crossover

this september/october changeover is pulling on my ankles. dirty dishes looking at me. rain and fog. i put my contacts in, finally – glasses work as a sort of buffer the same way boys hide under their caps. i remember once (maybe ten years ago) going out in glasses and a cap and felt safe from the whole world. between the bill and the lenses (and various personality supplements) i could’ve swung my car into a tree without fear.

better to say i’ve been re-charging my batteries the last couple days. i think adam does the same thing, but i’m not sure if he’s just tuned to my patterns or we have similiar brains. the similiar brains theory would be more believable if he held his pen in his left hand and not his right, but i don’t hold that against him. when scribbling on lined paper with an ink pen or pencil he makes tight, tiny scribbles and says he’s “working.” when scribbling on unlined paper with crayons or markers, he makes looping, wide strokes and says “drawing.”  this distinction makes me almost explode with happiness. he’s eating cherry tomatos and singing the alphabet song, pushing a mini garbage truck. today was trash day and we missed seeing the truck – it’s kind of a big deal, but he hasn’t realized it so i’m not bringing it up.

i’m STARTING all these things, i just haven’t gotten very far with them. i registered as a seller on ebay and made a pile of sweaters. got out boxes of beads and thought about etsy. told a– we should go to AA, just to get a nice solid reminder that other people know there’s an easier way but are also not taking it – but i was sort of joking, and don’t really know where those types of things are around here. obviously, i mean they’re anonymous.

the air smells delicious – i open the door and feel myself almost toss adam in the car and go to the post office, almost photograph all those clothes to list, almost be done with the dishes. almost, almost. 

the sun came out about a half hour ago, that might make all the difference. the fog is finally burning off. i put my contacts in. what was it?   ”found my goggles under my bed, wiped the dickinson off on my grey shirtfront – not cracked, just dusty…” and so on and so forth.

what a difference the sun has made, just since i started this post. what a difference the fifteen minute break in the middle to sing Dream a Little Dream with adam and try to explain a sycamore tree has made. the chainsaw has been going for DAYS next door – when i began typing i would have described the sound with the word “drone,” now i’m leaning toward “hum.”

in two weeks i will be married 4 years. yesterday at 5am while getting ready for work, eric realized i was out of coffee and went to the store while i slept. i want to make a bubble for him and punch people in the face if they try to burst it, or even make his eyebrows knit. i want to see a smooth eyebrow on that man. i know what would go a long way to help, but that’s not the sort of thing to get into on a public blog even if heather and angela are the only ones who look at it.

maybe tonight i will print out that story and salvage the metal. maybe when i’m done with this i will post clothes on ebay. maybe i will just play on the floor with the kid. anyway, i think i may be done staring at the wall for the week….

once upon a time……

THEN BLACKBIRDS PLUCKED OUT HER STEPSISTERS’ EYES AND HER STEPMOTHER HAD TO DANCE IN IRON SHOES HEATED IN THE FIRE UNTIL SHE DROPPED DEAD

AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER……..

damn you, bridget

okay, so here we go. out with it.

i can’t write a fucking thing. not even a character inner monologue, scene outline, nothing in over a month. 150 fucking pages in and i’m FROZEN.

the temptation i have is to print it all out and go in with a marker and circle all the salvageable pieces. scrap the fucking thing for parts. 5  & 1/2 chapters of scrap metal.

and by parts, i mainly mean characters. i’ve got a decent and possibly tweakable first chapter, a cast i’m in love with, and a cunt bitch of a main character who grabbed my nice, neat linear plot and shredded it with her slightly crooked teeth. i also just recognized someone as a character from another story - revamped, and realized he just needs to stop lying to himself and be who he was in this other story – instead of a rehash, he should be an honest overlap. 

frozen by form and fear (much like this sentence was just hijacked by F sounds) i just kept rolling along, worrying about voice, and in the meantime bridget was talking herself right out of her fate and into a different plot. and she’s soooo RIGHT. there can be more to this. if i can swallow the bile and burn the manuscript i really may have something. no more gilded cage, i’ve underestimated myself with the ever-so-frightening word “NOVEL.”

no more lying to myself and lying in bed thinking up new scenes (as i have for weeks) that the back of my brain knows will never be typed out. just spinning my wheels while i waited for the courage to do this. slash and burn, slash and burn.

wish me luck, and the presence of mind not to vomit when i trash the original.

