Out

take your time boy I'm in no hurry--came across all the swords you buried (tell me what it's like to never worry)

I think for the week of my thirtieth I will be giving myself the present I've been flirting with all year: a total mental breakdown about everything that happened in the second half of my twenties! Just kidding, but also not. I am wore out of this sick, unfair year, and I'm too tired not to say so.

Oh my god, I need Elkhorn so bad right now. My best happiness, my place, my untouchable woods.

I came across this picture when I was clearing stuff off my camera, and I look like such a stupid goon, but it made me stop because I also look so damn happy. I know exactly when I took it: trip 5 of 13 this year: Josh and Travis, just a one nighter way down on the sites right on the creek. And I was a creek girl here, going to fetch breakfast wood, a bottle of cold champagne in my other hand, happy to be alone in the woods, listening to the high water break through logjams.

The first camping trip I went on in 2016 was at the end of February, and I was in a state where I felt like utterly nothing. That place gave me snow. It sounds shit and gay as hell, but I realized that trip that a place never runs out on you. If I wanted to put my trust in something that wouldn't disappoint, I should spend the year out enjoying these incredible woods that I washed up on. So I went a lot. And now I need to go again, and regain something.

left me begging to the birds for a bone or offering, left me saying nothing, nothing like I always say

I remembered today that sometimes great solace is to be entirely by myself for a little while, especially up on the top of some hill in the Shenandoah, watching the sycamore turn white in the dusky cold and all the little farm lights come on across the Valley.

*

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*

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On the other hand, then I came home to this:

25 things I did in an hour and a half

Hey, Jess, what are you going to do because you cancelled your long rain run because you're getting a cold, (probably from last week when you thought you were maybe coming down with something and said you were gonna take it easy but actually did a lot of cold wet bell-ringing for the Salvation army, speed running, and 3 am barefoot dog games) and find yourself with unscheduled free time?

1. Take out the garbage
2. Feed, walk said dog, tell said dog how handsome and smart he is (he just mastered the ring-the-bell-with-your-nose-to-go-outside trick)
3. Consider current full moon in Gemini with a crazy evil Saturn conjunction and all the horrible emotional really on-the-nose astrology it's supposed to portend
4. Do the laundry
5. Shot put non-pie quality pumpkins into the compost area in the rain
6. Stash pie-quality pumpkins in the cellar
7. Play favorite album again
8. Dance with said handsome brilliant dog to said favorite album
9. Burn nice new fancy candle bought because "Dark Forest" is name of said candle and in a really Nithavellir headspace re: wicked full moon
10. Prepare lunches and grind up beans and set coffee maker for tomorrow
11. Prep dinner
12. Empty dishwasher
13. Just open up trashy fantasy story to look
14. Write trashy fantasy story instead of working on, you know, the actual book
15. Love trashy fantasy story
16. Get kinda sad about stuff for a while: trashy fantasy actually v. sad when read in certain light (Full moon in Gemini light for instance)
17. Wonder if other people think about self as often as self thinks about them
18. Wonder if might have a fever
19. Think this Nithavellir candle is starting to smell like a real sucky bath and body works man perfume, decide should have anticipated that for reason of the stupid thing being called
"Dark Forest " duh Jess, beat self up about more foolish choices
20. Think that's probably what goblins smell like anyway
21. Carry said handsome brilliant dog around the kitchen on hip like a 40 lb baby
22. Get really into said favorite album again while sauteing shiitake mushrooms, recover good mood (shiitake mushrooms!)
23. Start cleaning fridge out uh oh don't
24. ...start a big project right now
25. 6:30 time to eat dinner

I was only for to die beside

I told Chris that for this Yule event, my costuming would be to dress as a girl named Jess wearing a tackyass urban outfitter t-shirt. He said, "So... Yan, as usual?" The look was short-lived, as I had to haul my dog out of a frozen pond, and then a very clingy baby put a lot of doughnut in my hair. Managed to get a photo record of it, though. I thought about cropping my knarly upper arm bruise out of this picture, but then I thought "What am I censoring anything for anymore?"

Yule was kind of fucking magic. We spent the day cooking together, as nobody had to be rushing around game-planning. Everybody awesome came, and it was the true believers, none of the lip-service heroes. We had a massive bonfire. At four am, I was sitting in a pile of my friends, drinking entirely things that were made by our talented people, talking about all that has changed and all that has stayed the same, my dog utterly draped out on a sleeping Joe, who he adores. It was so good to see the progress in everyone from last year. I miss the game, but it's been an important year without it. I feel bitterly bittersweet about a lot of things.

don't you frown when you're feeling like this: only love can dig you out of this

Sometimes, but especially right now, I gotta think: gosh, Jessica, why are you so fucking stupid? And then there's this part of me going, like: yeah, okay, and that's fine. C'mon. 

That's the thing. I always thought I was faking it, and I wasn't. I think some part of me really believes in all that stalwart crap. I don't believe in the idea of people's faith, justice, goodness, or bravery anymore. But by God, I'm not going to slink off on them. 

I did myself a little janky tarot reading, (a hot mess: star over two of pents, inv. emperor made an appearance, bunk for miles) and my personal representation card was the upside down nine of cups: heart, valor, loyalty, but not without some little ruin. 

People are not going to do right by me. I can't control that. People have been using me and taking advantage of me since I was a little girl. Since I was a literal child. They will chew me up, and then they will spit me out when they're done and bored. I can't control that. I can control me, though, and what I do back. It's so fucking cool to be all cynical and grim and cold, but I'm not that, even now. There's nothing to be gained by turning your back on people who don't even know the extent or consequences of their actions, and probably wouldn't care if they did. People are just people. 

