oh won't you be there with me for it tonight

November is the hardest month.

this is over my head, but underneath my feet

I think there must still be some xanax in my system because I can't quite settle into a focus, or find the catch in my own gears. I'm drifting after a bad, long day, and while I'm not anxious, I'm not exactly present either. I think something has shifted, because after years of being prescribed this drug and hating it, never taking it, the feeling of empty blankness it creates actually for once feels good to me. I can see how people get addicted to it and accidentally Heath Ledger themselves. Or maybe I'm just in a big mood.

*

I got it into my head that my front garden needs to be reworked for fall, which I'm actually looking forward to. I got it into my head this year that if there's something in my garden that's not working out or that's past the prime, I yank it out and put something I like better there. As a girl who got her start gardening picking plants out of the trash at the nursery where I worked (and honestly, I still have some of those plants 11 years later...) it's pretty counter intuitive. But I think the yard has benefited from it, if it would ever stop raining. So tonight I ripped out the browning zinnas and crabgrass and put in a new fox red coneflower, some pale blue asters and lighter pink mums to soften up the big mess and give my front porch prize pumpkins some space. There's a lot more to be done, but that's what I like about gardening. I have two beds worth of cole crops in, and one cleared out ready to plant the ones I bought over the weekend.

*

Is this always the way it is going into this remembering season? Such hairpin triggers. Will it ever become different? Recently I found the list of things I made last year to remind myself, and I wanted to add some postscript about kindness to it, for myself, or others. I wanted to add something.

maybe I listen more than you think

Sometimes I see the artifacts of myself drifting in my own wake - the shoes I took off after picking basil in the rain, half-propped against the wall in a way both thoughtless and neat, or the dried, dead pieces of a bouquet I grew and arranged but can't remember, drying on my friend's wall,  or even my own ragged knees from the fires I knelt to ignite, the way I couldn't notice them until after. I inhabit my moments the same way as those insects that hatch for only a half life such as mayflies, or moths: lust-wild, mouthless, expecting nothing, bound only to a clutch of bright seconds, and then dust. I like that about myself, but sometimes I think it makes me come off as dismissive of others, inaccessible, or worse, overly self-interested. It's a part of my personality I'm only now coming to understand. And love.

I didn't realize until this year, recently, that I designed my garden as an identity piece.

Today was trying in a lot of ways. I had to wonder about a few uncomfortable things. I got home and stood on one leg in the kitchen while Josh made turkey burgers. I went to the gym, came back, stripped out of my clothes and showered in the empty house. I drank iced water in the shower. And all the while, I could hear this soft, thumping feeling of okayness within myself that grew and grew until I'm here. I'm sitting on the front porch with my dog in the dark, calm and listening. 

I keep it upstairs, gonna jump out of the cake with my heart on a string, keep it upstairs, keep it upstairs, keep it upstairs

This is one of my favorite times of year, when the woods are still full, warm and overflowing, and fall is just a whisper away. You can feel sentimental about it since there aren't ramifications yet. I planted some fall variety sunflowers just to see if I could stretch out my luck on a second crop, and soon it will be time for cole crops again.

Still, you forget about mountain summers: how cold they can be. I don't know if the checkered shirt I bought today is even blue or black because of the cloudy weather.

*

Sunday, my friend and I were talking about the phenomenon of the hotness "bubble," and examples of this personality and its aftermath. At the end of the conversation, he shook his head and said, "You're just lucky you don't have to deal with it, since you're so fucking weird." I didn't know whether to be terribly complimented or insulted.

*

I found a new The National album on spotify that's just a live version of the exact show we saw earlier this year in Cville. The show was extra good because they played so much of my favorite album, quite an older one at that, and it's wonderful to find that same playlist on something I can hear again and again, such as now, when I'm writing and drinking champagne on my porch.

At the show we went to, my boss kept texting me. She had planned to go, but had to cancel at the last minute because her daughter was sick. She had much better seats than I did, and kept offering to drop them off at the show, since she lives in downtown Cville. But I was there with like eight friends, and I didn't want to ditch them to go sit up front by myself. Then, during my absolute favorite song, Matt Berninger drunkenly threw himself off stage and sang the whole song from the section I would have been in. The song is Mr. November, and I like it so much because it really bangs, but also is emblematic of such an excessively hard time in my life, that it's painful to hear too. I didn't exactly know what the lesson there was, so I bought myself a conciliatory hot pink muscle shirt from the band merchandise, and called myself square with it. It was one of my happiest nights of summer.

