Let’s just dash across the page and say things as though we mean them.
Let’s just throw back our shoulders and say ENOUGH ALREADY.
Let’s just pretend there are options and the best of which is staying in bed together with the sheets made from bamboo that are so soft and cool against the skin and we’ll plan what we’ll do when we inevitably win the lottery and they’ll necessarily solve the world’s problems with a lasting and total world peace.
Let’s pretend that we are always able and willing and excited to eat our vegetables.
Let’s pretend that we remember the anniversaries when they need remembering and we don’t tear ourselves up when we forget the ones that didn’t matter anyway.
Let’s pretend we have the grace to carry over our mistakes and our failures without ripping up our own countryside in outrage.
Let’s pretend that even if we don’t know we can pretend we do know and find a stone on which to step.
Let’s pretend that the problems are simple and visceral and based on caveman instinct. That chemical reactions are the way the great unknown plays out our destinies on the stages of our bony frames. That a scientist could solve it if we would just lay on his table and let him begin an examination, an excavation. We could be the trail of bodies that leads to a vaccination and no one will ever suffer so again.
Let’s pretend that nothing we says has any impact whatsoever and that accountability is for people who are running for things.
Let’s pretend that the things that make us feel better are things that will kill us if we touch them too much. Let’s kill them with spears and fire and never want them again.
Let’s lay out a picnic on bearskin rugs and get a tan.
Let’s misplace our glasses and have to get in very close to see if we’re rolling our eyes at one another.
Let’s not try very hard and get away with everything anyway.
Let’s be twice as long and half as good.
Let’s miss one another all day long and let every minute apart drive us a mile further into madness until we wake up lost in a bedlam of love.
Let’s shake tambourines and run down every roaming troubadour we can find, shackle them to our radiators, teach someone tall to play bass, and start a band.
Let’s find this anxiety in our heads, the one that brings us near to nausea when we pull into the parking lot, the one that tells us that if you worked harder you could make it rain the money that was needed, that if you were willing and brighter you could double time, you could make it happen…let’s find that thing that is making you dizzy and overwhelmed and shape it into a paperweight. A touchable, tangible thing. Something that can be addressed. Let’s not fail to breathe.
Let’s just call the whole thing off.
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Strange day. I feel kind of at ease in a way I didn’t yesterday, or maybe haven’t for a while now. It feels like summer, it feels joyful. It feels like how John Denver felt in Aspen. Like there’s air in the lungs and all is worthy of our praise or at least our kindest set of eyes. This includes ourselves. And yet, that air and that praise is spurring me on and bringing me here to the page where I was sure I would be too exhausted to do anything of worth. Maybe that’s true, but I’m here.
Oh, the beauty in the world.
I am wanting to go to the Shakespeare Festival this year. I’ve said this for ages, but I am longing for it. I am longing for the beautiful air and that outdoor stage and that wit so crisp and bright and like a dancing star. I want to go with some nice guy, but there’s a serious shortage of those about these days so I’ll have to go with one of the usual knuckleheads. I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream there as a child, as a guest of my father’s friends. I felt so grownup and giddy with the atmosphere and the play. It was a 50′s inspired version – Puck as the Fonz – this gorgeous sequence where a girl falls asleep to an old-fashioned radio on a porch swing opened the play and I was drunk on the tipple of it all. It was memorable in every way.
We’re talking about going to the renaissance festival tomorrow. This is traditional. I’m going to wear my dress and get my palm read or my cards read and not worry too much about the rest. I want certain experiences to be certain ways and when they’re not, I get kind of hatesy and bitchy and miserable and a few of these blog postings are reason enough for you to encourage me to stay mellow and just enjoy the cleavage and boys in tragically awkward leather harnesses traipsing across the faire grounds in 90 degree heat and mispronouncing privies. PRY-VEES, you say, m’lord?
It may be said that this is where I got the amber for my magical, eh, not so much?, necklace. Maybe it needs to go back home to be activated. But it was Baltic amber and frankly, I don’t got the airfare, magick necklace so commence with the love powers or GTFO.