(now that i’ve said it, it can’t be unsaid, and that’s where a lot of courage comes from i think – the inability to chickenshit backpedal)

september (photographs)

appalachian girl

the next door neighbor is nuts with the chainsaw this morning. thinking that, next i thought: they all have chain saws. all the neighbors. and rifles, and large dogs, and nascar parephenelia, above-ground pools in the summer and yellow spots leftover from these in the fall. large clunky windchimes, potted plants on the front steps, bird feeders, well-worn shovels, perfected methods of keeping raccoons out of the trash. vegetable gardens. in most cases, a couple of horses. in some, a pair of ducks or llamas. a prescription or two in the cabinet they’re not proud of. a network than runs like a private party line so a web of roads and connected properties know if there are robberies in the area, down to the possible make and model of the vehicle.

listening to the chainsaw, i finally hit ’we.’ for all my homo-loving, writing, philosophizing, open-minded ways, i spent most of the summer barefoot in a sundress, and my toddler has stained dale jr. shirts scattered through the house. eric took down the pool this weekend, i put yellow walmart mums on the front steps near my two foot metal skeleton winchime and called us decorated for fall. we have TWO large dogs. birdfeeder, chainsaw - rifle AND stun gun on the top shelf of the closet. two horses. a helpful prescription. ’strangers’ (not ’of the neighborhood’) knocked on our back door, as opposed to the front, near dark last week; everyone around us now know what they look like – and we know the week before a house down the road was robbed near dark.

they’re nitrite free angus beef, but my kid loves hot dogs. he says ‘mee-ulk’ for ‘milk.’ i complain about the increased ratio of crap food as opposed to apple butter & church food booths at the apple festival, and mutter about crystal meth ruining the town. raise my arm straight up if a car passes while i’m in the yard, without even looking, the universal hillbilly wave. so does my husband. so does our son.

my husband and i met on a horse farm, breeding in the spring of 2006, and recently drove to kentucky to get tattoos together (not matching, but still). we sort of want a four-wheeler, or a motorcycle, but not until the cars are paid off.

my grandparents – on one side was a carpenter/tobacco farmer and homemaker with six kids; on the other side a smalltown police chief and homemaker with three kids.

target-shooting is fun. burgers on the grill are great. shoes in the summer suck. the best corn in the world is from your neighbor’s garden, brought smiling in an armful by a truck driver in oakley glasses with a ponytail whose wife will bring you a tin of sugar cookies around christmas. the best morning event is watching for the school bus, a good evening is one in which the ducks next door sneak over for a visit. nothing makes a kid happier than a swing hung from a tree in the front yard.

my husband can lift me over his head – i took his last name without blinking. he mows the lawn and i wash the dishes. i love bluegrass, it vibrates in my belly and makes me remember being little, or makes killing for love sound sensible.

someday i will do a counterpoint, a contrast sketch, but on this first day of autumn with the leaves just touched with color, the aussie sleeping on the porch, chainsaw still going at the neighbors, i might just sit here a bit longer with my feet bare, watching the munchkin crash matchbox cars, and enjoy my own strange blood.

“REDNECK” origins:   ”The United Mine Workers of America (UMW) and rival miners’ unions appropriated both the term redneck and its literal manifestation, the red bandana, in order to build multiracial unions of white, black, and immigrant miners in the strike-ridden coalfields of northern and central Appalachia between 1912 and 1936.  The use of redneck to designate “a union member” was especially popular during the 1920s and 1930s in the coal-producing regions of southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania, where the word came to be specifically applied to a miner who belonged to a labor union….Clearly, the best explanation of redneck to mean “union man” is that the word refers to the red handkerchiefs that striking union coal miners in both southern West Virginia and southern Colorado often wore around their necks or arms as a part of their informal uniform.” (nice thumbnail sketch appropriated from Wikipedia)

and because Hazel is frickin awesome:

gasoline

everything in the house smells like gasoline this morning,  i keep lighting candles with contradictory scents. it isn’t my fault, i dreamed i went to a re-enactment (found the envelope with heather’s brickhouse measurements right before i went to bed) and only about half the people knew it was fake – big plantation house, not enough staff. simon baker thought it was real, he “lived” there.. there was something about who the baby belonged to, i kept trying to tell the melodramatically distraught grey-clad governess that it wasn’t real, but there were a couple of old women in touristy sweatshirts that chastised me over and over for ruining it.