*
I promise, as weird as it sounds, I can see the morning glory on my front porch actively growing: moving, wrapping, touching each other softly in the night. I always wonder about these moments, like the last seven days have been for me, when everything stops and throws itself into perspective. I feel very present in this uncertain time--I see where it hurts me, or catches me. You can see the shadows, the important parts, the gaps and the profile of your own ass in very good jeans.

In the morning I'll be with you, but it'll be a different time

There's a hatch in the graveyard tonight--something between a winged ant and a midge, and they've been caught all around me all evening, in my eyes, dripping from my cheeks, caught in the small white hairs of my arms. The spiderweb on my front porch is hazy with them, and the full moon is shining through, light caught in the grey of their wings: spotlighted. I feel scared and alone, and like I don't understand what I've done so wrong.

I haven’t been any good at writing or anything lately, and feel so unlike myself, so I thought I would just write tonight, and see what dumped out.

This evening, I went to a champagne tasting at a winery I like downtown to celebrate Bastille Day, a day I didn’t actually know about until I looked it up just now to write this blog. Well, I take that back: I had heard of a holiday called Bastille Day, but I didn’t know why it was celebrated, even though I made a joke to Josh this very morning about getting the guillotines ready for my mother’s awful neighbor lady, and her unemployed adult son’s 50k new car. I had seen the promotion on facebook, though, and I very much like champagne, so it seemed like a good treat for myself upon arriving alone from a weekend at my parents house, plus a fine way to celebrate France winning the World Cup. For once, I didn’t follow soccer this year, but it seemed my mom and brother were supporting Croatia, so I adopted France to be argumentative when we were watching the final. This is a great example of the many flaws in my personality.

It turned out, my ignorance didn’t end at history; it wasn’t a tasting at all, but just a champagne the winery happened to be featuring. Between my work for the happy hour club and my low key wine problem, I personally know all the owners of wine businesses in my tiny town. They are all named Susan or Nancy, are handsome, older women, and like me. Susan at this winery lamented to tell me I had dumbly misunderstood her facebook posts on the subject, but gave me some free tastings anyway. Then, because of how I feel guilty when someone is nice to me, I felt like I needed to buy something.

The problem was, I had forgotten to bring the depressing book I had been planning to read, and deliberately left my phone as a kind of self-improvement exercise that I wasn’t sure the point of. Now even more I regretted it, because they were only selling the champagne by the glass, I had already told Susan that I had come in expressly for champagne, and I didn’t feel like I could just leave.

Then, I remembered that the winery featured an upstairs art gallery. Sometimes, on bleak winter Sundays, I have convinced my friends to come there and hold court for an afternoon. The gallery itself is a bright, wood-floored attic room shaped like a honeycomb cell, with big windows. Since it offers full directional views of Staunton, it’s a fun place to monopolize, pace, scheme, and fill up with echoing loudness. There is a long, beautiful Last Supper Style-esque table. And art, of course, the art.

I like art okay, but I am not so experienced at walking around alone, thinking carefully and quietly about art for the time it takes to drink one champagne glass, which for me, isn’t even very long. On first glance, it looked like a lot of wavy trees painted by someone who didn’t much love for the woods. Or maybe she liked them as an idea, but didn’t really have a lot of first hand knowledge of them, the way that some people will insist so much more loudly about an interest they never actually spend any time on. They were loud trees. Her artist’s statement used that word specifically.

Thinking about the trees, the nature of the trees, and connections, I remembered how over the weekend, my father had advised me about my favorite catalpa tree in my yard. We were both lightly drunk so I was talking too much about what I liked about this tree: a squat, little globe-shaped mound of catalpa leaves, effectively bonzai’d by the power company having shaved it down to the height of the lowest telephone wire some years before we moved in. It created a stooped, cute effect, like a Miyazaki grandfather monster, and I hung lanterns accordingly, planted up the underside with hosta, spiderwort, wood poppy, Japanese painted fern, and lenten rose.

