Category: sathead

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of manatees and a book called _see_

there’s a gathering down at a friend’s family place in georgia or louisiana, a reunion of sort of generations of good girlfriends long parted organized around a marriage or some other event. there are myriad sweet and homely activities around about the house, both specifically preparing and also just for savoring. I go down to the swampy waterside with one of the older women and sit on the dock where we’re visited by manatees who thrust their short elephant snout fingers up through the water to investigate us newcomers. then there are odd and comical ground foul running through the brush who have scattered-looking downy, sunset-colored plumage with bright orange stripes running down their breasts. I ask my companion what they are, and she says some ridiculous name that marks their derivation from both wombats and something else silly, nonsensically two land mammals, and that someone introduced them to the area from australia years ago.

back at the house we’re exploring and trying to reproduce a whole host of arts and crafts produced by the women and girls of the family over years and years. there are tracings of some kind on old table and bed linens (ironed crisp) of vintage ad imagery. I’m dashing around with chalk and crayons, an electric iron, a stack of newspapers, and a crumbling tome with yellowed pages falling out, conducting experiments, partially on the sly out of fear of making mistakes and ruining something.

later on (possibly a separate dream altogether) I’m sitting outside beneath the arcing branches of an enormous ancient tree with thisbe and her husband and laurel and, for part of it, thisbe’s mom, who has begun the slow and painful process of dying and is being handled carefully and cradled quietly with both arms and words– and we’re having a gentle conversation that feels very real about dying and childbirth and the parallels between the two. then the others are discussing and telling me about a beautiful book they’ve all read called see. I’m listening and marveling and overcome by gratitutde for these people and all the love surrounding me.

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slipping house and found dress

I enter a house hanging on the edge of a cliff to rescue a tin box of letters and papers. the ocean has come up over the lip of the cliff and covered the grass where we were formerly sitting. an older man (our teacher? the descendant?) and I have taken off our shoes to go retrieve what’s left. the old house is tippy, precarious, and our added weight causes it to shift alarmingly, so we step back across the old wood floor gingerly– I find the letters, though they’re somewhat scattered. mostly they seem to be innocuous and not much worth the effort of saving– routine classmate valentines and such– there’s a good deal I may just throw away– the at the bottom are a few pieces that seem more meaningful– there’s a sheaf with handwritten messages from all my friends, expressing concern and care over my dark mood, and then there’s a folded-up piece of my own writing– I stuff it all back into the box and resolve to review it later on outside the tipping, sliding house. my companion is still working on his own search, so I poke around a little and discover an old handbag belonging to the former tenant– it hales from another era and seems to me to be redolent of history and character– it’s a large satchel type bag, and I’m imagining its owner, thinking how it’s just the sort of bag a lady might use to carry a shawl in, and lo and behold, I reach inside and pull out a length of fabric– which turns out instead to be a dress of deep blue and fascinating cut. the other guy has come over to see what I’ve found (there’s the sense he has prior claim on the house’s contents), and I hold up the dress to show him. I’m thinking I might be able to wear it, as the fabric is stretchy even though it at first appears quite narrow-waisted– but he gives me a dismissive look, and I feel quite horrible suddenly, though I play it off and offer the dress to him, telling him it would make an intriguing piece of art hung on a wooden hander on the wall.

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winged beast

not quite clear exactly how it came about this morning, but suddenly everything is terrible. not where I want to be, or doing what I want to do. just everything. marked pattern of a distortion, and I know that although it feels utterly real, this is an illusion that will pass. keep shaking off the dark thing perched on my shoulders, stretching my back and taking a deep breath, stepping forward foot by foot, only to have it settle its heavy shadow once more. this thing has pursued me the length of conscious memory, with blessed stretches of unblemished sunlit daytimes and mornings and even bright evenings, whole weeks when it seems to have retreated to some moldy stinking grotto, only to return again and again and again.

exhausting.

