Life on earth and other accidents

DEPARTURE

2011-04-04T10:10:00.007-03:00

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go." -Tennessee Williams

My doors remained open years after you left. Friends and lovers. In the doorway, a logjam of stories and memories of stories.

The grandmothers in calico weeping for joy, a hermit uncle who died in the woods, a young boy fleeing Cuba, how mean the streets of St. Louis were to a country boy.

“What color are your socks? What's in your fridge?" I was fracturing into insanity. Your writing exercises glued me back together. You stayed long after most would have left.

“You’re my best friend, didn’t you know that?” I can still see your expression, a little hurt, stunned that I didn't know. I thought then it would always be so...

There, in one corner, your heart beats underneath my hand, sunlight spills over the bed. It's all I ever needed.

There you are, marveling that I came “all the way from somewhere to nowhere” to see you. As if I could have stayed away.

Flotsam and jetsam. The spillover keeps me here, awash in love that no longer has a place to be.

I have tried everything.

I have tried to blast you out…called up tornadoes, brewed hurricanes but it only stirs up more. Fragments fly out of corners and off window ledges....

Look. You are all gone now.

I will give each one of you, each story and each memory of a story its own bubble. Each bubble will float away, burst open and spill out glittering in the sun, dissolve in air. This is how I picture it.

Letting you go.

Whistling past Christmas Past

2010-12-21T11:27:00.003-04:00

Maybe your family will never be fit-for-prime-time or perhaps you've lost someone dear. It could be you've been laid off or diagnosed with an illness. You might be struggling with poverty, addiction or painful memories of Christmas past. For those of you who find Christmas difficult, I'm reposting an entry from several years back. I know how you feel.
Don't let the general merriment - and your lack of it - get you down. I'm thinking of you.
******

Let’s say her name is Adrianna. She’s wearing beige jeans and a thick patterned sweater, underneath a jacket. A natural blonde and even taller than me, she’s formidable and impressive looking, in a Celtic sort of way.

I’m sitting on the wooden bench outside the college’s metal shop. I’m shivering in the cold and smoking when she wanders over, hesitates a minute, and then sits at the other end of the bench and lights her own cigarette.

“Well,” she says, exhaling smoke and giving me a sideways glance, “I suppose I’d better be happy, seeing this is a happiness zone.” Her tone is ironic. Someone has stuck a neat, typed label to that effect on the back of the bench, and she tells me one of her friends pointed it out to her when she sat there last week. “I had the flu and I was burnt right out, and I hate this time of year. Right. The happiness zone.”

She’s a student, of course. I’ve seen her around. We’ve smiled or talked once or twice. But we don’t know each other.

I say that everybody’s burnt out right now. Tired, trying to finish studio work and study for exams. But it’s the remark about the season that grabs my attention.

There’s a comfortable silence for a minute and I tell her, “I hate this time of year too. And what’s worse is, one year someone gave me a Grinch head on a stick, and I felt like, fuck you, go ahead, knock yourself out, just stop making it mandatory for me to join you.” She nods agreement.

We smoke our cigarettes for a minute and then I turn to look at her. “I’m not asking what or anything, but is there a reason – I mean is there an emotional trigger or a memory that makes this a bad time for you?” There is for me, and I’m curious whether it’s true of most people who find Christmas a struggle.

She thinks for a minute. “I grew up poor,” she says, “I mean, people around here mostly can’t relate to what I mean when I say ‘poor.’ A lot of the winter, we ate potatoes and salt fish and game because there was nothing else.” She hunches forward.

“My mom is fifty…she’s an artist and she just went back to school and she’s trying to raise two teenage boys and she hasn’t got any money. I used to be better at it when I was young. You know, I pretended better.” She mimes opening a present. “Oh! Slippers! Thank you! I’d be able to put on the surprised, pleased look as if it was the big present. As I got older I didn’t do so well.” She sighs. “I invested a lot of energy in being negative about Christmas. I’m trying to stop.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“But you know,” she continues, “a couple years ago was a good Christmas. When I went home for the holidays, my mom said, ‘I have to make a decision. I have $200.00. Should I put oil in the tank, or spend it on food for Christmas?’ I thought about it and I told her, ‘buy food.’ So she put $50.00 into the tank and we bought a bottle of Rum and cooking supplies.

We sat in the kitchen all day, drinking rum and cooking, with the oven going, heating the house up.” She’s smiling now. “And the next morning – my mom’s room is in the attic, so there’s no insulation. It’s so cold I’m sleeping with a hat on – we wake up and she says, ‘Are you okay, dear?’ and I say, ‘I’m just fine,’ and I can see my breath as I answer her. But it was good, laying there under the covers, talking. And there was no drunk there to spoil it. My brothers got ski-jackets – the really good kind - and all day, they ran around saying they couldn’t notice the cold because the jackets were so warm. It was a good Christmas.”

She tells me her mom is studying to be a therapist. I’m not familiar with the type of therapy, so she explains that it has to do with integrating the different personalities we have. “They use affirmations,” she tells me. “I’m not altogether on side about my mother’s therapy.” Wry grin. “But sometimes I use them and maybe they help. How they do it is, I’d say, I am an intelligent woman. She is an intelligent woman. And then you look in the mirror and say, You are an intelligent woman.” I nod.

“I think most types of therapy help people, some of the time.” It’s vague and noncommittal, but as close as I can come to what I really think. She seems to understand me.

“So,” she says, with a big grin, as we get up to go inside, “I am not a nasty, cynical Christmas hater. She is not a nasty, cynical Christmas hater. You are not a nasty cynical Christmas hater.” We both start to laugh.

“What’s your name?”

“Adrianna.” She adds, pointedly, as if she’s a little insulted that I don’t know, “I’ve been here for several years.”

“Linda.” I reach to shake her hand and look in her eyes, “Yeah. But we’ve never really met.”

I am not a nasty, cynical Christmas hater, I think to myself as I head into the office grinning hugely. She is not…

What will you be doing when you're 80?

2010-10-14T09:22:00.014-03:00

"The degree of Civilization in a society can be judged by entering the prisons"

-Fyodor dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

As far as staying young goes, there is no surgical procedure, no vitamin, diet or exercise program that can beat passionate involvement doing something you love. Jim Chapman is heading for his 81st birthday. He's retired, which in Jim's case, means he only works 16 days sometimes.

Jim works with and for prisoners and ex-prisoners (or as he calls the latter, "newly returned citizens). An introduction to a book he's writing compares the situation of a newly released person with that of an Untouchable in India. Finding housing and a job, for an ex-convict is not just daunting - it approaches impossibility.

When someone has served their time and wants nothing more than to rejoin society and never see the inside of a prison again, they face employer policies, laws, rules, restrictions and societal attitudes that nearly guarantee that they have no access to shelter or work. Think of it: In the USA, as of January 2010, there were 1,404,053 people under the jurisdiction of state prison authorities. Most of these people serve their sentences and are released, so what does it mean (to them and to the rest of society) if they can't find shelter and have no means to make a living? What "degree of civilization" is implied by the fact that once a sentence is served, a person is punished by having the very means of survival pushed out of their reach?

Jim is one of those people you won't see on the news. One of the many people who don't talk about what's wrong - but stand up and do what they can:

P.O.E.T. SNARES ATTORNEY TO HELP RETURNING CITIZENS COMMUNICATE BETTER
By Chinta Strausberg

If you’re late for one of attorney James P. Chapman’s classes, you may think you’ve walked into a movie shoot because it is a reality check for returning citizens who may not know how to sell themselves to prospective employers.

Since 1954, Chapman was a trial and Appellate lawyer, and he has had a burning passion to help returning citizens for decades. But his real joy is working in the communities with men and women in prison and those who are coming from prison. When asked why bother with returning citizens and those incarcerated, he said: “I don’t know. “All I know is that if there is a higher power…if there is an angel, it touched me…. It is the most fulfilling thing I’ve every done and I can’t tell you why,” Chapman said.

When I walked into his classroom, sponsored by the Cook County President’s Office of Employment and Training (P.O.E.T.) that is held each Friday from 10:30 a.m. to noon in Room 2260 of the 69 West Washington building, Chapman was directing two students engaged in a personnel role-playing skit.

One student pretended to be a would-be employer at a Target store looking for an inventory control clerk the other was the applicant. When the “employer” asked if the applicant had ever been arrested, the jock job seeker quipped, “Yes, for racketeering.” Chapman cringed at his answer and grabbing his hair warned the students: “You never tell a prospective employer that you were once arrested for racketeering” which he said could mean he was once involved in an act or threat of murder, kidnapping, arson, robbery extortion, drugs, embezzlement and the list goes on. In the participant’s case, it turned out he had custody of his child and was trying to make the mother pay him for child support. Technically, his actions amounted to racketeering but Chapman taught them how to explain these acts in a softer and more acceptable way. Myron Colvin, communications manager for P.O.E.T., played the role of a prospective employer with a volunteer from the class. The role-playing continued under the watchful eye of Chapman. “Some words are too harsh,” he warned.

Chapman teaches a course entitled: “Life Transformation Through Communication” which is based on an interactive program where the participants speak, act and talk while learning the dynamics of effective communication. However, it is more than just speaking or writing. “It’s how you enroll people in what you want…to touch, move and inspire people,” said Chapman. “Communications is much more than one of understanding your audience. It’s also how you speak differently to different audiences,” he explained.

Chapman said those returning from prison often are prevented from getting meaningful employment. “The attitudes of the public of potential employers are so negative based on false publicity, a kind of hysteria about dealing with ex-prisoners particularly those convicted of crimes of violence that barriers are set up to meaningful employment.” Part of the course, he explained, is dealing with those issues and how you can convince a prospective employer that even though they have been in prison they are now a changed person, prepared to work hard and will be an honest and good employee. “This is very challenging,” Chapman admitted.

For the past five-years, Chapman has taught this course at the Stateville Correctional Center (located in Crest Hill, Illinois) he described as a “serious, old maximum security prison where people are doing very long sentences.” There, he teaches 25 men once a week. “Even people in prison who are doing long sentences begin to learn how it is to have a more meaningful way of talking with other men in prison, with their families with people they are trying to get help from in the community,” he said....

***

Personally, I'd be thrilled to find something half as meaningful to do with the rest of my life. And when the roll call of daily evils is delivered on the evening news, I like to think about James Chapman and all the people like him who are, against staggering odds, working to change things.

GOOD REASONS FOR BAD TASTE

2010-10-11T14:37:00.003-03:00

Picture this: a poster showing a skinny, mean-looking cat glaring over its shoulder with the caption,

“I’m out of estrogen and I have a handgun. Any questions?”

It cracked me up when I saw it years ago. In the same spirit, I laughed at the quote below, which I copied and pasted from a friend’s FaceBook page onto my page.

“"Studies show that if a woman is menstruating or menopausal, she tends to be more attracted to a man with duct tape over his mouth, a spear lodged in his chest, with a bat up his ass, while he is on fire."

I laughed. A lot of women laughed. And one lone man commented, “Wow. Chilling.”

Then I began to think it over. It’s harsh. It is chilling. I began to wonder why I thought it was okay to post it. Why we women found such a brutal joke funny. And then it occurred to me - men have been putting us down with comments about our screwy hormones for years. Any time a woman is irrational or angry or emotional, she runs the risk of being asked if it’s her time of the month. And of course, sometimes it is. But sometimes we have good solid cause and it’s damned insulting when someone hints that you’re dealing with a bout of temporary insanity.

I wanted for a minute or so to explain this to the man who commented. I would have said, “You notice this is not really about men. It’s about how we feel sometimes and it's exaggerated for effect. There’s no direct slur here.”

I thought about what author Eckhart Tolle calls, “The Pain Body.”

If you’ve ever investigated complimentary healing practices of any kind, you know that energy is only invisible to the human eye. Other than that, it’s as real as the keyboard I’m typing on. It can even be photographed using Kirlian photography…colors and light surrounding every inch of us and extending outward.

Even the most skeptical of us can understand that energy is felt. You get it if you've ever been in a meeting where one person is really angry and found yourself getting tense and upset too, even when nothing about that person’s mood is personal to you. You get it if you've seen how your mood can even out when you’re around someone who is centered and happy - or you've come home from a boisterous social event feeling like you need to retreat quietly in a nice dark closet and let the rattling in your head subside.

We may not touch someone else or talk to them – but that does not stop an energy connection, for better or worse.

Tolle claims that as well as having pain bodies we’ve grown from our personal hurts, group pain bodies are passed down, generation to generation, too. For example, races and religious groups who have been oppressed have a shared pain body. Women, after generations of patriarchy, have a shared pain body. That is why such a cutting joke is funny. Darkness buried, is darkness festering. A joke, even a very sharp-edged joke with a graveyard underside can alleviate the festering.

Laurence Fishburne said, in an interview on The Actors Studio, that he once acted in a theater troupe called, “Kill Whitey.” It’s rage toppled on its side and turned into a joke.

Is it politically correct? No. Is there enormous pain underneath? Yes. But these kind of jokes, the incorrect, visceral and dark are escape valves. I winced when I heard Fishburne say that.

But then I laughed.

Keeper of the day

2010-08-17T21:32:00.003-03:00

I'm sitting in the courtyard on Granville and hail my friend as he drifts by today. "How's married life?" I get to ask this because it's his turn to get hammered with that inane question and I'm not letting him off the hook.

"About the same as single life." He and his girlfriend have been together for a few years now. We talk a bit about the wedding and then bitch about work until his ever-present cell phone rings. He picks up and I pantomime that I'm late and have to go back inside and as leave, I catch, "I'm not sure if I'll be there then, I have to pick my son up..."
Before it was "My girlfriend's son" or the boy's name. Now it's "my son."
Suddenly I'm tearing up and there's a lump in my throat.

My friend had a good father.

That's all. Except - here's to good men and good fathers - and their sons, who become good fathers too.

The Hermit

2010-07-30T11:53:00.006-03:00

Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I'm a bit of a loner. More socially active people sometimes read this behavior as negative, sad - It must be lonely or mean I don't care for people much. And that isn't so.

Some of us just need to go to the mountain on a regular basis. Some of us need to leave the clatter and incessant buzzing of the world behind in order to think clearly, to stay grounded. I'm introspective by nature and need time and quiet to hear my own thoughts. Stuff my schedule with too much face time and I begin to feel like a pinball careening wildly out of control.

When my time is my own, it's not unusual for me to have a three or four day run when I don't hear a human voice. The quiet outside seeps inside. It leaves room for whatever the universe wants to toss my way.

This morning on Granville Street, it tosses me a present.

I spot Charley in his usual spot outside the Split Crow Pub. Short and sturdy as a fire-plug, a hard history imprinted in the lines in his face, Charley is one of my morning beacons. His presence lends a kind of reassuring certainty to my day. He and I have been smiling good morning at each other forever but we've never spoken. For some reason, today, I break the routine.

"Mornin,'Charley! Let's hope this fog breaks, huh?" Charley grins and nods.
"Yep. Kinda damp, ain't it."

We stand side by side, smoking our cigarettes in companionable silence and then Charley asks,

"Do you like to read?"
"Why yes. I read all the time."

Charley fishes a crumpled photocopied pamphlet out of his pocket. I wonder, before I open it, if maybe Charley is born again and I happen to look like I need saving.

"It's my wife's," he explains, "she made about a thousand of 'em."

I open and read. It's poetry, painfully, clumsily rhymed. But the first one is for Charley. It begins:

This is the man I love
Who is above
All the rest of the men I had in my life
For this I am proud to say I am his wife

"Sounds like you have a happy marriage. This is nice, what she wrote for you." Charley beams.

"Yep. Nine years," Her first husband, he beat her something awful." I let that sink in.

"Well," I say, "maybe the only good thing to come from being with a bad man is that you appreciate a good one a hundred times more..." Charley nods and his expression brightens.

"We comin' up on ten years in the fall," he tells me, "I got her a surprise she never going to expect."

"Okay, now you have to tell!"

"I got her a $14,000 diamond ring." He beams. He looks like he's still shocked at his own extravagance. I gape at him, suitably gob-smacked. That could be half a year's pay or thereabouts.

"Well, Charley - you have to show me the poem she writes after that anniversary."

With that, I admit I'm late for work and we both head off to our respective jobs.

Hours later, I'm still hugging the memory. It's not about the quantity of contact. It's all about the quality.

Who could be lonely with gifts like that?

The Ruby Dee Prayer

2010-07-22T12:19:00.003-03:00

I wake up this morning feeling like I am made of badly-cobbled spare parts. It is the kind of morning that metaphorically misses a step on the staircase and flails gracelessly to regain balance. The kind of morning when unremembered dreams have clung to the edges of consciousness just out of the grasp of recall.

it's as if I had swallowed gravel along with my morning cereal...as if emotions had lodged in my stomach, undigestable, a little gritty and sharp around the edges.

I try to reason it out. The first thing that comes to mind is that I was one of many who disappointed a new Native American friend by remaining silent when she commented on a recent injustice. Even though my subsequent apology is graciously accepted, my mind can't let it go. I keep thinking, "All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." Or good women. Doing nothing, facing nothing, is the great sin, in my estimation, of the middle class. Figuring all of it is someone else's problem is a universal form of denial. To watch the news, to read the newspaper is to drown in bad news. It's overwhelming.

So what do we do? We good men and women who are disturbed and saddened by injustice, racism, pollution, war? What do we do when we realize that just meditating on all of it, just holding positive thoughts is not enough. What do we do when we see, at the same time, angry measures create stronger polarities that drown the voice of reason and erase all hope of cooperation?

In a time of escalating tumult and chaos, from the economic to the environmental to political - what is the responsibility of "good" men and women? It's our world. And the scary thought occurs to me that if we don't participate in change, we deserve the lack of change we get.

So, when an opportunity arises to speak or act - next time I'll stand and be counted.

And I'll accept the gravelly discomfort of this morning with gratitude. It's an answer to the Ruby Dee prayer: "God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear."

Nosorry

2010-01-15T15:00:00.006-04:00

We walk by him twice. First, going to lunch at the Carleton House and then coming back.
"Spare change?"
He's tall and achingly thin, with a scruffy beard and beat out clothes.
Krista says, "I'm sorry, I have nothing."
I say, barely looking, "nosorry."

Later, when I run out to pick up coffee at Sam's Macchiato, I pass him again, and he asks again.
"nosorry," I say. But a foot or two later, it bothers me. How the two words have grown into one, and how I don't even look.

"Wait." I fumble in my purse and pull out a one and two dollar coin.
"Thanks," he says. His smile is genuine and a little shy. "You know, I was schizophrenic all my life," he tells me, "and I've got new meds now. I used to think people were talking about me all the time. And now that's gone away."

