Summer’s Eve
July 17, 2009 at 5:43 am (diary) (appreciation, carrying on, facebook, high school, nice guys, nostalgia, prose, random, real life, sensibility, the great plan)
First, we attempt the bath.
Yay, baths, I suspect there’s nothing better on a hot night than a lukewarm bath with a clever picture book. Well. I’m sure there are better things, but darlings, that is what I had and I didn’t mind it at all.
Putting music on my mother’s Ipod. Trying to pick things that are cheerful and bright, but not abrasive for her to listen to while she’s studying her genealogy. This is very strange to me, because it makes her sound so human. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t think my mother was human, it’s just odd to see her dig things and want to do things. She’s…something’s mellowed in her and something’s gotten into her head where it doesn’t all feel like such a big fucking deal that has to be controlled and wow, it occurs to me that maybe what she’s given up I’ve taken up like some kind of torch of martyrdom that nobody ever asks for, but the hell if you’re going to to be the one to let it go out. At any rate, we’re sidestepping the Liz Phair for mother.
We are going to Much Ado About Nothing. I am quite delighted. Shakespeare outside, in the free air. I plan to get a bit slippy and praise our beloved, problematic, sisterless except in the soul, Mr. Shakespeare. He must be all in wonderment that here we all still are, finding meat on his folio of carcasses. That’s later this month, though. It provides a decent something to look forward to when I’m foggy and wanting a good rope and a long nap instead of the strength to soldier on.
I should really start this earlier. I only get half way into it and then I feel really tired and ready for bed and I start to get very choppy in my thoughts and sentences. I start doing things for laughs that under other circumstances, I would try and be more circumspect and restrain. I start getting mushy and nostalgic in a creepy, Rose for Emily sort of way. I start yearning for sepulchres and reliquaries. An old friend from high school said hi on facebook. It’s weird to consider how you used to consider friendships and levels of friendships back then and what was acceptable given the social castes involved and now it’s just Hey. Hey. How are you? Great, fine. How’ve you been? Wow, wonderful. Been a long time. Yeah.
There’s just this collective befuddlement that the world’s somehow sustained us all for the most part. Even more bizarre is that he’s married. This is a gangly kid I used to know who never talked to anyone. Knew since elementary school. For fuck’s sake.
I know what this is. This wavering in my stomach. This is the quarter-life crisis, the storm that’s coming and I am suddenly, to quote a wise sage, smack in the middle of it. I’ve been solving it so far by drinking hard lemonade, buying pink vibrators, going to concerts and Shakespeare and sobbing over how hard my work is and traipsing hither and thither as I dodge bullets and creepiness of all orders and manners of being.
I don’t know if it’s working, but this is what I have. And tonight, I don’t mind it much.
Lettuce
July 14, 2009 at 3:07 am (diary) (anxiety, carrying on, hope, love, random, waxing poetic, writing)
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.
