I miss ... and therein lies everything

I miss her. She and I weren't truly close until our twenties, but we knew each other from the age of twelve. In high school, we shared that certain world of boys we liked (I have never been famed for liking the same boys as everybody else, so this actually does have specific meaning). She seemed brave to me, more daring. Once we got out of school, and were together because we wanted to be, we were daring together - more and more often, until she was my sister.

Sister.

She's in my DNA. And she is gone. And I hate that. Even practicing gratitude, even counting the blessing that she was - that she IS, dammit. Even being glad I got to love that girl, and was loved by her. Nope. It's not enough, because I was only good enough on my own schedule. I was too little, and too late, and we both did that, but the last too-late was mine.

She's left us all to deal with these scurrying circles. She, bless all of her ashen bones, is at peace, I pray.

Today, I listen to old music, and Dokken seems to be transforming to make me think of her. Alone Again and Heaven Sent, no longer cis/het/sexual love songs, but longing strains of my lost friend.

I miss her.

She was SO alive.


***


I miss him.

Even in a dream, all I have left is "that you ARE" - telling myself in a dreaming brain, that it is enough only knowing he exists, and telling myself that by way of "telling" a chimera of him: "just knowing you exist."

It *is* enough - knowing whom I have loved, knowing I was loved. But distance. Depression. Distortion. They make it hard. He's a Daemon of air and darkness, and I miss him. It's all we have, to make life bearable.

If only he could be alive as she was. I pray it for him. Never sure if it does any good.

He's in my heart and head and soul. He isn't "gone" - not dead; only curved into himself; too distant. I can't even know whether to love that or hate it. The wall I am pressed against is blank.

Scurrying circles. Small ones. Vicious.

I shift to Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here - and it is nothing like him. And its drawn-out softness, its langour and melancholy and desolate gorgeousness transform me. And I am quiet.

I miss him.


***


I miss writing.

It means so much, and it means nothing. Gets me through, and on the other side of "through" I find nowhere.

Even so.

I miss writing.

Collection

WOW, this is a fascinating piece of legal history and a wide-ranging look at civil forfeiture. When journalism goes this deep into stories, I can't tear myself away. And the story is a moment of "bipartisan" cooperation (yes, theoretically the SCOTUS is not supposed to be party-based, but we all know perfectly well that's hogwash). An excellent read because it's great writing, engaging storytelling, relevant and hopeful history.

T-Rex at the American Museum of Natural History. NEATO-SPEDITO! Don't even pretend you don't want to see this.

I grew up with the affectionate use of "am" in my house. White and Southern and old as I am, this wasn't correlated to Black American speech, though we were familiar with the stereotypes. The "am" was just linguistic overlap, though its tone of juvenilization/baby-talk usage has a distinctive paternalism, viewed alongside the hideously racist exaggerations of blackface speech. In our family, it was our intimacy: dad would ask us or our friends, "How am ya?", but it was certainly not a greeting he used with colleagues. I'm fascinated to see the roots that am between us. I'm also reminded of the long-held belief that Appalachian American speech preserved Elizabethan English for centuries - the truth of which is delightfully more complex than "yes, it did" or "no, it didn't." The lineage of Black American English is more complex than its reception has generally allowed. It's hard not to want to protest, "but my dad wasn't racist" ... even as it's impossible not to see the Colonial heritage of a language long-shared only because of slavery.

Once again, Diane's fascination with the archaeology of poo ... oh man - "comes to the fore"? "raises its head"? I'm not sure how to put this that isn't lame scatalogical humor. Anyway: NEATO, it's excremental science again! This time, on the moon. <Resists the Schrödinger's poo joke> Go! Learn the wonders of human contamination in space ... or the secrets of seeding (cue echo-boom voice effect) LIFE ITSELF.

Collection

I am a fifty-one year old woman, and this very blog reflects that experience. Take a look at the history of the vanity tag; it tells a story.

A reduced sense of visibility does not necessarily constrain experience. Associated with greater empathy and compassion, invisibility directs us toward a more humanitarian view of the larger world. This diminished status can, in fact, sustain and inform—rather than limit—our lives. Going unrecognized can, paradoxically, help us recognize our place in the larger scheme of things.

Yep. This is, more and more, informative of my spirituality.

My personal favorite Hawai'ian deity is Kamapua'a, but this guy actually does hang on one of my walls. (My print is definitely worth less than $5k.) Another interesting tale of repatriation and also a story about provenance.

Sigh. When you check your stats, and all the Russian and UAE bots seem to be swarming to the post you wrote about your best friend, who just died. The post you wrote in 2015, when that wasn't even conceivable.

Ahww, man. Guilty ...

In this moment of political division, Garry sees a spiritual test. The temptation to discard others has always been strong, and in some ways it is stronger than ever. But this is an old problem, maybe the oldest, he says. The Bible is all about overcoming the temptation to discard, to dismiss, to unfriend. If it were always easy to love your neighbor as you love yourself, it wouldn’t be a commandment. “We trust anger. We believe anger gets things done,”

Was I ... ?

My gods, was I writing as recently as November? Surely I was a liar, surely I picked up the manuscript and put it down again as quickly as I enthused about writing. Impossible to invoke any sense-memory of writing, happening so close in time as November.



Happy new year. So I'm late: I still do wish anyone left reading here, or who accidentally stumbles in, a good 2019.

This blog has been Crickets-ville for a long time now. This isn't so much because life is so terrible as it is just *life*. Since some point in December (when someone I love very much went back on anti-depressants), things have been going well. Work is good, the house is not falling down, I am regularly paying bills. I even got together with friends recently. Progress.

