making me want to stop

...but the other option Longstreet obviously didn't consider was the "over-analyze these things, think about nothing else, cry your eyes out, then put on some makeup and go to Walmart to buy a trashcan" route. I think I'm all used up on the whole dignity high road.

On the other hand, if you'd like, I have a long scene I just finished. I thought about posting it up here, since maybe I'd like to go back and read my Nithavellir therapy story some day, like when I can look back and laugh at how stupid I was

.

"Don't think on these things. Keep an orderly mind. This stuff is like heresy."
-Longstreet, The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara

you were supposed to walk me home from the river, man, this is heartbreaking, heartbreaking, heartbreaking, heartbreaking, heartbreaking, heartbreaking

I had this big thoughtful tired post all planned about where I am with various losses and plans and calibrations, but the evening took an unexpected and classically grim turn. I think instead of ruminating on the endless parade of cynic revelation, I'll make a hard-working agreement with the day. I'll drink a dark beer, write some porn, and nurse my shoulder, which feels like it has had the heavy butt of a shotgun kick into it a hundred times today, which is exactly what happened.

small things

Love this guy.

A lot of greens: kale, spinach, butterleaf lettuce, and collard greens.

Christmas tulips.

Christmas hair with silly flowers. Sitting in the garage with the door open, listening to the hot rain, writing a little scene on my phone while I waited to depart.

My main character is asleep on the stones.

I feel much better, and better, and worse and then better

continual themes of 19th century and manhood and evolving perspectives

"What I'm fighting for is the right to prove I'm a better man than many... There's many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don't think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice. 'Tis why I'm here. I'll be treated as I deserve...and I God damn all gentlemen....and YOU, Colonel laddie, are a member of it and don't even know it. You are damned good at everything I've seen you do, a lovely soldier, an honest man, and you got a good heart on you too, which is rare in clever men. Strange thing. I'm not a clever man meself, but I know it when I run across it. The strange and marvelous thing about you, Colonel darlin', is that you believe in mankind, even preachers, whereas when you've got my great experience of the world you will have learned that good men are rare, much rarer than you think.” 
-Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

insistence, disregard

It's been a month of old specters and hard realizations. Gutchecks. Nothing I can or want to talk about, even here in this little empty corner of the internet that I doubt anybody reads.

On the other hand, I think the identity lessons are valuable. And all told, I have a lot to be thankful for. I haven't been spending my time quietly. I went skinny-dipping in natural hot springs with my lady friends. I've made new friends. I've exchanged letters with all kinds of people: a famous poet, a construction worker in central TN, an eight year old girl. One day on a run, I saved a Cooper's hawk with a fresh kill from a band of thieving crows, and then to make up for playing favorites with a bird that's basically just a little wyvern, I handfed my father's wingshot pet crow live mealworms. I've seen him tear into my dad hard enough to draw blood, but he was gentle with me, his beak like a pair of delicate scissors. Snip-snip. Small acts of karma. I've studied 19th century battlefield tactics. Work has been interesting in that dynamic way that everything seems to be right now. It reminds me of Fritz-Golberg's line "One woman is so long/ longing does not come out of her./But this time I have loved you /so long I become the boy you were. I must still/ be alive, for everything is changing and /incomplete." I've had a lot of vitamin D gummies that taste like "meyers lemon." I've built fire after fire after fire.

I get it. I'm not stupid. It wells up in my throat, occasionally, and those times, I think about wherever I am in my dumb little story and imagine the bit I'll write next, the dialogue or whatever. Right now my main character is up sulking in a sycamore tree, something I know a little about because there is a good sycamore tree in the back of my parent's land that I used to climb in high school, and so that's an easy thing to write. Half a moon, and cold blowing in. My main character is feeling sort of sad and dramatic and thinking about cruelty.

*

I stood in my kitchen this morning cooking sausage gravy and perfect eggs. I'm excellent at cooking eggs; it's one of the many great things about me. My friend was hanging out to keep me company, and we were talking about our natures and flaws. I said, "Meanness is one of my qualities. I'm inherently, instinctively mean in a petty way. But I don't have enough cruelty."

*

After Star Wars Thursday--or Friday morning, really, a different friend was drunktexting me at 3 AM. I couldn't sleep, wide awake in Charlottesville, so I was looking at my phone and watching her texts come in like little boats. I didn't really want to talk, so I didn't respond, I just lay there and read them. She told me some nice, drunk stuff, which is the kind of 3 am text to receive. She said I made her feel good about herself, That's high praise. I like to do that. It felt good to hear that kind of thing.

*

I think I look really pretty tonight, despite all my nonsense.

I'm not gonna lie, everything feels pretty shitty and confusing and hard right now. My birthday really bums me out.

God, my dreams this week are fucking killing me. When they aren't emotionally laden angst festivals about loss and the past, they are just plainly horrific. I never thought I'd be checking for "bald-faced hornet's nest miscarriage" in my dream dictionary. (Not that it matters, but apparently it means--wait for it--loss + loss.)

