Podiatry

The podiatrist gave me little over-the-counter pads with stick’ums on one side. I’m supposed to paste these fuckers to the bottom of my feet while he sees if my insurance will cover some professionally made inserts and we’re supposedly going to talk next week via the phone. I forget what he said he conjured was causing all this. Something rolling in a particular direction, obviously a particularly wrong direction. Pronating? Bones suspected of curving. You could tell, he said, by the wear pattern on my shoes – which were shoes I don’t wear often. These are comfortable shoes, He says, so people like them. They are the least comfortable shoes I have, I tell him. My feet hurt worst while I wear these particular shoes. Wouldn’t it be awesome if just once you went to the doctors and left feeling better than when you went – that they were able to tell you why were you having particular symptoms and outline a course of action that would actually make a meaningful difference?

Off like a prom dress to the optometrist. My prescription hasn’t changed significantly (all the change, I guess, is just in my head.) And I really couldn’t find a pair of cool new glasses. I went to visit Dan because I was too early for the eye doctor and he says, but those are really cute glasses. (Referring to the ones I’ve had for the past however many years.) I have to agree. They are really cute glasses. So I just up-graded an old pair of glasses with my newer old prescription and picked out a cute pair of prescription sunglasses. Five hundred and ninety dollars later and my flexible spending account is clean, zippo, wiped out. The sad part of this purchase is that I totally have a premonition of these expensive new sunglasses laying in the dust, trampled, at the side of a trail after some mountain biking fiasco. I know they’re not long for this world and I don’t even have them yet.

He says he misses me. I miss him too. I wish he lived closer the same way he wishes I lived closer and we won’t. That’s just the way it is right now and maybe for forever.

Cassie’s back from her astral travel adventure (heretofore known as ATA.) She came to visit on Saturday – but now I suspect she was just a mirage, an ATA illusion. She’s not only merely a lump of flesh channeling Cassie, but she’s not even real flesh. (I pinched her and she didn’t even notice – she didn’t even flinch.) We went on a short hike and I made us stop in a peaceful little meadow near the stables. It was too short – both the hike and the visit. Short because Ed and I planned to go the beach – something fun for a change. But that didn’t happen. Time got away with us so instead we began the arduous task of getting the kitchen cupboards up. They’ve been painted (or so I thought) for months and months – laying on the floor of the extra room. I bought hinges a few weeks back and it was time to do something with them.

As we began to affix hinges I realized the bastard who I paid an arm and leg to paint them didn’t even frill’n finish the job. One word - Asshole. But up they go nonetheless and I’ll do touch up later. The kitchen looks so different. Less cluttered. Brighter. Different. It’s a little shocking to have cupboard doors on – it’s been nearly a year since they’ve been off. Now I need to make a decision about knobs and pulls. But really, who needs knobs and pulls when you have no arms or legs?

Did I mention I bought a new lap top? Well, actually, one place I work for agreed to pay $1,000 toward the purchase, the one agreed to pay half the remainder. So I bought a quarter of a lap top but I get to keep the whole thing. It’s an HP 8000 series (8140.) Very sweet. It’s being shipped. I decided to demonstrate patience and choose the free five to seven business day delivery option as opposed to paying extra for next business day or second business day delivery. This proves I’m a saint (read patience of a saint) for anyone who doubted.

Okay.. this ranks up there as one of my most mundane entries. It only gets better from here. Promise.

KavOuch, Kavetch, KavItch

My feet hurt like hell. Ouch, ouch, ouch. At first it was the just the right foot. The toes began tingling last October and then a dull ache and throb. Later the entire big toe and the ball of the foot went numb and it continues with the thudding pain that now extends down through the arch. And the left foot, it’s starting in now too. I dropped the transformer or whatever the heck that big ass thing is on the cord to the laptop. I dropped that on the right foot – it sent me gaga. And then I picked it up and it slipped out of my hands and it dropped on my left foot. I wanted to cry. So I go get the phone to call Ed and whine a bit, and I drop the phone on my right foot. On the bright side, I’ve got an appointment with the podiatrist on Friday. I think I want to marry a podiatrist. Sorry Ed.

And I’ve been having these headaches, I think because my prescription is changing on my glasses. So I’ve got an appointment with the optometrist on Friday too. I inquire with the HR guy at work if I have cashola in my flexible spending account. He replies that I do - $500. That’s gonna be a sweet pair-o-glasses. (He says get something with some bling bling cause it’s a bitch getting old and falling apart.) That’ll be me, limping around on Friday looking for bling.

