OK OK OK, the water is changing shape and so am I

January 16-31, 2024 / Nightmares & Morning Pages

1/16: The snow has just started to fall wordlessly w/ promise. Promise to fall slowly, steadily, promise to twist Thursday into a container for snow, for hope, for extra caution. Our atmosphere cushioned. I put my rings back on this morning. My ear cuff pulled and discarded in sheets in sleep. I’m dressed in soft layers, wearing a new perfume. Juniper branch and leather and subterranean musk - 34 Bohemian Cafes. I hear jazz again, what jazz has become in the 21st century, eye level to the street and buttoned up w/ building codes, across from dispensaries and boutique hotels, snow on the cobblestones. Has my city been restless like me? Tossing & turning in sleep, all its silver left by the sink? Has jazz become fearful? And the poets, have they become too dependent on the words?

I am planning on walking after work today, in the time before dinner and drinks and the reading, knowing tides turn quickly, knowing plans change quicker, knowing the night will find me at the peak of my day, whispering only what saxophones can say. My small graces: the food in my fridge, the blankets on my bed, my friends a short distance away and open open, my pipes that haven’t froze, my feet still carrying me, two snow tires on my car and jobs that pay me, doors I can open, doors I can close, a sturdy old house of wood and concrete and metal. Everything I look around and touch is everything I can give away. Everything I look around and can feel is everything I can say thank you for. For now, I sleep in a safe place, can wake up early and write this, can write and scratch out, write and bury, write and read out loud, write while my hand cramps and I forget all the words, until only music is left - music as wordless and ambient as snow, wordless and ambient as love.

A portal of debris / quote from Tess Guirney (on substack) / The Vibe, totaled

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1/17: Dog-Ear, free to read for now

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1/18: Do I look like I tossed and turned all night? I did, I did. It’s all good. My painting projects all have my messy fingerprints on them and everything I say sounds a little ridiculous. As I faded off to sleep, I took note: writing, like dreaming, comes before thought.

I had guilt in my head as it whipped back and forth on pillow, keeping track of to-dos and saying soon, soon, not right now, but soon, soon. I started a note in my phone where I write down everything I buy that I don’t need to buy and the price, in an effort to will some discipline, to feel guilt and harness it, to look at it - I call it the Frivolous List.

Today, I will drive my totaled car to work w/ my paper license. I will park my totaled car in the lot. I will fill my totaled car w/ 87 octane gas. I will parallel park my totaled car for the SPACE holiday party, leave another empty ginger beer bottle in the cup holder of my totaled car, smashed tail light facing the road. In my totaled car, I will take only right turns unless no one is around to see me take a left. I will pull into my icy driveway, pull into my crowded garage, put on Do Not Disturb. I will look at my totaled car and count the stickers. I will cry one last time in my totaled car, gripping the steering wheel w/ love. I will photograph the Title of my totaled car and send it away, bargaining for her freedom. I will empty out my totaled car from front to back. When panic slips into my breathing, w/ the creeping feeling of loss, I will find comfort in the garage and home and sun that surrounds my car, totaled but beloved. And when they come to collect her, I will tell them to be gentle, to be sweet. She had a lot of life before me, taken out w/ one snowy spiral on the highway.

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1/19:  I am blood and you are oil. I am skin and you are metal. Our lives cost the same. Our lives travel together. I have been frivolous and at risk and you have suffered. I have been pushy and you, solid, stoic, stuck w/ me. My cars have always told warning stories of reality through the language barrier of man and machine. From place to place, they carry what I carry and then some. When I whisper, my cars have listened - even desperate, they listened. And when they’re done, we both know it. I am the last body many of my cars know. They’ve all been beaters, battered and broken, never worth much. To add severity, I’ve battled recklessness since youth. I like to think it’s at least a little fun, being my car - dressed in slogan tees, fuzzy dice on the rearview, enough shit in the trunk to disappear completely. I am never more comfortable singing than in the drivers’ seat and never more comfortable napping than feet up on the dash in the passengers’ side in the summer, enough room for friends to pile in.

The Vibe is still in the garage, waiting for us to remove the snow tires and everything else. I’ve gotten a call from the tow company every morning, all gone to voicemail. Wish I cared. They will come when I call them, whenever it is. Shame is a living part of me now. It has become its own kind of strength, carving me from stone. W/ each of my cars’ dying exhaust, I felt it - felt fear, felt shame, felt them dancing together under the stars so desperately. But I never let myself love a car before, so this lesson is sticking.

