“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.” ~ Louis Adamic

Stormy Seas by Jake Pike (cc)

                   

“She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Great Gatsby

Saturday afternoon. Partly cloudy, 63 degrees.

Well a front moved through yesterday, and temperatures are more like April. However, the bouncing temperatures are wreaking havoc with my head. I just haven’t had any energy at all in the past few days, but today I was feeling a bit better, that is until my mother called.

Apparently someone called her number looking for Corey and me, and my mother went off the deep end, and now she thinks that the police are going to show up at my door and haul me off to jail. It does no good to try to explain things to my mother because she makes up her mind, and always, always, it is in favor of whoever is not me. So I have to listen to how I’m a deadbeat, and so is my husband, and what in the hell are we doing anyway.

Stormy Sea 3 by Lemondjinn on deviantArt (cc)

It’s unfortunate that these people called my mother, especially because she has an unlisted number, because she thinks that I gave these people her name and phone number. Like I would ever be stupid enough to do that. I tried to explain that Corey will be in port on Monday, and we’ll talk to the bank then, but noooooooooo. Not good enough. Consequently, the almost better mood that I was cultivating when I woke up has fast fled the premises.

I really, really hate days like these. I hate bill collectors. I hate everyone. Well, not everyone, but definitely bill collectors, especially as we have made a true effort since Corey went back to work to get back to erasing our debt. Nothing is worse than trying your best only to have it boomerang and slam you in the face.

“—tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do,
we’ll move away still further:into now” ~ E. E. Cummings, from “all ignorance toboggans into know”

E. E. Cummings is appropriate for my mood: convoluted and obscure.

I just don’t know how or why or who or what. I just don’t know. I only know what I don’t know. I feel like I’m drowning here. I feel so overwhelmed and so tense. My neck is hard with knots. My shoulders hunched and hurting. Yesterday afternoon I tried to read a book of poems that Brett had lent me, but I couldn’t because of the spots in front of my eyes. They’re still there, but it doesn’t matter so much when I’m writing because I don’t need to focus on anything, not the screen, not the keyboard, nothing.

Stormy Sea at Coldingham Bay by Walter Baxter (cc)

I realize what’s happening: I’m going into insular mode, retreating into myself beneath my invisible protective shell. It’s probably a good thing that invisibility cloaks are only the stuff of fiction, because if I had one, I’m not sure if I would ever poke my head out, choosing instead to remain cloaked and therefore, safe. So instead I’ll just hide here in my corner of the room in my corner of the house in my corner of the world, trying very hard not to draw any attention to myself.

Who have I become?

“I somehow have a feeling of being senselessly drawn, wandering senselessly through a senselessly obscene, absurd world.” ~ Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 12 March 1928

I’m not at all certain that I like this woman, this person I am describing, the one who cowers and hides instead of facing things head on, shoulders back, an imperious glare daring the world to bring it on. What happened to that person, to that woman?

I feel so beaten down, so powerless, and it’s so much more than the telephone calls and my mother. I mean, it’s almost mid-April, and what happened to my big plans for the GRE, for my graduate school application? Is my desire for the doctoral program only so that I can retreat into the world of academia once more in order to avoid reality for another prolonged period?

Stormy Seas, Scarborough, UK (Wikimedia Commons)

I’m sorry if I’m not making much sense, but I’m not making that much sense to myself either, if that helps . . . Hell, I don’t even know what I’m trying to say here. I feel like a walk-on player in the theatre of the absurd, one of Shakespeare’s fools, except the fools were the ones who actually saw what was going on and dared to comment on it. The fools, the japesters, the clowns—they sat back and observed and then pretended not to know or understand when in fact they saw things more clearly than the greatest kings and queens, but their lowly stature kept them in positions of obscurity.

So probably not a fool or a jape, or perhaps a fool or jape but without the wisdom. They had the wisdom but none of the power. I do not feel wise or powerful at the moment.

“My love,
for one hour, let’s sink into
the mercy of being irrelevant.” ~ Rane Arroyo, from “Surviving Utah”

It’s as if I’m standing on the bow of a ship facing the wind head on, and the only thing keeping me from being tossed overboard is a very thin tether, and I’m dependent upon my knot-making for security, and, well, my knot-making is limited. I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it, let’s just say.

