I have had to spend way too much time trying to fix my main drafts post in which I collect quotes and poems until I have an appropriate post in which to place them. For some reason, my WordPress switched to Block Editor, which I have no fricking idea how to use easily or effectively.
So once again I tried a forum fix to revert to old fashioned Classic Editor, but of course, it did not work, at least not exactly as explained. When I opened this main draft, all of the formatting between quotes and line breaks was gone, and if you know anything about poetry, including the proper line breaks is kind of important. I don’t even want to talk about how long fixing all of this actually took.
Yesterday, I gave up in the middle because with the script problem, moving things around was taking way too long I decided that today I would fix the damned thing no matter how much pain and anguish it caused me………..
So here I am. Finally.
I really, really hate how thing have been going in just about every compartment of my life. And my horse still isn’t home. Sucks to be me.
Music by Arctic Monkeys, “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” (Tame Impala cover)—I know that it’s a rare repeat. Don’t care. Sue me.
” . . .they would walk home in the evenings when the light was soft, anything bad sliding off them, and they would feel owned, completely owned, in a good way, by the air, which would touch them constantly, sometimes urgently, sometimes lightly, just to let them know it was there, and they would think maybe this is what being alive is” ~ Emily Berry, from “No Name”
Saturday afternoon, cloudy, 74 degrees.
I think that today would be a good day for a walk with the dogs mostly because I was walking everywhere in my dreams last night. I frequently walk in my dreams—to my imaginary jobs, to school, to the doctor’s office—it’s weird. Last night I was walking home (in Norfolk) down Shore Drive, which is definitely not a street for pedestrians. I was walking when I realized that it was getting dark, and there was no one around. I started to pick up my pace until I was running, but then I found myself running on all fours, but it felt completely natural, and I was able to run quickly, like some kind of animal.
I’ve had the being on all fours dreams before, but last night’s was one of the first times in which I felt myself moving. I’ve dreamt that I’ve been walking to and from a primary school in which I was teaching, but my walk takes me through a sketchy part of town, and I have to keep looking down alleys. Those are always strange as I’ve never really lived anywhere that had a lot of alleys.
I remember that in part of last night’s dream I was trying to remember if I had ever gone walking completely naked, and my dream mind remembered a time in which I went to school completely naked. I know—the naked dreams are all about being vulnerable—but in this particular naked dream I didn’t feel at all vulnerable, just incredibly free. I sent to school (college), but no one was especially surprised or concerned, and I felt very at home in my naked body. Go figure that one out because I’ve never been able to translate that one.
“Night opens itself only once. It’s enough . . . And I am well aware what night is made of.” ~ Alejandra Piznarik, from “Sex, Night”
Lately my dad has been making many appearances in my dreams. Last night he was bailing some of us out of jail (unsure as to who exactly was there), and it cost him $1500, and I was worried about how I would ever be able to pay him back. Funnily enough, though, he wasn’t mad; he was smiling. If you ever met my dad you would know that he was not a big smiler, which is probably where my antipathy towards smiling comes from.
But last night he was smiling, and it unnerved the me in the dream because I couldn’t quite figure out if it was a happy smile or a mad smile, if that makes sense. I have a vague memory of him appearing in my dreams the night before last as well, but now I cannot quite grab the thread of the dream, even though I awoke from it thinking that it was so powerful that I would definitely remember everything, but of course, I cannot. The only part that I can remember is that I was in the military, which is very, very weird.
For some strange reason, Brad Pitt was in part of my dream: I was sitting across from him in some kind of restaurant, and he was telling me why his marriage failed, and it was the most natural scenario, which it definitely would not be. I was also back at my old pain management doctor’s office so that I could get trigger point injections, but instead of the neurologist, it was another doctor that I saw for a while before him, and I was very confused. Oh, and Jennifer Aniston made an appearance as well.
I don’t have many celebrity dreams, and if any do appear, it’s not usually in a casual setting, but last night, this dream seemed to be populated with famous people. In another part I was in a movie theater, and I was watching a documentary. The strangest part was that I knew that the person sitting next to me was not who he claimed to be, and I knew that the scene involving the primates (?) would reveal who he really was, and I knew that Brad Pitt would be angry at the charade.
