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.

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Dog selfies like:

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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. 

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

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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.