bits of drift

 

Women, Dorothy Napangardi.

Dear Rushing & Impatient,

Here is a thing I am cleaning out of my closet: procrastination.  As a concept;  I think I don't actually even believe in it.  I propose we look instead for inclination and ripeness.  

Procrastination is entirely created by the pressure of people's expectations of you, and yes, I know, I know, sometimes we enter into contracts with others- at work, at school, etc., etc., etc.  So okay, give the people what they want on those occasions, but, but, but, on the other occasions, let us look for ripeness.  Let us be alert to the decisive moment; let things simmer on the back burner; because that might be all life is really, a constant simmering; never a 'doneness.'  If the simmering is the goal, that means you can stop fussing about setting the table, if you get my drift; never mind I shall continue snowing!  (25:25; but really, watch the whole thing, watch all the episodes, and then descend into grief, because there are no more!).

In the time I am procrastinating on finishing that sweater, I am actually, factually, working on it!  I am mentally muddling through dividing the yarn equally, deciding where to end the armscye, etc.  Damn it people, get this through your heads: time that you are leaving unfilled is actually the fertile field of idea and imagination- please, please stop plowing it up and sending the delicate soil into the air to come down elsewhere as nuisance dust!

get so lonely

 

Dear At Sea,

Can you believe they/we wanted it darker?  Well, I still can't.  Here, is one heck of a song for today- I hope you sing along and also, that you have a candle, so you too, can get a lot of reading done!

PS  Yes, I think that is a conch shell, that opening sound.

out

 

TV Dinner Tile

Dear Kyle

You know that I love you, really I do; and I know you love and care for me, too, as much as is possible in a diner/server relationship, but I just don't always want to know that your name is Kyle and that you'll be taking care of me tonight.  I don't want to be 'taken care' of; like you'd take out the trash, or deal with a plumbing disaster.  And, it feels all wonky in terms of a power structure, because you don't know who I am, what my name is, and it doesn't matter that we exchange names: I don't need your name as your bond of responsibility.  And I think you must feel this way too, don't you, Kyle?

One thing that constantly bugs me at my job and at my life, is the word 'my.'  My students, my class, my husband, my kid, my couch, my kitchen, ugh!  None of this stuff's most important features are their mineness.  They aren't really mine at all, and you don't have to be my server, either, you can just be 'the' server, and I can just be (as I always am, I guess) 'the' diner.  But, I am in such a stew about our interconnected collective lives that I may never go out again, anyway, Kyle, so maybe this is goodbye?

Yes, I know, I have gone all tu/vous and tu/usted on you, and you never liked studying language anyway, so why bring it up now, but these distinctions of familarity matter, somehow, in the struggle to stay out of the blind perpetuation of power abuses, no matter how minor, and so, yes, I think this is goodbye!

gather, miserablists

 

Dear Living,

I think I may have mentioned here, once, the kind of bolt you get sometimes, a sort of jolt of joy, out of nowhere; you might even be taking out the trash.  It's a feeling I might call happiness, but with extra euphoria sauce and a cherry on top.  In any case, one day I may write more on this frisson thing that sometimes happens.  I know for certain that I have mentioned my new best friend Viv Albertine?  I put 19 post-it notes into To Throw Away Unopened, and one of them was stuck on a Jenny Diski quote.  Now, Jenny is a gal I am not yet very familiar with.  I tried to read (I really did try!) The Golden Notebooks, and I swear to you on a stack of fifty unread books, I will try again!  Anyhoo, Doris Lessing was a sort of mother/(tor)mentor to Jenny Diski, who, in whatever it was I read, was said to be a difficult woman.  Jenny D., I mean, and yes, Doris L. was fabulously difficult too.  And I want to know them, as role models for my own emergent (dormant? latent?  consistent? continual?) difficultness. 

All this horizontal & lateral introduction and introspection, just to get you to here, a little thing that Jenny Diski wrote on happiness.

PS

If you want a song for today, a 'happy' song, you can choose one from here, if you like.  I don't think I want to tell you how to get happy.  Although, I will give you Get Happy, side A, and side B.

out on the wily, windy moors

 

Ellsworth Kelly.

Ellsworth Kelly.

