I feel a little overemotional this week. I've cried three times today:

1. because someone (who I don't even know!) in a meeting started crying
2. because I saw a video of a guy rescuing a cat from the hurricane on twitter
3. because I read a new poem I really liked by a poet who once picked my poem to win an award

....4. right now again thinking about the cat video. 

Tuesday, my team went to the arboretum up in Harrisonburg for a tour. The director of the program said that their most requested thing that's put into their anonymous suggestion box was "a place in the arboretum to have sex." I bought ghost ferns, maidenhair ferns, and lime green queen ferns at the plant sale. Today I put them into my yard, and I'm just about to go teach tarot to a group of teenagers at a library program I'm running. Aughhh. My heart, my heart. 

 Happy equinox to all who celebrate. It was like turning a switch this morning, feeling the wind blow cold from the west and send dozens of yellow walnut leaves twirling and dancing into the yard. Everything - the overgrown pumpkin patch with their misshapen, rotten-tooth colored gourds, the unmown lawn, the dead sunflowers stalks teeming with goldfinch - suddenly looked soft and sleepy, seasonal, and not just overgrown and shabby. 

I had become perfectly content with my life of doing the bare minimum while I trolled linkedin for new jobs but unexpectedly this week, the source of all my problems at work was abruptly fired. Nobody knows what happened. It's hard to not feel relieved and like the tension is suddenly gone. I know that it's not really like that; the new manager's methods were terrible, but her ideas were coming from the new VP who is still at the company and still planning to do the nonsense that had me looking for new work in the first place. All that said, I do feel like I can finally take a breath. I have some time. I can really look and not feel like I have to take the first thing that comes along simply to get away from a terrible situation. 

Got my booster today, which will hopefully help me not get covid reading tarot downtown at the wizarding festival this weekend and later, traveling. I didn't have a tattoo sleeve the last time I got booster which is bizarre to me - I got so much ink so quickly - so I asked the guy to stab me on my other arm. He accidentally got too deep into the muscle which involuntarily twitched, making the needle jump, which really hurt! I was distracted by this and didn't notice until afterward that he had decided to put the shot directly into my world serpent tattoo ring on that arm. He had so much other space to stick it! Oh well. 

It's strange to feel so touched and in love with this particular change of the season, and then to think in just a few weeks I'll be in a desert. 

 Oh how completely lovely it is to sit outside on my porch, a jar of flowers on my front table, a little ugly cat in my lap, and write in the morning. And how the little ugly cat reaches her terrible claws and mouth up  and savagely bites and claws the undersides of my wrists as I type! What a world. 

 September! Bright skies, cold mornings, and finally appropriate weather to make the shit I love to cook. Tonight I'm making this Moroccan shaksuka - I've been doing green shaksuka all summer with big bundles of chard, tomatillos, queso fresco, jalapenos, and smoked hot sauce dumped over it all (over rice) but I'm glad to play around with the red version. I've got a bunch of San Marzano tomatoes that I grew, plus roasted red peppers from the farmer's market, and I'm going to make these tiny little lamb meatballs to put in it and serve with flatbread and cucumber salad. Can you tell I'm writing this really hungry? 

I'm in a lot better mood since I discovered what NPR tells me is "quiet quitting" while I update my resume and look for new work. Right now, I'm over in Ali's yard letting the goofus dogs run around and play wrestlemania. Her neighbor's giant pot plants are towering over the fence, almost as tall as me. The dogs are happy; they've been good today, and it's nice to let them crash around like they like to. Bean goes home Friday night or Saturday morning. I will miss him. 

This weekend won't be too much. I want to go downtown tomorrow night and sit out in the street before they stop doing that for the season. Saturday is some farmer's market and maybe planting the half dozen pepper plants Rach dumped on my porch for some reason, then to Chris's for dinner. I always like going over there; they have such a pretty garden and the kiddo is cute. 

 It's a nice cool morning that feels finally autumnal. The red berries in the dogwood almost look like they're bleeding into the leaves around them, leeching in the color. The moon was up in the blue sky over to the west. How is this year going by so fast, but these September weeks are crawling slowly.