He sighs happily, "Reality," he says, "is so much quieter and easier."

"I'm so glad for you." I look into his eyes and smile and speak the words one at a time.

The door

2009-11-27T11:09:00.004-04:00

White sky and rain, day three. An hour ago, I threw on Capri's and a linen shirt, yanked my hair into the habitual ponytail, washed my face and scrubbed the green and blue ink off my fingers. Earlier, I was in my ancient navy housecoat, molding inked and gold-leafed polymer clay into a cover for a screw clasp and generally making a cheery mess in my studio.

Energy. Mine comes and goes like something connected with faulty wires. I never seem to know when it will connect. Today it's working and as usual, I'm a little frantic trying to do everything I've left undone - last night's dishes, the shopping list, the everlasting tidying of the coffee table, finishing a necklace I've worked on for days. Oh yes, and taking photos of the necklace too.

I've had words with my significant other. It's left me with an uncertain heart, a question mark. Stasis again. A void. He is incommunicado, thinking things over.

And during this silence, months since I've heard from either of them, my ex-husband and ex-lover call contact me.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a random happening were I a person who believed the universe to be random. As it is, I wonder if I'm being reminded that people come and people go as if my life was a slowly revolving door. And that for all my trying to jam a foot in that ponderously, relentlessly turning door, I don't even slow it for a second.

The universe regularly announces,"You are not in control." Control-freak that I am, I nod acknowledgment and go right on battling that door.

Today though, I'm just going to run with the energy. Step away from the door entirely.

As my ex-husband said, "You just get to the point where you realize you do okay on your own."

That's enough truth to do me for today.

With dream comfort memory to spare

2009-06-16T13:13:00.002-03:00

I envy writers who can summon the memory of every item in their childhood bedroom and the names of each child in their fourth grade class. My own memory is more like badly spliced 35 mm film stored in acid cardboard and run through X-Ray machines. Bumpy, faded, streaky, erased entirely in places.

I don’t recall dates or names with much clarity but my emotional and sensory selves have a kind of substitute for memory. I can’t tell you when I was married or divorced but I can recite most of “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” because it seared my soul when I read it.

And there’s music. Offhand, I don’t know what year I lived in New York on the streets of the Village, one of thousands of runaway kids. But I can recall with perfect clarity that “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel was piping out of the speakers at an Orange Julius one night when I felt particularly lonely…. I can date times of my life by music. I was 17 then.

Forward on the rickety tape of memory to deep summer in Sudbury, Ontario. I am lounging happily in a downtown park with two musician friends. They mention Buffalo Springfield but somehow, I’ve missed that part of Neil Young’s career and have never heard “Cinnamon Girl.” Rick and Digger, who are sprawled on the grass, shift into sitting position and softly sing the entire song to me. Deeply emotional, vividly intimate to be sung to. That is my first Neil Young moment.

A year or so later, a Sunday in January - I am vulnerable, cocooned inside myself. I’m walking to karate practice, getting on with life pretty much on auto-pilot. The sky is a clear pale blue and the snow glitters with light. January steals my breath, freezes it in my lungs. . My steps, the only sound at all, crunch thunderously on the snow as I plod along.

The dojo sits alone at the top of a hill and on the other side of the road is an open field, with an equipment shack in the center. I am 50 feet from my destination when loudspeakers in the shack turn on and Neil Young’s voice floods into the cold stillness,

“There is a town in north Ontario/With dream comfort memory to spare, And in my mind/I still need a place to go/All my changes were there…”

Until the song plays to the last word and note, I stand transfixed, listening, looking up at the vast sky, heart pounding.

To this day, I cannot hear Neil Young’s “Helpless” without a chill running up my spine. And if I am in a public place, I try not to weep.

Total recall. But only of the parts of life that mattered most.

The Phoenix

2009-06-11T19:36:00.003-03:00

The girl with the turquoise hair and face jewelry squeezes into the seat beside me. She’s wearing black steel-toed boots and an over-sized camouflage raincoat.

“Sorry about the coat,” she says. She sniffs and wrinkles her nose.“I just got it and it smells funny. It’s a really good one though. Got a beak on the hood and everything.” It's pouring outside. I assure her that there's only a faint rubbery smell.

She has fine, perfect features and astonishing green eyes fringed with dark lashes.

The whole ride home, in a voice so soft and even I’m straining to hear, she talks to me.

Native father, white mother. The father gone, the mother a suicide only a year after she, the girl with green eyes, survived a fire that burned her out of her home. Life on the street, abuse, beatings, tragedy running back generations, “youth jail,” and finally, her love, her daughter, Amber. Baby’s daddy didn’t want her – didn’t want a kid with a part-white, part-native girl. The grandmother has her now but the girl goes to see her every chance she gets.

She’s in a program and going to school in September to become a counselor. And maybe after a while, she thinks, she’ll go for a degree in psychology. She wants to help people. “These,” she gestures at her lip and nose rings, come out.”

“Do you know about the Ark?” she asks next. I do.

“I want to start a place like that, only where kids can stay over. They don’t have money for that, the Ark.”

“The smell…” She’s sniffing the sleeve of her raincoat and rubbing her arm. “I’ll have to wash as soon as I get home. You’d think they’d make sure this stuff is clean. And it’s not my boots, either. I wash all the time. I take care of my skin – and I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t know why I have these dark circles under my eyes.”

She asks how old I think she is.
I study her, glad for the chance to look directly at that stunning face and those lovely eyes.

“Twenty-three, twenty-four.”

“Thank you,” she says, “I’m twenty-seven and somebody guessed thirty-five. Thirty-five!”

I smile. Oh. The tragedy. Thirty-five.

“You won’t look much different when you’re thirty-five.”

"I feel so old sometimes. Real old."

"You've had a tough life."

She switches topics and tells me about her mother. We jump from there to possible new colors for her hair. She comes back to the course she'll be taking at school and then tells me about the babies she couldn’t save from the fire and the little boy she did save. Her eyebrows burned off and her eyelashes and her lungs were burned for months. At first, she couldn’t remember much, but it’s coming back in bits and pieces now. “It was in Truro, six years ago. It was in all the papers. You might have seen it.”

She rubs at her wrist and arm. “See these?” She pulls up her sleeve. There are burn scars the size of dimes and quarters splattered along her wrist. “They go right up my arm…from the fire.”
The rest of the scars, the ones hiding behind the perfectly clear green eyes, go right into her bones, I figure. The tics and apologies are a song of sorrow and self-loathing.

I tell her, “You heal well. You have good skin. I’d never have noticed them if you hadn’t told me they were there.” She smiles a little.

“I don’t mean to sound….you know…all poor me.”

“Like I said, you've had a tough life, a lot of sadness.”

She sits up straight and smiles. “I’m strong for it, though,” she says.

She seems to know that I am genuinely listening and although I don’t know if some or all or none of it is true, I am not a stranger and it doesn’t matter.

When I get home I recall the quiet flow of her voice, how it’s a lullaby in which the wind always blows and down baby comes, cradle and all. A lullaby... and a litany that tells her she survived. She is some kind of wonder, by God, right there on the number twenty bus. A lovely, green-eyed Phoenix still not quite out of the fire, but trying. Trying.

Sleeping and waking

2009-01-18T15:53:00.001-04:00

Fine, thanks. That is, for months now, calm and creatively engaged. There are periods of unrelenting cheeriness. And were it not for the dreaming thing, I’d have to say that life was heading in a distinctly upward direction.

Waking, I shake off dreams of being enrolled in a university class and trying to explain that I’ve lost my purse to the professor, who simply keeps assuring me with enormous heartiness that I’ll do fine, just fine in the class – look, I’ve already made friends, apparently. It’s as if I’m speak in Farsi.

I search for my purse in a cloakroom festooned with coats and red purses. My purse is black. And I know that somehow, at lunch, I ended up on a slippery, snow-covered red plastic bridge only 3 feet wide. I look down at the far-below traffic and realize that I have no idea how I got there, and that I’m in danger. I shinny down on my stomach, gripping the edge. And now? I leave the classroom and set out to find the purse…my ID, my money…but I’m standing on a hilltop in what seems to be San Francisco. It’s cold and snowing and I don’t know the city. I can’t remember how to retrace my steps and I’m desperate.

Or I’m about to sing at a concert with a Very Famous Person. I have complete confidence in my ability to sing, only I can’t remember a single song or lyric.

I am lost or don’t know how I got there or missing some crucial piece of the puzzle…struggling to keep the ground under my feet, some control over my life, some sense (for God’s sake) of knowing what is next.

But I don’t. Know.

I think most of us embrace the illusion that there is an AHA moment coming in our lives…an age, a stage, when we begin to understand. When life becomes easier, or at least or resistance to the tide diminishes and we can flow. Certainly, speaking for myself, I hadn’t expected to be approaching 61 with the feeling that my biggest question is “what the….?”

So I’ve booked an appointment with an excellent astrologer. Recently, he suffered a devastating stroke and lost just about everything but (and I quote) his mind and consciousness. I told him what my big question is. And he still took the appointment.

I’ll let you know…

Linda is...

2008-12-04T14:20:00.001-04:00

thinking in images again.

Mom comes home circle dance and rug flop

2008-08-26T18:48:00.002-03:00

Blithering Friday

2008-08-22T12:06:00.002-03:00

I am sitting on my wobbly green steno chair which is currently inside a wobbly box-like structure made up of a desk stacked with file folders, book carts and books. The walls of my box are in one or another stage of processing for course reserves…coming down from summer term, going up for fall term. Someday. When the system is online again.

“The system” is our name for the software from hell which, on a more-or-less regular basis, screws us all by failing to operate or requiring extensive downgrades (referred to as “upgrades”) that make simple tasks impossibly complex. For example: I need to hammer a nail. For this, the system provides me with an approximation of the space shuttle. It can defy gravity and vacuums. It will orbit distant planets and record scientific data. What it will not do is hammer a bloody nail.

Outside my box, where I am not working as my workload piles, my student assistant is slumped at the circulation desk. Her eyes are not quite open and her mouth is not quite closed. You could be forgiven for thinking she has smoked a nice fat joint before arriving at work, but she’s stoned on Neo Citron. Stand there a minute and she’ll snuffle for you. I have a sneaking suspicion that the same virus partying in her respiratory system is about to host a fiesta in mine. I’m pretending to myself that it’s only…

that just as I drifted off to sleep, the muscles in the arch of my left foot went into spasm. I tried, oh-god-i-tried, to relax the cramp without getting up, without fully waking up. And I was rewarded for my efforts by an additional cramp starting on the top of my foot. Nothing to do but get up, walk it out, drink water, wait, walk etc.

Fine. Okay. Back to bed. Only to wake twice for trips to the bathroom…stumbling out of bed still half-in, half-out of a series of hideous dreams. Nothing I clearly remember…except one detail I repeated aloud to myself. I said, “artist holocaust.” Miles of dead artist bodies. Thank you, subconscious, for the memories.

At 5:10 a.m., Cat was possessed by the devil. Instead of his habitual early morning activity (dozing beside me, taking up more than his half of the bed) he launched a running leap from a few feet off and galloped violently across my back and shoulders, howling.

I sit in my box. Eyes not quite open, mouth not quite closed. Praying for 4:00 p.m. to come.

A mind undarkening

2008-08-07T21:43:00.002-03:00

I always called Ben, “D.” In my last letter, I told him it stood for “darlin’.” “Darlin’” is my name for people towards whom I feel a rare maternal impulse.

Now and then, while he was online with the blog, before his arrest, we exchanged emails, me pleading with to him to believe he was more than the hallucinations, loneliness, anger and dark fantasies, him assuring me in turn, in his matter-of-fact way, (and in exasperation at my thickness I think) that really he was crazy, totally around the proverbial bend, hopeless. I would write back agreeing with the crazy part. But I was never afraid of Ben. And even when Darkmind was at his darkest, I couldn’t forget his self-honesty, his intelligence, his insight and the compassion he claimed not to feel. The curse and the blessing of Venus in Pisces is that, although you see who people are, you hone in on their possibilities. I’m not sorry to have done that.

And now it’s time to update for those of you who might have read him. I guess it was worse than bad after his arrest. He didn’t really plan on making it through the arrest, matter of fact.

But now, he says, he’s glad he did. After months of near catatonia, not eating, getting crazier and crazier, someone in the justice system realized he was truly ill. As Ben says, in his accustomed cryptic tone, he didn’t know what gave him away – the paranoid tics or the 70 pound weight loss.

He hasn’t been sentenced yet. But he’s been diagnosed and the description, when I check it, fits everything he talked about and couldn't get help for... The visual and auditory hallucinations, the paranoia, the horrifying emotional, uncontrollable mood swings, the lack of sleep – the almost autistic disconnection. If his blog was full of hellish visions, it’s because his chemistry moved him into the heart of the neighborhood. He’s getting anti-depressants and anti-psychotics and therapy now. And he’s glad. He’s glad for the help. Me? I’m over the moon about it.

And he’s still Ben. Or maybe he’s finally Ben. He’s funny and cryptic still – unflinchingly honest. But there’s a little soft showing, somehow. And god, that’s so good to see.

The prosecution isn’t going to cut him any slack. Even with three psychiatrists concurring on his condition they won’t accept “diminished capacity.” But he has no violent criminal record, so I’m hoping, hoping. And I’m asking the universe to give him a chance.

Please.

Hobbies one should not admit to and dead plant life

2008-07-26T16:10:00.004-03:00

This is a dead tree. Specifically, a dead Ficus Benjamina, a weeping fig tree. I nurtured it, coddled it and feed it nutritious tree food. And did it appreciate that? No. The Ficus is a drama queen, a professional victim. If a breeze comes within 10 feet of it, if a person (god forbid) brushes against it, it sheds leaves like a martyr shedding clothes to take in the burning desert sun. The wimp. I pampered it and replaced its soil. And finally

in the dead of winter, I put it on the balcony. But not, let me add, until one mutant very long branch poked me in the eye. A branch bearing 3 of it's scrawny collection of 14 leaves.

Now it lives on the balcony. Weedy thinks it's kind of cool looking. So. I'm beading it.

I think I've officially been working on the Etsy shop site for tooooo long.

Push Pull

2008-07-11T18:01:00.001-03:00

Hurry up

It only takes seconds to establish a few pertinent facts about the man at the counter.

1. He wants someone, anyone to hear his complaint about a bad landlord.
2. He's the kind of guy who hates trouble but finds it everywhere. The dejected slump of his shoulders suggests that he expects to lose. Again.
3. His complaint has nothing to do with the Registry of Joint Stock Companies.
4. In spite of number 3, he isn't planning to vacate the premises anytime soon.

The clerk is kind. She doesn't rush him. Her answers are quiet, respectful. I imagine that simply talking to her, even though it won't solve the problem - will restore a little of his sense of dignity.

Two of us are waiting our turn. The man next to me, sporting full sleeve tattoos and a profusion of dreadlocks down to his waist, is slouched bonelessly in his chair. He's following the exchange at the desk with easy interest. Then there's me - perched on the edge of my seat like a runner waiting for the starting pistol, spine rigid, teeth clamped in frustration, checking my watch a little too often and exhaling pointedly.

Mars and Saturn, the push-forward & hold-back planets, are conducting battle in the territory of my natal Mars. Every push is met with equal-force resistance. The civil war in my head projects itself to the outer world. It's 95F in the office and so much hotter on the bus one particular day, that the driver succumbs to heat stroke half-way home. We passengers pile onto the steaming concrete to wait another half hour for a replacement bus. An ambulance comes and goes.There is no shade. Hurry up and wait.

Business documents, mailed to me weeks ago, vanish in some Canada Post limbo. Hurry up and wait.

I'm angry. I'm desperate.I wonder at the fact that I haven't yet ground my teeth to veritable stubs.

At this moment, I recall with hallucinatory clarity how it feels to have the grace and patience of that government clerk. But I can't get there.

The evening before: why hurry?

I've stopped for one whole night. Every other evening this week, I've made the base for a new bracelet. I'm going at it like it's the Olympics of beading and I'm going for gold. What I'm actually trying to do is get out of the day job for real. Another year? Can I save enough? Can I sell enough? Teach enough?

I'm far past my best-before date at the day job. If my attitude assumed material form, it would match the potentially deadly science fiction growths forming inside tupperware containers at the back of my fridge. My boss of 18 years, the saving grace of my department, retired early. Now, I can't decide whether "utterly dysfunctional" or "toxic" best describes the atmosphere.

Added aggravation: my unit of the union is owed five years back pay and although there are now five administrators, fund raisers or administrative assistants for every staff member on the ground, the employer seems curiously uninterested in negotiating in any meaningful way with people who actually keep the place running, day-to day.

Work days, I greet the mornings with feelings of dread and battle my way up to resigned stoicism. Walking a picket line has become one of my more joyful fantasies. Really.

On this, my one night off, I'm angry and I want to stop being angry. I'm scared and I want to stop being scared. I feel utterly disconnected and alone. I'm fighting for survival with no help coming. I'm so tired, so very tired of the long, long hours and the constant feeling that I have to apologize for my self-imposed work schedule. I try to hide my desperation because I don't think anyone understands it. I'm tired of that, too. I realize, in the way I often realize a thing days and days before it leaves the uselessly abstract territory of my brain and makes its way to my heart or gut, that although all the work issues are problems, they are not the problem.

The problem is never out there. Wait for those kind of problems to stop and you'll die waiting - probably sooner than necessary. I know that in my brain. I am waiting for it to reach my gut, where it will cause a meaningful shift. Let go.

Let go, my brain orders my brain - which is like the police ordering an investigation of the police.

It'll take the time it takes. Hurry hurry hurry up. And wait.

My name is Linda and I'm a...

2008-06-22T11:00:00.004-03:00

It is Friday night or Saturday morning. Someone from my past is writing and calling again. His first letter sounds so sincere. Thanks, he says, for everything you did for me. He misses my friendship, he says. But when he calls, he seems to be pining for the woman I was back then – and not the friend, although I was always that too.

The pleasantries are barely observed when he steers the conversation in the direction of what-are-you-wearing. I tell him: capris and a big…thing. I don’t know what you call it. A baggy top that I’m wearing because it’s Saturday and I don’t care what I look like. In the time he’s remembering fondly, I would have cared. I worked my ass off to keep romance and interest going, to keep his ego stroked.

But now, instead, I offer an excited summary of the Prime Minister’s apology to Aboriginal and Inuit people and tell him about the Powwow last week, the pictures I took, how beautiful the day, the dancers. The impatience at his end is palpable. He takes another run at arousing some sense of romance. He hits another wall. And so it goes until I say, I’m hanging up. Really, I’ve got nothing more. Write me, why don’t you? There’s zero animosity at my end, I just have better things to do than counter his moves. Want a friend? I’m in. But otherwise…

I’m a Romantic in Recovery.

