once in a while i rediscover
and anymore it's like how did i forget again
or give up and go away or
get scared or
hunker too

how very good and okay and not a problem fer cryin out loud
is being in music

let it wash over,
    through,
         along  with   me

oh my

Today our office dog, Bob, died.  And my friend and her family laid her beloved grandmother to rest.  Also I had my first PT and that went well, and there was just a lot of day today.  Here toward the end of the night I found my missing labrys, which is a word the iPhone doesn't know (suggests lanyard).  It doesn't know "girly", either, thinking it more likely I'm trying to say "Gorky".

Got some things done and didn't get some things done.  And, next up, our big concert nights.  Sold out in advance.  I'm looking forward to them in a way (to a degree) that surprises me.

I gather I'm having a couple of booksellers as houseguests this weekend, too, though I haven't heard when they're showing up.  Saturday?  Tomorrow?  Who knows.  I just know I'm going to dinner with 'em on Sunday night.  I've got the place almost ready for a houseguest.  Clean sheets and towels are ready, anyway.  Half the kitchen is fairly clean.

Oughta get my butt to bed.  Tracy's off at an overnight camp-out with a passel o' children.  Me, I'm up just by my own momentum.  Had a nice chat on the phone a bit ago involving, among other things, the concept of worry partners.  You swap worries, basically.  It's less heavy to worry about somebody else's worries, and yet you can let go of your own, the idea is, if you know somebody else is on it.  Has that duty.  Is taking care of that worrying.

I realize I don't believe that I'll walk right again.  This is kind of not the greatest thing.

Goodnight, whoever you are.

After a Mother's Day afternoon romp at the dog park, Lu's been content to rest while I do some freelance proofing.  She's starting to stir, though.  And I'd like to take a shower tonight, early enough for my hair to dry before bed.

Bert's out my window now.  A young woman with groovy thick pony-tailed hair and a backpack and water bottle was just petting Zach, and then she and Bert shook hands, and she pointed to what looked like a house around the corner.  They continued to chat a while.  He's pretty affable, that Bert, and good neighbor material.  "Good good neighbor material"?

My friend's grandmother is very ill, and she loves her grandmother very much.  It's hard to see her going through this thing.  Calls up that human experience of loss for me, too.  Which I think is part of why it's hard to see in this painful situation.  I have an idea of what it's like.  It sucks.  Interestingly, she noted, in her numb "ghost"-like state, that there's something comforting in how there's nothing anyone can do about it.  I'm touching this idea a lot, about the comfort in helplessness.  I think I get it.  I think I like it.

Of course people don't have to be dying this week for our helplessness about what goes on with them to be acute in its twinges.  More to the point, however, I have a ---well I don't want to call it a duty or a responsibility--- I have a sacred call, if you will, to remember my boundaries in these situations, though that is really hard.  And maybe because I'm not helpless there, but just not very good at it.  (But better at it than I used to be.)

Okay.  Shower time.  The last 40 pages will be before bed, after pup's settled in her room for the night.

Big week coming up.  Chorus performance week (extra rehearsals).  Book fair guest(s).  An after-dark softball game (the best kind).

I've gotten sucked into the jigsaw puzzle at work the past coupla days.  An absorbing pointless thing, putting together jigsaw puzzles.

it's hot outside, first time this year.  humid & low- to mid-80s, i guess.  quite somethin' in the sunshine when you're not used to it.

had voicemail while lunchwalking dog from phys. therapy place.  this is good news.  wanna get that going.

can't seem to think about a whole lot; could use a solid night of sleep.  met some people to work on the chorus program last night.  stayed and talked to one of 'em about her ex- and what's up there.  but that was nothing next to the simple lift i gave somebody earlier in the evening.

leaving work early today for a blood draw.  this might mean i can run an errand and then dogpark the dog and then go to euchre.  i don't think it'll mean i can do those things and make the stir-fry i've had on deck for days.  it's the last euchre tourney of the year.  kinda wanna go.

tomorrow's the day my old friend arrives back in the area, to live.  moving, they call that.  i mean we call it.  i'm one of you, and i call it that too.  except i didn't here.  emphasizing the arrival, i guess it was did that.

can't stop with the odd syntax in my head.  i've stopped myself from putting things oddly all day, including in some of these sentences.

pear slices now, from a jar.  cool.  mouth waters at the thought.