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wanderlust (the grass is green everywhere)

pure trompe l'oeil

even here.

it’s not easy living with me, I know. I’m the moodiest of critters, too often curled mollusk-like into my own shell, betimes bemoaning this or that or the whole kit n caboodle of my lot, tending to place blame for dissatisfactions wholesale on geography. poor chicago, it’s not to blame for my malaise, ultimately. but I can sure make it sound like it. to live with me is to attend an ongoing litany of plaint (hi, een) and confected concoctions of how fabulous it would be to move elsewhere in one direction or another– now closer to my family, now nearer friends, then away overseas, or what about just striking out behind the wheel across this great nation, no agenda, cameras and gazetteers in hand?

the noodling, you see, unto perpetuity– and I, for the most part, swept up inside its momentum, remain largely unaware of the impact of narratives I create, compulsively, in words thrown out across the airwaves of a room– until confronted by my partner’s, or on one or two memorable occasions my friends’, sheer sense of cognitive dissonance– you say again and again how you’re unhappy with this, how you’d just be happier with that…

the bittersweet truth is: the that is the forever elusive horizon, and this state of affairs is as it’s ever been. spinning dreams out this way and that is what I do. and it may from certain angles seem to contain only downside: continuous complaint, who wants it? so tedious– but underlying it nonetheless is the present, also cherished, if less volubly, and, at least in merciful retrospect, woven through with a thousand graces. the dilemma has in part to do with what folks have taken to calling “mindfulness”– that is, not having enough of it, not practicing it sufficiently to be… what? evolved? at peace with myself in the present?

peace in the present. peace amid motion and thrash of ongoing life. such a buddhist concept. I manage it ill. I am utterly western in my own thrash and whingeing. let us say I could be better: well, I will try. it’s foolish to leave a thing at that’s just how I am. cop out. but also I’d like to be kind of okay with, and see the value in, my own particular, flailing mish-mash. castles in the air can serve as seeds, take root given a fortuitous season, and climb and grow into something vivid, rooted, and real– or they can fly away over the water, so much dust into the view. only time sorts it all out.

so, at the same time that I discourse and fantasize about the multitudinous romances of Elsewhere, now I shop for a home to buy in chicago, a little piece of real estate in order to dig in, plant my garden, take root and claim this city as my own.

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touching base/wood/the keys

ah, man, I’ve missed my little ibook– chris got it working again just last night and then was off to work super-early this morning, so here I lie, having my old type-in-bed time once more. an indeterminate brain is confronted by the opportunity…

honestly, I’ve felt a bit adrift without the tether of words composed here– facebook brings something else entirely– reconnections, semi-connections, a superficial sort of webbing, but webbing nonetheless– it’s brought me back into some form of contact with more than one lost friend, for which I’m enormously grateful– but the writing medium is altogether different, requiring by custom if not strict technical limitiation (as twitter) a tendency of hyper-abbreviation. this tenor is most surely the coin of the realm more generally, but as an expressive form it does little for real mulling through– my milieu. yes, I know, it isn’t as if vox (or for that matter wordpress, blogger or, heck, my trusty paper journal) has gone away, only myself that has elected to neglect the form– the medium itself remains available throughout my various distractions.

and to what do these distractions amount? little coherent cumulatively, I fear. there’s me, always inclining to weigh and measure. recently here and there been torturing myself for no good reason with google searches for people I no longer need any connection with– wretched, idle hands. I know better. well, at least the killing curiosity is soon exhausted with lack of any relevance, but it’s a waste of energy. and other wastes as well– time and self spent merely watching video, tuning out, dialling down the day. then there’s been some good reading (margaret atwood– and attending her gorgeous many-voiced book launch event downtown on friday). a weekend full of sleep, fighting off one of the many seasonal bugs flying around. glorious golden autumn days. car repairs etcetera.

adrift. diffuse. in need of locating a likely thread to stitch it all into some sense.

one thing tho: we’ve begun to plan weddinging for 2010– in our own idiosyncratic way, with sites of celebration in chicago and northern michigan– we’ve started sketching it out for ourselves, what’s wanted, what’s not wanted, how to accommodate the needs versus desires of those we love, how to make something authentic and real and delicious and right for ourselves, to relinquish any mar from the past’s damaged expectations– to begin anew, rightly and brilliantly, for ourselves.

