angels crying so hard they're laughing*

I have broken into an odd, all-over, symmetrical kind of itchy rash and the only thing we can figure is that it's my stress exploding out. It started yesterday and I went through an entire tube of a generic hydrocortisone cream. I've been wrapping my head in a turban so I can't itch my ears. 

This started yesterday because today is the eve of my departure for everything.

So thank you, heavens, for suddenly letting all your rain pour down upon this earth because I went outside to stand in said downpour and it's the best I've felt all week.

I can promise you one thing, I will continue to be stressed but this is the best summer ever.



*read this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html

look what she did to the hydrangeas

another from a series where Marge Bjork wonders why she writes diary-like every day huzbahs for the world to read. Is it really that important?

There are other sides to summertime times. They're the rounding-out, three dimensional character building, story fleshing times. 

Last night Karonius and I bicycled to the dollar theatre (pardon, that's a misnomer, the dollar twentyfive theatre. blah) to watch a stupid flick that ended up being so stupid I began having an overwhelming craving for taco seasonings and junk food. And we walked out.
Only to find that our bikes were being watered by the evening sprinklers. These things are always highly amusing at 11:30 pm. and things seemed even more funny when Karonius, my protector who has super powers, retrieved them and we rode home with wet bums making almost every green light.


This morning I woke up from a dream. Do you remember that I hate dreams? All I desire is complete, heavy unconsciousness. Since we started sleeping outside I have not been troubled by internal, nocturnal, sleepytime films. Someone told me over a frozen pizza that the dreams probably just drifted on and away in all that big, wide, nighttime sky. 
It was bound to happen, I suppose. This clean streak couldn't last. And this dream being the worst kind, taunting me with something I wish for. [But] all gone after a deep breath of outside morning air.


Then I noticed my limbs itching over breakfast. I innocently assumed I must have gotten a couple of new mosquito bites and continued to read about Russian espionagers infiltrating suburbia USA and growing hydrangeas. It was not until I looked in the mirror before my shower and saw that my usually clear-skinned décolletage was mottled by minute bug bites or some kind of rash. Minutiae ruin everything. Minutiae is now gracing my calves, knees, elbows, upper arms, collar bone...

"Ah mortality," she said as she leaned back in her rocking chair and continued to crotchet her afghan. Then out of the corner of her eye she noticed a black spider string down from the ceiling and land on the bamboo mat about four feet away from her. She never wears shoes these days so there were none of her usual weapons on hand. Asking for forgiveness for such a disrespectful act, she picked up a book of poetry, prayed this would be one of those miraculous times when she could aim true, chucked the book at the bugger, beaned it flat on the mat, and retrieved the book, with not a bent page corner in sight.

you would love them too

or, "I am my father's daughter"

My stomach and I are working towards better relations. And it seems we're good workers for I haven't been super sick in a few weeks.

But I have a confession.

They tell you not to eat citrus, tomato based, and spicey foods.

But guess what I love.

And what I can't get enough of.

a cream come true

sam cooke.

 

Sometimes I'm trying to read or work or eat or think and I can't continue focusing because Sam Cooke or Otis Redding or Aretha Franklyn or Solomon Burke has swept me up in their soulful waves of voice.

And I love that this happens.

This post has an orphan. Just for T.

bodies eat cavities

The new thing is to blog in the morning because by the time evening comes all I can do is fall onto the air mattress outside, mumble my participatory remarks in the girl talk that ensues, and fall asleep.

Especially when I get home at 2:30 a.m. after a great summer adventure.

What a dreamy summer.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm blogging instead of writing in my journal. But today I just want it to be written in every locale I can think of: I may sometimes be afraid of things but I can't stop there. I may most particularly be a little agoraphobic but I can also stand firm by my life theory that people will end up liking me because I always end up liking people.

Oh dreamy, dreamy summer.

Even though I keep popping all of my bike tires.

Video coming soon, I promise.

Trigger out.

Remember those t-shirts that said "NO FEAR"?

Ok. I'm really done now.

is there anything you keep using with affection?

I learned something yesterday: I can very effectively threaten people when I'm holding a raw egg in my hand. I might take advantage of this. Watch out.


I've been in this morass of cameras, microphones, XLR cables and strange poetic documentaries lately. Where I'm going with all of this I'm not quite sure. I only know one of us is crazy and I've lost my book, At the tomb of the inflatable pig: Travels through Paraguay, and now I'm reading some heavy book about U.S. foreign policy with Israel. That might suggest something about who's the crazy one. And my mom is concerned that I shouldn't travel internationally with this book and if the book is in anyway correct in what it says about the Israeli lobby that's probably more of a valid concern than one might realize.

The answer, to the question asked above that wasn't originally asked of me but I found on the website of Naomi Kawase, one of these poetic filmadoras I've been morassed with, the answer is that there are a lot of things. A lot of things I continue to use with affection. Most obviously there is Bicycle (again, that is Bicycle not Lester, sheesh) but then there are cameras. I hope to install you with a piece of morass filmmaking later on. In the near future. Poetically speaking.