Took me a little longer to get to unconsciousness this time.  The dog was good and wored out from a playdate at a little poodle's yard.  Originally I'd thought I'd arise to make a stir-fry kinda maybe thing with tofu and veggies and the crisp kale I got today and maybe peanuts and pineapple and/or the Thai red curry...  Really one of these days I oughta break out into following recipes more often, vs. winging it.  Winging it is good in some ways.  But I might wing it better with more practice at following what's worked for other people. If I can somehow combine that with my own imagination.  I think I store them in different brain places.

Well that was an example of an incoherent paragraph, ha.  

Yesterday the dog ate part of the wall.  She chose to get the plaster-and-I-dunno-what snack from inside a duct vent, thus not doing much cosmetic damage.  I let my buddy crawl in the hairy mess to screw the thing back in, too.  How it can be right for somebody to "do for" me so much, I guess I'm gonna have to find out.

Leg/foot/butt pain continues, along with other knee pain.  I'm pretty fed up.  Had it up to here.  Etc., and so what?  PT arrangements slogged with the run-around last week and thus nothing's in place yet.  Oy and ow; ow and oy.  Over breakfast yesterday tho other buddy and I spoke of observing the pain with the meditative open approach.  Noticing how it moves and changes.  Being with it.  I mean, it's hard not to go to how I'd rather not be with it, what can I do to get rid of it, doesn't it suck that I have it.  Making peace with pain is not an easily inviting sort of peacemaking.

Softball shirt guy was still working on the numbers today, he texted.  Gonna bring 'em to me at work tomorrow.  How'm I gonna play softball this year, y'all.

when you cannot sleep this mix of realities holds

less to say

nothing much to say

little to say

nothing to say, really

i'm all kinda sciaticrippled on toppa knee hoo-ha.  got a shot, but not an instant-relief shot.  napped the afternoon away.

Dan was a sort of relative of mine, only not really.  More not really than his kids.  I met Dan when he was part of Ann and Dan.  He taught psychology and they lived in an old house on the stream in Allen, Maryland that's now a bed and breakfast.  They had two kids, a few years younger'n me and my brother.  Younger enough that it was a little weird to play with them.  But I envied their collection of 45s, I remember that, and they let me borrow some.

When I was a teenager and Dan caught wind that I kept a journal, he wanted to borrow it for use in his adolescent psychology class.  I wonder a little now whether this plan was a ruse designed to get me to turn the volumes over to my father.  Mebbe.  It's not like they were all that confidential, being written not for me but for my high school English teacher and mentor-of-sorts.  But I wouldn't have put it past my folks to sneak to read 'em, so maybe that's a silly idea.  At the time I mainly thought Dan must not actually know much about adolescent psychology if he thinks I'm going to be cool with turning over my journals for that purpose.

After I was out on my own, I asked my mother more than one time for Ann's e-z dump cobbler recipe.  It involved a box of cake mix, some bits of butter, and canned fruit.  (It lived up to the e-z billing.)  Mostly I didn't think about Ann and Dan and the kids a whole lot. At some point I heard Dan had lost his tenure over moral turpitude, which word I still haven't looked up and learned proper.  He'd been sleeping with students, the story was.  Or at least one student?  I dunno.  Came to find out later, too, that, perhaps true to the times and the wild hippy-ish air I admired in certain of my parents' adult friends, some intoxicating substance use was part of the picture.  The flavor of my understanding about those matters has changed dramatically since then, and I now can easily imagine veiled pain as a part of such pictures.  Such family situations.  So somewhere in there I heard Ann and Dan, like the other rhyming couple Carol and Darryl, had split, not because, like with Connie and Gene, the husband was (o my god) gay, but, so the rumor had it, Dan had fooled around.  He moved to the Florida Keys and taught scuba diving, and I didn't know what else.

But then my brother, who'd sworn off women, after a summer love gone wrong, with a bravado akin to that with which he'd sworn off TV (except for "Moonlighting," for which he'd pull his set out of the bottom of his closet once a week for an hour), was suddenly in love with Ann.  And they were all handsy and make-y-outty, often in front of my mother, who hid her difficulty adjusting in, e.g., chainsmoking retreats to her room.