When the truth was revealed on the screen, a loud argument erupted, and we were all asked to leave the theater, which meant going up an aisle filled with chaise lounges because those are always in theaters . . .The whole sequence was truly bizarre.
“. . . each of us joins night’s ongoing story” ~ Li-Young Lee, from “Black Petal”
Sorry to go on so much about my dreams, but I always find them fascinating. I’ve never actually bothered to try that whole lucid dreaming thing, mostly because my dreams are already to full. I’ve found over the years that not everyone dreams like this, though, which is definitely a shame for those people because dreams that are so vivid are actually pretty cool, that is, until they aren’t, like the ones in which I awake screaming or yelling or crying.
I have wondered if my vivid dreaming is part of what makes my sleep so fractured. Apparently, not everyone awakens two to three times a night. That whole seven or eight hours of uninterrupted sleep only happened in my youth. Once I got married (the first time) and began to worry about adult problems like bills and rent and everything else, my ability to sleep uninterrupted ceased, and then with the birth of babies, sleep at night became even more fractured.
I suppose the dogs replaced the children at some point because I now awaken instantly when I sense a dog stirring and moving towards the front door. When my children were babies, the same thing would happen: Something in me would cause me to awaken instantly when a baby or child stirred, even once they were in their own rooms. Maybe that’s just an innate mother thing because I did it with Olivia as well.
“Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.” ~ Henri Frédéric Amiel
In other news . . .
I’ve been reading the Mueller report because, well, democracy you know. Amazingly, it’s not filled with a lot of legalese, making it fairly easy to go through, but I’ve been taking my time, going back and forth so that I don’t end up giving myself an aneurysm from being so angry.
Trust me. It’s better this way, well, better for my blood pressure, plus, I really don’t need yet another thing to keep me from being able to sleep. I’m really trying not to allow the state of the union to move to the top of my worry list.
I’d really like to print the report, but I think that I’ll wait until we see an unredacted version. Overall, though, I really want to hear from Mueller himself. His letters to and interactions with the pseudo attorney general only confirmed my initial suspicions about the entire Mueller investigation and the blatant bullshit of the administration’s declaration of total exoneration.
I’m so tired of all of this, the constant breaking news because there’s never a day in which something else stupid or illegal or evil happens. How did our country get to this point? But more importantly, why aren’t more people upset? I truly don’t understand. No, not everyone out there gives a whit about politics, but this is our entire system of government, people. This is our Constitution being blatantly ignored, and need I remind everyone that democracies die in countries all of the time, and the U.S. is not immune, no matter how superior we all feel to the rest of the world.
“We heard of nights lit with lightning bugs and cigarettes. With rumflame
and tonguefire. We needed none of it. The nights were black puzzleboxes and we solved them. It was easy— in the darkness, our minds sparked like flint.” ~ Catherine Pierce, from “The Geek Girls”
And now for something completely different . . . (I really miss Monty Python).
Last night Bill Maher made a Carpenters’ reference, and very few people in the audience got it. As the Dump would say, “sad.” You know that you are aging when you make cultural references that no one else in the room understand and/or appreciates.
Anyway . . . Corey bought me a small bottle of Maker’s Mark a few weeks ago, and I’ve been parceling it out like it’s gold, which it is actually akin to, considering the cost. I’ve just been having a weird craving for bourbon the last few months; it’s especially weird as I rarely drink any more, probably more as a reaction to being around a drunken Dallas.
Who knows. Certainly not I. But there really was a point to this: Even though the driveway is still in precarious shape because of the section that washed out, Corey met Dallas coming up the driveway yesterday pulling the horse trailer with the tractor. He (Dallas, not Corey) was sloppy drunk and talking about loading Sassy in the trailer and what he’d do to her if she wouldn’t get inside. Corey reminded him that the driveway was damaged, and actually convinced Dallas to turn around.
There was a lot more to the episode, but I just don’t want to get into it. Suffice it to say that Corey locked on of the gates on the driveway, which is good as Dallas actually came back up the drive after Corey left, and if Dallas had made it all the way here and tried to scare Sassy into the trailer, I’m really not sure how I would have reacted. As it was, Corey’s retelling of everything left me shaken. I’m really beginning to hate a lot of what is going on around here, the constant threats of lawsuits, and jail and violence, even though we’re not actually in the midst of it. But we’re close enough that it’s affecting us.