Upon hearing all my misguided love, my father shook his head, and told me, “You don’t understand: that tree still thinks it’s 30 foot tall.”

I'm bad at this blog, but I'm bad about a lot of stuff. I feel disconnected to my voice this summer, clumsy, disastrous, and poor at articulating. I know I have to keep trying, and I will, but it's hard. I don't feel very present.

what's the blues when you've got the greys

I'm really doing this more, I promise. I actually have a lot to catch up with myself about.


*

Scott Hutchison, the guy behind a band I like, Frightened Rabbit, took his own life a week or two ago. I'm not much on feeling sad about celebrity death, but this one kind of hooked on me. Frightened Rabbit was my go-to music I could listen to when I was in an actually bad place and couldn't stand to listen to anything else. Scott wrote very candidly about his depression and struggle with mental illness, and what he created was powerful. It was so simultaneously bitterly real, and yet somehow kept this upbeat, fierce, hopeful note. There was an optimism and energy to it that was easy to connect to. I feel much better, and better, and worse, and then better. His work spoke a lot to  the unique experience of having a mental illness/depression and also trying to be in any kind of successful relationship with the other people in your life without feeling like you're damaged goods and more trouble than you could ever be worth. The Modern Leper is such a good song about that. You are not ill and I'm not dead, doesn't that make us the perfect pair?

That's not to say there was anything inspirational about it particularly. Poke is one of the most bitter songs about letting go of someone I've ever heard. His songs just always felt so reassuringly genuine. His death feels unfair and it makes his music almost feel untrustworthy. I know no one's life is there just to prop up something for someone else, even people who choose to share and make their experiences/feelings public for their living--maybe especially then. Hell, half the major female poets of the last generation killed themselves. But it just fucking sucks. Maybe just tonight, I'm feeling alone, and like damaged goods, and I wish I could just listen to it.

I'm not the kid you knew, I'm not the kid you remember

All yesterday and today, I keep feeling like I've done something wrong. I know I need to be more responsible for my emotions, but I also wish this energy would move on.

Last night was a good hike. though. Out in the National Forest, chasing up and down fire access trails.

The last month has been Mercury retrograde: a good time for reflection and self awareness, a bad time for big decisions, actions, or knowing what the fuck is going on in your own head. I want to write about it because it felt like there was such an arc to it. I've been thinking a lot about my career, and where I fit in with my work., what my role is, how I piece into everything.

I was in the dog park early in, and had a conversation with a guy I've talked to there before. I had pulled the Magician that day, and he felt like some manifestation of the elements of the card. He was a professor of Arabic and a lit PhD, so we were chatting about translation poetry and our publications, dishing the way you do when you unexpectedly meet someone in your field. Midway through, he stopped, laughed, and said something like "wait, but now you're in software?"

A lot of the month I spent walking those lines as I put together this tech writing/software industry presentation for some JMU writing students. It felt like the perfect culmination of the question and my uncertainty about my identity. Doing the thing I used to do to describe the thing I now do to a bunch of college kids studying what I used to study? It was a weird, full circle.

At the same time, I struggle a lot with the magician card. When I pull it, immediately I assign it to someone else in my day instead of acknowledging my own ability to be a shapeshifter, to be charming, attractive, and sleek and capable. I've worked in software/tech writing almost ten years now, but I still have so much impostor syndrome. The last two weeks of work I've been so anxious about what I'm doing. I woke up having panic attacks about it during this week. But it's not really a big deal, and I've got it. How much longer am I going to have this narrative about myself?

I'm waiting for the night to take us, I'm waiting for the night to break us, I'm waiting for the night to save us

Not a lot of posts for March, huh?

This time last year I was entering into a vulnerable, wonderful, weird, hard, transformative time where I learned how to be wrong in a good way. I had to revisit a few narratives and realize that maybe they weren't all the stories I'd told myself. It was entirely unexpected, the way that life is sometimes, and the way that sometimes can save you.

I don't know what it is that I'm learning this year, but I'm trying to keep an open heart, and not freak out, which I guess is the best anyone can do.

one time you were a glowing young ruffian, oh my god it was a million years ago

I fix myself a strawberry cocktail tonight: fresh strawberries, rose wine, and prosecco. It's supposed to have simple syrup in it as well, but I want it tart and bright. The berries are intense, sharply fragrant, and the coolness of the evening feel good on my cheek that are flushed from my run, workout, then the steam rooms afterward.

