fields in the summer, making my mom hysterically laugh, that feeling that I get right when I know someone is thinking about kissing me, which is my only super power, but I didn't. I briefly considered the unhappy errands that afternoon I wouldn't get to.

I missed slamming head on into the barrier at 70 mph by mere inches and probably one second. It was really the lady behind me who saved me--I could see her freaking out, and she hardcore slammed her breaks so I eventually had room to slip back in behind the truck. For all my nonchalance, I found myself uncontrollably shaking with nerves for a good two hours after.

*
One of my very favorite things that I like in Virginia is the New River. It's called the New River, but it's actually one of the oldest rivers on the planet. It's older than the Appalachians and the Atlantic Ocean. There are some very old insects that live around the banks of it, but nowhere else.  I've also, in my time, waded in and fly-fished its ancient holes in a floor-length skirt, and yes, yes, I am bragging.

*
Today the light was milky and white on the mountains and I had this thought that the sheer fact of my continuing life was imminently good and wonderful and being alive was the just most incredible thing. I love the littlest things so dearly and richly. Looking at the bare trees on the ridge makes me profoundly happy. Once or twice this week the kindness of another person was enough to make me want to literally cry with gratitude and plum dumbfuck undeserved happiness. Then I thought: is that true, or is this just an exceptionally good sandwich in my mouth right now?

Of course it's true, but it was also an uncommonly good sandwich.

*

This post sounds persistently upbeat, and I enjoyed writing it, but it's not really optimism I'm feeling or wanting to convey to myself or my memory or anybody who might be reading this. There is no telling me anything just now.

I can't be told

Drew my first cross in almost a month. Queen of Swords inverted.  Mmm, hurts so good.

A natural history of getting through the year

My family likes to tromp. Today, we went out on a few hours' long walk into the forest. My brother had hunted those woods before so he knew them mostly by dead reckoning in the half-light, and it was strange following him in that fashion. He didn't take a path but cut down ridges and deer trails and across creeks and old wagon roads and we ended up somehow where we started, although by no coherent, consistent route. We came across a two hundred year old ruin of a mill and I found some beautiful quartz crystals. The one is so perfect at first I thought it had a little clear water pooled in the center, and only saw it was solid rock when I tried to pour it out.


I want to say more about everything, but my brain feels pretty absent.

there's something

I categorize seasons and years. I used to find what I now recognize as an insipid quality in myself charming, and if nothing else, it has proved categorically useful---in the same kind of way that jerking off is also categorically useful.

Autumn has always been a significant time for me. I traditionally have fallen in love during autumns. I make big life choices during these months. The crushing apathy of winter hasn't set in, but I'm not dreamy and oblivious like I am during the summer. It's a time for growth and transition.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, for your edification and my own, I give you the last five year's worth: The autumn of cold geometry and the end of my childhood, the autumn of blind migraines, the autumn where all the colors seemed to get richer and more saturated, the autumn of bridges. Now this current autumn, most poetically put by yours truly, a real honest-to-golly trained poet: "the autumn where I fucked up everything forever and every single little thing I ever touched or loved or wanted to keep turned to pathetic ashes in my hands."

lay my head on the hood of your car; I take it too far

A teacher of mine in grad school asked us once to read Gertrude Stein, and I didn't. It's poetry at its most dense and incoherent and obscure and obtuse, and poetry, specifically mine, already has a problem sometimes with that so it might as well be avoided.

When my teacher, whom already I suspected of not liking me, went around the room asking if we'd read it, I had no choice but to tell her honestly that I hadn't, just skimmed. She picked on me about it a bit, but said if I really wanted to understand some certain aspect of poetry that I no longer remember, I should sometime. She said it was super hard--like learning another language--but worth it. And so, dutifully, I saved the handout and so, tonight I read--actually read--Gertrude Stein.

I still don't really like Gertrude Stein, and I still don't get it, but there's this bit:

Will you be pleased to have more
Which in a way is not even a question
Because after all they like it very much.
It is very often very strange
How hands smell of woods
And hair smells of tobacco
And leaves smell of tea and flowers
Also very strange that we are satisfied
Which may not be really more than generous
Or more than careful or more than most.
This always reminds me of will they win

 And so it's raining and a November night with everything under Scorpio and I'm sitting here reading those obtuse, obscure lines and my head is full of hate and ice and nonsense.

all of this can be broken

It's starting to smell more like winter than fall outside here. I've wanted to write all day about my stupid feelings---or anything, really, funny stories, poems about the trees or about the quality of the fucking light, but now it all seems very unimportant and even indulgent.

I talked to my mom for some time tonight. I kept thinking I had some big news to tell her, but I didn't really, although it felt like it had been a long time since we spoke and that a lot had changed in the time in between. Just as I was getting ready to hang up, she brought up something that sounded very serious. I think she might've phrased it like "I've got to talk to you about something important."

 I had this feeling like I was in big trouble, that little thrill of leftover horror I get when most people use my full name. I steeled myself for whatever it was, but in the end, she just very earnestly asked me about this set of nice pans she wanted to buy for herself that were on sale but oh how very terrible she felt about it, since she thought she shouldn't be spending the money, and certainly not on herself, and all of this and that. I assured her that she very much deserved all of the pans and of the things she could be agonizing over splurging on, that was a very practical thing. It was very charming and left me with that kind of keen affection for her that kind of hurts a little, and I don't know.

 I'm so tired but I keep staying up like I'm waiting on some important news, and maybe I am.

