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.