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.