Of course, I have also already attended the funeral of someone I loved (more than she could possibly have realized) this year. Family gathered, warmed, dissipated. Ebb and flow.

Life.

It's got a lot of death in it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have a lot of creation in it of late, and the tragic part of that is I don't even stop to care.

Is it possible I was writing less than three months ago ... ?



Is it possible I will write again?

PROSSA-seez

Since my last post, there has been some indication of life in the WIP. I have the comments to thank, in part, but also mindfulness that baby steps really are the most important, sometimes.

After a week at work that was extremely difficult - not because the work was hard, but thanks to office politics which demand emotional and professional bandwidth I don't have these days - I've returned for a new week with my head down and my feet steady. You have to keep your ambitions small when things are overwhelming, and a week that ends with the advice to document difficulties is overwhelming.

So the WIP may be viewed as a saving grace - something for my brain and soul to resort to, which is "under my control" (cue the laugh track of every author I know enjoying the idea they "control" their writing). Well, perhaps it is just a refuge - a puzzle to work under stress, a world outside the one I have to occupy day-to-day. A promise to be winkled out.

A week ago, it was scary facing the dragon, but right now it is oddly satisfying to contemplate going at something so big. With work being just as daunting, the strange truth is that the butter knife is turning out to be an unexpectedly efficacious tool.

The thing is to see it as a TOOL, rather than a weapon.

I don't want to kill a dragon. I want to write a book. It does seem rather fighting-a-beast terrifying, given that I have been out of the world I want to build for so long, but thanks to perspective and a certain assist from Jeff Sypeck, I realize that not only is this not a fight ... the fact is, it's an enterprise I can take or leave, and that somehow makes me want to claim it, to get the best of it, to create something remarkable.

Or just create something.

Whatever the words, the point is *motivation* - something I have not had for six months, really.

As with the WIP, so goes the job. I'm off my game - even just cognitively, my mom and I both are up against forgetting things, being blankly unable to identify how to deal with things, the recurring embarrassment of displaying our sieve-brains. It's pretty giddy, but I have trust that it is temporary. You have to.

And you have to work for a living. And, if you're a writer, you have to write. You don't have to publish, but you have to *write*.



And so. I entered my credentials for the expense system at work. All I'll need to do to start that item on my to-do list is hit "enter" when that bubbles up to the top of said list.

I sorted piles. I knew which pile is the easily-dispatched stuff, and I knew which pile I had to defer for today. It left me with a nice proportion of stuff I knew could be managed. I managed it. Printed nameplates. Scanned uploads. Scanned several small things to email to specific people. Deferred the items I'll have to scan and share around looking for who should see it. Laid out two FedExes. I'll enter credentials for that in the morning.

It sounds, perhaps, unbearably elementary, but it's just conscious inrementals I usually implement every day without the consciousness part:

What is routine is now something I have to think about, but that doesn't mean it's not advancing.



Inevitably, this is where I get all writerly and point out that it's the same for the WIP. Ooh, meta.

But it's true. Opening the doc can be a step, but of late it's not enough. One window amongst others can be ignored, so - having realized that research is my entry point - I squared off with the manuscript and found a piece of research I could manage. It is so vanishingly small it may seem silly: but, it was an image, already followed by the character description it inspired. I deleted the image.

That is work on a manuscript. Tiny work? Undoubtedly. But it is "in there", and "in" is where I wanted to be. Right?

This led me on to a more substantial idea, which might get very exciting indeed. The WIP having been born out of research for The Ax and the Vase, there are relics of that novel in this one. I put them in place in the years when WIP was related to Ax, even if it never was a "sequel" in my mind. And ... the stunningly obvious fact has at last pierced my callused brain, which is: that work is not relevant to this work.

My next step may be some deletions. If I ever feel the need to refer back to anything in Ax, I always have that manuscript available. But that may be absurd conjecture.

In the meantime: deletion is work. It is "in." I want to be in. So some extensive surgery could feel really good.

Leila: remember the time you got me to cut 60 pages out of Ax? I will think of you with a bloodthirsty smile as I get to slicing again.

The butterknife is a tool. Which can do a great deal, in the right hands (and when you know where to apply it).

It's pretty exciting.



I'm coming back to life. Not from death. Just from a long detour.

Thanks to Jeff and Leila, especially, for helping me find the path - and maybe lighting fires under my posterior.

Scale

God said let there be lights in the firmament of the Heaven, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.

My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

To a fruitfly, it might seem a wasteland of time, beyond bearing.

To a molecule ... to an atom, to a gluon ... all existing at such different scales: would my life seem vanishingly short, or extraordinary in its immensity?

A living cell might exist within a comprehensible "human" scale, though it comes and goes more quickly than we do.

The molecule - these can be broken so easily, or may hold tight for eons and eons. Some unstable and brief, some all but immortal from where humanity stands.

Down into the tenacious atom ... the nucleus ... these buzzing, speeding systems outstripping any velocity we can understand - are we great, slow, neverending collossi, or fleeting organisms, so ephemeral as to be irrelevant? So tempting to conceive a universe in the orbit of an atom. So human.

And, if space folds into itself, who is to say that scale does not ... that Horton was right, along with every one of us when we discover the mind within the brain we already had: that, though we know the universe is the greatness around us, we also occupy the greatness which encloses lives and systems and universes impossibly small? That there are systems within us; planes we do not understand which make us up. Not merely the individual cells coming and going, each one's life one necessary part of what we think is "our" own life - but symbiants - even the impulses and autonomic actions that preserve life, but we do not create.

We are minuscule and immense; it is all in how we look - outward, and inward.