Do you see how this is true for everything? Deep transformation of love. Deep transformation of loss. When we engage from the realm of felt experience, we take up space in reality where reality proves magical. Each of us have to grow the same muscles eventually - unfurling into the world w/ all our leaves and limbs, delicate, affected by the seasons, doomed to live a sensational life and learn to love it, to love into it. I read “doomed” the same way I read “destined.”

On Wednesday, I shared some things to do instead of mentally punishing yourself and opened up the question on my stories:

Once the question of the body is answered, we sort through its space in time. We are simply bumping about until we learn where we’re going and how to get there. In flux as the world is in flux. We learn w/ machines what we learn w/ money what we learn w/ love. I examine my learning curves and find they lean the same directions. Is this true for you as well? I learn we do not need to punish ourselves when we are contending w/ the past and its hold on the present. I learn our futures die when we do not forgive ourselves. I learn it all dies anyway, so love right now. 

Right now, I’m merely taking note through the panic and taking good care of myself, though it feels like I shouldn’t, or I am taking care of myself in ways that sustain me (all the silk, all the silk wrapped around me) and not in the ways that steal from me (all the silk, all the silk stolen on a slow, spiraling spool).

Vibe in the garage / Painting in the morning / OK w/ cat

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1/21:  I am not really writing but a few words while I am raw & embodied: I’m nervous today because to write is to get real and my ‘real’ has had fear and frustration in it. The first time I sit at the pottery wheel, I feel my way around. But anything I try to make after, I ruin. My fingers digging in or a wobble. I touch the clay either too hard or too soft, too fast or too slow; my learning curves towards indulgence, too. Am I choosing to forget? It looks that way but I think I’m somewhere else, dizzy, don’t know how I got here or where I’m going. Finding balance between caution and courage takes too long, I try them both on at once but it doesn’t last. I tell the clay, it’s not fear of failure, it’s fear of the unfixable.

I’m really broke now, secret money all spent, still driving the Vibe around. We might keep her, have someone fix her, not to perfection but enough to perform. Does my world need to be rocked for me to find grounding? Does it need to teeter totter on some edge for me to learn what limits feel like? Well I wake up everyday feeling the same and it’s so strange. I run into rocks w/ all my attempts towards flow - did I put them in the river myself? Did I throw them there in my sleep? My dreams even, exhausted and elusive, not wasting any more time on me this week.

I have work soon or I have to leave for work soon, clay on my pants, sadness in my eyes. Am I outgrowing or is life slowly giving up on me? (How it feels like this sometimes; like the trees at noon, I am casting long shadows, I am shaking in the chill of change.) I say to the sea, I trust you to shape me! I whisper. But can you tell me how bad it’s going to hurt? Even now, I am mostly shadow (I know I am not really writing because I am too awake to dream, too freaked to try. I am used to abandoning myself here). I make sure to make noise when I cry - breathing in and wailing out. I am sure to pack something quick to eat during my shift. I am sure to say thank you to the Truth when it hurts.

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1/22: I sit to write well into the day and decide I want to write a list. I don’t normally but I’ve written a couple lists this week, writing to remember. I think of precious things. My cats are on the list. My books are on the list. I want to write “relationships” but feel it is too dense for this list, so instead “time spent w/ love.” I think life is not a precious thing. New life, maybe, is precious, when eyes haven’t opened and muscles still soft like silicone, but life itself is no precious thing. Life is not something that needs to be protected or wrapped w/ fear, like all precious things. Helplessness is a part of precious. The precious are awarded a little fantasy, a little otherworldliness, a little freedom when we love them. In life, we become precious for a few glinting moments and these moments keep the lights on, precious flame. Precious clay when it is being shaped on the wheel. Precious ceramic when it is pulled free from the kiln. Precious bouquet of flowers w/ the groceries. Precious to practice giving. Precious to practice receiving. Precious sleep when we need it most. Precious apologies when we mean them. Precious forgiveness when it feels both easy & impossible. Precious nonsense when it surprises us. Precious love songs when they are simple.

I suppose I am thinking of all this because I am alive. I believe I am 29. I am the perfect size for my world. I am the size of you and you are the size of me, give or take, our bodies all smaller than our souls. We can look eye to eye. I can be brave so you can be afraid. You can be strong so I can be weak. We can rub the hurt out of each other’s backs and fill the gaps we think are there, the ones we keep poking to see if they’re still bleeding. It is impossible to not get hurt in this life but it takes a lot to kill us. We can look eye to eye, hold hand in hand, sing the joyful dirge of death together - our hands clasped and sweating, we’ll sing not yet, not yet not yet. 