Migraine raw: all a thousand pieces of the glass of myself, and just in time for Monday. Today at work, my casual work friend asks about my weekend, and I can tell my own transparency and vulnerability spilling through as I tell her my small disappointments and the things that scared me. She says, "ohhh Jess" in sympathy before I'm finished, and I half-love her for just using my name.

I'm susceptible and aware of the fact, aware of my own dubious breeding and maturity, too. She's one of those nice Cville sorts born and raised there, and she possesses that easy, graceful command of her own attention. The gift of the effervescent Right Word, delivered with perfect kindness and yet structured distance. I'm not complaining at all. I would never be anything but admiring of the whole suite of qualities. (At least in the great score of my flaws, the pathetic trap that is to be jealous of another woman's skills or beauty has never entered in.) But I see it, and it makes me feel absurdly grateful and lonely both.

*

Yesterday, feeling glum and fractured and finally able to drive, I went out and bought myself a dumbass dress. It's less of a dress and more of a trifle or a confectionery. It's white with flowers and a deep, long skirt that cuts down in a series of tiers down my long legs, cut tight at the waist. I feel like I was only still returning to my body from some fog when I bought it, which means it probably won't look ridiculous on me at all.

Afternoon for deletion and Adrienne  Rich. Impossibly, the title is Walking in the Dark.

can I get a minute of not being nervous, and not thinking of my dick

Energy, suddenly dropping weight though my workout routine is fairly the same, intermittent unexpected crying, and five straight days of sex dreams means that maybe it is finally getting to be spring, even if the weather is determined to say otherwise. My body feels like it's moving the same way as the plants unfolding under the dead leaves in my garden, same as the birds that are suddenly everywhere and looking to fuck. 

The first camping trip of the year, and it reminded me of the snow camp back in 2016, the way everything was so tentative and bruised out there, but packed with potency. There was a crow's nest in one of the great, dying pine trees in our site. The water was clear, up, and so cold. I felt empty headed for most of the time, walking alone or with my boys, feeling out my body. Windstorms had knocked down a lot of deadfall. Something about it felt so accommodating.

*

Today, I was easy. I unpacked; I moved my possessions unproductively around my house. I called my mom and she wanted to talk about whether I thought the souls of dogs endured on, or were destroyed upon their death. I told her that there wasn't any way God would spend all this time creating something so designed for relationship with an immortal being, and then throw it away, and besides, it'd be inefficient to populate the afterlife with a whole new set of created animals. I couldn't tell her how much comfort I take in the opposite idea: this deep affection for dissolution, the idea that at the moment of my death all of my dreams, deepest, secret little hopes, funniness, talent, cruelty, soft jealousies, deep loves, stupid stories, fingernails, eye crinkles will perfectly un-exist and be quiet and complete. But you can't say that to your mom.

I called my grandmother, too, and then went downtown to pick up some eggs from Mary. I bought myself a cappuccino, which I loved. I tried to garden afterward, but I kept having to cross to the sunlight parts of the yard.

I don't know if it will snow, but I hope it does.

So sad today.

in the end I was the mean girl, or somebody's in between girl (now it's the devil I love)

Tired night, dull night, feeling heavy with the full moon coming up or you know, the other stuff I feel actually low about. I have been so unfamiliar to myself lately. While I know that in actuality, responding to disregard or let downs with resignation or apathy instead of confusion and devastation is probably a step in the right direction for me, the change unsettles me. The Star today, but I feel alone and tired, not charming or touched. I put a lot of my energy out. Maybe I have more to learn about what I give to other people, and what I think I need or deserve in return.

*

 All I want is to go camping and for people to be nice to me, so maybe I'm not actually that obscure and remote, huh? I pretty much always want that.

*

Every morning lately, the first thing I do before I brush my teeth or look at my phone or get coffee or put on a bra is to go downstairs, and lie down on the couch next to Sven. He rolls over, very sleepy, and I rub his belly.

My brother calls me because he is angry. He wants me to yell at our father.