Really, I think tonight in my exhaustion (I hung around to make a minor fool of myself at the city council meeting, but what else is new?), I’m feeling fairly good-natured about my situation on the whole.
There’s all these parties to look forward to throughout the summer, too. Galas, second proms, steampunk balls, picnics, barbecues, artist receptions. One where I need a glittering gold dress, in fact. It is a little bit exciting, isn’t it? Even if you’re an invisible girl, it is quite a social calendar to maintain. I’m focusing on the fact that I’ll be able to have whatever time I want to have at all of these things and I can dread them and hide or I can just go.
I can just go.
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Nervous breakdown for one, yes, please.
I don’t want to be here so let’s go somewhere else, okay? I said I was rusty, but some ways are too well-known, too much muscle memory to ever leave completely behind.
There’s lots of places I go when I’m in trouble like I am now. They’re not places with addresses or even much concrete floors and walls, but I know them and there’s shelter there. For a short time, but time enough, I’m not the tragic creature that I proclaim I am or the even worse creature I fear I am, I am the caretaker of a great and swelling nation. More than that, I am the keeper of a lore that thousands know and trust and believe in.
There is in this land, down a winding, almost British, slightly Victorian, partially French, little road in the middle of a teeming metropolis, a bookstore. This bookstore is not immediately obvious for the cavern it is, but the door is pushed open on a rainy day and visitors tumble inside, shaking their umbrellas and overcoats and some stomp shoes not fit for the unexpected precipitation. Their eyes widen slightly as they take it in. Rapturous waves of literature. The smell of freshly printed and yellowed and tea stained covers wafts through the ozone-charged air. A tea-kettle pipes in not so much a bright hello as a piece of a song picked up by the shuffling of paper, the delicate dings of porcelain cups tapping porcelain saucers. Just enough to pull the eye all the way around the perimeter, around the stacks, to a ladder, to the legs of Mlle. de Crevecoeur as she sets a slim volume of Thoreau’s Self-Reliance between The Prince and a collection of sonnets. It’s a warm feeling, calm, but not sedate. It’s an industrious ease that permeates the shop as much if not more than the dust itself. This is why you like the shop, not because there is no screaming promotional cardboard cutouts staring, no promotional tie-ins, no branding indelibly flashing into your retinas. But because there is a book here for you and you know it. And even if you have to spelunk to find it, or flirt shamelessly with Mlle. de Crevecoeur who favors anyone who compliments the quote of the day with a free cup of tea, it’ll be worth it. It’ll be the book that breaks the weather of your life with a strange, surreal oasis not unlike the store itself. You can find that book, take that tea, sit by the fireplace and between chapters and bites of warm biscuit, watch the other customers fall through the doorway, as drowned a rat as yourself. As needy, as hungry, as unassuming. With eyes that want to see something new and more than that, something true. You pick out books for your fellow customers. Naming them, telling their stories that their body language tells you in your head, mentally guiding the tall, thick, effortlessly muscular man with a face so inset looks more like the mold of a face than an actual human visage over to this Kurt Vonnegut book. The one that isn’t famous, but was so good you wondered why you never read more Vonnegut. The little girl who needed nothing more than to be read Angelina Ballerina. The inscrutably handsome man that you made up just for the joy of imagining him furtively glancing at you out of the corner of his eye while he makes notes on an investigator’s tablet.
This is a good place, you think. This is a good place to be while the world rains and floods all else away. There’s a hope here, and oh, I am loathe to leave it for a world so much less pliable. I hope to make it back soon.
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Oh, oh, oh.
This is the therapy I got. This is what I can afford.
I really wish I was two people. Then maybe some of my hours would be free of dread. Not such a hot day, really. And I have to get up early tomorrow to finish what I couldn’t finish tonight. I feel really exhausted and overwhelmed and when that’s the case, I make bad decisions. I totally pulled out in front of oncoming traffic. I told myself as I drove off all numbly, that this completely justified the ice cream I bought at the grocery store. This is my near-miss life. But sometimes, I hit dead on.
