This is the end of the poem

For a long time love was a bludgeon.

Now I'm a little afraid of it

"He's the guy who you want to see pushing a stroller around a park"

I like that Peter makes me feel like a woman. 


Sometimes I think it must be the most intense, romantic thing ever and that it's going to be so good when it finally happens and other times I think that I must be nuts, that it could never be as good as I imagine it to be, that if it were supposed to happen wouldn't it already have happened because who would want to wait this long to start living the rest of their life


So much laundry to fold I think I have time


God I'm so over men and women slutshaming women

Goodness remember when I used to have sex with lots of different people


Remember when I hung out with a man who was extremely particular about how to pronounce the word sauna and who made me so uncomfortable that I asked my friend to sleep beside me on the floor of the living room so that maybe I'd stay safe

These days I wouldn't spend nearly as much time with that creepazoid.


The critters are all asleep and here I am writing and eating black bean chips propped up against a pile of clean laundry. Could somebody please bring me some water


The garden is planted, nearly a month late this year but still, I'm growing three kinds of mint, curry, rosemary and of course thyme, yarrow, salvia, onions, garlic chives, and several species of flowers. Supposedly if I treat them right they'll attract hummingbirds and butterflies and can you imagine here I am at the garden center picking out flowers expressly because they are said to attract butterflies and birds


I never understood people who talked about having walls around their heart because of having been hurt in the past but I think now I do



We're making some honey salts to pour on our bodies 

I seem to have gotten through a clog

Time does not heal all wounds. Allowing yourself to be present for the passage of time might. To keep living on in the present, which eventually becomes the future. So long as you dwell in the past you do not move on from it.


But what do I know. Still there may be reasons to remain with what is past.


Sometimes I wonder what my therapist really thinks of me, and oftentimes this line of thinking leads me to wonder if she is writing a case study about me. Then I wonder if I'm actually interesting enough from the perspective of clinical psychology to warrant a case study being written about me. Then I wonder if that is egotistical. Then I return to wondering what my therapist really thinks of me.

I think that if she does write a case study about me, it will be titled something like The Outrageously Persistent Patient.

I think that because nearly every time I talk to her she says that my life stories are characterized by incredible persistence.

When I took my last undergraduate creative writing class, my professor said my stories were characterized by loss.

So. Loss and persistence. There's cohesion, there. Still, for the most part, and with a profound effort not to slip into spiritual bypassing, I prefer to think of my life as being characterized by possibility and abundance.



It would appear that Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law thoroughly enjoyed each other's company and repartee during the filming of the Sherlock Holmes trilogy. Or else they are really good at acting.

I wonder if Robert Downey Jr. is sober now.

How much creative thinking has been stilted by the fact that we can find the answers to our queries simply by opening a new tab. It relieves me of the opportunity to envision any more about what may or may not be going on in Robert Downey Jr.'s life. Perhaps he is sober except for the occasional joint and every once in a blue moon he enjoys smoking said joint and dancing and lip syncing to The Killers in his living room. Perhaps his living room is on the second story of a multimillion dollar home and it has large French doors opening onto a small deck and when the weather is nice he opens the French doors and delights in the breeze blowing over his skin as he lip syncs and dances in the fresh night air.

According to Wikipedia, Downey has been drug-free since July 2003.




Sobriety is on my mind so much of the time these days, not mine but his and other people's and also maybe mine in a much different sense of the term, in the sense that I don't ever want to relapse into helping other people so much that I stop caring about and for my self.


When I went to the summer solstice gathering on Friday night I laid on the floor while my dear friend played a buffalo skin drum and I saw my four-year-old self standing in her blue dress at the end of the driveway with a notebook in one hand and a large pencil in the other, and she handed me a piece of paper with those three words written in her four-year-old handwriting, and she said remember who you are.

I said yes, I remember, that's how we will live the rest of our life.

"Turning Forty" by Kevin Griffith

At times it's like there is a small planet 

inside me. And on this planet, 

there are many small wars, yet none 

big enough to make a real difference. 

The major countries—mind and heart—have 

called a truce for now. If this planet had a ruler, 

no one remembers him well. All 

decisions are made by committee. 