I know why he has come to me. I know it the way you just know your sibling, even one you barely speak to. This person whose growing mirrored and entwined your own, who is the closest exact living being to you in genetics and upbringing, almost a twin, yet inverted: deliberately different on purpose, different by choice. I'd like to say he came to me because I am his bossy, mean big sister and I have always fixed things for him, or protected him, but that has never exactly been our relationship. I am not much of a fixer, as anyone who knows me can say, and he has never needed my sheltering.

He came to me because I have always been my father's special favorite, while he, the second born, has raged and fought and gone as different from that legacy as a person possibly could. He tends to the damage of our childhood like a bitter garden, while I am magnanimous, forgiving, looking for the relationship that wasn't possible when I was young. As always, I scrabble for whatever I can get. But my brother knows I can talk to my father, and my father may care, listen, or possibly be hurt by my condemnation, and in that way, I am a missile he can launch into him from afar.

As it happens, I have already yelled at my father. Instead, lost without a crusade, my brother and I talk. We don't talk much, even though I know he is still the boy that I snuck out at 4 am with to go lie on the hood of my Maxima and watch the meteor showers before high school. I taught him to drive, but so often now he seems older than me often, and always better than me.

For some reason, tonight, when we are talking about our disappointing father, I tell my brother about how sometimes when people around me are upset and start yelling, I get furious, almost out-of-control angry. Me! Who is never angry. This happens even if I'm not in any way the target of the yelling, even when the situation is in no way directed at anything to do with me, I lose my cool. I tell him about how I don't know why, but always figure this must be some black hole in me, some damage I can't parse, to have such an irrational response in a situation where I should go out of my way to be calm and placating. And maybe my father is the way he is sometimes in the same way: this helpless compulsive tell, this inherent brokenness. All response; no reason.

We talk more about death, the family, what can be done. We arrive at nothing. We make each other feel better about our own small parts. As I am talking to him, I am barefoot, dragging the trashcan up from the backyard to the curb for pickup. I could hear music when we first said hello, but now the other end is silent, and I think he has probably gone outside like he does when he talks on the phone. There is the sound of our breathing. Neither of us like to talk on the phone and we aren't good at it. Finally, he tells me that he does that too--that thing about the anger reaction. He says even when strangers beep at each other in traffic, it happens to him. That weird rage.

We say goodbye. I promise him we'll talk more when the weekend comes and I know what I'm doing. Maybe, I say, I'll send him a text. He says "I love you, Jess," and then I tell him I love him too, and then we say goodbye again, and then he says I love you again, and I tell him I do too.

and when I killed her, it was so easy that I wanted to kill her again

In the last month, I started

1. actually taking care of my skin
2. wearing quatz
3. taking selfies with creeks I like. (This one's Buckhall branch.)

*

7 am me: oh, I'm too sick to go into work, I need to stay home and take it really easy.
3pm me: shitposting on my blog in my underwear

*

I've been trying to characterize my energy to myself over the last week. It's not apathy, or anything so cold, it's just... disinterest, or a lack of fight. I actually want to read, instead of doing and participating in my life. A little surrender. A spring haze. I guess I get a little tired of my big, talky heart sometimes too.

I do keep thinking of things I want to write in this blog, though.

But I could never be so mad to shake you by your shoulders screaming: you coward, you hummingbird

Spell to Face Reality with Some Valor

Get your black dog. Run breakneck through the melting snow and close stickwoods. The dog will usually follow; make sure it's at least a moderately good dog. Let the run hurt. Don't stop for anything, and when you scare up turkey together, plummeting like twin meteors straight down a hill, let them explode around you. Feel the violence clatter in their feathers and the displacement of air when their absence rushes in.

Spell for Cures

Late at night, push open the window in your teenage bedroom. (If you no longer have access to your adolescence, any bedroom you've acted like a teenager in will do.) Listen to the rising and dropping voices of the coyotes, their little yips, songs, and silences. Fill up on glory and cold and knowing and fear, and then, exhale.

Spell for Partials

Admit you want it. It takes vulnerability. To ask, to express any kind of want is to invite loss, lack, rejection. You have to say it out loud. You have to talk to it.

Otherwise, a good start is to look at the ground. The earth shows where it has been touched by water.