And I have company. Me and my friend, Drifter, have our own little 12 step program.

Drifter and me have been “undating” since March. We decided to call it that because both of us were still crawling through the broken shards of our last relationships. Drift had lost his brother and his love almost at the same time. I had been trying to brazen it through missing my lost love by searching for someone new. Too soon and through the internet. The results were predictably catastrophic. We knew that neither of us could even contemplate launching into another relationship, but neither of us wanted to sit at home intoning the Poe mantra, “Nevermore.”

We’ve been keeping company, in our weird quirky way, for over four months. We talk on the phone nearly every day. We’ve considered, both of us, that “things” might develop. It seemed logical enough. We find each other attractive and interesting. We understand each other very well – and we are nearly at the same level of introversion, give or take…

But…

Suddenly, we’ve realized that we just aren’t that needy anymore. We don’t have to have a partner. We’re happy with our lives, more often than not and happy to have a real friend of the opposite gender, someone honest and fun to be with. Someone you can call every day and no matter what the mood is on either side, it’s fine. Someone who understands you and values you. No eggs to walk on here.

It’s as if a lifetime of grand love affairs and being swept away has amounted to a vaccination against that kind of romance. It’s a heady thing, that feeling – like being perpetually drunk. Sure, there are the deathly hangovers and your life is out of control but isn’t it wonderful when you’re up there at the top of the high?

And isn’t it wonderful when the illusion shatters, when you stop pining for it, when the real becomes more valuable and precious than the ideal?

Yes. It is.

PowWow at Point Pleasant Park: Halifax

2008-06-14T20:27:00.008-03:00

Images from my day. A fill-up on joy. Please click to enlarge.

The girls is OK!

2008-05-15T20:55:00.003-03:00

The girls (find them about a third of the way up from the bottom middle - lower, I might add than they used to be) are OK. They are fine and dandy and taking a nice x-ray.

Or as the Breast Screening Clinic writes, "Dear Ms. JONES (are they shouting or using a form here?)Thank you for participating in the Mammography Screening Program. (I had a choice? My doctor didn't indicate that it was optional.) I am pleased to inform you that the radiologist who read your mammogram (forget the scandal over Atlantic Province radiologists who gave wrong results for thousands of women recently) did not detect any evidence of breast cancer at this time."

Good news. I'm not (at this time) dying of that. Pap test in July. They don't have to squash anything but my dignity for that.

Life is good (at this time.)

A word of explanation shouted into the void

2008-05-13T18:47:00.003-03:00

I get up at 5:45 a.m. weekdays. For half an hour I sip coffee while the cat twines himself around my ankles. Then days like this, I put in three days work in nine hours.

Twelve hours after the alarm goes off, I’m home. I’ve made it through ceaseless interruptions at work, a parade of other people’s problems and questions, computer freezes, software malfunctions and several hours of sheer, deadening mental factory work. I’ve smiled. Over and over. I’ve survived the number twenty bus, once again – but I confess, by the end of the trip when the seat next to me opened up, I stood up, preferring to be flung gracelessly back and forth with each break and acceleration of the bus than to have one more person sit next to me. Touching me.

Closing the apartment door, I slam the radio off, kick my shoes off, pour a glass of red wine and sit down to listen to the cat sing throat songs celebrating my arrival. It’s all the activity and noise I can tolerate.

I think about not writing. To anyone. But the need to speak is so strong and what needs to be spoken has become too large and formless to get out. It has become a vortex in my throat and chest, sucking words away.

I think I’m waiting to be heard in a way the human ear and heart is not equipped to handle. I think I’m waiting for whatever universal awareness might be out there to hear me. Or maybe it does. Thing is about the Universe, it doesn’t communicate in exactly the way I’d like it to…

An email would be nice. A phone call. Or a sign – spelled, let’s say, in flaming letters against the sky.

I’m voiceless, I mention to the Universe. And, totally in character, the universe says nothing and the girl with the cell phone who is seated immediately behind me begins a loud conversation about nothing. That’s it? I ask.

I can’t feel anything much – except annoyance, sadness, I add, I’m wondering if that’s going to change sometime soon? I imagine the Universe shrugging. Do galaxies die when the Universe does that?

Soon, for no logical reason, I’ll crawl out of the funk. I might not write when that happens, but for a while, I’ll project a benevolent face on the Universe. Things will make sense. I will stop disintegrating, or at least stop fighting disintegration and imagine I see the wisdom of the whole thing. For a while.

Maybe, if the Universe is feeling generous, I’ll regain my sense of humor.

Meanwhile, to those of you I haven’t written – insert platitude here.

I would write you. If I could.

Apparently, I'm back.

2008-03-30T14:29:00.005-03:00

Earth hour at my place. Not that I need an excuse for candles.

Watch to the end

2008-03-27T14:37:00.000-03:00

Goodnight and Good Luck

2007-12-20T18:33:00.001-04:00

I started this in 2005. The writing has been a friend - and I treasured the writers/friends I've found here.

Everything has a cycle, though - and this cycle has come to an end.

I wish you all peace, happiness, wisdom, laughter - and good writing. I'm only a click away if you want to find me.

Be well, all of you.

Namaste.

Linda

Pilot to co-pilot

2007-12-16T13:35:00.001-04:00

Cat used to feel very very sorry for himself when I was at the computer. He was, after all, down on the floor like an animal and he didn't like it. He sang great sorrowful arias to that effect, too. Andy, formerly known as "the wanker," suggested that I might give him a place to sit and watch and much to my astonishment, it worked. As soon as I sit in my chair, he sits in his.

Now, my only remaining problem (other than him throwing up on the carpet), is that he feels compelled to bead. Or at least to stand on the beads when I work, trying to eat them.

The truth of the moment

2007-12-11T17:56:00.000-04:00

I’ve reached the State of Equilibrium. It borders on the State of Hysterical Inertia – a territory with a thousand highways criss-crossing flat, changeless land only to arrive back where they began. It is always exactly 5:00 p.m. in Hysterical Inertia – neither day nor proper night. You start having impulses to get out of the car and dye your hair blue-black, or shave it off, or move your bed into the bathroom. Anything to get off those roads. I imagine it’s like Alberta, without borders or mountains.

I’m not sure what’s beyond the metaphorical gazebo I’m sitting in now. The thing about Equilibrium is that it doesn’t particularly matter what’s out there. I’m counting crows and seagulls. A three crow morning today, matter of fact. And that’s about the only fact worth knowing. I’m pretty much happy with breathing as my primary activity.

You do have time to think here, though. And I realized today (with no sense of alarm or disappointment) that when people (okay, male people) hail you on an internet site, it is merely a reflexive action - a man passing by rotates his cranial unit and seeing apparatus in your direction. Rather like a nervous tick. A flicker that sputters out in the time it takes to send an automated compliment. I’ve stopped answering the flickers.

In November, I decided that a period of celibacy was in order. I cut the last thread with my used-to-be, who took it in a spirit of bad grace, foul temper and threw in a couple cutting remarks. No one else was in view, so it was pretty much a done deal. And I was happy with the decision for a week.

The fretting began soon afterwards. I was celibate for over seven years once. By the end, it was neither a happy nor a healthy experience. I began to dwell on that. Began to ponder years, possibly all the rest of them (because I-am-no-spring-chicken, as they say) alone. Alone except for the cliché of a cat. Woman and cat. How long, I wondered, until I was dressing the cat or making little hats for him and then taking pictures. Ohmygod posting them. Here.

I moved from Fretting to Hysterical Inertia over a period of weeks.

And here’s the thing – I have no idea how I got to Equilibrium. One minute I was considering packing a duffel bag and running for my life – to anywhere else. And the next, I was in the gazebo not even remotely considering haute couture for the cat.

And feeling like my life was…pretty much okay. Maybe it was the hours of making mandalas – or just plain old divine intervention. At any rate. I’m manless. The cat is hatless. And there was just one crow on the way home. No seagulls.

Send therapists

2007-12-09T17:22:00.001-04:00

The floor of Herhimnbryns garden

2007-12-09T10:28:00.001-04:00

I've gone Mandela mad. Kaleidoscope Krazy. I'd snitched this photograph from Secret Hill, having fallen in love with a certain blue-grey that seems to be everywhere in Western Australia, and this morning, because I had Far More Useful Things To Do - I made Mandelas instead. This is much nicer to look at full size. So please click to enlarge.

Travel plans

2007-12-07T11:11:00.001-04:00

The cover of a book on Claude Monet is tacked to the bulletin board on the wall in front of my desk. It is, specifically, a reproduction of one of Monet’s paintings of the Garden at Giverny. I’m caught in butter yellow water lilies and the water itself, a shimmery reflection of surrounding greenery.

I’m dressed in jeans, a sweater, socks, boots, my winter coat and a scarf. My hands are icy.

The new heating system for the college is having one of its frequent unreliable days and outside, it’s -14C.

I’m imagining strolling the garden at Giverny, eating in Monet’s blue and yellow dining room, drinking coffee in his studio, talking a little about the work, the light…

Later, I plan to visit Frieda Khalo’s blue house.

Mostly, I plan not to be here – where the Atlantic Ocean spits wind cold and damp enough to split your bones. To leave this place where, for 8 months of most years, listless grays and shriveled browns give way only to the dingy white of exhaust-stained snow. This place of shoulder-hunch and salt-stained boots and February weather bombs. Soul shrinking. Bleak.

I will take myself to Frieda’s, where tropical flowers bloom year-round – fiery reds and flaming oranges, exotic pinks and purples…the scent of heaven in the air.

Frieda waits in this alternate dimension. A pet monkey on her shoulder, flowers in her hair, the jungle breathing green behind her. We will walk to the blue house together, holding hands and laughing.

Winkers and Wankers

2007-11-22T15:16:00.000-04:00

I do some of my best work when people piss me off on internet dating sites. I'd feel sad about sinking to the level of replying to some of these ding-bats, but hell, they "winked." What is a wink, you ask? A little message available to people who haven't coughed up the cash to actually join a site - but are able to post a profile and send canned messages like, "I think you're beautiful" or "I could be the one for you." If you email them (as a paying member) they can reply. They just can't initiate email.

Last night, a man in Britain winked. He said, in his profile, that he wasn't actually looking - just amusing himself. OK, fine. Then, he offered a joke that went:
"I got a sweater for Christmas but what I wanted was a screamer or moaner." He wanted to know if the winkees got the joke and found it funny. He suggested he enjoyed getting erotic email from strangers.

And then, I used a valuable two minutes of my life replying:

"The sweater vs moaner/screamer joke? Mildly funny. I have a hard time with puns. There was a traumatic pun incident in my youth involving an uncle who also wore plaid pants on Sundays. I'm sure you understand.

You are not looking for someone. Admirable. At least you admit it.

I don't write erotic emails - so we have a minus score there. I prefer to be erotic in person. This is not to say I can't write erotic emails. I'm very good at them - but I think some company like Hallmark should be paying me for them. I could be "Say it with Smut - a little tiny division of Hallmark."Or I should have my own 1-900 number. (You may not get the references here - unless you are cursed by Hallmark cards in Britain.)

I am looking for somebody. I actually - I WAS looking for somebody but have given it up. Now I'm looking for another cat and perhaps a goldfish.

What exactly is the purpose of the "wink?" I suspect it's a way of saying, "Hello there. You don't know me, but I'd like to see you naked." The reason I'm asking is because I've bothered to actually write letters (See! I'm doing it again) to winkers (try not to think about how close that is to another word)...and find that they reply with a sullen or distant few words and then disappear into cyber space, never to be heard from again. Or they express regret that I am so far away. Light years, if they only knew. And besides, the number of miles is clearly indicated on the profile.

But you're just amusing yourself and so I feel it's fair enough for me to amuse myself back with yet another letter saying anything I please. You did say that fairness was a quality you value, didn't you? Cheers, Linda"

It was a therapeutic two minutes. Even though it's like feeling pride in being able to hit the broad side of a barn door with a volleyball. And at least I wrote something.

The Planet, Saturn? Or as Mark calls it, "The Flaming Shitbrick"

2007-11-18T20:32:00.000-04:00

“Once Saturn enters the twelfth house a subtle change occurs within the psyche…the time of dissolution.”

I’m cliff climbing up that rock face, sleeping or waking these days. Struggling to write something witty or even slightly, minimally upbeat. Sorting through my bag of spiritual answers and handy little mantras and folks, I’m coming up empty. Coming up dissolved you might say. I thank you from my heart for your patience – but I don’t see any immediate possibility of a change in weather patterns.

“There are many times the client has said ‘I don’t know who I am’, when Saturn is deep into the twelfth house. This is not to say that other people do not think that they know who one is.”

Which could explain the disorienting sensation that people are talking to someone who is not me. Someone who is occupying my exact location in space.

“The boundless deep of the unconscious is filled with primordial images that arise spontaneously, both while awake and while asleep. Images and sensations creep in, occupying what used to be superfunctional space in the consciousness.”

Well. There we go. Then everything is unfolding as it should. Do not adjust your monitor, there is merely a leak in superfunctional space. A sense of “terror and anxiety” is to be expected.

You see? This is also why, when friends ask me to look at their current transits, I know that they are likely twisting on any one of a hundred hooks like this. And I am plumb out of soothing phrases like "transitional period" and "opportunity for growth." It's the equivalent of telling a woman pregnant with huge triplets that she "will experience some discomfort" during delivery.

I am apt to use phrases like "Flaming Shitbrick" - and really, it's not very professional to do that.

...Once my friend KD dreamed she was sitting in a boat with an angel who was standing, (looming, I assume) at the front. She was trying to shoot it. And she was missing. “At close range,” she told me, in a tone of disgust...

I think I know the feeling.

(Quotes from Saturn in Transit – Erin Sullivan)

Surrender

2007-11-17T16:44:00.001-04:00

I've been staring at the screen for a long time. Words refuse to type themselves and thoughts refuse to shape.

Last night I dreamed I passed through spider's webs and I was bound. Stung until it was a matter of death or immunity.

I woke to purrs and little paws walking over me. Sticky with threads, I pulled myself to consciousness like someone climbing a sheer rock face with no hand or toe holds.

Disconnect

2007-11-16T18:52:00.000-04:00

The future fumbles
blank and blind
while tidal waves of memory
cover me.
Flotsam and jetsam.

Tide in, tide out.
Swallowing the ground
underneath my feet.

No one here but me.

A little shy,
I gave you music
I bought for you
on a rain-soaked lunch hour
and you smiled.

You said:
I’ll have to pay you back.
I’ll call you next week.

You meant to favor me
with your presence?

Alms for the past?

I swallowed shock.
I couldn’t reply:
A gift is a gift.
Not a trade.
I’m not cashing in
the chips of our history.

I didn’t tell you.
I can’t explain the obvious.
I never could.
Not that you wanted
very often
to know.

In the spirit of the writer's strike

2007-11-16T12:39:00.000-04:00

An LOE rerun. I was reading back recently and decided that this was one of the entries I personally liked. I'd been uninspired for weeks and Mark finally wrote to say, "Just fucking write something."

So I did.

http://lifeonearthand.blogspot.com/2006/10/just-f-ing-write-something.html

Maybe my friends should swear at me more often.

All that you have

2007-11-13T20:47:00.000-04:00

This is what I'm listening to tonight.
And specially for Sister Teri of the beautiful voice.

Blessings all.

Post-Noel. Anyone care for a dried apricot?

2007-11-05T14:27:00.000-04:00

Well. That was underwhelming.

Hurricane Juan hits us as easily as a Harlem Globetrotter lobbing a basketball into a flock of sleeping pigeons. We count on it subsiding into the nice kind of tropical storm we’re used to but no.

So this time, as Noel scuds up the Atlantic coast all whirling hell and red center on the radar pictures, nobody is asleep. The pigeons are wide awake indeed. They are moving patio furniture, slicing off dead tree branches. They have water, batteries, flashlights, first aid kits. And…

It’s no small deal to have 170,000 people lose power – especially if you’re one of them and it’s two days later. Crews are in from New Brunswick and Maine helping out and everyone should be back to our precarious “normal” soon. Until the next one, anyway.

When we’ll all be effectively reminded that Mother (Nature, that is), at any moment, can fling us back two centuries.

The winds were fierce. Up to 180K in Newfoundland. It rained in sheets for hours.

Personally, I woke up Sunday morning to flashing digital clocks – and the sudden understanding that dried apricots and almonds (I just had to have a few) are about as effective as peanuts and prunes.

But really, nothing to see here, folks. And hence, no material.

Perhaps I should try another date if I’m seeking disaster material.

Joyeux Noel

2007-11-03T09:59:00.000-03:00

Dried Apricots & apples.
Almonds and sunflower seeds.
Beans.
Tuna.
Bread.
Cheese.
Grapes.
Applesauce in individually sealed packages.
Water.
Milk.
Candles.
Batteries.
Flashlight.

Here we go again. Post-tropical storm Noel is due to arrive sometime tonight, packing hurricane strength winds and bringing with it what meteorologists are calling "a solid wall of rain."

This time, I won't be suffering the cheap, scented dollar store candles - the only ones left in stock by the time the stores finally opened after Hurricane Juan. Since Juan, I never have less than 500 tea lights (safe candles) and two dozen votive candles on hand. And a flashlight.

This time, I won't be stuck, if the power goes for days and days, eating the only dried fruit and nuts I could find days after the hurricane: peanuts and prunes. Usually when I tell people that's what I bought (because dried fruit and nuts are nutritious and don't spoil), they start laughing. I might as well have taken up a steady diet of Ex-lax. I was unwashed, my sinuses were suffering near terminal damage from inhaling cheap candle perfume, but I was, by god, regular.

Waiting for the bus this morning, the sky is heavy and sullen. The air is wet and cold - but the temperature will climb considerably today - and then plummet again after the hurricane passes through. Flocks of birds wheel wildly in the sky. When the wind begins, my cat will start to tear through the house, unable to contain the energy he feels from the change of atmosphere.
As for me? I'll haul out the duvet and hope that the power isn't gone for long. It will be 8C the day after Noel. That's around 45 F. Brrrr.

Wish us luck, folks?

The Smarties Theory for Smart Women

2007-10-31T17:44:00.001-03:00

Weedy came up with the Smarties Theory. Because, I suppose, she has to listen to me whine about my love life and my total ineptness is driving her nuts. Weed is half of a happy marriage that's lasted around 30 years, and (it seems to me) any guy she ever dated or has been around for over 20 minutes is still in love with her (in a charming, unobtrusive kind of way).

" Because they don't know everything about me," she explains.