dinner was poisened. several people actually died, and several people that hadn’t paid for the dinner inclusion thought it was spectacular. gaslighting after dark, and little by little the smell of gasoline, everywhere and on everything. after dark in the yard, crickets, dew on the ground, late, rose byrne/governess with a cardboard box of rags and a box of matches, and i yelled “they’ve soaked your clothes, don’t you realize they knew what you would do?” and she lit the match and the box caught and her skirt, and i was yanking and tearing at her clothes while she screamed and i screamed, and when she was finally naked and the box blazed and i was lost between real/fake, all the people that had gathered on the lawn were clapping, including simon baker and the old women in their keds.

i punched simon baker over and over in that ineffectual girly lower-arms-involved way, but woke up before anything was resolved.

still smells like gas.

zombies…..

rearview mirror…

Reflections, 1918 XI by e.e. cummings

 

this cigarette is extremely long,

i get them by the indigo box of 10.

And then, you were sitting across from me:

and my blood silkily telling i was, how wrong!

(i thinking to have remembered how

you were beautiful) this cigarette, when

inhaled, produces a mystery

like scented angels joking in a sharp soft row

(i buy 10 of them in an indigo box.)

Wrists.   Elbows,   Shoulders.   Fingers.

the minute amorous stirs

of flesh invisibly visible (this

cigarette, exhaled in musical shocks

of kiss-colored silence) by Christ kiss me.   One kiss

autumn stuff

i actually have things i want to DO – and things i WILL do….

9/11 – Southern Ohio Horse Sale, Henderson’s Arena, Jackson

9/18 – International Observe the Moon Night

9/19 – weekend of Paw Paw Festival, Lake Snowden, Albany

9/21- 9/25 – Apple Festival, Jackson

10/2 – Civil War Reenactment, Robbins Crossing, Nelsonville

and by then everything should be crunchy and orange and rotting and gorgeous, and we shall be preparing our droog costumes for trick-or-treat…..

things i’ve seen….

an old favorite, from my trunk o’ girls

i miss this girl. i truly hope she is not in a freezer in pensacola. and if she has been sold into slavery, those dance moves are being sorely wasted…

grey matter & llamas

i can feel quite clearly my brain has come loose from its moorings, sort of rattling around in there, clonking off the sides of my head as i tilt it – each pressure point throwing up a random image or memory – tilt forward – clonk - scene from buffy where spike threw his arms over the cross and smoke rose – tilt to the right – rattle and smack - did herman melville’s work process for moby dick look ANYTHING like i picture it? at the begininnig with him MAD with ideas, pacing at the front of a stuffy attic room full of ramshackle desks, gathered vagrants, poor students and generally confused hopefuls bent over books and pads, or scribbling general knowledge, others sketching rudimentary sketches of whales and their anatomy, unable to spell but drawing the pictures up from their minds, coaxing them out, all with the dust swirling in the light from the one open window, and melville as i picture him, pacing and feeling a bit of the ahab as he watched the information accumulate and pile into stacks of gorgeous paper and the idea and obsession clogged his head and he smoked and stopped to scratch snatches of prose or single interesting words or effective descriptions – tilt right, pop neck, smack – they can’t seriously be thinking about putting more animals in that field. what is that? buncha horses, two llamas, two miniature donkeys, a regualr donkey, a rabbit hutch, and  now a  chicken coop?? dumb fucks. rednecks with money are ten times worse than poor rednecks – head shake, eye scrunch, shake rattle and roll – how many times can you come apart without doing it safely under the cover of night and not end up divorced? and how much sleep do you really need to survive? and how clean does a house have to be to count as clean? does it have to be MORE clean if the judges are landlords? what about landlords AND relatives? how many books are enough for a two-year-old for one day? ten one day, one the next, zero, then two, five, five, four, two, ten, none, etc and on… does the inconsistency make for inconsistent brain development? how much m- c- has to build up in your system before m- into c- m- and start causing headaches and sickness? is there already tissue damage, organ damage, brain damage, irreversible damage, by that point?  if so, how much? – big sigh, chin on chest, squelch sound, brain resting against back of eyeballs, pushing them forward in sockets – how long before i short out? – tilt back – i haven’t watched titus andronicus in like a year, i’m really in the mood for some gorgeous violence and shakespearean monologues “OFT I HAVE DUG UP THE BODIES-”  – yawn, feeling grey matter run down the back of throat, acidy phlegm, don’t cough, that’s your brain, swallow hard – if solitary bees build nests of flower petals, how do they become solitary? what makes them suddenly break free? or are they cast out??