Spell to Get Salamanders, Transformation
It's easy; this is the part of the world with the largest salamander biodiversity. Turn over dead leaves. It's not as if you haven't lived this day before.

won't you carry me back

don't be careless with me yet

I've been thinking all week about those banded water snakes out at Elkhorn. In warm weather, if you're near the water, or especially swimming in it, the place is alive with them: vicious, jewel-eyed little things, diamond-patterned enough to trick for a copperhead. I've seen them swim underwater like eels to hunt baby brook trout. They are nonvenomous, but known for their intense aggression and painful bite, though I've lain beside them without any trouble on more occasions than I can count, and I can't name a Virginia snake I'm afraid to be bitten by. They're perfect creek spirits, as mean and adaptive as those mountain seasonal flows, and in some spots, as numerous as the very stones. Like women, they give birth to live young.

*
I tried hard to be positive this week, but I don't know that it ever really worked out, that I helped anything, or did anything better. Everything I tried to make kept changing, twisting, turning away out of my hands. I hate feeling helpless. Today, the mountains turned from blue, to iron, to smoke as I hiked in them. By nightfall, rain came in on the front and the air seemed to dissolve or congeal into mist.

My stars advised me this week to fixate on blue, particularly the way the color manifests in sunsets: pick out the blue parts. The Cherokee see blue as a cursed color. Deceptive, tricky, low. My eyes aren't actually blue; they're clear as quartz: only appearing blue by a weird byproduct of structure, lack of melanin, and a lack of collagen deposits. It's all dependent on light.

Content for miles

I have been having a struggle-time recently, feeling down and depressed and low energy. Today was a long one. A lot of bills and paperwork, forms to fill out and send in, 300-some pages of tech writing at work, errands to run, kitchen to clean, then finally heading to gym around 7. A friend gifted me a fancy literary journal subscription for my birthday, and this week, the first issue finally arrived in the mail. Once my day was finally done, and I was home and showered, I got a glass of wine, put on my new most sexy and soft sleepy pants, and lay down on my bed with the rotten cat to enjoy the most recent and best esteemed writing of the day. So as to educate myself on current literary affairs. I'm some kind of fancy shitass poet, you know.

But then, instead, I opened up this blog and made a top ten list of my all-time worst t-shirts:*

1. Bad Axe Michigan t-shirt, navy blue with yellow lettering, formerly belonged to my father, who I believe stole it from my grandfather, whose people came from that degenerate place. Extremely soft, tied up at the waist to make it fit my girl body. Paint splattered from that time I worked as a technical writer for my dad's drug dealer's landscape business/money laundering scheme in college, and I got bored and painted his "office" shack red.

2. Little boy's section medium blue dragon graphic t-shirt, with the neck cut up to look slutty, circa 2011.

3. Gray t-shirt from my fancy, well-esteemed graduate program, used exclusively for gardening, cut up to look slutty.

4. Arcade fire t-shirt, stolen from Isaac because I was mad at him for a reason I can't remember, but turns out he stole it from Eli to begin with, causing my vengeance to fall flat. Makes this list because what kind of fucker owns an Arcade fire t-shirt? Mark of poor character.

5. Urban Outfitters blue dragon crop top. I spent an untoward amount of money on this shirt. An utterly untoward amount of money. Cut up to look slutty.

6. "Technically I write" black fitted t-shirt a woman I haven't met yet (because she's in Mexico?) bought me as a welcome present for my new job. Too real, lady.

7. Red oversized workmans t-shirt from my dad's failed landscaping company/possible money laundering scheme in the late 80s.

8. Urban Outfitters black dragon t-shirt dress featuring a snake-wrapped rainbow eight-shaped ouroboros just kidding this is the most quality garment I own and it was on sale for like 9.99 and I look like a tall glass of dark and frightening sex in it, I guess I'm just bragging now about owning this beautiful piece of t-shirt art

9. Star Wars Empire Strikes Back blue graphic t-shirt with the neck cut out to make it look slutty. I got it because even though it's the movie poster style graphic on it, it features Han and Leia prominently, and those shitboy/girls are my favorite in the old trilogy.

