Dillemma-ing day

to blog or to work more on nothing because there's nothing left to do outside of packing boxes, which is not advisable as the strained back is a direct result of said activity.

to journal this morning or to play solitaire for over an hour because I was afraid of what the words that came out of my pen would be.

some few things make more sense. the words in my head, because I believe that words have power, are becoming more clear. meaning that they make enough sense to me that I can see myself saying them out loud to a person, one for whom they would be intended. nothing specific, just clarity and understanding. without these things I am lost and floundering in a sea of mismatched vocabulary and there is nothing good about that.

daydreams about punching people again. not just random people, specific ones. the same specific ones that i've always had, although I have lost the need to deck joe. pete is still open game. and there are a few girls whose heads i'd love to bash in. I figure anne can take care of her own ex-boyfriends, so i'm not waiting around for just any old opportunity. now, the fact that I probably would not be physically able to perform said smack-downs is a huge factor as well. so, instead of feeling weak and unable to live up to my own expectations, I read books.

two more of the Camilleri mysteries featuring the lovely moody grumpy forty-something Inspector Montalbano. While talking to a co-worker yesterday, we started describing him as a Sicilian version of Greg House. I love House. Love the show, love him. Haven't seen fit to get the whole thing and watch it obsessively, I seem to be hanging on to the fringes of detachment at home, but I love it just the same.

Another co-worker overheard parts of our conversation and asked me later if I am dating said Sicillian version of Greg House. He said he couldn't visualize it. I'd like to be able to say that I agree with him. But, I like grumpy ego-maniacal men. I am grumpy and ego-maniacal at times, and it's nice to be able to be around someone who gets it. Although, they usually don't. They tend to be all shocked and weirded out by it. And then they go away. With something much younger and totally yuck.

This has happened over the years more than once, I am sorry to say. (for the naysayers: I historically marry against type, allowing myself to be the grumpy one in the relationship.) I like people who are what they are, and who are willing to speak their minds, and whose minds are even goofier than mine. And I have respect for people who can be angry at the world and not expect me to do anything to fix it. Because that's not my fucking job. When I love someone, it is because of who that person is right now, not chipper or sleeping or sweet or wounded or in the future or in the past, right now, moods and all, breathing here in the space that we are sharing.

I suspect this has more to do with my commitment-phobia (did I mention that I have one of those? yeah, that was a fun morning) than any romantic ideas I have about acceptance and adventure and the nature of true love. Because how can you share a life with someone who cannot bring himself to share his life with you? It's a built-in exit strategy. Only, I don't want out of the relationship I have with myself, so I think I have to do something about that.

In other news, new self-help book coming out called Feel Good Naked. I think I might have to read it. The whole point of it is that if you can feel good about yourself in the raw, you can feel good about yourself in the not-so-raw (would that be cooked?) and that does nothing but help the spiral of goodness and light that lead to salvation here on earth (not a religious version of salvation, just that whole "happiness" thing. Speaking of, did I write about the blurb I read from an interview with a psychologist who has written a book about how stupid humans are about what will make them happy and how we never seem to think about the fact that just as sadness with pass, so will happiness? cool stuff)

Someone got Shot in downtown Lincoln last? What?! What the fuck city do we live in?

Andrea Camilleri. I recommend him.

dream

in the dream there was a man, he winked at me as if to say that he knew the joke and so did i, he wasn't trying to trick me, he wanted to see if i could see how he was doing the trick. it was a coin, a large one - maybe an inch and half across, silver in the middle with a gold edge, like the old francs. on one side the coin was worth 39 cents, on the other side it was worth a dollar. one of the sides had a smaller coin attached to it - magnetically, maybe? he would flip the coin - not toss it, just flip it over and the littler coin would be there, and the player would make a bet with his own coins. it didn't depend so much on what side came up, rather how well the player could match the value based on what he had in his possession. i can't remember which side had the little coin, the dollar or the 39 cents.

somehow it seems important.

evening at home

This is one of those moments when I am aware so much of why my husbands found me so intolerable.

Reading the latest Martha Grimes - Dust. I am terribly in love with Melrose Plant. I have been for years. Never mind that he's fictional, or that even if he weren't fictional he would still be something like 20 years my senior. He's just so unhappy and so content to be that way. Grumpy. Practically an alcoholic when he can get around to it. His friends are elitists and utterly silly. Did I mention the part about the house? The estate. Yep. And the days filled with sitting in front of a fireplace reading or mucking about. I could almost not mind the regularity of murder.

