Category: sathead

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grey weather state of mind

opportunities for humility are daily, legion, and profound.

everything spins out in labyrinthine array as I seem to tread in place– wake, reach for spectacles and smarter-than-me phone, page through virtual emptiness, and declare, “poo and things made of poo.”

consider posting this line to my facebook status. reconsider.

decide instead to post it to my blog.

declare a regimen of less reflection, more writing, vomitous or otherwise outright. righting.

(in light of, I must inquire: what is it about water– bathwater, shower steam, dishtub– that unfixes the internal glues and gets things flowing at the very least paper- and PC-conducive moments? by the time I reach pen or keyboard, all the patterns that seemed so finely intricate and scintillant instants previous have fled, and I sit in the flood of white page, giddy winking cursor tweaking the last nerve. yet as I’ve declared it, so it must be.)

this morning in the raining grey of nominally neighborly hoods I attended a political breakfast in support of hydraulics and pistons in a machine I don’t begin to fathom. the alderman intoned, “it’s all, ultimately, about service.” so, shrug off the majority of maneuvering malarkey and let it wash away down the gutter.

besides which: redemption through action, yes? of course, mindful action, preferably. too often amidst the spin it’s tricky timing to pick and choose– the darting hand makes hasty grabs and hopes for sanguine (distinctly not: bloody or crushed) outcomes.

some days I’m quicker of reflex. other days I find I’ve barged in on conversations taking place beside me at the table that I realize only belatedly are private, or at least not altogether communal.

for lack of better modus operandi, I engineer a smile until tired facial muscles drag me home.

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brokenheaded

once again I’m brokenheaded and can’t seem to do a thing with the troublesome appendage. It flops about in peevish and aggravating fashion despite efforts to stoke it with chocolate and yellow lamplight. Train whistles pierce through and through, grey window condensation soaks it drearily. It hangs and flutters in rags about the shoulders, desperate for a mission and altogether ineffectual and undecided.

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new us, new me

we’ve gone around and around about the question of marriage-related name change, chris and I. it’s kind of funny– it sort of felt like a non-issue until his family raised the question– and even then, at first, I was all “of course I’m not changing my name.”

more than anything it felt to me like just so much bureaucratic hassle– and for what? well, there are the identity and affiliation questions, obviously, which, I must admit, I was initially slow to grasp. there is, on some level, residue resentment of the one-sidedness of the naming tradition in our culture– all patrilineal representation with matrilineal influences disappearing into a palimpsest of occasional token middle, and to a certain extent so-called christian, names– the elizabeths and katharines in my family, the “one L” russels, my own holmes– but less substantive and resonant, ultimately less legal. hard to really do anything real about, given the long run of generations.

so I suppose I have, historically and somewhat by default, laid claim purposefully to my full given name, that sarah holmes townsend, as some type of enduring token of identity, wholly mine, unmoved by the shifting of emotional, psychic, and experiential influence. even willfully to spite the, koff koff, crappy monogram.

until now.

because I’ve changed my mind. that is, I’ve decided to change my name. to take on, with marriage to my fascinating and fitting partner, his name along with a commitment for the remainder of our lives. but I’ve also asked him to take on mine, as well– for us both to adopt townsend as middle and reiser as surname (thanks to tammy and by extention aleah for the suggestion).

now, I realize this tactic doesn’t touch the whole patrilineal/matrilineal naming convention question– and, ultimately, I suppose I’m throwing up my hands on that one as simply too big and deep and unmanageable to tackle (too further complicated by a heritage of multiple maternal lines through adoption). and despite how chris explained it to his dad yesterday, it’s not even so much about fairness in the final analysis for me as it is about doing it intentionally and together as a genuine gesture of our union– so that what results is a kind of townsend reiser team sans the unwieldy mouth-jumble of hyphenation.

I do understand that through use and in the course of things this townsend middle name will likely fade into something of a remnant, becoming less present and apparent over time– and I will probably become increasingly this new person myself, this sarah reiser, who currently feels like something of a stranger to me. I guess I’ve decided these things are just fine, too. I am become a neologism.

words, and all the more so names, are important to me. I tend not to use them lightly or effortlessly. I’m not so much a woman who bends easily with the groove of convention or external expectation– I resist and question and insist on finding my own right way, often taking my good time to do it. I kept my given name throughout the course of my first marriage without a second thought. I have a first cousin I’ve been closer to and distant from on and off over the years who at one time taught me something real about the resonances of renaming oneself, of laying claim to a matrix of familial and associative identities. I continue to decline to endorse any fixed right way— only the right way for each of us, felt in our bones and executed to the very tips of our nerve endings.

