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stuckness & stickiness

I’ve been stuck here for awhile now. Stuck again. Damned ill navigable slope. I’ve been cultivating the sticky sort of attentions I crave. Along with a bit of bumbling through brambles, up and down slopes, into puddles, over  boulders, and all kind of canted at a slant. And mires, oh yes.

What, you might ask, do I mean by sticky attentions? Come to that, why even bother? Just clear the way and sally onward.

But look! I say back– lookit alla this wonderfulness going on! So much to play with, to admire and rearrange and wonder at. So much to gaze at, lo– not so much my own middle belly parts, tho there’s a fair share of that (another story for another day)– but all around, out yonder, right there and there and there, golly, everywhere.

struwwelpeter-johnnyFrankly I never outgrew it, I often think. You see kids, out on the sidewalk, squatting over some red leaf, simply enchanted, and it is childhood perfectly poised. We say childlike wonder and craft tales about dreamy, gazy boys who wander off cliffs.

I tend to be more cliff-clinger than climber. Writing teacher Ralph Fletcher calls it freezing to the face, that writer’s paralysis, petrification, fear of ungripping fingertips to reach for the next handhold. Fear, Fletcher says, of making the inevitable big discoveries accrued through risk. Fletcher assures that the message takes care of itself in the writing of it. Trust the process, an entire generation of writing teachers intoned, responding to the leaden verbal structures marching forth from drill and repetition.

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names

When young I identified with the sound of my own name, Sarah–common enough, surely, but particularly mine. Sarah signified me tonally, instinctually and in a multiply evocative array of associations accruing over time. In those early years I felt myself called into existence by the very word, owned by pronunciation, as much possessed by as possessed of a two-beat fluid melody of consonants and vowels.

 

As a girl, I liked to play with names on notebook paper– a typical schoolgirl rite of passage, linking your first name with last of the love object and concocting fanciful monikers for offspring unborn, nicking them this way and that in elaborate slavic panoply. Some girls keep running lists of baby names down through the years. Some never outgrow a fundamental preoccupation with the nominative.

 

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orderly

I’m putting my house in order at the most incremental, cellular, specific object level. I must touch everything. Everything bears scrutiny. From the overlooked piles of intention to jumbled drawers and cupboards. I am caught up in the throes of outright mania for order– sorting, sifting, unstacking, and arranging everyday objects, glassware as well as curiosity cabinets full of odds and ends collected, squirreled away for years.

Partly this is evaluating stock for the theoretical etsy store, which I can’t seem to get off the ground– and partly it is just the hoarder’s habit of acquisition and utterly grudging parting from mundane yet enamored objects.

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balcony garden, redux

All I want to do is sit out on the back porch with the finches and breezes and swinging chimes, snacking on hummus and reading escapist novels– but I’m chased indoors by the broiling sun.

To work. Preserved by air conditioning and sucking down jars of cold water.

Just now a voracious gust attempted to yank the propped screen door off its hinges. Then suddenly everything is still, heart-shaped moonflower leaves swaying as if spent.

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balcony garden

I’m worrying my tomatoes may never ripen this year. It’s been unseasonably cool.

Another year and I long for the abundance of garden tomatoes in the Augusts of my childhood–fat slices sluiced with balsamic vinegar and olive olive and scattered with black pepper and scissor-cut basil.

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doomy

Hell, as that single searing jaunt through the Mojave Desert in the middle of July in a Renault Le Car sans AC attested, would be hot.

Under general heat advisory, Floyd and I hunker down inside next to the single chugging window unit. We maintain a cooler distance than usual, minimizing unnecessary activity. Larger mass of water consumption is notable on both our parts.

Lesson of the day: when the hot, grim, viral apocalypse descends, warlord kings will command access to clean, fresh water.

Which only makes the entire sold-out state of Michigan’s surrounding lakes so doom-drenched. Our largest Great Lake, so deeply voluminous and stormy clear– expendable in the name of commerce and industry.

Whee.

I have American History X out from Netflix. I’ve ordered it for some reason (Ed Norton), having recalled it (Ed Norton) as brilliant (Ed Norton) if nigh-unbearably grim, which today I think perhaps I should forego, for all the (sigh) Ed Norton.

