The drizzle’s fallen off, but the wind is picking up. Kids in the swing and shout. Boys knock the hats off one another’s heads and race to the corner.
danced
Until I broke a sweat, then danced some more to bebop jazz, with visions of bubbles and sparks.
collapsing floors
All the floors of J and E’s giant old farmhouse collapsed under the weight of their friends. We were all sorting through the wreckage trying to salvage important stuff. I managed to rescue J’s wedding dress and a pink crinoline underskirt and a one other thing.
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.
emergence
Quimby’s Zlumber Party
NavelGazer Zine
wild potato
Dear Reader,
While I’ve lurked here, all underground-like, I’ve been working at last, slap-dash and pell mell through that very multiplicity of media/genre I blahty-blahed about so acedemiciously, so booooringly theoretically for so long.
[–YAWN–]
I had to, by gum, jump up sooner or later and DO my very utmost to make good one way or another.
And ta-da! Â here I am, have been, doing writing, of sorts. That is, words is tough at times, poetry done wore ’em out a bit, so I’m shaping stories otherwise and elsehow, shifting about contraptions of construction– all of which to me means writing. Or perhaps composing would be a better term.
Ensnared, I navigate a branching network of passageways hatching like roots between bunches of genre: novel, both graphicky and memoirish, comic strip so-called, picture book, cards for greeting.
I’m practicing not taking it all so damn seriously and succeeding, sometimes, in playing as directed: with drawing + coloring + cutting + stitching together stray bits that enchant or perplex. Unintended and serendipitous connections emerge.
I’m making little books. I’m making sewn dolls and quirky embroidered insignias. I’m building inventory and getting set to cut loose on Etsy.
The sooner the better in fact. I need to work and get paid for it. As I haven’t collected a steady paycheck in some time, I’m struggling somewhat with my own sense of self-worth. I’m also weighing some overarching questions about worth and value as I go my skint way thrifting and crafting and–well, it’s a tricky time of year.
At a holiday party I found myself recently arguing a case for guerilla knitters as engaged in executing some kind of craft revolution. In retrospect it sounds a little silly and pretentious to my own ears, but I meant it sincerely at the time. And I guess I mean it still, kind of. I’m sensitive to a DIY groundswell sweeping over many of us.
I’m re-valuing Things as I make things with my hands and eyes and ranging, sometimes rumpusing imagination. I’m experiencing regeneration through craft.
The next logical and necessary step is to make it all pay cash money. Queue Etsy. And I’m fishing for freelance writing and web work, honing skills through projects for the community, wrassling the gnarly beast that will one day emerge a fine, polished portfolio.
Here’s the thing about being a spud: coming out from underground is a strenuous upheaval of a process, preparing for public purview with work of several uncustomary sorts: snipping and buffing off of unseemly bits, tweezing and squeezing what wants to be unshapely and dumpy into snappy and vivid, or at very least -er. It’s tough work for a tater.
Love,
Navelgazer
sweet baby jesus
All year I’ve been undergoing infertility treatment, and when it comes to the winter holidays, something in me just breaks. I mean, I’ve put up the silver tree and ornamented it reflectively– but even this effort at a certain point breaks down. So what if I love this dangling aqua peacock? Who cares?
Because Christmastime is family time, observational differences aside–witness the blizzards of greeting cards crafted exclusively to exhibit new babies and growing families, the giddy, delightful glee of a grandmother friend whose generations convene around her from across the globe–
When what I want so exhaustively is family of my own– as my mother said it before me, pining for her own reasons. Of course I have family of my own, family of all kinds: biological, married-into, chosen by affinity and shared experience. But the progression stops for me at me. There is no child or children in the picture. I’ve spent a lot of years papering an empty room.
There are, of course, myriad alternatives to conception (which we are actively researching and pursuing) as well as a thousand things to do as free and childless people. But, by gum, my arms ache for a very specific weight. And, sweet baby Jesus, this Christmastime, family time vexes me.
stretching & growing
Last winter my back, usually pretty problem-free, piped up in a fit of pique. The immediate cause was clear:Â a week-long yanking-about by my parents’Â overgrown Lab puppy– one irresistibly adorable beast in that compensatory fashion employed by most difficult critters (babies, spouses) to ensure an otherwise questionable survival.
This energetic canine visitation exacerbated daily and, more problematically, nightly twinges of bodily protest. Assessing the alternatives, I self-counseled: time to straighten up my act. While I’m not the world’s worst slouch, my posture could surely stand some tweaking.
Several years and countless hours spent straining my gaze toward a computer screen compounded by a bad habit of slinging heavy bags over one shoulder have resulted in an S-curve torque in my neck vertebrae that impacts the median nerve and sends pain and numbness down one arm and, most annoyingly, into my writing hand. For a decade now I’ve contended with this aggravating condition, unable anymore to keep the longhand journals I maintained religiously and waking frequently in the night to pins and needles in an appendage like an inflated blowfish.
Back in Iowa I enjoyed the nigh-magical ministrations of a chiropractor who performed delicate electric percussions and sonographic therapies that relieved my screeching nervy hand. Transplanted to Chicago, I’ve missed this expert reengineering of the all out o’ whack.
Failing to engage a local replacement, I’ve taken it upon myself to conduct an intuitive and amateur course of reconfiguration, not quite yoga, derived in part from high school era modern dance stretching routines: those patterns of ranging movement, drawing up energy from within and flowing it into configurations before the miroir.
Like my several houseplants who greenly rebreathe our apartment’s interior atmosphere, sympathetically respiring our collective exhalations back into fresh oxygen, I inhale purposefully as I incline toward the sun and drink in clear water.
Some days it takes hot cascading sheets of steam to soften and elongate all the rough and knotted places inside. As I breathe into the shoulder-drop, inevitably something pops and releases. I close my eyes and focus down the entire wired length of my being, straightening, and unkink just that much more.
Pop pop pop.
I imagine uncurling the pillbug armadillo psychic/physical self that’s clenched up incrementally over the course of preceding weeks.
Bending deeply, leaning gently and ever more inexorably into clutched-tight pockets, I can feel the letting go. Inhaling, I relish this sensation of release and push deeper into the curve. Concentrating, I make of myself a shape both vibrant and articulate.
Minuet back to bum shoulder, joints creaking like stubborn hinges, warming under the fluid of motion. The plants and I, we stretch to grow toward the light, envisioning ourselves into best shapes for living forms.