So I don't know, I feel tired, but I'm not bitter.My heart is very full. And that's the thing I feel I've been trying to wrap my head around in my late twenties. What do you do when loss and disappointment happens again, and again, and again? What do you do when everyone is the same? Internalize it? Get furious, and atom bomb the people who hurt you? No way. you make bread. (Or pumpkin pound cake.) You love, and scrap together whatever compassion you've got, and you never, ever give up on them, because the real thing is so much bigger than any stupid wound you've got to nurse. And that can be okay.

I'm not really like this, I'm probably plightless

My thing comes out tomorrow. You know, my thing, my thingie, my thing! Fame at last! Just kidding. Well, not kidding about the thing, but you know.

*

My fugue has taken a weird turn today. All month I have felt disconnected from myself, unattractive, cautious with every thing. I have snapped at friends who inquire too pointedly, or with too much entitlement. Self-protectiveness has been an ugly trend in myself this year, and this particular season, I've felt truly paralyzed by it. I was never like this.

But today, of all days, when it's pouring and grey, I feel absolutely on fire, utterly consumed with warmth and wanting.

*

I had one of those weird, portentous dreams last night. I was in kind of a shit raft with a friend, and we were trying to paddle it upstream these rapids for some reason. (A reason I had not really condoned--we were arguing, and I was being quite frank about a lot of things.) Still, the water shooting underneath us was strange, beautiful, and clear, and we could see all the fish moving around. Something odd and magic about it.

I dream about boats a lot these days, ever since Travis and I took the canoe up the Little Otter to get to Falling Creek at Isaac's farm this summer. We were moving a lot of stuff up a long ways--many more miles than we'd realized--and it was hard, visceral work: getting out of the canoe and dragging it over deep pits, submerged logs, and snags, walking it through flat areas, scrambling over rocks larger than my car to haul the gear over rapids and line the boat down safe. It was utterly exhausting: seven miles longer than expected, but one of those experiences that gets into you, like when you spend all day in the surf and then close your eyes to see waves.

I've been wondering what to do; I'd give anything to talk to you

A big couple days. I'm so tired and wrung out. Should be in bed, because I think I might be coming down with something, but instead I'm drinking tiny cups of sake and looking at things I wrote. When my head feels like this, I want to play with my little stories. I wish I could write something good right now. I want to have that feeling like being excited to get into a scene or a piece, but tonight, I'm just re-reading old stuff. 

I like to write seasonally. I want to write summer stories and bright, happy scenes in the summer. In the darker months, I write colder things. The thing I'm looking at tonight is a sad story, one that has come to mean a lot to me, but it ends on a scene in summer. It all was enough to make me a little soft and dreamy about a season that didn't actually pass too long ago, even if I'm relieved the unseasonable late autumn warmth has finished. It makes me all feel a little dumb and vulnerable.

Being home this weekend was odd. I felt a strange doublethinking, like I could see fields I had once loved that had become shopping centers as vividly as the shopping centers. I could sit on my living room step-down, where the wood floors meet the carpet, and remember when I was a teenager and my house was the first house framed out in an empty meadow, and I sat on the boards in that exact spot and let my legs dangle into the basement. Strangely inhabiting of my old self, with all her faults, bitterly-sad naivete, and charms. Hard to hang out in that headspace when I've been feeling a little disconnected otherwise.

Don't be afraid

I'm thankful that when I'm up at 6:50, smashingup mashed potatoes, my dog loves to dance with me in the kitchen to Ain't Nobody's Problem.

singing so much softer than I did back then

If you spend the weekend having conversations in your head, it's best to do so ranging with a pup in Vanaheim under the Hunter's moon where the old trees and pastures make your heart gentle.

well I cursed and I cried but now I know

I came closer to dying last night that I have in a long while, when our furnace burst, and I slept for a full night in a house slowly filling with smoke and carbon monoxide. It was hard to wake up, and when I did, I went down to the source to try to stop the smoke. I felt poisoned and housefire sick all day.

Tonight, my house was heatless, waiting on the repair, but clear. I lay down with my pup on the couch and he put his head on my shoulder and stretched out alongside my body on his back, paws up, like he likes to do. He's turning all of a sudden into a real big dog instead of a little snugly puppy, and I'm remembered how big his breed will get. He still thinks he's a lap dog. He still thinks he's a dog that can lay his whole big sprawling body on yours and let you wrap your arms around him and that's just perfectly fine with him.

I thought that I should feel something about a legitimately skin-of-my-teeth near death experience, but I didn't. Josh said, "that's how people die in houses." I guess asleep in a house I love is probably not such a bad death as the ones I can imagine. The moon is very full.

Some real talk

I realize I haven't written in this thing for longer than I've ever let it go. I wasn't having some personal crisis or anything. I'm sort of over having a big dramatic episodes about stuff.

That said, there were very real reasons I wasn't using this. I still feel those reasons, but I started thinking about them today. I was on a run by myself, and it was one of those emotional vomit runs since it's been a hard week and I've had to suppress a lot of anger. So often now I run with other people--Josh, my run club, or Thomas--I don't get a lot of time to have those long runs alone where stuff boils up to the surface and I get to just feel my feelings.

As I was running, I was thinking of this year and the stuff that has changed. The places and things I used to associate with happiness and the people that have been lost to me. I've kept a journal every year of my life since I was 13. Of everything I lost this year, am I really going to let this get taken away too?

I also started a new blog, elsewhere, that I publish much more publicly on facebook and stuff. It's not quite the same content as this; this was always my little secret space that only one or two people in my life knew about.The other blog is obviously much, much more public. Still, I miss having this space to process my feelings and unravel what I think about things.

2016 is almost over, thank God. It was such a classic Saturn return of a year. I feel like I changed so many things in my life in such a short period of time. I guess that's a good way to do it. I'm looking forward to my birthday in December and saying "Okay, I choked that all down, what's next?" It wasn't all bad, it was just so much change, so rapidly.