As I am the good ship Titanic of relationships, she's seen fit to share her survival tips with me.

First this: I tell men what I think. Not just some of what I think. Most of what I think. OK - all of what I think. With hand gestures.

"Men don't want to know what you think," Weedy tells me.
"Well then, what's the point of a relationship then?"
"There isn't one. But that's just it, most of them don't want to know."

Weedy's secret to marriage and dealing with the male gender - hand out one or two Smarties of personal information as needed. Everything is on a need-to-know basis. Never give them the whole package. Maintain a little mystery.

"So, you're saying that giving them the chocolate factory in Belgium is excessive then?"
"Yes. Here you go - two Smarties. If you're good I'll give you two more Smarties."
"Then giving them Belgium in its entirety is a mistake?"
"Two Smarties. Believe me, they'll be grateful."

Weigh in, ladies and especially gentlemen. Two Smarties or Belgium?

In which she increases her incredibly crappy karma

2007-10-26T21:02:00.001-03:00

Only two people ahead of me in the line at the postal outlet – just in front of me a young black woman with a notice of delivery in her hand. I’ve already fished my notice out of my purse. “She Bop” is blasting out of my head phones. The customer at the desk is an elderly lady who is gesturing broadly, waving what appears to be an empty Purolator Courier envelope. The very young clerk is registering barely contained distress. “Time After Time” starts. Finishes. “I drove all night” becomes “Hat Full of Stars.” Five, ten minutes. I unhook my headphones.

Something about a letter to the passport office not being picked up until 5:00 o’clock, after she paid twenty dollars and thousands of dollars are involved here and what did she pay for if the letter is still there at five o’clock and her son needed that passport and…

You get the idea. I’m not without empathy. I’ve had those days on a regular basis, when everything that can screw up, will. When you hit the wall of bureaucracy and I’m- sorry- but- I- can’t- help- you at high speed, with your face. Where the wheels fall off and the universe seems to have roundly cursed your every effort to stay sane.

Loop loop. Echo trap.

We are now up to “True Colors” though, and there are six people in line. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes. The woman spins through the same story over and over. The clerk, who is too young and good natured to have any idea how to stop it, proffers her best explanation and advice over and over again.

The man behind me explodes, “Jesus Christ!” Everyone else is sighing heavily and shuffling, including me.

Finally I work up my nerve to say, “Ma’am, I’m very sorry to interrupt and I know you’re having a bad time, but there are five of us waiting now.” She whirls around, five feet of grey-haired, tired-out, fight and frustration.

“I have as much right to be here as you do. I have a problem and I’m not satisfied with the answers and my son needed this to be delivered and I paid twenty dollars….” and it’s none of your business!.”

This is a finger on the trigger of the rather large man behind me.

“It’s our business when none of us can get our business taken care of. The lady has answered you. She can’t do anything else. There's a one-eight-hundred number you can call….”

And so on. Raised voices. The air is shuddering with crappy energy. Full moon. Loop, loop.

The woman steps aside. It’s the bass voice that does it. The testosterone voice.

As I’m leaving I comment sheepishly to him, “I guess we both get Creep of the Week for that, right?”

“Somebody had to stop it,” he replies. He thinks a second. “You started it but I was only too happy to finish it.”

Hell hath no fury like that of the powerless. I consider that she’s a generation before mine and most of her life, complaint has been met with actual assistance. By a human. No one gave her a 1-800 number and told her to get lost. Certainly no one charged her twenty bucks for the privilege.

Someone had to stop her. She was stuck, looping. There was no foreseeable end to it. But I don’t think that made either of the creeps in question feel a lot better.

Drink, anyone?

F*ck it anyway. Girls just want to have fun.

2007-10-24T19:31:00.000-03:00

So, another man I really click with - surprise - has huge, enormous, continent-sized intimacy issues. I allow myself to be truly naked with this man - the kind of naked that goes well beyond taking your clothes off - and although he is tossing around words like "enthralled" at the time - two days later he's saying he doesn't want his life "disrupted" by any woman.

Yes indeed.

Last night's therapy was posting the above photograph and a new, take-no-prisoners profile on the Plenty of Fish site:

"You want a lady in the streets and a wild woman in the sheets? You want passion but don’t want it to stray out of your exact comfort zone? Look elsewhere, because I’m not tame and I won’t darn your socks and write the Christmas cards. I'll understand whatever deep hurts you bear but I won't pander. I’m not appropriate unless you possess tenderness and nerve in equal quantities. I’m not appropriate unless you’re a realist who knows how to dream. I come with history (and if you say the word “baggage” once, you’re deleted from the mailbox). I’m not a one-night stand. I’m not what you expect. I don’t want to own you and I don’t want to be owned. I expect the same respect I'll extend to you. I expect caring and give it back tenfold. I don't care what age you are (within reason) just please be ferociously alive. Having said that, I am fiercely loyal, monogamous with the right person, deep down practical when necessary, sensual, sexual, creative, honest, intelligent and funny. And if you mess me with me, you better be serious about what connection really means. And if you write - let me know you read this. If you're just fishing idly - fish elsewhere."

Suddenly I am so very popular. Overnight I am on 16 "favorites" lists and my inbox is filling up. Good for me. A ton of strangers, 99% of whom I will have zero interest in have written to me. One polite question about whether I've ever let anyone worship my feet. And I'm so raw myself that I write back respectfully, kindly - because goddess knows I don't want to make anyone else feel this shitty. In spite of the dubious results, writing the post was damn good as a temporary wall between me and black, consuming sadness. And let's face it - at least I wrote something.

Tonight's therapy is dancing wildly to Cyndi Lauper's "Sisters of Avalon" and writing this post. The dancing, at least, takes my mind of the fact that I can come up with ideas for art but can't actually produce any. It fascinates the cat - who watches from a safe distance, looking utterly astonished.

This afternoon I proposed to Detta, my equally long-suffering coworker. We agreed that we both needed a wife and that because we could at least recognize each other's innate fabulousness, we were a good match.

Whistling whistling whistling past the graveyard. To Cyndi Lauper.

Laugh. I thought I'd never start.

2007-10-23T15:15:00.000-03:00

I am hanging onto the edge of a cliff by my fingernails. The cliff is a metaphor for my lifelong belief that love matters, that people are innately good. My fingernails are, well, my fingernails – French-polished and neatly filed, but not much help in the staying alive department. And they make bad philosophers.

In this moment, it is the cliff, the fingernails, a lot of Tracy Chapman songs and Cyndi Lauper howling out “Who Let in the Rain.” It is wine. Whine. Whine. Woman alone music. Apologizing to the cat for being so little fun. It is buying craft supplies, books on soft sculpture, bags of fabric rose petals I-might-use-for-something and lime green dagger beads. It is copying pictures of the Venus De Milo and red apples to print on silk and plans to make a doll with mirror eyes. I’m going to call the doll “romantic love.” Naturally, the doll will have no arms. And I have a strategic spot for the apple. She may, in fact, have wings – or a Virgin Mary halo and horns. It’s part of the overflowing, moldy laundry basket that passes for my mind right now and any month or year now I’m going to sort the laundry and make art.

Or maybe I’ll write a self-help book. When Good Women Fall for Plaid Men. Or Vlad Men.

I want to be an art nun. But no, I keep dating.

Peter Pan. In wolf's clothing.

What.

conversations with The Cat

2007-10-13T11:57:00.000-03:00

In which it is decided that my purpose is to be furniture. He hopes that this is understood and he won't have to explain it one more time.

Stories

2007-10-10T19:23:00.000-03:00

I'm crappy at meditation, but I sit. Observe my breath. Not enough. Light a candle and focus my eyes on the flame, the rest of my attention on my breath. Better.

The din in my head begins to subside. I'm using reminders. When the brain-spin cycle starts (and it's so sneaky how it creeps up) I remind myself: "thinking" and return to breath and candle flame.

For the past few months, the noise has been deafening. Thoughts becoming emotions becoming thoughts becoming emotions in a ceaseless chicken or egg-first cycle. I am overdosed on the stories of my life churning in my tired brain. I'd prefer a plotless life for at least a few hours every day. I'd like to fold up my opinions, ambitions, fruitless worries, vain and reachable hopes, my judgments, fears and even happiness and just be whatever is underneath all that deafening, distorting roar...to stop filtering, to stop being twice, three times removed from myself.

This makes it difficult, you understand, to write...

But I'm quietly reading you all, all this time.

Emerging

2007-09-30T15:22:00.000-03:00

My mind floats and bobs, gets caught in eddies in the stream, bumps up against a rock at the edge and attracts a discarded plastic shopping bag which clings, flapping in the water and then floats off...

Three months by the calendar. Rocks and rapids. White water swallowing the sound of my voice.

Trapped in the broken boat of my own thoughts.

Emerging. I begin to wind paper and cloth into beads. And to gather silk cocoons.

It is the start of a voice.

And the good news is

2007-09-17T12:30:00.000-03:00

Two news stories I can live with in under three weeks. First it was the squeegee kid who gave chase when a gang of girls were beating a 65 year old woman using a table leg as a weapon. Other squeegee kids helped the woman while he ran after the girls, hollering for someone to call the police. Someone did and the girls were caught.

And this is the other story: http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/09/student_activists
written by Dan Savage.

A little more of this and I'm going to get downright hopeful about the world.

"Rising"

2007-09-02T14:18:00.001-03:00

Breathing

2007-08-29T19:13:00.001-03:00

composite photo: self-portrait & shadows on jute rug.

I wake up in a room I didn't rent. Where the walls once bore pictures, there are rectangles of unblemished paint. The wooden floor is bare and worn. The place is empty of furniture. I don't know what street I'm on, what city I'm in...

I haven't looked out the window yet. I'm just sitting on the floor, watching the shadows move across the wall. Calm.

Ghosts come and go.
I am not frightened.
This is a waking dream.
This is the mind telling the mind stories.

Pox girl and the Phobic

2007-08-22T16:59:00.000-03:00

Okay, he's truly, clinically phobic about germs, the new boyfriend. Nobody is perfect, right?
I tell myself I don't need to take this on. I really don't. Not my problem.

But he's phoned twice trying to make it up. The second call, I'm virally teary, offended and depressed and ask in a somewhat hysterical, quavering voice, what other phobias might be looming - homophobia? racism? Because those are real deal breakers I tell him. He assures me he is not a Nazi or harboring either of those peculiarities.

He asks if he can see me after I go to the doctor tomorrow. "After all," he argues, "I'm not going to get over the phobia sitting here alone." And he's proud that he's already made it past the discovery of a tattoo on my upper left arm - tattoos apparently being related to the germ-thing. He's thinking maybe he can conquer fear of germs and viruses next. "That's what you need alrighty, a tattooed, virus-ridden girlfriend for therapeutic purposes." He agrees enthusiastically. As if he can tell that I see his point and seem to be moving him out of potential ex-new-boyfriend to probationary-new-boyfriend status.

What can I tell you? What passes for my love life is, at least, not boring. And did anyone see "Aviator?" Because Howard Hughes was a pretty interesting guy before he went completely off his rocker. Okay. Never mind. Fire at will.

We are not amused

2007-08-20T20:00:00.000-03:00

Day eight. See how much better this is looking? You don't. Well, admittedly, me either - but I haven't wept uncontrollably for two days and this, I assure you, is progress. Weeping and depression are two of the side-effects they don't mention in articles.

Today the Doctor actually issued me a corticosteroid ointment. To tell you the truth, I'm not confident anything will help, but I'm desperate enough to try and desperate enough to beg for anything that might. It's that or spend the next three or four weeks wearing high necklines and scarves wound around my neck. It's August, for the love of god. August.

Today was the new boyfriend's birthday. I'd rallied a little and planned to cover up suitably (I am not contagious) and take him out to dinner. However, it seems he is a little Howard Hughesish about rashes and wasn't about to take the doctor's word that he wasn't in danger. I believe that was sufficient reason to push him into the ex-new boyfriend category in my mind. Instead, I took Weedy and her husband out because, frankly, by this afternoon, if I had to stare at the walls of my apartment or go without human company a minute longer I'd have gone stark raving mad.

On the up-side, I can start the medication for the bladder infection just as soon as I finish the anti-virals! Party!

And P.S. I have decided that my immune system is not the only thing past its best-before date. The dating pool is, at best, a stagnant pond full of bottom dwellers and slugs. The good part is that I no longer care.

Thank you for allowing me to rant. Stay tuned for the huge spiritual realization that will follow all of this. I'm grinning. Really.

The blue pill makes you smaller

2007-08-16T14:58:00.000-03:00

"It's Nancy from Spryfield Medicine. I'm sorry, I should have caught this while you were here, but the doctor needs to see you about your tests results. When are you available?" Half an hour ago. Half an hour ago I was sitting in the doctor's office, fully available.
"Well, Nancy, I'm just kicking back enjoying time off with Shingles, so my schedule is pretty open."
"Monday, at 11:00?"
"Nancy, she said the office wouldn't call unless something was wrong and I really would like not to wait four days to find out what. Else."
"Something with the urine test. I don't think it's urgent." Jesus, what now? Kidney failure?

This is what you get for letting your immune system kiss the dirt.

Turns out, in a rarely dispensed follow-up mercy-call, the doctor has the office advise me that it could be a minor bladder infection. Am I having symptoms? Nothing I can't live with. And besides, the doctor has just increased the dosage of antivirals from 1,000 mg. a day to 3,000 mg. and these are nasty little babies. I'm swallowing six blue horse pills a day and twice that many vitamins and I'm strangely put off the idea of adding a prescription for bladder infection.

I was hoping for a nice mild attack of Shingles if I had to have any at all, but it seems four or so nerve paths are involved in the party and I am beginning to look like a plague victim. The good news is that I am young for my age (the doctor's opinion) and very unlikely to have paralyzing pain for months after this clears. Good. And the lesions, now that I'm on the right dosage of drug, should start clearing up before I have to wear a burka.

Meanwhile, whether its the virus or the cure for the virus, I am operating like an out-of-sync film. Which is to say, my thoughts are trailing about five inches behind my body, my head feels like a floatation device, and my feet are not quite touching the floor when I walk.

But there's always an up side, isn't there? If I can still whine, I must still be here. I have zero appetite and my diet is solely small amounts of healthy food so there will be weight loss. Oh. And The Cat is very happy to have a private sofa with massage feature 24 hours a day.

Thanks everyone, for the kind comments on the last entry.

Shingle me tivers!

2007-08-14T19:48:00.000-03:00

I get up finally when The Cat gives up on purring and head bonking and bites the top of my head to wake me up. No coffee. Fasting-since-midnight tests upcoming. I drink three glasses of water, shower, scoop the litter box, feed The Cat, make the bed and get dressed without actually being fully conscious. Weedy picks me up at eight a.m.

Blood tests. Routine yearly blood tests that I regularly go for once every five or six years when the doctor suddenly says, "How long has it been since...?" Take a number. Wait. Maintain dull caffeine-deprived stupor. Try not to look at other number-clutching victims. When number is called, proceed to stall four. Sit down, hold out arm and be recognized by staff vampire who knows me from another lifetime and needs to list all common acquaintances of our youth and ask if I've seen them. Stupor is holding perfectly. Lucky I know my own name. Finally, we reach the grand finale and I pee in a jar.

Then we are directed to the third floor by a nice man who clearly doesn't know if that is where you drink barium. By a stroke of luck, we arrive in the right unit. A sign says "Barium enema, Barium swallows, Upper GI" - very warm and homey. I am "Upper GI" and thanking the gods for it when I consider the alternatives. I take a number. I turn to Weedy and say, "It's your fault I can't read a magazine."
"That's right. Germs." she says without any hint of remorse or apology.

Finally they call my name and we go to waiting room three of the morning and I am issued the standard cotton-tie raglets. Everyone has barium to drink but me, I am wearing only large dust cloths in unflattering colors and my sandals and I consider complaining about the service. Then I look at the faces of the people drinking barium and reconsider. A half hour after my appointment time has come and gone, I am ushered into a room with a slab and given my very own cup of barium. I don't think it tastes half bad and swallow as ordered while a machine studies my inner workings.

By noon, Weedy and I make it to food. We inhale eggs, bacon, toast and potatoes and I steal an extra piece of complimentary fudge for her as we leave.

On to the doctor. Who looks at the big nasty sore red patches blooming on my chest, shoulder and back and decides that I have Shingles. He prescribes large dark blue pills and assures me that they should help. Should? Should? I am running horror stories about people with shingles getting addicted to pain killers and being unable to function for six months. Should??? No way. I am not taking "should" for an answer. This virus WILL die and it will damn well do it fast.

I phone to inform the new boyfriend of my pox-ridden condition. And add, cheerfully, in a later email, "Well, at least it isn't an STD!" I know how to charm a man, by god.

Inside my head, however, a small high-pitched voice is whining, "Why meeeee?!"

And of course, you all know the answer to that one, don't you? Why not me?

This might be going well so far...

2007-08-12T20:04:00.000-03:00

A trip out for ice cream and a walk includes a stop at the grocery store so I can pick up a few things and, it turns out, he's located the Tall Girl shop for me out in the Big Box ghetto. He takes me to the store and comes in to wait while I look for straight-legged jeans. He passes the time charming the salesladies.

This is nothing, right? Big deal.

Big Deal. Very big deal to have a man think of the fact that I don't drive and groceries have to lugged and the Big Box stores are so far away that it's a day's expedition to go there. Big deal for him to offer so casually that it seems like a routine thing. And he makes it fun. Coming out of the Superstore, we meet someone he knows and when the man introduces himself and his wife, HB smiles cheerily and says, "Nice to meet you. And this is my wife, Linda." I manage to keep a straight face until we get away, at which point HB says, "Well he had a wife." We snicker like children.

Athletic footware and interviews

2007-08-07T10:47:00.001-03:00

A month ago, the final breakup with the Scorpio. A note under my door, followed by weeks of off-and-on snotty nosed crying. I'm puffy-eyed and feel like someone has taken a metal scoop and dug my heart out. The space that's left is sore.

And it's back to internet dating. My old rule is "you have to write me for a while before I'll meet you." Someone points out on their profile that what this method garners is a lot of history that may not be particularly relevant. Someone else says, "You write for ages and then you meet - and hey! You're still meeting a stranger." I have a new rule now. I will talk to you once or twice, briefly via email - and then we meet in a public place.

It's like interviewing. I had three interviews this weekend - one on Saturday, two on Sunday. As my friend D says, "it gets exhausting." Up until the third interview - when I meet HB.

He picks me up, and rather than suggesting a coffee, he spreads out a promotional poster advertising the events at the harbor this weekend. "I have an itinerary," he tells me. We locate the place the bands will be playing and light out for the harbor. He parks and is bewildered, when he comes to open the car door for me, that I'm already on the other side of the van. Good manners, I think. Not me, him.

