Today, the Star. The woods. 

I had really resigned myself to not getting anything done for work today, but taking a lot of time for myself, and then, miraculously, my monitor started working again after 3 days of not turning on. Well, guess I'm working. I had also thought I might skip my run today because it was pouring, and then it cleared up. Guess I'm running. At least I've been good about hitting my 5 miles a day this week. 

Storms in the forecast. I'm thinking about the weekend and feeling soft. 

 "I feel pretty good this week" - everything in the news instantly becomes unconscionable, my house breaks, my work machine breaks so I can barely get my job done even though I have a horrible, looming deadline... Still, it's hard to look at my life and feel sorry for it when there are so many people hurting so much this week.  

Even before all this, I've been thinking a lot lately about community and the people that our society fail. One of the things that I started doing this spring in my effort to not just lay down and die of depression was taking a kind of personal, secret responsibility for the neglected little neighborhood food pantry in my area. Nothing like a little white sanctimony to improve my withered mental health and sense of uselessness as a person! 

But it actually really surprised me. I always thought that a good antidote for feeling bad about myself is doing something good for my community, even just picking up trash. Picking up a country road full of trash is inherently satisfying. You're outside in a beautiful place. You can see the big bags that you filled and the road itself looks better when you're done. You can see the work and immediately feel good about it. It's very a clean-feeling kind of community service. "Other people have been poor stewards of the land, but not me, and I did my part to make it better."

Trying to keep a food pantry constantly full is a really different feeling and has made me think about different things. Because of the adjacency of my neighborhood to the mission, a lot of people who rely on it are unhoused or don't have access to kitchen stuff. If I buy cans that don't have pop tops, there's a chance someone won't be able to open it. I try to get foods that don't require extra ingredients to prepare like those knorr sides or peanut butter crackers or shelf stable tuna or ravioli. Then I started thinking about things like hygiene products or pet food. It got hot last weekend, and I realized how difficult it must be to stay hydrated when you are spending your whole day walking around until the mission opens. It feels like every single thing I consider expands out into a larger need. 

Another thing I didn't anticipate would be how fucking annoying other well-meaning people are. There's not a week that goes by that I don't pull out some kind of rotting crap from the box. Most recently, 3-4 withered tiny potatoes. A half-eaten vegetable tray where the ranch has gone rancid in the unrefrigerated box. Literal trash. The worst was a bunch of expired meat someone had clearly cleaned out of their freezer. Again, the box is unrefrigerated. It makes me so angry. Like, would you want to eat that? 

It all feels shitty and not enough. On Saturday morning, I got some stuff to take when I was at Kroger, and then stopped at the farmer's market on the way to the food box. It was hot and I bought myself an iced lemonade from a food truck. I also bought myself flowers: big, fragrant peonies that I could put in one of my many vases and arrange in my cute little kitchen to fill it with cheerful brightness. Then I got to the box and found a thank-you note scrawled on a fucking coffee filter and felt this raw, insane feeling of sorrow, rage, and sense of the profound unfairness that I was out buying myself little treats when someone else was checking the box, hoping there was something there they could eat and not literal garbage. I didn't do anything better than anybody else. I don't deserve what I have anymore than the people who don't have it deserve not to. 

As I write all this, I guess I "hear" myself. Oh, my little plan to make myself feel better by helping the impoverished backfired and made me think critically about have and have nots in our society? It feels easier and cleaner to play Captain Planet in the woods than it is to engage in real human need in my own community? Like, come on. I'm probably not going to stop buying myself lemonade. I tried to imagine being homeless: I was at a point last year where I literally didn't think I had a place in the world to go. Even so, I still made more money than I ever had in my life.

I guess I don't really have any point, or much less, a meaningful conclusion about what I've learned through this, but I wanted to write this out because it's been on my mind a lot. Maybe even the fact that I have turned the act of buying a few extra shelf stable goods into a personal essay about my relationship with wealth and need is inherently selfish and stupid. But that's one of the great things about having my own stupid blog where I can write the shittiest things I can imagine that I'll never say to anyone.