I had wanted to get away from people, away from neighbors, but I suppose you truly cannot get away from such things unless you are physically unreachable. I mean, we’re pretty isolated on our property, but these people can still reach us. Several years ago I wrote a post about hermits and hermitages; I remember it fondly. The irony is that when Corey first met Dallas, we thought that it was so great to have a contact who knew everyone and knew a lot about our property. That boon has become my bane.
Ah me . . . I just need to spend more time writing and practicing my piano, more said than done.
More later. Peace.
*All images are taken from the short movie Elephant’s Dream, which is the world’s first open movie, made entirely using open source graphics software and presented under a Creative Commons license. To see more images or to watch the movie, go to Blender Foundation | www.blender.org
Music by Disturbed (yes, again), “Sound of Silence”
Falling Water (section one)
I drove to Oak Park, took two tours,
And looked at some of the houses.
I took the long way back along the lake.
The place that I came home to—a cavernous
Apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee—
Seems basically a part of that tradition,
With the same admixture of expansion and restraint:
The space takes off, yet leaves behind a nagging
Feeling of confinement, with the disconcerting sense
That while the superficial conflicts got resolved,
The underlying tensions brought to equilibrium,
It isn’t yet a place in which I feel that I can live.
Imagine someone reading. Contemplate a man
Oblivious to his settings, and then a distant person
Standing in an ordinary room, hemmed in by limitations,
Yet possessed by the illusion of an individual life
That blooms within its own mysterious enclosure,
In a solitary space in which the soul can breathe
And where the heart can stay—not by discovering it,
But by creating it, by giving it a self-sustaining
Atmosphere of depth, both in the architecture,
And in the unconstructed life that it contains.
In a late and very brief remark, Freud speculates
That space is the projection of a “psychic apparatus”
Which remains almost entirely oblivious to itself;
And Wright extols “that primitive sense of shelter”
Which can turn a house into a refuge from despair.
I wish that time could bring the future back again
And let me see things as they used to seem to me
Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state—
Alone and free and filled with cares about tomorrow.
There used to be a logic in the way time passed
That made it flow directly towards an underlying space
Where all the minor, individual lives converged.
The moments borrowed their perceptions from the past
And bathed the future in a soft, familiar light
I remembered from home, and which has faded.
And the voices get supplanted by the rain,
The nights seem colder, and the angel in the mind
That used to sing to me beneath the wide suburban sky
Turns into dreamwork and dissolves into the air,
While in its place a kind of monument appears,
Magnificent in isolation, compromised by proximity
And standing in a small and singular expanse—
As though the years had been a pretext for reflection,
And my life had been a phase of disenchantment—
As the faces that I cherished gradually withdraw,
The reassuring settings slowly melt away,
And what remains is just a sense of getting older.
In a variation of the parable, the pure of heart
Descend into a kingdom that they never wanted
And refused to see. The homely notions of the good,
The quaint ideas of perfection swept away like
Adolescent fictions as the real forms of life
Deteriorate with manically increasing speed,
The kind man wakes into a quiet dream of shelter,
And the serenity it brings—not in reflection,
But in the paralyzing fear of being mistaken,
Of losing everything, of acquiescing in the
Obvious approach (the house shaped like a box;
The life that can’t accommodate another’s)—
As the heart shrinks down to tiny, local things.
Rapeseed field barn, Cotswold, UK by Eri Hossinger (FCC)
“Our hearts teach us how to fly with wings of pain.” ~ Frank Lima, from “Felonies and Arias of the Heart”
Saturday afternoon, sunny and warmer, 57 degrees.
This afternoon Corey is adding a modified barbed wire to the pasture enclosure so that we can move the goats there. It should keep them in and keep predators out, at least, that’s the intent. I really don’t like barbed wire, and I know that part of that is because of how it looms darkly through the movie Legends of the Fall. Hey, at least I’m being honest.
