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.
Longest Day
July 8, 2009 at 5:47 am (diary) (carrying on, hope, prose, writing)
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.
Pop Can in the Freezer
July 7, 2009 at 4:09 am (diary) (carrying on, hope, irritation, love, magic, real life, whining, work, writing)
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.
Ignis Fatuus
July 1, 2009 at 4:26 am (diary) (boys, carrying on, college, love, poems, poetry, real life, writing)
Sounds almost like an insult, doesn’t it?
Doesn’t sound like the best description for my heart I’ve yet found. Doesn’t sound like the place I go when you wonder if I’m listening to you and have your strong suspicions that I’m not. Doesn’t feel like a glow should sound.
I’m much less cohesive in purpose tonight than I’d like. Too bad, I guess. Today was interesting. The man in the hospice who apparently has been as near to the light as a moth drawn to a candle’s flame, been there as many times as he can without burning his antennae. I suppose my waxing poetic about it must have given him the ironic courage to carry on, as though hope and miracles can be gained by sheer force of will. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. I get to tell people not to expect them to return calls in a timely manner what with the dying and all. Everyone has a role, if not in the coming, then in the going of someone else.
Apropos of nothing, I’ve found my new favorite thing: the tactful kissoff. We’ll have to see how it’s regarded, but it is delightful not to have emotional millstones and albatrosses adorning my neck, or at least not this specific one. That specificity is the key. It’s funny how staid and dull and laborious faking people out can get. I get a thrill with being direct nowadays, with giving it to you straight. With telling you that you can’t get me off with a crowbar and a tractor beam. With never taking my gloves off in the act.
I was reading my college poetry book. My professor thought my writing was great, that I should pursue poetry, pursue my MFA – neither of which has happened much (I suppose this is a blog or twenty in itself) – but he wrote that he didn’t always like everything I wrote. Hmm. Still don’t know what that means. Probably he saw the same insubstantial quality of my thoughts, the way I could make silk purses out of sow’s ears, but had to fake authority. That I wrote about writing, withdrawing, relationships of coincidence and not connection, there was always this psychic distance. Perhaps this is why I’m trying now to honor the experiential at the moment, the truth.
Truth: I remember being wildly in love with him for a period back then, before, of course the semester was over for break and I found some other altar to worship at. I remember thinking he was quite appropriately tormented, perfectly clever, and absolutely lonesome. I wrote poems about…well, it’s hard to describe. It was vaguely steampunk before I knew what steampunk was. Succor and a tormented man and airship captaincy may have been themes. I have never failed to be ridiculous in my methods of lust. Venus in Sagittarius allows for this.
I remember picking the wrong poet for our little poet review – wrong in that Linda Pastan was not a poet’s poet. She is a mother. Who had to break through years of silence and drudgery and not knowing her drive to write in order to find her identity as poet. And she writes plainly, emotionally, without fifteen meanings to parse in between her lines. She wasn’t this modern, scattershot, laser-eye, cut-your-gut powerhouse poet he seemed to be and love. She told her tale with the flourishes her heart felt and not to tug at your head. I like many poets more than her, but I like few poems more than her Deathwatch Beetle which was why I picked her. I remember this professor dismissing her and somehow, me with her. As if we were from the same mold of simple, fine, pine furniture poets. Built with a grip on the fundamentals, a concept of art, but nobody’s putting us in the Louvre.
You can let so much go when there’s no pressure to find the thing inside you worthy of a gallery. Maybe I just wanted to be fawned over. I wanted to be lifted up on a pedestal for this one thing, this one gift of wordplay and an ear for euphony, this one reason that justified everything that came before. And like my mother before me, it’s not my life now, my little talent oxidizes like a farm implement left in the field. It has trouble fitting in now. And you wouldn’t have heard of either of us, my professor or me, but I might have been happier for having written. Happier than some of the days I’ve been through lately.
That’s one reason I’m here.
And I haven’t even told you about the waldorf salad and my lovely mother nd the pond and walking and everything else. You should really fall in love with me and then I’d feel obligated to catch you up.
