I've been so bad about writing in you, little blog. July feels like a migraine coming on, and my heart is a little listless. I go around my town, I look at magnolias, the shops, the street, at the twin fawns in the graveyard that are so used to me by now, I can walk right up to them. But I'm so out of it. Everything about the season feels a little bit like a song I played too many times and now I've ruined it for myself. I know I get gloomy when I have a running injury, which I seem to have right now but am still running on. The weather is getting hot, which makes me tired. And the world is so terrible. It's just bad on bad on bad, and eventually there feels like an apathy that comes on, like maybe this is just how it is always and nothing will ever get better. Oh, I'm depressing, aren't I?

I want to go camping at Elkhorn and feel plaintive and sorry for myself that I can't. I'm feeling the lack of being in a truly detached wilderness area, no cell service or strangers around, cold, cold stream water. 

 Wild to take a fucking cat in today to get a procedure that I won't be able to choose as an adult human in this country.

Good morning, especially to the butterfly bush I put in a few years ago whose blooms just perfectly frame the side window of the house! I love to sit here, not packing, and look out into the garden. I need to take more pictures. I was looking back in my phone to years and years ago and seeing so much brightness, pictures of flowers, pictures of food, pictures of campfires, a thousand pictures of me smiling, looking hot. Why don't I take pictures anymore?  I bet I would like to look back at them sometimes.

Last night, I sat outside and stared across the graveyard, watching the fireflies come up from the stones like souls. I made myself look at them, really see them and how beautiful they are, and try to preserve the thought in my mind. I figured maybe there would be a time - not too far from now, given how quickly the year is going - when it was so cold and dead outside that I would be hard-pressed to remember a time when there were fireflies out there.  Memory is a funny thing like that. I feel like if I try, I can open it up and go back to a time or place and feel it exactly. 

Well, it's time to go configure my festival girl life for the next 36 hours. 

 Funny little mood this week - uncertain, unlike myself, neutral and a little bit blank. June going crazy all around me with blooms and storms and business. Trash, which is what I have named the porch cat, is blowing up like a football even though I have her spay/termination of any pregnancy surgery scheduled for Tuesday after the festival. They were busy; they had to schedule her in. I told the house sitter, "there's not insubstantial chance that she has kittens all over the porch while you're here... if she does... I guess... use your best judgement to handle the situation?" At least Trash is friendly and I've already been doing the little things like flea medicine and such. Any kittens she has should be cute, accessible, and easy to find homes. But in my heart, I'm getting unfortunately attached to that little cat herself. 

I think I might have shin splints for the first time in my running life! I'd always felt slightly superior for having not had them, as if I had done something right and everyone else was just unlucky. "Look at me, the professional runner, I've trained my muscle and bone tissue not to have microtears, weird, why didn't you think of doing that?" Silly, right? I was stupid to think so. But... I am wondering if it's from changing up my shoe. My running routine is so regular these days - 5 miles every weekday: easy, easy. Not something that should suddenly change up my bones. It must be a shoe thing. For not the first time, I wish I had someone to talk to about these little running problems, and also these little everythings. Sometimes my brain feels so disconnected. It's like when I was accidentally poisoned with drugs and I had this persistent, almost supernatural understanding of the wide gulf between myself and everyone still in my life. 

Tomorrow will be Redwings. Hot, hot, hot. I should be packing. 

 A perfect day, sunny, but with a very strong breeze that's getting into everything, mussing the trees, tossing my porch curtains up against me, and blowing around my hair. The air has some kind of scent memory to it, something I'm attracted to, a mixture of laundry and dead leaves and clean, wood-fed fire. It would be a good day to camp, or go for a long run someplace beautiful. There are buckeye butterflies on the verbena in my garden. Something I learned about poetry early on is that you could just say the names to things, and people would like it in poems. Early frost euphorbia. Firepower dwarf nandina. Coronation gold yarrow. Volcano purple phlox. It just sounds good. It sounds right. Even my favorite tree in the yard: catalpa. It's like what I was saying a couple posts ago about the name of that river down in Clarksville. You can just tell it's a word native to the region, the way the sound repeats back on itself. 