I feel angry all the time about work, and when I start to articulate it to myself, I just get angrier. I keep thinking this should be easy: if I'm so miserable, go. I'd make more money and every week wouldn't have some new terrible thing to dread. When I'm not angry about it, I just feel so tired. I've got to resolve something about my attitude before we get into the truly dark months and I'm trying not to sink in a puddle of terrible depression just from the season. Something to work on. 

Ugh. But all I want to do is drink like... a Legends brown ale or a shitty Octoberfest in a field while the late season sun is still warm but the air is crisp and watch the woods grow dark and purple as evening comes on. 

 Another early morning. Yesterday, the whole cemetery was covered in thick fog. No fog this morning, but a kind of haze. I can hear the cooper's hawk screaming. I was sad that they recently cut down the huge oak that the hawks have been nesting in for the past couple years, but like so many of those big, old trees, it was nearly dead. 

I'm bummed to find out that my tattoo artist is leaving town. (By town, I guess I mean the town three hours away that I keep having to drive to for work on my sleeve.) I always knew this was a likelihood; she's too talented and frankly, too young to stay in one place for long. I'm glad that I kept at it, insisted on staying in her books even when the money was tight, and got my sleeve to a good "stopping point" for now. I still wanted to add my second moth, but I can't imagine someone other than her doing it. Maybe someday. She was such a good artist and person to work with; I think it's really soured me on other experiences. At least I have a pretty much complete color sleeve of her stuff. 

It also means the money I'd had in my head as next-year tattoo work is freed up. Between the cost of the work itself and needing to drive and stay in a popular area, that's not an insubstantial amount. I feel a lot better about taking an extra trip or something. 

 I had to get up at 5 this morning because Bean was crying to go out. I stood out in the wet dark of my side yard, bleary, still wearing my sleeping things. I heard a soft sound and saw movement down the street, but it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. There were two little skunks snuffling around, dragging their beautiful fan tails. Quiet, secret things. Skunk hours. 

 Rainy labor day Monday. The Trash cat brought me one vole, one cicada, and the legs of a grass hopper this morning. It promises to be one of those days where the morning glory stay open all day instead of closing up in the heat and the sun. In my facebook inbox, I can see a long message from a childhood friend I haven't kept up with well and I can tell it's so sweet - thankfulness about our shared connection back then, how it helped her - and I can't bear to actually open it and read it, let alone reply. The last time we talked it was in the early spring of last year and I just sat on the video call and sobbed without being able to tell her any of it. I'm sure she thinks I'm insane. 

I'm enjoying to dogsit Bean, actually. I had worried it would be something of a chaotic mess, but he's adjusted really well to the routines. It's still so overwhelming to go from such a manageable number of pets to suddenly ... six?? But I think Curtis and Victoria have agreed to take the backyard feral cats, so that's good. Now I just need to get them transported up there in the waning weekends of this month. 

 In the story of Patroclus no one survives, not even Achilles who was nearly a god. I used to say that poem to myself almost every day. I had it out of an anthology, but last year, I realized there was a whole book of poems about the Iliad and read them all on a plane as I flew over the Mediterranean. It's the season for poems that I love and talk and talk about and say quietly to myself in my spare moments. 

Mmm, I have a headache. I mixed too many different types of alcohol last night - local beer with its unfiltered funk, herby Aperol, and the homemade lemoncello, the lingering bitterness of the lemon peel. I want to work in the garden today after the show. I need to call my mom. I should start getting ready for the tarot workshop I'm doing at the library at the end of the month. I haven't taught anything since 2011. (I probably haven't learned anything since then too.) 

I kept thinking there was something else I needed to say here today. Maybe it will still come to me.  

 Sometimes when I write into this thing it feels like a letter to someone. To who? To myself? To my fake best self? To God? I don't believe in God. I remember this tweet I saw: you're in her DMs, I'm the nebulous "you" she addresses in her poems. I relate to that. 

Drove up to Elkton today, toward the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe pass on 33. The brewery was cute. There was a perfect rail line next to it in such a way that you could be completely at ease, enjoying your mediocre brew on the patio and then, out of the literal blue, a giant train could come thundering through. It was so loud that no one could talk, that the whole place rattled. I grew up in a train town too. I grew up hearing that regular iron thunderstorm every night and loving it. It felt secure; it felt like home.

And to you? Does it ever feel like that to you?