- I got a new job. When I left grad school, I wanted a break from academia. I joked to my writer friends that I was a corporate sell-out. Now I'm fully on a track that's totally different from anything to do with writing. I have a job in software at a Fortune 500 company, and I'm doing great at it. It feels really strong to be working in a technical field after being the arty-writer-teacher type my whole life. I still tell new people I meet that I'm a writer before I catch myself and explain what I do. That's odd, but it's helped me to be working with a bunch of engineers and techheads, too. I think differently now than I did last year.

-We got a dog. Josh and I are in a really different chapter of our lives now together. We're doing a lot of stuff together we thought we'd never do. A lot of weird, cool, exciting stuff. And we're bringing the dog.

-I have almost a whole new friend group. For the first time in my life, I have a squad of female friends I do things with. I know a ton of new people in my town. I can walk into a bar downtown and know almost everyone. That's a strange feeling for a person who leans toward introvert. I thought when Legends ended, I would have all this free time, but now I feel like my life is busier than it has ever been.

-I'm writing, and getting published like nobody's business. My audience just got a lot bigger.

-My closest friend left my life, probably for the last time, which has been a defining factor of the year. It wasn't something I didn't see coming; he's always been the kind of person to quit things if he wasn't afraid to quit them. I don't say that coldly or bitterly, it is just the truth about him, and I always knew that one day would come where his goals were more important than whatever it was I meant to him. His own fiance warned me about what type of man he was when he and I got close, and though I'm still not sure she was right about him, over the years I thought about her words. Still, he was such an incredibly important part of my life. It hurt me that after everything we'd been through, he didn't have the strength to say goodbye to my face, which is something I've had a hard time finding closure about. There's so much I never got to say.

I'm okay about it, though part of me feels like I'll be having stairway conversations with him in my head for the rest of my life. I know he isn't having stairway conversations with me--honestly, he's probably a lot happier directly because of this. And that's okay too. I'm not childish enough to pretend my unwillingness to give up on people is a strength.

-This election was a big deal to me. As a girl who grew up in a culture that eschewed female pastors, that taught that a woman's place was in service and obedience to her husband, that encouraged me not to have a career, that literally told me that my own body was sinful and should be covered up, voting for the would-be first female president meant the world to me. The failure of those ideas, and particularly the people who I thought were my friends and allies on the left, was crushing to me. It feels very personal to me.

I posted on twitter that I felt like 2016 was like the shitty stub end of a cigarette that you started to smoke on a drunk impulse and now just don't want to finish it, but your mom didn't raise you to waste anything. A friend arranged a sort of public support group on Wednesday night for people feeling sick about the election, and I went to try to support her. Hearing the people who were weeping and devastated about this whole year, I felt tired and ready to move forward. My life has a certain momentum these days. A lot is going very well. Tonight, I'm going out to see my beautiful town. I'm going to take my veterans roses. I'm going to bake bread.

So that's some real stuff. I mostly couch everything in a fine level of bullshit that I put up on this thing, but nobody reads this anyways, and it made me feel something to write it. Maybe the person I'm well on my way to becoming will read this in a month or a year and it will mean something to her. For now, I don't know that I'm keeping this blog, but I felt that I owed myself some explanation.

You're already in there; I'll be wearing your tattoo (I'm already in circles and circles)

Rabbit, rabbit, Autumn.

*

Tonight, we hung out with the family next door for the first time since moving in. I took them some tomatoes and butterflies over the summer, and the woman, Erin, said she felt badly that we'd never really connected in the two years we've been at the house. So when their boys were settling down, they asked us over for some wine and we took over bread and some garden flowers. She was like, "I see you running all the time, what race are you training for?" and I was like "oh I don't run races I just run for me," and she was like "I've run seven marathons, you could if you wanted to." My maniac brain is pretty intrigued.

Also, it was cool to be reminded that people aren't always what you think or expect. I always assumed we were pretty different types of people, but it was laughably untrue: they both had MFA writing degrees, and ran, and liked the same history books I did, and they'd watched the same TV show I just started. I'm too old to still be categorizing people, but I do. You'd think my experiences would have taught me better than to trust on my impressions.

*

I've had kind of a bad week--more dreaming, as always, tired, and then I have to go all to cville tomorrow. I took my emergency anxiety meds for the first time last night in six months, and then I hated today, how everything slowed down to a crawl, and everything like sharp fractures of glass for my analysis. The only way I started to feel normal was tonight, sitting on my front porch, writing garbage.

I didn't die and I ain't complaining, I ain't blaming you

Tonight: folding laundry and listening to Modest Mouse like some kind of 2010 me.


*

I mean you had me on my knees

I'm a tough and capable woman who can handle her shit. But sometimes there's just nothing for it. I run, I read my story, I get off, I eat, I drink, I listen to music. There's just nothing for it.

turn these diamonds straight back into coal

This has been the most successful year of my life so far when it comes to my work being published. I just found out I got another two poems in this week, and yet, for the life of me, I can't think of a single thing to include in the writer's bio that every single publication or contest wants from me. What does a person say? What do you include in a brief paragraph about yourself?

I'm Jess from the Shenandoah Valley. Suddenly this year almost everyone in my life has spontaneously begun referring to me as "Jessie"--a name I have never gone by but like because it's different. I don't know what I'm doing. I dream exclusively about OLED driving circuits, touch substrates, interface processing or the same recurring nightmare I've had for six months replaying my litany of interpersonal failure. Everything has changed and everything is different and I have almost no use for myself anymore. My hair is almost to my ass. I am all of Nithavellir. I make a lovely trifle. I am a ruin of my former self. I can cook and I'm good at running. I know how to define a space. I suck good cock. I grow good pumpkins. I have to still think: worth it. Like Satan, I am an angel of light.