Yes, I read detective novels. And instead of being head over ass for the detective, I pick his moody moldy buddy to fall for, this is the best thing ever written ever in the history of anything. He drinks Old Peculiar. And he reads French poetry. For fun. Because he can. He still smokes.

With Anne off wandering the wilds of Southern France and Brad negotiating the wilds of Lincoln, the house is mine and the CD is classical. But, remember, this is me. Classic Wynton. Trumpet solos by Wynton Marsalis. Cuz, come on, if Ken Burns is going to act like the history of jazz is wrapped up entirely in this family, I can get behind the classical music detours every now and again. Portuguese blues next.

Water crackers, bland goat cheese (oh, did I mention the part about the blandness of the goat cheese? I'm going to try white wine to see if I can pick up any flavors whatsoever that might be getting over-powered. by the water crackers. yeah. the texture is gorgeous, of course, but come on, goat cheese should make your lips go a little tense for a moment, get your tongue off the bottom of your mouth, wake you up to eating, not inspire drunkenness as a last resort for flavor.) but the wine is cheap and enjoyable and i have a carton of smokes at my leisure.

My, but I am insufferable, in that whole i-like-what-i-like-and-fuck-you-
for-interrupting-and-judging-and-i-hope-you-don't-mind-being-married-to-
an-icebox way. It is good to know that there are some things that haven't changed.

Thank the Goddess.

Life and Times of a Toad Suck Shake

Iconium, MO.
From the Book of Acts.
More later - my father tells me good stories.

yes, yes, the day goes on

there is an intermittent hissing noise coming out of something that controls the highly unstable air quality and temperature of this area. it sounds like highly controlled competition peeing.
Country Weekly comes out every two weeks.
Today is the kind of a day where it occurred to me at a very unfortunate moment that it's incredible that the months of the year are called the same thing every year and that every year they happen in the same order. Repeat any common word to yourself over and over and over again until it becomes not only meaningless but almost impossible that the word ever had meaning. Leave it alone and the meaning comes back. I am teetering back and forth between being and being in the reserve room (for that read: not being). Reading for the book, reading for work, reading at all or am i just processing the letters in the alphabet to guide my feet and hands to the right place on the shelf?
I will enjoy processing this so much later - along with the Dyer déjà vu and the connection because of the rain and how is it that lunch at the coffee house is so inexpensive, really? and why oh why does every-fucking-body feel the need to go the noodles place on the one day that I want to go?
must head off and work some more and lost my sense of the reality of words and place and meaning. Yay!

I know you're seeing things

I bought myself a composition book at walgreens the other day. and pens. it is a gift i have not given myself for more than a few years. many many years more than a few in point of fact. it is good. the words are closer to my hands and i have been finding them more easily.

i am reading a book called "yoga for people you can't be bothered to do it." it's a travelogue. seriously. this last 6 days have been so utterly uneventful and yet it seems that so much has happened. it's like the reverse of being on a train watching the world go by. i feel it in my stomach, that slightly off-kilter rocking sensation where normal is moving and standing still makes you sea sick. i drink and have not gotten past tipsy - not even the spins. i am still working on the 2nd bottle of tequila - no, brad, i have not finished it yet. and then i wake up and everything is all topsy turvy. my head is dry, my mouth is spinning, my stomach feels full before i eat, i am fascinated by the colors outside and find my room a terrorizing place to be.

my room. my bedroom. shared by the kittens and wigs. also now the place of pilgrimage for visitors come to see the babies. it is deeply troubling. no, it is more than that. i fucking hate it. i hate that i take people up to see the tiny beings who need to sleep and eat and learn their mother and their family. i hate that we are going to send them away in 8 weeks. (not because i want to keep any one of them. they are moving out.)

i don't want anyone in my room besides me on the best of days. anne has taken to knocking - it's like we live in a dorm. and yet, there is nothing correct about keeping potential families away from the kittens. there is nothing inappropriate about it. and once i move them into anne's room, i'm not going to hate it any less. it's the same thing that i go through when folks visit to see newborns or just to take a look at your new place. you can't interact with the babies - they are too fucking small and if there are too many people around, wigs will move them and move them and freak out and there will be paranoid, stressed out, angry felines everywhere. however, if people don't play with them, they will never be socialized (or so the books tell us).

to me, they are not cute. they are incredible and amazing and loud and they already have their own personalities, which is good because two of them look exactly the fuck alike. they fight and they mewl and they feed and hiss and yawn and get their butts licked and hate it. one of them nuzzles. one of them climbs already. spleen is a boy. ew is a girl. one of the wigs jr's is a girl and one a boy. i think. sexing kittens is not tricky business (what they hell do they care) but i am no vet and haven't had enough experience with this to presume absolute knowledge. i am thinking of finding a place where they can be visited that will allow room for viewing and later room for playing without crowding anyone.