Spring wildflowers at Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma by USFWS (FCC)
On Thursday, Corey and I made the trip to Bristol, Tennessee so that I could have an echocardiogram and ultrasound. The echo was to check out a suspected murmur, and the ultrasound was for my thyroid. But as usual, things did not go as planned. I did have the correct day this time, but I did not know that I would have to pay the copay upfront for the ultrasound. While it was only $16.78, I did not have the local bank card with me; Corey had it, so I had to cancel the ultrasound; this was the second time I had to cancel it. However, when I reschedule I might be able to have the test done somewhere closer to home. Here’s hoping.
Anyway, it seems that the echo went fine; the tech said that my heart pictures were “beautiful,” which was about all that she could tell me, of course, because they aren’t allowed to say anything as the test has to be read by a cardiologist. I wasn’t too worried about the murmur as such things are supposedly fairly common, and obviously, it wasn’t something that I’ve had all of my life.
However, years ago, my heart used to click whenever I lay on my side. It did that for a couple of years and then went away. I remember telling some doctor and was told that it was nothing, and since it went away, I never thought about it again until the echo.
“We’ve paid our dues. Our hearts are inscribed with loss after loss.” ~ Luci Tapahonso, from “The Holy Twins”
So after leaving the hospital and while I still had a 3G signal, I tried to call my insurance company to see if I could change my PCP. I’ve tried a couple of times to do so online, but I’ve locked myself out of the account. Turns out, the doctor with whom I have an appointment on Monday isn’t even in network, even though she’s part of the local medical network. It’s all such bullshit. I ate up minutes trying to clarify with the insurance rep, only to find out that the echo that I had just had done wasn’t covered; the urgent care visit that I had when my fingertip was bitten off wasn’t covered either.
I did not wail uncontrollably into the telephone, which was my internal reaction; instead, I just asked the rep to transfer me to tech support, but when she did, I was put on hold. I just didn’t have it in me to stay on hold any longer and eat up valuable minutes just to have the online account unlocked. Frankly, I’d had more than enough stress for one day. I don’t even want to know what my blood pressure was at that point.
I’m keeping the appointment on Monday with the out-of-network PCP because I’ve had such a horrendous time finding competent doctors around here. Apparently, the co-pay will only be $5 instead of $0 for an in-network doctor, so that’s not prohibitive (she says even though we are currently broker than broke and sorely lacking in things like, oh, milk . . . whatever).
“And I knew you, a swelling in the heart, A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass Burning—as the sun falls below the earth— Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow.” ~ Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from “Elegy”
In other news, Max and Ruby (the goats) are finally beginning to forage, which they weren’t doing initially. The pair of them are actually very quiet. For some reason, I always thought that goats were loud when they bleat, but I’ve only heard them bleat quietly. Maybe different breeds of goats bleat at different levels. I suppose we shall find out.
Dallas hasn’t been around here since the dog fight. Apparently, the fight frightened him. I’m not complaining as it’s been an unexpected boon for me. It’s been quiet, but that’s not to say that he still doesn’t call Corey frequently for rides to various places or for help, and of course Corey so generously assists..
Spring in Bornich, Germany by Mark Strobl (FCC)
Speaking of animals, we’ve been dragged into the periphery of a local feud of sorts. Dallas has a nephew who has property on the ridge. This is the same guy whose livestock has been frequently found grazing and roaming on the road in search of food, something we’ve witnesses ever since we rounded a corner and almost hit a horse the first time we came here.
Well apparently this guy had a cow and its calf who wandered onto someone’s property, and the idiot son of the property owner shot the cow, leaving the nursing calf without a mother. Unbelievable. Corey and I heard about it, and I was livid at the ignorance that would make someone think that this was an okay thing to do. I mean, what happened to saying shoo and waving your arms?
It seems that calling the police and suing one another is another local pastime around here, and Dallas and this nephew do not get along. The day after this happened, and to be neighborly, Corey stopped while he was out and asked the guy if he had found the calf yet. The guy hadn’t found the calf, but he had accusations to throw, mentioning Dallas’s name and insinuating that Corey might have something to do with it.
Corey assured him that he knew nothing at all about the situation other than hearing about the cow being shot, and then he drove off. When Corey told me about this, I did not have a good feeling, and Corey described this guy as being incredibly arrogant. Nevertheless, we had hoped that would be the last we would hear of things.