But I will probably just list my other publications.

When we're found, oh we'll kiss that ground

Every night, I come home and listen to my Gregory Alan Isakov record and make a beautiful dinner and clean up and go for a run and then take a shower and think over and over again to myself: at least your tits look amazing seriously you dumb fucking bitch your tits are finally so good.

I'm remembering last fall, and having one of those moments where I realize a time-travel last fall me would in seriousness not believe any of my life right now and the things that are happening.

*

I wanna write about my gettysburg sex/ghost vacation but I'm just this side of still catching up from it all. I'd say "I'm feeling kind of odd tonight" but that's literally what I've been posting for months and I should probably think of something else to say eventually. If I ever had any readers, I'd lose them. Tiresome sad girl.

Here's something though:

Where Col Lewis Armistead fell, the furthest any Confederate ever got on Pickett's charge, running to see his friend on the Union side. I know I've written about the story on here before and what it means to me. The scroll monument is for him: to mark where he was mortally wounded. He never saw the friend he was trying to find, so their last words to each other would remain as they had parted during peacetime:

"Goodbye, you can never know what this has cost me."

But I like some of the last words he said to the Union soldiers who came up to him after he'd been hit on the Gettysburg field a little better. "I'm not surrendering; I'm dying."

Oh, Lo.

you were right about the end, it didn't make a difference

I've been drawing the Tower a lot these days, and again today, on another recurring nightmare day. Today, it seem to say "Learn to be comfortable with your ruin. This rubble. This is it."

Today was my Monday

Despite having the kind of dreams that cause me to wish aloud for lobotomy, I felt pretty neutral today. Instead of the kind of constant mental overdrive that I normally struggle with, most of the day I thought about, legitimately, nothing. It was kind of weird and very unusual for me, but also kind of nice. I think I was extremely dehydrated.

On my morning carpool, I was telling my buddy about having the bad dream again. The morning was hot even at 7, and the mountains were hung all hazy. I told him, "I think it's just my mind's way of getting by. I don't respect myself enough to demand confrontation or closure in life, and then in my sleeping mind, I try to make it for myself but it comes out like this: a recurring nightmare."

And he said, "I had a dream that you were a really unsuccessful werewolf."

Now: a horrible run in the heat.

down in the valley with whiskey rivers, these are the places you will find me hiding, these are the places I will always go

Good time to run off.

I'm happy that it's cool enough for my fatigues again. I've hardly felt like myself without them, and my legs get torn on the thorns.

Late season harvest for dinner.

Long hair; don't care. 

This week's meditation: keep room for what you don't know.

Current status

That mood where you're giving road head on 501 and you take the dick out of your mouth to say, "pour one out for our favorite daughter" when you pass the turnoff for Travis's farm. Then you spend all Saturday in a hospital waiting area.

It's a weird time for me. What weather we're having.

one more for the stars and the eyes of the walls

It's funny how things scar. Sometimes surprising, sometimes the littlest things: I have one from chasing around at Legends and getting caught on a brier. Nothing deep, just a long line of silver on me. It blazes up when I tan, and I'm almost tanner than I've ever been. I have one up my wrist from my bad, tough, dead girlcat in highschool. I love to see it and think of her wicked green eyes.

And sometimes there are the pretty obvious ones that you know as soon as you get them: they're going to stick: I have a scar on the inside of my throat. My calf where that Wampler boy threw me into a fence. Wounds you see and just know how it's going to look down the line.

I just got a new one, and I'm a little proud in my cut-up too-interested way about it right now. I ripped open my knee on a jut of beaver-pointed limb, and there's so much of me gone. I can look at it and know I'll never be on my knees in the same skin again.

Skunk Hour, Robert Lowell

I myself am hell;
nobody’s here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

More of this fucking garbage

This evening I took time to loiter on my back porch. The sun was setting bloody over the Allegheny to the west, toward Augusta Springs, and I dangled my limbs into the sticky backyard and looked at the late season rare mess of fireflies and pumpkin vines and sunflowers where the goldfinch had been being crybabies all afternoon. I tried to say, "I am inhabiting this failure." and for a little while, that worked: all my rich masochism filled everything in and I thought of this O'Hara, close to it:

Now I am quietly waiting for 

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

But it never lasts. I keep saying, "no one ruined you, you did this to yourself" but it just circles around again. I can't get away from this right now. I need to stop trying, and put my shoulder to something else.

I've gone crazy, couldn't you tell; threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell

-I didn't much want to, but I did my five miles tonight. I don't enjoy running like I used to, but I still do it, because it's important to stay fit, and sometimes things are hard but you have to do them anyway. Maybe I'm just a little burned out. I don't set goals anymore: I don't have to, I'll run either way, but maybe I should get back to it.

-I sent out a ton of work tonight, washed the sheets, talked to my mom on the phone, made a really nice-looking and tasty dinner, cleaned up, packed lunches

- my old mentor at work is turning into my friend now that I'm off training and he doesn't have to talk to me but still does for some reason. I know that sounds pathetic, but I realized it today, after I noticed it was the x day in a row he'd turned up at my cube to tell me something unrelated to work for 30 minutes. "Oh, you have voluntarily decided I am worth still talking to. What?" I like him the way I genuinely like people sometimes without knowing too much about them. He looks like a grim elf and used to be a male ballerina and his wife who works downstairs leaves sweet notes on his monitor that I first thought were notes he'd written as encouragement to himself.

also I thought I'd left my badge at home today but it was just at the bottom of my purse

-*-

I tell you one thing I've been thinking about. I think my personality has changed in a bad way over the last year: I'm such a little nihilist these days. I'm not depressed, I just have this let down feeling of seeing how everything actually is. It's like in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy pulls back the curtain and sees that the wizard is just a sad little man pulling levers. Suffering has no great purpose, and there's no real narrative to anything, no story, no meaning.

