Pig and farm report

every morning after I wake up I want to write then I get busy in the day and I lose that impulse this is 90% caused by the news cycle out of the white house which amazingly gets worse every single day and still nothing has happened to the tiny pig fucker king today after I heard about Elijah Cummings’ death I thought these people are just sliding off the earth's skin which has become dangerously slippery then I thought I am only two years younger than Elijah Cummings then I thought yikes

in the past few days I have put the winter sweater on the outside spigot I know sweater is not the actual name for it but it looks like a milk engorged styrofoam breast and connects with a rubber band then I took my car in for an oil change my son cleared the roof of pine needles and pine branches  this is all boring and way more exciting in my head

here is my autumnal table all the tomatoes and roses gone now pears and apples and garnet yams that iridescent pumpkin soup tureen was the second thing I bought for the house after I bought the gravy boat that I coveted for so many years and I have not yet put soup in the tureen or gravy in the boat but I am not sorry I bought them

yesterday I asked my son to drive me to the co-op in Mount Vernon for organic vegetables so I can make minestrone on the way I saw a huge coyote standing in a field of frozen pumpkins and the Stillaguamish River which runs under the bridge that connects the island to the mainland has been partially diverted to build a new lake and park and I think the salmon must be running there because the entire body of water was filled with snow geese with their black tipped white wings honking away they are noisy and spectacular and this explains why the birders have been lurking about and I flushed this pheasant out of a marsh when I squatted to pee in a cornfield (the cornfields are done don't worry) O he was huge and such a surprise to both of us

I saw New Nurse twelve days ago and she told me that I could buy the doxazosin I had originally taken for PTSD induced anxiety which my insurance denied me for fairly cheap at Walmart truly I was in no hurry to go back to Walmart and truly I didn't understand why my insurance would let me buy meds at Walmart but not at my regulation drug store so I farted around and continued to take the prazosin instead which accosted me with gross side effects including constant nausea and my first ever yeast infection SERIOUSLY GROSS SIDE EFFECTS so maybe you are chortling at me now which is also my first ever use of the word chortle in writing ever maybe you are wondering how I could possibly be so dense so yes I chortled too because it took me twelve days and thirty years to figure out that I could buy meds without my insurance company's permission as long as I had the paper prescription in my hands so I called Rite Aid another pharmacy close to me and asked them how much their doxazosin cost and they told me $12 so I bought it 

what the hell what the fucking hell Rebecca???

was I so locked into the Big Pharma machine that I could not figure this out on my own?
was I incredibly naive?

was I six years old or what?

all of this speculation of my dumb aside I have not had the terrible free floating anxiety since I started on the doxazosin over a month ago it is for now absent from me gone and I've been sleeping every night and today the wind is up and strong and I might lose power but even if I do I will be okay I'm making soup I'm cooking oatmeal in my wee slow cooker the cats are on my bed and all is well all is well in my world

hello hello Darklings from Summer's End where the table is laden and the coyotes are watching

I have spent most of the last two days trying not to puke but I wanted to tell you that there is a creative nonfiction excerpt from Queer Wing-ed right here with amazing art from Swedish performance artist Leif Holmstrand

Guest editor Johannes Goransson called it “a breakneck maximalist excerpt”

Ooohhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Thank you Darklings

Dear John, I miss your voice happy birthday

Pig and farm report

this post is fractious and blinky and discursive
I lost power three times last night in the middle of the night in the middle of the night I call your name oh Yoko oh Yoko
at 11:30 pm for two hours then again at 1:30 am for 45 minutes then again at 2:15 am
Oh Yoko oh Yoko
the fuckery of insomnia and smoke alarms that emit a loud sad Disneyfied nose whistle as they shut themselves off

no dizziness today but I am punched in the stomach
I thought after 1989 i.e. the cocaine years I would be done with withdrawal
but the universe says NO the universe says ANSWER HAZY ASK AGAIN TOMORROW
I don’t know whether to recite the Serenity Prayer or the Boy Scout Oath

my son is here my darling good boy my situation has caused him stress so he is rearranging my cupboards and my refrigerator and my pantry in his way which is to stack everything neatly according to size and then pushing everything in the back in order to make more room he does not understand that the cans of tomatoes have to go with the tomato paste because he is not a cook but I am grateful that he is here I love his steady presence so I will wait until he leaves to put the sugar back with the flour and the beans back with the rice also he took me to breakfast where we saw a black sky across an extraordinarily bright meadow to the south and a sunny sky with popcorn clouds and fluffy goddamn angels to the north and two rainbows and the Stillaguamish River stormsurging up to its grassy lip