Maybe you don’t want to hear about that. I don’t know what to say in response to that because this is the story I have and if you want another story, you have to find a storyteller….or at least one a bit more in practice and a little bit less burned.
My necklace. I don’t have to tell you it broke last night. It was a little bit frightening in its immediacy. But, in the most positive and optimistic manner, I put it back together on another rope and I put it on this morning. We’ll continue to see. 24 hours with almost all of them trapped in an office isn’t really telling. I guess I was hoping for proof for my faith. For faith in a honey pill.
So, things of the day, things that you need to know – I’m not sure what they are. I worked. I went to the grocery store. I came home. I came to the page looking for a clue.
I’m trying to get well, stir up some courage for tomorrow so I don’t crumble again beneath the waves of responsibility. I’m trying to figure out what to do when I’m scrambling and what I’m doing is pulling me down harder.
I need to write.
Boy, I’m not feeling all that precious tonight. My hands hurt, the computer’s hot, and I’m watching Touched By An Angel on youtube. I like myself a lot better when I’m not cowering, but I expect that’s fairly universal. Apparently, as I’m learning from this show, most everything can be affected just by fixing the lighting. A warm glow and you stop questioning. I like its sweetness, though. I like imagining angels that are so keen to help, to help with every problem, every distress. Just being emotionally less than is a reason for them to call in the troops and soft light you back into correctness. Gauzily straightening in a breath everything you’ve allowed to corkscrew. Saying you’re blameless and good and have purpose and hope. Sometimes even a cynic wants to buy in. It’s a good short-term solution which is about the only solution I have to turn to right now.
Time, I think, to spend a little quality time with my friends and not just the voices in my head, my sarcasm and my defeatist attitudes. Right? Right.
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Whatever it is, the Great Plan has to have some groundrules to be followed. Otherwise, I don’t think I can be held to much account for following it. I’ve been trying to think about it today, loosely, because I know that the Great Plan is wildly disparate. It can mean everything and in so doing choke itself on its own tail. It can mean nothing and literally mean nothing.
I have this piece of amber that several years ago I invested something into. I invested in this pseudo-magical-kitchen-witchery-need-to-do-something piece of amber what little I knew about what I hoped for in terms of someone coming into my life. I don’t know what I believe in, but I think that there’s something in a person’s will, in their hopes, and in their fears that can become a kind of energy, a magic that can alter what does and doesn’t happen for them. I don’t mean The Craft, I just mean….I put enough into it that I couldn’t wear it as the necklace it was meant to be. I couldn’t even bring myself to put it on because of the possibility that it could work. That it could honestly bring me someone who could be kind, and funny, and liberal and true and like bad movies and be in the right spot in terms of overcoming all my massive insecurities and troubles and then, I’d be in the terrible fix of having no good reason to rebuff him.
This was an issue because of the after. The dangerous after. An after I had no clear visioning process for. An after that could leave me really messed up or an after that I could tramp through with my army boots and destroy even just by accident. Commitment issues, sure, why not. It felt like a forever that would impact everything. That if it was the answer to everything it would stop the search, stop the wanting, stop the status quo.
So, I have this piece of amber. It’s been through the washing machine. It’s been in an out of pockets and purses, under pillows, everywhere but around my neck – hanging there, announcing that I might have some hope, some want, some sincere desire. I’m thinking about wearing it now until I do. Or until he arrives.
I know there’s the basic argument that love arrives when you least expect it, when you’re out Great Planning something else. But I’ve been doing other things for as long as I can remember, with intermittent splashes of maybe! and a boatload of depressingly unacceptable even to someone with no real standards to speak of, and nothing obvious has ever snuck into my ken.
So, one piece of the Great Plan, might be this. Wearing this necklace for whatever it means or doesn’t mean, whatever it brings or doesn’t, because I’m trying to let down these Great Walls. I had a whole Great Barrier Reef joke that didn’t quite work. But, I hope you get some of this drift.
It’s the color and shape of a honey tear.
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