And we owe debt both to the greatness beyond us, as well as the greatness we enclose, which contains all we think is "small" ... That we are both gargantuan and infinitessimal, and that our part is to BE part of both these scales: in the universe, which is the organism of which all our lives are the tiniest part: and as the universe, within which myriad forces exist, dependent upon us, or making up the magic and meat that *is* us.



My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

But if I do not honor its scale, it might as well be nothing at all.

Meta-for

The old metaphor of life, like a candle, flaring up before it goes out ... really isn't strictly poetic. When you reduce them to lowest terms - that fire, and life, are energy processing systems - they are the same thing, fundamentally. A wick left on its own will burn until all its paraffin is gone or it sinks into its own matter, self-snuffing. Life seems similar; we eat, we burn - and, though human beings of course also do so much more than this processing, the end of fuel means the end of life.

What is rarely displayed is just how efficiently the human system burns, sometimes.

I put the blog on pause to wait out a system at its end ... and here, on day six, we still are waiting. Life is almost cruelly tenacious. And, like a candle, life can gutter by flaring up, by burning furiously and then flickering. And even then it may not be exhausted.

Life is *alarmingly* tenacious.



The sacred time we place, around birth or marriage or death, the most important things to us ... I have never spent so long, in my life, in this time removed from the world, from everyday life. I have been enclosed in sacred time so long now it may be time to emerge, at least for a day. Only, presumably, to go back inside. It is a dizzying prospect, even though the hermetic seal around us right now is itself rarefied and disconcerting/disorienting.

We are exhausted. The living, and the dying. But I have learned this: though I know I have had periods in sacred time before, thinking I wished it would go on and on ... now I understand in a more immediate way, the truly sacred part of time separated from the everyday, from the world: is that it must be finite. The truly sacred part is re-entering LIFE.

Tomorrow, I may have to do that. Let us see what tonight will bring.

"You can do ANYTHING you set your mind to."

25 years ago now, having left my marriage and come home to Virginia, I found myself in a job with one of the best managers I've ever known, a woman I'll call C. C managed a keen balance between getting the ratty jobs done but finding each employee's talents, and playing to them. So it was that, as a secretary, I ended up assisting the guy who was writing a book. And the IT guy. Writing our newsletter. And, by the end, taking care of orphan clients (we were an insurance and financial services agency).

It was just at the moment I was about to be sent to Minnesota in February for securities training that I left that gig. But I never did forget that manager, and C stands out to this day as one of the smartest people I've ever worked with. And I've worked with some great, wise people.

All this time later, I have found a position where I get to do my own balancing - still a secretary, but one with decades more experience on the resume, and in a company/with a team where I have been able, almost singlehanded, to define my job. I get to play to my own strengths now.

Not long ago, I was thinking again about how I ended up being a secretary. Yeah, it was the early and mid-80s that formed me, and yeah I was VERY much an underachiever during my early career (though, looking at that job I mentioned above - maybe not so lacking in gumption as I have told myself for so long now) ... but nothing was stopping me from pursuing some more specific or lucrative or creative ambition.

But, the thing is: my parents always told me, "You can do anything you set your mind to."

Here is the problem: they never gave me specifics. Mom might occasionally talk about things *she* would wish to do, or which she found prestigious.

But neither my mom nor my dad ever did as C did: took up the thread of what I loved, or was good at (which were not entirely the same thing), and revealed to me the particular things my talents or my abilities could lead to. Nope, not even my dad. And he was a professor - a student advisor. His very life and career were dedicated to pushing people toward success.

Or ... maybe just to knowledge. To understanding those concepts he himself taught, or to harnessing those from other disciplines, which his students were studying. Synthesizing these to the tools to reach their specific goals.

My dad was encouraging to a fault - but the fault was, he just opened the doors wide. He provided no guide but "anything" - and that was too much. Overwhelming, or under.

I have always known that what I do is "less" in the eyes of other people; nobody's subtle about it. I basically fell into it to make a living. Doing what I do was not a dream, wasn't something I *sought*. I have made it mine, and I'm not complaining nor regretting. But it, in the barest and least freighted, but clearest sense of the phrase, "is what it is."



I could do anything I set my mind to. Sure. But in high school, I already knew I was directionless.

And MOST OF US ARE as teenagers. And that is okay.

But then majoring in Theater (or, insufferably, Theatre/Dance, at my insufferable alma mater) never was going to get me famous and wealthy and yield a successful movie star at the end of college.

(To which I now say: Thank MAUD.)

But it wasn't getting me anywhere else, either. Working on the crew was pizza money and fun, not a career trajectory. Our department wasn't good enough to provide one of those, frankly.

And I could type.

So I fell into my first jobs, my early talents - whatever they might have been - sublimated to make a living, and over the years I've done well, or just done *enough*, and scrabbled and fought my way to giving a damn ... and here we are.



I am proud of my work, and I love what I do. But don't ever think that this was my fantasy. Or even my calling. It was barely my *aptitude*, even, for a while there.





This morning, musing to a friend at work that my hair was looking particularly teased-and-tapered in an 80s sort of way, I pulled up Beauty and the Beat on my phone, and revisited that time before directionlessness became ... well, to borrow one of the Go-Go's song titles, Automatic.

The Go-Go's, I think, may seem a bit bugglegum and maybe even gimmicky these days. But that first album, steeped in 1981 and its New Wave-ness, was not a feather-light pop concoction. There is a menace in the chords. This album is bouncy, but it's bouncing on bruises, and it's propulsive. (Automatic is very dark and affecting. It *still* hits me in a very deep place, perhaps the more for life's experience rather than less.)

And this album is inextricably linked to the one person, before C, who ever pointed me at anything specific.

It was my brother.