But one thing about that is that I'm not afraid anymore.

if you want what the syllables want, just do your job

I was having my weekly wine date with my main girl tonight, and she told me about a thing. She's teaching a class on productivity--trying in vain to teach creative writing majors Agile method she'd say--but in particular, she's teaching a book on productivity. She told me about one of the techniques the author of the book recommended as a general better-type-of-person centering exercise. At the end of each day, write down three positive things. We were a bottle in, so we both got as far as "having wine together" and "dogs" but I should do it for real.

1. goldfinch and monarchs on my daily 3 mile walk over my work breaks
2. nice mom next door being really friendly to me ever since I brought her tomatoes
3. team lead told me I had "greatly helped the team" so yeah everybody there thinks I have a masters in physics and am not one of those creative writing majors who learned Agile

Like, I feel a little better, and I only spent about 43% of today thinking about all the dumb shit I'm carrying.

didn't anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear

So I bought some cute underwear, flowers the color of a tiger orgasm, bright hard dry white wine and donated some money to a children's charity in Yan's name. My small acts of self-pity: have myself a little wine and try to do something good for somebody. I worked on my dumb book.

As Mars comes fully out of retrograde, out of the month long slow turn and back into direct station, I feel like I misread everything. The period of retrograde, from late winter to a little while ago, wasn't the difficult period to get through and process. That was the easy part; the reprieve. Mars isn't gentle. The trials are now at hand.

I should count my blessings. Last night, we hung out with my bud, his cool, funny girlfriend, and smart-as-a-whip six year old. Getting to have her in our lives is so neat. She wanted to know about the times we hung out with her when she was a baby, and she said her one wish would be to survive. Good wish, kid.

Today, I ran in the pouring summer rain. I pulled weeds, cleaned house, I got by.

It's important to remember. Earlier this weekend, we had ducked out to elkhorn for a one-night woods. Some time during the night as I slept in my hammock, the dry creekbed filled with water from further up the mountain, and when I woke, the brook was humming with water and life.

All my life, I have been cutting toward myself. One of my earliest memories is hiding in the reeds, frightened, blood spiraling out into the water from where I'd cut myself on my dad's pocketknife while fishing. I have cut myself on every beautiful blade I've ever owned: my machete, my hatchet, my perfect little tigerwood hip knife. At 8:30 am in the woods, my friend and I were walking along the freshly-filled creek and drinking a bottle of champagne. I said, "It's not that I don't know any better. I do." and my companion's reply was "I know: that's why I didn't say anything."

I got guns in my head and they won't go

And like, what did I think? I want to say, "uncle."  I want to say, "parlay." I'm so sick of myself.

Do you know that one way to read that six upside down is a profession of love?

it's been some time

I have felt like such a colossal fuckup today. I woke up from the same old nightmare feeling like I wanted a lobotomy, and the whole day has spun on that axis. I keep returning to this breakdown feeling: nobody else has these problems, nobody else is hung up on these lines--even the people I'm having nightmares about don't still think about this. I've always been this way, and it's about me, my flaws, not anything or anyone else. This is about my persistent failures: the lacking, the spill.

Even getting compliments about my performance at work didn't help. It made me feel shitty. I cried on my commute, then got home to my hatching.

It's a bad picture of me, and that's fine: I don't care too much what I look like anymore. Butterflies don't make any real grief better. You don't get your day turned around because some beautiful little thing you hauled out of a parking lot and fed hatched. That's for children, and I'm so old right now. I know about butterflies: I can raise them from egg, give them what they need, and let them go. I can't let anything else go; the symbolism is meaningless.When I released this boy, he booked it just like he knew what he was running away from.

Sometimes you just do the best you've got, because that's all you have, and there isn't any other choice.

it's late august and the prophets are calling their bears in

Popcorn thunderstorms back in the Shenandoah Valley. Got dropped at the car in Charlottesville and raced the storms over, eager to get home, out of there, back to my bugs and tomatoes and the flowers I unwisely planted before leaving. Vacation was fun, but I have, stupidly, put more on my mind than there was before I left, and the stars are nothing but trouble this week.

I have to be smarter about this. I have to be less indulgent of my own sad stories. I'd got to get my perspective on right before I'm stuck pondering all this in the dark and cold this winter.

I think I'll go out onto the cool of my back deck and watch the next storm come in. I think I'll write something I love and take advantage of the little last drip of time off from spending my PTO today. I think I'll make a homemade red sauce out of brandywine heirloom tomatoes out of my garden, and roast zucchini and eggplant also from my garden, and try to think about all the good that is given.

Charles Wright, in All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself:

Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
        hopelessly, passion-placed,
Untranslatable language.
Non-mystical, insoluble in blood, they act as an opposite
To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.

All forms of landscape are autobiographical.

Salt water is the cure for everything: sweat, tears, and the sea

Persimmon mead mimosa

Obligatory beach hair picture

you must have known I'd do this someday

I caught my face's reflection in a monarch chrysalis. Funny how it all comes back around, insect to insect.

Purple Cherokee like a bright wet garnet or aorta.

Harvest.

***

I don't know, man, I'm in a weird place today. Too many conversations in my head. It got late all of a sudden. My hot run made me want to pass out. I took tomatoes to the neighbors; they were kind and seemed surprised and happy. I think giving things away makes me happier than having things ever could. That letting go. Seems like I'd be better at this.

Charlie Kaufman's Screenwriter's lecture

And since convincing yourself that you are interesting is probably not going to happen, take it off the table. Think, ‘Perhaps I’m not interesting but I am the only thing I have to offer, and I want to offer something. And by offering myself in a true way I am doing a great service to the world, because it is rare and it will help.’