Ace of wands

Over the weekend, I somehow (I imagine an ember was involved) received a perfect little round burn just directly in the center of my chest, over my sternum, like somebody jabbed me with a hot poker. It hurts but in such a vague, internal, and not entirely unpleasant way. It's like having a tiny, persistent fire just at the very core of myself, which sounds really stupid and metaphoric, but which I mean quite literally.

In the meantime, I can about see my breath in the living room and it's getting dark almost immediately.

re: moving to Antarctica and sticking my head in a fucking lake

Let me tell you something important:

So in Antarctica, deep, deep under the miles and miles of glacier ice and snowpack, there are ancient lakes that have been there for half a million years. And all the pressure from the ice and residual heat coming up from the planet's core keeps the water liquid, and it's supposed to be pristine and crystal clear all this prehistoric water, and nobody knows what lives there, or if anything even lives there at all.

But I tell you what: right now, and for tomorrow especially, God, I wish I lived there.

After working seven hours in a nonmetaphorical fever, I stopped in at the grocery for a few last minute hurricane supplies. (I mostly mean wine for Josh.) I carried them in through the cold rain, my shivery heart leaden not so much with lamentations as grim acceptance. Since the backdoor was locked and I don't have a key for it, despite my landlord's most ardent promises four Junes ago, I cut down through our side alley, stepping through a deep puddle which perfectly drenched my feet. The gutter over the side has been broken since the snowstorm three winters back, so it poured a steady stream of water down my neck as I tried in vain to shield my parcels. Finally, I got to the front door, unlocked it, and came up the stairs, soaking wet. The first thing that met my sight: the bathroom, which has been under landlord-construction for over a month, was still quite shittily unfinished. I found the likewise-effected closet/dining room in a similar state. Coughing in fury, I called my landlord for the fourth time this week. My phone smashed between my shoulder and my wet face, I wandered around the devastation of my home, feebly reminding him of the various things that were undone whilst I helplessly shoved at the clutter that I could still not put away. Receiving no straight answer and losing my civility, I hung up and headed back out into the rain via backdoor to carry in the remaining groceries.


But my backyard was completely transformed. In the brief time I'd been inside, about 50-100 migratory robins had blown in. Every conceivable space was brimming with chattering, dipping, flapping birds. They didn't even mind me. I just stood there and watched them.

I know it's stupid and doesn't mean anything. In my life, I collect and value this great girth of sentimental bullshit. I assign significance to moments--natural or interpersonal--and hold them tightly and count on them like my own small fortifying army. I think that a lot of the times, people are too kind to call me out for what am I, which is a fool. I've felt so grim and alone the last weeks. But the birds did remind me, if nothing else, this world is one of true magic and beauty, and God, I love it. I don't care. It was something of a lonely miracle, and it didn't make all of the things that worry me today or this week or the last year go away. But it did make me know this: I never want to stop appreciating all of the small, wonderful blessings that constantly surround and support me.

seriously

1. Be the most responsible, goodly, sober DD at epic fun party so as not to get hungover or a late start on the most productive Sunday ever.
2. Become critically ill overnight anyway from unrelated sickness and get no sleep aside from that granted during sparse night terrors.
3. Get up, insist on continuing cleaning/productiveness routine despite on-going sickness.
4. Impale/rip hand open on inch long thorn during the first chore of the day.

I'm not saying I'm stopping, I'm just saying that now I'm angry.

it fits around me so tight

Spooky, foggy little morning on here in the Valley. Feeling blonde and removed.

Daily bullshit: an important card for me as it's the card of Sagittarius: the blended and balanced alchemy of optimism and risk, composure with expansiveness. Earth to water, air to fire. One reading suggests a particular significance paired with Knight cards, and I did see a few this week in cross. The eye of the hurricane.

We may minimize our emotions today, particularly if they stand in the way of something we want.

Yesterday, I bought some dark, murky-green nail polish with little weird swirls of glitter. It's something very unlike me to wear, sort of goblinish, but the heart wants what the heart wants. In my case, this heart also wants: a white pumpkin, a couch, another cup of coffee, time to tuck my garden in for the winter, some small assurances, a new dress, and a few other non-bloggables. Controlling my own expectations has always been a particular sticking point of mine.

While it's true that my toes actually are cold outside, it's better to be sitting out writing this. The mountain is very colorful and there are leaves and yellow jackets all around me. It smells a bit like fire up here, but not in that comforting legends campfire way, it's more like a grill. I want to attribute the strange chest pains all day to altitude, but I don't think it's that. So: taking a nice deep breath and a little break.

Today I've cooked about a million things and done all the dishes and cleaning, but like yesterday, in spite of working near constantly, I still feel unproductive and restless and half-mad. I don't really know what to do with myself. Jittery.

we'll see how brave you are

Traveling these last few days.

 Lots of mountains here in North Georgia.

Also some sun.

I like to think this decrepit barn looks like a hobbit abode if you blur your eyes.

Soligado, one of my favorites.

I spent 90% of the day digging, hauling dirt, transplanting, planting, and clearing the yard. As such, I woke up a lot of hibernating lizards. They were cold and sleepy and didn't mind my (gently) relocating them.

Really, though,

Quite a lot of lizards.

57 F in my heart and living room

"One solution is to think of your experiences in the intense shadows as an exciting journey into the unknown."
-Bunk

cosmos

Sometimes, but especially this week, inaction is my enemy. Right now I find myself alone at my parents house with nothing to do--which is weird when you're almost 26. You're never just home alone in your old house anymore. It's not that it makes me feel melancholy, but it is that it makes me feel like a teenager, and not in the good way.

quickest girl in the frying pan this morning

quarreling, looking for a fight, being bothered by trivialities

Here in the Valley, the trees are starting to go. I drove past my two favorite historical markers today: Where Ashby Fell and The End of the Campaign.