I can't remember how it came up, and how it ever seemed "real" at all - and, the fact is, the moment of this memory may not have lasted more than a few days. But my brother, for some reason, excitedly encouraged me to get a band together, like the Go-Go's. To cover them, for Stunt Talent Night. He pointed to Kathy Valentine, and said I could do what she did.

It didn't change my life - or, at least, it didn't set me on a path. But my brother was the only family member who ever looked at anything in me, and pointed to anything at all. He didn't say "You can do anything you set your mind to."

He said, "You could do THAT."


I was too shy. I didn't know any musicians. Time ticked on, the moment passed, I never did it. Years later, I still entertained the odd fantasy of being a drummer - or, later still, a lead singer. But instead I watched Beloved Ex do it, and was still too shy. And never thought to connect to the many musicians we did know then, to try to become one of them. Well, never thought of it seriously. Never had the confidence to try.

And I had a job. And hadn't, perhaps, divested myself of the vague idea I might become wealthy and famous by sitting around waiting, hopefully being 80s-foxy enough for the world just to arrange its attention and money around me. Or maybe being a writer. Or just getting by, day to day.

There were a lot of years of getting by, long periods of time lived day to day.

And, not in the least ironically at all, it was my brother, again, who pointed me at something, years later. Aged 35, he asked me to go to a writers' conference ... and we all know how that has gone. Still the world has not arranged itself around my ridiculous success. But at least I consider myself something more than a 'nartist now.


I don't wish things had gone some other way. My life is an awfully good one to live, and the means to my living never has been the most important thing to me (the people I work with are, though). The idea of an alternative life in which What I Do *was* more important is no source of regret for me; perhaps in that life, my soul would not have been the one I have here and now, and my soul means everything to me.

No, I don't wish things had gone differently at all.

Just: looking at my parents. Thinking of the way C managed the people she worked with. I'm actually just surprised it *didn't* go differently. And curiously grateful I failed to have certain dreams ... ? What I did have was people like C, and others, and enough privilege to say I've made my way successfully, even if not prestigiously.


And I'm doubly grateful for that big brother, too. Turns out - he's actually even more special than I understood. Back in those years when I idolized him so, and didn't even know why.

Almost my birthday, and all I want is death

This post is a barely-edited version of an email I sent this morning. It's funny how trains of thought actually seem to create their own tracks and destinations.



Forwarded message to a best friend TEO...


"When bitching about a sweater gets REALLY dup and profiend.

Sometimes, being a writer is weird."


-----Original Message-----
Original email to Mr. X
Sent: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 8:06 am
Subject: Yep nope

The quest for the right wardrobe never seems to end. I bought a sweater maybe three months ago - it was definitely "recent" - but am deciding today, it has got to go. Which is especially irritating, as it's a GAP and I usually have good luck with GAP. (One red/black damask print v-neck has lasted me like six years now, it's woooooonnnderful.) But this simple blue rib knit: I'm not into that whole Marie Kondo thing, but this sweater is NOT GIVING ME JOY.

Which, ugh. This sweater made me use THAT phrase. This sweater sucks.

The thing is - it's really comfortable, it's the length I like, and the color is great on me. It is also pill--tastick (yes, with a K - like your name, it needs the consonantal emphasis), the "inseam" tag sticks out (and no, I don't cut out care tags because lord knows I'll louse up the laundry at some point), and the front hangs really weird at the bottom. Gah.

So, though I've worn this probably not even half a dozen times: I need to get rid of this thing.

Life is too short to wear unflattering (and prematurely RATTY) sweaters.

It's just a shame I happen to be wearing the thing NOW. On my fake-Friday, and family day. And with good jewelry, too! Blah.


Tonight is steak night at mom and Stepdad's. The filets from Christmas, which we didn't eat because everyone came down with the flu.

This'll be the way to spend some family celebration time with Step, but leave Wednesday free for me and mom. He's been in bed a couple days, and says he might not eat with us (he'll almost certainly eat with us, but how he'll be feeling today overall is up in the air). Sigh. Poor S. He just can't seem to die.

Bro and I were talking about him this weekend. He said it was something of a shame we came to love him after he lost his mind - I think there's a feeling akin to guilt, for Bro - but I feel like it's a blessing. We LOVE him. Neither of us felt like that was a possibility twelve years ago, and okay, it took dementia to loosen S up and give him this sense of humor we treasure. But he's loosened up. He is funny. We love him. That is enough of a blessing, and dementia is enough a part of life, I feel like it's worth just being grateful for the love and the blessing.

This is the power of a sense of humor, really. Laughter is so elementally *human*, I think, that the bonds it creates can't be trivialized. I mean: look at the way I talk about your face, broken up with laughter. It's in no way a small thing, the way that is beautiful to me.

It's in no way a small gift: S's immense grace in his sense of humor.

They always say there's no comedy without pain. I'd have to agree; that's fair. S's wit has come at such a price. Life itself, arguably. But his funny-ness has made all our lives just that much more wonderful. And just saying that squeezes my heart, and all but breaks it.

And as much as I am grateful for the incandescence of S's impishness and his smile, G-d I wish it could be taken from us all. I wish he could die. Because as long as we have his brilliance with us, HE has to endure such hideous, unbreakable pain. It is so unjust - and I know life is not fair. But nobody should ever suffer this. I would not even wish this on a Trump.

And even with all that, to feel *guilty* about loving his humor would be to waste it, and to negate the blessing it is. I just have to pray it is some amount of blessing for S. It looks like it is. It looks like, even if only a moment at a time, it takes him out of the pain. Even as selfish as it is: he takes *us* out of it. He invites us out of the reality he can't escape himself.

I've never seen grace quite like that. S is something so special.