Having Ann & the kids now part of our family made for a shift in the tone of Thanksgiving dinners, I recall, those being one of the occasions on which I would be in the now-larger company.  The raucousness was a bit of a shock of contrast for me, with lots of louder sarcastic humor and boisterous interruptions, including such humor as making fun of the son's penis size.  Quite a shift from the polite convo meals when Polly (Dan's old buddy, and my now-dead Dad's too) was still in town and single and brought her tomato ass-pick (and we didn't even make the joke we were thinking of), or maybe one of the math grad students Mom had living in the attic would be joining us for the holiday feast.  That first year with the newly-expanded family my mom did say to me, back in the retreat, "Sometimes a little bit of a generation gap is a good thing."  That was pretty direct, for her.

So Dan built a new life with some kind of Jimmy Buffett flavor to it, and sometimes he'd be back in the area, eventually with a new wife.  (I think they were married.)  The kids had kids themselves.  I moved away---further away than the three hours' distance I had been.  Dan's grandfather name was DanPa, which was purty good.  Sometimes I told people not in the family of the naughty-funny nickname he'd had for Ann's not-so-parsable comments out of nowhere:  Anneurysms.  But that was a secret spilled in hearsay, like so much of what I know of any of their lives.

Those faculty couples, though.  That's what my head's coming back to today.  This strange impression of adulthood I had, as the '60s-Kansas white shirt and narrow black ties of the short-haired nearly-all-male horn-rimmed glasses faculty mutated into the Maryland-'70s prints and women-teach-too and new hair and make-up smells and thick-stiff-chemical dresses that I saw in department parties at our place, when the hard liquor came out of the pantry and some kind of new thing was happening, paneling, shag, wallpaper, vinyl ice bucket.

Most of what my family knew of Dan happened when I wasn't there.  He's a heard-tell kind of guy to me.  Conjectural.  And not a relative, but sort of a relative.  I think of Jill and Jay and wonder how it is for each of them, Dad dead, after being dying for a while. And of how so much for me is this once-removed, or twice- or thrice-, and how that fits with my own sense of distance and isolation.

I don't have any first cousins, but I think I've just found out that a cousin of my mother's generation is this woman whose obit I saw in the Lesbian Connection.  Same weird last name, family-lookin' face, but still a long shot, I thought, until I just came across, googling about her, another familiar family name in association with her.

She seems to have been the daughter of an uncle of my mother's with whom at least some of the rest of the family was no longer in touch.  He moved to D.C. before we moved to Maryland, but we never got in touch with him once we were there.  I gather (upon brief snooping) he worked as a meteorologist for the gov.  But Shirley, his daughter, ended up in Colorado with a partner of 30 years and a big life in queer chorus--- from the obit:  "An elder among us, Shirley was a founding force for the women's choral community in Colorado. She helped launch the Denver Women's Chorus, has supported Boulder's Sound Circle as fan and friend since its inception, and in recent years she sang with Resonance, Women's Chorus of Boulder. The women's music community was a primary facet of Shirley's relationships, and a nurturing ground in her life's journey."

I remember my mom once suggesting (disapprovingly) that a guy in a family photo album who was a cousin of hers was thought to be gay.  This is somethin', though, this Shirley.  And, hell, Uncle Ruben lasted until 2010.  Why didn't I ever try to get in touch with him?

I contemplate writing Shirley's partner, if I can figure out where to write.

Wow.  I got some kind of shiver when I saw that nugget confirming the hunch from the picture.  Some stirring in my internal physiog.  This is a sign of emotion, yes?  (I've felt so pre-kindergarten about emotion today thus far, until that.)  (As in maybe somebody coach me in that chart of basic facial expressions.)

on something like easter, for inst.

christians seem to expect you to know it's gonna be easter, even weeks in advance.  and who can blame them.  a lot is still organized around it.  plus it's not like i didn't eat me a pazcek on packzi day.  (lookit me, all workin on my spelling.)

my easter morning observations include that it's amazing how wet a sock can get after just a second in a dog's mouth and, uh, ah hell, i already forgot my other easter morning observation.

very congested today.  may be less than ideal company at brunch at seva.  still intend to go, however.  even have the hair dryer out.  oh, maybe that was my observation?  that easter is likely to be the only day in 2012 that i use the hair dryer?  (wet head in brisk breeze not good for very congested.)