I just need a break from this sound cos it's killing me

Chiron is both a comet and a dwarf planet, with two rings and a wonky orbit. Hangs out between Uranus and Saturn. In astrology: the Wounded Healer, currently sitting in Pisces square the sun in my pretty little sign. Ow.

I feel bad today, and this week. I'm having a hard time pretending to still be smiling.

good year for hunters and christmas parties and I hate

Today, I am asking to be shown what I am usually blind to. I am asking for new questions. I am asking to be open, and for creative, divine intelligence to guide my thinking.

--And by that I mean tearing my fingertips apart with my nails like a psycho to get at the thorns in them and dreading my evening drive over the dark mountains.

If ever I can't see you any more, I hope you're more beautiful than before

So today I did this dumb thing to my hair. Look, just like Kirsten, the American Girl Doll!

I think I've ranted about this before on here. Kirsten was not the best American girl doll, but she was the one I had and associated with the most, because she was blonde and Nordic, although I think she was a Swedish immigrant. Sweden is basically the poor man's Norway. Kirsten did not have very good adventures on the frontier nor very good clothes for her doll. Her only cool thing was like getting caught in a snowstorm once. "Ohh I hope I don't die in this snowstorm." She was mostly lonely and poor and everyone she loved died or left her. I think once she ran away from a bear? So you can see how her plight is essentially a good narrative metaphor for my twenties.

But braids are super cute!

*

This has been an interesting week. A really interesting week. I'm paying attention. I've been thinking about change--the way people do, or don't. I've been noticing where I begin and end.

*

As if on some expected cue, an email from my mentor arrived tonight. The subject? "White Witch." As if to summon me.

PSA

Jessica.

Jessica, slow your roll.

Rabbit, rabbit.

I'm feeling kind of low energy today, so here's a couple pictures from my weekend. 

This is Relic. He's some kind of mastiff, my parent's back neighbor's replacement dog for the heroic Ronan, the husky/wolf protector of my sixteen year old self. I miss Ronan, but Relic is a good dog. 

Just to size those lion paws: that's the thickest part of my thigh, and I'm crouching. 

My brother, waxing his bowstrings. He shot a little buck with that on Friday.

My neighbor dug this up in the woods behind my house. It's incredible--I didn't realize my little part of Manassas saw action. But that's a hotchkiss shell from the Civil War. I don't recognize the other shell, but I'm just learning about matching Civil War shells to their artillery pieces, so... 

This is a really incredible piece: a piece of fossilized coral that turned to agate several hundred thousand years ago and then, a mere few thousand years ago, was found and shaped into a scraper by an American Indian. My friend Andrea hunts a particular river in Georgia which is known for these kinds of artifacts. On Sunday, she gave me a little box of some of her finds as an early birthday/Christmas present. They are incredibly lovely: scraps of deep blue, white, and amber or crimson.  You can still see the coral polyps along with the knap marks, or could if this were a better picture. I might post a few more because I like them and they make me happy. 

Today, full moon in Gemini: a hard aspect up against Saturn.

Today, finished Cold Mountain. Spoiler alert: the handsome wonderful impossible unlikely rugged hunk male protagonist dies on the last page. If it were me, I wouldn't have let a dumb blond kid shoot me though. And I might have done a little more sex.

Today, I got a lot of compliments on my appearance from attractive strangers. Today, I bought Star Wars lipstick. I couldn't decided between light or dark side, so I got both. I wore "light side" on my run. It was silver bright.

Happy Thanksgoblin to us all.

gonna tackle young girls off their beautiful bikes

the hierarchy is always apparent. though the legends cannot be trusted--- their source is the survivor, the one who has been

I haven't really posted any of the ruminative, cathartic post-Legends retrospectives I imagined I might write when it all finished. To be honest, I don't feel in a great place for it now. But it feels a little like back in 2013 when I just didn't do an end-of-the-year retrospective because it all seemed too hard and I was so crushed, and then that year slipped by without marking, and then the next. I don't want that to happen here. This thing is only here so I can look back in two years, or ten, and trace the line of where I was, more or less unfiltered. The game was so important to me, such a big, disruptive part of my life, and I loved it. It taught me a lot of things about myself and about the people I would come to call my closest friends.

When Legends started, I had about no friends. 2009 was such a year. I just gotten married, started grad school, moved to a brand new town where I knew no one. More than that, my two best friends since I was 12 had recently elected to dump me, which was hard and unexpected. I am a little shy and in my best state I rarely get close to people. Their sudden, random abandonment was devastating, and it changed me on a deep level. I still have a reactive, deep streak of fear for people turning on me or just ditching me entirely.