I am making myself chai tea. It's funny, I have been making chai tea for years and this is the first time I've just made it for me when I've been home alone.


I'm in a fairly good mood for a girl who had to do post production all day, leave work for an hour to go cry in her car/see about throwing up, and come back and continue post production. I always feel thoroughly odd after a migraine, a bit like my brain has been scrubbed by a cheese grater, but very quiet and... pure sounds like a dramatic, indulgent word for it. It's possibly less a raw quality and more like the feeling of the last fuck having been giving. I'm still really word switchy: I typed fairy instead of rainy, suburb instead of superb. It'd be funny if it wasn't so embarrassing and frightening.

But that said, I have a good, if wary little feeling on. Not about everything, but sort of about me. Maybe it's just the hot water.

hold me fast cos I'm a hopeless wanderer

Today has been odd. I wish I could articulate it better. I've remembered two things that I wish I hadn't, which is a thing for me sometimes. Out of the blue, memories bubble up almost as clearly as the day I lived them, but they feel so strange and significant and thoroughly odd out of context. One of them is from two years ago and involves somebody else, so I won't talk about it, but the other is one of my earliest memories.

I remember it was in the very middle of the hottest part of summer and I was by myself in a parking lot. I was out just with my dad and my brother was too little for me to remember, at home with my mom We were checking a minnow trap in a creek by the railroad construction site. My Dad went down to the creek, but I had to stay up by the car for some reason. It was getting to be evening but not yet cool or dusky. The place was entirely deserted. I remember sitting on the curb in my little girl shorts, dry, dead grass around me, the heat wiggling the air over the asphalt. I was playing in the dust and I found a lighter. I knew what it was, but I was acutely, almost dutifully afraid of it. Even as young and barely formed as I was, I had been taught not to play with fire.

I don't know, it's not really about the ever-present potential for fire or the being afraid that stuck with me in that particular reminiscence. It was something about the feeling of my parents being very young.

at once I knew I was not magnificent

God, you ever look at dumb, young photos of yourself from even just as soon as two springs ago and think "geez, I was so dumb and young?"

In other, better news, it smells like cedar fires outside tonight.

our thoughts compressed which makes us blessed

I feel pretty quiet this week. I started a list of things I wanted to talk about driving home from carpool but they were all mostly stupid poem things, like mist just grazing the blurry mountains, leftover black-eyed susans, and a crow staring me down from the middle of the road. Nothing real. I really like this time of year but I don't know what to make of it just now.

I spent a lot of time tonight practicing in front of a mirror for that poetry thing. I think my voice sounds entirely like somebody else's when I hear myself read. This is like the first time I've read anywhere near where I live, let alone the town I work in. I'm nervous and excited at that prospect.

precious territory

no ups and downs, my pretty

I'm giving a reading soon and so that has me thinking about poetry. That is to say also that everything else feels turned against me so that once again, like a sheepish ex-lover, I creep back to writing and expect to be taken in, mostly as a way to distract myself from whatever else it is.

I've been looking through, of all things, my old school notes from undergraduate. I threw a lot of them out after college, but a couple remained mostly by the virtue of their notebooks being incomplete, and I, ever a practical and un-wasteful girl, kept them to reuse. It's a pity that some were thrown out, too, because of everything I feel good about in myself against the difference of what I hate, I have long valued my ability as a note-taker. It's not that I ever wrote neatly or accurately, but I kept a near perfect internal commentary on whatever was going on in class, complete with the better professorial quotes, drawings, half-begun letters, notes passed, revelations, scraps of poems, doodles of dragons (yes, even then) and other assorted hodgepodge bits. They were almost more like journals.

I had a close friend ask me recently if I thought I was one of those writers who took herself too seriously, or not seriously enough. I think I said both, but tonight maybe I will seem like the indulgent former. The one notebook I looked in tonight got used and then re-used with an odd strata effect. I never wrote these two bits into real poems, they just stayed as drafty dead bits. Still, even if their quality is bad and embarrassing to me, they are perfectly juxtaposed over periods of my life and touch me now in some kind of uncomfortable, sentimental way.

The first is from the end of my senior year of college, when I was stuck in this required symposium I'd put off as a freshmen, surrounded by freshman. I remember the day I wrote this it was spring and storming.

the way the air
curls up in your palms
low clouds give you something
a hard twist of gray
I want to love you
but the leaves are turning
over and over, flashing
their white underbellies.

And the second is much more graphic and listy and rough, from the end of my grad school career two winters ago when I was teaching freshmen. I would write terrible little stream of consciousness things while my students were doing their exercises. I think I might've saved one line from this old thing, which is good, because I lost the stomach for the ending so much that I couldn't even finish re-typing it here.

thumbs of clay, tuckahoe
simmer down
scrape or gnaw it soft while
carolina parakeet such a pure clatter
cockleburr, cockleshell, mussels
pickerel, arrowroot ground in
a mash pot put it in the fire
put this to fire
better to be switched with light
or know the blood trails through
the forest we're hunting
compass less the needle
tell us the correct geography

Hullo bugs

I do like them.

examination and the qualities thereto belonging

I'm up too late and everything feels so unresolved. This was a very eventful weekend and I should talk about it or anything else but I just feel so blurry and vague. I've not been sleeping well.