We stroll, we locate the beer tent where the bands are set up, and we settle in to watch people and listen to the music. He's funny and he gets all my jokes. Never short of an answer. He won't hear of me buying a round. The music is great and we're both belting out songs along with the band before too long. I keep thinking, in total amazement, this is a real date. And I'm actually having fun.

By the end of the evening, we're in The Red Fox Tavern. There's painful local talent on stage and the place is jammed with regulars and it's a little like the bar scene in Starwars. He'd said we were going to another bar. "Bait and Switch" he grins at me.

The next morning, I get an email. "Do you have plans? Shall we go to brunch and for a walk?"
I have plans. My house is in shameful condition. I'm behind on my beadwork. "Brunch would be great" I email back.

Brunch starts at 10:00 and he leaves at 8:00 that night. It turns out that he's a bit of a lunatic. Attention Deficit, I think. He's very bright and his mind is going about 20 times the average human speed. We end up driving and he gives me a tour of auto body shops, indoor cart-racing facilities and remote factories, mostly because that's where the van pointed at a given moment, I believe. For some reason, I just relax and enjoy the pointless meandering. It's a beautiful day. Why not drive anywhere at all?

In the evening, he wants to show me a lake.
Now the interests on his profile were hiking, kayaking and swimming. When I answered his email I agreed to meet with him if he could settle for a woman who might hike, provided no bogs or swamps were involved. I am wearing silly jeweled sandals that consist of a thin sole and two straps over my feet. The path is less gravel than treacherous chunks of rock and root. It's narrow and the trees are closing in. There are boggy patches. We pick our way through what seems like a mile of bad walking and finally I say, "HB!" He continues walking merrily along. "HB!" He stops and turns. "HB, look at me. Have you noticed at all that I'm rather a girly-girl, as opposed to your basic outdoor athletic type?"
He beams at me. "Almost there."

The lake is beautiful when we arrive. He's promised me the sun will set for us and light the water, just wait. It hasn't quite when we arrive and he admits he hasn't come through on that but quickly points out a tree the beavers have almost felled. "Bait and Switch" he says again.

On the way back, it seems there are more paths than we noticed earlier. After tromping, in my ridiculous sandals for about ten minutes, he stops ahead of me and says, "Does this look familiar to you?"
"What??"
"Does this look familiar to you?" I look around. It looks like forest and bush. All of it.
"Noooo. I don't think so HB. Why?"
"I don't think this is the way we came. See usually I go a different way and come out over there." He points to a jetty of land about four miles away and then perks up. "I'll bet if we took this path over here, we could still get to it - and it's on our way!"
"HB. Get me out of here." He looks surprised. He hands me a blueberry.
"Eat that. These are SO good for you."
And then, I'm not absolutely sure it was anything but blind luck, he got me out of there.
"I'm not forgetting you dragged me through bogs, HB." This does not diminish his cheer level in any way.

But I see the pattern shaping up already. We work different hours through the week and just before he leaves, he says, "I know! I'll come over Wednesday morning at 6:00 and wake you up and drive you to work."
"No you won't."
"I won't? Why?"
"Because I know what waking me up means and I'd be late for work."
"Noooo. I'd get you to work."
"No."
"You know you just might start to like that after a while."
"I will kill you if you show up here at 6:00 a.m." He smiles beatifically.

The pattern:
"No HB. I'm not doing that."
"Okay!"
And then we do whatever it is he had in mind.

So we'll see. We'll see. You know it might not be half-bad to hang around someone who has announced, in answer to something grumpy and skeptical I've said, "I'll be the cognitive therapist for us." A Leo. Goddess help me.

Friend in high places

2007-07-24T20:58:00.001-03:00

A good frog is hard to find

2007-07-22T19:48:00.000-03:00

Here is my fantasy:

I meet a man in my day to day life. We talk for a few minutes here and there. We finally decide, because the conversations are pretty good, that we should have coffee together. We have coffee or a drink together and the conversations get even better. He's interesting to me and I'm interesting to him.

We exchange phone numbers. He says he'll call on, say, Wednesday. He actually calls on Wednesday.

He asks me out to dinner.

Ahhh.

Dinner. At a decent restaurant, with a little ambiance. And why does he choose that kind of place? Because he wants to impress me just a little and wants the atmosphere to be congenial and pleasant.

We meet at the restaurant with a little ambiance. I wear a dress and my wonderful new high heels. Why? Because I'd like to impress him a little.

And while we're having dinner and another great conversation, we're both thinking how lucky we are to be there with each other. We're thinking about possibilities. We're actually entertaining hope.

After dinner, we go to our respective homes - kind of wishing that we weren't but not wanting to spoil things by rushing ahead.

Right. Pigs fly. And it's the era of internet dating. Besides, I keep mistaking frogs for princes.

Either KD had a slip of the tongue today or I had a slip of hearing but I thought she said, "Traumedy" describing a movie. I started to laugh. The perfect label for my so-called-love-life:
Romantic Traumedy.

Damn I'm tired of it.

**Some post after all this time, but hey - that's what's not so new.

The meaning of X

2007-07-17T08:46:00.000-03:00

A kiss

A "do not" symbol when placed over the picture of another object

A way to mark the spot where treasure is found

An unknown quantity

In Runes, a rune of the elder futhark meaning "Gift" and indicating the principles of sacrifice and generosity, cooperation and relationship.

The meaning of (o)

2007-07-16T20:51:00.000-03:00

A stone.
I was here.
I listened.
I read.
I felt.

A small mark in the vast universe to show you passed by.

The embers of a shared campfire when the travelers continue their separate journeys.

Breaking bread.

Consolation.

Reaching but not intruding.

Gentleness.

Comfort.

Excerpt from a letter

2007-07-10T14:49:00.000-03:00

Excerpt from a letter to Jim, who never quits trying to do more than hate injustice in his heart...

(Came home sick and) got a great cab driver - a philosopher from Somalia who didn't have a high opinion of the human race in general - but admitted, before I got out, that everywhere in the world, no matter how crappy it is, you will find that one person who doesn't know you and will benefit nothing from kindness but will be kind and unstintingly generous anyway. It was a nice conversation. And a nice turn in conversation. And then I came upstairs here and passed the hell out.

Today I'm home - just because I still feel a tiny bit rough around the edges (but better, overall.)

I read your description of being in Statesville during lockdown with interest - and not without a certain amount of sadness. It's been a year since I wrote Lamar - but not a day has gone by when I haven't thought of him. During our last visit, he looked at the door before I left and said, in a strangled voice, "I just want to go with you. I have to get out of here." I can't seem to forget that. Can't forget the enormous blast of feeling behind the words. Or that it is so unlikely he will ever get that wish.

I wonder sometimes if it's intentional - keeping the prisoners off-guard. On the one hand, I know that when they built the super max prisons, they adopted techniques based on those used on Japanese prisoners of war - I had papers from a conference to that effect at one point. At one point, I had in my possession, a letter written by the prison chaplain at Menard, recommending many inhumane and cruel and punitive measures. He must have been a hell of a spiritual comforter. Certainly the suddenness of change - the ripping away of "privilege" - the uncertainty, is an effective tool in keeping people constantly paranoid and mentally locked-down for self-protection. Works well on visitors, too. Who also never know when, after they've followed the rules to the letter, a CO will suddenly spring a new "rule" on them and usually there will be no room for debate.

God I hate prisons. They stink of fear and anger and lost hope and injustice. I've met a couple great human beings who were COs (correctional officers)...and had a good experience with a warden at Potossi who actually was very helpful in assisting me to choose a place to stay. But I think anyone who spends time in those places is affected adversely.

You go on - doing what you do - perhaps you get discouraged, but it never seems to stop you. Me? I can't think of being in a prison without a wave of sadness coming over me.

First visit to Lamar at Charleston, when it came time for count, the guards didn't take the guys out of the room. They were just asked to line up on one wall. The visiting room went silent - a huge reminder, just in case we'd been able to suspend disbelief and feel relatively "normal," that things were not normal. That this is what the guys went through umpteen times a day and night. We all sat - fathers, mothers, friends, wives, girlfriends, children, with our eyes averted. The CO on duty was a Native American guy with a good sense of humor (and I suspect, a little compassion) and he turned to us and said, "And visitors can line up on the other side of the room for count." It was a joke. And met by silence. Because it was too close to us. It was too close to that feeling we all had of having become prisoners for the duration of the visit - subject to the same rules, the same arbitrary changing of the rules, the same hassle to enter or leave a room, the constant possibility of being yelled at if a guard even imagined we committed some infraction - say, our chair was too close to his chair, we absentmindedly took a potato chip from his side of the table.

My Somalian cab driver told me that in Islam, they are told to act against an injustice unless it will endanger their lives. If it is life endangering to act, then to speak against an injustice. If it is not possible to speak, then to hate the injustice in your heart. The last is the worst of all the solutions, he said - but to not at least hate it is to be less than human.

I hate it in my heart. And it's no solution at all.

Saturday in July: components

2007-07-07T19:04:00.001-03:00

1. The sofa formerly known as Mine.
2. Light hitting Freda.
3. "Dance" in progress

Where she's been.

2007-07-03T20:20:00.000-03:00

I've been in the studio. Anything worth considering it on the bead blog. But for those of you who might suspect my demise, I've posted two new digital pieces I worked on when I took a break from beading.
I've been...happy. Happy. Yes, I believe that's the word for it. Solitary and happy.
Regards,
LJ

Wherein she commits to a relationship

2007-06-06T21:18:00.001-03:00

I suppose this is the beginning of the decline. Soon it will be stewed prunes for breakfast and sensible shoes. I've taken to sitting in the sun - damn the wrinkles, let 'em come. And now this...a cat and I have adopted each other.
Meet Smoke, my new roommate.

Miss Blue Eyes

2007-06-05T21:54:00.000-03:00

A warm misty day. Fog blots out the usual neighborhood activities – street conversation and kids playing in the parking lot. Everyone is huddled at home. At times it rains – a staccato conversation, water on pavement. The whoosh of tires on the road sounds like ocean rolling in and out from the shore.

My beading hand went into a charley horse yesterday, so I am holed up resting my it and come to think of it, the rest of me. Silence, then a movie, then silence. The day has no time sequence. It just rolls slowly, like the fog.

For some reason, I think about a doomed pregnancy that ended in my fallopian tube and with the doctor’s pronouncement that I could easily become pregnant but it would probably be life-threatening. I wonder, if that baby had come to term and been born, how old it would be now. Twenty-two or so, I calculate.

I wonder, if there was a soul, a spirit, waiting to come into the world. If so, did it find another mother? And inevitably, it occurs to me that I’ve spent twenty years working with people the age that child would be now. Although that child never became a part of my life, many others did.

I think about the students at Toronto Dance Theatre and my student assistants at the library– a few of whom I’ve reconnected with by putting a profile up on Facebook. E. found me.

E. graduated a few years back and was, last time I saw her, a successful entrepreneur, looking very big city and glamorous, compared to her student days. E. has beautiful eyes, a quick, quirky wit. She's a natural scholar. She is funny, pretty and kind.

I almost didn’t hire her. I was worried that, with cerebral palsy, she’d find it difficult to cope with all the physical motion at the library desk. Back and forth, hauling down course reserves, having to move quickly when it was busy. Marko knew her, and he was a friend so I confided my dilemma to him.

“She takes sculpture,” he said. Sculpture is a heavy, physically demanding art form. “And if you’re not sure if she can handle it, ask her. She’ll tell you.” Right. It was good advice, as well as a mild rebuke.

So I hired her. She hefted the heavy hard-cover books onto tall shelves without a whimper of protest. She waited on the public, and handled the cash and helped people find the material they needed. She showed up on time, every time and often filled in when someone blew a shift. She sat, to my shame, in the same broken-down, second hand chair – the one with the wonky wheel and no back support – that all my student assistants put up with. And she never asked for anything, even though student services told me there was a fund, if she needed a good chair or anything special. It killed me that she had to sit in that refugee from a second-hand office furniture store.

I found out about her sense of humor and kindness because of the chair. I insisted on a new one, budget or no budget. An expensive, ergonomically correct chair. One with all the requisite wheels attached and functioning. When it finally arrived, I was beside myself. None of my student assistants could come near the library without me joyously urging them to sit in the wonderful chair and try it out.

I learned later that E. had whispered to the others, “Make sure you notice the chair. She’s so excited about it.”

They pay Oprah for this

2007-06-03T17:19:00.000-03:00

I realize that most of you probably imagine me to a kind, patient, loving and occasionally amusing person – clear and articulate about my feelings and sensitive to the feelings of others. A virtual model of consistency, level-headedness and at least a little comic attitude. Certainly someone who doesn’t deserve the unfeeling sons of bitches who litter my love life.

This concludes fiction practice for the day…

“What is it you really need?” he asks.

“Not to die alone….but that’s stupid because, let’s face it, no matter how many people are around your bedside, they aren’t making the trip with you.” He smiles and nods and I continue, “I want to feel protected. Like some man actually wants to protect me. But the minute any man tries it, I wheel around and ask who he thinks he’s talking to – I demand to know if he thinks, for some reason, I’m incapable of looking after myself.”

That’s probably as accurate a picture as I can paint of what it’s like to deal with me.

Now him…the recent villain of the piece…he’s afflicted with the same damn set of emotional paradoxes. Or at least the male version of them. He's just as emotional as me too, only he's stuck with the macho inability to rant and rave when aggrieved.

And this. Both of us have good-sized betrayal issues (I know, who doesn’t?) stemming from our relationships with parents of the opposite sex. Both of us are hyper-sensitive to rejection – real or imagined - and both of us are disposed to think death is preferable to indignity. Our honesty levels (along with our tactless blundering) are about the same. Our sensitivity to undercurrents is very close and we are both very observant - except when it comes to ourselves. Our certainty that only we know what’s really going on is the same. We are independent, passive-aggressive and horribly stubborn. We laugh and cry and care about many of the same issues.

That's why we understand one another, why we connect effortlessly, almost always. Except, of course, for the times when we don’t connect and the whole thing proceeds into the toilet with great haste. And then comes anger. And pain. On both sides. Have you ever seen the tarot card, "The Tower?" It's like that when it happens. Babel. Suddenly we need a universal translator because we are from different planets and cannot make ourselves understood.

Having blabbed my own hurt and innermost feelings all over this blog, I feel compelled to emphasize now that I was talking about my feelings, my interpretation of the whole sorry fiasco. That’s all I knew at the time. And so I write it out and he, this unnamed man whose side of the tale you never hear, comes off sounding like a cad and a bounder. And it’s just that he doesn’t get a speaking part here.

Officially, as narrator and the recently distraught, I want to clarify: he isn’t a cad. My boyfriend is not a twat. And his last two weeks were about as lousy as mine. Only he couldn't talk to anyone.

Just for the record.

On the thirteenth day

2007-06-02T12:05:00.000-03:00

By the 13^th day, anger has flamed into ashes and blown away. The emptiness of loss hollows a space that fills repeatedly with tears. I can’t think badly of him, can’t live with the last furious words I said to him. I can’t summon outraged dignity and hurt pride.

I call to leave voice mail, tell him I hope his upcoming biopsy is over with quickly and the results show he’s holding his own. The wish for his good health is real, but only the top layer of the message, which is I am still your friend, no matter what. I call when I’m certain he’s not there, because I’m not challenging his decision.

And he responds to the message sounding like it’s the first time he’s breathed in two weeks. We talk for two hours on the phone and I say, “I’m glad we could have this conversation. I’m glad it didn’t end in anger.”

He says, “Are you free? Can I come over so we can talk in person?”

At the end of the afternoon, he looks at the bead journal page – studies it for a minute before he says anything then,

“You really thought I was gone for good, didn’t you?”

“Every time.”

Maybe this time we’ve taught each other how to recognize the minefields. God knows, two people never tried harder.

Have shovel, will travel

2007-05-30T19:28:00.000-03:00

Archetypes come in all shades: the good nurturing matriarch and the destroyer, the strong, protecting patriarch and the tyrant…the trickster, the fool, the rebel, the child. You get the idea. All these archetypes exist inside us in some measure.

In dreams, I work on the premise that each element of the dream is a fragment of myself.

So what I’m going to talk about here is personal. It is not about a man or men, or about my conscious views on the subject of the male of the species. I’d like to be clear about that.

“Your patriarch had a dream,” KD says, after I tell her about the nightmare.

The light is dim in the dream, a brooding near-dark. I am standing on the bank of a large flat-bottomed pit, about six or seven feet deep. It resembles, slightly, a skate board park but it has been built for the purpose of torturing women. In this dream, there are a group of nearly grown boys. They are wearing the uniform of an exclusive private school – shorts, white shirts, jackets and striped ties. I know that the uniforms mean they are the children of wealthy, powerful people. Above the law.

One of the boys is in the pit, mercilessly kicking a woman who is only half-conscious and curled into fetal position. He is doing this simply because he can, because he thinks she is less.

I am down on the floor of the pit suddenly and find a shovel nearby. Raging, I hit at his legs with the edge of it, over and over, as hard as I can. He continues, somehow, to kick the woman anyway and I keep swinging the shovel at him.

The dream shifts and I am at the far end of the pit, back on the bank, face to face with an older man wearing the same uniform. The boys have retreated to a kind of underground bunker behind him. “No one is going to get to those boys,” he says.

“I’m calling the police,” I tell him “and we are going down there.”

Another shift and I’m at the opposite bank. In my hand is a crumpled medical document in a wrinkled paper bag. My father’s wife is there and I’m telling her that it’s medical information about my father. I’m anxious that it might be important and might be lost. And then I realize that my father is never coming back.

I wake up crying.

Patriarchal power gone mad and corrupt. Right next to the beloved father.

All in my own little psyche.

Somehow, the job is to own all this. I feel like I’ve been in a hit and run. From the pavement, I look up and see that the driver is someone I love and trust. I know perhaps, that he couldn’t swerve in time. But what kills me is that instead of getting out of the car, he screams into reverse and gets away from the scene as fast as possible. That’s how it feels.

In my heart of hearts though, I know that at some level I’ve allowed it to happen. The same corrupt patriarch embedded in his psyche – the one that tells him he has the power and I don’t, that he is justified in his feelings but I am not – is embedded in my psyche, too. The same beloved and good protector in his psyche is in mine too.

I’ll tell you though. I’m damn proud that I didn’t back down to the boss of the bully-boys.

And maybe, I’m going to own it all a little more. And stop blaming myself – and him – a whole lot more.

I'm not foolish enough to think that this ends with one dream or realization. Or that I won't spend more days in tears. But right now, I'm upright. I'm walking and I have that shovel.