10. Actually, I don't have a tenth entry on this list: in fact, despite having abandoned my other plans to write this list, I'm not that big on t-shirts and I've tried to reduce the sentimental junk I hold onto and only keep things I actually wear. These are the worst shirts that also I really wear quite often, which in some ways, makes them even more terribly worse.

T-shirt List Retrospective:

I felt pretty good about composing my t-shirt list in lieu of looking at anything in that literary journal. A big reason was that it reminded me that I own several dragon graphic shirts, which is a worthwhile thing to consider in my own estimate. Maybe I should try to get some more dragon content. It makes me happy and always looks good, no matter the occasion. Dragons are always appropriate.

Something I made special note of was that many of these t-shirts had been altered by my inept scissor work, since I am picky about necklines I find constricting, also, sometimes it's nice to show my shoulders. Other of these have been knotted up at the navel, so they don't look so baggy and shapeless.

It's probably time to throw out the grad school t-shirt; I never liked it, and mostly kept it as some kind of reminder to myself that I was very smart and got into a very important school, which is a poor, shallow reason to hold onto anything. Also, it's the one shade of gray that doesn't look very good on me, and has a dumb rooster on it because my adviser at the time was freakishly into the weather vane atop the writing building and took it as a kind of sigil.



*I've been sorting through my clothing and organizing/downsizing.

Some good things

Today at the gym, I was trying to get a copy of a couple months of my membership receipts to get a gym credit refund from my job, and the woman helping me was being pretty surly about it. Halfway through, she asked for me to spell my name again, paused, and then gasped, "Wait. I know you. We were in the second sweat together. You're a beluga." Then her whole manner changed. She said, "You're family!" and came around to my side of the counter and gave me a giant hug. It made me grateful for my strange little community here in this good town. As I was leaving, she yelled "Aho!" to me.

*

Dog selfies like:

*

As we were packing up, Josh was messing around and teasing me about something, tickling me, and though he must have known we were joking, Sven lay his whole body overtop of mine until he stopped. He's a good dog. 

*

This picture of an early morning woods walk in a rare Vanaheim snowfall

*

Somewhere out at Elkhorn, I bet the foxes are still up.

I took the stars from my eyes and I made a map

I just can't get myself together enough to write something very inspired. I'm hanging around in my room in bare feet, wearing tights from a gal my friend was fucking for a while, and a loose strappy green top, an exact copy of a shirt I bought my mom in purple. I must be in the phase of certain female friendship networks where I have been given a lot of clothing over the last week by various female people I know: my favorite of these being a rather risque razor-backed floor-length dress I got from Ali, almost the exact shade of muddy gray that my eyes are. I think my eyes are getting darker as I get older. I put on my string lantern lights and my salt rock lamp that I bought because of how I am garbage. The moon is in Aries, for whatever it's worth.

This week, I have been pretty acutely aware that I'm not in a good headspace, that I am not doing well. This is the time of year I don't do well, and it feels like death has kept looking out at me from under all the rocks. It has the usual tells: I'm doing that thing where I read into everything and turn it into a big dumb narrative. I get vulnerable, then later disgusted with my emotion, and feel (rationally or not) that I've embarrassed myself and been rejected by those I reached out to. I know I'm doing it, at least; that it's not actually real. I wish I could pass a little card to everyone I care about and explain "please just be nice to me, and make me feel valuable, I know I'm not being that good," but it's hard to be a coherent, self-aware adult and ask for something like that. Most often, you've just got to scrap by on what you've got, be productive, and it'll be what it is. Maybe the people in your life will have the grace to give you a pass if it starts wearing on you and you act out.

So I did a lot of running, and a lot of house work: dishes, laundry, clearing out this excess of crap I seem to can't donate enough of. I want to go night hiking; I keep dreaming of it, the only good dream for days and days.

I loved the way she wrote about dragons

“The dragons! The dragons are avaricious, insatiable, treacherous; without pity, without remorse. But are they evil? Who am I to judge the acts of dragons? … They are wiser than men are. It is with them as with dreams, Arren. We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not do magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do: they are”

—	Sparrowhawk, The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin

we took a walk to the summit at night

These mountains are so big and they have so much to them, hips that go and go. They have such strange shapes, the way they fold up on themselves and then cast out, like a handful of raw elements: hemlock, granite, loam. I can't stop writing about them. I love them so much. They remind me of everything.