 So here is the end of my favorite poem, at least my favorite poem that I always think of this time of year, which I have almost certainly posted here before. Being Pharoh, Beckian Fritz Goldberg. The reason I like this poem is because it resonates with blurry emotional nonsense. I like how quiet and understated it is and how it builds up to great heights. In the same poem, although not the portion I quote below, she says this line: "I"m an unforgivably domestic mourner" and I don't think anybody else has exactly articulated so well how it feels to be in a terrible grim mood while doing some mundane household chore as that--domestic mourning. Maybe it's time to scrub my sideboards.


It is August. One woman is so long

longing does not come out of her.
But this time I have loved you

so long I become
the boy you were. I must still

be alive for everything is changing and
incomplete. Half a tree, half

drives its shadowy web near the shutters.
August has just turned September. The ancestors

want 4,000 year old grain, hard as quartz,
in grain jars. All I have are cigarettes.

What a night this is. What a night.
I'll lie down and my pillow will thrum

like a machine. I'll go barefoot
to the window, see if any light is

still on in any house. Who else
is afraid of missing something. Who else

knows one thing God can't enter
is my memory: I, a minor

twentieth century poet, the first
of September, 4 am, finish one thing.

High Priestess crosses Hanged Man up over the seven of cups under the reverse six of wands, with the six of pentacles behind me and the upside down Queen of cups in the front. Nine of swords is me, the Devil reversed in my house, ten of cups for good medicine turns out a four of pentacles.

All that is so much to say that sometimes I build myself up into these little dramatic castles of old, reheated emotions and blind reaction and leftover garbage and I miss the singular fact that I'm acting like a self-absorbed ass and not only not helping the people I care about and should be focusing on, but steamrolling over their perspective entirely. And that was today. And I feel like a heedless bitch for it and I'm sorry.

I know the robins bring me many things, but sugar?

Ten years since I was fifteen, and yet here I am still here propped up on the same shoulder in bed writing a stupid little thing when I should be sleeping, wearing the exact same tiny pokemon sleepshorts. It's funny how much everything can change and nothing really at all.

What a vague, fussy little thing this blog is sometimes. I wish it were funny or insightful or that I talked about things other than my cards and dumb emotions, but I guess this is right where I am just now. It's funny how in some rare moments you can see yourself, your whole life and what you are to everyone and even to yourself, with perfect impunity. I think I had one of those moments today when we were walking downtown.

If this were my usual sort of post, I'd tell you why the planets right now are perfect for me. Cold, awake, hungry and reasonable. I do feel finally proper myself for the first time this summer.

Speaking of seeing myself, though, I actually have had a "true" out of body experience once, but it's an embarrassing story so I don't like to tell it. I guess I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I was into this boy from work who was much older and cooler than I was. Except, the thing was, he wasn't cooler at all, but sort of a short little hobbit dip with wide, buggy eyes and, as I recall, terrible, small, stunted hands. Awful hands are a dealbreaker for me in men; I haven't felt up to unpacking that. That said, returning to my story, I had yet to discover self-esteem and I didn't know much about boys at that point. (Compared to now, the future, when I know absolutely nothing about them.) So when he asked me to go for a walk with him at this park I was absolutely dazzled and not a small bit confused.

He was older, so the whole time I felt like we were about to get into trouble and the dull roar of nerdish anxiety increased in my ears as we walked. By the time we reached this one bench, I was clammy and stammering. He kept looking at me sideways with his big weird eyes and I kept trying to turn my body so I was looking at him too. A lesser super power I have developed is to know when a boy is about to kiss me, and it was going off pretty bad, but I was so muddled up and confused because didn'theknowIwasadorkomg.

Finally, growing irritated with my playing the accidental coquette, he snapped "Stop moving, Goddamnit, I'm trying to kiss you!" and so I held still and he inevitably kissed me. And that was when the out of body thing happened. It was just as they described on wikipedia. I remember feeling a tipping over feeling, and then looking down at us from about five foot up, my gawky fifteenish self on the bench with this dumb boy that I didn't even like except that I thought I was supposed to.

It was only a kiss so there wasn't much to see, and if that was my one time to leave my body and look down on my life, it sure felt like I wasted it. I have had much, much better kisses since then; I've had kisses good enough to kill me, but I've never left my body. A few weeks later, that same boy would call the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing off, and oh, I was so, so devastated. I remember asking over and over "but I thought you loved me!" like the most pathetic creature in the world. Even now, saying that word makes me feel embarrassed, like it will be thrown back at me.

So that's an awkward story about my teenaged years that I'm writing for  penitence for not updating this thing enough lately.

don't look at me, I'm indiscrete (you're sharp all right)

I found a desiccated yellow jacket in amongst my extra socks and delicate things from last legends. Little fucker died waiting for me to push my blind, trusting fingers down into the ambush. I felt horrified and wonderful. It felt like a victory, but what did I even do to my notorious enemy if not just lazily put off emptying a small bag at the bottom of a box? All of my greatest incidents of viciousness have been accidental. Maybe everyone is secretly like this.

I feel weird and cold and aggressive tonight, not unlike how I've felt all week.

Rough, bad, rough draft but a draft?

In summer of 1608, John Smith sent an expedition south to locate any survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. It turned up claims of four Europeans living in a mysterious village called Ocanahonan, although subsequent efforts to track them down proved unsuccessful.


By slug hour, I bury my bad news,
my lists.

I see now
how, to history, we are already spoken for,

and neither the cards nor the stars care much
if we heed them,

austere minutes in the ledger of what is already known.

Here in my garden, snails stretch their necks
along the rockface and consume my vegetable goods
before my eyes, while the jimson weed burns white sweet
poison above our heads, my own land turned against me,
morsels in the damp mouth of this forgettable evening.