Bead Journal Page 1

2007-05-30T15:46:00.000-03:00

...................Wingless..................Purdah.........................

............................Shatter.........................

I used to write

2007-05-21T09:33:00.000-03:00

I wake up sane. At least, as something passing for sane. A sense of calm, a sense of something better, or at least different, approaching. There is always something new to learn.

In responding to a letter from a dear friend who has asked for my blog URL, I choose links to a few entries rather than subjecting him to the whole, sometimes badly written saga. I was cheered to think that once in a while, I actually say something that holds up over time - for me, anyway.

And because I'm not much in a writing mood right now, and some of you have started reading here recently, I'm going to post links to the pieces I'm not embarrassed to have written.

Of Sandals and Sealing Wax
You are what you (h)ate
Night of the Iguana
The Habit of Sorrow
Eva

Thanks for allowing me to rerun. And for sticking with me through the not-so-hot times and not-so-eloquent entries.

Weather report

2007-05-20T12:12:00.001-03:00

Day three.
The pattern for the magazine submission is done. Seven pages of directions and diagrams, an alternate clasp arrangement enclosed at the last moment. New photos posted to the bead blog. Fewer tears.

Waiting.
Telling myself a door closing always means a door opening. You have to be patient to see how your story turns out. I am waiting in a deep silent place for the page to turn.

The self-portrait says it better.

Country and Western songs

2007-05-18T12:47:00.000-03:00

The phone rings at 8:57 a.m. - but only once. It rings again at 10:00 a.m. and this time he doesn't hang up. By then, I assume, he's taken the requisite number of deep breaths and stiffened his resolve so that, after a long and almost entirely happy relationship of two and a half years, he can announce that we have not been very happy and now it's over.

He phoned it in. That's all I can think about. Two and a half years and he phoned it in.

It is, I think, the second time I have ever let him see me angry. Or more accurately, hear me angry. I don't argue or point out that we have one of these every six months and the rest of the time we are overjoyed to see each other.

"I hoped we could be friends, " he says, "but you don't sound friendly, and I guess that's understandable right now...."

Friends. Does a friend dump you on the phone? Doesn't feel very friendly to me. Feels downright sleazy, in fact.

And now, onward and hopefully upward - pushing off on my three unbalanced wheels, I'll just be continuing with the diagram and directions from hell.

I fall in a hole.

2007-05-16T19:55:00.000-03:00

Pattern:

I'm steaming towards a goal. Right now, I have to write directions and draw diagrams for a bracelet pattern because, to my shock and surprise, a pitch I made to Unnamed Beading Magazine got to stage one - which is: send the bracelet and directions for consideration. I chose, in my infinite wisdom, to submit a bracelet design that I seriously doubt I can explain in under 100 pages. But that's not the pattern I'm referring to.

I'm steaming towards a goal. I need to focus intensely. At exactly the moment I get speed up, an important relationship in my life goes pothole (like going postal, only without weapons) I'm left trying to reach the goal of the moment, driving over the speed limit, on three wheels.

Example:

The phone rings. It's 10:00 a.m. and I'm having a good day at work. It's Man In My Life and he's calling to inform me that I've sent him a covert message. The covert message in question is that I'm having doubts about him and he's trying to decide if my life would be better without him in it. I have recently, casually mentioned getting email from a Man Who Is Not In My Life. This was the fatal mention containing top secret content understood by him, but not me.

I blithely assumed that I was telling him something about my life. You know, day to day news. I compounded the problem in a later conversation by explaining that I get too far into my maze-like brain as the result of choosing to spend days without human contact. I thought that I emphasized "choosing" as the operative word here but, according to him, I am sitting around alone and blaming him if I am lonely. I am, it would seem, a goldmine of secret messages. And crazy or stupid to boot because, really, I actually thought I meant what I said. I thought I was clear. I thought I knew what I felt.

*Pattern: Blindsided in a public place, deep in the pothole, I try to explain that I didn't mean to give covert messages. I consult my gut. Nope. No secret wish to have him out of my life there. Nope. No blaming him for my choices or general dilemmas.
But I have, I do, I am guilty on all counts, according to him.
Repeat from * over and over and over until I am trying to hide in a nearby storage cabinet with the phone while crying snottily and doubting my sanity. Maybe I'm not even on the phone. How would I know? Maybe I'm not even at the office. The general idea seems to be that I'm shaky on these kind of details.

I call KD, a Trained Professional and more importantly, a pretty smart cookie, for an objective opinion because I'm beginning to doubt whether it's really my hand dialing the phone.

According to the Trained Professional, Dr. Smart Cookie, what we have here is a mixed message which reads:

1. Be free! I have no claim on you. I am not jealous or possessive nor do I want you to be.
2. I am the alpha male and you have just mentioned another man. That upset me and now I am going to make you sorry.

I think that's pretty close. And what makes it bearable is that he has no idea that he's doing that. He gets pinned between his convictions and his conditioning, the testosterone floods in and maybe he's thinking, too, that what's the point of a girlfriend if she comes with issues and - voila! I'm a crazy woman, speaking in tongues, saying bad things. Covertly of course. Just like a bloody woman, don't you think?

Somebody shoot me?

No. Somebody shoot me if I do not a.) make a firm rule against conflict calls at work and b.) if you catch me apologizing for sending messages I definitely did not send.

No shooting him. I still love the big idiot. That's the other part of the pattern.

"Once had a love and it was a gas
Soon turned out it was a pain in the ass"
Heart of Glass - Blondie

View

2007-05-13T17:02:00.000-03:00

They did not kill it while it slept, the chainsaw executioners. They didn't do this a month ago, when buds were a dream and reality was bare and frozen.

Two days now, the escalating whine of blade meeting the resistance of a living tree, just blooming into leaf. The sickening crack of branches as they give way. The shouts and ecstatic whoops of men enjoying the sweaty labor of destruction.

They perch precarious, stories up in the maple's branches and silently I urge them to fall. I wish them dead and then pull back the wish. Curses are dangerous. Perhaps a broken bone or a missing finger would do. Limb for a limb.

A red maple three stories high. As tall as the building I live in. How old was it?

Branch by branch, they dismember it. In a neighbourhood, I think, where beauty is not the hallmark, what we really need is another squat, treeless bungalow surrounded by nothing but patchy grass and decorated with a prefab shed.

I plug my ears with silicone stoppers. I turn the music up. But now and then, sickened and anxious, I check.

There is a hole in the landscape. Through it, I see pavement, cars, bungalows. Where there was a hallelujah of red growth, there is now sky.

Do curses fall on small patches of ground? Not long ago, at the house adjacent, there lived a big yellow dog who was chained to a shed. No one ever walked him. I never saw anyone pet him or talk to him. My landlady asked the owners to have him put down if they wouldn't care for him. The man snorted, "It's her dog and I don't live here anymore." Neighbors fed him and brought water, but many days, ( he was sick and cold as well as forgotten) he keened and mourned aloud - a sound that stabbed my heart. One day the owners sold the cursed place and I can only suppose, grudgingly paid the money to have him killed. I was thankful to think he might be dead, might be free.

Now, right next door to where the yellow dog mourned, this.

And I keep thinking, just a finger, even a fingertip...just so you know how it feels.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

2007-05-08T18:43:00.000-03:00

I am the new poster girl for a charity event in which people (not me) are sponsored to rappel down the side of a thirty story building for money. This event takes place annually, diagonally across the intersection by my workplace.

At the corner of Hollis & Duke, in front of a Subway sandwich shop, I am standing, one clear blue-skied day last year, mesmerized by the proceedings. Wind gusts hard off the ocean and the victim/volunteers, many of whom are entirely inexperienced, dangle and swing like bells, tethered to life by a mere piece of rope. Many of them can't seem to connect toes to building except to push themselves out into midair again and again. Way up there. About a foot from the sky. Miniature people, from my vantage point. Below them, waiting, are reporters and TV crews.

I recall this with the clarity of absolute attention - my neck aches, my head is thrown back, my hair blows wildly. I don't move for a long time. I gulp down the hugeness of the sky, the sight of the flapping flags on the building top and the flapping humans-on-a-string. For me, the world has stopped its push and shove, it's anthill flow of street level activity. I could have stayed in that spot forever feeling the sky fill me up and the blood pound through my veins.

This past week, people keep announcing that they've seen me on TV. I don't watch TV so take their word for it. Apparently, the next rappelling event is being promoted - and there I am on flickering screens in their living rooms - locked to my spot outside the sandwich place, oblivious to everything else, thinking it's just me, the sky, and dangling people. Can they do that? I mean can they make you be the poster girl without asking?

Sometimes, my brushes with celebrity are less innocuous. For instance, I once agreed to be interviewed by Frank magazine - a muck-racking tabloid of little repute. A friend who had a friend who wrote for them asked me if I'd agree to meet them. They were sympathetic to prison issues, she said - and they said. They assured me they wanted to do something positive.

I asked around, "Should I do it?"
"What the hell, said one friend whose judgment I trusted, "why not? Who reads Frank anyway?" I couldn't argue with that. Certainly no one I knew.
Ahhh.
Who reads Frank anyway?

Let me tell you. Every person who visits a corner store, grocery checkout, magazine stand. Every person, in other words, who doesn't live in a cave outside of town, saw the cover - with a hideous picture of me, under the screaming banner, "The Librarian and the Lifer."
And the story was even worse. Not mean. Just...cliche. I told Lamar, the "lifer" of the title, "I was Joan of Arc and you were the Baby Jesus."

Even farther back, practically in neolithic times, when I was receptionist for a local TV & Radio station and when the guest for an afternoon talk show didn't arrive, I was yanked from my receptionist chair and plunked down on the set to be interviewed (live) about the mystery of Tarot cards. Considering the five seconds notice, I did a damn good job. The station even thought about asking me to host a show. Until the calls came in about the godless witch on the afternoon show.

I wonder if that's my fifteen minutes? If so, I'm not looking for more. Not unless I see a cheque soon.

Thanks Evaard, for the inspiration for an entry. For paragraph two - and the rest as well.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste

2007-05-03T15:46:00.000-03:00

abstunt: to abstain from an activity thereby stunting growth

assclown: I just like this one. From KD

bioblabgraphry: talking about ones’ life on a blog (alternate: bioblographry)

biocide: unsound ecological practices (I haven’t heard this, but it might already be in use)

bubblegut: The result of drinking too much beer or bad elimination habits

coopernation: What politicians see as patriotism (these days)

drome: A self-employed person who works at home (fr: drone and home)

fantmare: A fantasy that turns into a nightmare (such as coopernation)

fembrane: the largely useless membrane that denotes virginity in women

Farch: Occurs in the month of March when it feels like February (Weedy’s word)

frage: fear followed by rage

frice: The price of friendship

friceless: Often mistaken for a typo (KD) meaning “without frice.”

sleaky: Slick and sneaky behavior; a charming sneaky person

tofood: Anything vegan trying to act like another non-vegan food

Undulush: Lush undulation

wisteria: transitional emotional state between wistfulness and hysteria (not to be confused with the flower)

worshop: To believe that prayers are currency to be redeemed for merchandise or other rewards

As usual, the f-words have it. Anyone else just dying to burn off a few brain cells in the pursuit of nothing? (It started with "wisteria" and I have no idea why.)

Reflecting on the last post...

2007-05-02T18:03:00.000-03:00

And what of “the suitcase it came in?”

I wear my body. I inhabit it - with a kind of smothered resentment when it aches and with joy on other days. Often, and this explains being accident prone, I barely inhabit it at all. Ordinarily, I occupy a space somewhere a few feet above, a little distant from it. Or perhaps I could say, I “preoccupy” a space a few feet above. I’m nearly famous for my ability to pass within two feet of someone I know without seeing them.

As a child, I was told I was pretty and took the lesson that being pretty was a valued commodity. It was unearned though, an accident and therefore not to be trusted and I knew it. Sure enough, just at puberty, when we all hit that gawky stage in-between childhood and adulthood and our bodies seem undecided about which way to go, pretty slipped away. I was too tall, too skinny. My knees were knobby and my arms and legs extended forever like willow branches. My hair was blonde, thick, coarse and unruly in the era of the glossy smooth Breck Shampoo girl. I was flat chested and my feet were long and thin. “Olive Oil” one kid called me. It was the era of Marilyn Munroe.

I slept with my hair in wire brush rollers every night. I perched on the edge of telephone books and steps, raising up and down on my toes, praying to the god of shapely calves to give me muscles. I hunched my shoulders forward and tucked my head down hoping to take up less skyward space. I squeezed into shoes a size too small and had constantly bandaged spots where the leather had cut into my heels and toes. I wore padded bras and frantically exercised, pressing the palms of my hands together and releasing in sets of 50, in a futile effort to build something to occupy the bras. I imprisoned my non-existent, flat white-girl butt in panty girdles because Ann Landers said “Ladies don’t jiggle.”

My Aunt Dorothy, who hit the measuring tape at 5’10” tall was a symbol of abject horror to me. Never mind that people said, “You should be a model.” They also said, “You should play basketball,” never thinking that being tall was not the only prerequisite for either. I was awkward, I photographed horribly. I felt genetically cursed. I actually prayed, “Please don’t let me be as tall as Aunt Dorothy.” I was 5’7” at the time. I towered over boys my age and that was a matter of extreme concern when, in high school, the boys began to date my shorter sisters. The ones who cared about their cars and looked cute in knee socks.

Pitiful. All adolescents are pitiful and painful aren’t they? This story is so old it’s as if it doesn’t belong to me anymore. The sixties arrived bringing hippy colors and then feminism and a boycott of makeup, bras and all the wily arts of disguise. I noticed that my politically inclined “feminist” boyfriend of the time was staring at the babe wearing Cleopatra eyeliner and a micro-mini, while critiquing my feminism if I combed my hair or wore lip gloss.

Somewhere in bouncing from one stage to another I realized that how you look is a genuine kind of currency. It’s a shitty realization, really – but there you go – we live in a world that pays lip service to inner beauty but not much else. A kinder realization, and equally true, is that I view my physical self the same way I view clothes - sometimes strictly utilitarian, sometimes as a form of artistic expression. I am a bit of a shape-shifter and I’ve learned how to cast a glamour. It’s done with makeup and mirrors, with angles and light. Anyone short of the Elephant Man can look good in photographs.

Don’t let image fool you. I don’t let it fool me. It's a little skill and a little of what's left of a particular kind of currency.

And soon, soon, I think with anticipation, I shall be an old woman and...

".....I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter..."

-Jenny Joseph

Right choice?

2007-05-02T10:03:00.000-03:00

I've just done three self-portraits trying to get something better for an avatar. I needed an image that showed my bead work in a striking way because this avatar appears also on Born Under A Bead Sign. I liked the last avatar because I looked a bit like a mad women, which, of course, I am but this hardly the image you'd like to leave with a potential customer.

In these the blender, kitchen counter and other domestic lovelies have been removed and replaced by solid blue-violet - and I've bumped the color in places, and brightened the light.

It is my hope to look approachable. I chose the bottom one, even though it cuts the cuffs off a little. The middle picture looks like I am about to shape-shift into Munch's "The Scream". Or like I'm demonstrating what "too much" is to a plastic surgeon about to do a face lift. The top one looks a bit deer-in-the-headlights, or like I'm a wise-ass. I am a wise-ass, but it isn't the image you want to sell in this case. This would have been my second choice though - I've softened my face and sharpened the cuffs. Hmmmm.

Whatcha think?

oozing through the weekend

2007-04-29T21:14:00.000-03:00

The swoosh-hiss of cars on wet pavement. In my studio, the fan hums, turning its satellite head back and forth, issuing a tiny arthritic click each time it stretches to its farthest point. It jerks gracelessly along in its preset path – front to side, side to front, and back. It’s rather how I imagine I’d look in an advanced aerobics class.

It's an underwater day. Like looking at the world from just beneath the surface of a lake. The sky is diluted Payne’s grey, cloud and mist. The music of rain.

The grass is patching up green. The Red Maples behind my building – always competing with Forsythia to be first in bloom or leaf – have a peach fuzz growth of leaves. An aura of leaves.

I am happy. The story arc is kind of a gently waving line, really. Wake up, sit down in studio wearing only my bedraggled over sized blue T-shirt. Pick up a needle and thread it. Pick up a bead, and another and then repeat for ten hours – less the time to stuff myself into clothes, shop for food and flowers and have lunch with Weedy. I leave the radio off. I don’t talk on the phone. I don’t check email. I am happy. I even like the weather – below normal temperatures, rain, fog. It’s all watercolor lovely and hushed.

Happy begins yesterday. The Scorpio is visiting in the morning. “Ten, ten thirty,” he says. At 8:30, I’ve had time enough to clear the debris from the coffee table, dump the dishes into the dishpan to soak. I've just barely stepped out of the shower when he arrives. “I had to come early,” he said. Uh-huh. And here I am with Hair By Showercap, clutching a towel around me and dripping on the rug. This is more chagrined, sopping woman than sexy, I assure you. “Take your time,” he says, with a big magnanimous grin, thoroughly entertained by my discomfort.

What the hell, I wasn’t going to be dressed for long anyway.

****Interval****Shot of Scorpio putting jacket on****Shot of hands moving on clock****

I slide into the afternoon – where the story “arc” begins to flat line. I pop in a DVD of Running with Scissors and watch it. Twice in a row. And I loll, boneless and lazy. I loll eating ginger snaps. And then I loll drinking wine. I loll right up to bedtime.

I reflect on the week of not complaining. The one big challenge – a three hour, no coffee break meeting, followed by training to change computer tables. Mute squirming on my part through the usual overextended, rambling off-topic blah blah. I note that while I am not complaining, one woman is. I perk up. Oh good – someone to study. She starts by making a relevant point, but it swiftly descends into a pinched thin monologue about how much work she does and how much is still left and how really, it isn’t even worth it to take two days off when you have to face that when you come back. I’m absolutely fascinated listening to her. I sit up straight in my seat and pay close attention. I know it’s exactly how I sound when I complain. And it’s horrible. We are on item 3 of a 16 item agenda, and we’re an hour into the meeting and she is not clamming up.

I decide to extend the not-complaining experiment for life.

Talking to Weedy on the phone, I say, “It isn’t that hard. I don’t complain as much as I thought I did.”

“That,” she replies, “is because we don’t care about much anymore.” And it’s true. At least it’s true of the bullshit things I used to think were important and worth worrying about. There’s something to be said for telling yourself, when your thoughts start to shove you front to side to front, that you might only have a day, a year, a decade left.

It is enormously cheering and makes complaining seem a little ludicrous.

Voila! Finished

2007-04-25T16:53:00.000-03:00

Can't complain...