I wrote a post last night but then woke up at 3 am and deleted it. It had a whiff of terrorism about it, if that makes sense, a self-immolation that I didn't actually feel. It was reflecting on my week of being alone. I guess I had a big feeling about this week that "something would happen." I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it didn't occur. Nothing really occurred, actually. I was good at the simple tasks of keeping the house, the pets. I drank a startling amount less than I normally do, except for last night, when the pool got cancelled for bad weather and my friends just came over to sit on the porch instead. So I mostly want to drink a lot in front of other people? That doesn't seem true, because I like drinking: the very act of it, the ceremony, the glasses, the lore, the ritual. But it was an interesting counterpoint. 

Last night, when my friends had gone, I lay on the cool wood floor of my kitchen and listened to Coldplay. There is some album of theirs that was one of the only things downloaded to the iTunes at my first job at the coffee shop when I was a teenager, when I didn't know the person I was going to be, when I didn't yet realize I was going to be this person that I am. It's like one of those movies from childhood that you watch over and over until you have the beats of it memorized. I knew every word by heart, not because I love Coldplay so much, just because it was the only thing we had. I would put it on when I was closing alone and the store was dark and a little bit frightening. It was a good experience though - sometimes I still dream about it, cleaning the beautiful machines, scraping the ice cream cooler, wiping the counters with Windex which was all we had for some reason, and counting out the register. Good dreams, dream I wake up from feeling content.

The nandina is groaning against the house in the wind. I think I can feel my toes getting sunburnt. I need to get up and move. 

 All evening, I watched silent lightning storms move around me, tracking them by the direction, my fancy radar app, and orienting myself by the compass. I realized the heat lightning I could see to the south east was a cell down in Lynchburg. The massive tangle of light behind my house, out beyond Elkhorn and Elliot's Knobb, was a cluster of storm deep in West Virginia - skimming southeast, angling to miss my sleepy little town. I like the shape of my town, its position between and within two mountain ranges that are tangled together like interlaced fingers. I like how much you can see. But no storms here yet. The night has remained hot and breezy, the stars looking dull between piles of anvil-shaped clouds.

How did the weekend creep up on me so soon? For the long hours of this quiet week, it has gone so quickly. I got home from my long errands of procuring cold air and wine from onerous Harrisonburg, cleaned house, went for a long walk with the dog, and ordered Indian food. The rest of the night I just sat on the porch and read my book. 

Now I'm into the witching hours - where I know I should go to bed and even want to, but as soon as I go upstairs my mind will snap back into action, and I'll have to find something to do with myself for the next two hours. At least it's getting cooler. I'll install my little AC unit tomorrow and then it will be very cool indeed. 

 God, it's oppressive. I'm going to costco this afternoon to buy a window unit, if any such unit should exist there. I feel dull and stupid; I stayed up too late last night again, reading and thinking and listening. But now I feel so soggy and like I can't think. I ran two miles and then just stopped. These hot weather runs are turning me tan and my hair, already light, is bleaching out for the summer, but I feel so gross and sweaty. Even the mountains look hot and tired. 

I need to be thinking, because there's a release going out next week. At the end of next week will be Redwings again, which I am actually really excited for. I like festivals, though I don't really know any of the bands this year aside from a few local ones and of course the main act. Still, it's cheerful to think of something fun. 

Okay, more later. 

Loud ones, I cannot sleep.

 Such a genuine thrill to realize that my empty house means that I can have a lil cry if I have to, after having had a little day. Now evening is really getting on. My plan was to drink very very cold rose on the front porch and read the stupid history books I got out at the library while I was eating dinner, but instead I've cleaned the kitchen to within an inch of its life, made a potato salad for reasons unknown to me (not what I planned to make for dinner and something I really ever make or eat or even like), and realized that actually, I'm entirely not hungry. I have done all this while listening to a very, very corny Star Wars audio book about Quinlan Vos and Asaaj Ventress accidentally falling in love. Hmm. Perhaps the source of some of my mania.

Today, a funny thing happened while I was out on my run. There's this one squirrel who really gets that I feed the crows good shit. It always sits on one of the stumps I feed them on in the graveyard and waits for me. I don't even like squirrels, but it's just so appealing, sitting there, that I started feeding it a couple months ago. It comes up so close to my hand when I put the peanuts down that sometimes it almost scares me, like it might bite me or something? 

