For the next 5-6 days, this becomes a travel blog. Call the papers.

I leaned on the wall and the wall leaned away--can I get a minute and not be nervous and not thinking of my

I call this, another in my series of photos instead of real thought-out entries: self portrait on the kitchen floor while waiting for the rice to finish at the end of December.

here I am with my hand

Sometimes I think there's something wrong with me for how intensely happy it makes me to unload the dishwasher. Especially when they're all hot and warm and dry. Guh. I'm such a dork.

*

A thing I've been doing recently is running a ton, but not recording my time at all. It's really helped me get out of the destructive mindset of "I am not fast enough" and back into enjoying running. I also notice I tend to run a lot longer when I'm not paying attention to all that. What felt like a twenty minute run today turned out to be over six miles in a little under an hour, which is in no way un-ordinary, but it made me feel good to realize.

*

I really like the swing on my front porch. The one good thing about this lukewarm, stupid, not-snow weather is sitting on it today and looking at my little yard. Thinking about the things I'll plant and the food I'll grow.

*

But what am I even gonna wear tomorrow?

*

Okay, seriously though, I'm exhausted.

Lights in the night

Fire from a knife part II

My brother made this, including hammering out the pattern on the steel top. It used to be a pickle jar.

My parents and this year's fawn in her winter browns.

I promise a real entry soon, maybe even tonight once I've had a martini and mopped the floor until I feel more like myself.

hail Mary full of grace
our Lord is with you
blessed are you among women

and blessed is the fruit of your womb
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death

Happy Christmas

Fire from a knife

Updates

After a weepy, icy birthday, a lukewarm feverish Christmas week. Feeling ugly, down, and unyuleish. Curled up on the floor in a pile of jack russel terriers until further notice.

Today, walking in high mountains in the middle of nowhere, I met a blonde woman out hawking her juvenile red hawk. She was wearing a Norway hat and looked familiar. On talking to her, I realized I knew her. I had played in her house in Northern Virginia as a little girl probably 24-25 years ago: a feature of one of my earliest memories.

Small world, huh?

still its a shock, shock, to your soft side

I was feeling a touch demoralized as I left work today. I'd stayed late, stupidly, futzing with InDesign which kept crashing until I was actually going backward in progress. I finally decided there was nothing for it and that it was time to go home.

I crashed outside into the cold night and grumped the block to the parking garage that I hate. Half-there, I cracked open my dumb bubble water because I really wanted it. I thought about my pepper spray, detached from its usual place on my keychain after my last run and in the bottom of my purse. The parking garage is on the classical "bad part of downtown" and I've had to brandish my spray at a creep there before. Now that I'm parking there again, I'm always pretty careful, especially when I work late.

Anyway, I headed into the deserted deck, and as if on cue, I saw this man coming toward me. A white guy, dressed entirely in black and wearing a black winter skullcap so I could only see his face. Even from a distance, I could tell he was looking at me in a way that rubbed me wrong. He was my height or shorter, but big. I sized him up, morbid wagers. Shorter men that I don't know make me uneasy as a rule; I know too well from my dating days in college that some seem to take rejection from tall girls with macho over-reaction and, rarely, violence. As his path took him parallel with me, heading in the direction I'd just come, I kept my eyes straight ahead, keeping him in my periphery, alert for any sudden movements. Weighing my options for fight or flight the way I think all women do when placed in a situation like that.

I stepped up my stride, wanting to put him behind me, and suddenly, he called out, "I think you dropped something!"

I whirled, awkwardly, startled. What? Had a misjudged him? Was this a benign exchange that I imbued with womanly, frightened paranoia? I scanned the pavement behind me, my mind blank and buzzing. Nothing. I hadn't heard anything drop. My eyes darted up to his face in question.

He clutched his chest dramatically, walking backward away. "My heart."

Dear reader, I tell you in that moment, I blossomed with the purest fury. My can crunched in my hand. I produced a noise of incredulous anger. I think I would have thrown the dumb bubble water can at his face if the rage hadn't been so sudden and stunning, almost incapacitating. His laugh cut off abruptly when he saw my face, mixture of fear and wild anger, and he quickly went on his way.

I guess it was just that the idiot had scared me, you know? I'd gotten spooked with the dark and isolation. A dumb pickup line is the thing a graceful woman dismissively laughs off, and I was fine. Nothing had happened to me, and I would walk the remaining stretch to my car in unmolested silence.

My dad said a funny thing to me this weekend--genuinely funny, not funny like talk too much about it on your dumb blog funny. I don't actually remember the context; I had done something of which he approved--something bravado-ish. He was joking with my mom, had me proudly by one shoulder, claiming me. He declared that I had turned out so much like him, that I was just the female version of him. My mom rolled her eyes, and mugging for her, he told me in a theatrical aside: "Aww, I'm sorry I couldn't make you a man, sweetie."

I like the woman package. I like my long hair and my breasts. I glow under the affirmation of a loved one. I'm a sucker for chivalry. I like to be nurturing or dainty in turns. I wear skirts. I buy that old-fashioned stuff about learning to be a hostess, to be graceful and a creature of great household efficiency, and I think there's value in my abilities there. Secretly, very secretly, I think I'd like being a mom, and that I'd make an okay one. I like these things about myself.

But sometimes, also, being a girl really sucks. I hate not being able to go places alone (my standard setting) or coming off as helpless, clingy, needy, or weak. I hate crying, and the way I do it sometimes even when I'm desperately trying not to.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I guess it was just a stupid thing, and it made me feel weak and shitty, so I wanted to write it out. I'm tired, a little lost, and okay, this week, go ahead and take your point. Shuffle, deal again.

but I'm just made

I must've looked like a busted up bitch today. No makeup, pretty nice facial bruise from taking a faceshot in combat this weekend. I feel like a busted up bitch from today. I don't know if I'm really looking older or if this is part of my usual pre-birthday week freakout. I'm coming along. It was lukewarm on my run tonight but my ears were cold. I need to remember my small maintenances like a hat and gloves, but I don't.