Here, I can tell you what happened to the Roanoke Colony.

Down the pine barrens and tiny villages, not much of a river,
so what if four leftover men lived for two or twenty years,
and Dare an Indian wife among them, so
what if their delicate cotton clothes
rotted in ribbons from their bodies?

Such love is unrequited.

I stutter in my armor

 

Impulsiveness, troublesome expectations, controlling aspect of men or fire. Remain receptive to indications of a disagreement or dispute and be the first to withdraw.

she tells fortunes with a deck of leaves until it comes out right

I keep meaning to update about my adventures up north, but my health has not been so good. Suffice to say, the whole thing was like Bilbo's birthday party meets the Great Gatsby, which is to say very overwhelming and fun and good pictures that I'd like to put up, but after it all, I'm just so tired and weird-feeling. A little too Gatsby, to tell you the truth. Also long bad sentences with too many commas. I'm not much in the mood, but I've been working on this little post in my head for a while, so here's a entry of snips, a device I haven't utilized in a while.

*

I drew the reversed Magician today. Sometimes my interpretations feel more realized by the end of the day, and in this case, by now I see it in my own context as a sudden crushing reality, wasted, fruitless efforts, ineffectiveness.

Stirred and gloomy, I made the mistake of then reading my own cross tonight and it was genuinely quite terrible. It was like a bad joke made up of all my secret--or pathetic, glaringly obvious---fears.

*
Jay has these kittens. He is out of town, so we look at them.

I went into his kitchen to get some water and I ran into some drunk, long-haired hippie boy apparently wandering the house. He asked me "Are you living the dream?!" I thought he said drain and so I was pretty confused, but then he clarified. That sounds like a fever hallucination, and that would be a fair guess this week, but it really wasn't.

It is a good question though.

*
I'll say it: I'm ready for autumn. I've got that poem about the pharaohs and boys and love and jank that I always go on about this time of year stuck in my head. Also Robert Hass's line from the Problem of Describing Color. It's so plaintive and genuine and hopeless to me just now. "How could you not love a woman who cheats at tarot?"

I think I sound really stupid when I try to talk about why I like the poems I like in this blog.
*

I do like, however, how long my hair is now. I'mma get it dyed again tomorrow and that will make me feel happy and confident.

*

Here is a very good picture of the farm that I did not take.

*
I had this moment Wednesday morning where I woke up at my house for the first time in a week and stepped out into my garden. The air was very cool and everything was a little damp from an overnight rain. The light caught up on all the water and mist; everything was gleaming and beautiful. I thought about all the wonderful blessings in my life, the rare and talented people I've come to love. I'm lucky enough to be a very common girl surrounded by uncommon people.

Then I saw a snail hanging on one of my tall white garden phlox and I went into a blood rage. I'm gonna execute some Order 66 on those motherfuckers this weekend. And also maybe paint my kitchen cabinets.

*

Okay, but really.

policy, fear, unreasonable caution

Strange old night on here. I got home and took off my pants and then put them on again and then haven't been able to focus since. I have run through all my usual formulas for little distracted moods: are you hungry? lonely? angry? tired? but it doesn't seem to be solvable. My eyes feel itchy.


B-cat is also having issues. She and I were home alone during the big bad storm a couple weeks ago, and she got very upset during it. I don't know if it's the repeating circumstances or if that event had made her stormshy for any bad weather. A severe storm came through tonight and she crawled up onto my lap and just went utterly limp. I know a good cat owner would have petted her and told no one about her dark secret, but it was just so damn cute.

Not the aforementioned important post

Clear-cutting my material life tonight which is good in that I'll have even more space to stay organized and bad in that I realized at a certain point I was up in my room alone muttering to myself as I threw away many of my possessions. Like, you know. A crazy person.

It's stupid, though, because if I didn't wear it then, I'm not going to wear it now and I should stop dressing the way that I do and buy sensible slacks and many of my clothes do not even close to fit and really, having worn the red dress to a party once in college and not a very happy party at that does not a keepsake make and the beautiful picture isn't going to stop having bad associations and to be very honest I never liked it much anyway. There are so many things I still possess that I have no right to possess as a moderately adjusted nonpackrat vaguely organized 25 year old, and it makes me feel very stupid.

I think I'm just having one of those weird nights of doubt and loathing, wherein, for example, I think obsessively about all the nice things friends and teachers have written for me in books they've signed and how I'll never come to deserve any of them. People do that when you're a writer and eventually you have friends or teachers who publish; it's a thing. My favorite one I just found, in a book written by a very, very dear professor from undergrad--she'd signed the title page and left the inscription "Jess, always keep this in mind: you are one of the best writers out there." I loved it because it felt like such a unrestrained, absolute endorsement and almost clumsy or unbelievable in its extremity. An insincere compliment is dispiriting, but every now and then in life, you run into a person who for whatever reason likes you enough to be raw about it, and I genuinely believe she meant it. I sort of took a lesson from that lack of restraint. Even if I kind of ruefully sit here now and think gloomy thoughts about it not being objectively true, maybe it should be enough that one person believed in me that much. 

Some good news, though? Don't worry; I just found my M*A*S*H t-shirt.

List

Woke up at 7:30 and already gotten bored of finishing all the little morning routine things there are to do. So now there's the question of going to Lowes to buy foam. And plants. And iced cream cones. Right?

Previously-alluded-to 'something big' post still coming.