But I don't know - today, I knelt down, held out my hand full of peanuts, and it came up and ate them right out of my hand. It was really surprisingly gentle with my fingers. It was such a little soft nibble against my hand, the slightest brush of whiskers. Magic. 

 A stormy week alone. It reminds me oddly of the week of the derecho such a long time ago, when I was also home by myself, and how I hadn't thought anything about it, then the entire world went dark and outside turned into the inside of a washing machine. I remember stepping out onto the little gross side alley at the old house and seeing leaves and hail and rain and debris just swirling around, the air being dark with it, and afterward, picking up piles of broken catalpa and privet out of my back garden. The power was out for days everywhere in town except my house, which was extremely ironic, because it was about 104 and my house didn't have A/C. 

Now, it looks like the threatened derecho and even the line of bad storms hasn't hit me. I'm watching the radar, the wall of wet energy break up on my trusty mountains - soften and scatter. I'm almost a little disappointed because it has been so incredibly hot the last day. A storm might cool things off for a little while. 

I'm disappointed the catalpa have stopped blooming, but now my runs are filled with the smell of the giant magnolias in the graveyard. I picked a bloom and brought it inside to make my kitchen smell sweet and lemony. 

Full moon coming on. I read a line that I liked tonight: "I still thought bravery would be somehow rewarded."

 An ugly little pregnant cat ruining my clothes with her fur

A mushroom bag I brought in San Francisco

Chicken empanadas

That same stupid cat curling up in my lap

The smell of bugspray

Thinking about a dream

Fireflies coming up from the dusk

 A hot cup of coffee on a cloudy day
Cutting herbs from my garden, particularly chives, which slice so neatly
The annoying way my dog curls up in the foot well of my desk when I'm trying to work but it's also kind of sweet
This one really fat, loud catbird in my yard
Dinosaur kale, just dinosaur kale
Playing with someone's long hair
My big tattoo sleeve, the way it still startles me delightfully when I see it on myself
How when my dog is hanging out with his dog friend he brings out every single toy I have ever bought him even though he never plays with his toys on his own, and yeah, my dog gets two entries
I really like this one particular brand of bespoke orange juice
Waking up comfortable and warm and realizing you don't actually have to get up for a while
The way that in summer, every week has a new bloom and scent
Sitting on the front porch in a thunderstorm
Smelling campfire in my clothes
That crackly soft sound when it first starts to rain
The girls two doors down and how they are turning from children into dramatic teenagers before my eyes with real feral pony chaos energy and I would die for them
Cold water: drinking it
Seeing people I know downtown and telling them, "take care, take care, take care"
Tomato cages and the way they are just inherently a little bit comical
Sometimes when I am the opposite of depressed I just kiss the inside of my wrist to feel it
The marriage of shallots, garlic, nice olive oil, and capers in a pan
Really, really, really cold french rose wine - how it's almost salty but in a good way, like the sea
A lot of these are about food?
A dream of someone you miss, how upon waking they stay with you all day
The pleasure of realizing you have no excuse not to do something indulgent, like reading a book or writing story
Vacuuming I really love vacuuming
Asphodels
Chicory
Tealights 

 

 Another beautiful day, a thousand cleaning tasks, errands to run, runs to run, and work releases looming, and yet me, obsessing instead about what sort of Tuscan-y lemony summery bright herby pasta I'm going to make tonight! (And where on christ's green earth I'm going to find good tomatoes this early in the season. ) Well, that will be a little problem for me later.

Maybe I'll write some more later. 

 My tear-away-a-day calendar today says, "I have been thinking about it a lot, and I love you." It's about a cartoon dog. Still, I read that, and I felt so soft and tender, like it was addressed to me.

This morning, the beauty of the day came in through the open window even before I fully woke up. It was bright and cool, with a perfect breeze, and outside, everything was luminous and interesting. Later, when I was running, everything was so beautiful that I just closed my eyes and felt myself seem to float. Different from earlier in the week, when it all felt like such a slog.