I feel small and vulnerable tonight, a far cry from the big smashy girl of the last couple days. I can't seem to get into the right headspace. I think I read--or listened to--the wrong thing on the car drive home through the snow tonight. The repetitive beat of the flurries against my hot windshield, nursing my brokeass car home. I want to stretch out tonight and work my body hard, but I feel so feeble doing my little floor exercises. What I really want is a treadmill--or a gym again. I don't know.

I have lost my eyesight like I said I would, but I still know

 This weekend I lit the little moss/jar lanterns I made for my mom and sat outside on my parents deck and thought about all this month and the lessons of my gratitude experiment. Being thankful for those little things like life, light and warmth on a cold night.

This has been a good exercise, even if it's been especially vivid, at times. Feeling anything is a good change, though.  Last winter, when I was so dissolved, I floated around in an emotionless fog, got lost wiping down counters. I'm different now in a lot of ways.

Spacing out is a thing I just did, though, leaning in the doorway of my dining room and looking at my floors and surfaces. Not loss or grief,  but just thinking and looking at my materials. The great tally of the things that are important or not, the tightropes of expectation I'm always trying not to hang on. The rain pounding against the house.

*

Friday: I appreciate my past, which has felt at times like my constant, grim companion this month. The things I left behind and the things that I lost. Sometimes it feels like this fragile egg I can't open without shattering. I've tried to learn from it, to put everything into scale. I know it's made me harder, sharper, brighter.

Saturday: I'm thankful for my health. This season there have been almost constant reminders about how fragile the human body can be, and how easily things can feel tipped over into something life-changing and irreversible. I've bitched endlessly about my calf injury this fall, but at the same time, I've realized how blessed I am to be able to be as active as I want, to jump fences and throw myself over creeks without even thinking. I don't look when I jump. It doesn't consume me. Even when I'm anxious and wild, I can feel this steady reliable persistence to my body. I feel it working. This little warm animal of myself that likes good, healthy, things, and behaves, responds, beats, wants.When I tilt my head back, now, my hair is long enough to nearly brush the top of my ass.

Sunday: Thankful for my fine tribe, the loved ones who make up such a strong support during these dark and wonderful months.

Tonight, gosh, tonight. I staggered off my front porch to go for a run I was almost rabid with desire for, and yelled "are you fucking kidding me?" at the sky as a sudden summer-level downpour poured down cartoonishly on me. I looked over just in time to meet the eyes of the sweet young blonde mother who is my next door neighbor, her two little toddler boys in tow. A great impression I made, doubtless, yelling at the clouds.

Later, I lay down on the floor of the bath and filled up the tub with the shower going.

I know-- I have three thankful-fors left, and I'm trying to make them very good. Happy fall. I survived November. I have a lot to be thankful for. Here is a picture of my face and body and fence, and I look like I'm the cover of a country mall photo kiosk.

My brother & the fox

I'm thankful for the kind of heedless joy and total exhaustion that comes from being used as a piece of playground equipment by several wild little hooligan girlchildren all day. Oh my gosh. We all want to be carried? At once? And you know how to climb a tall girl like a tree? And what's this next game called? Endless running?

So fun, though. I grew up with boys, and when I ever have kids, I would adore any, but man, do I have a soft spot for tomboy girls who like to play outside.

I'm thankful for a beautiful early snow day. I've just finished three different styles of pumpkin pie, and am waiting for them to bake, drinking a spiced lager, and mulling over the day. Also mulling wine.

I know, concentric rings in the bones aside, we've surely grown up

I'm thankful for my job, for as much tumult as it's cost me, especially recently. Even just dipping my little toe into the waters of holiday retail tonight made me sympathetic and grateful for my office with the door that closes (and locks), my big windows, my choose-your-own adventure schedule. That's not to say that it's perfect, or even reasons to stay, but I appreciate those things. If it snows tomorrow, I'll work from home. So many people will be put in dangerous situations to get to a job tomorrow, and I carelessly don't even have to think about it. I'm extremely blessed.

It isn't that I think it's somehow beneath me to work retail or food service. I got my first coffeeshop job at age 16, and I put myself through college and then grad school foaming lattes. It was hard work--on my feet for 6 or 7 hours rushing around--and it was good for me. I talked about some of that in a previous post. It taught me to speak up, to be compassionate, to listen, and to try and understand people better. I also got really good at making coffee. You should see my latte art.

I've been thinking about my first coffeeshop a lot lately. Gosh, I was so little. I didn't know anything outside of the sheltered Christian school microbubble that was so poisonous and lonely to my tiny shy starwars pop jerkoff teenager brain. Then, almost overnight, I was working at this wild new place with public school kids and real adults, people who were so different and intriguing!The star-eyed, bewildered spectacle I made of myself was almost cliche. In particular, there were these two bored twenty-somethings that worked there, Dan and Juli. (I think it was Juli. Something with a cool i ending.)

They seemed to know each other in a way that wasn't clear to me. Dan was super tall, a happy, stoned, sandy-hair vandal. His ambitions included "be really good at spray-painting." Juli, though, was incredible. She was Japanese, with dark, liquid eyes, chin-length hair, a koi tattoo. (Can't even.) She was studying some kind of medical thing at George Mason. Exacting, gorgeous, and terrifying. My manager.

I didn't really know how to treat them, because I wasn't super exposed to young adults, especially not cool ones. The only few I'd ever really encountered were like youth pastors or praise team guitar players in church, which were to be admired at a worshipful distance and not spoken to. I was shy, and I really had no reason to interact with even older teens. I assumed I should treat these twenty-something-year-olds sort of like a cross between a teacher and a Young Life coordinator, and did accordingly, obedient, well-behaved, and meek as ever, waiting for any pearls of wise, spiritual advice to drop out.

