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.