an incomplete list of things I've done

In a little over 24 hours, I have roasted three pumpkins, baked two pumpkin pies, roasted a chicken with mashed potatoes, cooked homemade gravy, sauteed asparagus, spaghetti squash, brewed a giant stock, and made homemade chicken noodle soup with said stock. I vacuumed, swept, scrubbed the kitchen into unrecognizable shape, cleaned and organized the upstairs, cleaned the bathroom, did all the laundry and put it away, and cleaned the steps and wood floors with orange and clove oil so everything smells festive. I scrubbed the baseboards.

Now I'm out of things to aggressively domesticate. What will happen next?

I keep thinking I should post one of my dramatic, emotional status updates, but I don't have it in me, and I probably said everything my last post. I guess I'm a little spaced out these days.

full by your count

To be honest, lonely little blog, I could use some good news. I'd settle for even just one week this month that didn't feature a day that involved coming home to briefly sob on the floor of my kitchen. I know lately all I've poured into this empty portion of the internet of mine has been misery, vagueness, and whining, but you have to know when you're beat, and God, am I ever beat. Surrender makes for stale blog fodder.

I cleaned house. I lit some incense and took a shower. I shaved my legs. I resisted the urge to re-read the entirety of Star Wars Yoda: Dark Rendezvous (A Clone War Novel.) (Dooku has some great lines.) I listened to some shitty Bon Iver. I need to write, but everything comes up useless and clotted, fit for nothing except to be tucked away here.

now I understand on better terms since Burmingham

I'm home for the weekend. Last night I couldn't sleep in sort of the old fashioned sense--I tossed and turned and thought sad, furtive thoughts. At some point, I got up and looked out the window of my old room where I'm staying. The trees were all swallowed up in mist and darkness, but even sunk under so much cloudcover, the full moon gave everything an eerie blue cast. I don't have a picture, so I'm writing it here. When I was imagining this lunation in my mind days earlier, I thought it would be bright and shining, sort of absorbing negativity. It's in Taurus--a comfortable moon. Astrology is total bunk except when it's something bad or hurtful. I think I always sleep poorly on a full moon because of the extra light.

My dad told me this story this weekend about when he was about 8 or so. He was living on his grandmother's farm in Michigan. His father and uncle had gone off to war, and his grandfather had just died in an automobile accident, so it was him and his brothers and sisters and cousins all living under one big roof with both their mothers working to make ends meet in his grandmother's restaurant. One day, my dad's grandmother gave him a BB gun to drive off the rabbits that were getting into the garden. Being a little boy, he immediately wanted to hunt everything. He knew this place where this gigantic horned owl roosted, and so he got it in his mind that he would go and shoot the thing.

 He found the place, and the owl, which flew down very obligingly and let him creep up on it. He got very close--closer than he'd ever been to an owl. But right when he was about to shoot it, it flew off about a hundred yards deeper into the forest. He followed. It flew off again, and seemed to wait for him on a rotting stump. It went on like this--the owl "leading" him deeper and deeper into a frozen swamp in the middle of nowhere in small town Michigan. He realized soon he was miles from home and lost.

It seemed like the build-up for some backwoods fairytale, or a parable, but my dad just ended the story saying he didn't end up ever shooting the owl, and by the time he found his way home, it was long after dark, and he had frostbite starting on his toes. Maybe just a story of hunting for a Hunter's moon, but my mind keeps returning to it.

the best way to love the world is to think of leaving it

Well, shit. Bad things come in...threes? Fives? Somethings. The thing is, it's all starting to be funny again. It's all rolling back around to morbidly hilarious. Yeah. Okay.

nothing but pills and ashes

I had this dream that I was walking through familiar forests with some friends. I recognized them as the woods behind my parent's house, but deeper into winter than they probably are now: empty, brown stickwoods. I came out over the hill and found that the pond there had been recently drained. We walked down into the empty basin of it, passed the crumbling ruin of the little dock. There was all kinds of trash at the bottom--dead, scummed-over leaves, old miller bottles, tangles of fishing line and tackle. I walked to the far bank, away from my friends, and my eye caught on something pale white stuck under a tangle of large branches. It was my own dead body. All of the sudden in my dream-logic I remembered having previously drowned myself there, and forgotten, like my suicide was a project I'd started and then put down. But the weird thing is, I was so embarrassed. I tried to play it really casually and walk off the other way, hoping my friends wouldn't notice, change the subject, suggest another route. It was almost funny.

I've started so many posts here recently, so many vague, stupid little stunted things. Confessionals and distractions. I wrote pages about standing in line at the pharmacy at walmart only to find that they hadn't called in my desperate little prescription after all. I've been thinking a lot about what I say and don't say in this, and in my life. I'm vague, I half-say everything. But now it's too much. I feel like I pulled my ripcord and realized I wasn't wearing a parachute. I feel literal, nuclear.

chickens get a taste of your meat

Tonight, I've been writing up letters alone in my little cold house. I had this big idea, and then, all the sudden, I kept thinking of pumpkin pie: all the ones I've ever made, and the ones I thought I had wanted to make in the future.  The ones I was looking forward to making. I watched this show with my parents at home once about how pumpkin is the most desirable scent--they did some study. But I'll tell you the truth: it's not pumpkin. Talk about smells: after two washings, the sleeve of this my new nice shirt still smells like catfish from this weekend. I remember how confident I used to feel when I was a little girl fishing for catfish with my dad: unhooking them, touching their sides. How special and good and unbroken, enthusiastically in my element. I really want to remember how I feel right now this minute, too, though it's the opposite of all that. I really want to grind it in.