One day, Juli was training me on the milk wand. Dan was doing nothing, as ever. We never really seemed to have customers at that place. Every now and then, Juli would cast Dan looks of scalding fury. Mad about him not closing up the shop very good last night, I guess. I was too young and clueless to recognize the body language. I realize, of course, now that Juli and Dan were most certainly hate-fucking--disappearing into the backroom for long periods of time while I naively scraped dried syrup off the wall and tunelessly mouthed the lyrics of Goo Goo Dolls songs. Anyway, between icy silences and loud sighs, she showed me how to grasp the wand with a damp rag and carefully position it above the surface of the milk to create a thick layer of foam on top. It didn't occur to me then, but later, I would see how the whole process is somewhat....well.

To the massive surprise of no one at all, I really fucked it up. Hot half-foamed milk sprayed all over me. Juli sputtered with rage, looked at my spattered apron, and hissed "You look like you've been to see DAN!" Murderous glare thrown back in his general lounging direction.

"Whaaat?" I remember saying, even as I got it, and blushed so hard I could feel my cheeks burning down. Mentally, dying: ahhhhhhhhhhh as my brain tried to reconcile this. Ahhhhh. Because it looks like cum.

Now, though, it's pretty funny! Oh, Dan. I wonder where they are now. Anyway, long anecdote, but I am really happy for the jobs I've had, the good and bad, and the things I've learned from them.

I'm a genuine little monster today, hungry in all the least flattering ways, tripping over my words and feet, lurking about. A little bit of a mood--not a bad one, but distinct. I think there's snow coming in.

My month of saying the things I'm thankful for here is drawing toward a close. I like a lot about doing it: being more forcefully positive and appreciating the good things that fill my life. I've tried to think about little, specific overlookable things as much as the big ticket items.

This is a bit silly, but I also like that it's reminded me to post more--a trend I'd like to keep up in December.

Tonight I'm grateful for small, hopeful things: an easy, healthy dinner, clothes laid out, lunch packed and bag ready, a clean kitchen. I'm thankful for fresh flowers by my kitchen sink I bought myself that make me happy when I wash dishes, for sparkly green nail paint.

I'm not yet used to the noise the wind makes whipping around the corner of the house here. Being up on a hill, it sounds like the whole world is coming in. There's a Cheshire cat smile moon up, and it's hard to think about snow when it's still almost sixty. I just remembered a really dumb hairstyle I used to do back in high school when my hair was long, and so I put it up, dorkily, and now I'm listening to the wind.

I say there's got to be some good reason

Friday: thankful for late-night oreo cookie iced cream, for the end of a hard week
Saturday: thankful for reliable fires

Sunday: the jury is still out on Sunday.

I feel a bit unsettled, anxious, antsy, but still weak and low energy from my cold. Getting out would probably improve things, but I worry a bit about making my health worse. I want to restlessly organize, but it feels like doing so would probably only result in my condemning lots of perfectly-acceptable items to the goodwill bin.

I think for now I'll say I'm thankful for quinoa, and the nice mountains I've doubtlessly already thanked for, where I'm off to go for a lighter longer run just now.

Tonight, I'm thankful for the red. I'm thankful for this blog, which as much as I abuse it, helps me think about things and reflect on my actions and feelings and remember things. I'm thankful for my support systems in this time of year that can be so hard and dark, especially when shit hits the fan like it did so utterly today. I'm thankful for my oversized Captain John Smith t-shirt, which is so comfortable, even if I am to be a mercenary.

Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Rally behind the Virginians.

Poor General Barnard Bee. So many demerits at West Point, one of the very first generals to die in the Civil War, and all he gets remembered for is accidentally complimenting a guy he was actually using his last moments to bitch about.

"There stands Jackson like a stone wall" sounds great, but in context, he meant that he'd just begged Stonewall Jackson to come help him and his men, who were being overrun by Union force. Jackson responded with a no. (Well, to be fair, he basically said "you have bayonets, handle the charge yourself")  Bee's brave, desperate, and often-quoted speech wasn't to implore his men to follow Jackson's amazing example and rally from that. He was saying, "Look, we aren't getting any help, might as well go out hard." And he did--he was mortally wounded seconds after speaking those words.

Speaking of Old Blue Lights, though, I visited General Jackson's grave in Lexington, where he lived before the war, when I went there a couple weeks back to see Jen. I've got a bit of a thing for Civil War generals. The graveyard was oddly run down and mountain-grim. One of the old granite box tombs was cracked open, and we could see something that looked a lot like bones inside. Jackson's monument thing was sort of interesting. People had thrown lemons all around it in tribute; the legend goes that he loved lemons, and fresh fruit of any kind, and his soldiers would often remark on it. It made me wonder who was bringing them, who came to the grave regularly to put fresh lemons down for a man who'd been dead over a hundred years.

I much prefer Bee's memorial on the Manassas Battlefield. You walk straight back, and there's a thicket and deep emerald green woods where I always would see the same doe and fawns.

So today (yesterday, really, but posting today) I'm thankful for Virginia, and for having a homeland not only so beautiful, but rich in history and people and stories.

281 north Howland call KHAQQ beyond north

Thankful for my small rituals of personal salvation, among them: bad day new lipstick. "Euphoria" is the shade.

I'm thankful for my mom, who never minds my diatribes, confessionals, inadequacies, or irrational grumpiness. Especially on the kind of Monday wherein a lesser girl might be tempted to kick a harassingly-solicitous Trader Joe's employee in the shins and run weeping from a store.

