as fire to the sun, tell me what I have done

This is a little dated of an entry, but I shuffled it up into shape because I like some of it. I have so much stuff to say recently.

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On tornadoes:

I guess technically I was in my life's second (so far) tornado over the weekend before this, or at least the wall cloud. My first tornado was so dramatic and singular--I watched that skinny funnel come at me forever, I couldn't get enough of looking at it. I was so sure it was going to kill my little seventeen year old body dead.

The one of the other weekend was amazingly diffuse, rain-wrapped. I was alone in the woods in bare feet and a dress, getting ready to enter a river, and it went abruptly night-dark. The thunder started falling down around me, and the paths turning into brown creeks. I've never seen rain like that. It was all strangely cathartic. I walked back to shelter through the pelting weather and I thought about how when I was young, I used to feel like this Jonah, like there was a big tornadic storm hunting me down my whole life, and one day, it would catch up with me.

I was a dramatic teenager.


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That tornado weekend was good in other respects. I'm good at what I do. That's something I don't acknowledge to myself a lot. I feel confident about the staffing decisions I made and my leadership role. It felt affirming to control this one dumb thing when I've felt so helpless in my personal life recently.

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(It's an awkward angle to photograph.)

I got my first tattoo last week. My tattoo artist asked me why the image was significant to me, which was an innocuous question to ask someone getting an image put on their body, and I realized I didn't really want to talk about it. It's a print from John Bauer's 1907 book of Norse folk stories. I bought my first print from that series when I was 15, working my first job: that picture of Princess Tuvstarr looking into a pool for her heart.

This is a variant of my favorite print He dealt the dragon a mighty blow. I like the tension/balance of the image, the undecided circle, the throw-away courage of it.

When I was getting inked, I was alone in there, which was okay, maybe objectively sad. I might have been more nervous if someone had been able to stay with me. I put on some of my best face alone sometimes. I saw my mechanic and his wife in there before I went in, and half-way through, my mechanic stopped by to play-hassle my artist (who he knew) about how I was doing, if I was okay, and if he was doing a good enough job. I always find it a little striking when older men act... for a lack of a better word "fatherly" to me: lecture or protect me, because my actual father wasn't ever like that. He expected me to fight my own battles and stick up for myself, scorn condescension and twist it into a weapon.

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It's funny, I'm happy and very glad I got the ink, but I keep being sort of haunted by the recurring thought that it's a deliberate personality-specific addition to my body that I'll have until I die. I guess it isn't really so different than wondering if you've bought the clothes you'll die in. In the case of the tattoo, I have.

A mortality-filled post, isn't it? I don't know if that means I'm getting bad again, or just feeling myself here in my Saturn return. I'm a little head-down, in a thinky place. I'm torn between feeling cool clarity, and a little in trouble. Some people go bounding through their whole lives with total disregard. I guess the last couple weeks have made me wish I was a person more like that.

I have all my safety knots in place, though. I have this story I write for no purpose other than that it makes me happy and recently I've put in a lot of little bits on it.

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Yesterday, my brother and I went for a scramble. I love being in the woods with him because he's utterly silent, and we just go. We communicate without speaking about the obstacles or direction or ringneck snake wrapped around my fingers or Io moth. We follow each other's lead. If one of us is going in the water, we both are, even if it's blown out waist deep. There's no real point to this wandering, but it's something we both enjoy and have done on multiple occasions. Yesterday, we climbed a rockface taller than my house, and half-way up, a rock slipped under his hand and a live bat burst out from the crack.

I guess there is a point; fire for the sake of fire.

I won't be the most complicated minute in its configuration of hours

This week is hard, but I'm getting through. I've made my hardworking agreements with getting by for now. I do have a long blown out entry I'm editing. I feel tired and almost everything hurts, but I'm getting by.

I really want to post about some stuff from the weekend, but I got too tired and kinda sad last night, so I'm putting this here to remind myself to do so when I have time. Which will be... sometime!

The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road
Ada Limon 

That we might walk out into the woods together,
and afterwards make toast
in our sock feet, still damp from the fern’s
wet grasp, the spiky needles stuck to our
legs, that’s all I wanted, the dog in the mix, 
jam sometimes, but not always. But somehow,
I’ve stopped praising you. How the valley
when you first see it—the small roads back
to your youth—is so painfully pretty at first,
then, after a month of black coffee, it’s just
another place your bullish brain exists, bothered
by itself and how hurtful human life can be.
Isn’t that how it is? You wake up some days
full of crow and shine, and then someone
has put engine coolant in the medicine
on another continent and not even crying
helps cure the idea of purposeful poison.
What kind of woman am I? What kind of man?
I’m thinking of the way my stepdad got sober,
how he never told us, just stopped drinking
and sat for a long time in the low folding chair
on the Bermuda grass reading and sometimes
soaking up the sun like he was the story’s only
subject. When he drove me to school, we decided
it would be a good day, if we saw the blue heron
in the algae-covered pond next to the road,
so that if we didn’t see it, I’d be upset. Then,
he began to lie. To tell me he’d seen it when
he hadn’t, or to suppose that it had just
taken off when we rounded the corner in
the gray car that somehow still ran, and I
would lie, too, for him. I’d say I saw it.
Heard the whoosh of wings over us.
That’s the real truth. What we told each other
to help us through the day: the great blue heron
was there, even when the pond dried up,
or froze over; it was there because it had to be.
Just now, I felt like I wanted to be alone
for a long time, in a folding chair on the lawn
with all my private agonies, but then I saw you
and the way you’re hunching over your work
like a puzzle, and I think even if I fail at everything,
I still want to point out the heron like I was taught,
still want to slow the car down to see the thing
that makes it all better, the invisible gift,
what we see when we stare long enough into nothing.