But the thing is, they didn't dump me because I'm the put-upon heroine of this story wherein the various monsters viciously turn on me. They dumped my ass because I was a conniving, nasty little snake, and when they were cruel to me during our long years of unhealthy friendship, I pitted them against each other with all the disinterest of a sociopath rubbernecking a fatal wreck. I've been petty and vengeful since I was a child. I see that now. I didn't see it then because I was young and my nature was mutable.

You could see how Legends might appeal to a bankrupt girl in this deserted state. Big heroes. Earnest, brave friends to the end: all that stuff that Legends was so built up on. I snapped up this myth hook, line, and sinker. 

When I made up Yan, I wanted somebody as different from me as possible. I wanted a confident, vulnerable, sweet, good-hearted idiot. I felt so jaded back then, so cautious with myself and suspicious of anyone and everything. I didn't like anything about myself, and I welcomed the chance to grow as a different person.

As stupid as it sounds, pretending those qualities coaxed them out a little in me. I figured how to be more open. I said yes, and then yes please. It was good for me. I learned how to do stuff I'd never taken agency for: how to be a valuable, hard-working person, mainly by modeling off other more productive people I watched. I was so impressed by these people I ran with, and I took as many opportunities as I could to grow there. I learned to be vulnerable and let people in.

To return to Yan, briefly: that central story involves a Swedish folk legend called Leap the Elk and Little Princess Cottongrass--or Tuvstarr, if we strip off the English. It's a tale about a sweet, golden naive girl who gets lost in the dark woods and comes upon a world-wise, protective elk who tries to help her even though she's fairly clueless. Throughout the fairytale, she loses more and more until she's naked. But each time she loses a possession, she refuses to believe in despair, insisting instead that the world is good and warm. She insists that she wants to do nothing but share joy and give light, while the elk warns her against this. Eventually the elk falls into rut and abandons her to death. 

These themes repeat. I always thought the important part of this was the message of relentless hoping, pouring goodness into the world regardless of what is given back. In the story I participated in for Legends, this worked out perfectly. Yan got his unrealistic happy ending and I'm glad for that. But I see it now as any greater metaphor: just a child's story. A dreamy fairytale. Not something real or ideal to duplicate when composing identity or life lessons.

The more interesting character is certainly Leap, who warns and then abandons the protagonist to his own need. Self-protective. I think this is the lesson I need now. I am standing at the edge of this year with cold reality stuffed in my mouth and all the hard realizations I put off until now filling me up. And that's fine. That's part of the world.

I got my hands up

desertion

Today, I watched an middle-aged woman hug a gravestone. She wrapped her whole body around it even though she was not very large to begin with and the sheer size of the stone made her look tiny. She pressed her face against it. I was close enough to see her mouth touch the granite. She wasn't crying, she was just hugging it like she needed to hug that person and that person was now a stone.

Today, I stood in my hallway because my cell signal was spotty, and even though previously I had been sobbing like a child and tried to hide it to talk on the phone, the woman I didn't know from the "Report Lost or Stolen" branch of my credit card company made me laugh. We started talking, telling stories, and then we couldn't stop, but she had to keep going with her script. So she'd get a little ways into it and then burst out giggling, and I'd start again, and it was all really nice.

I'm tired and feeling a little desolate. I've been reading Cold Mountain, and I can't help thinking the central theme of Frazier's writing is men.So I've been thinking about men and being quiet. I think I'm smarter than a lot of what I've been feeling, so I'm going to skip all the exposition. I'm a little sick of my labels. The week isn't going great, but here I am, up late, licking this day from my fingers.


See? The knife I carry?
It cuts my smile even wider.
-The Good Fight, by Ada Limon

step back from the line of fire

I told myself I could have one hot mess of a week to feel real bad, drink too much, break down on runs, ignore my chores in favor of writing long, sad descriptions of Nithavellirian mountains and watch TV. Now that's done and I'm moving on. 2000 iu Vitamin D and getting back to work. We cleaned and aired the house; I made a pumpkin cheese cake and a broccoli cheese soup with salad and bread for tonight. It's important for me to keep in mind that for all my skirts and dumb poems, I'm a hard, practical sort of bitch at the core, the kind of girl who, historically, would spare her own life on account of promises regarding pumpkin pies. It's really beautiful weather we're having.

*

Last weekend was so good. If it stays this warm, I'll camp into December. It doesn't even need to be dry. Fuck doing anything else except being out in the woods. 

*

I might have gone overboard on the pumpkins this year. I knew I had a lot of baking to do with them, so I filled up my front porch pretty well. Now every time I go out to choose one to sacrifice to the many things needing to be cooked with pumpkin, I feel like I'm picking out a beloved chicken to chop. That's a bit of an exaggeration, I guess, but I'm not messing around about how much I like pumpkins.