I know I already posted my thankful for today, but I thought of an extra one. I am standing in my kitchen and waiting for my onions to caramelize, and wearing my favorite apron. It is double-sided, blue, green, and pink and covered in little frogs. I like it better than my great grandmother's delicate, floral waist apron, my cool blue ruffley vintage one, the lace one that looks more like a negligée than a cooking tool, the dumb hot lips one--a gift--that says "I kiss better than I cook" (I can only be good at one?) Anyway, I like it so much not because I think cartoon frogs and lily pads are the height of good taste, but because of the woman who gave it to me.

When I was a junior/senior in college, I worked at this shitty little coffeeshop in the communication building. It wasn't an easy job--we'd get slammed at the juncture of classes and have a line of 40 people stretching around the corner and out the door. There were usually two of us on shift, three if we were lucky enough that the lazy, snaggletoothed harpie who managed the business would emerge from her backroom dungeon to give us a little backup. It was my second job in addition to my 22 hour courseload, and stressful, but I had a broke-ass car to fix up and a mile of student loans. The kids we served--my Lynchburg college fellows--were nasty as shit to us, often having waited a long time and impatient or late already for class.

My sole cellmate in this frappe hell was a woman in her late thirties. She was big, with fuzzy orange hair, a take-no-shit attitude, and a single mom from a trailer park. This coffee job--my martyrdom fill-in-the-cracks-of-higher-education employment--was the primary means of income for her and her elementary school son.

 I did not get the feeling she liked me so much. She had something negative to say about everything I did, and her sole topic of conversation: the great unhappiness and dissatisfaction of her life, of which I contributed. Not that I didn't have my bones to pick with her: she called me--from the moment I introduced myself as another name to the last time I ever saw her-- "Jessie." What was more, she had this habit that many women I encounter have: of randomly and insultingly making comments about my body, as if my height and fitness level make me immune to having any kind of feelings or body issues in my own right. Calling me a stick, or beanpole, or that I should eat more, or criticizing my lunch choices, or what. Nobody enjoys this, baggage or no, and I resented it. I judged her as ignorant Lynchburg trailer trash, and watched her scornfully as she drawled and lost and wolfed down candy bars and 22 ounce Pepsi's, with a quiet superiority that I didn't earn or deserve.

Because of my schedule, I'd often come from class or my other job, and not be quite dressed for eight hours of slogging through minimum wage food service. Particularly, the health code regulation about needing to constantly have a bleach bucket on hand for rags was troublesome, and it wasn't long before everything I owned was covered in bleach stains. To this day I can locate the few surviving garments of this era that remain in my wardrobe by searching for the little white constellations of stain that pattern the hip of each.

So this is the backstory of the day that my seemingly antagonist presented me with this apron that I'm wearing now, as an out of nowhere, beautiful, thoughtful gift. She had been working on it for a while, and picked out the fabric specially because something about the happy frogs had reminded her of me. I didn't even know she could sew.

She still bitched and fussed at me. I was still, probably, an entitled, Northern Virginia little ingrate, missing my multitude of blessings and advantages for the fact that some graphic design major just yelled at me over a mocha. But sometimes it just takes a small act of kindness to jolt somebody out of their perspective, and I'm thankful for that, and the lesson there, then and now.

when it sings to itself or whatever it does

Yesterday was a really good day, spent cleaning up my friend's to-be meadhall. I know, vaguely, how to paint: put paint on brush, apply, but I have never been particularly good at it and always been a little frustrated by my (mostly outdoor) applications. But yesterday I think I finally at least started to get the hang of it, and I had a good teacher explain some of the finer points. Now I keep noticing places I want to touch up around the house here, and I feel a lot more confidant in starting a project like that. So I'm thankful for a day of good work, learning, and friends.

Today I'm thankful for a quiet day to catch up on house chores.

The rain came in early today, spoiling my run. It was supposed to be twelve miles, so I don't know that I can make it up during the week in one go. There's about one hour of morning daylight before the time I really should get a move on for work, and I'm not that fast. Otherwise, things have been nice and productive. I finally found and bought some curtains I like, so I hung those, mopped the floors, did some laundry, washed the sheets, and generally tidied. I'm going to roast my first chicken of the season and do a side of asparagus and a prosciutto/red onion/swiss chard dish that I think I saw in my old lady housekeeper magazine but I might just be making up. Half my hair is up in a long braid over my shoulder and the other half has fallen out of said braid.  

Later I might make a little mead, or conquer the Celts, or read an old story: who knows?

I'm the new blue blood

I'm thankful for my long, stupid body, its strength, health, tricks, trials, improper balance, and height.

My hair is getting proper long.

we will repeat this message, we will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait,

Today, I'm grateful for a house with heat that works in spite of my ice cold, for hard knuckles, for bitter beer.

I'm thankful for my little busted Volvo station wagon: thoroughly uncool, needs an oil change, but still able to accelerate out of the playful side-swipe of an inattentive eighteen wheeler.

I'm thankful for my grandfather, the Lieutenant Colonel. A lot of things in my very military family would have been different if he hadn't served. Right now, he himself would be different. I talked to him tonight on the phone, and he kept laughing with obvious happiness at the sound of my recognizable voice, but unable to say more than these joyful, stunted "yeah... yeah... yeah.." because of the long-term damage from the agent orange he was exposed to in Vietnam. He couldn't tell me where his middle son and wife were taking him to dinner, or how his Veteran's day had been, or my name, or his. I remember before he got bad, he was so sharp, so practical and productive: he used to tell me gruffly, his highest piece of praise: "Keep up the good work." He could be brutally hard on us kids--harder still on my father.

He has grown soft and affectionate as this health issue has taken hold of him. My mom sometimes tells me that she thinks this is a blessing, in a way, that he's so much gentler now for my little cousins' childhood. She tells me stories of the way he used to be as if I didn't live them, as if I didn't know how he used to be when I was growing up. Scornful, contemptuous, exacting. The Tank Commander in everything, barking orders, getting things done, filling up a room with his personality. He was always telling you how something could be done better or more efficiently, how a lack might be turned into an opportunity. This is the same man who as a boy used to wait on the front porch for my worthless drunk of a great grandfather to come home so he could knock him senseless so he didn't beat my great grandmother.

