envision the fiery crash

This is the way I usually kill blogs--something big happens, and I put off posting about it for a while, but in that time, more stuff happens, and eventually the backlog is too overwhelming to address. Still, this is hardly a sequential chronicle of my life's events, more of a murky skid mark, so I'll struggle forward--valiantly, I'm sure.

I've tried to make 2012 the year of BEING A FUCKING ADULT. So far, it's going okay. Adults exercise, have usable desk space, clean front seats. They wear matching bra and panty sets. I've found it easier to address the practical applications of adultdom (grammar being not necessary one of those) than the emotional kind, but I don't think I'm doing badly at that either. I've successfully kept bad people out of my life, actually followed through with things I legitimately wanted instead of wussing out a couple times. It's hard, though. I really need...a job. I'd feel so much better if I had a real job.

I've been sleeping poorly. I go to bed early, fall asleep easily, but then I always wake up. 1 am, 3 am, 5 am. It's like clockwork. It's only since I've been home, too. It must be something about this house.

This post has very little direction and certainly no plot. I doubt it has a moral. Today, I organized, scrubbed and sorted the spice cabinets, the coffee/tea cabinet, dried and put away all the tents, woke up my garden, swept the patio, trimmed and cleared all the dead leaves off my perennials, went for a long run, made dinner, put away the clothes I washed, and readied the next goodwill box. My cheeks are windburned, and thus, permanently blush-pink. Who am I to complain about a Sunday?

this goes here

here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

-Lucille Clifton

I met Lucille Clifton the same year she died and retell the story a lot, though our meeting consisted of nothing more than me stammering and her smiling kindly.

I knew about my love too, my samurai

We had to go to Lynchburg for lunch with the mother-in-law Sunday. I felt bad because there are lots of people I like very much in Lynchburg and care about, but we only stayed about an hour--long enough to lunch and then get the hell out. We raced back across the scrubby piedmont and didn't look back until we'd reached the cold safety of Afton, enough distance to recover, glowering back over a dark beer in a little pub. I felt a little shaken in the mental health department.

I loathe the place. If I could go my whole life and never see its sickly Waffle House and weeds and cigarette butts and rusty bus benches again, I would. I don't know if everybody feels that way about their college town--that it's generally disconcerting, like seeing half-remembered pictures taken during ones painful childhood--or if it's just something specific to my dysfunction and that city. If you were to ask me, I'd say I mostly enjoyed undergrad, so I don't know what that's about.


Tonight, meanwhile, has been kind of fucking weird. I felt really bad and then I listened to a bunch of Tori Amos and made like the best rootbeer float in the world. I don't know if it's safe to admit to how truly and deeply I love Tori Amos, but I am because, dramatically, and mostly because of all the sugar from the root beer, I've stopped caring about everything! Everything! Except root beers!


Here's a picture of it before my mouth happened to it.

And like five seconds after. Oh my God, so much sugar, so happy.

try not to wonder what the weather will be

Dreams of snakes and foxes. :<

I woke up with Charles Wright in my head

Only the dead can be born again, and then not much.
I wish I were a mole in the ground,
eyes that see in the dark.

Two posts in a day? Can't be good.

Full Moon in Leo--exhausting.

I thought of this poem coming into the house tonight through the moonlight. I don't hate sex or a man's paralyzing body or anything like that, and there aren't any flowers. And it's probably stupid that I post poems in this thing. But I thought of it.

Mock Orange
By Louise Glück

It is not the moon, I tell you.

It is these flowers

lighting the yard.

I hate them.

I hate them as I hate sex,

the man’s mouth

sealing my mouth, the man’s

paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,

the low, humiliating

premise of union—

In my mind tonight

I hear the question and pursuing answer

fused in one sound

that mounts and mounts and then

is split into the old selves,

the tired antagonisms. Do you see?

We were made fools of.

And the scent of mock orange

drifts through the window.

How can I rest?

How can I be content

when there is still

that odor in the world?

