Bee Hives in a Field of Canola, Oregon, US by Ian Sane (FCC)
“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.” ~ Charles Bukowski
Thursday afternoon, rainy and cooler, 74 degrees.
Bad day. I’m mulling over a decision that has to be made, and I just cannot see a solution in which anyone can be happy with the outcome, least of all me. To distract myself, I thought I’d just do kind of a random post . . .
Thursday thoughts:
Why on earth would Corey’s recipe for beef and noodles also include mashed potatoes? Not enough calories in the noodles?
When will Roland realize that Bailey is a dog and that he cannot have sex with her?
I wish that Dallas could have a life-altering epiphany, but I just don’t see that happening. He’ll never change, and he’ll probably live to be 110.
Can we ever take the time to paint this stupid house? I hate living like this.
Why did Danny Burke leave Most Amazing Top 10? I know that this is probably only something that I wonder, well, me and the other 5 million subscribers.
Why on earth would anyone trust a Facebook cyber bank? Talk about taking unnecessary chances . . .
Can we just get an even 30 Democratic candidates for president? I mean, 24 isn’t nearly enough. Is it?
Will I ever be old enough not to have breakouts? Once upon a time, I assumed that such things ended once you left your teens. Ha.
I miss my books.
I dreamed last night that I pushed on my stomach and a ball the size of a handball popped out. I pressed on my belly again, and another one popped out, and then a third. But no holes, just stretched skin. Weird, huh?
What is the goats’ obsession with my Bentwood rocker? I’ve had this thing longer than my kids, and I really would prefer that it not be destroyed by goat hooves.
Did you know that a kid swallowed a live fish, and then the fish ended up living in his lung? Also weird.
There are no movie theaters within a half an hour of here.
There is nothing within half an hour of here.
My daughter wonders if I’m going crazy from the isolation yet.
Hmm . . .
I have so many insect bites on my limbs that it actually looks like I have small hives.
Obviously, I’m competing with the bug zapper for number of captures.
One of the goat girls has figured out how to make knocking sounds on the front door. I kid you not.
Dogs like to eat goat poop. Yep. Just as disgusting as you might imagine.
I really want to have bee hives. We have plenty of room for them. Yet another thing to go on the list.
Did you know that bees are so essential to our lives that they even affect the production of coffee? Like coffee? Save the bees.
Should I try to go back to work full time? The question that continues to plague me.
The White House sent out an official letter in which the word occurring was misspelled. Not surprised.
I really, really want to try a pint of Magnum sea salt caramel ice cream with a chocolate shell. Every time I see the commercial, I begin to salivate.
I’m still having the script problem, particularly on WordPress and YouTube. Anyone else using Firefox experiencing the same issues? It’s making me kind of crazy. More than usual. Meh.
Well, I think that’s about all. Concentrating on thoughts is just too hard, and that’s just sad. Chocolate would definitely make me feel better.
“You cannot fight against the truth of what has happened. You cannot expect metaphor to comfort you” ~ Nate Pritts, from “Decoherence”
Sunday afternoon with an amazing effulgent sun and unseasonably warm temperatures, 65 degrees.
I’m not entirely certain as to what I want to say today, but I know that the words are just below the surface. The fact is that I probably should go for a walk up to the ridge and beneath the trees, especially as the weather is beautiful even though the wind is wicked, and more than likely, I will interrupt this post to do just that, or perhaps not. I haven’t decided yet.
As far as the eye can see: a view from the right side of the ridge, by L. Liwag*
Last night was another rough one, sleep wouldn’t come even though I was so tired, and then I awakened several times during the night, only to spend about three hours trying to will myself back to sleep. If you’ve never suffered from insomnia, you cannot possibly understand, but if you, too, have been susceptible to these spells, you have my complete sympathy. Once morning comes, more often than not, you feel groggy and half formed, at best.
One of the main reasons that I’m having such a hard time sleeping is that I’m out of a lot of my regular medications. Since moving here, I’ve had a real beast of a time trying to find a pain management practice that will take me, and I have yet to find a practicing psychiatrist who is accepting new patients. It took three months just to find a primary care physician because no one wants to touch you if you have been in pain management because the assumption is that you are a drug addict. I’m not joking about this.
“Meanwhile, within the tiny moments of this hell I was fighting a small fight of my own which was not leading anywhere—but like a man with a bent spoon trying to dig through a cement wall I knew that a small fight was better than quitting: it kept the heart alive.” ~ Charles Bukowski, from “If you let them kill you, they will”
Apparently, this area is rife with people who are addicted to opiates and amphetamines, which means that those of us who just want meds in order to live a normal life are pretty much out of luck. Without my maintenance pain meds, I spend hours trying to calm my legs, as one offshoot of my chronic pain is RLS (restless leg syndrome), and like insomnia, it’s almost impossible to describe to someone who has never experienced it. Essentially, though, your legs tingle and ache, and you feel the need to keep moving them to try to find a comfortable position, something that doesn’t exist.