 I feel a little bit good this week - coolheaded, quiet, considered. It was so hot this weekend - I saw the blackberry blossoms foaming up white around the edges of the woods and told them out loud, "some blackberry winter, huh?" And then here I am, two days later, trying to warm up my cold fingers around the ceramic of my little coffee mug. 51 outside, 62 in the house. I bet the blackberries are still blooming out there on the shoulders of the Middle River, a river I slipped fully underneath this weekend, whose specific bacteria is even now likely festering in the small scrap at the center of my right palm. (Destiny line.)

Outside, the rain pouring out of my busted up gutter beats down into the exact spot in my garden that it always does, smoothing away all the soil I built back up there. The little stray cat is screaming. The catbird and the blue jay are sparring with each other over the feeder, and the crows all look so bedraggled, like old men in black coats at funerals.

Garden things are going slow. I'm disappointed that my extra push for an insane amount of sunflowers has come to almost nothing. It seems like nothing wants to sprout this year. The ones that did managed to come up look anemic. I wanted to get my tomatoes yesterday but they were sold out, a big mess from the nice weekend and the aftermath of mother's day. I'll need to go to a second option sometime this week. But I did buy delphinium and 5 different kinds of basil. Hot peppers, zinnia, a few fancier sorts of black-eyed-susans to replace the ones that didn't come back. 

 I feel busy the way I do on a Friday when the weather is warm and things are happening. I write lists of places to go, things to drop off and pick up. My throat hurts (I wasn't kidding about that dust and mouse droppings) and my hair is all crinkly from braiding it when it was wet and then letting it dry. I feel like there's a lot of energy coming from everywhere. 

 I feel extremely full up on loneliness and honey locust, my airways full of pollen, mouse droppings, dead leaves, sawdust, and the pulverized, hot-cooked air of I-81. 

I feel hot and allergic, grateful for the wind through the window and whatever blooming thing it smells like. The burnout is so real this week. In the graveyard, every day I watch the hawks feed their fuzzy babies. 

 I feel sad and tired.

 Oh here we go, classic times, crying while vacuuming and listening to the Decemberists, a band I don't even like.

 How is this week lasting for fucking ever? I guess probably because I have an onerous family weekend to look forward to at the end of it, and I'm down to my last shred of patience on that front. So the week won't really end, but flow into another series of stressful interactions. Work is ridiculous right now too, and I make jokes to myself about their ridiculous processes and failed initiatives. It's great. 

Still, I think after this weekend (watch me make god laugh here) I should be free to pursue my own interests for several weeks - maybe even months - if I can survive my stupid release at work. It's coming into the season of doing fun things deliberately, maybe even going outside. 

Well, at least this evening I can take the dogs out to the villa on the Middle River with Ali. Sven will like that, even if it ends up being a bath night afterward from the riverbank mud. 

 A little depressed today, a little down. Of course there are a thousand trillion things in the world to be sad about, but it seems a shame on a day that's such an over the top example of a beautiful spring - almost crystal bright and with the world filled with color and blooms and birds, especially the crows. Tonight, they've figured out to come down when I'm writing on the porch and have me toss 'em little snacks. 

I feel tired. I want to write about things that make me feel better to write about, but that stuff seems to be in short supply.  I've been thinking about how much time I invest in keeping my own secrets, even from myself. Usually, when I sit down to write, that world opens up, but now it feels blunted and stupid. I feel dumb and exhausted, thinking of it now. 

See, I'm even writing like a boring, depressed person. At least the night is cold and interesting. All day, I've been able to see a half slice of moon. I like to write and think about the moon, because it's such an intimate thing to track - each moment that you take to notice and enjoy it is yours alone in such cold, perfect privacy. And yet it's a literal satellite, and anyone can be looking up and being with it at the same time as you. People you can't stop loving, people you have always hated, enemies, friends, old school mates, acquaintances, animals, idealized versions of yourself, lost romances, losers, landscapers, people driving by but most of all that purest class of true, real stranger - there's always a chance they're looking up at the same time as you. There's always someone on the other side of that reflected light. 

Dear diary, why is it always cold and rainy and full of family obligation on the weekends, but sunny and perfect on Mondays when I have to sit inside all day? I'm tempted to work out on the porch in the sun, but I should really get some stuff done that would be more efficient with two monitors... Maybe this afternoon when I'm winding down on work and want to dabble on my stupid story.