i have jet lag and have not travelled anywhere. everything is covered with the gray of coming to be, and nothing is there yet. that blur of definition in progress that comes when my world finds itself transformed into letter and rhythm and line and action. dogs approach me, cats don't run away, fireflies land on my hand without coaxing. it is not a wrong place, it is different. and the streets and houses and workplaces and people are all the same. they look different to me, as if in a dream only they are real, they are who i know them to be. perhaps this is the kind of thing that i will know from now on. perhaps this is why the writer of that book is so involved in philosophical discussions about the reality of place and the possibility of mental interference on that reality.

my glasses are repaired and yet i find myself taking them off because i see better that way.

Last time for stuff kind of thing

Seeing as how I only have another 11 1/2 months in this town, there are some things which I would like to do here before i do not have the chance to do them again. It's a thing, it helps me keep my focus and enjoy my time here to the best of my abilities - kind of a no regrets kind of a thing.

Movies on the Green starts July 12 and runs every week into August. I'm thinking of skipping Kramer vs Kramer, because it is a movie that I have no need to see, personally. However, 2001? oh, yeah. and M*A*S*H? on the Green? Fuck, there is no way I'm missing that!

I am still up in the air about Jazz in June. I've been. It's been cool. It's fucking hot this year. I don't think I need to put myself through that. Plus, there's yoga class to go to - why complicate things with more than one planned event an evening? I have a hard enough time with more than one planned event in a week!

Must go to Roca Berry Farms this year, as I have never been there before. There was something else, but I can't remember. No need to go to a football game, I've been in the stadium to watch the marching band. That was enough. It was cool, but whatever.

Been to Morrill Hall, never been to the Peace Park. Haven't visited all of the lakes around town - and there are quite a few. Not doing July Jamm again. It has gotten pointless.

The only movie theatres that I haven't been to in town are the new State and the Joyo. In my world, the Joyo is more important. It's actually a part of my family history. Back in the day before children were had by Mel and by Leatha, they were first wed and broke and would save up for the movies once a month. Sometimes they would go to the drive in, taking along a bag of home-popped popcorn. Sometimes they would go to the Joyo. The would go the Dairy Queen on special occasions and cooked at home all of the time. Their office had their desks front to the front and walls of books around them. The crazy quilt that hung in the office in Chicago hung in their office in Lincoln. This town is the town of their history for me. It is the town where my father's mother lived and would call to see if Mama was making fudge. She didn't call every time Mama made fudge, but she never called to ask about it if she wasn't. Here was where my father's father worked at the K Street Power Plant, where he drank and quit drinking in order to save his marriage and his fatherhood, where he is buried. I am glad that I moved here and have my own footsteps to leave behind. I would not leave without knowing that I knew as much of this place as it does of me. But this is not the city of my life. It is not the city of my death. I have distractions here that surpass my abilities to ignore them most days. Every corner brings the possibility for yet another unexpected, potentially undesirable encounter. There are more than enough happy sightings, but I am not of here and it is letting me know.

It's that final fuck before the end is absolute. Best make it a good one.

attempts to focus on a furry day

Rule to add to the list of on dating: never date anyone who doesn't hold the deed to their own ego

Finished a book yesterday called The Terra-Cotta Dog by an Italian man named Andrea Camilleri. What do they call those things? Police procedurals, that's it. Stupid stupid name. It was wonderful and thoughtful and human and there was food food food - no recipes and no gastronomic over-indulgences, just a man who likes to eat and who hates publicity and who is very happy with the routine of his much to the consternation of at least one woman - i like that one of the women in his life is attached without being pathetic. We'll see if the positive feelings continue throughout the next few books. Oh, did I mention that there are more? Yes, there are more. There are shows on Italian television. Happy.

The brains of the story don't show themselves right away, which is kind of nice. By the end, I was totally impressed. Made going back to Hamilton kind of depressing, like going out to lunch and having wonderful conversation with one friend, knowing that dinner will be with someone intriguing but temporary and pointless. Nothing life changing. I do tend to find the ones who will totally fuck up my perception of the world. It's the smallest changes that do the most to change things on a large level. Perhaps that explains my historic pattern of choosing companions whose world views are so drastically different from my own. It is easier to maintain a sense of myself in the face of overwhelming challenge. Then again, it is easier to stay the same when no change is even considered because it is coming from such an opposing force.