As I move through time, things change. I change, the world changes, the way the world sees me changes. I age, I fail, I succeed, I am lost. I have a moment of calm. The remnants of who I have been, however, hover, embarrass me, depress me, make me wistful. The inkling of who I will be depresses me, makes me hopeful, scares me, and embarrasses me. And here I stand at this crossroads, always embarrassed, wistful, depressed, angry, longing, looking back, looking forward.

...

‘That’s two hours I’ll never get back,’ is a favorite thing for an angry person to say about a movie he hates. But the thing is, every two hours are two hours he’ll never get back. You cannot hoard your two hours.

So you are here, and I am here, spending our time as we must, it must be spent. I am trying not to spend this time as I spend most of my time: trying to get you to like me.

all the things I never told you still glooming

There's a line in my favorite show: we don't get to stop, we have a job to do. That has resonated well with me this year. It's a good year for tomatoes, the best one I've ever had. Mars has been retrograde all year, since the end of February, and it's finally turning back around come the end of August. I've gotten a lot done in this backward season. I have changed nearly everything. I won't pretend I'm ready for this autumn, but I have to be soon.

A couple nights ago, Josh was teasing me about something, and he said "Do your Yan voice for me; say that in your Yan voice." and I couldn't. It was just gone. That sounds so tremendously silly, and I know that. But being in that mindset with Legends was such a conscious change for me, and I bought it hook/line. Forgetting it felt somehow symbolic, and I wasn't drunk enough not feel genuinely about it: not charmed by my own coldness, or my commitment to no longer pretending to lose. The lessons I learned about myself from that whole experience were important ones. Even pretend people.

I did remember eventually a couple days later. The trick was to say "waaaaaoohhhht" like you've just been totally blindsided by your own stupid vulnerability and the relentless cruelty of the rest of the world. Oh well, thank goodness. There's still some part of myself that can be a total sucker.

At that field party, I discovered I'm really good at kickball still. A drunk guy called me "MVP!" so there's that, too. It was a great party. All my best bitches were there. I wore good boots, and the sky was amazing; the milky way up right bold the way it never is anymore.

This week and the next will be interesting. I'm happy that for tomorrow at least, I know exactly what I'm doing and where I'm going.

but you're still, and you're bright, and you're quiet at the heart of this

fall swooned, left me drunk in a field

I do have a field party to attend tonight on the Middle river. It's going to be hard to go out there among those big fields of thistle and queen anne's lace, secret chapters of hemlock and oak and little pieces of creek and stone and not have big coyote eyes.

Presently I'm finishing my coffee before my morning run, which will be too hot. I should have just gone when I got up, but I didn't want to, I wanted to sit at the table and drink coffee and listen to my new record.

now we're just liars

I just wrote a very long post about friendship, bonds, fellowship, reality, ego-propping, approximation, loss, and self-respect. And deleted it. I might just gotta let some stuff go.

Everything is fine. I think tomorrow I'll wear a false doeskin skirt I wore once on a rainy mountain top in an autumn as different from tomorrow as any day could be. The moonflowers are blooming their soap-sweet fragrance out in my big garden, and I'm about to be asleep. Today, I drew the magician. I think there's a certain amount of grace available for those who stay to look.

It was terribly hot today. I slayed it at work. I really love my new job. I ran tonight, and 2.5 miles out of 5, it just started pouring and pouring.

now grace she's just left you skin and bones

This batshit week I'm sad, and angry, and perfect, and having a lovely time, and it's too hot, and I'm intemperate. Saturday I woke up and drank champagne naked in a creek. All the curses I laid are coming true. I'm tired. It's too hot to be anything but languid.

I've been reading the Once and Future King, because Josh was, and because it's like a Legends fanfiction. (When I mentioned that, a friend reminded me that Legends was a Once and Future King fanfiction.) It's been weird to be back in that headspace after so long. and di book does have that same spirit, though, that relentless making of sense out of chaos, for which I always treasured Legends, although I think when Wart grows up and is left abandoned and destroyed for all his fine traits, it might actually kill me.

There was a good part today. Merlin said, "Education is experience. And the essence of experience is self-reliance."

My garden is doing well. It's very celestial this year. All sunflowers, moon flowers, and morning glory. And tomatoes. Beautiful fucking tomatoes.

Bailey too has her summer coat in.

Another absurd thing I've been up to is taking fucking selfies, because like, why not? I'm hot and by hot I mean suffering 110% from actual heat exhaustion and the kind of stuffy fury that comes with it. #winning #blessed

Last winter, my friend Laura gave me some prayer beads for the service of the Norse goddesses. I picked them over the male deities very deliberately, and I think some of it was sign for me. Some of that, even then, was foreshadowing.

Speaking of, I have the first and last line of my book! The first line is:

We deceived ourselves
that this was a love story.

And the last is:

It's just the new world and the covenant
it makes with our bodies.

Spoiler alert, though, it is a love story. Isn't everything, a little?

like we'll meet again and fuck the man and tell my mother not to worry

I'm just deciding to be okay with all my emotions right now. I'm unstable, mercurial, retrograded, but there's some fire in me too, some lust. I'm not sitting around feeling bad, except for sometimes, really late at night when I'm probably just drunk. But I'm really gobbling up my life. I'd think some dumb planet was running backward, but it's not. I'm doing good work though. That's the best anyone can do. I talked to my cousin on the phone over the weekend, and that's what we said to each other when we hung up, our family line, the last words my grandfather was able to say when he still could speak: "Keep up the good work."

*

I ran last night late under the big full moon. My running partner had been hauling out asbestos all day at his construction job, and was having a bad run. Usually I'm chasing him, but two miles in, he was gassed. He said, middling out to a lazy 8 minute mile pace, "you know cultures only evolve through suffering" and I said, "Are you talking about anthropology or this run?" and he said "yes" and then told me that I reminded him of that old lady Sith witch from the Star Wars Outcast video games, but all the while very earnestly assuring me of how it was really a compliment.