To Infinity and Beyond: Under such an effulgent sky, by L. Liwag
The medicine most prescribed for RLS, ropinirole, is one that I cannot take because it can cause tardive dyskinesia, which is involuntary body movements. Oh, the irony. Several years ago, I took relpax, and for a while, it was doing good things for me, that is until my doctor noticed that I was moving even while sitting, so she promptly pulled it from my regimen. Later, my pain doctor prescribed ropinirole for my RLS, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized the connection when I started making those weird movements without realizing it. So the medicine that is supposed to stop the discomfort of RLS movement can cause dyskinesia, or involuntary movement: it’s yet another instance of damned if I do and damned if I don’t.
Unfortunately, the RLS is the least of my medical issues. I’ve been without my maintenance meds for more than two months now, and the result is that I am back to having three or four migraines a week. It’s so disheartening because I had finally gotten my migraines under control after years of trying to find the med that would work best for me, and I tried a dozen or more, including Botox—no lie. So until I can find a neurologist or pain medicine doctor, I’m basically ingesting ibuprofen and supplements in an attempt to stem the tide. The success is limited, at best.
“Lonely for weeping, starved for a sound of mourning I bowed my head, and heard the sea far off Washing its hands” ~ James Wright, from “The Slackening of the Tide”
Anyway, enough of my medical trials and tribulations . . .
I was telling you how we actually came to be here, on this glorious piece of land with so very many possibilities, so let’s go back to 2017 again. As I had mentioned, 2017 was one helluva year for us, all of us, near and far. But in the midst of this, Corey took his mind off things by looking for land. We had decided that once we could get back to a somewhat stable place, that we were going to move.
From here to eternity: a view of our land from the left side of the ridge, by L. Liwag
I had wanted to leave Norfolk for years, but never felt that I could or should because of my mother; I’m an only child, you see, and while that may seem like a wonderful thing to be, it actually isn’t, especially if you have an elderly parent with medical issues of her own. I’m not complaining about it; god knows my mother took care of me through my asthma, migraines, and a host of other things. But once I had begun to recover from her death in 2014, we decided to look for the land that we had always talked about.
The first piece of land that we looked at was absolutely gorgeous, but it came with a hefty price tag, one that we could not possibly afford. Then, during the summer of 2017, on a whim, Corey and I decided to look at another piece of land that he had found. It was about seven hours from Norfolk, but we ended up driving around for about nine hours because we got so lost. Once we finally found it, though, we both fell in love. It was over 100 acres, and there was a small house on the property that was built in the late 1800s. Fortunately, it had been updated over time. Even better, the price was amazingly affordable.
So began our saga of trying to leave Norfolk, and the house that I had lived in for a very long time. I simply cannot go into all of the details that made this transition so hard, but it will suffice to say that it took us almost a year from the time that we first saw it to the time at which we finally arrived. It was a very, very, long, hard year.
“It takes courage . . . to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.” ~ Marianne Williamson, from “A Return to Love”
Honestly, there were days in which I believed that the dream that we had so fervently sought would never happen. And during the wait, we suffered—emotionally, physically, spiritually. It seemed that the entire world was against us.
Three at the trough, by C. Fickel
You know, at times like that it’s hard not to wonder if some kind of karmic disharmony isn’t being visited upon you. You begin to think that you must have done something absolutely horrible at some point to be faced with the almost insurmountable. There was even a point during all of this that a piece of the ceiling in the Norfolk house suddenly crashed to the floor, and all that we could do was look at one another and shake our heads because it just felt like it was yet one more thing beyond our control. Mind you, a piece of your ceiling falling is a pretty major event, but we had been through so much that by the time it happened, it was just one more thing in a very long list of one more things. It’s weird to think of that event in that way now
But we clung to one other and to the possibility of actually realizing a dream that had seemed so out of reach for so long, and very long story abbreviated, now, here we are. And there is no other place in the world that I would rather be.
“In this life, this is how one must wait, past despair, the heart a fossil, the minutes molten, the feet turned to stone.” ~ Li-Young Lee, from “Here I Am”
Well, that all came out much faster than I had thought. I suppose the words were much closer to the surface than I had thought. That’s good when that happens, although at times I feel that I’m just throwing words at the screen and hoping that something sticks and makes sense, kind of like spaghetti noodles that aren’t overcooked.
