aiming and it sunk and we were drunk and we had fleshed it out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picturespams of the last few days. My headache finally broke, my head weather cleared a little. I realize absolutely nothing, and learn little from the experiences. I like my braids and show them off. I'm nervous.

Right now

I am sitting at my kitchen table which is currently covered in a sage-green tablecloth. I have cold coffee in my blue dragon mug. Last night, I dreamt about walking through doorways to better rooms. Headache day a million. Don't care. Wanna get a tattoo. Like right now. Of a dragon. Something tacky. My shoulders smell warm, like the lavender I was picking last night, and like leftover bugspray.

Mercury Retrograde in Cancer

I tell you something that's good for increasing your run times: running in an Antebellum graveyard after the sun goes down. Talk about remembering to pick up your feet! It wasn't so bad except when the place wound up away from the road and I was deep in among the graves and giant trees. The fireflies were going crazy all around me, thousands of them, sort of disorienting with the reflective panes of the graves, and I kept thinking I have nothing to fear from the dead until I turned a corner and about ran over a little skunk who was so mad and probably thinking I have nothing to fear from the blonde girl as she raised her little tail up. Gentle reader, I booked it.

I hate feeling the way I've felt lately, like a little bit of a mess. Sometimes I read this thing and it sounds like such a small, irritating, low-grade high-pitched whine. I can't seem to get my head in the game this month. I don't want to be that girl who always has some problem. I must be needy, I must be a pest to loved ones.

The last week or so, one of the problems is that I can't seem to shake this mild, persistent headache that is with me almost all the time in varying levels. It starts off really low or nonexistent and I think "I've beaten it today!" and congratulate myself. Then just like a band closing around my head. It builds and builds until I feel drained and nearly incapacitated by the end of the night. I don't know if this is the cause of my emotional problems of late, or a side-effect of them.

Another thing I saw on my run tonight was a muskrat. Like, for serious. Just... on the sidewalk. I've only seen them in books before, but I got a really good look at it. It didn't seem to care for me anymore than the skunk did. 

So, yeah, Tuesday night post.

Stayed up too late, got up too early. Full Moon in Capricorn: cautious and guarded.

 I felt better after a small workout, but it's no running. I have done many domestic things. I have washed my cat and my curtains.

but something keeps turning you on

So, I'm sitting here listening to my pants with all the clunky pockets clatter in the washer and berating myself with a sort of internal litany of the day's failures in a style that repeats the term dumb bitch ad nauseum. As if I needed it, I just watched a horrible homevideo online of a fatal, fiery car crash and that has made me feel even worse, and very scared to be home alone like a child. (I have already called myself a dumb bitch for these additional things.)

I feel like I've been doing laundry all night, but it isn't done. I'm mad about work stuff and I am tired of all music that has ever existed and there's too much to do. Now that I've explained how vulnerable I feel, I want to tell you something real. I want to say something significant, or better yet, funny, but the only secrets I have tonight are that for a while I sat down on the floor and cried (like a child, or say, a dumb bitch) for absolutely no reason at all except that my stupid dumb ankle hurts and I felt needy. Then I felt stupid, so I got up and did more laundry.

Sometimes, it feels pretty good to nurse a bad mood or throw oneself a pity party. It's indulgent, like buying stupid white cheddar puffs or makeup I don't need, but probably just as empty. I should drink a beer and write more. This post would be more illuminating and less pathetic so far if you didn't know I was writing it stone cold sober.

One thing about today was that I bought some nice new incense from the silly hippiedippie store downtown. They got a new shipment in and it was very fresh, much darker and richer-smelling than the dried out old stock they've had in forever. I got "dragon's blood," although it's not the same brand I used to use for legends. I like incense, but I'm not very good at it. I mostly pick the scents based on the names. "Mystery Moon"--yeah, that sounds like a smell I like. Sometimes it goes out when I light it. I remember once watching a friend light some, and the way he was very careful to let it burn enough at the tip. Then he blew it out--but softly, really slowly, not all at once like a kid blowing out birthday candles the way I do it.

Okay, so, during the earlier fit of pathetic crying I mentioned, I smeared my eyeliner onto my nose pretty good. I just looked in the mirror and noticed it, and that made me laugh.

I also thought of something else--just remembered it suddenly out of the blue, so I'm gonna write about it because I guess that's what I'm doing tonight. When I was 16 or 17, I had an internet friend--not Roo, a less cool one--who was older than me and married. And a weirdo. And into writing sexy Star Wars (torture?) porn, but that's kinda related. Anyway, she mentioned to me once that she and her husband never, ever, ever had sex--that he'd bought her toys so he wouldn't have to fuck her. Even at the time, as a Super Virgin (like the super moon, but more frantic) I gawked at that. I remember very specifically her saying that to him, having sex with her was just like doing the dishes--another chore. He was heavy, and she couldn't have kids, and so this is what they had worked out. And it wasn't like...a thing, you know? She was perfectly happy to use her toys and he was perfectly happy in a sexless marriage. Allegedly--I mean, who really knows, but I'm still her friend on facebook, and they always post little jokes and quotes and stuff to each other. They seem pretty genuinely happy--or happy enough, I guess.