TROUT Again!

Funny I should run into this today, after yesterday's musing about Brautigan et al. Could be one to hunt down.

Image: Wikipedia, of course

November 9, 2016

Yesterday, almost from the moment I voted, I experienced a sensation of strength much the way voting always makes me feel. There was also a pretty sure happiness. This hideous campaign was OVER. Time to look forward.

What I was expecting, we do not have to look forward to after all.


The things this cannot take from me, though, are almost obsessively on my mind this rainy autumn morning.

Rainy autumn mornings, finally cooling down.

The tum of my sweet Pum, when I lean over her to hug her and wrap my arms around her middle. Gossamer's purr.

My health. This blessing, surrounded as I have been for ... years now, with people I love who do not have it, has come to mean a great deal. I am immensely grateful for my health. And the year or so I've been working out; how much *that* means to me, how good it makes me feel to do it.

My mom. My stepfather. My brother. My nieces. My friends - I have such ripplingly, gloriously, wonderfully fine and good friends. The mere knowledge these people love me. Nothing can take away what that means.

The city I live in. It isn't perfect, but its swamps, its architecture, its history, its beauty, its schools and universities, its people, so many such richly beautiful and interesting and good people. This home is mine, and I belong to the land I came from.

The little locket I wore to vote yesterday, that was my grandmother's and bears her tooth marks from when she was a little girl and tested it the old fashioned way, to see whether it was gold. The picture of my dad, inside. The family I miss, who are gone but are inextricably mine, my blood and my memory. The family I love, no matter how far away.

My talents. My writing.



Nothing can take from me these powerful, important blessings.

And, to my friends, nothing can take me from you. We have to have each other. I thought of so many people this morning, after a night of quaking in my guts, after a night spent fear-pooping through denial and horror. All the so-very-different people I love, who honor me back with their regard.

It would dishonor them for me to give in to despair. It would say the blessings I have are not enough.


I wore the bright, light clothes I laid out last night with different hopes in my heart. I wore the beautiful necklace Cute Shoes gave to me, and the stylish little shoes, and I brushed my hair and put myself together. Walked Penelope. Fed the babies.

My neighborhood is not less beautiful today than yesterday. What concrete things are mine are mine, at least today, and what ineffable things are mine remain in place: along with my gratitude.

You have to practice gratitude. It's like anything else - if you don't practice, you'll never get good at it. Ten thousand hours.

Today is my recital, and I have to nail it.

I am grateful.





I am afraid.

Faces of Death

We've got to start off with the following phrase: the denial of human creatureliness. My stars, what a great twist of words, as cruel as any knife.

(B)eing an animal is threatening because it reminds people of their vulnerability to death...
--multiple authors, see link above

A few days ago, doing those things we do that we don't share with most others - showering and getting a look at my body's age and particulars - I was thinking, as I have before, of how I wish it were a different sight. Thinking about how age has changed things, how annoying bodies can be, not trapped in amber and constantly energetic and healthy got me to thinking (a) of all those things we are told we can do about that and, inevitably, (b) the people who do the most to give some plausible lie to the necessity of age and our animal nature.

Image: Wikipedia
Obvious choice? Heck yes.

If I'm honest, Dita von Teese actually occurs to me most often when I think about these things. She actually is lovely, but the image she's crafted - I sometimes wonder how well it will age. Perhaps it is her vintage spin that makes me look to the ways some of the Hollywood glamour goddesses who inspired her ended up; and at forty-four, you wonder how much mileage is left in her career of being alluring. The Kardashians are an industry, and nobody expects humanity of them, so contemplating how they age just means looking at Momma K and shrugging a bit.

But the fundamental point is, artifice is the denial of the animal.

There are times I revel in artifice. But the thing with me is, there are also times I revel in being an animal - in the biological status of my existence, as much as the spiritual or intellectual (or silly). In some ways, the best PART of getting dolled up (and note the word choice there, hah) is the way we start off - sweaty, sparse-eyebrowed, with imperfect skin and no ornament. For me, "gooping up" as my friend TEO and I used to call it, is an emphasis of artificiality, not of myself. When I go out in any sort of drag, it's not a presentation of myself, but of the things I like or find funny or a neat idea I had with hair or makeup, something archly and specifically NOT myself.

Anyone who believes I have purple hair - or those eyelashes - is not my responsibility to counsel.

Anyone who believes I am significantly younger than I am - well, I have two lovely parents certainly to thank. Assuming we take the cultural worship of youth as read.



For those less than eager to take on the entirety of the paper whose abstract is linked above, consider this. An interesting look at death, indeed, and possibly informative of more than America's own current state of politics.

Study subjects who were prompted to talk about their own death later rated their support for Trump 1.66 points higher on a five-point scale than those who were prompted to talk about pain generally.
--Max Ehrenfreund, Washington Post

The old "May you live in interesting times" joke comes to mind. Not only because ALL times for humans have been interesting, harrowing, joyous, and terrifying all at once, but because the first and foremost draw of Trumpery has been how interesting he is. He's entertainment, as well as a valve for the release of all those unseen things we hold inside; hatred and anger and fear. He's a really big show.

Image: Wikipedia
I chose this because it's about as dignified a shot of The Donald as I can find in fair use rules,
and the juxtaposition with someone notorious for his flamboyant looks was irresistible.
And he's really smiling.

***

It is common received wisdom that art and comedy are born out of our knowledge of death. Fashion and cosmetics are too, which is interesting given their connection to human sexuality, itself the only means toward immortality in providing for procreation.

Politics is death. And sometimes suicide is the way humans meet death.