Self portrait with laundry, pjs, and World Serpent rising

babe, it got away from me, it got away from me

I'm not good for much this week. I realized it was a bad anniversary from all that November incident two years back, but too late to make anything of it in the way of self-preservation or learning from anything. No tidy lessons for me this time around. I've felt very unable to articulate in my usual way. Very blank. I thought myself right out and now I am composed of simply physical things: cold hands, a ripped fingertip from a metal edge, my too long legs tangled up under me, tired eyes.

sky is womb and she's the moon

There are few things more wonderful* in the world than my perfect, beautiful, gorgeous kitchen fully stocked, organized, and cleaned, with everything emptied and put away in the proper place.

*Dick, dick is better.

*

The whole Valley looked just like it was smoking apart at the cracks tonight as I drove home: bright, dark, luminous fog, and heavy cloud bank all swirled together like some birth or death of a thing. It looked like Nithavellir.

I can't imagine that it would be possible to live here and not fall in love with this place.

*

I got a lot of little worked up thoughts about Legend's end that I'd like to put in here. I guess part of me feels like if I write it all down, it will be really done. I will talk about it soon. For now, I just want to tell a brief anecdote. Leaving Monday morning, I ran into my older brother, who had just got in that morning from a big trip, but had apparently been in touch with my parents--probably my father. Anyway, he gave me a hug and immediately said, totally earnest and concerned: "I heard you died. TWICE."

I have such a great family.

My post legends

All we gotta do is be brave and be kind

Got a lot of thoughts tonight flying around. A long phone conversation with my incredible and very wise mom helps more than anything. A martini with iceland vodka and cucumber from my garden doesn't hurt.

It's funny: speaking of harvests. Of gardening. I've had that in my head for days since putting my own to bed. All the metaphors in the world can trick you up wrong. What grows in a patch is far more unpredictable than the parables could tell you. Sometimes hard work or need--and you can need it so bad--it just isn't enough. Everything is whim. Bad seed, bad ground, too cold, too hot, too dry, too wet. You want a profusion of some thing, but what you have is a glut of something else.

I'm just glad I'm not surviving on what lies blackened in my backyard.

part female, part male, part terrible dragon

This has been a productive weekend. I mowed the lawn, got my bulbs planted (shout out to "Ice Follies" and "Manly" there *snickers*) and put my garden away for winter. I worked on Legends, and then made Duck l'Orange for the first time with rosemary roasted red potatoes and southern-style kale. Tonight, because I am a savage, I'm gonna make poutine with the fries cooked in duckfat. No one can stop me.

I woke up in a good mood, despite having a series of weird dreams. In one, I was talking to a friend, but his words got softer and softer until this sort of spooky twilight fog swallowed up the whole scene. In another, a dude choked me to death. 

Recently, I got a thing published in my town newspaper: an editorial about domestic violence and how they handled the local murder of a 19 year old girl. (Bad, if you were wondering, bad in a dangerous way.) I'd link it here, but I don't really care for how it turned out now with a couple days removed. I'm not great about writing about those issues, which is weird to say as a girl who has written most of a book with the central theme of masculinity and violence. I think my editorial piece in particular suffered from some lack of willingness to be personal, and it's true, aside from occasionally ranting about stuff with that guy who was stalking me recently, I don't talk about my experiences. Even this shitty poem I'm writing about those themes the last couple weeks is only an exercise in saying absolutely nothing. Some confessional poet, huh?

When I was writing the editorial, Josh took issue with some wording singling out the role of men in these situations, thought it was unproductive, divisive, prejudiced. I ended up changing the line to be more neutral, but I was also frustrated: I wasn't being blamey-critical, I love men. Insert dick joke here, but I really do. I love their boxy knuckles and wide elbows. I'm so genuinely interested in them, in male perspective, and how those roles must feel to take on in our society. I like writing about men. When Casey was running a theme of "masculinity" for his lit journal, he said he thought of me immediately. I guess in this context, that's sort of like saying "I'm not racist, I have a cool black friend!" Still, I feel like there is something important to this juxtaposition, though: being raised as a woman to love but also be wary of men in contexts. But I know either genders can hurt the other. Love is a state of vulnerability. 

So now I guess I'm just rambling about the relationships between men and women, which is probably a good time to stop. I guess have a picture of some of my wonderful pumpkins. Katie announced "my beautiful pumpkin princess!" when I brought her pre-frost flowers at the bar Saturday, but she's wrong, I am a pumpkin queen.

It feels important to mention that the "title" of this photo is "Don't play with me, bitch." Pumpkin. Queen.

Just Thursday

Laying around with my cat, drinking a tiny jam jar of Shiraz, eating ramen, writing porn, and worrying, worrying, worrying.

swing wide your crane and run me through

Today was so bad as to be a little funny. I realized I was in the jaws of a trap just right about the same time the nice man whose job I was removing was telling me how excited he was to tell his wife about all of my nice compliments about the quality of his previous work. But I'm starting to think I should stop whining and see things as they are, how it divides up. I often have this feeling I'm a couple steps behind everyone else on the whole cold reality of situations.

*

Clipping down my nails boyshort for the last time for this old reason. They hurt now a bit, since I'd been keeping them long, but in another week they'll be just the right size--long enough to not smart when I fight, but short enough to be tough.

