In the tradition of posting and overanalyzing vague nonsense dreams, I'll post last night's counter to the terrifying symbolic dead fish dream I posted about yesterday. In last night's version, I was also fly-fishing, casting out into deep water, and I hooked and easily landed a huge, beautiful brown trout. Then the dream changed to another place, and became a sex dream.

I'm going to interpret this as a sign from the universe that I'd really like to go fishing.

Moon in Virgo opposite Neptune

What was it that I was going to write about? Oh, tornadoes.

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Today, I felt very Brienne. Not in the cool warrior maid way, but sort of in the shambling, awkward, pathetic way. Uncomfortably aware of my limbs.

"...ugly, and pighead stubborn. But she lacks the wits to be a liar, and she is loyal past the point of sense."

*

Over the weekend, I had this dream that I was fly-fishing in this dirty river with my dad. He was catching fish, and I felt this need to impress him and prove myself. I finally hooked a trout, but as I was pulling it in, I realized that the fish was snagged by the tail. The fish was dull gray instead of bright silver, and its eyes were blind and white. I reached out to unhook it by the head, but the head sloughed off in my hand. I realized it was rotting in layers, like an onion. It was weird.

*

Open windows tonight. Bare feet, no bra, straight damp hair, soft green pants, dark blue tie-up shirt.

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My coworker took this picture today at work. It's the hard drive our development server is on. I'm the only person who uses that server. No, I don't have a very important deadline friday or anything. Hilarious! I don't care too much. I'll get it.

84 degrees, unstable air mass with possible severe storms tonight. The branches outside are moving in a way that keeps catching my eye, thinking someone's walking out there.  Breezes crossing through the open windows between my dining room and kitchen. Wearing a stained white t-shirt with a pocket over my left breast and new bleach-wash skinny jeans, hair up in a messy bun, no makeup except lipstick in Vibrant Mandarin--a hateful color, if you wanted my commentary on it.

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

I took a couple pictures over the weekend for this particular blog. I talk a lot about my family, but so often, when I post pictures, it's of my dumb face or some tree or something. My mom always says the most interesting pictures have people in them. So here are a couple of my people.

My brother, grandfather, and grandmother on my father's side.

 

Chels, back from 89 days in Switzerland and crafting a tomato salad. She's the sister I never had, the almond to my vanilla.

 

 

This is my adopted brother Skip. He called this his 'jail pose' because I was trying to take his and my father's picture while they were arranging flowers for the table. (My father is hiding just off screen.) I like the juxtaposition of the flower bouquet with the reflected weapons and deer skulls.

 

 

Speak of the devil and she will appear.

 

 

The Devil in miniature, looking for a snack.

 

 

No one is allowed to park in the driveway re: cornhole.

 

 

 My father's most epic tomato garden ever.

 

 

The pond overflowing with lotus this year.

 

 

My fine young mom and some wine. I accidentally caught her being quite serious here.

 

 

 

 

Garage self-portrait, post-flowers. I took a better picture of my face in the basement, but I like how my arms look strong and my boobs like good in this one.

 



There's gloomy, and then there's eating pierogies over the sink at 10:30 pm on a Sunday night.

say a girl needs a gun these days on account of them rattlesnakes

I am not afraid of snakes.

I come by this honestly by way of my father. It's common to speak of men learning fundamental identity things from their fathers, but I think as a woman, it goes understated how much we draw from ours. I am getting to the age (ancient) where I can start to sort out the qualities I have harbored and replicated from my parents. From him, I learned charm, friendliness, nonchalance, grit, strength, and contempt. I learned a certain affinity for absence. He taught me how to behave around other men and to start fires with pine knots and to tie on fishing hooks and about all kinds of animals.

