It's okay to be afraid, but praise, praise, praise

You just think my jokes are funny because my shirt's off

Last Saturday there was a Shakespeare block party downtown. We had a great time cruising around the stalls and booths, drinking a few beers, and then everybody came back and some of my friends built me a raised bed for my tomatoes and grilled while I taught Layla how to make quinoa and zucchini/squash. (And homemade lemonade!) Weeded, cleared, and managed to plant all my 500 billion seedlings in the ground on Sunday. Super nice weekend overall.

Josh and I had gotten into kind of a "fuck this, we could move/go anywhere" itch the last couple weeks, but this weekend was good for reminding me--us I think--what there is to love about this town. Roots. After my childhood in anonymous, everybody-just-watches-tv-in-their-own-house-end-of-list NoVa, I like that I can live in a lively place that I can really get to know people, from the friendly Indian family who owns the convenience store to the guy who always walks his dog by my house to the dude who fixes my car. I like knowing their names. I like that I can go downtown and buy a replica 16th century coddle mug from an art historian whose castle I've been to. I like that I've partied with all the members of my favorite band. It's exciting to be making new friends as well as enjoying the good people in my life who have stuck around.

You have to get to know other people because they are the only real important thing. We share the years we get on this planet with a handful of other lives, and they're the only ones we're gonna ever meet in all of human history. If you don't keep the good ones, there's not going to be another chance.

As I get older, I'm realizing that it's getting less and less enjoyable to be so negative all the time myself, or to be around negative or lazy people. I want to be around people who un-apologetically like things and are willing to say so. I've seen it really beautifully modeled recently in some new friends I've made, (as well as in some of the current people who share my life) and I'm excited to try to apply that spirit more strongly.  It seems simple, but sometimes a very novel proposition. I want positive, active people in my life who say yes to things and do shit and go big and be gracious. And I want to be that kind of person too.

Meditations in an emergency

Kind of thoughtful tonight. Some days, I'm a hard adult woman with her shit together. Some days I'm just a girl stripped down to her running bra holding a dying baby squirrel in her shirt while trying to intervene in a domestic violence situation. That's all right, though.

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I have camping stories, and I promised Laura I'd write them, but I'll have to save that for a less eventful evening than this one has been. I have pictures, too. Good pictures! It's been a busy week--camping recovery, Joe's birthday drinking, bocce ball and then sort of a non sequitur tonight.

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April is the cruelest month, so the poets say. And sure enough, we have Mars running retrograde and Mercury turning back on the last day of the month. Easy to think about Mars in particular when the Blue Ridge is on fire and the air is full of ash.

I happen to personally know one of the trails at the epicenter--the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe up on 33. There's a monument, and on the back side of it, the AT, and in weather, the rain and mists wrap the place up until it looks like another world: a world of smoke and what-ifs and the ghosts of salamanders. Those aforementioned "knights" came through in 1716 in Spotswood's "expedition:" what was really a kind of party bus of a wagon train where a bunch of drunk, weak men from Williamsburg were carried through the mountains and made up names that wouldn't stick. Still, it's so remembered: the beginning of the Shenandoah as a frontier. And I think of it. A place of conception.

Strange and stirring to think of it burning.

But back to Mars. Oh, the old returns. A time to reexamine what angers us, what drives us, and what gets us off. Time to make friends with the parts of ourselves we don't like or understand.

But here's a few things I do like in April:
-Helles lagers
-tacos
-my brand new saucony Hurricanes and the subsequent 6 out of 7 day running cycle they inspire
-the front and back porches of my life

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Maybe because of the mercurial weather, or maybe because I've been wearing white pants before Memorial day and craving champagne, or maybe because I'm feeling altogether longingly wistful and cynical, but I've been in the mood for Frank O'Hara. I like O'Hara. He might have been one of those writers I learned a lot from, but he died youngish, when I think he was just starting to write his best thing. He got run over by a jeep in the darkness on Fire Island. That's doom I can relate to.

This is from "Meditations in an Emergency."

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

you wanna camp out and I wanna fuck around

For camping this weekend, a bunch of my buds are dressing post-apocalyptic. I don't have an epic fallout kit outfit the way they do, but I've been watching a lot of Walking Dead, and I opted for an all black thing with my knife, machete, and axe strapped to my ass. I look like 90s Avril Lavinge, but with an arsenal. Stay hungry, fuckers.

when I asked you your name you said John Wayne and I guess it's true

I'm thankful for the coldsnap because it's giving me a chance to catch up on spring cleaning before it gets wonderful and warm and I am tempted to blow it off and go camp my weekends away.

These tallies do help me feel organized and motivated, but they're also shameless brat bragging because though my nature is to be a little messy in motion, no bitch throws down on cleaning like I do. And my housework dress is cute.