*

I sure wish I could stop coughing so I could sleep well for once this week. When I finally slept last night, I had this dream where I was sort of stumbling around these black thick woods at night. I felt something fuzzy and moving accumulating on my skin, and when I moved out the woods into the moonlight, my skin was just covered in a massive coat of yellow jackets. I've not ever dreamed of them like that, so I looked it up as far as dream symbolism. The closest I can find is betrayal or being gossiped about.

*

It's not really warm enough to be sleeping with the windows open, but I am. Since my house is up on a hill, these gusts of stormy wind keep hitting the open window at the right angle to blow my hair. It feels good. I thought today about how these would probably be the last little storms of the season. I guess I want to feel them.

so don't give me respect don't give me a piece of your preciousness

Awfully into the Dark Fields lately. It feels interesting. Awfully tired and worn down. 

Hopwood

I'm sitting on the pillared front steps of my old college's English building as I write this. Three stories up is my old dusty attic office from when I was editor of the lit rag here. I thought of going up there, trying the door, but it was supposed to be haunted, and I'm not as quick at ducking ghosts as I used to be.
I'm trying to get back in touch with the girl I was then, but I'm mostly feeling sad, unwanted, and perfectly alone and okay with my existence.

look and despair

I had a weird memory just tonight. I guess I'm getting old enough now to have unsolicited memories just shake right free inside my head, like big ol' limbs tangled up in dead wood that sometimes come randomly smashing down to disastrous results for the picnic. I can figure out where this one came from almost the way you can track back a weird dream: I was looking at somebody's facebook thing, somebody who was complaining about not being able to write fiction after being traumatized during a particularly critical session of a creative writing fiction workshop. Then I thought about my own writing and how boring.

Sometimes I feel like an impostor with "my writing." At Hollins, I met all these passionate, talented authors who would say things like I will die if I do not write and Writing is my life. And I don't feel like that. I've never felt like that. When I read the aforementioned facebook thing, I tried to imagine that circumstance: a writing rejection so utter and personal and debilitating that I could never feel the energy to write again.

So to the memory:

It was a final party of my second Hollins year, held at the house of the visiting writer in residence: a very famous writer in residence. Anyway, he had just been my teacher for the semester, and I was still not over being excited to just be in his presence. (There are rare people in life who never become exhausted with seeing you, and are genuinely thrilled to see you every time they get to--I was not one of those for him, I was just excited because he was funny and new and fairly famous and I liked his work.)

Anyway, he sat down beside me, and put his hand on my knee, and he said, "JessJessJess, you know, I heard a lot about you before you ever got into my class. There was a lot of "buzz" about you." I leaned my body forward the way a person does when they are readying themselves for a very splendid compliment and trying to make sure they spring back exclaiming humbly and dismissively at the right moment. No, no, not me, I'm just an ordinary girl. Whaaaat? I've won a writing contest I didn't know I was even entering, willy wonka style? I will accept this cash prize onlygrudgingly. 

"And when I read your first piece of fiction..."

Uh-huh.

"I couldn't believe..."

I'd like to thank...

"...how bad it was."

I remember sitting there, blankly, feeling him pet at my thigh like I was a confused golden retriever, and thinking wait what. He didn't have a larger point. He was just sort of rambling about how maybe I should stick to my breadwinners of poetry and essay and maybe never ever ever please god don't write fiction again because fiction was very hard and I wasn't good at it.

Me, so, I was used to being praised. I was often a big fish in a little pond with my writing before Hollins, and I did pretty well there. And here was this old famous dickbag with a bunch of fucking bird poems in the New Yorker telling me I'd done something badly--not just badly, but laughably bad, worthy of scorn and going on about. I blinked softly and dumbly in the fading spring dogwood light.

Almost immediately, I began to ignore and dissolve this advice and humiliation. It wasn't some kind of weird denial. I just really, honestly didn't care. I thought "Well, whatever, asshole." Not that it's good. Not that I wanted to ever publish it, or even show it to anybody. I literally do not even remember what short stories I cooked up for him; now, looking back, I'm sure they did suck. (I think it was a long series about a youth group who literally killed their youth pastor thinking he was Jesus, or something? I don't know, it's fine. I believe it was bad.) I never was a big fiction writer. When I did it, I just did it for fun, and I liked doing it.

And I immediately started doing it again. I went home and wrote something I loved writing. It's fine! I knew it was bad! That's not the point. Not for a second did I think to myself "Oh no, something's wrong with my talent, I should strip away any joy associated with this and replace it with shame."

I genuinely feel that about my writing sometimes.

My best friend could comment on this post and say, "Jess, it is so terrible to read your words." And I'd feel like, 'okay, yeah, that's fair, okay, okay, maybe less long run-on filled posts about my feelings. I should have cut some stuff." I'd love to say that it was some byproduct of my fancy training, but it's probably not. I like real criticism about my writing, and if you're just trying to make me feel inferior while touching my leg too much, I don't care at all.

