Pig and farm report

The Surfer drove me to the dice & slice doctor last night & we passed the field where the unicorn & the black stallion & the Magic Goat live and suddenly one of the horses was a red & white cow near the fence almost at the road and I yelled COW! & The Surfer said I thought it was just a lumpy horse & I laughed so hard my stigmata woke up

he went to the store while I was in the office & bought me my four ears of corn

all is well here except for rolling panic attacks that have been looping through me for two weeks & the hoards of gigantic RVs moving on my beach in caravans like a creepy midwestern circus during the dust bowl era except they’re elderly & richer & whiter & meaner & minus elephants 

The End.

Ow

going to the doctor at 2:20 to get my ruptured cyst punctured possibly sliced into then squeezed then stuffed with gauze and left to drain down my ribs I just took four Ativan and a bath now I’m watching the clock I hope I don’t lose my shit in his office things like screaming crying kicking biting cursing or stabbing with my Swiss Army knife all these things follow you forever much like your grades in hs “weeping” and “hysteria” are n all my reports which I tend to grab off their plastic holder on the office door when I can manage it

pray for me

ps

Wolfie got her head stuck in a small square Kleenex box and ran around my bed for a good 10 seconds before she could shake it off 

(this message has no body text)

reading as temporal insanity 

reading as gluttony 

reading as religion

reading as fuel and as love

reading as dearth when reading becomes impossible for me which has been happening more and more lately as my disease progresses when reading becomes impossible for me in the dull clomping dance of depression and words jumble and boil on the page I want to tell you how it is to lose this elemental comfort this joy that has been with me my life entire  and now it goes away for long stretches at a time and yet I tend the library in my house with its piles of to read again and not yet read books I surround myself with stacks of books in every room I wait for reading to return to me I stand in my forest watching the trees or sit in the living room watching the reflection of trees on the glass of my coffee table or on the black empty screen of my iPad I have these windows now that open when reading is alive my brain on fire with it and it's all I do and I luxuriate and rest and learn and eat and eat and eat always aware that the window can slam shut at any moment so I hurry to gulp it all up

I have been writing by sending emails to myself usually a few words in the subject line and so the email arrives with the warning (this message has no body text)

not being able to read means I am disappearing

not being able to read means I am in the undertow about to drown

not reading is a bottle fly inside my body

not reading is circular

not reading is a paper cut in the wound of my being it has tiny teeth that never stop moving

not reading is grief

(this message has no body text)

(I am actually disappearing)

sending my work to myself in emails is a way of hiding or burying it because I move the notes to a folder I rarely open if I keep telling myself it’s a hoax then it becomes a hoax 

out here on the North 48° I can feel the moon pulling my brain more specifically than I could in the city and I feel the seasonal changes more profoundly as well for instance I have always found spring to be frightening and harsh and savage but yesterday it finally got warm enough to put the screens up in my bedroom and the feral kittens got extremely excited talking and stalking the winds and the smells that came in pacing around heads up ears tilted forward last year they were so wild they only watched at the window in a pantomime of hunting that was actually a mixture of fear and desire which drives all our animal selves

this morning I woke to the owls and they called from 5 am to well past 11 am I drove to the grocery store on the island for apricots and blackberries and cheese then I drove to the library and I didn't have a panic attack until 2 pm as often as not I cannot drive inside this looping mess in my brain so I live on brown rice and yogurt today I made sourdough flatbread with Greek yogurt and chopped fresh rosemary

I keep trying to write here and I am stopped I keep stopping I have lost the flow

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here are some of the empty (bodiless) emails I have sent myself

because once a man told me I was perfect and I believed him

rotary Bakelite telephone as an instrument of malice

Alex Trebek vs. Jimmy Gator in Magnolia

on being a mentally ill child

fish farms in Spokane in the 1950s

the blue glass bunny

terminal lucidity museum dream nursery was I even then dreaming of my body of what was happening to me at night

my chaotic work

collecting canning jars as a way of warding off anxiety

my anxious blood

circuit rider

Barthes

every small crime

my face is long like hers

refusing to mourn

it makes no sense I make no sense I have lost the thread of me

(this message has no body text)

but these lilacs

I tossed a pan of water outside into the forest and accidentally hit a wee cotton tailed bunny who shot out and up the path

sorry wee bunny

Pig and farm report

transforming the terra

I bought these struggling coleuseseseses for 99 cents on sale at the local grocer a few days ago I have always loved these plants I have one thriving inside my elderly terrarium they were sickly and weak and completely waterlogged this morning I drove to the Country Store and stocked up on  hummingbird nectar and clay pots then replanted the coleussessessses and now they look brilliant on the table in the redrum kitchen soaking up sunlight and forming a friendship with my aloe and my new terrarium here's my rescue op

my depression is truly gone for now there is always will always be a caveat and the only way I was able to get out of it was to spend three days in a religious stupor high on thc and cbd edibles the only thing that worked that made it possible for me to read again and sleep again and function as a human the cure for now


this new- not-new experimentation with pot as medicine coincides with our fucked government right now and feelings I swam in during the Nixon administration living out here in the North 48° extends the rightness of that era as I wander around the island every day every day every day I feel like I'm on the commune again the air that makes me heady blue endless water in my blue eye living at the edge of the world the trees and sun through the leaves that greeny dapple the sheer overwhelming beauty of the earth's skin the divine terra as I drive listening to Neil Young and CS&N and the Beatles mostly alone the main differences of course are that I have a car  electronica and now of course I'm old

I'm reading Kate Zambreno's new book Appendix Project a companion book to her Book of Mutter she writes about being a new mother and of photographing her baby girl every day of documenting her child's daily movements about Barthes' Mourning Diary and how she Kate continues to  mourn her mother in this incredible section titled The Winter Garden she wrote:

"I take constant photographs of the baby, of me, of me with the baby, of the baby with her father, of me breastfeeding the baby, of the baby and the dog, of me and the dog. This constant, casual, documentation. Perhaps I wish to remember something of how this felt, of the life of the thing. How to record the shifts of her darling face. A mournfulness that can suffocate me. The energy of my baby. How I cannot believe four months have passed."

the first thing I thought of when I read this was how lucky this generation is to be able to document so freely such intense intimate moments with a camera always at hand and the second thought I had was of Mary Moon how she so ardently and adoringly documents her grandchildren and how amazing it will be for them as adults to see this record I have so few photos of my son from when he was about 11 years old and up he the photographer resists the camera's eye on himself

the other thing Kate's book sparked in me is how the lack my mourning my mother might affect me in my deep damp thriving bloody heart is it a necessary mourning with a mother even if she was evil and I didn't not for one hot second I shuddered when I saw her box of ashes pale blue ribbon patterned paper with a cup ring stain from where my cousin must have rested his coffee I don't even know if my brother or cousin has scattered her ashes and I don't care

that's it for now I am long winded and busy today

love to you Darkling and intrepid travelers