Yet there are a few pictures of the old dictator— 

how youthful he looked on his big horse, 

how bright his eyes. 

He was ready to conquer the world.

Ride

After that dickbag in the landscaping company truck buzzes me while I pedal above the wet white line, I turn off Rt 6 and head toward the canyon. The path is quiet, but the clouds beyond the canyons, above the wide, white mountains, are filled with thunder and lightning and rain, and so I do not stop to put in my new wireless earphones even though I had wanted to listen to music on this ride. Instead I pant and swear into the 20 mph headwind, my quads straining even to move my bike downhill. At the crest of each hill I think surely I've nearly reached my destination at the construction site on the far side of the new bridge, and each time I am dismayed to realize that I'm still miles away.

Until I'm not, and I coast to a stop at the white-orange fencing, drink some water from the glass kombucha bottle that's been enjoying the ride of its life on my bike's downtube, and slip the headphones into my ears. I don't have signal and for some reason (it feels so weird to write) Spotify won't even let me play the albums I've previously downloaded, so instead of listening to The Gilded Palace of Sin I find myself in a muted, introspective world of my own, akin to slipping into the underwater wonder of a lake or a bathtub or a swimming pool.

For once there's no headwind on the return trip--the storm is at my back now, sweeping in from the east--and I bike the 10 miles home in less than 25 minutes, swerving around ground squirrels as they sit and stare and scamper and loiter and mingle and haul ass across the path. As I pull up in the alleyway behind my apartment lightning zigzags across the navy blue sky and thunder claps so hard that the thin walls of my apartment, once a two-car garage and still not at all fit for human habitation, shake.

After I greet Hanna and Wilson and stretch on the carpet I call the landscaping company, where the young woman receptionist apologizes profusely for the driver's aggressive behavior. Oh it's not your fault at all, I tell her, and she laughs with relief. I just want people to stay safe out there, ya know? 

Gotcha

Perhaps I'll prepare the salad in a large saucepan. Eating kale chips and watching the candle burn. My therapist says I deserve to be happy


Yeah always I get rusty. Where would I be if I stayed inside the river at all times?


Don't worry about the money you'll make it.






Everybody telling me I can do it. I know. I can do so much. It's the "it" that's bringing me to my knees, teary-eyed and begging, looking for signs in the appearance of the great blue heron, behind the series of robins hopping along the path in front of me, at the tail end of the wide, languorous snake slithering into the sage beside my right foot



Be with what is. One of the many things I've been telling myself. I've been surprised to see all the pain in my life, and also the possibility


Another one: stress-free living. A pandoraparabolapandemicparadox? Maybe. I'm not stressing about it



Hasn't had a drink in seven months nearly, what a difference sobriety makes. how much easier it is for each of us to be with what is. still I flinch every time he asks the question.


made with REAL vegetables

the next time there is a ring on my finger I want it to stay there until death do us part. that's how much I want to believe in love



How did I get to this place?


I don't remember writing that.

I am eating the chocolate made by my very dear friend.



Last night so many of my friends appeared for the spontaneous vegetable grill down by the river, I wore a homemade paper crown and they sang me happy birthday and I thought, I have friends who know me and I deeply love each of these people and then this morning I woke up thinking my heart is so full 


home


This weekend I will go camping and rock climbing and hiking and maybe throw a little disc golf before building a campfire and sleeping underneath the stars with my dog in my new webbed-ceiling tent. Fuck I'm so grateful!



My heart tells me so many things how am I supposed to listen to all of them

"I'm not a religious person but" by Chen Chen

God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in

Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties, 

unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super

vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me. 

This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought

I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending

church except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God is

not a good listener. I said Stop it please, I’ll give you wedding cake, 

money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians,

children, reality TV stars. I’ll even set up a booth for you,

then everyone who wants to talk to you can do so

without the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen,

& the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers

on their way to heaven. I’ll keep the booth decorations simple

but attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I’m not religious

but didn’t people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint. 

My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop 

sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is 

pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new 

Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked 

my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinner

so she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am 

a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe 

I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am

a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one. 

It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon. 

We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God 

about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence.

He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm.

I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them.

Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.