I think I can honestly say I don't have anybody who it would crush me if they thought I was a total hack. Is that... confidence? I bet not.  I can be bad at confidence as a person. This isn't some cool statement of agency. I have people in my life who it would crush me if they thought I was bad about other things. Personality things. I've even recently had that experience of hearing something about myself that made me want to jump off a fucking cliff. But not about writing.

I write constantly. I write garbage. I create Mcdouble after Mcdouble of immediate satisfaction for myself, and then I cram the wrappers down into the backseat of my car where I never go and only clean it out occasionally. I love that about it. And maybe that's why I'm not a real writer. And that's fine.

50 I'm gonna change my mind

There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition.

"The gist of the story is that when all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time."

I started listening to the audiobook for Charles Frazier's 13 Moons again and while I know that these "great man" bare knuckle wilderness trope stories are suspect, it really gets me up in a lather about all my old favorites: masculinity, wildness, violence, and survival. The story opens with the main character as an old man, reading about Lancelot in The Knight of the Cart. Gets me every time. I'm such a sucker for it.

I've often read things about women with strong father figures, and how that shapes their relationship with and to men their whole lives. Tina Fey posits that it leads for a lot of high expectations. I've wondered how my own inclinations factor that out. My father is very legendary in his right, the kind of man who, the year I was born, rode around Marajo in Brazil with nothing but a horse, a machete, and a whip, wrangling water buffalo in the jungle and killing the snakes the vaqueiros wouldn't touch. I probably like these frontier stories like 13 Moons because of some element there that I connect to and see as familiar and important.

That said, the quote above and the surrounding text really reminded me of something I think I'd forgotten this morning. Yearning is important. If you can't conjure up some fire, what is there?

I am reading a book I love and it's not even about Civil War battle strategies for once

“People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That’s a mistake. I know I sound like some dour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man’s touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don’t understand how you could have self-confidence if you don’t do the work... I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a 'workaholic.' Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.” 
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

This feels especially relevant for women. 

with my own blood in my mouth

My day was okay; I got my teeth cleaned and behaved myself for the most part. I thought a little about this weekend again, which was weird in certain ways and exciting in others. I made some new friends this weekend, which is something that's not very natural to me anymore, and so I guess I had to prowl around and think about that some.

I have this feeling that my blog isn't very good or interesting this year. I have less good stories and more vague things. I had this idea over the weekend that I wanted to write up a lot of the things that happened because they all felt very strange and narrative, but I didn't.

One of them was that at the castle party, we met up with a new(ish) friend and her two roommates. Afterward, we all went out to Pompeii and got pretty smashed. It was extremely fun. We danced a lot. We swung by my place after, at about 2 AM. The boys went upstairs to watch music videos, and then my friend, her roommate, and I sat on my front porch and talked about men and drank Miller Lite and they smoked. Sitting out late at night with pretty girls? Gosh. I really liked them, and I wanted them to like me. I tried to be so correct. The roommate, who is blonde and petite and beautiful, told me that we could pass for sisters, except that she would be the evil witchy one and I'd be the sweet Cinderella. A statement probably laughable to anybody who knows me well. Oh gosh, new people! Blank slates! It was very surreal.

I am not so cool, though, I am a goon, and I like that. I can pass for cool professionally, when I wear pencil skirts and talk about my field. I'm a good hostess, a great cook, and I can be polite and make a good impression. I'm excellent at lighting fires and sometimes I'm funny. A lot of times I'm mean. At least you get a little older and you know what angles work best for you, and which people you really, actually care about and want to impress. Not the strangers. But it was nice to play for a night.

*

There's bad weather coming on. Roleplay hyperactive and turned on! No, no. I am mellow just this week.

There's been so many years since there was a real hurricane around here. I remember them very vividly from my childhood: Fran, Bertha, later sweet Isabel who rooted up so many of the wonderful trees in the park where I go running with my mom. I think it was with her in 2003 when we got off school, and Justine and I just tore around in our little shirts soaking wet getting into as much trouble as possible and fighting the wind.

*

Work is finally being interesting. On Monday I have a meeting with a potential new printer, and that's pretty exciting. It's good to finally be potentially making a change that could mean something.

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I took this scruffy, hour 15 face selfie entirely and only because my boobs looked good tonight, but also my hair is coming in so dark. My brother and my mom picked out this top for me as an Easter gift, so I'm pretty fond of it.

I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

If I'm honest, today has bummed me out. I saw all the signs lining up for it, and it was almost exactly like I expected. Now, in its hollows, the rain started up again, I went home late, made a good dinner, cleaned up, and put away laundry. Now I'm sitting up in my upstairs window listening to the far off noise of someone screaming at his wife. I have like a terrible tangle of things I'm excited to write about on this thing, but at the moment, I just feel kinda worn down. I so often come across wrong; not just wrong, but the worst idea of myself I can imagine, and that bums me out. I think I'm just so tired.

