everything I love is on the table, everything I love is out to sea

I wrote what you might call a personal essay in a bar last week when I was mad. I thought it was incoherent at the time, but reading back over today, I have become dazzled with my own brilliance and perhaps will type it up and post it here.

I've been thinking some about the style/name of this blog. I considered changing it, since it's been a few years now, and the layout is pretty old to me. I have worried about the name--Even Then, and my leading line quote from silly James Tate poem Peggy in the Twilight: "Even then, it was too late for tragic women, tragic anything."

Abstracted, pulled off the page and onto the title of my blog, it sounds so sad and melodramatic, but god, the poem it's from is supposed to be funny. It's wry and poking fun at itself, a parody of the ludicrously indulgent claim. And frankly, it is too late to be tragic. No one has time for that. It can be truly funny sometimes to be really abjectly sad. I remember being struck by that when I was all fucked up before. It's so overblown and boring that it circles back around to hilarious. I want to be real, practical, and self-sustaining.

I'm steadfast about not having any emotions, tragic or funny, for my current part. My feelings are resolutely not hurt. My cheeks are nicely sunburnt. Work and home are hard right now, but I'm being quiet and asking for nothing, putting to death expectation where I find it in myself.  I'm a good little island.

Long roots for posterity.