So much beauty everywhere I look, by L. Liwag
In returning to this forum, I realize that I’m more than likely opening some wounds that really haven’t healed, but this is how I heal best. Fingers on keys, letting them fly without restraint (my very dear friend Rebecca once likened my typing to machine gun fire). I realize that I’m fortunate to have this ability—to write, not to type rapidly—because I am well aware that many people out there who are wounded or trying to heal have nothing more than their own thoughts, and that can often feel all-consuming. But I have always written my way out, have done this since I was a child—truly. I wrote my first poem when I was six. I started my first journal when I was twelve. Words have always been the balm to my soul.
I hope that by rekindling my love affair with this blog, that perhaps my words might touch someone out there in the ether and let them see that they are not alone in feeling lost or depressed or overwhelmed. I do not proclaim to have answers for anyone, myself least of all, but sometimes just reading someone else’s words can be a salve, much like hearing the perfect song can help us heal. We take what we can get, right? We are all only human after all.
Just a note: Today’s poem is a direct result of watching “Little Drummer Girl” on AMC, which was incredible. I really love it when shows incorporate beautiful poetry into the story lines, and Darwish is one of my favorites. I’ve featured his works here before.
More later. Peace.
*By the way, I did pause in this post to go for a long walk up to the top of the ridge with the dogs, which is where I took some of the images in today’s post.
Music by Katelyn Tarver, “You Don’t Know”
Now, as you awaken
Now, as you awaken, remember the swan’s
last dance. Did you dance with young angels
while you were dreaming? Did the butterfly
light you up when it burned with the eternal
light of the rose? Did the phoenix appear clearly
before you and call you by your name?
Did you see the morning dawn from the fingers
of the one you love? Did you touch
the dream with your hand or did you
leave it to dream alone, aware suddenly
of your own absence? Dreamers don’t abandon
their dreams, they flare and continue
the life they have in the dream…tell me
how you lived your dream in a certain place
and I’ll tell you who you are. And now,
as you awaken, remember if you have wronged
your dream. And if you have, then remember
the last dance of the swan.
“Churn and Break” (1913, oil on panel) by George Wesley Bellows
“Why walk in the eye of a private tornado, looking as if your life depended on taking cover sooner rather than later?” ~ Rachel Wetzsteon, from “Questions and Answers”
Wednesday afternoon. Cloudy and mild, sixty-two degrees.
A very bad night, restless, a creeping headache. Then this morning the pain medication caught up with me, and my body began to itch all over. Why am I telling you this? Who knows. A preamble to what is to come? Perhaps.
“Tang of the Sea” (1913, oil on panel) by George Wesley Burrows
You see, my mother is driving me crazy. For the past few weeks she has been calling me, nearly hysterical over her car. Right after she broke her leg she bought a new Honda. I tried to talk her out of it, but she would not hear of it. I think she felt she needed a new Honda mostly because Lex and Mike had bought one. Anyway, I was not involved in the financing of it; why would I be? But she had a balloon payment at the end of three years. Ever since the Honda finance people contacted her about said payment and her options my world has turned to crap.
At one point I intervened and spoke with the general manager of the dealership that sold her the car. We had things straightened out. Then my mother got back on the phone, and chaos ensued again. Now she is calling me, telling me that the stress of this is making her heart race, saying that she just can’t take it.
Which leads me to this: Does the woman ever stop to think that perhaps someone else is having a really bad day? That the person on the other end of the telephone my be a tad overwhelmed with stress?
Short answer: No. Never.
“And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself . . . that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.” ~ James Agee, from A Death in the Family
So today there have been at least two calls and two messages, during which she yells at me and tells me not to argue with her. This when I am only trying to get a telephone number from her.
“The Gulls, Monhegan” (c1913, oil on panel) by George Wesley Bellows
In the meanwhile, I’m stressed beyond belief over Corey leaving Sunday for his training. The trip is open-ended. He may or may not be back at the end of the week. He may or may not go straight to a ship. He may or may not be here for Christmas . . .
Unfortunately, at the moment we are existing on two paychecks from Louisiana unemployment, which is at least $100 less/week than Virginia unemployment, and we just had to drop almost all of that on the plane ticket for him to attend new hire orientation and training. I’m stressed because I hate for him to leave without having sufficient money in the bank for him to fall back on. Who knows what circumstances may arise. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out how to pay the utilities, phone, cable, etc. with imaginary money.
“My stoic, unconvinced world, world of the paper heart, is it that you don’t know grief or haven’t had enough of it that you let yourself be governed so?” ~ Katie Ford, from “Overture”
Now that everything is set, and Corey is definitely going to begin a new job next week, it’s time for me to worry. While he was worrying about his medical tests, I was fine. I mean, I wasn’t worried because I just knew that everything was fine (I had that feeling, you know?), and it was. The urine test showed a false positive on his bilirubin levels, but the blood test showed that it was fine. That being said, now that he’s beginning to allow himself to become adjusted to this new phase in our lives, I am becoming less adjusted.