Stormy Ocean, San Diego by Melissa Schranz (cc)

Who is this person I’ve become? I honestly don’t know any more. All I can think of are nautical metaphors: lost at sea, thrown overboard, jettisoned with the waste, tossed in a gale.

When you have spots in your eyes, it’s hard to see what’s in front of you. Couple those spots with a tumultuous soul and a racked body, and the resultant being is hard to identify. Indefinable, nondescript, untethered.

Perhaps I have become the living embodiment of a 404 File Not Found. I would laugh if it weren’t so close to the truth.

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.” ~ Fernando Pessoa

I just took a time out to play stick with Tillie and take a shower. I didn’t realize just how sore I was until I threw the stick. Man, my body feels like it’s 80 years old.

Speaking of bodies, and I was, you know how I’ve always said that I don’t believe in plastic surgery? I think I’ve changed my mind. I cannot stand my bat-wing arms; they make me so self-conscious about wearing anything sleeveless. I don’t want bigger boobs, and I don’t want a nose job. I don’t want a butt implant, and I think my ears are just fine the way that they are, but seriously? I’m wishing I had the money to do something about my arms.

Stormy Seas (cc)

Vain? I know. I also know that fixing my arms won’t suddenly make me write better and won’t get me published. Fixing my arms won’t fix my relationship with my mother, and fixing my arms won’t make my kids decide what they want to do with their lives. But fixing my arms would make me a little more comfortable in my skin. And precisely because of this unbalanced list of pros and cons, without even going into the money that doesn’t exist, I will never get my arms fixed.

But I thought that I needed to end this post on a completely different note, not necessarily a positive note, but a different one.

More later. Peace.

Music by Birdy, “Terrible Love”

                   

Cityscape

I have a word for it —
the way the surface waited all day
to be a silvery pause between sky and city —
which is elver.

And another one for how
the bay shelved cirrus clouds
piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea,
which is elver too.

The old Blackrock baths
have been neglected now for fifty years,
fine cracks in the tiles
visible as they never were when

I can I can I can
shouted Harry Vernon as
he dived from the highest board
curving down into salt and urine

his cry fading out
through the half century it took
to hear as a child that a glass eel
had been seen

entering the seawater baths at twilight —
also known as elver —
and immediately
the word begins

a delicate migration —
a fine crazing healing in the tiles —
the sky deepening above a city
that has always been

unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea
to which there now comes at dusk
a translucent visitor
yearning for the estuary.

~ Eavan Boland

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“I am interested in impossible embodiments. I wish to write; I wish to write about certain things that cannot be held. I want to create a sea of freely-flowing words of no definite form and shape waves of fluent exactness.” ~ Virginia Woolf, from Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909

                   

“First of the Light” (nd, oil on canvas)
by Peter Wileman

“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s not the best way to live. But it’s the way I am.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, from Middlesex

Early Wednesday evening. Cloudy, 56 degrees.

Last night I had a cousin dream again. At first, we were in a high school, and we heard shooting, so two of us hid in a classroom beneath a science fair project. I thought it was a stupid place to hide. The gunman came into the room and just stood there. I tried not to breathe.

“Dawn over the Estuary” (nd, oil on canvas)
by Peter Wileman

Then somehow we got away, and then we were on a ship, and the ship was constructed so that all of the decks opened onto the middle of the ship, which was a swimming pool, and I thought about jumping from the third deck down into the pool but then decided against it, especially after these figures in white robes began to round up all of the people in the pool. The robed people didn’t have faces. Then it was time to eat, but there wasn’t any food except for pears.

Then the scene changed and Corey and I were on some wildlife preserve on an island, and we had no idea how big the preserve was, and we were walking on these trails, and suddenly I was attacked by a giant frog that was the size of a small dog, and Corey was running from frogs and foxes. I finally found a map of the island and realized that we were never going to find our way back.

Make of it what you will, I only know that too much was going on, and I was so tired afterwards.