Also.. I know I’m getting bit by fleas. For cryinoutloud. I bombed this whole frill’n place not three weeks ago. Where in the HELL are they coming from? I never had this problem in the back cottage. Help?

Independence Day

I’m still working on those embarrassing moments. I’m on number three of five I suppose.

3) Before I had a good sense of how the internet and search engines worked, before I started this blog, I had another blog. I vented a rant called Independence Day in which I told the story of a failed first love with an aspiring comedian/actor. I mentioned his close friend, who has grown to be a rather successful comedian/actor. I mentioned these folks by their real names (thus it becomes important that I didn’t realize how search engines worked) and some of my remarks were visceral, blunt, personal and disparaging. In context, the piece was about betrayal and intimacy – deception and disease – and about removing the rosy glow of idealized first love to look at something in all it’s nakedness.

The piece was called Independence Day because it was about shuffling off the innocence and letting go the allusion. If you wrap your head around literary allusion it was about this:

we drove the car to the top of the parking ramp / on the 4th of july / we sat out on the hood with a couple of warm beers and watched the fireworks / explode in the sky / and there was an exodus of birds from the trees / but they didn’t know, we were only pretending / and the people all looked up and looked pleased / and the birds flew around like the whole world was ending

It was dramatic, yes.. what the fuck, I’m dramatic in my writing. Anyways… the subject was searching his own name and came across the piece. He was living in LA and tracked down my phone number and called to ream me out for putting such personal information on the internet and what if his future mother-in-law saw that!?! I have to say, I was mortified. I was embarrassed.

While there was nothing, technically, untrue, in what I wrote – in neither the actual events or in how I reflected on things –it also wasn’t the whole picture. But/and if you’d heard the Ani DiFranco song lyrics of the same name that inspired the essay you’d maybe get it.

so many sheep i quit counting / sleepless and embarrassed about the way that i feel / trying to make mole hills out of mountains / building base camp at the bottom of a really big deal / and did i tell you how i stopped eating? / when you stopped calling me / and i was cramped up shitting rivers for weeks / and pretending that i was finally free

Of course on the phone that day I couldn’t explain. All I could do was be embarrassed and mortified and apologize over and over. And within days I’d learned about meta tags that won’t allow for search engines to cache pages and I’d written personal pleas to search engines to remove this page. I was just mortified – I was so embarrassed.

Now, whenever I think of that relationship I don’t remember the good or the bad times, the deception or betrayal, the pain of lost love or innocence. All I remember is the entry in my blog and how sorry I was that he’d seen it. I have to admit that it feels better to just feel sorry than it did to carry around baggage filled with lost valuables.

and i don't think war is noble / and i don't like to think that love is like war / but i got a big hot cherry bomb, and i want to slip it through the mail slot / of your front door

Kaboom. Ouch.

Now the most interesting thing is that while that entry has long since been deleted from the internet, I still have it as a word.doc and to refresh my memory I just went back and read it. While I still regret that I used his real name and am embarrassed that he read it, etc. - man he so totally missed the mark. What an idiot.

Good Luck and Good Night

A small group of us went to the Sunday matinee of Good Luck and Goodnight. I loved the movie – the texture, the script, the acting… It left me feeling betrayed (again) by America and her infrastructure and ideologies. Listening to Murrow’s speeches – insightful, thoughtful, provoking – and actual text from newsprint media – addressing real issues in meaningful ways and using three-syllable words at that! I felt so disrespected by modern culture – with its sound bite treatment of the most complex of issues and fifth grade reading levels to appease the ignorant masses. I felt dimwitted by a country that expects us to be dimwits and we all stoop to achieve understanding. We need to get out our fucking dictionaries and learn how to communicate.

It’s time to allocute our crimes in a literary court – we’re culpable. We made it wires and flickering light. By our complicity it has really become Fahrenheit 451, though it’s not enforcers burning books of heretics – it’s so much more insidious and unforgivable then that. It’s libraries standing bereft of readers - dust gathering on the tops, glue turning brittle in the spines, pages yellowing and falling apart not from use but from neglect and abandon. Even music has become simple, lifeless and dim. I’ve spent what feels like a lifetime dumbing things down for the average reader when increasingly the average reader doesn’t, in fact, read.

Wiley’s visit was nice – relaxing and comfortable. He arrived in the afternoon on Saturday and left early Sunday evening. We walked for miles and had Ed come retrieve us from far away. We sat in a hot tub, went out for dinner, watched a documentary, chatted, watched a mindless movie, drank hot apple cider, fell asleep early. And on Sunday we strolled about town in the morning, went to the theatre in the afternoon and ended the day with a short hike. I felt empty – uninspired and intellectually listless – only made worse by this realization of how dim witted we all are.