To dream of deer

The soul, the gentle harmless self that is often hurt or wounded by our aggressiveness and cynicism, or by other peoples criticism; vulnerability; the unsocialized or wild, but gentle side of our instincts; love-sickness. In Greek mythology the deer was associated with the virginal huntress Artemis. So the female deer in a dream suggests the qualities of female gentleness and the connection with nature and the hidden world of the unconscious with all its strange wisdom. 

courage

Sitting in the dim morning light with my coffee and listening to the rain pour down outside. I haven't been a very faithful poster lately, but I've got something big coming, maybe over the weekend.

If there was ever a day I felt like just not going into work, it might be today, just because of the weather and how strangely serene it makes this house seem. But there's nothing to be done for it so I'm taking up my umbrella, the one I got from my cousin when she worked at the MMOMA with blue sky and white clouds painted on the inside, and heading out into the deluge.

More bunk

Since it's so difficult to memorize all the cards, I've been doing this exercise I read about where you shuffle and draw a card every morning as a sort of Tarot horoscope for the day. It's a good way to one-by-one get many cards memorized. And today's, it's

Six of swords: blues, travel, recovery, listlessness.

Not a terrible card, but not a great card either. Swords is the suit of air, also associated with trials.

old memories and failsauce this week

I keep thinking about college. Also, I am 19.

goddess of bad roads and inclement weather, take down our names

Another round of bad cards, storms crowding out the option of a run, so the only thing left to do for this mood is to drink and vacuum and maybe scrub the floors again. (Yes, it must be that ghost.)

At any rate, it isn't too bad to be listening to the rain pound on the tin roof and how this unending, miserable, lifesucking heat has at least brought out a strange but comforting smell to the house, like sweet sun-cooked wood.

where were you thinking that you've got to run to now?

On the other hand, the trees on the drive home smelled nice and hot and raw. On the other hand, everything else.

Deep feeling, freedom of emotion, testing of sincerity

This morning I pulled the best hand I've drawn since I started reading Tarot: The Lovers, Justice, and the Nine of Cups, all right side up, and I think I read it perfectly and accurately. Because of this, of course, I immediately think I'm ready for a grown-up deck, but mastering trump is not enough. I still have so much to learn.

I took such good care of my little soft animal body this weekend that anyone keeping score of how excellent I am at following through on any pre-arranged deals to do so might be very proud of me.  It was very productive as well. I can't help but wonder how much more I could have gotten done if not for the minor Armageddons Friday night that I had to clean up. Even with the intense storm that pretty much destroyed my yard (three hours to put the patio back into shape and cart off all the broken leaves and branches, heh, heh), I still managed to accomplish the following wonders:  took out a ton of trash, hung some pictures, cleaned and vacuumed the whole house, scrubbed the tub, paid the bills, did all the dishes from Friday, bought groceries, cleaned the kitchen, the catbox, mopped the floors, cleaned and emptied the gutters, swept everything, weeded, pruned, planted a whole host of new garden things, spent about an hour hand-watering everything and reorganized some bathroom things. *out of breath*

Now a ledger of the damages:

 

This was about mid-way through the storm. By the end, the whole patio was more leaves than concrete. 

 This is actually unrelated to the storm: it's my battle wound from fighting my lantern Thursday. It started to bleed again Friday so I took the photo to prove how I am a badass all the more for getting so much done with a terrible injury. It's like going into the battle with the Troll King at 0 LB. Also, because my jammies are cute.

Big ol' tree down in the back.


If anything, this weekend emphasized to me how I'm not a complicated creature, really, and it takes very little to keep me content and productive if I'm externally motivated. Simple things make me happy. For example, I just sang a five minute victory song about some cheap conditioner I bought at Rite Aid. The lyrics are as follows: "Happyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhuppyhuppyhuppyhuppyhuppyhoppyhoppyhoppy..." (There were hopping parts.)

So, yeah. Better than last entry.

Quarrel, unhappiness, miscarriage, anxiety over a loved one, desolation, sleeplessness

The tarot has it out for me. I drew the Fool which should blunt the Nine of Swords but I'm no good at these, and I feel small and tired and used up.

I kept thinking "I should write a thing," and I even did a little poem stuff tonight, but it's terrible dull. Even this post is sort of useless. Do you want some old pictures of things? I've got some.

Leopard frog

Tulip poplars are about my favorite tree.

Damsel fly leftovers.

Girl leftovers.

a lithe figure alert and awake to unknown dangers

It feels better for me to think of yesterday as some sort of arduous native purification ritual, as it contained many of the disorienting hallmarks: extreme heat, emotional blankness, fasting, unsolicited visions of my own death.

I keep trying to articulate what was going with me, but the closest I can get is this sense of not being myself. I've always prided myself on a certain sense of self-understanding and an ability to articulate my moods and resolve them, but now I'm at something of a loss.

If this was a better blog, I'd at least tell you exactly what happened so as to provide context clues to my dramatic, vague statements. Long, lost hours on a narrow road hearing the deer give their alarm-snorts somewhere out of my sight, or about the fishing, the dark water, or about the nice wedding, sitting out by the lake after, the drive home today. I caught more small fish than I could count. At some point, I found myself in an empty church parking lot and I tried to write a little with a marked lack of success. (This is becoming such a pattern with me that it's almost not worth mentioning.) Last night I fell asleep with my tarot cards in my hand and I woke up very early before everyone else, even Travis. I paced and prowled.

These days now are the longest days of the year and they remind me of being anywhere in Scandinavia during the summer. The sunset takes hours. The light now reminds me of Oslo, which I remember as being such a happy place. There was a kind of gentle, wide-streeted rosiness to the city that you wouldn't expect in a notoriously dark mountains and deep fjords sort of place. Even the castles were friendly, with warm big stones.