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quiet work

I’m good at going underground– somnolent and meditative for stretches at a time, drawn to quiet compellingly, as to water for solving itchiness, to bed when harried and jagged, to soothing smoothnesses for the relief of wear of ordinarily days. adrift and too often spinning in my well of leaves and assorted meandering flotsam, odd considerations float to the surface and grow momentarily compulsive– mainly thoughts of people I have known and loved, now distant in various ways, for different reasons. e.m. forster is reminded to me by a facebook acquaintance (the term “friend” exhausted by overuse in this medium):

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

I believe the work I do in this well of quiet consists in stitching up dispersed fragments of self into a more coherent whole, or at least a larger and more consonant piece– structuring alterations to the suit of self, tucking it here, letting it out there, adjusting so the skin of identity, outgrown or stretched, fits right once more. necessary, centering work. and yet there is an implicit irony in the disconnection seemingly requistite to the process– a pattern that traverses the ground back and forth between states of ragged psychic dispersal on the one hand and on the other isolation and disconnect from the warp and weft of social fabric.

a-spin and muddling, I find generous occasion for nostalgia– that golden retrospect that paints memory the fleeting luminance of dawns and dusks, a gilding inherent to transitional instants but lengthened and rendered more apparently permanent in the construction of the internal narrator. and so I relive momentary occasions of comradeship (themselves, to be sure, tiny islands in the slosh of reality once upon) and imagine almost that I’ve lost or forfeited or mislaid or otherwise squandered some more enduring state of connection. when in fact, perhaps, it is all episodic, inconsistent, occasional, and prone to stretches of drag punctuated by shining, resonant bursts of clear being.

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things that get stuck in the "drafts" folder

past birthday plan coordination; defaulted exchanges with spatio-temporally unavailable friends; partial apologies and limping pleas; notes to self; to-do optimism persistently listed; stalled-out gossip; collections of particularized references, filed for later; entirely empty messages somehow saved; whiny-ass complaints; lost and found messages for missing cardigan sweaters; mouth-drooling real estate and ebay listings, now closed.

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today

I miss vox. today I deleted the contact for vox blog posts off my cell phone. been awhile since I used it– still the residue of habitude was there.

I’ve been spinning in my solitude and transitional semi-idleness. it’s true, I’m semi-idle. it’s embarrassing to be not-busy– my work ethic throbs– but I am busy honoring an inner compulsion to lie fallow and let something sprout.

tonight I was drooling over letterpress accoutrements on ebay, getting starry-eyed over lead typefaces and the idea of building a shop, working in it all the live long day.

I’ve been spinning, unreconciled to the viability of any vehicle, uncertain of my desired destination– writing or drawing or collage or whatever I trip across seems less than a substantive means of occupation. I imagine what it would take to bump it up to a level that rendered the feeling of viability– and then I throw jacks under my own bare feet, object that I haven’t the nuts to manage it, frankly. stick-to-it-tiveness they used to call it, those field hockey coaches and math dinosaurs, outliving their due extinction long enough to sling final lethal commentaries.

in other news– my single argument thus far against the civil wedding ceremony as an ideal vehicle for accomplishing official bliss: one really shouldn’t have to have bureaucrats handing one any additional necessary paperwork, apart from one’s marriage license of course. I’m the type of bride who feels that’s enough to ask. as it was the groom’s brother spirited that away for safekeeping, and it was conveyed to me securely after the fact in a sturdy plastic bag. when the scolding lady handed me a tiny slip of paper amidst all the chaos, the fact that I happened to be carrying an outfit-matching pink handbag I could slip into this itsy smidgeon of printed matter outlining steps one should take to obtain a legal copy of the marriage certificate– well, suffice to say: I’ve lost it. onto the labyrinth of poorly-designed and -architected civil bureaucracy web pages I go to track down the answer.

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file under: how many metaphors can you hurl at an elusive thing?

aka, hot mess.

“what would be so terrible about not doing the things you’re trying to do?”

indeed at some point the effort seems specious– one has to wonder sooner or later. and yet attempting to address it stumps me.

“what would be so bad about just writing for yourself? no one else to read it– you could write just whatever you want.”

impatience with the process shoulders its way forward through all those shoulds, all the while envying the anatomy model for its detachable head– which saying out loud shows seams and stray threads. nightly reunions with daytime wits neither tidy or methodical.

“maybe you’re just not a writer, in that way.”

ouch. but right. … or simply in process perhaps (whatever that might mean.) wrangling with the judge who sits up top, comparing this and that, busily finding wanting, colorblind to differences betwixt tree fruits. and furious. mean little footstomper, greedy for the next arresting, authentic instance, urging to be convinced and content. only perpetual reinvention complete with throes seems sufficient, if less than entirely tasteful or pleasant for the participants.

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