Another thing from this morning - just to go back to it, briefly: there was some kind of eviscerated animal in the next door neighbor's yard. I can't imagine what could have done it; it was almost terrifying. Without being too graphic, there was no skin, no way to tell what the animal had been, everything inside out. There aren't really predators around here that do that sort of thing, and if there even were, I've never seen a kill look like that. If I lived in ancient Greece, and was some kind of priestess or shaman, I could have read my own future, or yours, in those entrails. But I'm nothing but a sort of low class witch thing, so the meaning will remain a mystery.

Happy hour club this evening, first time I've been in a long, long time. I went in to get my arm band and the new president didn't even recognize me; when he looked up my name to mark me down, he spluttered "wait, you used to run this!" because I guess he'd put down a note about that by my name. Some part of me felt good to creep back in there unnoticed, without a production, after how much stress that used to cause me. But it also felt a little sad, because it used to be such a perfect clique of just my group of friends, and seeing all the beautiful, bright young people I didn't know there made me feel old and washed up and tired. 

Eventually, I did see friends down there. I saw my obnoxious friend whose favorite thing about himself is first, that he is an author, second, that he was teaching at UVA before he retired. I told him I was reading a book written by his colleague, who still teaches there, and he was characteristically dramatic about it: "I know him, I could introduce you, you could go there tomorrow and meet him, you could get an interview with him and talk." I told him, "what could I even have to talk to him about?" and he said he was sure I could think of something. The guy is not even my friend, really - I almost never see or talk to him, and in fact, as I write this, I realize I don't really like him. 

As it happens, though, I am thinking about writing something in the vein of the historical research this absolutely annoying person was urging me to do. It's a poem, and the title is Drop that or by the splendor of God, I'll blow your heart out. Yeah, right? I'm basically a genius!

I'm tired. How often do I write that in this blog? When I'm dead, one could probably make an AI version of me based on the content of this blog and it would just say I'm tired, I'm sad, blah blah the past, and like the three poems that I always requote and write about. 

Whatever gruesome animal remains that were there in the grass this morning have been cleaned up. The signs will remain unread, except for one that I felt when my bad little stray cat returned to me this afternoon and actually let me hold her on my lap and pet her. That is, that she is almost certainly pregnant. 

 Do you ever just feel so tired and a little bit silly, a little useless?

 Storms bouncing around the Valley at a crazy pinball angle this afternoon, and me here just hoping I don't have to water my garden, but still get to go out for dog date with Sven and Bean. Always trying to have my cake and eat it too! The little stray cat hasn't come in screaming today yet, which is unusual. I wonder if the little girls down the street absorbed her into their menagerie; I saw them playing with her last night. It's always better to think that these cats get swept up into loving households than the alternative, but I've seen so many of them come and go by now, it's hard to hold much real sorrow for it. To speak of antipathy, I'll also report that I set a trap for the groundhog who I think is eating my swiss chard, my sunflower tops, my tomato blossoms. 

I'm in the mood for cold, fresh things to make. I found a good recipe for a shrimp linguine with corn, arugula, lemon, basil, olive oil, and white wine. I want to make cold, crunchy salads and keep them in my fridge to eat over the sink after runs. My run was very bad today; I felt so slow and heavy, the air felt hot and still. On mile 3 of 5, my car guy called, and is trying to get me to pay almost 400 dollars for some kind of light assembly replacement. How can it be so much money for a light? 

 Am I feeling burned out? Am I feeling tired? I want to write a story. I want to read something old back to myself and feel the comfort of it like a tick, like chewing on a hangnail or touching your face when you're nervous. 

The Hyco river looked particularly sick where it crosses under 58 on Sunday: worm-brown and sluggish, barely any pulse. Early morning Monday spruced it up a little bit with the cool air and a little lace of fog just fringing it, rustling around under the trees that were perfectly June green. For no particular reason, I read about the river when I got home. I found little details about it that seemed special and delightful: that it flows northeast, or that its real name might be Hicootomony or Hyco-ote, musical names that must be more authentic to the first residents of the area, that it first made an English map as the Turkey-Buzzard river because of, well, the turkey buzzards that roosted up over it. Sadder, that in 1964, its waters were stolen up into a dam. Or is that sad? People need dams. Don't I drink the water I think tastes so good in my own little town from a river that was stopped up to make a dam?