Something funny/horribly stressful that happened today was that I went over to feed the cats for Chris and Katie, and the key they'd left for me didn't work. I was going crazy, dashing around rattling windows, trying to figure out if the key was wrong or if I was just that stupid, and feeling pretty bad about myself. I kept imagining both their little mean tiger cats dying under my bad inattention while they were at a funeral in Canada. I called them, verified that yes, it was the right key, and continued flailing. Eventually, I went back to check the hutch I'd been originally told to find the key in, and... sure enough, there was another, second key there on a different shelf.

Apparently, whoever had owned their house before them had stored their spare key, unnoticed by Chris and Katie, in the exact same hutch. Who would have thought? People have much the same ideas.

Here's one picture of many of a castle we went to this weekend. This wasn't actually the castle itself, but a landscape castle in front of the main castle(s).

What the heart wants? The heart wants
her horses back.

-Downhearted, Ada Limon

My night

“Castle Motsognir eats her prey alive. What pity is there for the dead?"

McCarren Park when the beauty bled out

I love this time of year. Everything the air touches seems so much more vivid, rich, just soaked in color. Driving to and from work in the big spaces of my towns this week has been so gorgeous. I feel so lucky to live here this season. The whole soft pink gold melty early autumn Valley looks like something I want to put my mouth on.

I finally got Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things in the mail, so now I'm just resisting posting a ton of lines from it. I hope that you will appreciate the amount of restraint this requires of me.

I miss running. I've been a little sick, which somehow my mom already knew about and texted me to chat about: mildly spooky. I also talked to Chels, who proposed that she and I get gay incest married and move to an island with only us on it.

I'm not in a bad mood. I'd been feeling a little unattractive this week, and even today, but everything feels pretty positive. Two strangers told me they liked my outfit today, and both my friends I saw told me I looked pretty. That felt nice. I like to be told stuff like that; I'm just a simple sort of girl.

Trying to put this migraine to bed, doing laundry and burning my incense that always throws me back to a happier time. It smells like old school legends, like old musty tent, light rain on a campfire, leather, decaying logs, green apples, loamy damp leaves, Virgilina hay grass, smashed persimmons, and all my best.

I hate to be one of those girls who complains about her migraines. Lots of people get terrible headaches, or worse, much more debilitating ailments. I get mine fairly rarely: maybe 4 a year. They could be much worse.

That said, today, I feel like a dark wizard is trying to break me mentally with a brain tornado made of glass, and that dark wizard is winning. Today, I don't count.

I'm a girl who could use a win today. I feel like sometimes all I do is fuck everything up. Some highlights today were failing to run, failing to friend, failing to spend the right amount on groceries and making my spouse cross. All my sunflowers are blowing down. I spent like 30 minutes searching under my deck for a black widow spider the size of a 50 cent piece, and now I'm just crying into a WIP trifle. A fucking trifle, like with fruit and whipped cream and custard. Is there anything more pathetic than that?



Edit: complete sadness trifle.

Happy windowsill

You wear your mask, I'll wear mine; we can pretend that our fates were entwined

 "Go back!  Go back!  I had rather die than be whipped."
-a mortally wounded J.E.B. Stuart, being carried from the battlefield

Well, there goes Jackson in Rebel Yell. You've got to hand it to the Confeds for their good death scenes, at least.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever live up to my dedications

I wish I was delicate, I wish my name was Clementine

My car was briefly filled with leaf mold and burlap this weekend, and now it smells weirdly like my childhood. My dad's car smelled like that: full of landscape paint, rulers and compasses and sketches and good pencils for his blueprints, coriander (or pot, never sure) seeds, mulch, beer cans, plastic plant containers...  It's funny how transportive scent memory is. I'm right back as a kid.

*

It's a busy week. I don't really need to be writing this. Still, it's something to pick at as I sort the nostalgic clutter. It's all in bad shape. A lot of it has been obviously sewn back together. A sheath with the fur ruff of a coat from four years ago. I looked at old pictures today and we all just looked like children, especially me.

*

Turner Ashby was a dick, I don't care what anybody says. He was no true knight.

*

I drew the knight of wands today, speaking of knights.

*

I like this picture of myself because I look like an adult, which is what I am.

Wrinkly Yan pants? Check. Thor boyshorts? Check. Shitty delicious beer marketed to stargoons? Check, check, check. Just that kinda day, I guess.

I threw my trust to the birds, and my faith into the sea

Don't talk to the bear.
The bear isn't interested in you.
The bear thinks you're rebel Valley scum.

I'll never be a southern messenger poet

what was beyond us, or what came before us,
or what town we lived in, or where the money came from,
or what new night might leave us hungry and reeling,
we were simply going forward, riotous and windswept,
and all too willing to be struck by something shining
and mad, and so furiously hot it could kill us.