The death of a neighbor’s King Charles Spaniel (Romeo), hit by a car and killed, has both Secret and I in a state of grief. We bought flowers this afternoon and will be delivering them to their doorstep shortly. He is terribly missed and fondly remembered.

Freeze Frame

Looking through the lens of a camera I’m never more aware of what my mind erases. It forces you to look, really look, at what is there – the debris in the foreground, the splinter in your eye.

I’m tired. How was it that I became so bitter? On a day-to-day basis I don’t really see that bitterness, but it’s there – the figurative debris in the foreground, the literal splinter in my eye. I want to find a way to dissolve it like sugar cubes under absinthe.

I wonder if the trees make me feel lonely of if I’m lonely and thus have developed an affinity for the trees. One day I’m so happy, content and feeling apart of life – the next I’m a bit wrecked. As I have parted ways with lovers more than one has said, you’re just too intense. I wish I could part ways with me sometimes too. I think I’m coming to know what they meant – maybe. I really crave, demand and need a high level of engagement.

Okay, okay.. back track. I’m sick. I’m sick today – I’ve been fuzzy, foggy-headed, dizzy for days on end. And last night I was up most of the night, at least every hour and today is no better. I’m not feverish (unless the thermometer is broken… just my luck), to the contrary my body temperature is incredibly low. I just realized that most (really, maybe all) of my symptoms are side effects of an antibiotic I’m on. Fuck it. I’m stopping the antibiotic – frill’n MPH ho. I’m not convinced I need it anyways. While I love (in principle) the idea of solving a problem with a drug, it’s just not always the answer. In fact it’s rarely the answer. I just want my body to work better. The point of telling you that I feel sick, however, is that when I feel sick I come to the conclusion that my life sucks – even though just a few days ago I was riding high on how lovely and cozy and wonderful things are right now. So really it’s to say likely it doesn’t suck at all, I’m not really lonely, generally speaking, pervasively speaking (can one speak pervasively?) and perhaps I’m just intense, needy and demanding when I feel sick. Or maybe I’m intense, needy and demanding all the time – sound attractive?

Anyways, if you’re not in the mood for intense, needy, demanding and whiney then do not inquire within.

I’m freaked out by the idea of having to look for a job. I thought, oh, I’m not working today (because I called in sick.. because I am sick – it’s a weird thing to call in sick when you work from home), I’ll work on my resume. But I’m too dizzy-headed to work on anything.. duh.. that’s why I called in sick. I have to take a conference call in an hour and I really just want to heave. ((Why I am writing about this?)) Anyways, I’m freaked out by the idea of having to look for a job. I haven’t had to do that in over a decade and I didn’t really look for this job – it found me.

The truth is, I’m really freaked out about not having a job. And while not having an income does wig me out, not having a job wigs me out equally if not more. And worse, the fact that not having a job wigs me out more freaks me out even more. What does that say about me, what I’ve come to rely on for identity, purpose, blah, blah, blah? It means I’m becoming someone I don’t like – I’ve become someone I don’t respect and maybe that, as much as anything else, has inspired me to quit the job. I mean, you may have a job that you really love – and believe me I can relate to that – that used to be me – but the day that the job that you love and your identity become so intertwined that you don’t have one without the other, that is a problem.

And through all this lamentation my boss leaves a message on the machine telling me that she can’t give me any information about the possibility of a severance because they’re now entering into some kind of discussion about restructuring my job into something that might be palatable to me – something that I might be willing to stay for. I’m not calling her back. Talk away. Talk is cheap. I’ve had nearly fifteen years of talk. Blah, blah, blah. Do something already.

It's a (bad) Dog's Life

I’m agro today. Can you believe it? I’m launched into day two of a sixty day respite from work and I’m agro. What the fuck is up with that? I should be dancing in the street, flitting about, happy as a clam, without a care and fancy free.

Instead I nearly had a melt down in Trader Joes whilst in search of Scharfenberger chocolate. An elderly woman in white Capri pants kept moving her cart in front of me, blocking the flow of all traffic and wandering away. Every time I turned around this woman was pushing her skinny ass in front of me. I wanted to pop her one.