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/photogalleries/100510-bees-flower-sandwich-nests-pictures/

haven’t been to sleep

i feel sort of like this:

and even a little like this:

i also learned, while seeking  photos, that if i have any questions i can Ask Sister Mary Martha on her award-winning blog – because, as her tagline puts it: Life is Hard. Nuns Are Tougher. thank you sister, for making me chuckle this morning…..

an organic dream recasting of Henry & June?

copy & paste from email to andrea this morning:

“it’s largely faded over 2 hrs of morning things, but to tell you before it ALL faded…
 
dreamed you and i went to n— to see m—, and somewhere along the way in the arrangements he came to believe WE believed he was very poor and not doing well, through rumor or intuition or paranoia, not clear. only that when we arrived everything was fine and welcoming and very not awkward and we all seemd to be getting along fine, then little by little we began to notice all these ridiculous over-obvious signs and fronts he was putting up to show in what he thought was a subtle way that he was NOT in fact poor, or starving, or failing, but doing quite well. like, the apartment was just a regular apartment, minorly cool, average you know smallish with narrower windows, brick outer wall, high up, old wood flooring like in older apt buildings slightly uneven with a creak here and there, imperfect paint that was too bright in some areas from white being touched up, slapdash touchup, pretty wood baseboards but smeared with paint from touch-ups.

the kitchen/living room was divided by an island/bar type with that deep red, flecked-looking old-fashioned linoleum, but i remember a partial wall off to the left somewhere made of different colored translucent glass, and a big greasy-leaved plant in front of it. like things a guy would get to seem hip/domestic. this part seemed slapdash. we had put down our bags and taken off winter coats and you were sitting on the living room side of the island/bar on a tall stool/chair, i was slightly back in the living room settling onto the edge of a red velvet chair that used to be in my grandma’s house – i had time in the dream to absorb all this because m— was on the kitchen side of the bar, bustling around what seemed excitedly, and i was just on the verge of relaxing and thinking it was going to be a nice visit, and looking around (your hair was in a ponytail and you had on big silver rings, i was wearing very tall burgandy boots and a very similiar jumble of rings as yours. the suitcases were near me, they were black and exactly medium-sized and identical.

then m— stood upright on the other side of the bar, and i realized he was very nervous and wearing a dark suit with a bowtie, and holding a bottle of wine – he told us the year of it so that we would know it was very old and therefore expensive – that was when i began to understand what was going on. the round mirror that he’s always had (that looks like the sun) was over his shoulder in the kitchen, but when i glanced back over my shoulder there was a new very large black tv turned off, it seemed out of place like the hip glass wall and plant and suit and bottle of wine…. i got a sinking feeling in my stomach and tried to send you telepathic messages of what i was realizing but you were busy doing the same thing i was – looking around, but you seemed to be getting an odd vibe, too.

he opened the wine and we had it in uninteresting perfectly appropriate wine glasses – no one seemed to want it, it was all show, we just stayed quietly holding glasses and you suggested we go to dinner, mainly to break the silence i think. i agreed, and we simultaneously told him we would treat him to dinner – laughing talking at the same time, ‘let us treat you to dinner’ as a thank you for his hospitality, but he took it completely the wrong way and insisited he could pay, he was angry, he said he was plenty able to pay for us all to go somewhere nice for dinner and he was turned away from us, bustling angry, with all these money things to prove… you and i looked at each other in a sort of “what will we DO?” sort of way, but timeflash and we were walking on the sidewalk in the snow and m— wasn’t angry and we were going to a small bar around the corner and i knew some discussion my mind skipped had mended things for the time being, then we were in a very busy tavernish place with small tables and a crowd and m— was drunk next to me at the bar (for a moment it was a bar in portsmouth, i remember that now the name of it had manatee somewhere in it), his suit sleeve was touching my jacket sleeve and there was a hole in the elbow of his suit and he was telling me he was NOT poor, why did everyone think he was poor, and i knew he wanted me to tell you this, make you understand it, but i also knew you were at a table near the corner and i wanted to stop him talking so we could find you – it gets blurry here, just a jumbled bar scene.
 
oh my god i understand, i just read henry & june, the whole thing makes sense now…. WOW that was completely organic, how WEIRD……”