Right now, I smell distinctively like lake water and iron which is to say that I smell like blood.

you were always gold to me

I'm sleepy. Up too late. Tomorrow I'm going to be very well-behaved at work (and who wouldn't, since the CEO offered to buy me a donut?) and go to the downtown farmer's market and buy some tomatoes and then eat them for dinner tonight. I'm thinking about sleep and drinking red wine. This weekend was good.

Fairytales

'The world is big and cold, little child, and you are so small. The world is full of evil and wickedness, and it will hurt you.'

'No, no. I am young and warm. I have warmth enough for everyone. I am small and good, and want to share the good that I have.'

'Princess, the forest is dark and the roads are dangerous.'

'But you are with me. You are great and strong, and can easily defend us both.'"

Sunday

Tonight, I finally got to do the work that needed doing in my garden: dead-heading, clipping, pruning, weeding and transplanting my dying lavender out of the fine shadows of the orange mountain lilies, which are sentimental to me for growing wild on that one farm last summer.

This weekend contained many beautiful physical things: a rose moon, a handful of anise, a brushfire, a clutch of brown and murky bluegreen mockingbird eggs. Saturday night, the last coherent thing I remember is drifting off  all nuzzled up against Travis's leg with a sweet beagledog in my lap, which is so much to say that I cannot or should not complain, really, about anything.

pour a little salt; we were never here

Long, mixed-up, sad, cold, exhausting day, punctuated with forlorn sneezes from the office dog, Snowball, who has terrible allergies. I spent three hours mucking with a graphic. The shape of the mountains made me cry. This week will get worse before it gets better.

I think I need to snap out of whatever this is and do something productive. I'd really like to write something real again; I did so much good research this winter when I had my head together. I want to write a poem about Okeus and how he was grim and evil and appeared to almost every Powhatan as a young, handsome warrior in the woods--which is a convenient form for a god to a warrior people who go about in the woods. I want to write one about throwing beads into the James to pacify him as they'd canoe past his alter. I want to write about this giant quartz crystal divining stone they had at the temple at Uttamakin that was said to be so clear, you could see a man's face through it and that they buried there when they had to flee. Those are the poem I'd write if not for the problem, the problem being probably mainly that I'm tired and listening to sad music. 

Real content

Ahh, I bet you are thinking that this girl does not update her blog except for stupid vague poetry things these days, and that is true! But here is also a few other things about my life and general feelings.

* Work is going well. I feel like I'm really good at it. That feels good.

* I made some very tasty homemade spaghetti sauce tonight. It's been a while.

* I have quite the yellow jacket sting on my arm.

* My garden is being perfect and there's no one to see it. I'm at work all day and no weekend garden parties like in the old days.

* Full Moon Lunar eclipse in my sign tomorrow night. Don't worry, nothing can go wrong ever.

More Ada Limon

...he said he
liked to fuck her as if she was tied
to railroad tracks and this train, bigger
than the local strip mall, was roaring
around the corner.

She asked once, Is it the Union Pacific?
But he said it didn't have a name.
Do you untie me in the end? She asked.
I never thought that far ahead, he said.

She told him, But every woman tied
on the tracks needs a hero, right?
Look, he said, It's not like that,
it's not a love story, it's not so complicated.

Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer

It has been a good year or so since a Steve Scafidi poem really broke my heart, but the ending of this one really hit me in the face last night. It is like a hammer, Steve Scafidi, it is.

 And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your heart
and you stand in the lush dark of the moment after twilight
ends and begins to sing and nothing makes sense to you
and you sing louder for a while, then awkwardly sit down

where you are. And the stars overhead shine a little--no more
or less than usual--and whether it is daylight and they are invisible
or whether it is night and they are the embers of a blacksmith's
fire, they shine and you are grateful. That love is like a hammer.

-"The Sublime."

Tuesday Donut Lady Omens

There's something still pleasurable about breaking through the valley fog and giving the city of Harrisonburg a friendly up-nod as I drive into work. Unlike Lynchburg, which is populated with ghosts, this is the city where my past and present meet in a weird vanilla chocolate twist. This place was once a kind of refuge for me--maybe it will be again.

I skipped all the rest of the days

Some strange weather in my head lately.  I'm eating up all the crystalized ginger and sitting in the semidark at the kitchen table. It's not as bad as it used to be, but I'm a little removed from my usual self. Pensive and with nothing to show for it.This was a happy weekend spent with friends and so I have little to complain about. Even the dire stars are on the other end of the zodiac this time.

So here are some little pictures.

Offerings to Sif.

Little Nithavellir pumpkins unwittingly planted during the carving last October. Such happenings when one sits out in the garden late and drunk and with a friend and does a very sloppy job. They are growing very well now all the same. I hope they will be green.

This is the fanciest, nicest chicken pot pie a girl has ever made, so I took a picture of it.

Wednesday

Oh little indulgent blog, I held a dead peregrine falcon tonight.

Tuesday

I waited all day for Beckian Fritz Goldberg to arrive at her booth at AWP, the only poet I went to appeal alone. Still, when I told her the plain, obsessive facts of my love affair with her poem "Being Pharaoh"--how I'd memorized it, carried it in my car over every stitch of the last four years, she seemed almost amused. She said maybe I'd spent more time with it than she had. I don't know. It's a beautiful poem, and everything I feel right now, as it has been for every moment of the last four years. Sometimes I know exactly what she meant by her dismissiveness, and maybe that's a part of it. But tonight, it's rained relentlessly, and the rivers are all blown out, so instead of the Pharaoh,  I'll give you a bit of her "The Ventriloquist."