A gaggle of friends met for the noonish showing of War of The Worlds. Tom Cruise is not my favorite. Or rather, he was just stellar in Magnolia. That was the right role for him. I’m not saying this wasn’t a fun movie. To the contrary it had the suspense thing happening, was true to the story, fun special effects and a great little alien. Of course it’s Marin and a woman in the bathroom insists that since the environment killed the aliens there was indeed a message for humans in that – you know, about our toxic environment. Big eye roll…. It’s about evolution and adaptation… duh.

I bought four bars of chocolate and sweltered in the heat, despite the air conditioning in the car, all the way home to greet the Honey Bee. You know.. the Honey Bee who ate an ENTIRE frillin’ chicken carcass out of the trash while we were gone. I called the emergency vet and they say to just watch her. I ask, “well isn’t the issue here that the bones are brittle and can slice her insides?” They assure me I’m on target about the concern and well, damage done, nothing can stop it if it’s going to happen. I guess in most cases nothing happens but we’re to bring her in if she starts protecting her stomach, vomiting or having G.I. symptoms. I think, why bring her in, to watch her die?

This all follows her fabulous skunking of night before last. “Did you remember to shut the front door?” I ask Ed as he sleepily stumbles to bed after staying up to the wee hours watching some DVD or another. “Oh yes,” he assures. And at 3 a.m. I hear a scuffle on the deck outside our bedroom window and then that sickly creosote smell of fresh skunk oil wafting into the bedroom and sticking.. well.. pretty much on everything. And then the proud instigator comes loping in, hops on the bed and finds her spot on the pillow by my head. She’s foaming at the mouth where she seemed to catch the lion’s share of the spray. A few hours with the de-skunking enzymes… which work for shit… and we’re ready to settle in for two friggin’ hours of sleep before my last day of work.

But here we are… and I should be chipper as a June Bug (why are June bugs chipper?) but I’m irritable and agro and my massage therapist can’t see me until tomorrow and while we had a fun time at War of the Worlds we’ve made no headway on Hell’s Kitchen and I’m just… very… bothered by everything right now.

Snow Globe

Death twitches my ear. “Live,” he says. “I’m coming.” - Virgil

I was home for a day and a half and then off to Cleveland. That was nearly a month ago now… has it been that long since my last confession, regression, reflection? I don’t think I’d ever been to Ohio before. I can’t really say I was in Ohio. I was for a day and a half. And it snowed. I sat in the meeting and stared out the windows from time to time, musing at the courtyard as the first snow descended. What a magical time to be anywhere, during the first snow.

It was clean and white and relentless. I’d been reading Alice Sebold’s new book Lovely Bones on the airplane and it begins with a little girl lamenting the fate of a scarf-clad penguin in a snow globe. Not to worry, her father assures, he’s just trapped in a perfect world. And I’d laugh a little to myself as the day progressed, thinking about how we’re all just trapped in a perfect world. I need to remember that.

The day I left Cleveland, I’ve decided, is among the worst days of my life. Which is a testament to how my life hasn’t really been that bad and perhaps also a sad commentary on my yardstick of personal suffering. The meeting went just a bit long and the taxi was just a bit late. I needed to go to the bathroom. I needed to pee, but I figured the airport was a mere fourteen miles away and I didn’t want to risk missing the first taxi and logic informed that I should wait. I waited and indeed got in the first taxi which promptly was stuck in traffic due to that perfect world of a first snow. It took two and half hours to make that sojourn. The taxi stopping and starting, vibrating and the cold making me shiver even more. My bladder ached – it’s all I could think about for two and half hours… counting the seconds which crawled on their belly. Talk about the notion of ever lasting life. If every two and a half hour segment of time moved as slowly as that one I’d say it would feel like we lived forever. Maybe salvation is living wholly in the present in excruciating discomfort.

Trapped in a perfect world…

I think it is interesting that indeed I’ve experienced the loss of those I love, the death of those who died young and terrible deaths. I think it’s interesting that I don’t count those losses as paramount to the discomfort of sitting in a taxi cab for two and half hours whilst needing to pee. I reflected on this and muse that perhaps those losses are still happening on some level. Or maybe, in fact, they have stopped happening on some level. When someone we love dies, although the act of their dying may take place in a split second, we divide the grief of their death up over time. It’s like it’s not an acute event for us, the living. That needing to pee had a beginning, a middle and an end, like a short story. But death and loss is not. It’s more like a marsh - there are no clear borders where one world starts and the other stops.