sidney the greyhound and danny the large miniature poodle were at the dog park with lula yesterday.  a big-headed dog called bo (or beau) (i sorta think beau, even though he was one of those tough-lookin' dogs) kept licking sidney's not-so-private (when-you're-a-dog) parts, and so sid (who almost surely doesn't actually go by "sid") spent part of the time on the other side of the fence.  shelly said that was okay, though, as one of his favorite things to do outside is to stand and stare.  sure enough, there he stood, staring into the distance.  and he did seem happy.

me, i'm more into sitting and staring.  but i can relate.

may forego the dog park later today, with the wind, and my incipient cold.  our regular long leash park is being torn up for roadway repairs (and some new paths, i heard).  work shall proceed through july.  we can still get around on foot for much of it, at least as it stands now, but our most usual jumping-off points are inaccessible by automobile for the time being.

dog, dog, dog.  food.  staring.  mouth breathing.  socks.

been avoiding that.  don't wanna eat them too often.  don't know how often is too often.

texted carlos this eve.  i love that guy.  i know he's at work and can't get back to me right away, but it was good just to send words to him.  i'd done a dumb thing i shoulda known better than and was suffering the obvious aftereffects.  no, not eating a pain pill.  :)  more like what olja told me recently she read of as "online cutting".

sleepy.  gotta go hang with the dog some more.  we had a long-ish walk, for the neighborhood, this evening, after she ran around in bert's back yard for a bit.  plans for the dog park tomorrow, with shelly's greyhound on hand, if all goes as planned.

my but i do like a greyhound.

oh, hey, carlos just called me on break.  what a sweetie.

i can hear lu chomping on a nylabone in her crate.  what a sweetie.

the cats are sweeties, and bert's a sweetie, and i'm a sweetie too.

If you're having trouble peeling the stamp off the envelope, try peeling the envelope away from the stamp.

Just now I was struggling to think of "apocryphal", thinking it started with a "p" or "pr".  I kept thinking of "prophetic" but knew it was wrong.  Katie got it right off, however, much to my brain cells' relief. wednes, you may be amused/pleased to know that when I typed "fictional" into Google in part of my process of getting to some thesaurus choices (and eventually to playing with the Visual Thesaurus, which we are somehow lucky enough to be subscribed to through my work), Google put your picture at the top of the page, next to a link called "7 personal results".  It seems you're the most fictional person Google knows me to know.  Granted, my Google+ is not well populated, but still.

I told Katie how once, in college, I struggled for hours to come up with "determined".  I had narrowed how I described its meaning to a very precise point, and asked several people for help, and then finally I was asking my friend/nemesis K**** K*****, and she just said "'Determined'?"

I sort of hated K**** K****** while loving her too.  Or maybe I should say I sort of loved her while hating her.  Yeah, I think that's --- no, the first way.

Can't have one without the other.  Absolute one-to-one correspondence.

Yup.

It's a Monday; I'm working a middle-of-the-day half day just cuz.  Gonna get the dog outside before chorus.  Spent a lot of time outside with her this weekend, and also napped, and regret neither, despite their using up time I'd imagined I'd have been engaged in cleaning up the kitchen.

I also bought shoes at an actual shoe store where an actual person (named William) measured my feet and brought shoes to me and put them on my feet and laced them up.  Once I let myself relax into this treatment, it was grand.  Wished I could've bought all three pair I liked.  Dude knew his shoe stuff, too.  I did splurge on some polka-dotted socks and may go back for the New Balance tennies later.  Stodgey fuddy-duddy--soundin' stability in a shoe is maybe a good thing.  And my old tennies are getting to that point.

It's hard for me to throw away worn-out shoes.  I always imagine they'll be what I put on for going out to do some muddy thing.  For instance.  And, I dunno, there's just something about it.  They're kind of personal things, shoes.  And I do wear them to the point that they can't be donated for resale.  So it's just "Dumpster time?", and the answer to that one feels like "Not just yet" long after it really is "Uh, YES, Lisa."

So I'm going to throw some shoes out this Spring.  That's what I'm-a gonna do.

I had it, in its handwriting, on my wall for a long time.  Have had mixed feelings about it; have been all over the place with it.  But it's grown richer, and fragments of it often come back to me, most especially the words/notion/image of those birds.