“I’m writing against my own blankness, to record
this life that I’m living mostly lonely
or hopeful.” ~ Nate Pritts, from “All Those Sweet Things”

I’ve had a hard time focusing lately. When I sit down to write, nothing comes. I’m thinking about a million different things: the situation in Steubenville, Ohio, the prevalence of rape culture throughout the world, whether or not what I write here is writing, the idea of privacy in a world filled with technological gadgets that wash away any veneer of privacy to which we might aspire, and how I’m so tired that there actually exists a school of thought that the concept of feminism is just another word for lesbianism.

“Red Horizon” (nd, oil on canvas)
by Peter Wileman

Can you understand why I cannot focus? I have so very much to say, so many thoughts bouncing around in my head, but I am as yet unable to focus enough to write intelligently about any of it. Not to mention the whole thing about me having to take care of the bills and make the telephone calls and straighten out why my health insurance was cancelled once again and how that affected my upcoming doctor’s appointments and my medication refills . . . in other words—blech, double blech.

I did get a bit of a boost when I read selected sections of Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Reading these published writers when they talk about how they write always affects me in two ways: At first I am excited, and then I’m depressed, first because what they have to say makes so much sense, then the downside of realizing that the perch from which they speak is one share by that group of writers of which I hold no membership—the published writer who is selling his/her work.

“Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant;  once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin.  The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.” ~ Tana French, from Broken Harbor

I also fear that one of my new medications is messing with my head as well as my body. Since I don’t know a lot about Verelan, I looked it up, and of course, I have a host of the side effects, but mostly the ones dealing with stomach upset and pain.

“Blue Horizon” (nd, oil on canvas)
by Peter Wileman

Have I mentioned lately how very much I hate medications, doctors, medical tests, the medical industry in general, the medical treatment we receive, ya da ya da ya da? My neighbor’s elderly mother fell a few weeks ago and hit her head. She suffered from dementia. When when she got to the hospital, she must have told them she didn’t have insurance. She did. But the hospital was quick to do a CT scan and then send her home. Her son did not think she should be sent home. Then he noticed that her  discharge papers said self-pay. He called to straighten out the insurance problem. Meanwhile, she got very sick at home, wouldn’t eat, and ended up having a fatal stroke.

The MRI was not done on her until the second time she was taken in, and by then, it was really too late. She was 95. I would see her out in her yard pulling weeds. She talked to anyone who would listen. When her son tried to tell the hospital people that his mother was definitely not acting normally, they told him that they found no problems with the CT scan and insisted on discharging her.

I suppose I am lucky. I am still cogent and ornery enough that I insist on knowing what’s going on with my treatment. I won’t be ignored. But the stress of fighting for inherent rights as a patient certainly does not add to overall well-being.

“It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.” ~ Robert Frost, from “West Running Brook”

And then there are the raccoons. I know that I’ve mentioned them before, how Corey thought they were cute. Well . . . they are not huge, and they are doing terribly non-cute things like eating bags of dry dog food and opening the tubs in which we store chips and bread. Not cute, definitely not cute. These things are so fat that it sounds as if they are going to come crashing through the ceiling. Something has to be done. I have a solution but not the means by which to implement it.

“Evening Falls over the Estuary” (nd, oil on canvas)
by Peter Wileman

And then there is the dry rot. I know in my heart of hearts we have dry rot forming beneath our bathroom because of the leaky tub. Corey doesn’t like to go beneath the house, and I don’t blame him, but if we don’t do some shoring up soon, one day I’m going to be in the shower and the whole bathtub is going to fall through the floor. Of course I will be the one in the tub when it happens because that is my own personal Murphy’s Law at work.

I know. I know. Bitch, bitch, bitch, but really, my head feels as if it’s going to explode from all of the worrying that I’m doing over these things—large and small. Add to this, of course, my ongoing worries about eldest son and his total and complete lack of direction in life as well as his significant drinking, my worries about youngest son and what he’s going to do with his life, worries about daughter and her continued withdrawal, worries about my mother who seems to be in the initial throes of Alzheimer’s.

It’s too much, I tell you. Too much.

