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.

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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.)

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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In the ocean, I was terribly stung.

But not in the cool aquarium!

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I went with these folk.

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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?"

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*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.