***

I both revel in my creatureliness and play with those toys of denial. Most of us do the same in one way or another, saving contemplation of death for special occasions, but not actively denying it. Life just doesn't leave time for it, mostly. We get caught up in the day-to-day, and that works both in our favor and against us - it is all to easy to forget to deal with those parts of life that have to do with its cessation.

It is perhaps precisely because all times are interesting that we simultaneously gorge on it, and then need to retreat from it, and on a humankind scale this leads us to bewildering socio-political behavior. American media would have it that the Brexit vote came largely because people voted for exit thinking "this will never happen" and now they all wish they could take it back. How far this gibes with reality is debatable, but not a debate I wish to be party to. It's an interesting sort of finger-shaking version of "journalism" (a word that's been in scare-quotes for years now), but a curious look at the fear of death in itself. A few weeks go, Brexit looked like Roman decimation in broadcast media; right now, we're forgetting about it and "la-la-la-I-cant'-hear-you"-ing all the way to Sodom, most of the day-after pearl-clutching forgotten, at least amongst us unwashed masses. There isn't time to think about it.

Three days ago, I'd never heard of this dang Pokemon walking game, and now it is EVERYWHERE, both in hilarity and more finger-wagging ("don't play Pokemon games in the Holocaust museum" was an actual thing this morning).

Fantasy is our way of denying death - if we focus on what we find most beautiful, desirable ... death loses its hold in our minds, because those things are as strong for us as the unknowable inevitabilities of our bodies.

By writing, I revel in the creatureliness of my characters, and my own - and because I write fiction, I can deny it ALL. Nothing is real, and if I write about those things that frighten me most, that is not real either.

This is the essential appeal of horror.

The ultimate fantasy is control.

We seem to be exerting the fantasy of control by going out of control an awful lot lately.

Why *wouldn't* people rather contemplate the curiously human and artificial face of a Jenner or Kardashian ... ?

Beginnings ... (?)

It looks like my last post was the 2500th on this blog. Interesting; it was about neverending dying. It was unplanned.

Like so much of life. Unplanned.

One year ago, I allowed myself to contemplate putting The Ax and the Vase away. At the time, I could not face that as a death, but a persistent coma eventually becomes a death for those who are still in the waking life. It hasn't been long since I memorialized that death, not for the first time, but pretty much in that context. I even said, there is a freedom in letting go. I have been seeing the "release" aspect of death a great deal of late.

And so, it is hard. It is hard to contemplate hope instead.

Stripping off the preciousness and poetry: it's hard, and terrifying, to find myself considering self-publishing.

There is an aspect to the idea that feels like death, itself. The dream of traditional publishing, for me, has been a long one - as long as the writing of Ax itself was, and that was ten years or more. In the beginning, there was a powerful challenge and a business to learn, and that appealed to me. In the midst of that education, the idea of learning another way was overwhelming.

I've seen the commitment it takes to be an indie. I've long, too, seen the liberty inherent in being pre-published. For all these years, the technical side of the self-pub path has been aplenty to stymie me and allow me to maintain an almost studied ignorance, focusing on the traditional pub path.

Damn my brain. I find with age, it is more open, not less, to new ideas and new ways of doing things. I'm a Virginian! This is not natural.

But, even my wee and paltry brain is capable of perception. It has not escaped me that the infrastructure and the process of self-pub has been refined and cultivated over the same years indie's reputation has grown, along with its popularity. And my wee and paltry brain occasionally gets the idea it might just be big enough to learn something new.

And my heart and my talent and my uppity-osity kind of think Ax is a good novel. That it should not die.

I'm still very well aware of its disadvantages as a product. But vanity wonders ... could it work in a market unlike traditional publishing? In this, my wee and paltry brain may admittedly be prone to arrogance.

I am by no stretch committed. Too much to learn even to begin. And this time has been a hard time; it is possibly the worst time in the world to take on such an enterprise. But this is perhaps part of the reason I contemplate it.

As for the rest: I blame my wee and paltry brain. And reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. And a friend who is willing to give me the benefit of her experience and expertise, at least as a starting point. I am grateful for Leila Gaskin. As who wouldn't be?

Sigh.

The comments are open. I would love to see others' thoughts.

Thinkage

Today at work, I was thinking about the stress my family has been under , and half-thought to myself, "As human beings, we are not made to watch another person die." Instantly, I realized that this was incorrect.

As human beings, we are supposed to be with others - those we know, love, share community with - in illness and death, birth and joy.

It's the cube farm we're not made to do this in. Isolated from those we share the most with and under flourescent lights, breathing canned air, muffled by white noise.

Tears and blood and messy moments aren't the unnatural. Being compartmentalized and pressed away from these things is.

The Most Incredible Pen I Ever Met

Life's too short not to use the good pen.

Being a writer, every now and then someone gives me A Nice Pen.

I have a whopper of a colorful mother-of-pearl pen that was my first "because you are a writer" pen, given by a friend several jobs ago when I had to leave that much-beloved employer. It weighs something on the order of a pound or so, and its diameter is enormous, but it's a great-writing instrument. I love it most because of its provenance, but it's a lovely thing just to look at and great for a flourishing signature.

My current job brought a boxed set my way, a pen and pencil set in graphite casing, just beautiful.

Another friend gave me a pen hand-lathed by her own son; a slender, curvaceous number I favor frequently because it is beautifully weighted. This pen goes with me everywhere, in whatever purse I happen to be carrying.

The James River Writers conference has been a source of good pens as well.

One of the best pens they've had in the swag bag for a couple or three years happens to come from a sponsor semi descended from, or step-related to, the employer I had to leave so regretfully at the time I received the MOP pen mentioned above. It gives me a wry smile, because those who've stayed on through this generation of that employer have not universally been thrilled with the evolution, but they are people I still respect immensely, and miss.

