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!

Oh, also I got a job

I expect yesterday was Staunton-version Earth Day or some such because there was a sort of Earth-jamble attachment to the stalls at the downtown Farmer's Market. In it there were a lot of exhibits and activities which, since they were designed to amuse children, naturally attracted my attention.

I made this sort of arcane-looking pinecone bird feeder and I was so damn proud of it. The man at the booth complimented it extensively, and if you're reading this, you know how deeply susceptible I am to flattery and increased awareness of perceived victories. ("Ohh I guess I *diiiiiid* do a good job at thorough peanut butter coverage!") Since I was outside all of yesterday, I didn't get to see any birds use it, and so this morning, I excitedly leapt out of bed to check it for delighted, complimentary birds.

IT WAS GONE. :< Only the dangling string remained. Damn possums.

The people who were manning the pinecone birdfeeder activity were from the Augusta Bird Watchers Club. I talked to them at some length as their weird hobby feeds strongly into my desire to go outside and quietly look at shit, which is already one of my favorite activities. Still, I felt a little reluctant, but the man said something compelling. He said "I wouldn't have gotten into it so much except for it being some of the best group of people I've ever met." Which is a little how I've felt about my own stranger past times.

I hope you like gardening pics because that's mostly what the rest of this post is.

I like my window sill. Basil coming up, a couple little herbs waiting to be eaten, and the jar is some vodka I'm distilling with lavender. To drink it.



Here is a better picture of the cut flower on the end of the previous picture's row. Chinese Red Lantern Columbine blooming and Japanese Painted Fern. And um, um, Mouse Ear Hosta. In case you were wondering.

Bleeding heart is blooming.



I think this is hands-down the creepiest artifact I've ever unearthed in my garden. Our house is a hundred some years old, so the garden has a lot of little medicine bottles, bits of bone, white fragments of china and iron implements I've dug up when I made the beds. But. Yes. That is half of a porcelain doll face.



My blue pansy opened while I was working.


My camera's specialty is for blurred, half-eroded pictures that often take a few seconds after I've posed for them. I think I was in the middle of taking my hair down. My long, long hair.

oh honey, honey, shut your mouth

Today felt like a dream and not just because oh man did I ever have one interview of a golly-gee-whizz-humdinger interview today. (I was so friggin' nervous.) But I kept feeling like the whole day was sort one of those vague, dozing dreams where little ordinary things happen as your brain imagines they really might happen-you receive a small bit of interesting gossip, have a particularly enjoyable talk with a friend, order one sandwich over another. All real, possible, potential happy things, but kind of ones you suspect your brain would be inclined to make up. But then you wake up and realize you'd accidentally hit the snooze button and been dreaming for five minutes. I kept thinking I'd wake up and actually begin my day at any second. Which made me feel a little wild.

That's not to say it was a bad day at all. I'm not sure why I needed a paragraph to say that, except that it feels somehow related to how I feel when I get a migraine, which makes me anxious. My brain has been really weird this week.

On the plus side, I went through my dumb manuscript again and I can actually see my way out of a few problems I had. I always feel like a little bit of a jerk when I use the term "manuscript" but it sounds better than "dumb book of historical poetry."

I wish it would warm up so I could plant some annuals and vegetables. I also hauled a bunch of river rock from my parents that I need to put out to line my beds. Oh my, oh my yes.

Full moon in Libra: egg moon, pink moon

So far, this is a nice day, and yesterday was a very nice day. Adjectives.


To dream of a dragon:

• Power, magical power, or power that is bigger than life
• A challenge, as in a challenge to "slay the dragon"

Consider the type of dragon, how you feel about it, what it's doing, and its characteristics. For instance, a fire-breathing dragon might represent either self-protection, self-expression, aggression, or attack. A friendly dragon might represent personal power.

A long story about hillbillies that doesn't go anywhere

I should talk about something not my dumb feelings or poetry although it is National Poetry Month and I do have a lot of opinions.