The coyote is out on the street, thinking, The riverbed has moved.
The actual river is there too, mumbling
Yes, the bed must be somewhere in this valley.

And when the rivers talks,
you will still not know the fat-child-faith of my heart.

Monday

This afternoon, I gave up on work and went for a walk. It was a sad walk; it rained on my head. Now it's still raining and the sound is echoing through the empty spaces of my house.

I always thought I should post the reason for the title of this blog someday and today is that day

Peggy in the Twilight
 

Peggy spent half of each day trying to wake up, and

the other half preparing for sleep.  Around five, she

would mix herself something preposterous and ‘40’s-ish

like a Grasshopper or a Brass Monkey, adding a note

of gaiety to her defeat.  This shadow life became her.

She always had a glow on; that is, she carried an aura

of innocence as well as death with her.

            I first met her at a party almost thirty years ago.

Even then it was too late for tragic women, tragic

anything.  Still, when she was curled up and fell asleep

in the corner, I was overwhelmed with feelings of love.

Petite black and gold angels sat on her slumped shoulders

and sang lullabies to her.

            I walked into another room and asked our host for

a blanket for Peggy.

            “Peggy?” he said.  “There’s no one here by that name.”

            And so my love life began. 

-James Tate

the lighthouse burned

During this fuckchasm of a week, I think I spent more hours staring blankly at the wall in my office listening to metal than I did anything else, including eating or sleeping.

I'm in something of a dark place.

It is not ruled out that my eyes were open

Scorpio Full Moon coming on this weekend. I know it's stupid as hell, but I've been dreading and lusting for this particular lunar occurrence for months. I imagine I can already feel its sinister power twisting in my belly.

There was strange weather when I drove to and from school last night. On the way there, it was sunny enough, and then I hit Afton Mountain and the strangest, thickest swirling white cloud. It was such a physical presence on the mountain that I rolled down my windows and it entered my car and got in my hair.

By the time I was driving back, the weather had cleared in the valley, but the deserted back roads were still steaming and wet. I had to slam on the breaks to avoid hitting a baby fox, and when he'd dashed across the road and saw me stopped, he looped back to stand on the opposite bank of the road and stare me down with electric green eyeshine. By the time I reached Afton again, the earlier cloud had settled into the thickest fog I've ever seen, and I swear to you, I practically felt my way up blind.

I have used your unbelief

I'm currently sitting  on a blue blanket in my garden writing this entry on stupid notebook paper because my laptop is eleven sorts of dead. I'm not in a very good mood because of a lot of reasons: the slow failure of my computer and my child-like inability to fix it, the slippy unpracticed annoyance of pencil on paper, the prickle and damp creeping up through the blanket from last night's rain, the fact that I should be--but am not--writing lesson plans for a job I quit but still need to attend for the next two weeks. It is almost impossible to start caring about something again once you have truly lost a taste for it, and perhaps more so when that something promises a 16 hour workday during a week that would be better spent making a good first impression. Still, I think a lot of my residual mood is leftover from this weekend's visit to South Boston.

I'll jumpcut, since this is some long stuff.

Legendary

So I'm sitting here, trying to focus on my damn lesson plans, but I can't because I just found out today what I get paid for my teaching and I cannot force myself to give even the smallest of fucks just now. Plus there are these two groups of liberty kids in the coffeebar I'm sitting in, and they are having a war for the saddest spectacle of a conversation ever. ("Don't sit there, bro! The girl of my dreams might come in and sit there. As if.  No, she'd probably be like 'I'm just waiting for my husband to join me.' Story of my life. But really. If God wanted me to be married, the right girl would be in my life. Right? Legendary.")


Ho ho.

That said, I'm tired and it's getting cold. I wish I had a chocolate chip cookie. I keep waiting for the part of this week where things slow down and I can catch my breath, but it never seems to come. 

One such tired girl

Made my students freewrite about this photograph today in class: "The Kissing Couple" from the Vancouver riots in 2011.  They came up with such good stuff. I'm so annoyed at my administration right now and honestly, I'm about fed up, but damnit. Damnit. Damnit. Confession? Confession: I love teaching.

we saw the dragon move down

Part of  my whole job thing now involves commuting to Lynchburg and then driving back over the mountain by the witching hours. Though I'd gotten used to it last year, I'd sort of forgotten the joy (terror? limbo? odd dreamlike intensity?) of being the only car on a road cutting through nowhere during the deep parts of the night.
The thing that is always amplified is my tendency to brood, so I hope to have a lot of obnoxious contemplations for you in the coming weeks.

This post is not about those contemplations. 

This weekend I was up in Manassas at my parents house for my mom's birthday party and I had the opportunity to do some walking barefoot in the woods before a storm, which was both frightening and enjoyable. I like walking barefoot in the woods and it had been some time since I'd last done it--not since last summer, probably. I suppose whenever I have, then and now, it feels like a very trusting act--perhaps foolishly so. The holly leaves pricked my heels.  Barbwire, broken beer bottles, rusted nails to say nothing of cat brier. The storm brewing made me uneasy so it felt even more intense to be picking my way through the mayapple and crane flies.

At any rate, I could've gotten into some really deep water out there, thinking on the nature of pain and love and deliberate vulnerability, except that the storm started really kicking and I fled into the house like a child.

 Still, ultimately my hunting and gathering proved fruitful. Green candlesticks and mayapple leaves and the eventual party ended up being fancy indeed.

Here's the lady of the hour doing some prepping. Would that I could look so fine at fifty!