I got a haircut today (well, a fix to some bad decisions that were made previously) and it looks so good, I'm so happy with it. Between that and my giant new tattoo, which I adore more than anything, it feels nice and fresh and spring-y to have a new look. 

I'm restless, I want to go outside and see what stupidity the frost probably did to my tomatoes I hastily planted during my 8-hour-garden-marathon yesterday! I want to go for a long walk in the graveyard. (I didn't get enough miles on my run because I was late for the haircut, but I'd like do something more today.) Last night, I dreamed that I was lost way back in the twisting paths out at Elkhorn, but in the dream logic, they were different and contradictory, and night was coming on. The feeling has stuck around all day. Tomorrow is Mercury Retrograde, a good time for dreams, confusions, and backwards actions. Tonight, I'm making green curry for dinner with lamb. 

 It's a rainy little morning here, one of those sorts that makes everything green glow. I put on all my string lights and I'm drinking coffee out of my little blue clay cup. It's nice to have the window open and listen to the rain while I work. If it slackens later, I might try to run, or at least plant the little army of plants that have been languishing on my porch the last week or two. I have zinnas, hostas, butternut squash (I know), some little bright colorful annuals for my porch treasure box, and some tomatoes that I knew it was too early to buy, but they just looked so nice... 

 

Why does everything feel a little gentler now? I've been reading; chiefly, about surrender. Another dumb history book, another view of Captain Armistead glimpsing the top of Gettysburg, where his best friend turned opposing general was waiting, posed on the opposite side of the lines, and how he told him "you can never know what this has cost me." I like to read about the battle, about the way that the guns were so loud that even the birds fell out of the sky from the percussion and how a lot of the men actually just fell asleep because when your heartrate gets too high, you fall asleep. It's very human.

But it's May here in formerly war-torn Virginia, and I feel sleepy, and I smell like soap, and the mayapples are blooming, which always feels like a celebration for something, like candles on a cake. 

 Whew, I really need to talk to the creek at Elkhorn about some shit. I started to type up all the various crimes and misdemeanors of my mom this weekend, compounded by the fucking horror that is the Supreme Court and my complicated feelings about having spent my whole life as the product of an unwanted pregnancy, told from a small age that I was different than the other, wanted children and my very life proof of my mother's heroic failure to abort me. I grew up a pro-life prop, brought to rallies outside of abortion clinics, sanctimonious walks for life, and other drives to fund those kind of fake pregnancy centers that offer guilt and toy fetuses to low income women so they become emotionally trapped into carrying a pregnancy to term. To say nothing of my own experiences, the fear, the purity cult, the hangups with my own body. I open up this issue in my mind, and there are fucking oceanic depths of shit. It just goes deeper and deeper. I guess I started this paragraph saying I was going to talk about it, but now I am.

I think everyone is already just so stressed out and tired. Globally, and for me, all that the last two years have been personally. I think about it and start to cry, and then get angry because that's all I ever do about anything, and I have stuff to do today. The streak my mascara left on the side of my face makes me look somehow surprised when I check the mirror. 

I planted seeds last night in the garden, barefoot, with a giant glass of wine. Mostly sunflower varieties - really bold oranges, soft pinks, "strawberry blondes," lemon colors, and the big mammoth ones that the birds love. I also planted a few types of cornflower. I like the selections of striking blue, like a blue jay's wing. I need to go for my run. I need to get the groceries. I need to drink more water and put a stamp on this bill and mail it. 

 Perfectly, totally normal to dream about being a teenage girl in the 17th century frontier wildness, a girl from a sheltered religious family, and I fall in love with a charismatic, psychopathic girl from the local orphanage and help her murder the man she's being prostituted out to. She and I have incredible, frantic sex, but then, after the killing, it turns out that the giant French fur trapper mountain man we just murdered and robbed is actually some kind of Appalachian cannibal ghost spirit wearing the skin of a man and it's mad at us so we are chased through a haunted landscape of wilderness and broken loghewn buildings where pale naked white men with green glowing eyes and white teeth gnaw on all the trees and we finally escape and she agrees to walk me home through the woods. I'm so scared that my parents are going to be mad, but when we get in sight of my homestead she turns, kisses me, and stabs me in the stomach, saying "when you wake up, tell them this was about revenge."

Rabbit, rabbit, May.