Since the big Q, I’ve been writing about squirrels, you remember. Well, while I wrote that last bit, I saw two squirrels running in the snow, frozen ground to frozen tree, higher and higher together.

The Soul is next to the Vibe in the driveway. I have to laugh at that one; how we’ve made cars w/ our essence, how we’ve made machines into Gods. My vibe broken, depreciated, coated in personality vivacious - rendering her unwanted and impossible to sell (Good! A part of me says. Shh I say back). But my soul, my soul in alien green w/ a warranty. My soul has a hummingbird decal on the back. My soul has new breaks. My soul knows love, has been loved, will know my love.

S O U L

All I know of cars I know from T and his family. I’ve had about 9 or 10 cars at this point, from ebay or facebook, family friend or a friend’s family, you know how it goes. T and his brother ride motorcycles too, which is an artform. ‘Cars’ is a hobby for them, a hobby and a tool. We’ve had to hands-on fix a lot of cars over the years. Right now, T is in the garage changing license plates. clanging metal on metal. He got a new car too, in abundance. We were up at 7AM registering them both, our license plates are 599 and 600.

When we talk dream cars, I say a 1968 El Camino in that deep red color and T says, My Toyota, the one in the garage. OK. Alright, I say, I also like the Kia Soul. Years ago, it became a joke, that I should find a Soul, do like the hamsters do, drive around singing Black Sheep. So now I guess I’m a hamster and I’m listening to Juice.

It took all of my savings but I feel weirdly free, raw and fearful but lucky & free. At the start of this month, I created a playlist called January, Lucky, Free inspired by the Bright Eyes song, featured on the playlist. No accidents.

We’re going to keep Lorna around, the Vibe, see if we can fix her up slow and cheap, in case someone needs her like I needed her. I haven’t named the Soul yet and am being careful about how I dress her. My friend Emma made me some dice out of stained glass and I hung them on my rearview (reminding me of the game, reminding me of friendship, reminding me of what is precious). I am learning about discipline and embodiment these days, through lists and movement and rules that reflect my values. I am letting struggle make me a member of my world instead of ignoring and pretending and acting in the wrong directions - all the false prophets of abundance: convenient and cheap. I am learning the limits of giving, when it slips into giving away. I am prioritizing movement in my Soul, my chariot. I am learning worth on deeper levels every day.

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1/23: No safety or surprise, it is Tuesday again. I am wearing velvet and Chelsea Staircase. I walk strong in green cowboy boots and drive confidently in green Soul. I have frozen my assets energetically - remove the card info from my phone and squirrel away any cash I find, extra extra shifts at work, extra extra dreams to scheme. The investment is life. I feel like giving it all away and seeing what comes back. I cleaned the house yesterday so it is clean now and my week is stacked.

When I spun out last week, I was listening to Graham Nash’s Better Days and I am listening to it now w/ breakfast. The accident was quick, less than a minute, the song playing on w/ sweetness. What starts as a heartbreak folk song spins itself into a melodic hero’s lament and search of self, failure all wrapped up in the Now, endings inherent to beginnings (we know this). Similar to the Doors’ The End, Better Days is a break up song that reverberates into the larger, felt experience of endings on any scale, seeing them everywhere - a personal loss at the center that spirals into a loss of existential proportions felt by the world, in one way or another (do you believe in energy? I do, I do). “Ride the snake,” Jim sings. “Chasing mirrors through a haze,” Graham sings.

A saxophone always tells the truth. Endings always come, morphing and conforming the present like clay. We step into it w/ cowboy boots and fresh tears until we can be barefoot and beaming again, excited to dream guilt free again.

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1/24: *** REMINDER: M has the house key to feed the cats this weekend ***

Home late and up early, but easy sleep & slow wake up. There was levity yesterday, an odd ease I haven’t felt in a while, not since the seasons’ change at least. We are ourselves all the time but the feeling of safety and community opens the windows and lets the best parts of ourselves blow through. My smile held no hesitation on a regular Tuesday. Poetry was back on at Lincoln’s - another line to read, another full house. I wish the night was longer, wish time stopped inside the speakeasy.

Liz said “grab the mic” so we all grabbed the mic, sharing the good, the heavy, the new. Couldn’t help my energy, alive and awake and outspoken in perfection, goofy and talking talking, losing time in your company.

People say thank you for the strangest things. In the morning when I am shopkeeper I hear “thank you” just for being open, for unlocking the doors. On stage, we all say “thank you” before stepping down. Last night, I heard “thank you thank you thank you” for listening, for engaging deeply w/ new friends at the bar and asking questions they want to answer, for showing up & loving this thing. “Thank you” I hear “for dreaming w/ me.” I say thank you right back.