Tonight, I also talked my grandmother, the woman I try so hard to emulate. I feel a kind of kinship with her beyond my hero-worship of her charm, tact, hospitality, grace, and her sheer, womanly grit. Fire in a man can be a beautiful thing. I think she loved my grandfather for being the commander, the war hero. I think she chose him for those hard traits.

I'm thankful for my family and all the facets that make up this weird, beautiful unit of which I am a piece. I'm thankful for the sound of geese flying over head, for little reminders, for a clean sink.

wake me up when the bluebells are ringing

Top of the list of things I should've already learned is that putting my hands to work is a fine antidote to feeling irrationally miserable, unwanted, and chaotic. I'm thankful for that.

and I'm not afraid to die

Grateful for a good run, a pretty warm day, and a blue sky,

last night I dreamed that you and I had words, Cyprian

Haven't forgotten, just haven't had much of a voice the last few days. There's this detached, off-dry part of myself going, like, "Really, Jessica? We're doing this again?"

Friday: grateful for my little brother, a calmer, wiser male expression of my genes.
Saturday: grateful for the unexpected, and for the sharper lessons I should've learned a long time ago
Today:  post about today later once I've had a little more of it.

day 6

Feeling a little deflated, so I'll post this now while I can still gather myself into some coherency:

I am thankful for directness, and I'm thankful that this week is almost done.

even still you're calling me: not tonight, Josephine

White sycamore trunks, ice water, quiet.

Day 4

I'm thankful for the 6:45 AM sunrise that lets me at least get a little sunlight in before starting the day.

push me around a bit, shake my pockets, I store everything in my mouth

Dreams of my death seem to be a November trope, but last night, they left me with this weird, raw feeling. All day I've just wanted secretly to be pretty, which seems like the shallowest, stupidest thing, and a poor reaction to vivid imaginings of death by exsanguination. I feel self-conscious. Maybe it's a fierce little counter-surge to mortality. (Or maybe it's this hot new red bra putting a bit of extra fire in my chest.)

I'm thankful for hot new red bras in the face of death unpredictable joys, hot pink dregs in the sky from a leftover sunset, scalding hot alive showers.

Day 2

Today, I am thankful that my mother raised me to be the kind of woman who gets it done. I am also thankful for cut grass.

wear the blood in our cheeks like red roses

First snow out west over the mountains, but it hasn't come in yet. I'm watching it on radar like a creep. Today was good. I had a really nice time getting outside, even if it was chilly and throwing rain in my face the whole time. I guess the long run and afterward wandering gave me a lot of time to think.

I feel like Augusta Springs is mine a little, in the same jokey, earnest way I recognize. My mom used to say Burke Lake was hers back in the days when she would drop my brother and I at our grandmothers so she could get out and run for an hour. Hers like "What are these people doing in my private park?!" on busy days. A good joke for a kid. She would go every day when I was little, if she could, and run it twice to make ten miles. She's said that place saved her life--saved it from us, my dad, everything closing in, I guess.

It's not that Augusta is an escape quite in the same way as running was for her, I don't have little accidental kids. But I do love it so much. It's so quiet and solitary, all my memories there are the happiest, and I do feel like I found it just when I needed it most. I prefer it in winter: the starkness, the cold sharp light, the known path, and the way the clouds sort of slide down to fill it on really bone-chilling days. I always run more than I expect to there because of the way the circle divides up. It's so easy to say, "Oh, I'll just run a little more." I love it best in early March.

I don't do well this time of year. It feels like a confluence; I can't tell the chicken from the egg in ordering the bad things and my terrible reactions that cause and surround them. Am I such a poor little Viking that the sun goes away and I get sick for missing it, or have I just had an unlucky couple winters? What's the normal range there? I guess it's been on my mind recently.

But the thing I kept returning to as I was running today, and turning it over in my mind, was how much it's all my own fault. I have a hard time when I don't listen, pay enough attention, or think about other people's perspectives. I get deeper in when I don't eat and take bad care of myself. I can't not take responsibility for my energy. I don't know if this pops up more in winter, when the light is gone, but it doesn't matter if it does or not.

I see that some things are just lightning strikes. I had one of those last year, with my health, but I also had a whole hell of a lot of landslide I brought down on my own head. I feel like trying to excuse myself because of the freak accidents is missing the point somehow. So, anyway, I know it's not lent, but I really focused today on the alternative of winter crushing. Rather: what I could be doing to make my life a productive thing. Even if I spent every day of the next forever years picking up dumb beer cans, the smallest thing I could do, that would make somebody's life fractionally better. So I need to focus on that stuff, and not trap myself in this sunless mire for the next two month. (Just got to make it 'til my birthday, anyway, and then it'll start getting lighter. Plus then I'll be too old for it to matter.)

In the meantime, I need to remember to be thankful. So that'll be my month.

On...sort of an unrelated note, I have a backlog of dumb pictures, so here they are:

Halloween front porch.

One of the only trees that hadn't peaked was the red oak. The drive was just through a forest of blood.

Doesn't it look good enough to eat? It's almost certainly frost-killed by the time I'm typing these words, only 6 hours later.

So true story: I used to be afraid of this plant (some kind of sumac) because when I was little (like first-memory-near kind of little) I reached out to touch one, and a wasp was sitting on it, and stung my fingertip. And from that day forth I haven't touched this plant. Until today.

Spoils to decorate the mantle, trash bag, rage lines, running attire.

I love sycamores this time of year. Better than weirwoods.

Somedays, even one's lucky blue dragon underpants aren't enough.

Feeling a little down/quiet, so I'm posting some of my projects from today...

