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