He's just a kid, and I don't think we'll ever be really close friends or anything, but I like the earnestness. I'm a little faded out on people who will just say anything.

*

I think I look good right now. A homeless man and a lady in kroger have both told me "You look very beautiful today." I'll take what I can get. I'm having a hard time.

*

I'm kinda thinking of getting my next tattoo, since I have some more income. (Yes, I also paid my bills.)

I won't be going gentle

Finished the process for my clearance yesterday/today. There was a bit of a rush; they have to work in a certain window, and my application only became available just now. I had to dash around asking my old friends who would vouch for me; they needed specific references for periods of my life going back a long time. It has to be every single thing. Who was my manager when I was working at Betty's the month before I got married, when I was wildly planning my DIY wedding and cramming in hours? (Her name was Kathy, and she was very pretty, and used to chainsmoke menthol Virginia slims under a Norway maple in the Perennials section, and she was a tough exmilitary mom with all boys and a drunk husband, and she was so kind to me.) Who was my supervisor when I taught college in Lynchburg? (I don't remember.) Who could tell the federal government that in the late winter of 2012, I had quit my coffee shop job to look for real work after grad school, and I was running out at Augusta Springs every day, and sitting around, and thinking up reasons to put on clothes?

The process made me inexplicably sad. Not because of the privacy, or for having something to hide, just sad. Just this week.

were we the belly of the beast or the sword that fell

Today I categorize as "a hard day." I'm struggling this week. I don't mind saying. It's not work or anything, I just don't have my heart on quite straight.

*

My mentor at work swung by my cube to check on a laser I was working on last week at a certain point. He hung on the wall and said "Do you want help with that?"

I leaned out of my chair and said, "Nooaahhhhh?"

He said, "I recognize a married yes!!!"

*

I think "indirect online rants against people who will never read it on your own social media" is some of the lowest, tackiest form of behavior. Surely evidence of a malformed or immature psyche, and often the grim sign of a narcissist who prefers only the sound of their own beloved voice over developing, you know, like actual communication skills or graceful problem solving. I try, mostly, to keep my dim unspoken interpersonal rages to myself until they become the hard, bright diamonds of my ruthless and Disney-witchlike personality.

That said.

Dear Pokemon Adults of Gypsy Hill Park, 9:20 pm on a Weekday,

First off, can I say: I'm so glad you're here!

I'm not being a snarkyass bitch, motherfuckers! Welcome! This is a BEAUTIFUL resource! I try to come here every other day or so, and it's genuinely great to see more people taking advantage of a free natural space. These spaces only get protected when enough people care about them to keep them up and being a thing. And this is sure a good one. The trees are huge! There are fireflies!

Hell, and I don't care if it is because you're playing a dumb kids game on your phone. I know all about pretending for exercise. For example, right now, I'm listening to symphonic Viking metal and pretending to be really tearing into it on the fields of Ragnorok and it's like pow oh man swords yeah now nobody's falling down it's like the only way I can get off while also running! An alternate scenario I have is that I'm charging or defending Little Roundtop and it doesn't even matter which side: it's about VALOR and HORSES and GOING FAST. Sometimes I pretend I'm just that chapter in ASOIaF of Jaime Lanister taking the Riverlands and I bet his hair looked really good and not stupid the whole dang time. I guess maybe I could analyze why all my running fantasies are related to war, but that's neither here nor there to the Pokemans. The important thing is that you're out there getting exercise and enjoying the night, just like me!

But We. Have. To Talk.

You guyssss, it's such a big park. It's not that I reject your right to be on the only running path, but guys, I have five miles more to do tonight, and this is my time. I get up at 6 am, and this, now, after 9 pm is the first time all day I've been done with work, done with chores, and just doing me. You guys. I'm not even asking you to move swiftly or respond to my polite efforts to get around you. Just. Just...

1. Please with the vape clouds, please? I know, I was also impressed when you belched a fat Ghastly-sized puff of Fruit Stripe scented mist into the deathly still summer night air, but you see, I'm running, and it's hard for me to stop breathing, and sometimes, I don't want your blueberry thickness forcing its humid cottoncandy way down my throat. If you were smoking a cigarette, it'd be rude to blow smoke on somebody. I'm just asking for the same consideration, huh?

2. I know you're excited, having fun with your friends, meeting new people, and experiencing this novel "outside" zone, but it's never okay to volunteer unsolicited feedback, even, in fact, positive comments, about a woman's body. Yeah, I got a good ass. I know. It's because I run. Like I'm trying to do now. Please, I'm passing on the left.

3. And this is perhaps the most important: you might not be to old for a cartoon game, but you're way too old to be littering. Come on, now.

No hate! Just some words from one user of a shared space to another! And thanks to all you who are simply enjoying your game, the pretty summer night, and the sweet satisfaction the comes from not being a total asshole.

Love and all other indoor sports,
Jess

P.S.: Your vape pen smells like rotting poptarts and it looks like you're deepthroating a robot dong when you suck on it.

*

I take it as a sign of my improving character that seven years ago, I begged an escort on going into a field alone, and now when I'm feeling my way barefoot through semidarkness alone in a forest at Elkhorn, and hear a sound, I just put a hand on my knife, My prettyass perfect sharp-as-ice knife my friends Joe and Fish designed and forged for me.

I was a long, long way off

I think I can say here, even if it'd be a dirty jinx to put it anywhere else at this stage in the process.

I might just have a book deal.

