37 posts tagged “sathead”
ah, man, I've missed my little ibook-- chris got it working again just last night and then was off to work super-early this morning, so here I lie, having my old type-in-bed time once more. an indeterminate brain is confronted by the opportunity...
honestly, I've felt a bit adrift without the tether of words composed here-- facebook brings something else entirely-- reconnections, semi-connections, a superficial sort of webbing, but webbing nonetheless-- it's brought me back into some form of contact with more than one lost friend, for which I'm enormously grateful-- but the writing medium is altogether different, requiring by custom if not strict technical limitiation (as twitter) a tendency of hyper-abbreviation. this tenor is most surely the coin of the realm more generally, but as an expressive form it does little for real mulling through-- my milieu. yes, I know, it isn't as if vox (or for that matter wordpress, blogger or, heck, my trusty paper journal) has gone away, only myself that has elected to neglect the form-- the medium itself remains available throughout my various distractions.
and to what do these distractions amount? little coherent cumulatively, I fear. there's me, always inclining to weigh and measure. recently here and there been torturing myself for no good reason with google searches for people I no longer need any connection with-- wretched, idle hands. I know better. well, at least the killing curiosity is soon exhausted with lack of any relevance, but it's a waste of energy. and other wastes as well-- time and self spent merely watching video, tuning out, dialling down the day. then there's been some good reading (margaret atwood-- and attending her gorgeous many-voiced book launch event downtown on friday). a weekend full of sleep, fighting off one of the many seasonal bugs flying around. glorious golden autumn days. car repairs etcetera.
adrift. diffuse. in need of locating a likely thread to stitch it all into some sense.
one thing tho: we've begun to plan weddinging for 2010-- in our own idiosyncratic way, with sites of celebration in chicago and northern michigan-- we've started sketching it out for ourselves, what's wanted, what's not wanted, how to accommodate the needs versus desires of those we love, how to make something authentic and real and delicious and right for ourselves, to relinquish any mar from the past's damaged expectations-- to begin anew, rightly and brilliantly, for ourselves.
after plenty of sleep (i.e. napful, easygoing, soul-spacious weekend), cellphone alarm starts playing jenny lewis at 6 a.m. hit hush, scritch puppy and fall back asleep. wake for good when it goes off again at 6:30.
rise, throw on sweats and sneaks, and drag puppy and feller from bed, grumbly and rumpled for walk in still-dark morning through autumn neighborhoods.
stop for coffee and lox-cream-cheese-bagels and chit chat with the guys at beans n bagels.
cross the river on the wilson bridge with sunrise.
100 situps on the yoga mat.
art play table for an hour or so and actually make a piece start-to-finish.
off to work with a fine happy head.
I'm liking the look of things, the halloween colors, bright orange leaves, black branches. even the cold-gleaming wet sidewalks.
it does get tough when the skies hang low and grey-- too many clouds to know all the names-- strange ones pendulous as solid gigantic fruit suspended in air. or wispy spun drifts of vapor. my scribbled notebook, mainly garbage but with the occasional glint, exclaims over a single such airborne traveler. they're what's on my mind, some days.
then partly sunny, color leaps to the eye and helps resuscitate the grey-wearied mind.
a bumpy ride on the chicago streets these days-- potholes, of one kind and another. everyone loves having something to complain of, but too much ready plaint a wet blanket in cold weather.
once upon a time I used to kind of blog sort of. after I started splitting my infinitives with abandon. before that I hatched and hosted, erected and let crumble web pages. before that and after that were poems and then not any poems any more. maybe someday. here and there essays unwound, and the odd boil-infested academic paper worked itself up. lo, of yore the right hand alone scribbled letters on paper of different heft and hue, the graph, the blue and oniony, the soft creamy cotton rag. spirals unto infinity of narrow-rule close writ. and then email and email and email ad nauseum. oh microbloggery facebook puffs.