Is that newly polished chestnut flooring? Why, it is. And newly polished/rearranged bar to go with it. This is not a great endorsement for how smart I am, but those curtains took me an hour to jury-rig. 

Potting pansies with a chocolate stout.

Made some little matched planters of fall pansies and swiss chard. They are sweet.

Bachelor Girl Update, Day 6:

My manic can't-run-but-must-exercise walking (almost ten miles in under 24 hours) has combined with my forgetting to eat to turn me into a shaky, weak mess. So now I'm slamming scrambled eggs into my mouth like a genuine crazy person. My leg hurts, but that's old news. I have Taylor Swift stuck in my head. Today I'll brew mead in my basement, do some recreational cleaning, and maybe, if I'm good, buy myself some landscape plants to put into the yard.

So anyway, feeling pretty good.

red-breasted

 

Here's a dumb selfie I took this weekend. In which a girl drew that on my face at a festival, in which I wear my special green camping vest, in which my hair's getting too long to fit in a frame.

 



I'm dressed a little rock and roll today: strappy, tight black pants and boots, but I don't feel rock and roll. I feel all raw abs and like breathing maybe has been more successful for me in the past than right now. Some of this is probably the weather, and some of this was trying and failing to speed-run in ankle deep mud and cold water yesterday. I'm eating some beans for lunch and thinking about laundry. My mom says I never wear my hair up, but I am today, and I do a lot, especially when I'm alone in my room, eating dumb beans, and thinking about laundry.

It's been so wet. It makes the color of the trees changing out on the mountain I can see out my window look sort of fresh and vivid. Mt Doom. I sort of want to be picked up. The race did not go great, but I was glad I did it. I didn't expect the terrain. I should've checked it out beforehand, but I guess it wouldn't have made a lot of difference unless I'd checked it out months ago and drastically changed my approach. But such things.

Doesn't my dreamy, lovey post from Sunday seem a little stupid now after this childish temper tantrum crying breakdown of a week? I tell you what, I did see every inch of that stupid blood moon eclipse Wednesday morning. I woke up long before it started, around 4am, and I watched the ragged moon drag its sorry shape over every stage of the sky from shadowy crescent to a full swollen scab that finally broke on the purple line of the mountains. I hated every second of it. I tried to sleep through it.

so c'mon now, don't make me cry; everything you say has water under it

lifeboats
reeses cups
not getting it
waiting rooms
sugar maples
cups made out of red glass
pity in an english accent
quartz (redundant)
green glass beads
smoke signals
white undershirts
ignorance of cards
disregard of stars
organized paint
fall mornings
not over-doing it
foam-rolling
black wild rice (butterfly rice)
sharp nails
boots
superhero panties
vengeful depths
dap
missing the point (see: not getting it)
leather bracelets
wine red pansies
clouds on the mountains
white pumpkins

wednesday overplay

My leg turns to sparkles, my leg turns to pins,
I better get my shit together, I better gather my shit in,
You can drive a car through my head in five minutes
From one side of it to the other.

A proper storm out tonight. The rain is making such a racket, wind beating against the sides of the house. I feel a little nervous, a little manic, a little sad. I'm playing with a bear claw necklace, a gift from someone who hated me, and thinking about taking it apart, thinking dark thoughts about myself and my place among things.

This house is just so loud in the rain, or the rain is that hard. Today was sort of just little disappointments, things I shouldn't overthink, or should improve my attitude about. I worked out, but didn't run, and that's probably half my current issue, but like I said: it was raining. Do you ever notice my sentences go on too long?

I'm looking forward to a nice cool grey Tuesday.

you were a miracle I was just holding your space

I bet you'd thought I'd given this old thing up, huh? No, no. I've been moving and so it has felt like every free moment at night is taken up with unpacking or reorganizing something, and anything else is indulgence. In fact, it still does feel that way, even now, but I was engaging in a little recreational mopping tonight. I've mopped myself in and now I'm waiting for my floor to dry, so...

Once it's fully installed, I'll post some pictures of my little white hilltop house. For now, I feel a little soft tonight--not melancholy, a word I always misspell, but maybe thoughtful and somewhat...dreamy. My stomach hurts a little. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

I really do love mopping, especially with my fancy wood polishy liquid. It makes my whole house smell like almonds (mistyped: almost) and the wood nearly glows. The movement of it is oddly soothing, especially if you're feeling dumb and your stomach hurts a little.

Here's a little picture of my family from this past weekend. I'll post more this week to get back to a regular blogging schedule, because I can't let this slip up. This record is important to me. Elsewise, how would I ever remember that on the cold evening of Sunday, October 5th, 2014, I was feeling a little dopey?

no one to witness and adjust

This stupid poem came into my head unbidden when I was running tonight and has lingered. To Elsie, by Williams: the middle part. An old poem, old to me, and older still. This part:


while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

Moving weekend: feel tired, used up, practical, a little down, cynical, hopeful, sunburnt. I thought I was going to die at one point. At another, I fell asleep. I got groceries, and flowers for the house. I need more shower curtains and dish washing tablets.

More updates to come.

time has a way of throwing it all in your face

I looked at cards tonight for the first time in a few months, and to my surprise, drew action cards for the first time in years.

I think people who love you take the best pictures of you. Not that this is the best picture of me, but my mom took it on the Bull Run River (the best river don't let the unspectacular stretch of muddy water fool you) and I like it. I like that my legs look strong, and even though my strap is about to fall off my shoulder and I'm slouched toward the branch I'm leaning on a weird angle, I look happy and I recognize myself.

I love the Bull Run; I used to play in it when I was little. During a particular unsupervised adventure, I was with my friend (the first girl who ever kissed me, much to my confusion at the time) whose house backed up to the river. We were probably 9 or 10. There was this little... I want to call it an island, which is the word we used for it then, but it was more likely just the sandy opposite bank. Well, the alluring "island" was covered in bluebells, and it was gorgeous, and mysterious, and us being bad little kids, we got this desperate notion that we really wanted to get over there, that some good adventure was waiting on the other side. We were all worked up. We spent ages looking for a log or something to cross on, but it was no good, soon it became apparent that the only thing that would do would be to ford the river.