For right now, though, I'm sitting on my front porch. There's a rainbow up. It's raining, but the sun is coming out. I'm going to spend the weekend in the woods. I drew the heartbreak card today. It's a strange reading, isn't it?--but it feels right. My heart is a little broken. To feel things, sometimes, to be real--you have to break. I was so afraid of that for so long. I was afraid to tell the truth. I was afraid to be real.

Speaking on what is real: a couple weekends ago, I stood calf-deep in an icy creek talking to my friend Chris, a wonderful man I've known for almost a decade, a man I've grown up with. And we talked. He had black coffee and whiskey in a pewter cup. I had a bottle of cava. We talked about our dads, our dreams, our little registers of people who have been cruel to us, our disappointments, what we've held back. We talked about magic, about the things that made us happy.

There's so much here in my own small life. You just have to live it. There's always, always, always more.

Holy shit. 

I just got "laugh out loud, start swearing, talk to yourself, double-check, start to cry, start to laugh again" level good news.

Holy shit. 

love was a country you just couldn't defend

I love the fourth of July. It's not something I've always acknowledged. Nationalism can be destructive in today's highly charged political climate, and all the best fireworks are mostly illegal in Virginia. All the same, I remember the first time I felt excited about it. I was waitressing back home on a college break; a job I hated almost as much as my tables must have hated me. (I was no talent whatsoever at it.)

That night, I'd been cut early, and I had thirty bucks in my white apron pocket: the meager spoils of a slow night. I had my hair in pigtail braids with red, white, and blue ribbons ties. That cheap trick hadn't worked. The boys asked me to sit at the bar and take shots with them, but I lied and said I had somewhere to be. I drove home the long way through the hot, leftover light that lasts in summer, even after evening has come on.

There's no way you would call NoVa pretty these days, but I am old enough to remember when it used to be, and it was still somehow that night, the way every now and then you can see a flash of beauty in a woman whose features have aged away. It can get this look to it where everything is soft and pliant. The dark Virginia cedars and the ragged fields have a cast of rose or dust. The flashes of colorful light and rolls of spicy smoke off the various firework displays made it feel like traveling across some battlefield.

I like the fourth because of all the rich color. I like it because it's a celebration during my favorite time of year, when everything is blooming and awake and fucking and going. I like the fourth because, as much as I love the giving and preparing and tradition and hard work of the more formal holidays, the fourth you just get a day off to spend with people you like doing what you want. There are no expectations. Even the steady rain I woke up to today doesn't do anything but add to it.


*
New moon in Cancer today. Deep and tender times.

So what if I'm the kind of girl who gets excited about good coupons at the kroger this month? I just have this one little life. All my flowers are coming in and I can make some good bouquets, take them to people I love. Trade them for bread from my baker friend. My breasts look great in the top I'm wearing right now. My house is clean enough. These little tender joys. There's a lot of reason to be optimistic.

*

My friend has this print hanging above his toilet. It's an old school lady astronaut with the text "I'm going to space, you son of a bitch!" He told me the backstory of it: it was something the artist had overheard his unhappy mother retort to his father. I like that. I'm going to space, you son of a bitch.

Bow down before the one you serve; you're going to get what you deserve

I'm sort of happy most of the time

Blackberry mint julep up on my tall back porch watching the last drops of red sunset drain down off the mountains, and the bats and stars and fireflies come out. Week two of my chest-splintering cough. Today at work, I really slayed it. Then I broke into Chris's house by crawling up through a tiny bathroom window, came home, and made some excellent homemade Indian.

Indian. I think I'm learning that closure is the party you throw for yourself, not some beautiful moment that is delivered up with all the grace and justice you thought you deserved. Every day, I am learning that I am more capable. And I know what's next, and I'm almost ready.

Shit, I might read a book this summer

The myth of rescue

The myth of young men

The myth of the hair in their eyes

The myth of how beauty would save them

The myth of me and who I must become

The myth of what I am not

And the horses who are no myth

How they do not need to turn pegasus

They are winged in their unmyth

They holy up the ground

I must holy up the ground

I sanctify the ground and say fuck it

I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death

I say fuck it and fall down no new holes

And I ride an unwinged horse

And I unbecome myself

And I strip my poison suit

And wear my crown of fuck its

-From Lunar Shatters by Melissa Broder's Last Sext

Who will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?

Some shit I love this season

-dahlias
-prosecco
-tacos (all kinds)
-idealistic lace confections in lieu of proper structural bras
-quantum cascade lasers
-substantive female friendships
-finches
-enchantresses
-bread
-army surplus bags
-see-through tops
-waterway camping
-hot weather
-berries
-no reading
-A+ tomatoes growing
-pup wriggles
-lightning
-mix cds
-margaritas
-vegetarian food
-staying up late
-getting up early

Why is there something rather than nothing?

I was unborn when I was younger

I guess when it finally happens for real, you don't think to make a big thoughtful blog post about it. It just is. It clicks, but not on the thousand little torturous centipede legs that come creeping on sometimes, especially late at night. It clicks like when you learn something new. You find yourself using that piece of information without even thinking of it. Suddenly, a new tool. I've been learning a lot of new things recently; some of them about myself, and some of them about like... how the electrons in memory-storage semiconductors work. 

Or maybe it never happens; you just make a little room in yourself. Scooch.

I'm alone in my parents kitchen, making a kale and feta frittata and drinking coffee. I need the coffee; I have a little bit of a headache from the bonfire last night. I'm looking forward to going home to the Valley this afternoon. My pretty friend texts me a video of herself tossing around the surplus of unders and bras that we champagne-drunk-impulse-bought together last week, which have evidently arrived. It reminds me of that silly scene in Gatsby. "It make me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts!" I hadn't bought superfluous unders with a girlfriend in years, but I used to when I was 19.

It's getting hot. I love this weather, though I don't really tell people that. I like being heated through. I love the fireflies and the blackberries and the way everything smells.