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carnies

today I’m liking using navelgazer’s scrolling slideshow as an associative mosey back through the texty archives– so here’s another one, to consider, to reconsider, down the drafty internet eons from the heady Topic Project days of yore…

May 1, 2005

carnies.

The only carny I ever met was set up on a side street in Lower Manhattan—Ring Toss or Pea Wheel or what have you—Lorelei and I had run down to Pearl River for me to pick up some last-minute gifts/trash care of the Chinatown importers before my flight back to Iowa. I’d spent the week in long braids, littler clothing than I can fit into today, and had run the gamut of a line-up of metropolitan dates—at that stage I was chomping at the bit to flee my landlocked midwest life, feeling oppressively single, lonely, and questioning every last choice, not least of which the choice stemming from seeming inertia to continue on with the whole debt-incurring business of graduate school toward the ultimate, and long distance, goal of acquiring a Ph.D.—not to mention in a social science field when I knew myself to be a humanities girl through and through. Lorelei had moved east mere weeks before and had been living amid the musty waste of a dead or institutionalized old man’s West Side apartment, lining up his oddball and in places ingenious art collection for sale. Trying to keep the orphaned lapdog from shitting all over the place or driving the co-op members to action with its barking. New York. It all sounded good enough to me—intriguing at least if distinctly urban gothic—and I’d been shopping the New York Public School System’s web site for possibilities. I figured under the declaration of general literacy emergency even an MFA in poetry just might slip into a position at the front of a high school classroom. So this was intended as my initial, reconnaissance trip. Plus I’d been keeping myself busy with the dates lined up ahead of time online—somewhat flakey and sleazy across the board, but farmland beggars get down off their high horses and quit being so choosy after awhile. In any case, I felt just fine, sporting my particular exotic brand of pseudo-rural persona, done up in overalls with the tiniest of tshirts beneath and braids aided by sparkly little-girl butterfly clips—working that I’m-in-the-big-city-and-young-enough-and-desirable-enough-and-the-horizon-stretches-wide-before-me swagger—when that horizon literally split itself open with thunder a hundred feet outside Pearl River’s exit, and we dashed down the first side street and under a handy striped awning. We noticed then that the thoroughfare was closed off to motor traffic and lined with a series of such tented mechanical midway contraptions as make up a carnival these days—convertible trailers that uncollapsed to reveal a variety of culturally regurgitated Fun: Balloon-a-Rama, Spinna Winna, Hoop Shot, Rising Water, Frog/Turtle Pounce, Spill the Milk, and the like. Cheap plushies strung up swaying in the blowing rain. Hawkers leaning against their respective rentals each with the compulsory cigarette curled in a fist. Our guy shot us a lazy smile, invited us to try our luck, and, receiving a negative, proceeded to regale us with tales from The Life. In fact I’ve lost the details to the intervening years and doubt my own powers to reimagine the specific flavors of ramble and sawdust—chintzier and grittier than our wide-eyed romantic notions of carny life comprehended—but that tang of modern gypsydom—free agents contracting their chosen midway specialties, packing ‘em up and driving on to the next town in caravan with all the rest—or maybe packing in for a couple months to surf or hike should the notion seize—it smacked essentially of freedom to fresh-sprung workshop poets. And as we walked away, headed for the subway back uptown, Lorelei and I marveled together at the sheer weirdness of the world’s, and by extension our lives’, scope of possibility.

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squeaky

I have that squeaky-sinus thing, summer cold, yadda yadda, and it’s making me cranky. The spouse grows weary of my standard litany of plaint.

The aging, freon-scented window unit keeps things bearable in darkened rooms. Cicadas revs up for August.

I have decided to stop giving away good work for free. Let’s call it cranky and angry and be done with it.

I flop down on the unmade bed and lie texting confessional Facebook posts and then deleting them. It bugs me that Facebook makes it a fucking labyrinthine puzzle to figure out how to set my privacy settings so that certain people can see absolutely nothing about me or my life, motherfuckers.

Any minute now my nostril’s gonna squeak again.

Also I’ve wept about four times already today. Woo.