 I started across, my shorter friend traveling in my wake. The water was fairly shallow, but there was this deeper channel that came about up to my chest which was scary, and cold, and thrilling. I remember being surprised by the strength of the current, but also my body's ability to bear it and maintain my path through to the end. I was really struck by the experience--that one could merely decide to wade determinedly through a frightening experience and come out on the other side to bluebells and uncharted horse trails. This matter of will and body.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about when I was looking at the water.

on the unexpected death of someone I knew once

I'm sitting around upstairs thinking about a newly-dead old man I hadn't thought about in two years. Isn't it funny how remote tragedy makes one wring out the dregs of significance and personal connection? You want to justify something: that confusing lurch, the slight readjustment on your life's address book. Far removed grief feels almost indulgent. For example, I am remembering this one thing in particular my late former teacher said (to me, about me, of course: my favorite subject.) I had written a weird essay about my blood phobia, and embarrassed at a certain piece of it, within the narrative I'd bounced away from the topic and made a few self-deprecating jokes. He called me out in the middle of class. He said that it's a cheap trick to try to make people laugh at you to cover the exceptionally real parts.

well I own this field and I wrote this sky

I kind of like my often front-part of the week posting schedule. Not that I don't post on the latter half of the week, but I do notice a pattern of my doing it more now.

Good weekend: wild coreopsis, civil war trails, deer, bald-faced hornets, nice wine, bullets, picnics, and frittata. I went to bed filthy and sticky and smelling like earth and tomatoes, and I slept well. You know you're home in Manassas when a stranger makes polite small talk at you in Spanish and you respond in Spanish without even realizing it, having not spoken it for almost ten years, and then you go see a Confederate war memorial. But it was good to get back on the battlefields that I spent so much of my childhood and adolescence.

 Apparently while I was gone from my house in Staunton, a bolt of lightning struck the ground inches from my dining room window. It's raining softly now and I'm sitting at the kitchen table thinking.

 

 

Bright hot 11 pm. This whole night feels like friction and scrapes. I'm really past ready to be running again. My muscle does an excellent job of being really chill right up until the point where I'm ready to jump into things again, and then waking me up in the middle of the night. Race in 5 weeks--I guess everyone loves a comeback story, or a trainwreck. I feel restless and dirty and hungry.

I'm so glad to be heading north tomorrow, even just for an unpractical short period. I want to jog with my mom and pick tomatoes and see my dumb deer and drink wine and go four-wheeling with Skippy and Chels.

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

from "The Empty Glass"  by Louise Gluck

you'll never never never never get to heaven when you die, little girl

my busy mouth's just spitting empty

Strange quiet evening after the storms have moved on through. I'm up in my tower, doing my usual alone-time mixture of semi-productive prowling, picking at and musing on the hot wrecks of the week. I've felt so tired this weekend, but not tonight; my mind is buzzing.

what's the blues when you've got the greys

Some observations on the week with medium gratuitous attention paid to picture examples as necessary:

Here's some of the little beach shack. Behind it, a small retaining pond that allegedly contained alligators. (I saw none.) It was a cute little shack: very 50s, no A/C or wifi, but tough and friendly. I really liked it in the mornings when the sun was so bright in the kitchen and I got coffee and sat on the back steps.

*

I think I need to lighten the fuck up. I know my last post before I left was super grim, and I was sort of in a weird mood a lot of this week/weekend. It's easy to say that, like, "just stop being so sad and stupid!" but I get so preoccupied sometimes. The littlest things make such a difference to me. I should really work on making myself a more productive person and less of a fuckup who worries about stuff constantly. I wish I were a squire a la The Hedge Knight and then I could just like buff out armor and brush the horses and pull trout of little creeks.

(I read GRRM's Princess and the Queen on the ride up, so I'm about all extra Song of Ice and Fire stuff.)

*

There was a lot of night swimming. I kept thinking, like, isn't this how jaws starts.

*

One stupid good run and I feel starving and tight and hot as hell.

*

I love live oaks. I took a million pictures of them, but it was pouring intermittently, so only a few turned out as not just a vague tree-shaped smear of fog on my camera lens. They were so encompassing, so vast and bendy. This was at Fort Fisher, a Confederate fort that mostly got blown up where a lot of blockade runners tried and failed to keep the Southern port of Wilmington open by pirating the scatter of islands we were staying on. I'm sure some of the oaks were original--it's hard to tell scale here, but most were thicker than me, some several me's.

One of the coolest live oak encampments I ran (literally) into was what I assumed to be a hill. I noticed a strange little passage on the side of it--much like a foxhole in a thicket--and decided to check it out. It turned out that the whole "hill" was actually a thatch of tangled up shorter live oak tree branches that ended in a strange cavernous room made of tree limbs. It was super cool, and a little spooky to be in there alone with all the blown-up Confederate ghosts.

*

A weird thing: (featured in this, a vaguely unflattering selfie I took for my little brother as an entry in the years-long ongoing saga of "selfies I take for my little brother in front of unusual species of trees as a form of sibling one-upmanship") is that I got a ton of sun. The flash bleaches me out some here, but you can see the odd effect it has on my eyes...like... they're all green and weird! I guess the grey-blue seems more greenish or hazel with the flush of color/dark hair roots near them. Could almost believe I was sired by a true Black Irish* despite the more Nordic leanings I get from my mother.

Also, I realize now bright pink lipstick might not be the thing.

*

Down in Caroline,

Way down in Georgia, on the Tennessee line.

We fought for the rebels, and Robert E. Lee,

Now we want to go home to Virginia

Say we want to go home to Virginia

Won't you carry me back?