Don't listen to the ghosts that walk your hallways, heaven is a dog and it clings to thee

Fireflies in the graveyard on tonight's run. I took it on my phone, while I was running, and I was listening to this song.

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I wonder if my dad ever thought he'd have a girl child born in the same year as his football number, 86, and if she'd ever cut out the neck of his 30-year-old-soft Furman football 86 t-shirt and wear it to sleep in when she was grown up. Grown up girl child with the scraped up knees and prize-fighter black and red knuckles.

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My night time routine has gotten a lot different that it used to be. I come home. Sometimes I'm talking to my mom on the phone. (I was tonight.) I change into running clothes and water my garden for 20-30 minutes, weed, refill the birdbath. Then I come in, wash up, and start dinner. Eat dinner. Sit on the front porch after. Then a nice twilight run. Shower, chores, a little writing. Tonight a little work.

They market this to shitty bitches like me

Sometimes when I'm gardening, I can hear my neighbordad talking to his little sons/himself when he thinks there's no one around

(packing the two under-five year old boys into the car for a trip)

Next Door NeighborDad: What toy do you want?
Boys: ...!
Next Door NeighborDad: Godzilla?
Boys:...!!!!!
Next Door NeighborDad: And what toy does dad get? Mothra?
Boys: ! ! !
Next Door NeighborDad: No, Mothra is (boys names) toy too. What kind of toy does dad get?
Boys: ... ... ...
Next Door NeighborDad: Dad doesn't get any toys, huh? That's the truth. Dad gets a new pair of shorts. Do you know what Dad's favorite toy is?
Boys: ...
Next Door NeighborDad: Beer.
Boys: ....
Next Door NeighborDad: (to himself, reflectively) Well, it used to be video games. But I can't waste time on that when I could be playing with you two.

fuck me and make me a drink, I lost direction and I'm past my peak

Had a nice time watering the yard today. It was so hot. I put on my favorite cutoffs and a navy blue beater and drank a beer and thought a lot of tomato thoughts. I guess this blog gets a little insufferable when I'm gardening so much, a litany of plants I love desperately and try to tend and fail at. Err.

Speaking of, though, I guess this blog is always probably a little insufferable in general... but I always wanted the immediacy of my actual feelings instead of something polished up and interesting. I suppose up close, lots of people are a little gross. I think I'm getting too old to pretend to be cool anymore, at least especially in my own secret little corners. (Things I learned this week I'm also getting too old for: getting hit on in bars, college drama.)

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That said, I'm looking forward to some self-imposed exile this weekend. I'm also hawking some wares to earn tomato cage cash if that helps reckon my headspace.

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Sir Christopher Lee died. I always think it's a little silly to mourn over people you don't know who appeared in movies when there are plenty of every day tragedies. Still, he was my favorite, favorite, favorite actor for most of my life. It was sort of a dumb thing when I was younger. One time, my best friend in high school went over to England on a trip, and she and her English boyfriend ran into him at some kind of film premiere thing, since her boyfriend had some kind of family connection in the industry. They said something like "We have to tell you!!!! Our friend (My name) lives over in America and she thinks you're just amazing and has the biggest crush on you!!!!" And he said like "What? Uh, thank you...?"

And briefly after they called me international, screaming.

It seems like a pretty big That Happened, but I've thought of it since. Wugh, he had knighthood, how undignified.

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It's hard to know what to do sometimes. I think I need to learn something about stillness and calm.

Smokeset

Went out with my main girl for a drink tonight, met some good dogs and Papa Bear. The sunset was red from the smoke of aforementioned fires. I'd really like to go camping again soon.

This morning was so strange. The sky just looked all wrong in a way I couldn't put my finger on. Peachy-yellow-grey-overcast, but it didn't feel like it should be overcast, you know? The air didn't feel like rain--it was dry and felt like a sunny day except that there was no sun (something I had never thought about, but seemed to wrong and strange.)

Wildfire smoke, from Canada.

I wish I'd taken a picture...

I feel sad like a Kathy cartoon today. This morning, after selecting a really pretty white blouse, I dumped my entire cup of coffee onto it on 81. It was too late to turn around, so I just spent the day vaguely damp and coffee-scented. When I ran out for food at work, my coworker asked me scornfully "Isn't it a little late in the afternoon for pizza?" I messed up almost everything I touched. My ankles and feet are adjusting to my new running shoes, and that is leading me to do a lot of suddenly falling over when I take a wrong step and the muscle spasms. Facebook wishes me a happy best friends day.

Speaking of friends, this weekend was something. Going to Lynchburg on a good day is like getting kicked in the stomach.

One good thing is that I bottled up some meads tonight to show off at homebrew. Since I needed to call them something other than their charming working names of Nithavellir Honey and Goblinspunk for the general populace, I elected to label them Blood and Bones. Blood is sweet blood orange, pale pale sunrise orangey pink. Bones is dry orange with graveyard violets, very very clear and nice nose. To my surprise, I actually like them. They taste like something I would voluntarily drink, even buy myself. I guess this is all a process, but it was encouraging to see after so many abject failure batches. They'll always be goblin-themed to me.

I don't know, okay. That's probably all I have right now.

Pretend the dove from above is a dragon

Snap dragons, for a girl who needs a win.

But I've got a girl in the war, paul

Stormy old week cranking up, huh?