For Enemies (or, Wards II)

Last week, I had a conversation with a very dear friend who told me about how he'd been startled to receive a phonecall from a person no longer in his life. The two had parted on somewhat apocalyptic terms, so my friend wondered if the person might be trying to contact him for purposes of mature adult reconciliation or, alternatively, straight-up murderin'. My friend hadn't taken the call and no voicemail was left. As time passed, it seemed to have been only a mistake of which the caller was entirely unaware--no intended confrontation, but rather a casual call meant for the person probably one alphabetical down from my friend on his contact list. My friend marveled that years after the fallout, this person still even saved his number--although, he admitted obviously he had kept his number.

I told him that I had also, in a fit of paranoia, saved an enemy's number in my phone, even now, many years after our original fallout. (Exfriend is perhaps a more accurate descriptor, but I'd applied the word with my trademarked 9th grade dramatic flair. Friend satisfyingly gasped How could someone like you have enemies?--a question I could have more legitimately offered him in turn. )

Still, I suppose by this age, even the most truly passive and mild-mannered of us have collected at least one volatile person upon whom it might be awkward to encounter unarmed in a Walmart. Any heads-up in the case of their sudden, meteor-like re-entry into our lives would be worth the cost. But there's a sacrifice. There's a kind of catharsis in deletion. It's a tricky business, holding onto that bit of the past in such a tangible way, a reminder every time you skim through your phone. Maybe it's different for people with whom personal drama is less traumatic and more enjoyable. I bet people like that don't even keep numbers.

My friend faced this quandary with his typical cheer and panache: "And that's how I got an entry entitled Abusive Bastard in my contacts!" I uneasily followed his lead--the accidental dial scenario made me squeamish with weakling sentiment, and I'd already had the problematic issue of having acquiring a new friend with that same taboo name. The differentiation seemed too profound to denotate with a simple last name initial.

I deleted her real name and thumbed in "Cow" for the enemy, but the viciousness and anger I'd dredged up to dub her thus felt stale. I was sure that wherever she was now, years later, she fell squarely into the category of those who enjoy personal drama and had moved on to bigger game, while I was stuck quivering at her mere ghost. The loss was deeply traumatic and I still think about it a lot, even if her name wasn't in my phone. I still worry, still cripple my current friendships with much better people with leftover pain and irrational, persistent insecurities. The endless internal litany: areyougoingtohurtme?areyougoingtoleaveme?--it makes me sick with rage because I'm not that person. Except that now I am, sometimes.

Alas, I'm getting into ridiculous emotional soups. On the bright side, the experience means that I doubt I'll have many more people like that in my life. I think once you have an enemy, even if there's a lot of lingering angst, you don't let it happen again. Sure, there are always going to be trouble-making people. But spite, I've found, nowadays bores me. It's easier to let go.

Still, here is a paranoid list of secrets wards I have employed against such villains:
sparrow feathers
cardinal feathers
mjolnir
all-seeing-eye
rue
witchdoll earrings marketed "to provide confusion to enemies"


"If I could see Tommy today, I would punch his arrogant face right into its fatness!"
-Josh, pacifist, on a childhood enemy

a small discussion of wards and pretending to be Thunar in pajamas

I remove my makeup, but not my mjolnir could be a line in a really bad poem I'm not writing tonight about what I did when I got home and got directly into bed. The only thing I really took off was some red lipstick and a bra, but makeup sounds better with mjolnir, and the poem is much too banal to write anyway, so it's a moot point. (Moot: another word I would work in there if I were actually writing this poem. Viking connotations and, by other definitions, a reoccurring central image of my life right now) It seems important to report to my blog that I am at least thinking of writing poems, even if they are small, unwanted travesties.

Today, I have felt like a profound and utter failure in practically every regard. How's that for a dramatic whiny blog post for you?

I sympathize strongly with Ada Limon in the end of her poem Hardworking Agreement with a Wednesday and I will reproduce it here for the sake of tomorrow (today, oh) being Wednesday and for me bartering already with what promises to be a testing day.

Dear Today,
I have said too much, yet give me this--
I want to be a physical doll, just for now,
a stupid, splendid thing
tumbled into the touchable day.