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the right way to start off a week

after plenty of sleep (i.e. napful, easygoing, soul-spacious weekend), cellphone alarm starts playing jenny lewis at 6 a.m. hit hush, scritch puppy and fall back asleep. wake for good when it goes off again at 6:30.

rise, throw on sweats and sneaks, and drag puppy and feller from bed, grumbly and rumpled for walk in still-dark morning through autumn neighborhoods.

stop for coffee and lox-cream-cheese-bagels and chit chat with the guys at beans n bagels.

cross the river on the wilson bridge with sunrise.

100 situps on the yoga mat.

art play table for an hour or so and actually make a piece start-to-finish.

off to work with a fine happy head.

Wind at your back
Wind at your back

 

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insomniariffic

"everything! everything! everything!" (violent femmes)

facebook is gobbling up the energy/thoughts I would otherwise expiate here. but abbreviated and at the mercies of a larger and less self-selected/sympathetic audience than voxdom, and so I question the wisdom of this time/energy use.

I've been up since approximately 2 (it being now 5:18) at which time the feller came to bed and showed me all the pimping he'd done to my cell phone. with which I take fewer and worse photos than I did with the lower-end LG, which irks me.

I'm definitively not in michigan, where I thought I'd be right about now, probably still driving– visit determined not needed, so fine– I'm here, but not really ready to be here, having thought I'd be there– not ready to go to work today, having thought I'd be taking it off, and yesterday being such a dreadful headcase making me want to avoid the site of such uncenteredness entirely.

among the million things, was called a "cyber stalker", meant in jest almost surely, tho it stings since I'm such a watcher-wallflower and have loathed it for years, dreading those moments when my well-intentioned gaze is unwanted and garners tiny smackdowns– this tag, I should mention, in the context of fb public wall posts, so the truth of the suggestion clearly compromised, but still. the suggestion of it stinging.

oversensitive overreacting excessively inappropriately awake

hahahahahahahaha: all that I cannot say in fb space and that clangs around the cranium in odd hours. and so I purge it here. and you, if you are reading this, oh lord tread lightly– lack of sleep and judgment no doubt induces overmuch sharing of insecurity insanities.

and now back to bed, to breathe the air of puppy and fella and try to calm and sleep at least a smidge unto this undesired workday.

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simple pulse

weekend morning peace– hanging in the quiet kitchen with the wee beastie snoozing at the foot of my stool, chimes singing away through the open balcony door. following a few days of clogged kitchen sink drain, maintenance maestro snaking it out yesterday, this morning I’ve done loads of dishes and somewhat mastered the workspace chaos– though a big bucket of fetid-smelling drainwater remains shut up in the under-sink cupboard, which I’m choosing to leave for the tending of the manly man before I can put back away all the cleaners and whatnot that reside down yonder.

spent yestderday in the south burbs with the fella’s fam, pre-cousin-wedding-ing, introducing small monster to puppy grandparents, whose dogs generously tolerated his utmost sass, and returned home laden with a panoply of jewel-bright rubber chewables. surely human offspring would bring tenfold welcome.

work is work is schmerk. home organization drifts and lags, though thanks to heroic cohabitant we’re now equipped with plentiful bathroom shelfage. bit by bit. the days spin by. at night I feel my forties and find a dozen hundred larger, more meaningful accomplishments I wish I’d made yet. evenings are tough in the sathead, mornings kinder, weekends best of all– though the weight to make large changes swaggers in then with all its impatient bravado and sunday eve descends like a wicked clunker.

summer swelter has arrived after a full-on july reprieve, and we’re running the ginormous a.c. unit in the front rooms for the first time since the move– dim and cool in there with a small lake forming on the sidewalks below.