Clearing the Cobwebs

I have a Saturday to myself which is wonderful and strange and pretty much never happens anymore. I am at loose ends. I am unraveling into long trailing tassels because I can. This is lovely. I have three pages left to construct for the summer issue of blossombones (almost done!). I want to read horror novels and write fake personal ads and cook impractical things like elaborate desserts that nobody will finish because there's only three of us. I want to watch black and white movies where dangerous women smoke cigarettes and talk really fast. I want to drink icy cold white wine out of my prettiest glasses and hang tiny white lights over everything and pretend it's a party.

Things I want to cook:

Broccoli Soup

Salad Caprese*

Gnocchi

Foccacia Bread*

Tiny Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches


This probably won't all happen at once, but it would be awesome if it did. Also: I don't care what you say about carbs. I like carbs.

*Spellcheck suggests I replace the word "Caprese" with "Caprice" (Ha!) and "Foccacia" with "Moccasin." I would not eat moccasin bread (as both snakes and shoes seem like bad flavorings for homemade bread) and I prefer my salads to be stable, although I am not opposed to a bit of whimsy.

***

I saw a bunny in the yard the other day and I know I'm supposed to dislike them like all the neighbors do but I like bunnies with their twitchy noses and whatnot. I don't really care if they eat your petunias. Sorry.

Where am I going? Where have I been?

I have been living within the quiet spaces, away from the interwebs whenever possible. I am trying to find a proper balance between reality and electronic reality but this continues to elude me. My brain feels swollen inside my head but this is probably just the humidity.

I think I have abandoned twitter once and for all. It's too frenetic.

And now, notes from the dreamspace:


Last night I dreamt that I was under the spell of an evil dog. It had a gigantic head and seemed very sweet at first, cuddling in my lap and following me around. It asked me: "do I have your loyalty and your protection?" and I said "yes."



The dog controlled my movements, as if I were a puppet. If I tried to break free of his canine spell, he squeezed my heart with his telekinetic powers until I thought my ribcage would burst and the contents of my thorax spill out upon the floor.



Beware of dogs who speak in human voices.


***

I am cooking as much as possible, trying to get some good, homemade food in the fridge for the week ahead. I dislike relying on takeout for survival. I have homemade tomato & basil soup, a big jar of sun tea, a vanilla pound cake, & deviled eggs. (I have never eaten a deviled egg, so this is a first.) I'm thinking I might need a rice salad or quinoa. I'm hoping to bake some bread this week, too. For some reason this makes me feel more human. I like the simplicity of chopping, stirring, mixing, tasting. I like feeling wholly involved in the present moment. It's a sensory thing, I think.

Appropos of nothing, I just saw a news headline that read "Cannibal Squid Get Rough" and I think this would make an excellent title for a poem.

inspired meme-age

((I like this. Sarah and Kathleen inspired me.))

Is half a stone still a whole stone?
A quarter of a stone is as delicious as a whole stone. On the molecular level, they are identical.

Do grains of sand get tired of being recycled into mountains?
Do mountains get tired of being broken down into grains of sand? Is it impolite to answer a question with a question? If the grains of sand between my patio stones grow into mountains, I will climb them and live upon the peaks and become a guru. Go ahead, ask me a question.

If you crossed a bat with a mushroom, would you get an umbrella?
No, you would get a brown, earthy stew. I wouldn't recommend eating it.

Do the glasses one wears in a dream require a prescription?
Yes, but one can morph into an eye doctor or a wizard in order to obtain the perfect pair of spectacles.

What songs do they sing in a school without windows?
In schools without windows we hum the songs of bees. Sometimes we are a school of fish and our songs cannot be heard by human ears. Our mouths create songs that look like this:
OoOoOo

Do the daisies love us or not?
The daisies only love us when we push them from the earth with our corpses.

Is there any reason to believe that we’ll have working mouthparts in the next life?
If we can evolve into higher beings, working mouthparts will be unnecessary. We will communicate through scent and make our own food by processing moonlight.

What kind of cartilage connects us to the stars?
We are connected to the stars by filaments of invisible flesh. We are made of stardust, but our stars have forgotten us. Sometimes the strands of cartilage vibrate and the stars ask "What was that? A mosquito?"