*

The day before, Saturday, and sitting out in my friends' yard. I had given their daughter a little toy stuffed dragon with some kind of magnet contraption that connected so the tail wrapped around her wrist. I stepped away for a while to help pull some weeds in the garden, and then I got back, my friend prompted his daughter: "so what have you decided to call the dragon?" "Yon!" she immediately replied, with the long oo emphasis. All my friends who had been sitting around unsupervised with her while I was off in the garden turned as one to give me a triumphant look. I guess, if you're lucky, you live long enough to see your friends' children grow up enough to be used to troll you! But it did warm up something in my cold, dead heart.

*

I'm sitting on my porch, tossing small snacks to a host of blue jays and crows. The day felt cool, pleasant for running, but now, the rain feels strangely hot.

 After the heat this week, today feels almost chilly. The baby hawks in the graveyard have not quite yet fledged, but they have come out of their nest and are sitting up on the limbs of the oak like big birds, pretending to be cool. I want to tell them, "I know you're still babies. I saw you when you were little fuzzyheaded dinosaurs. I have your eggshell in my desk at home." 

I'm here, doing the things that I always do: going for my run, walking barefoot out into the garden to pull weeds and check the progress of small, hot peppers. Something has been nibbling on my tomatoes and sunflowers - two plants that I don't usually have trouble with, but that are giving me difficulties this year. The ugly little cat weaves between my bare legs as I work out there, occasionally throwing herself down into my weeding and trying to bite and lick my hands. The cardinals are courting each other. They do this thing where the female comes up to the male at the feeder and begs like a baby bird, flapping her wings, and the male very tenderly puts a seed in her beak. Is that love? Or is it more about sex?

Do you think energy is real, or is it just what we make up in our own brains for why certain weeks feel hard, or happy, or nostalgic, or easy? Sometimes I think there's so much significance to this life and the world around me, the cycles, the signs. At times in my life, I've felt so connected to that thread that I can almost guess what's going to happen next, or what another person is thinking, or feel them across time, space, mountains. Once, years ago, I had the strongest sense that my dead grandpa was standing just in the next room, listening to the sound of his beloved piano being played during a night when my house was full of happy, singing people. It was the realest, truest feeling - even if I knew I would walk into the dining room and not see him there. In life, he'd never even been to this house. 

And sometimes, it all feels so arbitrary, like maybe I'm actually just really mentally ill or stupid or I just come up with these things because it's better than that aspect not existing. If I were to work the components I bought last summer at the witchstore, would I stop dreaming of bees? If I did, would it be because something had really changed, or because I had convinced myself that it had? Would I lose something important? Would I lose the bees?

Here's the thing about being caught in a sudden, violent lightning storm while out on a run: as much of a pathetic, stupid, sad waste I feel, as much as my emotions sometimes rise up out of nowhere to completely choke me - I don't actually want to die.

I feel warm and very still.

I can't remember a year where I was this behind in the garden. It's hot and busy in my life and I haven't had the kind of day where I can just settle in and work on it. The work days and the life days are long, and then when all the tasks and chores are done and I get around to all the pleasurable things I want to make time for, I'm out of energy and just want to lie on the couch and watch the stupid new Star War, which, of course, I love almost as much as the Pirate show. Last night, I watered the garden, cleaned up the kitchen and did the dishes, put away laundry, vacuumed, and when I looked around to stop and do something for myself, I realized it was 9:30 - too dark to do anything outside and I was too tired to write or anything fun. 

But the new moon in Gemini brought me soft, affectionate little dreams, the kind I thought I'd stopped having - or maybe it was just the smell of the catalpa blooming just outside my window: heavy, white, and sweet. Conversations where I can guess the next thing that will be said. There was no nightmare aspect to it at all, no hatred directed at me. I suppose I can still surprise myself, or maybe whatever is the energy of dreams can surprise me.  

June. This morning, I thought "oh, I'll look forward to memorial day weekend at the end of the month" and then I realized that the holiday had already come and gone. This whole year has felt like that.