2007-04-23T17:34:00.000-03:00

I bitch. I often make aggrieved, self-pitying and sarcastic noises. Really, I don't have a life that warrants that kind of thing, so I've decided to attempt a cure - a week without complaining.

Let's look at the part of the definition I'm interested in...

com·plaint (kəm-plānt')
n.

An expression of pain, dissatisfaction, or resentment.
A cause or reason for complaining; a grievance.

In my case "complaining" is closely linked with "whining."

whine (hwīn, wīn)
v., whined, whin·ing, whines. v.intr.

To utter a plaintive, high-pitched, protracted sound, as in pain, fear, supplication, or complaint.
To complain or protest in a childish fashion.
To produce a sustained noise of relatively high pitch: jet engines whining.

So not complaining is partly a matter timbre, maturity level and what I'm projecting to my fellow humans. For instance, I will allow myself to say, "The bus is twenty minutes late and I have missed my appointment." But I will not let my voice arc into that wheedling, why-me-god, nerve-shredding tone of voice, punctuated with deep, sad sighs that mark protest in a childish fashion against the inevitable.

I picked a week in which I have to attend a meeting all afternoon. This is a proposition (she said in an upbeat voice) that generally makes me hope to be struck seriously ill - just for the day. Meetings are, to my personality type, as church services are to a hyperactive three year old wearing scratchy underwear and forced to sit in a wooden pew. That is simply a fact. I say that calmly, evenly. Not in a sustained noise of relatively high pitch. Nothing unduly protracted.

In spite of loathing of the average business meeting, my deportment, lately, is impeccable due to the fact that I've learned to: A) Shut my pie hole and B) when my eyes glaze over and I am beginning to look forward to counting paint stains, I take notes. Occasionally, in sheer desperation, I industriously record every word said. This yields the bonus of being able to actually report back on the meeting when I return to work, to appear to have cared about the content of the meeting. Sadly, though, this is often not sustained. It morphs into observation and free-writing. If someone comes in hauling a towering ego problem or an advanced case of anal retention they are likely to become fodder for the creative/escape impulse and I use them for writing practice - meaning that I have to read my notes aloud to my coworkers and boss and never, ever show them to anyone.

This week though, I am confined to facts. Just the facts, ma'am. Unembroidered and without opinion. She is wearing red shoes. His tie is loud enough to break the sound barrier. No. No. Scratch the tie thing. If it gets really bad, I'll draw or count the number of words in every sentence spoken.

Right after this week's meeting, I have computer training. It is necessary. It is good. I am supposed to be grateful for it. I will behave and take notes. Real ones. I will smile and look interested. I will use my company manners.

Then, on the way home, I will jam on headphones and play soothing music at a volume that could be heard by the dead. Oh. And I won't look around the bus, either.

Wish me luck. Better yet - choose a bad habit of your own (not blogging. NOT blogging) and swear off for a week. I figure we'll all have lots of material after seven days...

Unclench & update

2007-04-21T17:03:00.000-03:00

Almost there! Note for Ariel...the center is dichroic glass. According to Wikipedia (links are not active):

The brilliant dichroic optical properties of dichroic glass are the result of multiple micro-layers of metal oxides. These thin layers of oxides have a total thickness of three to five millionths of an inch.

NASA developed dichroic glass for use in satellite mirrors. Multiple ultra-thin layers of different metals (gold, silver, titanium, chromium, aluminium, zirconium, magnesium, silicon) are applied to the surface of the glass in a vacuum chamber.

The resulting plate of dichroic glass can then be fused with other glass in multiple firings. Certain wavelengths of light will either pass through or be reflected, causing an array of colour to be visible. Due to variations in the firing process, individual results can never be exactly reproduced; each piece of fused dichroic glass is unique and no two pieces are ever the same.

Brilliant sun, deep bright blue sky. I have forgiven the weather bastards. And today it's ass plunked on the plastic balcony chair and beading my brains out....

Wish list for the world

2007-04-19T17:40:00.000-03:00

My first attempt to avoid commenting on the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech was an attempt at humor. Yesterday's entry.

And this was not because I haven't thought about it or cared, not because I don't realize or feel the immensity of it - but because the event ate hope and shat out fear, grief and anger. I didn't want to add to it and I still don't.

So this entry is not for opinions, although, like everyone else, I have them. This is a wish list...

Let us pray if that is our inclination or remember the victims and their families - including the shooter and his family, with as much understanding as we can muster. Sadly, victims or villain - it could have been any of us. I recall here the mantra of Buddhist, Bo Lozoff, author of We are all doing time, which is "Anything that can happen to a human being can happen to me."

Let's not use it as an excuse to descend to fear, hate and paranoia. Let's not look with suspicion on every loner who ever displayed signs of anger or alienation. Let's not lock our hearts and minds and see the world as ugly beyond hope. Let's not pretend that dwelling on this, talking about it and using it as a excuse to descend verbally and emotionally to the same level of vigilante "justice" as the killer used is a helpful thing in any way. If we do, then another kind of terrorism wins. Again.

Let us realize that if we want a better world, to paraphrase Gandhi, we must be a better world. If there is something concrete to be done - do it. If not, let us not pretend that letting fear and anger eat our hearts and courage away in any way contributes to a solution.

Let us understand that fear, hate and rage poison. Period. And that all hate and rage is based in fear.

Let us feel our grief and let it pass through. Let us be kinder to the next person we see, whoever they are, however small the opportunity. Let us drop our everlasting opinions for just a moment, and realize that the world without reflects everyone of us.

I have refused to discuss this issue all day - and it amazes me how people react. There is a kind of tribal pressure to take some kind of radical stand. To react - in the ways I've described above or to defend not reacting. I hope we don't fall for the pressure.

May they all rest in peace. May we all try our best to live in peace, to be decent to one another.

Things I like about today

2007-04-18T20:21:00.000-03:00

1. I am not dead. This cheers me more than it does on some days because I have been talking to my friends, listening to the news and generally am provoked, more or less in self-defense, to count what blessings are mine and what curses, minor and major, are not mine. It's sink or count.

2. I have figured out that I can ice the bottom of my foot - which has developed a strange burning kind of pain for no reason on god's not yet (here) green earth - while putting on makeup, thereby saving myself a whole 10 minutes I can't spare in the morning and enabling me to insert my right foot in a shoe and hobble bravely off to work.

3. I do not have three adult offspring living with me, one of whom ruins my entire night of sleep by yakking on the phone at 4:00 a.m. in the next room.

4. I did not go to the Dominican Republic to find every single travel arrangement screwed up and have my baggage lost until two days before returning. The baggage I didn't lose didn't contain life-sustaining medication and I was not in a place where I could not replace said medication. I didn't go, so I didn't follow the trip up with an emergency appointment with the dentist either.

5. The huge white blister on the inside of my lower lip - the one caused by a rogue strand of chicken in soup heated (by me) to past boiling - is healing. There won't be a scar. Not visibly anyway. And better yet, no one will phone to ask me if I was hit in the crosswalk accident they heard about on the news because I am too obviously clumsy to survive.

6. I do not work in a reasonable facsimile of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and am unlikely to encounter anyone, in my daily work, who can weave a blanket and bra together and make a hat out of it. No coworker will make me count how many cookies someone else eats.

7. Minor Deity fixed a Trojan virus on the computer at work and we got to have a pleasant chat wherein he accused me of surfing porn sites at the front desk of the library. I assured him that people liked that. My coworker assured him it made the place feel more homey. That broke up the work day nicely.

8. The number 20 bus at high rush hour was one of the newer models I refer to as "mini vans" and passengers were about standing in the driver's lap and on the dashboard by mile two. I gave my seat up for an older man who, while not looking terribly frail, was lugging shopping bags and appeared to be panic-stricken and frightened when he saw the lack of available space. That's not the good part.The good part was how, when anyone stands on the bus to give up a seat, it creates a tipping point and someone else or several someones also give up seats. A hefty man in work clothes offered me his seat. Okay. It's not much. But it counts because it reminds me that sometimes we are decent people if just reminded a little about decency.

9. I have traded a cow for a handful of magical dichroic glass cabochons and expect to see a beanstalk sprout magically from them at any moment. Or at least a few minor works of art. In a pinch, I'm sure they'll be tasty when I can no longer afford groceries - and the glass artist is having a very happy day. eBay loves me, too.

10. Someone gave me a compliment on LOE and someone else referred to this blog as "dessert." I had cookies to celebrate. I didn't count how many.

11. They say - the weather bastards, that is - that it will stop raining and driving cold gale winds into our little Maritime faces by Friday. They say that it will become almost warm and that bright and unfamiliar light will appear in the heavens during the day time. I'm only sort of counting that one. The weather bastards are always right about crappy conditions but they often miss on good ones.

All in all...well...I'm still standing. It's a lesser ambition than I once may have sported, but it's achievable. Hope you are all still standing too.

Love,

LJ

"Hope I die before I get old"

2007-04-13T22:09:00.000-03:00

I was what? Fifty-two, I think. Some nerve, huh? In some of the other pictures, you can see the tattoo on my upper left arm - the tarot card, Strength - a lady closing a lion's jaws, so I had to be over fifty. The tattoo was a gift for my 50th birthday. My friend, beautiful Cristina, is the photographer and later we put her in the body suit and I take the camera. The cats needed no costumes.

Some people buy a little red sports car. For the pictures, I am a little red sports car.

See how thin I am? I'm not bragging, here. I am thin because my marriage is finished and my husband and I are painfully living together in the house we couldn't sell for nine agonizing months. I can barely eat or sleep. I am thin because I'd come to love someone wrongfully serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit. I am thin because my pre-fifty world and all my notions of how it works have collapsed. At first it caved a little on the sides, got soft and wobbled. It wasn't long before it couldn't hold at all. I am thin because I no longer belong anywhere. And I am the bad guy. I'm the one leaving a marriage everyone used as an example of "See? It can work."

I am thin and wearing a see-through spider lace body suit, posing for a camera because I have rediscovered that I am still a sexual being and because the pictures will make a man in a far-away prison cell happy. Just for a day, maybe, an hour, he'll forget the walls and the shouting male voices and the way it all closes in - a constant menace. Just for a little, he'll just be a man looking at the woman he loves. I can't send him a book or a pair of socks - but I can send the pictures.

I am thin because I've become one of those talk-show women - or at least that's how I feel. I don't feel like I belong to any race, to any culture. And people I thought would credit me with some intelligence are looking at me like I'm some kind of geek. Not all people. My close friends understand some, or they worry, and sometimes they're as outraged as I am at what I'm learning about how justice works. I have crossed a line and the only thing I know how to do is keep walking.

At this time, I'm writing. I am devouring books on race, justice, the penal system. I publish some writing. Preaching to the choir. I do research for a Prison Action Committee. Each step I take is one step farther on the wrong side of the looking glass - where the rules are backwards or tricks of the dark. Each step strips away a little of my privileged naivety. White. Middle-class. Surely that kind of thing doesn't happen here.

I am fifty-two or thereabouts. I have been patted down, screamed at by guards, processed through metal and drug detectors, and ordered to leave because the prison regulations for visitors didn't tell me that I could not bring a purse and store it in my locker.

I have walked, barefoot in the rain, high heels in hand, a mile or so through Southern Missouri farmland to leave the offending purse with surprised and kind strangers at an auto body shop in the middle of nowhere, down the highway. I have traveled over 1500 miles for the visit. The people at the auto body find someone to drive me back, bless them.

I am fifty-two and I am exhausted beyond belief. I am thin. I am a raw nerve resting against a high tension wire. I am grief and stupid bravery. I am love and loss and horrible awareness and can't be reasoned with.

"Cowgirl of the century" Marko called me - understanding more than I could let myself, and even as young as he was then, what kind of price I'd pay.

I look at the picture and have ambivalent reactions. I'm glad I'm not there anymore. I've learned not to tilt at the world and that screaming doesn't wake the dead. I've learned to swallow the things that break my heart and make me rage. I've learned that bravery is best used with careful strategy and needs to be balanced with a little care for life and metaphorical limb.

And I think...that even though I was more brave than wise, I am not sorry. For any of it. But most of all, I am not sorry for having loved.

Rather my life as it is and was than to let death find me saying, "What? But I still have to...."

Goodbye and good luck

2007-04-12T18:42:00.000-03:00

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1922-2007

I wanted to say something meaningful. But this image - the only thing appearing on his official website - says it all.

The beader

2007-04-09T12:55:00.000-03:00

Peter Cottontail is dead

2007-04-07T19:00:00.000-03:00

It is a typical January day. Steady heavy snowfall has dropped a white cover over the world outside my window, the temperature is heading for minus one Celsius, and the weather sadists predict that it will taper off sometime tomorrow morning, after which the wind will increase to 70K per hour. The temperature will still be a minus.

It is In between Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. April 7th, in case you aren't catching my drift. The time of year I expect to see small purple and yellow flowers emerging from the earth. The season in which I send my winter coat to the dry cleaners and start trying to remember where I put my sandals. When the dead straw covering the ground turns a miraculous green.

No. Apparently not.

And even though I have lived in this provincial outpost of hell for twenty-one years, my poor rigid brain cannot seem to accept the idea that Spring, in the Canadian maritimes, is more of a concept than an event.

I take it personally.

It is on my list of questions for the Supreme Being. It is on my list of Critical Design Flaws. Not to mention the fact that I'd like to inquire as to whether the Supreme Being thinks this is funny or simply dislikes an entire block of the north Atlantic and everyone who sails on her.

This paranoia is, of course, ego-maniacal self-pity of the grandest magnitude, when you consider real natural disasters. I mean tsunamis. I mean earthquakes and Hurricane Katrina. And the unnatural natural disasters spawned by our love of comfort and fossil fuel. I tell myself that, but I continue to sulk.

I sulk and I read "In a Sunburned Country" for the second time. I long to be in Australia - a place where plants and rocks are a strange and beautiful blue-grey. Where it is late summer.
Or in Cuba or Brazil - wearing a red dress to set off my gorgeous sunburn, drinking tequila or rum and gazing at flowers. Hell. I would settle for Vancouver where it's just as grey but the precipitation is not solid and the temperature is...seasonally appropriate.

Here, Spring may not come at all. One day in late May or Early June, it will become summer. It will shock our cold whithered systems into stupidy. It will be humid. Or not. Sometimes summer is also a concept - at least until September, when it becomes glorious, hot and sunny - just at the time I'm thinking I should find my winter coat. July could be lovely...warm and sun-drenched or, then-again, foggy and rain-soaked every single day for the entire month.

Fortunately for me, I have a book and enough cheap red wine to blur my eyesight if that's the only escape. And I can cheer myself with the fact that I haven't been waiting all winter to ride a motorcycle. Now those guys are suffering.

Tickets to anywhere else gratefully accepted. But be patient. Because if the ticket is for outside Canada, thanks to the new US border-crossing regulations, our passport offices are 127,000 passport applications behind - and my passport has expired.

What has survived major weeding

2007-04-07T12:33:00.000-03:00

Okay, Herhimnbryn! Snoop to your hearts content! Click on these and they blow up enough so that you can read most of the titles. Keep in mind this does not include the books piled in the bedroom, the top of the fridge, on the coffee table and behind the books on writing, where there is a row of fiction. Seven years ago, I parted with most of the fiction, keeping only a few of the dearest ones I knew I would reread. The rest, mostly, can be borrowed from the library. And believe it or not, this is as sparse as I can get things. Be thankful you are not one of the people who helps me move!
(Note of interest - Blogger burps when I try to insert an apostrophe. As I misuse them, perhaps I have been eighty-sixed!)

Writing is not always the same as saying something

2007-04-04T18:21:00.000-03:00

Above: left to right - Tiger's Eye, Pietersite, and Dichroic Glass WINNINGS.

I am a winner. A winner! I love how they call me that at eBay as I drain my bank account of grocery money. I will eat the word for breakfast and lunch until payday while I pray that the various mail systems from the USA to China to Canada do not screw my winnerdom up by losing my treasures.

I write the maker of the dichroic glass cab on the right. I tell her that I am slightly embarrassed to have paid as little as I did for such a fabulous piece. And it was nice to hear back that she loved the piece and had a hard time putting it up for auction. I will send her a photo of the finished work for her soon-to-be website and credit her when I finish my soon-to-be-masterpiece using the cabochon. Sometimes I love the craft biz. Love how generous and supportive artisans can be with each other.

I'm having a Dixie Chick day, other than that. A little sour, a wrong note pinging the eardrums, a who-cares (I do, actually) kind of dispirited day. As an Aquarius, I am supposed to love humanity and I do. It has often been pointed out, however, that Aquarians do not so much love the individual components that make up humanity. I have those days. And don't forget, I am one of the components.

Ruler of Aquarius, Uranus (the old god Ouranos) mated with Gaia & then, picky, high & mighty sky god that he was, he imprisoned his children. He was a swell guy. Finally, one of his kids, the Titan Chronos (Saturn) chopped his dad's manly parts off and cast them into the sea - where they begot the Furies and Aphrodite.

And so I am a cranky person with occasional charm because of having this astrological mythology as my heritage. That's my story and I'm sticking to it for now.

Tomorrow, I am about to meet an old friend of Marko's for a drink - and dump some of this fabulous wealth of astrological knowledge into his head. At his request, can you imagine...

Meanwhile, I will try to defeat the Dixie Chick impulse to not make nice and gloat over my winnings.

What? You thought this was about something?

Last word on the dysfunctional human as corporation

2007-04-03T14:27:00.000-03:00

It seemed a good idea at the time.

2007-04-01T20:54:00.000-03:00

If you look down to the floor (not to close, I didn't vacuum) you'll see a wooden wedge which has slipped out from under the bookcases. This is an oldish building and the wedge was intended to make up for an uneven floor that tilts the bookcases forward in a precarious sort of way.

I washed the curtains this weekend, and because you can't actually get into the corner on the left without dismantling the room, I've worked out a system whereby I thread them onto the curtain rod, stand on a chair by the balcony door and then fling the curtained rod in the direction of the hook on the far left. Mostly this works. All I have to do then is move the rickety kitchen chair to the left corner, lean over about three feet while stretching to the ceiling & make sure the rod in actually in it's hook.

But I noticed after (carefully) limping off the chair that the left side curtains looked wrong. Oh joy, the middle panel had tabs hanging limply off the rod. I'd sort of forgotten about the tilt, so I cleared the plants and flowers, the bowls of stones and (carefully) climbed up to stand on the top of the bookcase. It was at this point that I had a religious experience. The bookcase began to sway a little and I began to pray, fervently as I threaded curtain tabs and wobbled on my bad ankle. "Oh Lord, just don't let the bookcase break or fall over and I will never ever do this again, Amen."

