Ain't gonna study war no more

Wow. It’s taken nearly six moons, but I believe I may be getting my shit together, finally. How is it possible that I have extended such generosity of spirit, such blind affability in the face of true disrespect? It helps to be a little bit dumb – it protects you, in a way, from the gross, beleaguered shitshow of the inevitable. But there is no long-term protection, there is no solution but to face the day as it faces you. And the writing is thick and black upon the wall. If not now, then when? All the lives that breathed before me will it, and spirit is on my side.

Learn to love, to love your brother

Another Wednesday evening, another realm all to myself. The past few days have been busy and breathless and over-peopled. So much family drama, intrigue, chaos... So much obsession on my part - even in sleep, it would seem. I've developed the telltale wrinkle of the chronically vexed - a vertical fissure off-center between my eyebrows - a daily, deepening reminder that I am no longer young. (And yet, I know one day I will look back and see myself for the babe that I am. It can always get worse; you will always get older. But, on the other hand, as Grandma Dot used to say, "It's better than the alternative.") I had a funny idea of changing my WhatsApp photo to the hourglass from "Days of Our Lives" - a soap opera that my childhood babysitters followed. As a kid, I always felt immensely conflicted about soap operas. My mother had precious few rules about the usual things, but I knew that she hated soap operas and didn't want me exposed to them. My babysitters were by no means religious or fanatical about "Days", but on the occasions that they did put it on, I'd feel guilty and uncertain, awkward in my amusements. I'd busy myself with solitary games away from the cozy, low-ceilinged "back room", where everyone gathered to watch TV. I'd ask if I could rather go and dust the "sitting room", where there were tall sash windows and unsettling Hummel figurines, glass paperweights on lace tablecloths, and an enormous braided rug. On the wall in the sitting room was a grouping of individual black and white framed photos of my babysitters in their christening gowns and bonnets. There were six of them (four girls and two boys), which made it handy for my mother: over the years, if one outgrew me, another would come along and take up the post. I loved looking at their baby photos - you could see the whole person each one would turn into, you could read familiar light in all of their eyes. It was tremendously reassuring somehow. But then, once I could hear that the TV was finished weeping syrup for the day, I would return to the back room and stand close to the wood stove, which could not possibly have been as tall as I remember it. The back room was connected to the mud room, which itself led to a more barn-like space where puppies were kept during puppy season. They had a chocolate lab named Patricia who had several litters over the years. She lived with her mother, a black lab named Princess. All my memories of that house are fond ones, even if colored at times by the anxiety of a soap opera.  Many years later, the bathrooms were remodeled and a poltergeist unleashed. It was either in the business of fiendishly tormenting or merely inconveniencing the living, depending on who you asked.

The river's on the rise

It’s been a full three months since all hell broke loose, and I am now sitting on a Sunday afternoon in a dim house, alone but for the animals. The kids have gone to a party. Outside, the trees blow fitfully in sheets of gusty wind and the sky is a slab of grey and white. The wind whistles and howls, doors slam and the dogs sleep. Earlier, I watched the rugby (the World Cup semi-final in Yokohama; South Africa vs. Wales; SA victorious), zoning out on the ebullience of the happy, silly fans; the brute focus and mesmerizing physical will of the massive players. It was not an elegant match, but it was a close one. The girls played brightly animated games on tiny screens in the kitchen while I whooped and cheered and sprang up ridiculously from the couch for 80+ minutes. I would’ve much preferred to watch it with other people, the way we did years ago -- all those cozy afternoons of charged camaraderie, friends carrying on and commentating, fetching endless beers from the kitchen. One of the many things I took for granted, I guess. Being alone is delicious until it become compulsory. I am searching for a way to unravel from my former life, my old internalized identity, all so maddeningly – permanently, it seems— tied to one person and the shared post of our history. My thoughts are now always of him, while his thoughts are now always of another. In truth, my thoughts have always, ever, been of him. But self-protective reticence wrote a dumb, proveable future for itself. Good old-fashioned heartbreak is alive and well and it’s rough as shit; no one's heart has yet fully adapted to this precociously cynical and self-subsumed age of ours. It's true, I'm told - and it's the same as it always was, for everyone - that time is the only antidote to the pain of it. Time will loosen its grip and one day I will look back upon these brutally sad and distracted days with a head becalmed and heart made wiser by the indifferent ticking of a clock. They say I may even be grateful that it happened. I should be glad at least that I am able to sit down and face this, write this, post this; it's better than the past twelve weeks of verbally incoherent emotionalism. Not that this post is especially coherent... but it's a start. This is progress, already. Katy, a favorite yoga teacher, said the other night, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Those words made me infinitely strong in the bizarre contortion I’d found myself in on Wednesday evening, nearly drowned in facial sweat and doing a kind of sit-up crunch with legs and arms held in the air and twined around themselves. But how do you not suffer? Peter O’Toole says the trick is not minding that it hurts. Or maybe it’s the screenwriter that said that. Or maybe even Lawrence himself. Not holding on seems to be the key - not minding it, not identifying with the pain. You're meant to feel it, observe it, and let it go. Let it go, let it go. Let it all go. The platitudes can be true but they’re terrible. It’s all so much easier said than done.