“I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.” ~ Dejan Stojanovic, from The Shape

And at times such as these I think longingly of that other generation of writers, the ones who subsisted on booze and cigarettes, the ones who never seemed to care how much or how little money they had, and still they pressed on, putting their words down on paper, sending them out, getting published, being read. I think of Carson McCullers and her penchant for drinking bourbon for breakfast, and a wee small part of me wishes that I could live with such abandon, but of course, I cannot because, well because that’s just not a healthy way to live, and I know that I couldn’t do that to myself.

“Violet Horizon” (nd, oil on canvas)
by Peter Wileman

Two weird memories came to me in the car on the way home from taking Brett to campus today (will he ever learn to drive???). I heard the song “Closing Time,” which I heard for the first time many years ago when I was on a blind date with a firefighter. A teacher with whom I taught at the public school was married to a firefighter, and he had a friend who was looking for someone to date. Natch, a blind date was arranged. He was a very nice man, soft-spoken, attractive, and I felt absolutely no attraction to him whatsoever. I couldn’t wait for the night to be over, and I didn’t give him my telephone number. Of course, my automatic guilt mechanism kicked in and I wondered if I should have given him a chance, but I held firm.

The second memory came immediately after when the song “Come My Lady” came on the radio, and it was one of the first songs to which Corey and I danced, and he has always called me his butterfly. If I had gone on a second date with the firefighter, would I have ever made it to the point at which another man would call me his butterfly? Thankfully, I don’t really have to worry about that one.

More later. Peace.

All images by British painter Peter Wileman, President of the Royal Institute of Oil Pointers.

Music by Erin McCarley, “What I Needed”

                   

Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

~ Anne Sexton

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“My heart is maneuvering in rings of trembling darkness and unreasonable echoes of over-thoughtfulness.” ~ Virginia Woolf, from Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf

“Hornbaek in Winter” (1891, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

                  

“A sigh just isn’t a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.” ~ Salman Rushdie, from The Moor’s Last Sigh

Tuesday afternoon. Partly cloudy and warm, 69 degrees.

“Summer Evening at Skagen Beach” (1893, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

Last night I dreamed about my father. We needed to buy nitroglycerine, not sure why. Corey, my mother, my father, and I went to an old-fashioned hardware store. The man who helped us told us that we needed to be very careful not to jostle the canister when transporting it, so my dad also bought a weird-looking cart in which to move the canister. My dad and mom went to get the car. My dad called and said to meet them at the school. There was no school anywhere near the hardware store. Corey and I were lugging around this heavy cart with the canister, and I was really worried about moving it so much because I had seen what the nitro could do. The hardware store’s manager had poured a little bit around a door knob and the wood around the doorknob melted.

When we didn’t see my dad and mom, we went back inside the store. Then my dad called and wanted to know where we were, why we weren’t at the school. I told him that we couldn’t find the school. He got really mad and started yelling at me over the phone, and I heard my mother in the background telling him to calm down. Corey and I went back outside to see if we could see them. They were across the street in my dad’s old Falcon, and when I looked again, my dad was punching my mother (nothing like this ever happened in real life). I ran up to my dad and grabbed him from behind. My mother said that he was beating her because he was mad at me. Suddenly, we were in the middle of the street, and traffic was all around us. Then the dream ended.

“Heart on fire, ashes everywhere
— there’s no return from a red like that.” ~ Manuel de Freitas, from “Fado Menor,” trans. Richard Zenith

My mother still has the ability to make me feel like a six-year-old just by uttering four words: “Don’t lie to me.” This was an oft-heard phrase when I was growing up, and it has continued well into adulthood. As an only child, I was blamed for anything that happened, and very often for things that didn’t happen. Example: My mother once had me in tears by accusing me of flushing a bottle of nail polish down the toilet. I hadn’t done such a thing, and it never would have occurred to me to do such a thing.

“Sea at Skagen” (1882, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

Today, she pulled into the driveway behind the Rodeo and wanted to know who had banged up the car. “There’s a big one on the front and one on the back.”

I told her that there were no new dents, that the one on the front had rust on it  because it had been there so long, had been there when I got the Rodeo, to which she responded, “Don’t lie to me.”

I wasn’t lying. I don’t lie. I’m not a liar. I felt sick to my stomach.

