Growing up makes me sick

Pity January 31, consigned to half of a box on the calendar.


All this growing up makes me sick. Bills and IRAs and calmly resolving conflicts and being direct and polite all the time. I know I'm healthier but I also miss the days of living like an animal, gut instincts, the scent of come and blood and courage and longing and fear. My heart was in palpitations for years and let me tell you something there's nothing like a beating heart to let you know you're alive.

Whiskey and honey are a health food right. I almost forgot to put on pants before going outside to move my car. I mean who does that: forget to put on pants when it's 23 degrees outside and a blizzard is coming. I mean my coat is long enough no one would have seen my skivvies.

Richard Manuel why did you kill yourself. Could I have helped you, pressed your sweaty forehead to my palms, my lips, my chest. Could I have helped if I told you you were a shining bright light, if I told you you were loved.


I know.

Do you ever get the desire to burn all your possessions and get the hell out of dodge. Do you ever feel like you can't breathe and not just because of the bum lung. Do you ever wonder if you are even capable of feeling better.

Frankly I've been thinking that what I want from life is not more but less. Less societal bullshit, less 'growing up' in the sickening sense of the term, so that there is more room for meandering and wondering and beauty and joy. I don't think there's more to life. I know there is, and all I want is the freedom to enjoy-embrace-embody it.



I'm pretty loaded now. Wilson's chin is healing thank god. His ears are one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

Remember when we hopped in that beater car in DC, blazed a bowl while I drank in the backseat on the way to Philadelphia, climbed a tree and spent the night with you clothed in bed. The next morning I found the subway, rode disheveled to that dilapidated gas station, there were my friends in that loyal beater car. We stopped in Baltimore on the way back and I thought people were staring because of our smeared mascara but perhaps it's because we were happy.

Thank goodness for Vader

Thank goodness for Vader. His breath pushes hot and heavy against the walls of the tent.

I won't even tell you about my dreams of late. Okay, here's something. They've been horrifying.


I was sitting on the toilet when I told him. It took me a few moments to realize that I was crying as I reached for the toilet paper.

After I said it I felt lighter. We had sex anyway. The next morning I wrote in my journal, perhaps all that's left is to say it out loud. 


The you that was has been transmogrified into the you that is now. Or perhaps not changed but split, like a cell dividing.

In either case I feel a renewed depth of tenderness as your face cries in front of my face.



At this point I suppose it's hurting me more to repress it than it is to fess up. My name is June V., and he did not treat me well. I run too much and I work too much but I'm trying to sit still more often.
 

This is a year for adventure. In a few minutes I am traveling to the other side of the world.



I will not put so much pressure on myself. I spend hours in front of the computer, reading the town calendar and clicking through images.

Perhaps already my uterus carries it--pregnant not with human DNA but with longing.    


You've come a long way, baby, toward the hope of yourself. 

Early morning
On a wilderness river
Through the fog
I thought, for an instant
That I saw an eagle fishing.

Seconds later, through the fog
I heard an eagle scream
I thought.

    - Rod MacIver

haiku by H.F. Noyes

raking aside leaves
on the backyard pond
I release the moon

Curated by "A Pause for Beauty"

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk; gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.

    - Henry Breston, The Outermost House



I have . . . a terrible need… shall I say the word? . . . of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.

    - Vincent Van Gogh 

less of a woman

The dreams left me as aggressively as they came. I sleep not well but thickly until Wilson baps my face awake.

For the first time in the nearly two years since I've lived in this apartment the bar beside my building is playing a good song.

It was hot when I climbed onto my bike and I forgot I was wearing floppy sandals. My shoes and water were in the pack on my back but at that point I was too hungry to change or to drink. No choice but to ride.

I guess I'll eat crabs next time.


Fuck you youtube for putting an advertisement right in the middle of this Mazzy Star album. I'm trying to be somewhere.





I am misanthrope.
I am trying this on for size. I am questioning whether kindness (or a certain kind of it) is a medium of oppression. 

I am trying to care less, at least in some circumstances.


I am not entirely satisfied. 





Am I less of a woman because I don't want to be pregnant?


Perhaps someday someone will look at this blog and think "If only she had been more disciplined. Perhaps then her stanzas would have been properly formed and the visions she had for her poetry would have actually translated themselves through her fingertips." 


But at the same time fuck off.



I am trying to do it; I am trying to sit with myself. Lord it's so hard when you've been away for so long.

The truth is much harder to say than smiling. I'm sorry. That creek was contaminated by the landfill I just know it.

Perhaps I'll swim to that duck blind in the middle of the river and make it a home. I'll hang marine plants from the thatch, take off my clothes, grow a few fins, and call it my own.

Observations (v1)

Soundtrack



The penis in my dream had a dent in it, like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to the bottom left side.


I guess I shouldn't leave the windows down; it might rain. It's hot as balls, though.


5:16. I'll walk til the minute hand kicks over.


This is not the side of the creek on which I usually run.

The water is lower than it was three weeks ago.


The dog can tell that I'm bleeding. He plunges his nose into my crotch and inhales. Why isn't his owner calling him off.


I am lost. Or, rather, I've never been on this trail before.

I am in the woods. I have no reason to believe I am safe. Always the thing I am scared of is men finding me alone. I have my car keys, so that's something; I can put them between my fingers...


Come at me, motherfucker, I dare you.



Oh, here's the red blaze.

Oh, I remember this car from earlier.


Wherever I go, eventually I'll know where I am.

That was a fast mile.

Here's that spot where I saw that mama duck and her ducklings.

Sand. that scene from the Princess Bride, with the quicksand, right before Wesley is attacked by one of the ROUSes...

Shit, don't bite me; dog looks skittish.

I've never seen greyhounds so small. I wonder what a baby greyhound looks like.



Oh, here's the covered bridge.

Here's that spot where I saw a great blue heron that one time. God that was so good.


I'll walk this hill. Here, crooked lung, I will concede this much.

It's not my fault.

I am hugging my own stomach and walking breathily down the side of the road.


The corn is much higher than it was six weeks ago. I feel private, hidden, like I'm in the jungle. I know what it's like to ski these trails in winter.

Those robins are startled. I startled them with my running.

A rabbit.


God it's beautiful out here.
I'm really grateful. 


Here I am crying on the edge of a corn field.

Here I am spinning in circles on the edge of a corn field.


The sun is setting. A hawk takes flight.