“Sunlit Surf” (1913, oil on panel) by George Bellows
It’s the yin/yang thing, I suppose.
Mostly, though, it’s worry over bills. With the transition to any new job there is always a hiccup in income, waiting for the new pay period to kick in. For him, the first one is going to be December 20. My disability comes in at the middle of the month, but that is always spent before it ever hits the bank.
Add to this the fact that I am completely unprepared for the holidays, have done absolutely no shopping, and I’m getting that sinking feeling. So let’s just make this state of affairs completely unmanageable by adding my mother’s drama because, gee, why not?
“My soul is so heavy that no thought can carry it any longer, no wing beat can lift it up into the ether any more. If it is moved, it merely skims along the ground, just as birds fly low when a thunderstorm is blowing up. Over my inner being broods an oppressiveness, an anxiety, that forebodes an earthquake.” ~ Søren Kierkegaard, from Either/Or, Part I: Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 3
I feel the need to scream, silently, of course because of the head thing. Loud noise = migraine . . . (by the way, did you know that sensitivity to smells is called osmophobia? I didn’t until my pain doctor used the term, but I digress . . .) And then whenever I think about screaming, I think about Edvard Munch, and then I forget because the painting is too good.
“Rock Bound” (1913, oil on panel) by George Wesley Bellows
Nevertheless, a scream might release some of this pent up anxiety, or barring a scream pounding my fist into something, but it would do nothing about my mother, and I would be left with more stupid pain.
In the back of my mind I have a song refrain playing: “Leave me alone, oh leave me alone, oh leave me alone, oh leave me alone. Won’t you leave me, leave me alone?” So of course I had to hunt it down. It’s an old Helen Redding song called “Ruby Red Dress” (that’s Redding of the “I Am Woman” song), and the actual lyrics are these:
Leave me alone, won’t you leave me alone
Please leave me alone, now leave me alone
Oh leave me alone, please leave me alone, yes leave me
Leave me alone, won’t you leave me alone
Please leave me alone, now leave me alone
God leave me alone, just leave me alone, oh leave me . . .
But while I was looking that up, my mother called again, yelled a lot more, and then ended the conversation by saying to me, “I can’t talk to you. You’re just like your father.”
Have I ever mentioned that my mother has perfected the art of hanging up on people? It’s quite obnoxious.
“This is what it feels like to split the shell of a woman. Shards of her everywhere. Animal light spread across
the walls.” ~ Raven Jackson, from “My First Lover Speaks to Me as I Sleep With Her”
Sorry this whole post has been a rant. I actually do not feel as if I am in rant mode. Rather, I feel particularly heavy—heavy heart, heavy mind. All of my thoughts feel too heavy for my head. The air feels too heavy to breathe. My neck feels to heavy to hold up my head, and my eyelids are too heavy for consciousness.
“Green Breaker” (1913, oil on panel) by George Wesley Bellows
At times like these, I wish that I could breathe under water. How wonderful it must be to dwell beneath the sea—stippled sunlight, brilliant colors, muted sound, as dark as you care to go deep, or as light as the space just beneath the surface.
Unfortunately, not a possibility, gill-less that I am. Still, it’s my whole love affair with the sea that holds sway with my thoughts. To that end, today’s images are by American Realist George Wesley Bellows (August 12 or August 19, 1882 – January 8, 1925), who died at the age of 42 from ruptured appendix. Bellows was well known for his boxing paintings, but I prefer his land and seascapes, particularly the churning sea depictions as they match my mood today. As a bonus, I created a gallery to go along with this post. (Playing with art soothes me.)
I need a vacation from my life.
More later. Peace.
“Summer Surf” (1914, oil on canvas)
“Cloud Shadows” (1913, oil on panel)
“Romance of Autumn, Sherman’s Point” (1916, oil on panel)
“Gull, Rock and Whitehead” (1911, oil on canvas)
“Breaking Sky, Monhegan” (c1916, oil on canvas)
“Floating Ice” (1910, oil on canvas)
“Mountain Orchard” (1922, oil on panel)
“An Island in the Sea” (1911, oil on canvas)
“Mountain House” (1920)
“Cliffs at Eddyville” (1920, oil on canvas)
“Gorge and Sea” (1911, oil on canvas)
“Shore House” (1911 oil on canvas)
“Flaming Breakers” (1913, oil on panel)
“Approach of Rain” (1913, oil on panel)
“Forth and Back” (1913, oil on panel)
“Rolling Breakers” (1913, oil on panel)
“Wave” (1913, oil)
Music by Lucie Silvas, “Cry a Little More”
Untitled
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 