Something my father was not so good at was age-appropriate pets. One of my earliest memories was of wrapping a giant black snake around my bare shoulders like a feather boa, the way it bunched up and slid off my bare skin as if oiled. I was little enough that I remember it feeling huge to me, even though now I realize that they don't get very big around here. I remember playing with an electric-colored greensnake like a live wire; a pissy garter snake that struck my 8-year-old hand again and again and left tiny, ineffective pinpricks of blood in my thumb. The first animal I ever killed was a snake that was striking at my beagle puppy in my backyard. (I still feel guilty; it couldn't have been worse than a riled black snake.) I've handled live copperheads. I've had a well-meaning but nearly disastrous childhood friend use a canoe paddle to slap a live, striking copperhead up against my bare legs in an unfortunate effort to brain it.

Anyway, all this is to say that I'm not cleverer or braver than other people, but I've learned early on that snakes are a part of life that can be handled or ignored with more or less indifference much like any environmental factor. I don't love them; I don't fear and abhor them. That's why it's so strange to be dreaming about them for the first time in my life. Not just dreaming about them, but featuring them as an agent of hurt and personal destruction.

I've never had the snake nightmare, because what's the big deal about snakes? When I turned to my trusty bunkmachines, everything was all someone cruel, warning, hidden threat. But like... what if snakes don't really bother you? Is the symbol still the same? Signs mean something or nothing depending on what is needed.

Maybe I'm reading it all wrong. Maybe it's sexual. Mnngh.

In other news, I ran 5 miles today. My breasts feel huge. It's raining outside. I miss my family. I miss sleep.

I believe that dead leaves and black water fill my heart

Drew it for a daily twice in a row this weekend, Saturday and Sunday. Cutting through confusion, seeing through illusions, clear understanding.

I do feel filled with some hard, swords-level understanding right now.

Good fireflies this year, huh? I'm wearing a pink bandanna and feeling a little red.

weekend of fancy dress wearin'

the backs are bled, keeping her in turn

Wearing a tiger running shirt, blue bandanna (AMERICA) and looking for a particular bra suited for formal things up in my tower. My new boots are gleaming pleasantly where I've laid them out in front of the mirror. They look like these boots that I got in 6th grade and called, cooly, my "Jedi boots"---and wore until the leather slouched down and the bottoms fell out and I finally threw them out last year...but cooler.

Speaking of cool, the weather appears to be the best thing ever.  Speaking of cool, I'm one rare cucumber.

I had really soothing dreams last night, stretched out alone in my big bed.

Deer Dream
The soul, the gentle harmless self that is often hurt or wounded by our aggressiveness and cynicism, or by other people’s criticism; vulnerability; the unsocialised or wild, but gentle side of our instincts; love-sickness.
In Greek mythology the deer was associated with the virginal huntress Artemis. So the female deer in a dream suggests the qualities of female gentleness and the connection with nature and the hidden world of the unconscious with all its strange wisdom. While the stag often links with bold and powerful masculinity and sexuality in a natural and potent form.

(...or, I guess, it could mean that one literally has a deer or 4 back at her parents house, and misses them, or being home, or her parents.)

It just occurred to me that, for obvious reasons, today is not a good day to get groceries. Like before a snowstorm, probably, but with hot dog buns instead of bread and toilet paper.

Picnic, lightning

Driving home from the gym, I got caught in the teeth of a bad storm. The sky was that psychotic green color where the pinky flush of the sunset is bleeding through the grey and making everything look a little curdled. The wind was going sideways, slamming my car. I didn't mind it though--I needed a better storm than the one that fleeted through Harrisonburg earlier, leaving everything a little sticky.

Rescuing clothes off the line, I thought about my unlikely but possible death of lightning--appropriate for a girl who spent so much of her life fretting about storms, fretting about everything. (Optimistic Blonde Dies by Lightning While being Insane about Laundry, reads no headline ever.) I don't know if I have a point. When I was coming down the yard, damp clothes bundled in my arms, I thought about how ramshackle my house looked in the storm, a little long in the tooth. Needs a new roof, or at least a powerwashing. I have a bumper crop volunteer violets in a mishmash of color springing up everything--about the only thing it seems I can grow this year--and since they are a bunch of mixed up types, they are the most random different colors.

Now, typing this, still unshowered in my green room, I feel feral. I like exercise: a hard reset on the kind of bungling mood I get in sometimes, and have been in for the last two days.