Dear Moving Air,

What is time?  A river?  An arrow?  A goon?  A construct, a treasure, a collapse?  An ordering principle?  It feels like wind.  Here is your song for today.

it's just beginning....

overuse

 

Milagros; take two and call me in the morning.

Dear Contemporaries,

Do you worry about overuse?  My dj played this the other day, and she explained that it was her favorite* Neil Young song and she doesn't like to play it very often, because she doesn't want to 'overuse it.'  

Well, it has happened to me; I used to love some song, and somewhere along the way, someplace while I was getting it into my cells, into my blood, listening over and over (or as they say now: 'on repeat'), breathing and sleeping it, I fell out: out of lust, out if infatuation, out of the desire to consume it wholly.  What does that mean?  Not to you, but to me?  Am I so fickle?  Is there only so much daily enthusiasm?  Is it so that familiarity breeds contempt?  Ooh, I sure hope not!!!  

But, overuse;  In my shoulder there is a thing like that, and if I had it to do over, I'd have saved it a bit more; I would have turned the crank of the press with my left arm, might have taken some care when I was painting to stop now and then, as I do now; to stop knitting before two hours have transmuted themselves into three inches of cloth; I have this Thera-putty now, which I squeeze and twist around in between some number of rows now; I don't know if it helps, but, it is kind of fun to squish this stretchy yellow goop- it's kind of unstructured, compared to the repeated yarn loops.

And, what about relationships? Or chocolate, sugar, caffeine, alcohol?  And, ooh, what if one day you woke up and suddenly analgesics didn't work for you?  It'd be a hard rain that fell that day, and you'd have to face all these endless little headaches and sprains, pains and bruises with nothing but ice and tears!  

It isn't our topic, I know, but I would be, umm, under the weather, feeling delicate, nearly every day if it weren't for these medical marvels of medication.  I won't list my ills or my cures, but, I think often how uncomfortable I would be without the things I 'take.'  Without, for example, sunscreen.  I have a friend, who maybe doesn't wear it?  In any case, she has to subtly maneuver you to the shade when you run into her and stop to talk.  It's a weird, distracting feeling; you know her mind is on something else, but what?  Over years I have realized what it all is, and so now I say; let's move over here, into the shade.  But still, just saying goodbye in the driveway at the car is a problem for her- she is always, everly, antsy, on her way to out of the sun.  Her world revolves around the not-sun.  Think of it.

Anyway, I want to mention it here, because I think we have an odd relationship to medication here, in our culture.  I think we think we have failed, we are losers in the game of health, when we need a prescription balm to ease things.  We seem to feel that it is actually dangerous poison, prescribed by sadistic Dr. Frankensteins, and that anything else, even lighting candles and praying to the Big Head in the Sky would be better than to take this pill.  I ask you, I ask myself, why would anyone make a cure that would harm more than it heals?  I know, you are going to tell me it is about money, and I am going to say no, I do not believe that.  You are now going to tell  me that they are ignorant, foolish; '"they used to think smoking was good for you!!!"  Well, that fallacy isn't worth a response from me, either.  Your world of dehumanized idiots is not the one I live in, even though you are right next to me.  I am fine with you just hating yourself for needing medication, but I am not, not, not fine with you acting like only weak, failures of humans need or take medicine.  So you are going to have to contemplate all that; that big, fat cognitive dissonance in your brain, and if I were you, I'd see a doctor about that.

*Hmm, what is mine???  Now I feel like I have to find one, and quick!  This is the nature of competitiveness, isn't it?  Out of nowhere, you have to have or do or be something else.

PS  

I have, and I invite you to join me, spent some time, many inches of knitting, and square feet of painting and drawing, considering why I may have harbored this 'medicine is for weaklings' crap, and I can tell you that you grow up in it; it is there when you are just 15 months old, and you fall, and you cut your lip, and you howl out in the pain of all that misery and shock, and you are told to 'stop crying.'  It is there when you hear your people talking about how so and so needs to take such and such now, because they are old, and will die soon.  So, yes, we are afraid, and that is fine, but the medicine is not what we fear actually, is it now?

Wailing Woman

 

Dear All,

My DJ played this a few days ago, and ooh, what a La Llorona it is!  I hope you will gritar y llorar along!  If you don't know the weeping woman that can be heard at night in the arroyo near you, here is a short introduction.