Yesterday I:
ran 3 miles and did core
helped my bud get his paintings hung in a shop downtown
cooked a pretty cool sockeye salmon herb cous cous with an ab-lib lemon butter yogurt sauce
danced at a bar
went to bed at a reasonable hour

Today I have:
got up at a reasonable hour
bought red romaine and some violets at the farmer's market (I know I have a hoard of seedlings, including greens, going in as soon as it gets warm enough, but I couldn't wait.)
bought some groceries
sorted out and packed away my winter clothes/brought out my spring stuff/tossed the crap I don't wear
vacuumed and mopped my entire house
washed and put away all laundry
changed the sheets
cleaned all bathrooms (My new toilet bowl cleaner's scent is "country." Hmm, if you insist, Lysol.)
dusted the house and washed the windows and mirrors, the way my grandmother taught me how to do with old bed sheets instead of paper towels so they don't streak (Upstairs westfacing window v. gross from yours truly pressing up on it in her eagerness to take sunset shots for her dumb instagram)
fed the crows and songbirds
fixed a 6 year old kid a vegetarian dinner? (Okay this last step actually hasn't happened yet and I'm a little duuuubious.)

Another thing I'm working on today is a little play potion kit for Layla, whose current favorite game is playing "potions." It feels good to have some of Yan's junk from Legends going where somebody might hopefully have fun with it again, instead of packing it away somewhere.

Tomorrow I will:
mow the lawn
run 5 miles
grill six lbs of pork loin
prep and pack my camping kit for next weekend
make some more little vases and terrariums out of the two boxes of creek glass a well-meaning family friend gave me after seeing my post on facebook about the handful I made for my mantle a couple weeks back
mess around in my garden

So a chore day and a mess around day. Having finished up my list (aside from dinner cooking) now, I think I'll write some and drink this basic-ass honeydew melon bold rock cider.

Just a hang-up call and the quiet breathing of our Persian we call Cajun on a Wednesday

This morning, the air is so cold it reminds me of fly-fishing as a girl in upstate New York. Sometimes I still dream about the salmon runs up there, the sensation of icy water up to my chest and these huge, 2-3 foot long dying salmon bumping against my legs like decaying sharks.

I keep dressing for the weather I want, not the weather I have. But my lipstick is in season. These small skirmish victories, you know.

I feel like this and I never hated you

Somebody in the know with me asked me a couple weeks back: "Are you angry, or are you actually just angry at yourself?" And that was true. Forgiving myself is a bit of a thing for me. Forgiving myself for letting myself be treated the way I am sometimes. Forgiving myself for eating my lunch at 10 am. (Which, let's face it, is the cruelest thing I could do to myself. Past me is a real cuntbag.) I always find it easier to forgive others, or at least just start feeling plain old sorry for them, than to forgive myself.

Another piece of advice I received from a different person was "Maybe you need to just spend the summer in Tir na Nog taking really good care of yourself." 

But I'm a little tired of angst. I'm a little tired of breathless analysis of trial and revolution. I have work to do, or at least good chores, jerking off, and the excellent and interesting work of keeping my fucking shit together. I'm making a watermelon mead with Chris. I've untangled my garden and rolling it out. I changed my blog avatar because my other one looked kind of sad, and for as many dumb overwrought feelings as I pour into this space, I am a happy, grateful person. There's more of that relentless hopefulness in me than I'd like to pretend sometimes. I am the George Armstrong Custer of optimism.


Last weekend, I went to DC with some friends and saw a hundred hundred kites. It was pretty.  The wind was dead, but then it kicked up just as the sun was coming out, and everything rose up and illuminated.

Rules for Kites:

1. All kites must be of two designs: 

                                               A. Dragon-shape

                                               B. Classic shape

2. A kite should feature a good long tail of ribbons; this is not optional

3. A kite should be large if you're gonna spend so much time getting it up, right?

4. Kites can be all colors, but especially preferable are: red, white, and neon colors (Not blue. That's what the sky is for.)

5. If it's not shaped like a dragon, I guess a bird or fish is acceptable.

6. But seriously, why even fly a kite if it isn't shaped like a fucking dragon?

you shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self

I've had a strange and lovely last seven days. There's an otherworldly kind of energy to everything right now with the season. My Easter weekend began with a wild pagan fire bacchanal and ended in quiet, intimate religious meditation with my family, so I really feel the range of myself. I helped burn old man winter and found a new creek in my parent's back woods. I'm feeling really pretty good about things right now, actually. My energy is strong; I have good professional/artistic things in the works, my house is clean, and I've broken into the time of year when my life is being outdoors--exercising and playing in my garden. I'm ready for more camping come the middle of the month.

I guess also what my confidence needed was two weeks of core. It feels good to work on something and see results. I feel super hot today. It's really only the barest sense of propriety that's keeping me from taking a bathroom selfie of my newly-emerged abs. The barest. Sense. Of propriety.

I let myself buy a cute little spring outfit, too, which is nice after wearing "running clothes as regular clothes" for two months because I just didn't give a fuck about anything.

I don't know. I do feel more in touch with myself than I have in a long time.

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I had this poem in my head this afternoon after entirely forgetting that Walt Whitman was a thing, so I might as well put it up here, since Song of Myself is basically the most spring poem in the world. This is from part 51.

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

-Walt Whitman

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The weather is so good that I want to write romance.  Romance. That's how wild I am today.