I frankly don't know why I'm thinking about this. Most writers have a point when they want to mention things, particularly bizarre, sexual anecdotes, but I don't. I guess I don't think I could live in a kind of arrangement like she had. I'd go crazy. I'm a physical person. I half think part of my issue tonight could be solved by a pretty good hug.

Still laundry. Still here.

permission to rough house?

Sometimes, I tell you what, I wish I was more descriptive in this blog. For example, the other weekend, I wish I had said:

This weekend, we went camping on a friend's farm. Friday night we set up along the bank of the Little Otter river and watched the moon rise silvery over the rapids. The smoke of our driftwood fire mingled with the fog creeping up the river and I stumbled around happily to find more. There was sand in my shoes, but I didn't mind. The rocks seemed very old. The following day I painted a porch white. Later, I followed a creek through to conclusion with good company and I saw mountain laurel blooming for the first time in my adult life, and there was more variety in their color, pale pink, white, soft purples, than I knew existed, and it was more beautiful than anything in the world, at least just then, just that day, at dusk.

--instead of just posting a picture of a picnic basket. I've been telling myself for years to be more explicit. So here's an explicit post:

Last night, I dreamed of an owl, which according to my various and sundry online dream dictionaries, could mean life change, wisdom, the unconscious desire, bad news, or financial doom. In the dream, which was otherwise bad, I loved and felt an odd connection to the random owl. He was huge, voluminous, brown, and had a head and beak that was oddly vulpine.  I saw him on a high pine branch and held out my arms, and he flew to me. He wasn't trying to hurt me, but he was so big and feathery, his wingtips brushed my face and neck when he landed. Even though he was perched on my wrists, I felt like my arms were full of him, an embrace of rustling softness and air and pure strength.

I got up and checked my email, breakfast, dishes, coffee. Things have been a little dire and I felt grim and in something of a mood. I decided to drive out for run at Augusta Springs. On my way, I finished my Augustan Burroughs audio book, Wolf at the Table, which is a memoir about how much his alcoholic father didn't love him. This is the third or fourth "memoir about alcoholic father" audiobook I've read since I started driving myself, (I sure know how to pick uplifting material, huh?) and I'm always startled to relate to them. There are certain behaviors that children of alcoholics exhibit, and it always makes me furious when I notice the one or two oddly specific ones I see in myself.. Fear of abandonment/worthlessness, deep anger issues? Okay, but fear of eating in front of another person? That just seems weirdly coincidental, and it bothers me, sticks in my mind.

The audiobook really went off the rails for me, when A.B himself, (it being read by the author) broke down at the end and began just sobbing into the recording. It would've been very moving if I had not been a great deal freaked out. There's something about driving out into the mountains alone to the sound of a grown man's uncontrollable weeping.*

Thus rattled, I ran. It started to rain. I thought about my life, my decisions, and my lack of spontaneous, symbolic owl hugs to make me feel better about all this. When I was done, I stripped down to my running bra and bare feet  and waded into the creek. The springwater was shockingly cold on my feet and legs--so cold that my skin actually steamed. I remembered being in Isaac's creek, down past the mountain laurel, and washing the moss and mud off my legs.

After that, I drove to town. Bought wine, tea tree oil, oyster mushrooms, avocados, and pickled okra. After a month of devil-may-care dietary tendencies, I'm suddenly famished. I go home, eat burgers, shower, and start to write. I'm working on this essay for an old professor of mine who got featured in a big literary magazine, and he wants me to do a little piece on him. When I get close with it, I'll post it here, because that somehow gives me a context for it and makes it seem easier.

I'm excited with what I'm making for dinner: tuna steak with lemon butter sauce, sauteed oyster mushrooms, and cous cous/vegetables. Yeah.





*Although to be fair, when I took my memoir class at Hollins, not a single class went by where there wasn't at least one girl who started crying. Cooky memoirists.

I was a tender age



 

New little blue apron. Broke it in on some pretty tasty burgers, and tomatoes with motz, chard and noodles and vegetables. 

 

 

Okay, now that I have posted gratuitous self-portraits...feelings.

Feelings right now are very damp. I had a good run today--not that I did well, but it was very enjoyable. The cat brier is sending out shoots, and they're very good to eat--they taste a bit tart and sprout-like.  I always want to collect them and use them in a stir fry, but as it is, I ate them along the trail. They're high in vitamin C, and I must be craving it.

I love cat brier. It's never as vicious as blackberry, and I like how the thorns start out soft and flexible. They harden into real thorns in July, but for now, they're green, and you can brush up against them with impunity. I like thorns. Some of the best scars I have are from thorns.

This sounds vaguely poetic or metaphorical, but I mean it plainly. I keep saying that I'm actually a very simple girl.

Oh, internet, I do not feel so good. I thought I had run too hot dehydrated and made myself sick, but now more and more I'm starting to have that feverish sheets-hurts-my-skin feeling. What if I'm actually stupid, and self-deluded, and good at nothing?All day I've felt weak, small, and not good enough, and now I am wondering if my body was not just also turning on me.

I really wanted to write a good post, but now maybe I will just lie very still and re-read old fanfics, like the coolest person alive.