I keep thinking about, and dreaming about, death. This is not to be dramatic or say that I have some deep wish for it; it's just on my mind, pressing close. I feel strangely about the season, but I'm not unhappy, I am not doing badly. I'm almost afraid to write that, because last year at this time, I was the least amount of okay I've ever been. What if talking about it is a reminder, like something in me hadn't noticed I was chugging along okay, and is going, "wait a second, you're supposed to be sick in the head right now." What's different this year? What's the same?

But there have been changes. I want deeply to write about this year, whereas this time last year, I couldn't bear the thought of making a year end post. I want to talk about the surprises, about learning you were wrong about some things and the growth that can foster, and I want to talk about capacity. So maybe I will.

But probably mountain posts into the foreseeable future.

And me, with my spooky fire sign eyes, I'm the scariest thing on this mountain.

Remember you could weep fire

Early, undecided year. No one much wanted to talk to me today, from my partner to the people I sort of desperately needed to get in touch with for matters of work and organizational wrangling. I suppose some days are like that: blue, and you get a chance to think too much. The hiking was good at least, with the creeks all frozen solid like strange cloudy paths cut through the forest. The woods went quiet again with the cold snap in January, every leaf frozen into the ground, stiff past the point of any audible yielding. Something settled about them.

Be specific, and selective. Hold your ground.

There are things you don't talk about

I don't feel right using facebook to share about personal tragedy or loss, and my family is intensely private. Still, I wanted to keep these pictures somewhere, so I could remember the humbling events of yesterday and all that it meant. Here seems like an intimate-enough space.

I keep circling around how to articulate all the deaths this last year to myself, how to talk or write about them, and if I even should. There are so many layers of complication, loss, and identity. My family is such a strange, fierce, complex beast, and we lost our head, our commander. Putting him to rest at Arlington, I didn't feel like reminiscing about my childhood memories of special times with him or his life as it related to me: how he thought my fingers were so long and beautiful, and that I should have been a pianist like he was, or how he would take me on adventures, or how he was always telling me, "Keep up the good work"--not so much as a compliment for work I had done well, but a reminder that good work is what one should always be doing, and that one's work is never, ever finished. Except, I suppose, in the end.

The thing that feels strangest during this stage of the long series of events set in motion by his passing is this: my fixation on the person he was. For the last 5-7 years, my grandfather suffered a strange, rare malady related to his exposure to agent orange in Vietnam where he slowly lost functions like walking or eating. The first thing that he lost (and his only symptom for a long time) was his ability to make himself understood. Though he remained very cognitively sharp and physically strong otherwise, he was essentially mute. The person I grew up with was trapped inside his own head for much of my adult years, and it seemed to change him, to soften him, make him more emotionally expressive. (Certainly a better listener.) But now that he's gone, it's like I forgot entirely about those end years where he was quiet and humming and kind. I miss so keenly the man that he was before: the loud asshole.

My grandfather liked me; I could tell, the same way I could tell that my own father was his favorite of his four children: firstborn son, football star, magazine model, immediately settling down and starting his own business, a family with two blond-headed grandkids within a few blocks from the family home to boot. That said, I don't think my cousins or his other children always experienced the same golden favor as I probably took for granted. My grandfather was a tank commander, a war hero, a man to whom the word "valor" could be genuinely applied (and was, by the US military.) He could be ruthless, though he never spoke about the war. (He did speak about how when my great-grandfather, his father, would come home, drunk and looking to beat on my great grandmother, he and his brothers would lie in ambush and beat him unconscious so he couldn't hurt her.) Before the war, he was a professional baseball player for the Red Socks. He was funny and mean. He could be scornful. He treated the scent of weakness the way a shark will hit on a blood drop in salt water. He cheated outrageously at cards, a way I learned directly from him. He grew hybrid tea roses and was arrogantly proud of them; his favorite was the Peace rose: a creamy little pink number with a soft flush of gold in the center. He loved my grandmother and her perfect Jackie-O beauty and did almost nothing to make her life easy. He was ordained by the Catholic church to give communion, and would go to houses of the people of his church in hospice and administer last communion. His favorite word was bullshit.