"In Those Years"

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I

and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I


                                              -- Adrienne Rich

 

Not finding myself terribly into it.  The big 50th anniversary year.

Opening night's tonight.  I usually go to opening night.  But I'm not gonna.  I'd rather not.  I'd rather go home.  I'd rather go to bed early.  I'd rather give the dog her last big rawhide and watch "Mad Men".  After taking her out on the long leash so she can run off a little energy.

Right leg problems this past fortnight, with an unpredictablility to go along with the other annoyances.  This seems more nervous and muscular than bone-related.  I guess it's all related.  But I'd like a solution, besides the amputation I joke about.  Won't find out until April, I guess, whether I'm still anemic.  I suppose that could play into it, on the oxygen-to-muscles level of healing.

So tired.  Back to proofing daily box, though.  Non-exchangeable random variables, Archimax coupes and their fitting to real data.

hung out here (at home) after work last night with lula's first guest dog and her humans--- that went really well, much better'n i'd expected.  hung out here today some with lula's running buddy and her ex-/buddy.  they came to get lu some good exercise as i've had an especially bad day in the ambulation department.  then we just hung.  it's great to have people just come over and hang.  and to have a dog who'll occasionally settle down during that happening.

it's overcast and lightly rainy.  i look outside and recall the bullshit neighbor incident yesterday at lunch, when i came home to find bullshit neighbor with a tape measure in my driveway, and then some bullshit bullshit.  hers is the only foreclosure i'm rooting for resulting in eviction whether it's legal or not.

must say, that confrontation hasn't bothered me as much as i think it once would've.

took a painkiller and debate cooking.  i heard of someone's cooking pad thai, or getting ingredients for it, and remember having cooked that favorite dish, years ago, and it seeming pretty labor intensive.  but that may've been cuz we also made mangoes and sticky rice, and sticky rice is involved.  or takes a lot of time, at least.  i have the stuff to make some potato casserole thing, and it's a good day to heat the oven.  just might pay for standing long enough to cut everything up, and to clean enough of the kitchen to have space to do it and an empty sink.

ah, an empty sink.

katie gave lula a new toy the other day.  it's a winner.  made of a pleasingly rubbery plasticy stuff.  she can compress it and carry it around, and it bounces, and she doesn't get TOO crazy about getting the treats out.  really does seem to entertain her for quite a while.  so i leave you with a picture of it here, thus:

this is the week i heard that somebody i used to know is planning to move back here.  i also heard that somebody i know here was/is not happy with me talking about things from that person's past in front of other people.  these ideas are connected in a funny way involving my not remembering whether something somebody else said many years ago was about a situation with the first somebody or the second somebody.  and it doesn't really matter.  it's kind of a koan.  a touchstone of a koan.  there are a lot of rules.

just came back from a little kid play.  had chocolate milk with dinner, perhaps to keep the spirit going.  got a car thing taken care of earlier in the day.  just taking care of business can be so taxing sometimes.  in certain categories in particular.  still haven't messaged the doc; tomorrow, i say.  tomorrow.

official Spring has arrived with decidedly summereal overtones.  i feel overdue not having the screens in all the windows, and the daffodils have only been out for two days.  it was this time last year i got my dog.  so it's our anniversary.  maybe i should take her out to dinner?  we've come a long way, baby.  and have, i hope, a long way to go.

do you know how kindness can smart?  as in be ouchy?  i suppose i have spoken of this matter before.  it seems not everyone knows this thing, but some people know it very well.  maybe it's like cilantro, or the muffin joke, or olives.

if you type "you either like it or you don't" into google, in the q. marks, this evening, the biggest hits are about a motorcycle, a french toast recipe, a handful of vacation destinations, christine lavine, bose speakers, various music, looking at a house from the street, and the voice of "real housewives"' kim zolchiak.

anyway, i have been considering (again, still, anew, with today's mind) this niceness being harder to take than the opposite, and it seems to have something to say.  i've also been considering something else, about hail fellow well met and its coersive function.  yeah, i know i'm not speaking very clearly here.  and that i'm not speaking.

and somebody might let you keep chewing them and eating them, and then you might have an upset stomach.  But you might eat more of them anyway.  How soon you forget.