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.” ~ John Banville, from The Sea

“Summer Night on the South Beach at Skagen” (1893, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

My friend Mari asked me in an e-mail what I’ve been doing. I responded with the following:

What am I doing? Thinking about how I used to say to myself that May Sarton didn’t start writing professionally until she was in her 50′s, and that was the perfect excuse. What’s my excuse now? I try to post something every day on my blog. On days that writing is just too hard, I usually resort to something from Jon Stewart or a single poem. I started two novels during NaNoWriMo, but failed to finish either of them. I dream in French sometimes, and I still write poems in that time between sleep and wakefulness, only to forget them entirely before I can write them down. I dream about my few friends, now scattered across the country, and I imagine lives for them since I am miserable about keeping in touch. I bought GRE prep materials so that I could take the GRE this year and apply to GW’s PhD program by January of next year. I wonder if I’ll really do that.

What am I doing?

Nothing.

“and I am only nerves, strung on constellations,
meridians and vectors quivering.” ~ Cynthia Huntington, from “Meds”

I began this post three hours ago. In between I’ve played stick with Tillie and finished reading a book that I started yesterday. I wonder if I have anything to say. I wonder if I ever have anything to say. I wonder why anyone would care what I have to say. I wonder what the point is, the point to this blog, the point to me.

“Painting on the Beach at Stenbert” (1889, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

What am I, not who, but what? Am I doomed to be stuck in replay mode forever, that same track over and over again, the one in which I pine over the future that is not and bemoan the fates over the now that is?

I told Corey that I think my brain is full of holes, and I do. My mother thinks she might have early Alzheimer’s, and then she tells me that I’m just as bad at remembering things, so as usual, I take her words to heart, and I think, “my brain must be full of holes because I cannot remember things.” And is this post yet another attempt to dissect the person that is my mother, to try to see past her words into her DNA, the strands that define her, as if in so doing I might finally begin to understand.

No. I will never understand.

“Oh, my friend sometimes the realization runs through my head that I am actually living a supremely dangerous life: for I belong among those machines that can explode! I can’t emphasize that strongly enough. The intensities of my feeling make me shudder and laugh aloud.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, from Selected Letters

My friend Mari’s father died in February after a long illness. We both loved our daddies, but I would not say that we were “daddy’s girls,” or perhaps we were. Who knows. My father, when he comes to me in dreams, is always different, as in each dream is different, and I wonder if I’ve forgotten who he was. I don’t think so. But when I dream of family members, it’s always the past; everyone is younger, like my cousins who aren’t really my cousins—when I dream about the females in the family, they are always young, like they were when I used to care for them in the summers. And one other strange recurring theme: I am always very close to my male cousin, the only male with four sisters. In my dreams, we are always very, very close. We can tell each other anything.

“Summer Evening” (1908, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

My dreams are my past, replaying itself, unfolding in different ways. I rarely dream of future selves, either the past or now, alternative nows. But my father is in my dreams much more than my mother. I suppose my dreams are my way of maintaining those connections that in real life have faded into pale, almost transparent threads, from lack of work, lack of maintenance, which doesn’t actually make sense because on a woven blanket or on a quilt, those areas that fade the fastest are the ones that are touched the most.

So does this mean that because I touch these people so often in my dreams, then the imaginary quilt is fading?

I have not answers, only far too many questions today. No answers. No defining moments. Only standing on the porch hugging my arms close to my body, trying not to let a single tear escape as my mothers says, “Don’t lie to me.”

More later. Peace.

All images by Peder Severin Krøyer, Danish painter known as prominent member of Skagen painters

Music by Maggie Eckford, “What If”

                   

Today It Seemed I Had Nothing to Say

that hadn’t been said already—
my head full of moldy
hay and feelings
of futility—

until you asked me
what it was like, for a change,
to have no barred owl
brooding above the barn,

and so I went stealing again,
softly, softly
up the worn wood loft ladder,
hoping to startle up
a glimpse of something

that even now might heft
itself lightly through the mouth
of the mow, and drift just
out of view, off-levelly,
all hollow and feather pillow,

folding and unfolding
and folding itself silently into
the forest where its terrible
utility moves like a shudder
over every living thing.

~ Todd Boss

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