hello for now hello hello

day 4

A quick post in which feral cats eat my eyeballs

Wolf finally let me take a photo of her she is usually so shy and mostly under furniture Prince Hal is still scrawny and always will be last night I lay in my tub with my head underwater which is how I pretend swim when it’s too cold to get in the lake and when I sat up I got extremely dizzy like seriously scary dizzy and pulled the plug out with my toe in case I drowned and all three cats came in the bathroom and stared at me and I thought about crawling out of the tub and fainting and banging my head on the slate wall and languishing dead there until my son came around to visit if you can languish while dead that is then I thought about the cats running out of food and then they would eventually have to eat me because I would be meat eventually what happened is I am on my third day of weaning myself completely off Klonopin a benzodiazepine I’ve been taking since 2005 under New Nurse’s supervision of course but it still shook me but here I am still slightly dizzy with both eyes and etcetera intact hello from Narnia winter I’ll be back when the waves stop rocking under my feet

pee ess

I’m also staying away from twitter today since my feed (this always makes me think of horse feed which in turn makes me think of feedbags which are attached to a horse’s head so he can eat and eat and eat which in turn feels exactly like twitter) is full of bombos large and small politics photos of starving animals writers whimpering about rejection etcetera here I am the 4th of October gently treading across the ocean’s bottom to avoid dredging up mysteries

and still, there are roses

they aren’t fancy or cultivated just wild strong resilient climbers below my deck they are blood red though the photo I took this morning makes them look pink but here is proof of beauty they give me such hope in spite of this week’s panic attack I have been free from the horrible floating anxiety that plagued me for months for almost three weeks now

I am so thankful for the Johnny Cash Psychiatrist pushing me for two years straight to figure out the difference between panic and anxiety in myself though at the time it seemed like an endless repetition of where were you what were you feeling what did you think was going to happen how long did it last and now I know deep in my body that the panic won’t last but the anxiety is a different beast also I remember my last appointment with him when I used his bathroom then couldn’t find the trash bin then had a panic attack right in front of him which caused him to panic and he made me lie down and he gave me a giant triangle shaped Ativan that was apparently  just rattling around in his desk then he retired then died right after that and my brother told me he had seen his obituary and I was pretty sure I killed him

I swept my floors this morning (and collected enough cat hair to make a sweater for a small child) so I can mop later I ate red beans and rice and made an executive decision to keep the television off I need a break from the endless stress inducing news cycle once my bones thaw (from walking around outside early morning in my nightgown but it smells like Jesus’s own summer camp out there) I’m going to the beach then to the farmers market for now I’m sitting by my little propane fire place watching the feral kittens play with a three foot long black string with plastic aglets on its tips that appears to be a shoestring from a size 47 man’s shoe I’ve no idea where it came from but I bet this winter when some tent size thing flaps open I’ll have my answer the kittens have been running through the house holding it by its ends as it drags behind their bodies like the world’s longest mouse tail

Hello Darklings hello is it winter where you live do you have a pumpkin on your porch Jupiter the Magnificent Witchy Cat sends black cat regards from Summer’s End to you

17 of these eerie jellyfish stranded themselves on my beach two days ago maybe they were warning me not to go to Walmart with my son where I wandered around found a soft pink fleece hoodie for $11.00 then had a panic attack so severe standing there gripping the hoodie in the middle of the almost empty store that my heart hammered and gripped my chest and my shoulder muscles cramped then rolled into my neck then rolled up the back of my head I had to stop two strangers and tell them I can’t find the cashier and I can’t find my son then I think I’m having a panic attack

the man and woman were surprisingly kind as they guided me to the front of the store and my son who was waiting for me there he paid for the hoodie soft and fleecy pink and I held onto his arm and we made it to his truck

I was and still am humiliated
please don’t tell me that this is okay that I am okay
I’m not okay I felt like I was in a fender bender for two days after
do not don’t ever tell me to breathe ever

I didn’t want to write it here but when something big or awful happens I can’t write here my diary without writing through it

I am embarrassed to have my crazy out in the world I don’t feel okay about it

Side note:

I honestly believe at this juncture that the tiny pig fucker king could shoot or stab someone on the White House lawn then walk up the steps to his helicopter and calmly fly away with absolutely no consequences 

it is an extremely dangerous time to live in Terrible America

for all of us

ps. In order to end on a happier note I confess that I had double caramel ice cream bars for breakfast and for dinner today