A thing about Staunton is there are a ton of crazy people. In my vast, unpublished works I have enjoyed writing about both their antics and struggles in detail. The local standards like Fast Eddie and Crazy Ramona, as well as the one-hit-wonders like Circus Guy or that Dude Who Threw His Coffee on the Ground Because I Wouldn't Get a Beer with Him.

Now that it's warm, they stir. Suddenly they're everywhere. It's not even the genuinely insane that I'm used to, it's more this strange hillfolk that must come into town to resupply after their winter hibernation. (I bet they probably feel like I feel whenever I go to Charlottesville, where the locals inevitably consider me to be a hillfolk by my own right. "Look at all them beans!" I goon to the Whole Foods at large, while a middle-aged woman in yoga pants hits me with her cart. )

Anyway, they are a certain kind of mountain redneck I didn't experience before I lived out here. I try not to make a bunch of mass judgements on a group of people I don't know about at all, but I think it's a very specific kind of Appalachian thing. Growing up in Northern VA we had our very own version of weirdo poor, a class of which I was solidly a member. But out here are pockets of people who don't live in cities, who are sometimes pretty bad off, and seem to make their own separate identity in the social strata.

I remember this one time I went out to Pedler Mountain Reservoir (great fly fishing) and I made friends with the old man who kept the property there. He was a great guy, told me about the water, the age of the rocks, and how the government was secretly re-introducing cougars to control the white deer population and he had shot one with a radio collar on and how he called the number on the radio collar and they picked up the phone and were like "HELLO THIS IS USA GOVERNMENT" and he was all scoobydoo"Ah-ha!" and they hung up and wouldn't pick up the phone again when he called back. Anyway, he warned me about the local hillbillies with a crazy Deliverance-esque speech. "Out here you have two enemies and they aren't the coyotes or the elements. Their names are: Billy Bob and Junior." I'm not exaggerating and I remember this sentence word for word because I was about nineteen and my brain was still soft and squishy before my heavy drinking set it. But anyway, according to Reservoir Friend (god this would be a better story if I could remember his name), rural folk were a real danger. To hear him talk, there was literally only the giant chain link fence keeping them from overrunning the place and killing him and presumably poaching all his nice fish. "People think hicks are funny," he warned, "but they're dangerous."

He said this as if he was referencing a terrible event that had happened in his own life, but the main grievances he instanced to me at least were poaching, shooting wildlife from moving cars, and driving backroads drunkenly, and I've personally done two and a half of those. Still we didn't know each other that well, so perhaps there were other stories that discretion limited him from detailing to me.

It's okay to make fun of hillbillies. I thought you should know.

Recently, I've had two strange run-ins, both with women. The first was my age or even a bit older in Walmart. She did not seem proper Staunton crazy, but fit this bill, perhaps. She asked me casually if I had forty cents with which she could buy a coke, since she had brought a dollar, but forgot about the increase in modern soda costs, and she said she thought I looked like a good person to ask. I gave it to her of course because I was a good person to ask, and she was grateful, but not in the way that people asking for money in public generally are. She didn't say "god bless you" excessively--it felt a bit like handing over something to a kid. I don't even know what really to make of the encounter except that something about her plainly honest and straightforward manner stuck with me, though I couldn't say why.

The other encounter was with a dirty, loaded-down pickup that had stopped to let someone out right in front of my parking lot's driveway. I was waiting, not impatiently, because it was a fine day and quite a spectacle was unfolding in front of me. The pickup had some farm workers in it, a large dog, and a leggy, bedraggled 20 year old with long, uncombed red hair. The truck was taking up most of the road and so the cars started backing up impatiently on either side. She noticed this and leaped up into action, directing the traffic around the pickup with exaggerated ballerina-like motions, the grand conductor, her ice cream cone dripping in one out-stretched hand. I don't know. It was a strange moment.