 

dad-free french toast

Dad! Free french toast!
Dadfree's french toast.


punktooation.

I let nature run its course until last night when I noticed the ants on the kitchen floor. That was  too much. I was stressed (as I often am and I often can't admit and I often don't know what to do about it which is why it's good I live with girls because girls talk about everything and so talking kind of rubs off on me. slowly. so so slowly. but I'll get it) and then I sat down in my kitchen with E and T and there were ants everywhere. 

How unhealthy.

The ants are now gone and so are the webs in the corners of my porch-office.

The reason I started this blog is because I can't say things. Out loud. And because someone told me I was boring. Yup. I secretly started this blog and broke the secret by telling my parents and my sister and let everyone else find out about it as they may. It was easier to type things out in that melodramatic year when I was certain I was only typing to the abyss of internetting. And my parents. Because I'll tell my parents anything. They're that great.

I feel like I should be a stable person. I've always steered clear of being a female complaining about her hormones. Fact #597: I alienate myself from my femaleness because of stereotypes. And I'm disconcerted by emotions (mostly my emotions). Nope! Don't worry about me, guys, I'm calm and level-headed and I'm just going to keep my cool over here!  I've got it covered!

But again, as I had to face a couple of years ago, I probably don't have it all covered.

Where does this all come from? Why am I a whirling ball of emotions? Why do I suddenly feel overwhelmed...No. What I really want to know is, why, since I know that I'm being ridiculous and that everyone feels lame sometimes and I know I can't be perfect and that everything happens in its season and so sometimes you just feel great and sometimes you just have to feel down and that's just life and it's ok and I can't even believe I feel so lame sometimes because I've basically got everything going for me right now, WHY can I not keep my cool? How come my brain has figured everything out and the rest of me hasn't?

Is it because I'm a girl? I don't even know, I feel like people have told me what it is to be a girl and I'm not sure what's going on. 
Because I don't have a reason for ever feeling upset is it hormones? I've suddenly become so afraid of my estrogen that I'm terrified of birth control and I'm not even taking it but I'm stressing out over the thought of it. How does this make sense?

 Sometimes, guys, I'm not at all pleasant, I'm a mess. I sound like a raging, self-pitying lunatic.


And I can't even believe I'm posting this. But here you go. Here's a crack in my armor. Armadillo armor.

voodoo in my basement*

I've let nature run its course. In my house, at least, but probably on my face as well. Though I'm not entirely sure what that would mean.

Instead of battling every spider that starts puttering in my bathroom I've just started watching them. It seems highly ineffective to start stomping on all of them because more will just keep coming, like zombies or Greekly invented monsters. Instead now I just watch them, resigned to the idea of sharing a space with them.

This new attitude of lazy pragmatism is probably engendered by all the time spent on my back porch, the hybrid of the in and out of doors. I've become used to finding everything I own covered in pollen and to sometimes being distracted by a stray bumble bee that can't find its way out for all the screened windows. And then there are the spiders. I try to pay little heed to the white webs catching all the leaves in the corners of the porch. A couple of times the little monsters have crawled too close and then I've gone for the shoe smacking and yelling discourse against creepers.

But mostly, I do nothing.

Weird.

*such a good song.

oops

I am in this city that no bus will let me leave before 3:00 pm.

So I am at the public library wandering around on the internet....

Wait.

What the heck am I doing on the internet? I can get this cloud anywhere I dang well please. I don't mean to be ridiculous, I really meant to go into some profound thing about how much I love my career.

But I'm going to split.

Yup.

Let's get married and live like this:
http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/soup-au-pistou-recipe.html

get a life much?

I've got a Linda Ronstadt singing in my head.

"You go to my head, with a smile that makes my temperature rise
Like a summer with a thousand julys"

Which interestingly enough reminds me of family vacations.

Last week in my city a girl was brutally beaten and raped in the middle of the day. My roommate told me this right as I was about to head out the door on a run. I still went running because no  $^*&%#  is going to hold that threatening power over me. But that roommate and I had a conversation about the national sex offender registry. She'd never heard of it and I can't keep myself from looking things up when there are questions in the air. There's a compulsion in me that if there's anything one doesn't know one really must pull out all the stops and find out everything. It's impossible to resist. 
And so the internet and I pulled up a map and started checking out the various sex offending dots in my area and then suddenly realized I didn't want to know.
 
I don't want to know.

That's not an idea I'm very familiar with. 
(And then I wished I was Buffy the Vampire slayer with ridiculously amazing strength.)
    

wednesday is garbage day

Last night as I was laying on the grass of the dark midnight air, I could hear people, house by house, rolling their garbage cans out to the street. Some people do this at six o'clock in the evening. Many others were out between 11:30 and 1:00 a.m. checking this task off their list. Maybe this speaks to the age range of my neighborhood. Young families with a million things on their plates. A good amount of twenty-somethings. A humanities professor. One woman was talking on her cellphone. At least I assume that. But who knows, maybe there was a terribly quiet individual replying to all her chatter. 