So Dawn Goes Down Today

Much has gone on in the past seven years - much to regret and much to delight in. Yesterday morning, I flung myself from the bed at six, swearing as usual. It would be better, I know, to meet the black winter dawn as a grateful observer of its slow unfolding. To meet my conscious self once again, alert and dispassionate. To feel the cold puzzle of a dark room and not wish that it were something else, that the tangle of tasks awaking in my head were not so slippery and daunting. In the kitchen, there are the usual tired lights overhead, the endless truck of clutter along the countertops. How is it possible that supermarkets still advertise on thick, glossy reams of paper all their unbeatable deals of the week? Don't people have to go there anyway at some point? Will all those BOGO offers really be missed, the items remain unsold if not for the weekly circular? Must be that there's some profitable alliance between Big Printing and Big Market, its formidable lobby doubtless driven by the shrewdest of two-time bar exam failures, their ambitions fulfilled and futures secured by keeping us all in junk mail. Says my evil conspiracy twin. The kettle rumbles, its electric blue lightswitch like a tourist nightclub souvenir from the far away land of Mykonos. I am about to piss off at least one person - my first of the day! I push open Chui's door, turn on the light, tell her it's time to get up. The windows are black and the walls are freezing. She hates me right now and I don't blame her. I turn off her fan and hang her dear lavender bathrobe where she can reach it easily when she finally climbs down the clunky wooden ladder from her loft. Stumpy built her this amazing bed last year, a nest tall enough for him to walk under. Even if she's as tall as he is by the time she leaves us, she won't ever hit her head on it. I walk through all the rote motions of weekday breakfast and school lunch prep - again, the soft bread, the peanut butter, the rooibos and honey, the popcorn and salt, the muesli, the milk, the toast, the droewors, the green apples riven to pale white flesh and arranged on a plastic plate in a vaguely elegant, Japanese (?) way. Chui sits at the table, munching away quietly, her mind a private galaxy of thought. She reads Ripley's Believe It, Or Not! (2018 edition) and sometimes shares the stories she reads: a man in Illinois won the lottery twice using the same numbers. A woman in NYC posted an ad to have her pet tortoise walked daily in Central Park, and was surprised when more than 400 people applied for the job, a few from as far afield as Australia. I go to the bathroom and am momentarily cheered by the observant sensuality of John Cheever's journals. He retreats again and again to nature; he grapples with family, with desire, with truth and failure. He gnashes his teeth about the limits of his talent, the dreariness of his narrow capabilities. Reading Saul Bellow both inspires and devastates him. Like most things, I guess. And so I will conclude this blog post, which began in the morning and didn't get very far. It should be noted that I am obsessed at the moment - with the brokenness of this year, with the rawness of my heart. My abilities are limited, as were Cheever's, as are everyone's. We cannot ever be all things to all people. It's work enough getting along with yourself.