Won't you carry me back?

Carry me back to Virginia.

Won't you carry me back?

I wanna be buried in Virginia

*
In the ocean, I was terribly stung.

But not in the cool aquarium!

*

I went with these folk.

*
The Fat Pelican was a good place. Every now and then I would creep down during the day to check internet things, and we went out a couple times at night. I wish I had taken more pictures of the space itself: it was amazing and tacky and horrible. One of the things about it was that they encouraged you to write on the walls. The one I liked the best was by the ladies room, and read, "Gil you need to stop controlling Holly."

Most of the regulars were about twice my age. I walked up to the bar one afternoon to settle up, and asked "May I cash out, please?" and the old lady behind the counter mimicked my voice in an awful mocking accent back at me "MAYICASHOUT?"

*

*For the first time in a lifetime of hearing it said about my father and especially my great grandfather, I finally googled "Black Irish." Odd phenotype in the Irish people, and my Quinlan side is all like that: dark-haired, very tan, dark eyes. Anyway: one (not very good theory) is that they are descendants of Iberians or the "Atlanean" Irish via some ancient sea trading route. Yeah! That sounds good.

carry me back

Morning run in the misty rain to say hello again to Staunton. If the day doesn't improve, at least I will have, and it was nice: cool and refreshing under the trees. I'll update this about my trip and things a little later this afternoon, but now it feels time for a warm shower and a bit more coffee.

said you're really an ugly girl

Just forget about it--I'm such a hot little problem tonight.

I'm going out of town tomorrow. I feel a little frazzled. I'm looking forward to it, but it also feels oddly hard to conceptualize. I guess the last time I took a week off to do something vacationy it was Iceland over 3 years ago, before I even started this blog. It's kind of unknown to me. I don't think I'll take a real week off this time--probably work remote, but still. I feel this sense of guilt and lurchiness, like I'm in trouble, or I forgot something crucial, like to say goodbye. Which is admittedly pathetic, but this is my dumb blog and I'll write whatever stupid things I like. I'm always stuck between the fact that I like to stay positive and that I like to stay honest with this thing.

I guess maybe if we're being super honest I feel a little otherwise depressed, which is jarring. I imagine a lot of it is not being able to exercise, and job things, but I keep thinking too much and doing that thing where I dredge up shit to torture myself. It feels easy to do that right now: I keep thinking about this thing my mom said to me recently in particular, which is even more stupid and out of character.

Ugh, so, what else, what better. The night is cool and dark. I only barely resisted buying a dumb deer sweater when I was out trying and failing to buy a bikini today for said relaxing vacation. I'm burning some incense. My facebook ads have magically changed to show a particular set of fireplace cookware I've had my eye on. I don't know. It wasn't even a bad day at all. I just feel badly; I want to turn off all the lights. I don't know what I'm waiting up for.

Consolation unders: the unders you buy yourself as a runner-up prize for life because they are blue and have the comic book character Thor on them.

Updates to follow.

just me and all of my plain jane glory

Bourbon and video games to end a long week, a week as dissimilar to last as two weeks could be. I feel anxious, ruminative, lonely the way indecision feels lonely, and chatty. I'll probably pour a lot of noise into this scrap of space over the next five to seven days. 

I keep starting pretty good paragraphs for the topic at hand and deleting them. Everything I want to say now comes out tasting a little nasty, the way I mean to be funny sometimes but instead come out cynical and cruel. I had good news today, but a lot of it dried up. I guess that has me a little aggressive. Well, whatcha gonna do, huh. Relentless optimism.

what's the blues when you've got the greys

It's raining, it's such a rainy day, it's such a monday. At a certain point, you can just give a day up for done and go about in the skeleton of your routine, feeding the washing machine and wiping down counters. I'm drinking a glass of french wine with a "Saint" in the name and listening to the spotify playlist I've titled "90s breakup."

Developments in the why-can't-my-leg-support-my-weight department have turned up this:

Such sexy leg, huh. I wish my calf were really that big and awesome--I'd be a faster runner--but it's mostly swelling. I guess I'm breaking up with my so-called knee.

On my nightstand right now is a book on "the Sexual Key to the Tarot" that I got for 50 cents (spoiler alert it all means dicks), a nonfiction book on codes in the Revolutionary War, and two torn-out pages from my real simple magazine: a recipe for no-cook olive oil tomato spaghetti sauce, and an advertisement for some particularly nice dryer sheets. Tonight, that's what I've got. That and some dumb beads.

all day my body accepts what it is in the dark creeks that run by there

Today I went out to the lake to do a little fishing and alone-time relaxing. Stats:

Fish caught: 4
Blackberries picked: 2lbs?

Blackberries what caught me: 3

Bouquets gathered: 1

Park rangers: 1

The fish were not so big. This one least of all.

The blackberries at least were biting.

Taking stock of the goods.

Despite the fact of looking like an obnoxiously-posed selfie, I actually took this on accident. (In the process of trying to find a good light angle to take an obnoxious selfie) You can see the sunburn setting in.

Stained hands by a dead fire. A little gross, actually.

Looks like pretty Queen Anne's Lace, right? Actually is water hemlock, one of the most deadly plants that grow in this region. Seizures within 15 minutes of ingestion, death usually in 24 hours.

 

Cardinal flower, a wild edible that has anti-inflammatory properties. You can make a tea with the leaves that's supposed to help with respiratory afflictions. Native Americans used it as a cure for syphilis. Just to seem less grim after the hemlock.

This was the best part--I got off the main lake and up into the creeks. This is the sort of fishing I'm more used to with a fly-rod--quicker moving water, little space, lots of visibility. This was a little creek chub.

I felt slightly odd at this point--this realization that I'd spent 4 hours along tromping through brier and crossing creeks, and felt perfectly happy.

My first blackberry crumble.