I was transfixed by the echoing rolls of garbage bins, imagining full summer lives taking place before and after this weekly event. This sound has such a power for me. Maybe because it started in my childhood as a thing that only happened on vacation. In North Dakota where I grew up everyone fended for themselves to provide a garbage can, there were no uniform city utility bins to pick from. And there was no rolling them to the street. No, the garbage truck rolled down your alley and somehow--maybe there was a man attached to this truck--the garbage disappeared. Our garbage cans would always blow away in winter blizzards and we'd have to--that's a bit dishonest--my mother would track them down.

There's such an enormity of things going on around us, what a full engaging thing, this world. The woman on her cell phone reminded me of my mother talking on the phone to one of her sisters, sitting at the kitchen table doodling and taking notes on family happenings. I used to study her doodles and her cursive writing.

This weekend I had a conversation with a friend about seeing multitudes of people and imagining how they had lives outside of yours that carry on regardless of your place in them. It brought me back to this vignette of a film made by the professor for whom I'm working. It is one steady clip filmed on the London Underground with Professor narrating underneath about this very eternal mystery. He speaks of magnitude and of a poem by Wordsworth. Simon Lee: the Old Hunstman. My, is it a beautiful poem that I can't stop thinking about.

the chariot's wheels roll in fire II

I have in my possession right now an email address that could kind of be a big deal. I have so many ridiculous expectations about what could happen if I send a little bitty email that I will probably let this address just sit for a while. Then I will probably write many drafts of an email and look up every word to make sure I am using them all properly and analyze the email a few more times to make sure it shows a little personality and charm and intelligence and then I will send it and feel quite stupid and regret everything I said.


In other news.


I keep finding myself singing Peter, Paul and Mary songs as I ride Bicycle (yes, Bicycle). I've been singing out loud. People look at me strangely and I usually only know half the words. But I don't really care. It's summer.
Funny thing is, I haven't even listened to PPM in a long while. I've been too busy with The Troggs, Yardbirds, Pretty Things. Yesterday it was The Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout." Oh baby, I started a Pandora station with that song and it is hot.


Music is one of those proverbial things that affects your soul. A soul like mine will be perpetually stuck in its own little world since it loves the present day yet can't get enough of those 50s shoobiedoowops, 60s beats, and 70s...something or others.

But then there's the second Tuesday of the month which means that an irregular group of us met in St. Mary's Episcopal church near down town to do Sacred Harp Singing. Then my soul meets eternity.






Who knows what we sound like, sometimes our group is small, last night it was lovely larger. There were maybe 20 of us. The age groupings of us is rather interesting. Most people are old or young, there's hardly any in between.


I love the stolid, wide-mouthed, uninhibited singing in little chapel setting. It seems such a primitive, soulful way to express yourself. To worship, even. In large part the hymns are about death and afterlifes. They talk about burning chariots, drunkards, going home to meet your father, bright lands, Babylon fallen. Some songs have sections sung in rounds but it's not written anywhere. You just learn it. O the folklore! The mystery, history old magic of it all! They have names like Amherst and Haw Ridge that say little about the content of the song but allude to an older kind of history-taking. Where people, places, and face-to-faces were everything and nothing exists without story. Underneath each title is a short line of scripture. Many come from Psalms, Peter, Romans; they praise Jesus or dispense some short, slightly ambiguous bit of wisdom. Everything about it makes me feel the clapboard, ramshackle, appalachian past. I know I'm there with snake handlers and literal believers. The book of Revelations makes sense in such a setting.


David's Lamentation 268
David the king was grieved and moved
He went to his chamber
His chamber and wept


And as he went
He wept and said
Oh my son, oh my son


Would to God I had died
Would to God I had died
Would to God I had died
 
For thee, O Absalom
My son, my son

not the diaries of a road warrior

Last night I went camping. The conclusion I reached was that I must start sleeping outside more often. (i.e. all the time)

As we were biking up to camp camp camping I reveled in the trees and grass and smells and river hummings. It reminded me... 
The family cabin is on a ranch of cabins. They ranch cabins over here. For El Rancho to continue to be protected by El Fire Fighters we have all been instructed we must cut down trees around our oasis (cabins) and cut all the dead stuff off the mountainside.

I get stuck in an inner battle here. Doesn't nature have ways of taking care of herself? So are we clenching nature in a heavy fisted hand so that we might have our cake and eat it too?

Finally on that trail last night, bicycling up the fourth to last hill, as I was thinking what a joy this cabin has been for me and ma famille I realized a significant little thing: we must be ever so grateful and honored that we enjoy these things.



Gee, that wrapped up tritely but I am a bit fatigued...

turn, turn, turn

Among the many things that I have been working on these past few weeks I have developed the talent for not spilling a mug of tea in a moving vehicle. This is very important to me.

I have suddenly become very attached to animals.
We had llamas at my house a couple of weeks ago and as soon as I saw them sitting in their trailer in my drive way I knew I was in love. I want llamas.
Tonight I bought 30 little gold fish for my good friend's wedding reception. There was a fat ugly grey one that seemed to have a mustache so I named it Hercule Poirot. And it was my favorite.

Sometimes I hardly know myself.