Evidently there is a God.

I went back to beading, because the worst that can happen with that is a foul temper and finger pricks.

Later, the Scorpio phoned. He called because a lady was hit by a car at a crosswalk near my house and, he said, he wanted to make sure it wasn't me. I was so touched by his concern that I made extravagant promises of a sexual nature, only to realize later that while he is worried about my well-being, he also has been calling me Gerald Ford (Google it, those under 40) lately and is mightily entertained by my propensity towards falling off my own shoes.

I didn't say anything about the curtains, just in case.

I am a corporation.

2007-03-31T20:54:00.000-03:00

You're not the boss of me.

Here in Chez Spryfield, the problem is that no one is the boss of me, which leaves me as my own supervisor. Around the time of the divorce, I used to imagine that when I became supervisor, executive director and president of myself and my free time, I would write the Great Canadian Literary Non-fiction masterpiece or at least publish a few magazine articles or perhaps Do Good Works. I imagined that I would cook healthy meals without wads of dead flesh in them and go to the gym regularly. Things, things would always be exactly where I left them. No one would cut electrical wire with my good sewing scissors. I would keep a journal in which I wrote brilliant insights (as opposed to perpetually whining.)

I have approximately seven years of proof that none of this is will ever happen.

First of all (although this is very old news now) I cried for three months. I did (on the up side, if you can call it that) lose about 25 pounds, 10 of which were necessary to actually sustain life. I began to talk to plants. I lived on a diet of coffee, wine and cigarettes. I wrote volumes - of email to a long-suffering friend, who did his best, from a couple thousand miles away, to keep the sinking ship of my sanity from going to the bottom and me from walking off into a snowstorm and having a sleepover in the woods with a bottle of wine for company. Other than that, I developed a writer's block the size of the western hemisphere. But I looked great in my jeans.

Because no one is the boss of me, I've developed the different voices that exist in everyones heads (do NOT tell me you don't have them) and I've made sock puppets out of them. It's a regular puppet festival at my house. One of the puppets is my supervisor and is in charge of phrases like "you should," "you have to," and "when are you going to..." get off eBay, stop watching your bid on a Pietersite cabochon, start drinking water instead of coffee, get the laundry done, catch up on correspondence, do some writing, develop some for-gawd-sake ambition, wash the floor and so forth.

Another one, The Hanging Judge, comments on my life. It inquires as to when I'm getting one. It remarks that it is Saturday night and I am not on a date. It ruminates about the notion that everyone on the entire planet has a close and loving family and/or a mate, except me. It sighs and expresses the thought that I might have had talent but I'm too lazy and addled to use it and besides, it's too late now. It advises me, unnecessarily, that my place of employ is in the financial toilet and that morale is already on its way to the sewage treatment plant. It opines that my ankle will probably never heal and I will have to wear sensible lace-up shoes until I die. And support hose.

There's the child, who wishes everyone would shut up and let her watch the sky in peace and eat cake for breakfast.

The Piss-ant I picture as a belligerent 11 year old with scabby knees, curses and swears and leaves flies in the drinks of grownups, is in charge of answering the above characters. Her favorite lines are:
"Am not," "Fuck you," "Bullshit," and "You can't make me."

Lately, another voice has joined the crowd. This one is an actual adult, calmer, quieter. She listens a little to the Supervisor and gets some of the work done. She lets the kid watch the sky for a while. And she mostly dismisses the Hanging Judge.

She's saying, right now, that it doesn't matter that some rat-bastard just outbid us for a world-class piece of Pietersite for a lousy two buck difference. The rest of us are just plain pissed off about it. Except for the kid, who wants to watch a movie.

If you feel that you could coordinate in any kind of helpful way, kindly leave a resume. We are in dire need of a corporate takeover.

Can't help falling....la,la,la,la...

2007-03-27T19:30:00.000-03:00

Pity the puny of ankle and narrow of foot who, brainless but fashionable, purchase the knee high black suede boots with the wedge heel and zero ankle support, for lo, she has forgotten that two or three inches is a long way to fall if you happen to be a calcaneofiblular ligament attached to the ankle of a stork- like woman of sadly little grace.

No need to send thugs. I'll break my own kneecaps, thank you. I'll sprain and resprain the same poor old cancaneofib until it resembles, but is less resilient than the elastic you lost in your toilet tank three months ago. I will become so used to (as Marko says) "the annual wrecking" that as soon as my kneecaps are not grapefruit sized and the skin around my ankles has almost returned to the usual Caucasian fish-belly white tone, I declare myself well and strong and immediately spend days slogging up and down three flights of stairs carrying items heavy enough to tear my equally puny arms out my shoulder sockets. I move furniture. I haul bags of garbage, recycling, laundry and groceries. I dance spontaneously to Dead Can Dance (and I am not making that up.)

If this not stupid enough, I walk on uneven pavement.
You heard me.
I walk on uneven pavement.

Weedy has put in her customary keep-you-company appearance for my Doctor appointment. We sit there in the nine foot square room papered with anatomy of disease drawings like (thin gorgeous perfect red-headed) versions of Tweedle-Dee-Dee and Tweedle-Dee-Dum. This is the reward room. It means that after 45 minutes in the snot-infested, virus laden outer room, you may some hour actually see the doctor.

Dr. Margaret proceeds to poking and prodding the sore parts of my ankle very hard indeed and asking the rather redundant question, "Does that hurt?" as I yank my foot away, whimpering.
"It's a sprain," she says. And explains, "A partly torn ligament." She says the second part slowly, so that we, as laypersons, and I, as a person of drastically average IQ, can comprehend.
I explain that it was sprained but it got better and then worse.

"What did you do?" Oh god. This means remembering, which I'm not good at.

"I hauled heavy groceries and stuff up three flights of stairs." I don't tell her about the dancing or the decision, Monday, to walk up and down over a hundred stairs at work for fitness sake.

"Well, this is a common sprain if you go over on your ankle. It gets worse if you overwork or walk on uneven pavement." She explains the stuff I already know...ice, rest, physio, tape etc. while I consider moving to a city with more than two square feet of even pavement. Then, because I look unsuitably happy, she inquires, "Have you had your pap test this year?"

"No." Shit. Busted.

"Would you like to have it now?" Weedy's eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. She offers to leave for that part if I'm considering that.

"Nooooo."

Weedy, posing as the Cavalry, heads the conversation back to falls. She's fallen three times this past while, cleverly using her face as a buffer when she hit the ground. Margaret is her doctor too. The diversion is a partial success but I have to promise I will have a pap test. Soon. Damn. Is there no pity for the humiliation and suffering I've already accumulated for the month?

As we leave, I tell Dr. Margaret that really we are conducting do-it-yourself bone density tests where there is no waiting. If you keep falling and you don't break a hip, get pneumonia and die, then you aren't actually old yet and your bones have not yet turned to powder. I don't mention ligaments.

Weedy and me flee to MacDonald's to shorten our lives with transfats.

Stay tuned for "Running with Scissors."

Love song

2007-03-26T20:59:00.000-03:00

I have friends who moved from Rural to Urban Nowhere and learned to survive. Some grew up suffocating in the suburbs, some on reservations, some in small towns or large cities, some in the ghettos. Some live in beautiful houses and some in jail cells and some in areas where you can't walk outside, even at ten in the morning. Some are nostalgic about the past and some have a suitcase full of nightmares. They have survived poverty. And the middle class and even wealth - and all of them still fit through the eye of the needle, far as I'm concerned. Poets, computer geeks, artists, administrators, librarians, counsellors. Married, single, divorced, straight, gay, Buddhist, Atheist, Evangelical Christian and...undecided.

A diverse group with one thing in common.

When the wolf came, in the hour particular to each of them, they turned to face it. Some, more than once.

This is a love song. Make no mistake.

India calling

2007-03-24T20:21:00.000-03:00

The Scorpio advises me that my "I'm giving up men" post could be read as judgmental, that I left lots of room to offend. Being a male who was magnanimously excepted by me from the uncouth lot I referred to giving up, according to him, was not reassuring because it was so uncomfortably ambiguous. (I hasten to add that he does not read my blog, but got the idea pretty quickly from a verbal summary.)

Sigh.

I hate when he does that.

And he's right. You have to know me. Anyone who has known me for over five minutes realizes that the idea of me giving up men is a bit like the idea of me giving up breathing or orange lipstick or red hair. Not that I can't carp and whine with the rest of my beleaguered gender, and not that I don't have genuine complaints - but then, so do most of the men I know.

The entry was a little clip of my life. I was amused at how quickly my oldest friend dispatched the idea with the lack of ceremony it deserved. I was amused at KD, sarcastically offering to keep the ying/yang balance straight. But lest I offended more than one male person...

Here is a little background for those of you who have not been following along: Meeting few (as in no) new men (who are age-appropriate and interesting/unattached) in my daily life, and being in the situation of adoring a man who is (as I've delicately put it in the past) "mostly unavailable," I took a shot at the Internet. And it shot right back.

Case in point: Let's call him Dr. G. He is a tall, very good-looking man, 39 years of age. He is of East Indian descent, born in Toronto, and lived for some time in San Diego. His profile is literate, witty and blunt. All the things that appeal to me. I send a wave. He sends one back. We begin to email enthusiastically back and forth. He does volunteer work in India. He's writing a book. I give him my phone number and he calls immediately.

We talk for an easy, lively hour and decide to meet for a drink the next day. He asks if I'll be home for a while because he needs to do something and wants to get back to me. Sure. No problem. At 10:00 o'clock, I email to let him know I'm going to bed and ask that he email or phone the next day to confirm a time and place. So far, so good.

By 3:00 p.m. the following day, he hasn't done either and so, in a fit of pique, I make a disastrous date with the man I end up calling "Fish Stick." This is where some of you came in, I believe. I'd run my profile on the Internet site for a short time and had already managed to figure out that the vast majority of men who were contacting me want to have sex before they knew my name or possibly without ever knowing my name. Even worse, a fair number of them were more interested in just having phone sex. But I've never been a person who's put off by reality, so I persist.

And it isn't that I got to be this age without figuring out that men are interested in sex. Hell, I'm as interested as they are, but I'm damned if the first warm body to arrive on the scene is going to be the one I have it with.

Is it generational? Am I the only person who likes to meet someone before beginning a sexual relationship? Am I the only person who's heard of HIV? And in truth, I was perplexed because the men I know, the ones I value, who are just as interested in sex as any other man, actually prefer to like a woman they're having sex with and even to have a vague notion as to who she is before indulging...

But I digress.

I take the date with Fish Stick Man because I'm at the fuck-you stage with Internet meeting. If you're dealing with a wolf pack, best to be a wolf. Didn't call on time? Next?

Moving ahead a few days, and one very weird but fairly funny (in retrospect) date later - Dr. G. calls back. We have another lively, interesting discussion. Suddenly I hear a sharp tone. The exact tone you hear when you accidentally hit a key on your phone while talking. "Is that your phone?" he asks.
"Nope." We continue for another minute or two. We've been commiserating over the crappy way people act on this Internet site. We're at the point in the conversation where I say, "I'm at the point where I've heard from so many idiots that I'm ready to give up sex entirely..."

And the sharp tone sounds again.
"Is that your phone?" he asks again.
"No."
"Just a minute.....Oh. It's India calling. I'll call you right back, okay?"

And that's the end of Dr. G. Leading me to the conclusion that, in terms of Internet dating, even the smart people are stupid. The most galling part, of course, was that everyone on the planet knows that a call waiting signal creates a second of silence, not a beep.

As it turns out, the galling part, like the bad date, turns out to be the best part of the whole Internet dating experience in the long run. I tell KD about the "call interrupt" and she can't stop laughing. Now, every other phone call we share, one of us will hit a button on the phone and announce that "India is calling" and the two of us nearly pee our pants laughing.

So, my friends...that was basically the origin of the "I'm giving up men" blog entry. Or at least part of it. I yanked the profile. But I burned for a while over the general lack of even common courtesy.

Meanwhile...here's to the men I care about...who are interesting, street-smart, slightly insane, honest, funny, educated and not - but all intelligent, all trying to live consciously...

To: the Scorpio, to Mark, Coyo, James C., Doc, Minor Diety and the gentlemen of my acquaintance from the blogsphere - I send you a curtsy. And apologies if they are in order.

Hobbies that can kill you

2007-03-20T20:32:00.000-03:00

Saturday, as we approached what is in most of the civilized world, spring, my alpha rhythms went delta. All of them. Outside, it blew fat wet snowclods, which changed to sleet and freezing rain and finally to rain. The streets were as sloppy and grey as my state of mind.

I'm not one to sit and conduct a pity party for any more than a few days or weeks, so I decided to cheer myself up by taking an online IQ test. The results (the ones you didn't have to actually pay for) declared me to be stunningly average. (As Weedy says, "Remember that part in American Beauty when the girl wails 'I am not ordinary'?" Matter of fact, yes. Matter of fact, I was howling something just like that to my walls.)

And it seems, from the scant information they deigned to provide free of charge at the conclusion of the test, that it is visual pattern recognition that lowers my score. You know: the part of the test where they show you four objects that look like squared off, tortured drain pipes, and ask which one doesn't fit? I flunk those.

Once, during the Christmas season in Toronto, when I was working in my business partner's store and ripping yet another folding box, my partner exclaimed merrily to the customer, "Can you believe she can work with all those teeny little beads and she can't fold a gift box?" So, I ask you, how am I going to manage the twisty drainpipe problem?

And I've taken that round peg/round hole test too. And the psychologist, in an amazingly unprofessional display (I thought) remarked, "I'm surprised. You're such a bright girl," as I attempted to squish a triangle into a square hole.

Just thank the gods I didn't take up driving - or architecture.

I do splendidly on general knowledge and communication. I can easily figure out what number comes next in a sequence. But there's another area that drags my score down, too...

If four trucks with six wheels each are travelling down a highway carrying eighteen bicycles and it is snowing in Japan, what direction are they going and when will they get to Memphis?
I'm not kidding. This is precisely how these questions look to me. And then, instead of trying to figure it out, I stare at the screen and say (usually aloud because I live alone) "Who the fuck cares? Are you serious? Who needs to know this kind of shite?" My brain grinds into reverse. I can almost feel my brain hurting. Don't tell me about having no pain centers in the brain. The brain knows when it's being asked to imitate a seal balancing a ball on its nose. And then I guess.
Eight o'clock p.m. Why not? Who cares? Personally, I'm wishing flat tires on them all and urging the drivers to stop and have a nap.

Afterwards, I turn my average talents to thinking up solutions to the intricate problems of world peace. Stay tuned.

Something old and calm

2007-03-20T17:17:00.000-03:00

These are my new treasures. Ammonites, possibly half a billion years old. I'm planning to make pendents and pins out of them - perhaps one framed piece with a fossil in the center. I started out buying four. The next trip it was ten. I couldn't seem to put them back in the display box and just leave them there. Next piece of jewelry is for my boss - a Happy Sabbatical present.

Just so you know. I do stay out of trouble now and then. And you can only iron your wimple for so long, right?

An actual post, I dearly hope, will be coming soon.

She begins in the middle and ends there, too

2007-03-18T19:38:00.000-03:00

A week or so ago, I gave up men. I announced it to Weedy.
"I'm giving up men," I said. "Except for the ones I already like."
"No you're not," she replied. This is what happens when you're friends with someone for over 30 years. They go around thinking they know you and they say whatever they think.
"Yes I am. I'm keeping the Scorpios, though. Well...maybe I'm keeping the men I'm already friends with, as well. And the blog guys."
But that's it. Scorpio the Older and Scorpio the Younger. Maybe one Virgo (if he ever writes again). And okay, I'm still talking to Minor Deity. But I'm giving up on the rest. Absolutely.
"I'm giving up men," I tell K.D. "I told Weedy that today."
"And what did Weedy say?"
"She didn't believe me."
"Well. I'll believe you then. Just to keep the yin-yang balanced."

I'm going to sit around waiting for the end of the patriarchy. And ironing my wimple.

Meanwhile, can someone tell me why men who blog don't seem to have the a**hole quotient of your normal average male? If you can't tell me, then just pat yourselves roundly on the back, crack a beer (or a jar of olives stuffed with feta cheese) and do an entry so that I can keep hope alive.

2007-03-17T16:12:00.000-03:00

Fogbound. Outside, the sky is a dirty white. Now and then rain erodes the snow that fell last night. Fogbound inside the cranial unit, too. Moving in slow motion...a kind of fugue state. Disassociated. Not sad, not happy, not anything identifiable...just...
Passing weather. Excuse the silence. I send you these flowers from my living room as an apology for the long gap. Please stay tuned while we adjust our psychic state...

PS on yesterday (Teri similarly captured at a stop light)

2007-03-08T19:35:00.000-04:00

The Scorpio, who has spent his work morning coaxing teenagers to hand over lethal weapons to him and trying to drum it into their heads that they're being played, groans as I start into the story of giving cash away to a dubious stranger. "Linda, tell me she isn't sitting on your couch. Tell me you didn't bring her home."

No. Didn't do that. Made a couple crucial errors in judgment, but not that one. Jeez Louise.

And ever since then, I've been pondering the idea of hypothermia. Normally, I would have been out of there, away from that woman in a New York minute. The abused woman story has been abused so often in the same circumstances that I absolutely knew better. I consider how my brain wasn't registering the familiarity of the story. Her jittery speech patterns. The lack of presence in her eyes. How, a few minutes later, my brain wasn't even in charge of my feet.

And then I consider the fact that I feel no animosity about the whole thing now, when I am warm and passingly lucid. I don't feel like a person who tried to do a good thing. I'm just a person who wanted to get warm. "She knew that," the Scorpio says, "she counted on you needing to just deal with the situation fast, without thinking.."

More surprisingly, I realize I don't feel like she is a person who did a bad thing. Everyone did what they had to do to get their needs met. It wasn't personal. On either side. If she hits on me again, I'll grin and tell her, "You got me once, toots - but not twice."

Now the sidewalk. The bloody knee-eating, ankle-twisting vicious murderous sidewalk? That's another matter. That's personal.

Links. Lynx. Lincs.

2007-03-08T15:06:00.000-04:00

New people to read, stolen directly from Ariel's links list. If you have not wandered over to read about The Sad Case of Mr. X or visited Edvard Moonke, I have added links. Now Mr. X is simple enough to find. Just go here. Mr. Moonke, however, has a blogspot blog (must read "the laptop fairy of Darlington") but has recently moved to a new spot here! In my links list, I've entered his new wordpress URL - in anticipation that the pressure will force him to write copious amounts of words.
Enjoy. And thanks Ariel. I don't think I'm finished cribbing from your links list yet!