* * * / * * * * *

This has been a rough week peppered with many small unkindnesses, but my mantra is I am not unhappy, though I wonder why I cannot simply say I am happy. I dreamt I was a diabetic & had to check my blood sugar every twenty minutes. I dreamt I had a poetry reading & there was no audience & I just read poems aloud to an empty space. The show must go on. These dreams lack panache & so do I.

I have finally begun writing new pieces, though it feels something like a slow recovery from sickness, each tiny bit requiring more effort than I remember. Everything is running in fast-forward these days & the people are blurry & I find it hard not to let things like the flavor of good tea to slip past my notice. Time moves faster in some places & slower in others. My good days remain slippery & brief. I suspect this phenomenon is universal.

I would like to have a week to myself, where I do nothing but read & cook. I wish there were time to withdraw from the world for a short spell. I am tired of the word frantic, of the arthritis in my fingers, of the telephone & the doorbell & the bank & the post office & the dust that gathers on headboards & chair rails.

According to my horoscope I am subject to allergic reactions. Also: the stars are aligned for professional success. Unfortunately, I am allergic to success. And professionalism. Alas.

Footnotes

1 Day gazillion of crazy heat wave. I am making a mock tabouli salad with brown basmati rice because I have a giant bag of said rice and it doesn't keep the way white rice does. My hands smell like lemon and mint. I will probably eat this salad for the next three days.

2 I wish I did not have so much to do. It makes me think things like swarm, lockbox, undertow.

3 I am reading American Gods and Chimeric Machines, but only during the rests between the notes.

4 You can read a little something I wrote about the sea witch in this summer's issue of Goblin Fruit. Then go eat a mango or something delicious. Beware of wicked strangers and unexpected gifts.

Dear earthlings, tell me the secret to your success. Is it spreadsheets?

I am in this awful place where I cannot make decisions such as whether to go to the library on my day off or whether to eat cheese & spinach ravioli or grilled swiss on bakery rye or what book to read next or what movie I want to watch. Mostly I work & I sleep & I dream about malevolent witches which give me cool ideas for short fiction stories that won't ever be written, at least not by me. My allergies are insane & it feels like my eyes are itching to crawl out of their sockets. This humidity leaves me looking very frizzy which reminds me hey it's summer & I haven't really done anything particularly awesome like throw a party where we burn citronella candles and drink beer out of coolers filled with ice and watch fireflies. I have, however, brewed one helluva lot of iced tea. I am going to see The Sins of Sor Juana at the Goodman on Saturday. I'm looking forward to this.

How do all the normal people keep their lives in order? My floors are perpetually dirty & all I really want to do is bake chocolate cake and read random books I pull from my shelves when I should be paying bills & going to the bank & to the post office & making phone calls. The next four days are going to be mad-busy but after that I think it will all slow down for a minute. I keep pushing back my self-imposed deadlines & this is a bad thing, but necessary.

I am chipping away at it all with Sisyphean determination.

It's possible that I am simply mired in some kind of hormonal funk & it will pass. I am impulsive. I bought a plaid shirt yesterday because I can picture myself wearing it around the house while making spicy gumbo & biscuits. What can I say? I am not even remotely glamorous.

***

Reading:
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link
Night Songs by Kristina Marie Darling

Watching:
True Blood, Season 2

Way Cool Stuff

**A poem from CYBORGIA is featured at Verse Daily today!! **

View from the inside of an impending panic attack

I am plagued by elaborate violent dreams, with witches and serial killers and carnivorous plants, and terrifying weapons with multiple curved blades. This puts me in the mood to write a horror story, or at least read one, preferably on the shady front porch with a glass of iced tea.

I am convinced that we all experience time differently, that it moves at a fluctuating pace and we can sense this but do not possess the technology to prove it. Time has sped up as I've gotten older. Perhaps this is true for everyone. Perhaps I can expect the next cycle to feel like a temporal slowdown. I spend too much time thinking about this sort of thing. Right now the normal people are probably thinking about concerts and barbecues. I am wondering if time is real...if it actually exists or if it's just another social construct.

Clearly, I'm having a bout of anxiety. Here's hoping I can confine it to a tiny, tangled knot of ganglia in my brain.