The Italian translation works well. I have no idea how it reads in the original. I think I will get around to learning Italian just for the pleasure of reading these and much by Eco in the original. Now that I have the time and energy to do this, well, life is full and good for me. It is what happens when I finally get around to letting go. There is not much in my life than can come back to haunt me that cannot be dealt with somehow. Not that I want to deal with any of it at all ever, mind, I mean, that would be stupid, yeah?

I am again remembering how much of knowing me is in knowing my words. Not authorial intent, not purpose or meaning or symbol. The knowing is in the reading, in the rhythm, the words, the flow of my mind as I let it loose through my fingers. It is a part of me desiring to be a woman of action, words are action, the more carefully I consider them, the more true the action becomes. It is not fair that one who will not read my words will not know me, it is a potentially unreasonable demand to make, though if the intention is to know me, the demand is a necessary one. It is not as though everyone does not place such demands on others. Some demand patience, some an air purifier, some need attention to phone calls and emails and drunken ramblings that repeat themselves with regularity. It is telling, those demands. A tell that I have no need to investigate. I'll leave that to people who analyze relationships, not to the ones who have them.

beginnings again, and again, and again

Yes, yes. I am already bored at work. It will not last long, and I only have a few minutes before other people show up and I start greeting them with "good morning" instead of "good afternoon," so I will take advantage of it.

One of my difficulties with blogging is that I rarely take the time to write a draft and then post. If I ever get around to writing poetry or a short something that I'd like others to see, that will be different, but even these little essays on life and personal events seem somehow scattered when I finally sit down to write. I do not know if it's just part of my process of writing, in order to find my rhythm in the act of writing my brain goes blank and then has to be jump-started, or if I just do better when not typing, or what, but there it is.

These last few days have been very eventful in my psyche. It is a time of year of many birthdays in my life, of people close to me physically and people absent from my completely. One dead almost 9 years, more than a few removed from me by distance and severed connections, a handful of peripheral acquaintances, a few friends and one of my roommates. And then, of course, the yearly facing up to the fact that I am getting older. I like getting older. Childhood sucked. Not because of my parents or because I was unhappy. I don't deal well with authority. I never have. As a child, almost every event that took place outside of my home involved a litany of "do this" or "don't do this." I believe that it is the same with most, if not all, children. I took it personally. One of the drawbacks of being preternaturally alert and sensitive.

And then there was this looming sense of loss. Loss of innocence. Loss of trust. Loss of laughter and tears. Loss of loved ones. And the ever awful reality that it is harder to accept that happiness is a perfectly acceptable state of being even in the face of those losses than it is to just be miserable and caught up in them. Yes, the hurt is worse while you feel it and no the void is never quite gone from your world, but it is okay and right and good to go on and not dwell. There can be so much guilt in not dwelling, like you aren't supposed to be happy when you miss someone. Someone died and they will never be around again and somehow you don't lose just a part of you, but all of you and that's what's supposed to happen otherwise the love that you felt for that person has been invalidated. Bullshit. Natural. Still bullshit.

So, I let go. Stopped it. And then.... besides the truly fucked up dreams involving a co-worker of mine appearing in the weirdest places speaking as though he was narrating the events in my head, suddenly there was clarity. Clarity that involved perspective. Clarity that hurt, as clarity does (ever wonder why I take my glasses off so much? yeah, that's part of it). I will not say epiphany, because those get so boring after a while. Which is cool, except that it brought back all of the stuff that I have decided to not focus on so much, which is to say that there are plenty of other things to think about which are much more interesting - why does Laurel K. Hamilton suck so much (There's so much potential, and I do keep reading these awful books, and I just can't stop and well, they are not so much good. Parts are good. Some parts. ow. my brain hurts. At least they aren't going to leave a permanent scar on my brain or my soul)? - can I make a melted crayon mobile with stuff that I have on hand? - do you suppose I can figure out a way to turn old bed sheets into a yoga mat? - what can happen to make the vacuum cleaners work better? - does a cat with wings have any real chance of learning how to fly with them? - do I really only need 4 hours of sleep or is it just my brain taking it out on my body for reasons that probably have nothing to do with me, but could really be figured out if only I were willing to involve myself? - You know, important stuff.

That happened, and there was yoga and today, oh my stars do I hurt! What?! I'll have to stretch out again this afternoon before the roast duck. Did I mention the roast duck? I don't think so.

Also, lots of good food this month. Most of it not bought by me. All of it with good company.

Sodapop is wonderful. It is at the Playhouse. Go and see it next weekend. Buy pop. Laugh. It is good. I tell you this honestly, even above my personal bias (cuz Robie rocks!). It is good.