Trapped in a perfect world…

It’s sometimes hard to hold, isn’t it, that these things are all constituents of a perfect world? I find this interesting about me too. Some of the things that people enjoy about me are my insights, my perspective and the way(s) that I articulate these things. It’s also these same things that people want to shut up and down. But it’s the same people. They at once want and don’t want, love and loathe, my gifts. As though we can all have it both ways. The double edged sword – it can cut the vines to clear the view and your heart all at once.

Trapped in a perfect world…

Are you following my metaphors? Sliding down my similes to a perfect sibilant yes? There are things beneath the things, hiding snuggly under the covers.

Trapped in a perfect world…

I got a library card yesterday. I leafed through an Annie Liebowitz picture book called Women with a forward by Susan Sontag. A woman I once knew was photographed for the book. I cannot begin to express how dissed I feel by this woman. How insignificant and invisible in history some people can make us feel. And I wonder, does it matter? Does it change anything, what is spoken and what remains silent? As I look through the mirror, darkly, I see myself lurking in time and I see time lurking in me too.

Trapped in a perfect world…

Electric Blue Toes

I met Max for lunch at the Garden Court Restaurant at the Palace Hotel. I was in a particularly critical mood and took liberties to express my disapproval of his girlfriend. I wish I would have held my tongue. What Max and I have in common is his late wife. We both adored her. I shouldn’t tarnish our relationship with judgments like this. I think I just lost my way in conversation.

There was a family at the ferry building in Larkspur, overdressed, I’d thought, for a sojourn into the City. What’s really to dress up for – the concrete, the asphalt, the towering steel and glass? And there they were a few tables over, beneath the glass dome canopy of the Garden Court. It was I who is forever underdressed for the events of the day.

I stopped for a pedicure on the way home – some wild metallic electric blue/green toes – that would be good. I really don’t like getting a pedicure. It depresses me. As I rode my bicycle along the canal there were ladies lunching at the outdoor tables behind the Bon Air center. Some lounged on the grass with big brimmed hats. It’s like my lists – busying oneself so as not to notice how meaningless some days can be. Getting a pedicure is a decadent extravagance – paying someone to wash your feet and clean the toe jam from beneath your nails. Ew. It’s something I do when I’m trying to distract myself from the responsibility of my happiness. So I have fabulous electric toes, but am not once ounce happier. In fact, the very act of getting a pedicure seems to throw me into a mini existential crisis – life is meaningless, God is dead. Whoa.. I’m glad I got that out and over with…

Abercrombie and Fitch

We all survived the summer solstice. The world didn’t end and there was no mass hysteria at the prospect of shorter and shorter days. Okay Ms. Glass-is-Half-Empty, snap out of it.

In other news of the world, the Cookie Monster was assaulted and battered at a Sesame Street theme park yesterday. The Cookie Monster was pushed to the ground, while a father hit and kicked the fuzzy blue cuddly bear-monster. The perpetrator was arrested and contends the Cookie Monster was rude. Let’s take a moment of silence and grieve for the world and her ways.

The day was filled with a judgemental angst. This is probably a result of my wandering into Abercrombie and Fitch before boarding the bus from downtown to the neighborhood. Admittedly this was the first (and the last) time I have ever set foot in an Abercrombie and Fitch store, and frankly I was appalled. I’m far from being a fashion princess, my ripped T-shirts and Boy Fit Capri blue jeans are testament to this. I’m quite excited that Punk is making a comeback, even if it’s just fashion. I was assaulted with perky colors and slinky slogans on tight-fitting T-shirts and stretch pants. It was painful. I had no idea that’s what was in these places.

I walked out of the store dazed. It left me feeling like a fifteen-year-old girl ready to rebel and I got to wondering how a late thirty-something me would look in a Mohawk again. I recommitted to getting myself two biceps.

Today I find myself a little more concerned about the health and well-being of the Cookie Monster and the fate of humanity as a consequence of the recent attack on the beloved blue bear-monster. Some might call this denial, others may call it altruistic. While certainly a number of definitions are up for grabs, one thing is certain – Abercrombie and Fitch ruined my day.

Fetish

As I was dropping seventy-five dollars on hair care and make-up products at Walgreens (Yes, seventy-five dollars), I ran into Restaurant Girl. She’s quitting her jobs and was jovial and friendly. I’m invariably shocked when she’s cordial. I always look around and wonder, are you talking to me? Are you serious? Don’t you remember that you’re always rude to me? I think she forgets and I wonder if at some point mid-way through the conversation she remembers who I am and thinks to herself, damn.