JRW is also a great source for some of the best cheap pens I've ever had. Another sponsor provides snappy little lightweights that also have a great curve appeal, and they often come in nice colors you can find in the drawer. Some of these have lasted as long as the ten-plus years for which I've been attending JRW events.

Easily the most astonishing pen, if we may call it such, is the highlighter with which I do my hard-copy research.

This is a highlighter.

It was bought in a set of four colors.

In 1982.


To steal a phrase from the most intense aunt in my family: I kid you not.


This highlighter was born in the age of pin-dot printing, when static was something we concerned ourselves with, or, at least, the marketing dudes of the day did. When this FONT was cool-oh and futuristic looking. It came with blue, green, and yellow companions - the yellow long since used up, the blue still gasping 35 years on, and the green perhaps lost in time.

The pink highlighter works. It's fresh as a daisy, and has that satisfyingly firm tip that feeds its ink with a waxy smoothness that is gratifyingly dependable.

I didn't save this beast for special occasions. For decades, it lived with my mom. She cleaned out a desk, decades *ago* now, and I inherited it, and its mates. There was little reason to use it, but no pressing reason to toss it, and the thing has aged quietly for all this time.

It's probably more than twice the age of my eighteen-year-old niece. It has outlasted countless personal computers, fashions, even automobiles. Five of those, in fact. Individually, it may have cost a quarter or so - perhaps more, if we splurged on a princely tool for modern computer highlighting work! - but investment-wise, is has outperformed any conceivable commodity in any market in any corner of, perhaps, the entire universe itself.

And it shows no sign of giving up. It doesn't even show its age, though the design is perhaps amusingly quaint.

Pink has, since my earliest research on The Ax and the Vase, been the color for highlighting research for the WIP. I found the subject of the WIP early on in working on Ax, and so I used pink to differentiate it from the drab old yellow I was using to work on reading for Ax.

I used this highlighter. There have been one or two other pink ones, in a pinch, but those (!!!) died. Quickly.

This workhorse, though, lives on. And on.

I have a silly and affectionate idea it may see me through work on the WIP, and finally give up its hardy ghost, fulfilled at long last, the methuselah pen, the ancient markiner, the oldest highlighter known to man.

If not, I plan to leave it to the younger niece - also a writer.

In the meantime, it is working for me. And I am, quietly, but consistently, amazed by the little thing. It has such ... life.



What is your best or most beloved or oddest pen?

"Life. Don't Talk to Me About Life."

I love Scientific American.

Life is a concept that we invented.

… an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not.

(T)his division does not exist outside the mind.

There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark.

We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.

Death Takes a Holiday

Two years ago on July 4, which I have for the past nine years or so not really "celebrated" to speak of, I was here at home as the sky slowly decided to grow dark, looking at my Sweet Siddy La, and I decided to go to my office and pick up my laptop.  I felt like I might be being overdramatic, but I had this overwhelming need to be with her, to not leave her the next day and just go back to work.  And the next day, she did go to the vet ... and not come home.

Sidney was the gooderest thing, and I'm *still* grateful to ever have known her, to have been privileged to love her.  Her death began what has been a hideous two years - I was in a car accident one week after she died, I had health scares, there has been a surfeit of stress and fear and difficulty, culminating in the fear, starting almost a year ago, that my job was, if not in jeopardy, at least in for some fundamental changes I could not see as positive.  I reacted in knee-jerk fear, did not find a way out, settled down ... and then almost by accident an opportunity called my name, and I responded.

Image:  Wikimedia

I did NOT want to leave that job - least of all my team, whom I still adore to bits and have maintained friendships with - but it has in the end turned out to have been the right thing.

We used to look out our window there, from time to time; the cube farm was next to a small manmade lake in a large manmade office park in an area very close to the swamps of my childhood.  We'd be like little kids watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom if eagles, deer, our huge gleaming-finned carp, or the heron showed up.

For years, I've loved the Great Blue.  I saw them when I worked beside the river downtown, and they were regular players on our pond.  But I'd never seen a White Egret until last year, and the ghostly appearances of them starting just when I was going through such fear got me all schmoopy and I looked up the animal symbolism of the bird.  They stood for self-determination, among other things.




Starting with that job change, I was blessed to have the *power* of self-determination, and the past six months have brought ever-growing reasons to be thankful and grateful.  The job has been a good thing, and I have yet another new, great team and a really interesting desk full of work.  I like it and am happy there.

Right now, a new two years looks good to me.  Some of the best news in my life came in May.  I have a completely charming new (ish) little Prius.  Penelope and Gossamer are both two themselves now (I adopted the latter just two days after that car accident mentioned above), and we're a pretty good little pack family.  One of these days, I might even get to take a vacation for the first time in three years.

And the final polish on Ax is so close I can almost touch it ...

At its solstice, 2014 has been a wonderful year, to be grateful for, and the main thing I wish now is for my friends to be so blessed - and more.  I wish the same peace and prosperity for everyone.

Get to it.  And watch a few birds along your way - and pet a few furbabies.

Dreaming Is Free

Like most of us, I've always got ideas for "what I could do" - either in the case of if only I had more money or if only I had (or took) some time.  Some dreams are easier than others (I've been without a bathroom downstairs in my home since last July), but the time ones are the real temptors.

Penelope has graduated from her cage - on a day it was a blessing to have something good happen - and I am so happy for her.  I never was comfortable with "crate training" (the euphemism for caging, or the practice just in itself), giving a healthy puppy something like four feet by three to endure all day long.