-"Oh Please Let it Be Lightning" by Ada Limon


Her book Bright Dead Things might kill me when it comes out in September.

I miss this water

I was cut open on the way down

Lot of pic posts these days, huh? I guess I've been a little one note. There's change and smoke in the dry late summer air and I'm feeling like something is coming on. One of my girlfriends told me, in the casual feminine way, that she wanted me to know that she always had my back and I heard myself telling her "Thank God, I'm sure going to need that coming up" before I even knew what I was talking about. Maybe the end of Legends, maybe a certain Saturnine twist in myself, maybe just my bullshit meter being finally full up. 

I've been working on my dumb book. I'm working on a new poem about mountains and violence and men and Confederates and it's pretty good. Here's my best tercet from it so far, a mix of imagery and actual quotes I heard:

Storm clouds screening in like so much cavalry, 

south along the bruise-blue Allegany.

I’m going to say it until you fucking love me.

I don't know. I feel okay. Beach next week.

all the while this heart was forgetting how to love like that

I tell you what, honestly? I just feel kinda sad and bad tonight.

fuck the fiercest fables

When I say that ecstatic baby skunks lurch out of the undergrowth and chase me a while on my runs, sometimes I think people don't believe me. These little guys were the size of my hand and looked and acted like kittens. When I stopped to take the picture, they seemed mad that I wasn't running to chase and started fighting with each other instead.

Thornrose is like a Spirited Away landscape in the evening. Kicking up hares and skunks and dodging crows, trying not to trip when the landscape abruptly jerks downward, careening around beeches that are three times the size of me. As dusk falls, the fireflies come out, and there are so many, it reminds me of South Boston. There are so many that they hit my body as I run through them.

*

It was a good weekend to be camping under the full blue moon. When it rose, it turned on like a spotlight. The whole woods lit up bone white. One of my friends brought out a telescope and we took turns peeping at it. It was bright enough that after you looked, you had to reel back and rub your eye. A little moon blind, I guess.

If I was going to ruminate on my reflections for this cycle, I did have that sense of feeling the fullest of something, seeing clearly. Talk about your moon-blind; I guess it made me wonder if I was not getting a little tired of always coming on so strong in...I dunno, my whole life.

*

Lithics, though, darling.

I've got your fire, I've got your fire

Windows 10 dropped and my day was scrambled, anxious shit. I feel stupid, and I won't talk too much.

One good thing is I went over to Joe and Laura's. Joe gave me another bottle key to replace the one I lost floundering in the woods late at night one camping trip. I played with Laura's new kitten, Rowan, and he was really cute. He looked at me like "what the fuck are you?" and then climbed very carefully and deliberately up my body until he had both paws on my chest. Then he put my whole mjoilnir in his little tiny kitten mouth.

Lit up

I try to untie

intrigues and their analogies

I pulled him out of the bones of a 3 million year old coral reef.

in my peach party dress

I like this picture of myself, so I post it to my blog.

*

I am trying to get out of my comfort zone a little. I've tried to do new and bolder things. One of those is to try to become better friends with some of the people in my life that I know, but don't really... be genuine with, or be real friends to. I have this sort of... unfair designation for people. I either know them well enough to trust, and then I like them absolutely, or I consider them almost hostile strangers, even if they've been my acquaintance for a long time. I can be so defensive. I'm still such a recovering shy girl.

So, anyway, the last couple weeks I've tried to be more open and engaging. Out of that, I feel like I have made two 'new' friends, which is good. They are both women, which is also good. They are as different as two girls could be; one is a big nerd like me, and one is a hot rockstar. But I'm excited about it. I might go fossil-hunting with one of them next week. (Guess which one?)

*
Today has been insanely productive. I got up early, went for a run, drank coffee, wrote, cleaned the kitchen, unloaded the dishwasher, did a few loads of laundry, vacuumed downstairs, cleaned Bailey's box, swept the whole house, watered my flowers, ran errands, roasted a chicken and made a fancy dinner, cleaned the bathrooms, tidied up, cleaned the windows, and drank a couple beers because it's so goddamn hot I'm going to die my mascara is melting into my eyes.

*

well I was made of stone back when you were made of clay

Went out for a quick camping last night, then a quiet day today in town playing. Today I feel pretty matter-of-fact. There's only so much B.S. you can expect from yourself on a morning when you woke up in the misty woods and took your morning shower in a chilly, slick creek. If I am boiling down to the essentials, the things I want are more of that. Dissolve want; be a still mouth. I looked at an Io Moth: no hunger, no noise. I looked at a harvestman spider, a daddylonglegs: unobtrusive as a curl of smoke. 

So look at some pictures of my fucking Tigerlilys. I got these bulbs when I was 19.

Great white cherry tomatoes tangled up in the knightswounds, up against black knight butterfly bush.

The moon is an orange sickle in the west tonight. Sitting in Virgo, my heart sign, necking Venus there. Sweet old bunk.