I will find myself tossing, one side, then the other side, this position and then another, drifting off, dozing, only to jerk awake with a sharp intake of breath at some shapeless dreaming anxiety. who knows what parts it's due to, thirsty, having to pee, distracted by a change in the weather, blinds slapping against open windowframes-- but eventually I will quit fighting it, wake up, rise, wander the mostly-dark apartment aimlessly, picking up small things here and there, a glass, a plate moved from table to sink, stand staring in a doorway, wrap myself in a throw blanket and sink down on the couch, lie gazing up at moving shadows of tree branches cast across the wall by streetlights, listen to the base thump of a passing car or some random walker's laughter in the night... I think, ultimately, it has to do with the acute sense of life passing, simply and inevitably, right this instant, then this one, and the next, each and every and all of them leafing away and sinking without trace into the well of time-- and the overwhelming urge, desperation really, to do something, whatever, meaningful, resonant, actual, I don't know, just something that makes sense, that serves to tie those passing instants together, to weave them into a thread, wind that towline, and gradually drag myself back up from the vanished depths.
the treetops out the windows are turning from green to golden, the black underlying framework standing out bolder and bolder daily. sunrise shines pink against the window-studded brick wall down the way and must be blushing sleepers in their beds and giving rose-hued dreams.
my dreams have been fantastical and vivid, and I lie in bed after waking, drowsing, to recall them and find myself drifting into new scenarios and cul-de-sacs.
##
I go out for lunch with the work friends to a pastry place we're trying out for some event-- and after we've eaten our slices of quiche and crusty brioche, we rise to go-- I'm somehow full of bounces and race for the door and have to pull up in a hard stop as a display wall of hundreds of tiny cubbies filled with pastries looms in my path-- I reach out a single index finger to help brace me as I halt, and my momentum transfers and the whole thing wobbles gigantically-- I try to steady it with the same finger, but a kind of groundswell has taken the thing and rocks it, and it comes crashing down toward me-- mortification ensues in the flakey chaos I have wreaked.
we're driving back to work and rounding a bend in a swank and leafy neighborhood when I see a little black dog with its collar caught on a branch of shrubbery and call out to stop-- I leap from the car and run and release the little dog and lift it up in my arms so it can't dash off-- the black ringlets of its fur are soft against my fingertips and where they brush my arms. we try the houses one by one to locate the creature's home and in the process meet the inhabitants, and it turns into a fantastic adventure involving characters who seem ordinary at first but whose suburban facades cloak astonishing powers and intrigues that now escape me. I know that rescuing and returning the dog to its rightful owner initiates a string of incidents that involve underground cavern hideouts and complicated layers of good versus evil and non-human flying creatures and hiding in escape chutes like breathing vacuum tubes from spies of the enemy and job offers to join the resistance and an old man god of dubious beneficence who can be summoned to walk through solid rock mountains-- in the end, sadly, we must return once more to the routine workday-- though years seem to have passed, our hair has grown, and we all seem a good deal older and more interesting if not necessarily wiser.
(from the notebook, undated but a couple of weeks back)
there are birds of prey out the windows-- I hear them, ticking in the night-- or maybe that's just a cicada winding down-- I've been here just over two years-- I don't feel settled, I resist it-- will I ever feel settled anywhere? where would I fell settled? I do feel calm and right with my darling, but geographically, socially, professionally, just a little bit I am feeling unsettled, wrought, overcaffeinated, despairing, irritable, late, clumsy, hopeful, slouchy, and deliciously, exhaustedly, heart-recklessly, skitteringly, naughtily, snoringly scattered a good deal of the time.