So anyway, I’m being nice back, simply because I’m stunned by her pleasantry and I tell her that Cassie has recently returned. Oh yeah, she says, from Spain! Wow. And she asks after her, how was her trip and how is she? I tell her that Cassie looks beautiful and healthy and that it was my impression that the experience was great for her. Restaurant Girl breathes in acutely, gasps almost, and takes a step back, overwhelmed for a moment, “she really couldn’t be more beautiful.” Her eyes get wide as she ponders the mere thought of it and I think she’s going to fall right there in the checkout line at the make-up counter.

At that point all I really want to do is take my little plastic Walgreens basket and slam it upside her head. I think to myself, she’s given you her phone number how many times, encouraged you to call her and all but tattooed the word AVAILABLE on her forehead… you dizzy bitch! Well now she’s beautiful, radiant and glowing, I tell her – hoping it tortures her mercilessly. She’s dumb struck and nervous and just says, “wow.”

Restaurant Girl pays for her manies and I’m next in line. “Doing some make-up shopping!” The shop lady proclaims as she peers into the blue plastic basket with eyes wide, then gives me a sideways glance of disapproval. She pulls out a number of little sparkly eyeshade products and says, “these are marketed for teenage girls,” with a matter-of-fact condemning tone of utter disappointment. “Well I am,” I say casually, “a teenage girl,” and leave it at that. She steps back and looks at me and shakes her head. “For the girls who won’t wear Revlon,” she whispers under her breath. I’ve just committed a crime against humanity.

As a matter-of-fact, I was reading Mademoiselle magazine last night, after the shopping extravaganza, which is clearly not marketed to teenage girls, and these Fetish products which I purchased were indeed featured in that magazine. Now I don’t say I was reading Mademoiselle with pride, nor can I attest to actually enjoying the magazine. The featured fashions are atrocious and over-priced, the articles are all about planning a wedding, getting your man to marry you, dealing with the fact your best friend is getting married when you’re not, meeting your to-be in-laws for the first time or losing weight. The magazine was a freebee that arrives periodically despite myself and I do scan through the pages with self-righteous indignation and mock the articles and advertisements. I’m happy to admit that I do in fact enjoy some of these pulpy trashy periodicals – I’ll get titillated and giddy when I buy a Cosmo for the airplane for the Jerry Springer-like reader’s writes. Think on that as you will. But I’m simply not part of Mademoiselle’s market audience. But, Ms. Walgreen’s Shop Lady, I can be a teenage girl as long as I want to. How do you like them apples?

The Bonniest Baby

In 1927 his father was voted the Bonniest Baby in Yorkshire. This was much to the chagrin of the other contending bonny babies and their doting parents, no doubt. I fancy the parents of that bonniest of babies were quite proud and took the prize as a testament to their good parentage and skills in birthing bonny babies. A plaque awarded by the Yorkshire Observer and signed by the chairman and managing directors is displayed prominently on my bookshelf.

That same bonny baby lies incontinent and crazy in a nursing home facility on the peninsula, thousands of miles from his birthplace. I’ve never seen him smile and he’s ornery as a codger. I see the plaque, powder blue scrolls and pinkish script, and I cringe. Sometimes in the morning, without being wholly aware of it, I find myself whispering under my breath, bonny babies suck.

These past few days I’ve been filled with a rumbling rage. I haven’t even left the house but once all weekend, only to go to a movie yesterday. Partly I’m battling the remnants of a head cold. Partly I’m just tired of the world and her ways. So instead I sit home and ruminate, nurturing the seedlings of anger and resentment into a small creature that needs to be fed. This is that moment when everything thing needs to culminate into a big angry growl and someone needs to respond by saying, “you’re absolutely right. What’s happening here is unacceptable and untenable and heads will roll to vindicate the wrongs committed against you.” And just the mere thought of that kind of valor and vindication is plenty to steady my course and stay the raging seas.

I wait and I wait but it’s not forthcoming. So I just look for things and around the house to get mad about. The dishes, the laundry, the dust. Sooner or later I will have my revenge on these things.

This way of life is killing me and I’m such a willing participant at times.

Place of Subtraction

One must allow other people to be right- it consoles them for not being anything else. - Andre Gide, The Immoralist

This is where I started isn't it? Perhaps an addenda to that is that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

So I find myself, sometimes, in a constant place of subtraction. Sometimes I find myself in a place of bitterness, which I reel against. Bitterness may, at times, result from examination that occasionally leads to disappointment, but it's not the cornerstone of progress. Bitterness is also that taste that often warns you of poison in the plant. It's not something to hold on to, but it's certainly something to learn from.