making bread

There’s some kind of gutsy witchery about the craft and practice of kneading scalded milk and melted fat and salt into ground grains to produce wonderfully variable loaves.

wind advisory this morning

Which means little more than noise unless you’re a high profile vehicle. Property owners may incur minor damage. Kind of a weather yawner amid the Hurricanes Sandy and Winter Storms Nemo (a moniker which incidentally gives me cognitive dissonance– i envision a tropical oceanic fish shivering beside the highway in a Nor’easter blizzard).

This morning’s wind, even if a tame threat, gives me a general sense of unease. It’s the tornadoes and hurricanes I’ve weathered that make me jumpy now.

norovirus

It is snowing and cold-rainy-sloppy out. Also it’s not normal for your stomach to hurt for two days straight.

The doctor on tv advises against anxiety’s negative influences upon fertility, and I feel the tightness in my body, my neck and shoulders. My gut and ovaries screech with cramp. No baby will lodge in poisoned ground.

I flop across the bed on my sour belly.

Floyd follows me up Lulu’s Straircase and stands staring into my face, inches away. I tell him to lie down, so he lies down across my forearm and begins to lick my hand. The feeling of warm dog across my arm, breathing dog breath into my ear, the warm scent of sleepy dog feet folded underneath my nose.

My stomach hurts a little less.

stunted

Someone used the word at dinner: stunted. Blunt and harsh upon my ear hours later.

dis•courage

Insomniac laundry folding

I am a disappointment to my parents. In terms of worldly ambition and achievement, I’m a disappointment to myself, haunted by my own phantoms of expectation. So often anticipation of the thing so far outstrips the thing itself, I’m psychically waylaid. Hobgoblins in the night.

Why have I so undermined my own worldly ambitions, time and again? Poor resource management and frittering only explains so much. There’s something damnably determined in the whole thing.

Sitting there tonight in that gathering of bright-eyed and ambitious whippersnappers tweaked the hell out of me. I grew dreary as a Gorey character, and when my turn came to tout my own achievements from the past year and hopes for the next, I opened my mouth, and toads fell out. They plopped around the tastefully laid table for awhile, until I swallowed them again and beat a hasty retreat back to the hermitage.

I used to be unbearably bright-eyed myself. I was effin’ dewy with earnestness. But I failed to bring it. Because I chose time and again to fail to bring it. Self-saboteur. But for why?