time and again I find myself confounded and perplexed by the different places I've lived and people I've known-- dreams propel me back into lost contexts and once more I find myself in thisbe's farmhouse kitchen or a cornfield in iowa snapping stagey photographs with people I seem hardly to know but whose faces are fixed forever on film. it isn't so much that I want to recapture these expended bits of lived experience, rather that something in me urges to reconcile them. I know folks who routinely and obsessively renarrate their identities to the most convincing cases possible. sheer happenstance propels me into a few minutes' encounter with a writer I once knew for all of about five minutes, and the gravitational pull of her world throws mine momentarily all off kilter-- I'm suddenly wondering why don't I have a big, international writing project that I'm smack in the middle of? and then, after a bit, I'm able to shake myself like a dog shedding wet and remember that hers isn't my story. but every such momentary happenstance does seem to cast me back into questioning just how my own tale coheres. I suspect somewhat that my own struggle, much of the time, is in resisting this very compulsion to fix the story, to form it willfully into this or that shape, but rather repeatedly to draw myself back into the more direct living of it-- because, so far, it does keep happening. and too much preoccupation with explaining it to myself can interfere with the immediacy of the experience. but there's a balance. between drifting and driving forward. or between two other things I can't quite name. maybe it's simply that I require the thinking vehicle of writing when I wake up from these dreams, to ease my heart, to reacquaint myself with myself, to reassure myself that I am not as dispersed and diaphanous as it sometimes, terrifyingly, feels. not that I ever forget the real, good things that ground me in the here and now-- just that the panoramas that play out can, by their very variety and number, dwarf the humble, uncooked daily context I inhabit, throw it unfairly into cross-examination, onto the witness stand to fabricate some coherent narrative stitching it all, patchwork but seeming seamlessly, together. the truth is, I may never tell this story. or else maybe I already am, only most indirectly and episodically in this medium, as seems to suit my mood and general temperament. to what end I still can't name.
...and then think better of it.
I have this bad habit of just taking off, splitting, vamoosing, hitting the high road-- which I'm still learning, ohso slowly and late in life, to get a handle on. it's like I hit a certain point of sensory overload and just need to get away by myself-- it developed early, via tricycle, so it's not like it's a little whim I'm trying to shake-- but I do believe in gradual progress and the possibility of altering even the oldest, inset patterns.
I have this really amazing boyfriend. he's just so right for me, tho for a long, long time I despaired of actually finding a fortuitous match-- chalk one up for hope and a generous universe. still, it ain't always easy, even this. because, well, it's two people negotiating the world side by side, a dance of give and take. and also because, let's face it, he's got some crazy exes. yeah, yeah, you say, we all do-- but I mean really, cuckoo. and also he's a sensitive, immensely empathetic person, so it's not just like he can go, aw, yeah, whatever, to hell with them-- there's some understandable processing that needs to happen-- and then last night, while out with my crowd from work, we ran into one of them--
and the thing is, it was totally no big deal. I mean, really. but I had already been kind of, for various reasons, nearing the point of public/people saturation that I tend to hit, and then there's the cuckoo ex, and then somebody makes an offhand comment about how she looks like me-- and it just hits a nerve-- and this is where I mess up: I don't take my darling fella aside and say, honey, I'm ready to go home now. nope. not me. lizard brain sarah kicks into gear, drops some jacksons, delivers some rapidfire air-kisses, and splits.
oh ho ho ho, not such a mature move, you say. and you'd be right. I just left my fella standing there, looking like an idiot, with a crazy ex in the vicinity and a vanishing girlfriend.
bad habit vanishing sarah. it's not easy, catching that split second you have to consider, to think, before reacting when your old triggers get tripped. more and more I'm finding occasion to do just that, to catch it before it turns into a Thing, to consider and choose before automatically reacting-- I'm doing it more and more with my family, practicing doing it in the workplace, did it last week with a landlord issue-- I'm doing better all the time with choosing how I want to feel and behave. but last night I slipped. big time. I regressed.
the upside is that my fella is a prince-- brave and honest and full-hearted. he came home, and we-- did what we do, which is very good. we talk, we listen, we discuss options for the next time; we apologize, we hold one another, and we vow to do better. and, yknow what? we always are.