“It’s raining in my heart.” ~ Tim Dlugos, from “Come in from the Rain”
Listen, we moved here to get away from nosy neighbors, petty comments, and city regulations, and we’ve made it a point to mind our own business. We’re friendly, and will wave and say hello, but for the most part, we don’t know or care to know who is doing what to whom at any given time, including the saga of the cow and her calf.
Unfortunately, things did not end there.
Dallas took the cow carcass to his property supposedly to get rid of it, but not quite. And then the next day he and Travis, another neighbor we know, wanted Corey to help them load up the calf. Dallas said that he was going to let the calf nurse on his milk cow. Neither Corey nor I wanted any part of this, but Corey agreed to help round it up but nothing else.
Pared y Cefn-hir and Cregennan lakes, Snowdonia, Gwynedd, Wales, UK by Welsh Photographer (FCC)
I had real misgivings about all of this and was still really upset about the jackass who murdered the mother cow. Corey helped load the calf and came home. When Dallas and Travis got down the ridge, the police were waiting for them and wanted to know where they were taking the calf. Smooth talker that he thinks he is, Dallas said that they had found the calf and were returning it to his nephew. The cops had them unload the calf and then let them go.
That night, Dallas said that around 1 a.m. he heard horns honking, and he went out to find his nephew’s horses in the road. Dallas said that he rounded up the horses and put them in his pasture for the night and then went back to bed. The next morning, the local cops showed up with a warrant (kind of fishy, the timing of that), claiming that Dallas had stolen his nephew’s horses. Corey happened to be at Dallas’s at the time. They took Dallas in, and said that he’d be released that afternoon.
“She treats the dark like a cathedral. She is all swallow, the heart working under every scale to outgrow a fortified spiral.
The cathedral swallows the heart.” ~ Amber Flora Thomas, from “Shed”
This whole situation is unbelievable, but that’s not the end. That night, one of Dallas’s RV campers was set on fire. Dallas sometimes sleeps in this particular camper, which is behind his house and on the edge of his property; fortunately, he didn’t happen to be in it on this particular night.
Now Dallas is talking about getting his lawyer involved, and he still has to go to court over the horses, and his nephew has apparently moved his horses and cows somewhere else. I’m just hoping that wherever he has relocated his livestock, that he takes better care of them and feeds them better because they were always breaking out and wandering in the road looking for areas in which to graze.
Canola Flower at Showa Commemorative National Government Park, Tokyo by Takashi M (FCC)
All in all, I’m really over all of this. These people around here need to find better ways to spend their time and leave us out of it. I know that it’s a small-town mentality to be up in everyone else’s business, but seriously? WTF, people?
I had thought that my old neighbors on Benjamin were busy bodies, but they were small time compared to these people. I’m just glad that we had already been pulling back in our dealings with Dallas. The whole “painted by the same brush” mentality apparently applies: if you associate with someone, then obviously you are guilty by association.
Give me a break.If this is how it’s going to be, then perhaps my decision to become a hermit has not been ill-founded after all.
More later. Peace.
Anniversary
2
I lied a little. There are things I don’t want to tell you. How lonely
I am today and sick at heart. How the rain falls steadily and cold
on a garden grown greener, more lush and even less tame. I
haven’t done much, I confess, to contain it. The grapevine, as
usual, threatens everything in its path, while the raspberry canes,
aggressive and abundant, are clearly out of control. I’m afraid the
wildflowers have taken over, being after all the most hardy and
tolerant of shade and neglect. This year the violets and lilies of
the valley are rampant, while the phlox are about to emit their
shocking pink perfume. Oh, my dear, had you been here this
spring, you would have seen how the bleeding hearts are thriving.
~ Madelon Sprengnether (from Angel of Duluth)
Music by Jane Olivor, “Come in from the Rain” (a favorite song from my past)
I did not wail uncontrollably into the telephone, which was my internal reaction; instead, I just asked the rep to transfer me to tech support, but when she did, I was put on hold. I just didn’t have it in me to stay on hold any longer and eat up valuable minutes just to have the online account unlocked. Frankly, I’d had more than enough stress for one day. I don’t even want to know what my blood pressure was at that point.
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 