Her graduation - her freedom (and good behavior) means that the room dominated for two years almost by her cage can now become a room again.  Once my back is better, I'll enjoy quite a bit, taking the desk out of the room currently acting as a rather defunct office, maybe reconfiguring what's already there, and having a beautiful sunny place to set up laptop and so on.  A good place to write.

And free.

The restoration of the downstairs bathroom?  Another day.

But soon I'll be able to fix up that West Wing of mine - and even maybe do a couple fun things in the room my desk will be vacating.

I'm trying hard to distract myself from the more harrowing aspects of what makes life so difficult, in that link above.  Some days, it's all I can do.

But do it, I can.  And I am.

"This Life" is "Big" and Hard

It was a hard day today, and all I can do with it is count my blessings and be grateful the complaints I have, the fears I have, are the complaints I have.  The fears I have.

Because the fears I have are the fears of privilege, of the position from which money is what looks like a problem.  Of being fortunate, talented, and stable enough to live on my own terms.  My mom and dad did that to me, and I'll never be able to express the fulness of my thanksgiving.  The fulness of my heart.

Today was hard for reasons other than the way I actually spent it.  The way I actually spent it was at an Administrative Professionals conference, which is an event I've been to for some years, and which seems to get better every year.  We had a little fun with writing.  We got cheered on by nice people.  We stretched all our muscles in our seats and ... listened to some music.

Susan Greenbaum was with us.  I've heard of Susan for years, but - oddly enough, given the opportunities locally - have never seen her live before.  Seeing a musician live in a setting mostly geared toward thinking about work and professional development, not a coffee house or club, maybe heightens just how good music is.  The guy who got us to move our bodies a bit heightened just how good moving our bodies can be, and the sealed-in atmosphere of a day's conference has a way of imbuing something almost like sacred time.

I found out today that one of the longest-running stresses in my life, that No-Love Which Dare Not Speak Its Name (on a blog - as personal as I get here, I do have boundaries) - which was supposed to be resolved ... or, at least, which had the chance of being resolved and I hoped would be - is not at an end.

As I sit typing, the sky is GREEN and dark, and the rain is pelting so hard it's making my front living room window pinkle under its bombardment, almost with the sound rain usually makes on a tin roof.

That sound is my dad's sound, a sacred sound.  Rain, and queer skies, and lightning and very close thunder are heightened, and the green air mystical.

I'm also enjoying the hormonal rush of a lifetime, and getting static news, which can be as bad as bad news, when you have to give it in turn to your mom - to your friends and those who pray for you.  Susan's voice cracked a little, but I did not make it through "This Life" ...

I will make it through mine, though.



I thanked her before I left.  "People must say to you all the time, 'you touched me' - but you made *me* touch something myself, and that's even better."  She hugged me.  She has startlingly beautiful eyes.



By the way?  Susan is 4'10".  And she is just huge.  Please watch the vids.  You know who you are, who I'm asking to watch.  I know you usually don't.  But these were the songs I heard after the no-news, and they help.  Plus, the second one is joyous.  Funny.  It'll make you stop crying after the first one.  It was my gift, today.

There's a lot more to life than the problems I have as someone with a roof over my head, the love of a beautiful cat and a dog, and friends and family I will never hope to deserve.  I've sent a link to this post to you all, and every word of this I wrote for you - because I'm not going to want to talk about things right now, because I'm PMS-ing and tired, because you deserve better than my first emotions, and honestly so does the situation.  Whatever my problems are, they aren't those of someone else on the other side of my coin today.  Whatever my problems are, I'm grateful they're not greater ones.  I'm thankful for hope.  And for MY life.

In Other News

I've been having FUN (of all things) taking the old butter knife to the dragon again, which is a perfectly daft response to a request for edits on a manuscript already revised something like four hundred eighty seven thousand times.  But it's a wise response when the request comes from someone of the caliber it came from.

It is also exactly the sort of personal mission which provides rather excellent diversion at a time when ... well, shall we say, Life is doing its thing.  Wielding a butter knife at a thousand-foot fire-breather does take one's mind off certain looming stresses, and I am then doubly grateful, not just for the attention from another great agent (one I don't intend to let slip through my fingers this time, if I can help it) but for the boon of the work itself.

The reason it is fun is that I'm not doing anything to restore old work once scrapped.  I'm reinventing.  I come from the generation weaned on reinvetion (reboots), a generation with a lifetime lease on the word "re-imagine".  Some of what I'm doing, far from being a retrieval or recycling (I am really trying to use all the re-prefixed terms I can in this paragraph ... apparently ...), is entirely new work.

It even struck me that one supporting character, who needs some meat on her bones, is indeed the one secret I've kept all the time I have been working on Ax.  She's the only avatar for myself in the work.  I try not to be the precious, over-invested author, living vicariously in my characters (and making them all talented and beautiful beyond description).  But at some point, I consciously decided that I'd use my own physical description for her, and perhaps some personality.  (Emphasis on the perhaps - I have no musical talent, and lost my ability to sing even with mediocre ability years ago.)

What this work has made me realize is that, because she's the closest thing to me I invested in the work, I *shrank* from giving her a real presence.  This was true even before the revision massive campaign of cuts.  And so, it is liberating to actually give her a smile, a breath, a little scene or two.

I had fun, too, reinventing the tale of Basina and the animals - a legend of Clovis' mother, likely invented long after the fact, meant to evoke the degeneration of the Merovingian dynasty.  I told the tale with an oral cadence, with the lilt of a fairytale; it's a short passage, but it puts BLOOD in the veins of the meat I'm trying to hang on my bones.

Oh dear, and my metaphors are REally getting bent like overworked copper.  Time for me to cease musing, hit save, and proably log off for the night.