I feel this thing in its youth, eager & dreaming skittishly of future. I’m not skittish anymore. I dream w/ the whole of me. I am a Meaning Maker compulsively. I can see the arc of change, where growth shapes itself crooked and confidently up towards the sun.

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1/25: Incomplete Essay, free to read for now

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1/26: Hey, I’m feeling quiet and incomplete.  I’m feeling unwanted, unwantable. I am not yet packed for the weekend and unable to throw the clay into the center. I am top-heavy like the Soul this morning, all in my head where my feelings float. I make my tea mostly honey to curate sweetness. My leg hair long, I feel a breeze through when I walk. This weekend, we are driving 5 hours to upstate New York in the Toyota to spend time w/ T’s family. Time to pretend.

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1/27: Noise travels far in an all-white house w/ high ceilings. This stretch of New York feels like New Hampshire, everything new growing old. The stone houses are decrepit and the new houses are black and gray multi-units. Winding roads cut w/ hairpin turns. An old resort turned ghost town, abandoned pool abandoned meeting house. An old orchard turned distillery, w/ chickens and solo stoves. We are staying in a house T’s cousins own. One of those ‘middle of nowhere’ places that has everything you need, 3 acres and 2 matching houses cut out of the landscape across the way. Eight of us staying here w/ the real hardwood and the faux leather. People like white. White is supposed to mean clean, mean new, even when it isn’t either anymore. 

I’m hiding away again to write after breakfast w/ the door closed. In new places, I spend my time naked when I can, finding home w/in myself. I’m hiding away but I can hear everything: the water rushing through the pipes, every door that isn’t shut being shut until opened and emptied again, conversations about our time and getting dressed, the little hums we do by ourselves to affirm ourselves, C & L downstairs singing the song in their head Time To Pretend, can you believe that? And laughter, there is laughter through the walls, I can never be mad at laughter. 

My skin is dry, dry. The more I stretch into my words, the less words I seem to have. When I write by hand, I reach for the short words, words as symbols, symbols I know deeply, saying more w/ less (how I speak to myself) like cave drawings - juvenile as art, endlessly meaningful in essence. I can be a little stupid, that’s OK w/ me. I have to get dressed soon. The more people getting ready for the day at the same time, the longer the morning becomes - hours awake, hours to cook, hours to eat, hours preparing how we all feel we need to prepare. I brush my teeth and meet the day from there. This quiet is that of embodiment w/ nothing to prove. I answer questions honest and odd - sometimes they are well received and sometimes they aren’t heard at all. OK. Spearmint and espresso, cashmere, my own name repeated in my head as we walk out the white white door.

The plan today is to walk and to eat and to drink, a plan I can agree w/. Yesterday morning, I wanted to turn right around and go home, to see my home again as a kind of cave w/ candles flickering. Being here Now, I am reminded that any kind of travel is salvation for me. Any change of scenery lets me expand into something new. If I’m not careful, my world becomes small and I become eager to be swallowed. Give me open windows and Wisteria, even in dry bushels, and a red sunrise at the end of winter.

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1/28: I’ve been drawing my spirals loose and wide these days. The rain falls small, sounds like static as we drive through, T leading us home in the Toyota through winter all brown.

Awosting Falls wasn’t frozen yesterday but everything else was. We dug our heels into frozen earth as mountain water plunged and gushed, bubbling up and over icy banks. We wound down and around, finding caves, assuming all the world beyond the fog. Over the scars of stripped bark, visitors write life is fun and breathe, see, listen, feel what’s around you and ♡ God’s Creation ♡ 

We got back to the all-white house before the sun set in mystery. I took a big glass of red wine to the bath, ran the water hot w/ jasmine bubbles. I almost made myself sick in there thinking about purpose and floating through it all, like life as a river. I could stretch out fully in there, top of head to tips of toes. I keep my eyes above the waterline like alligator. When I float up, I see tits and pubic hair first - it is funny, this body I now love. Leaning back, I slide slick along the walls. I am clay, inherently round and soft, never still in a perfect clay bowl.

In the water, I am thinking of all the water - the snow forced into rain, rain forced into ice, can’t spend more than a few hours in one state. The falls flood the riverbanks. The ice suspends gravity in dissipating diamonds. The Earth will come out of this winter plump, will be bursting by spring, water getting into the basement. Water always looks for somewhere to flow. Wine always wants to be swallowed. 

The water asks the wine How can you bear it, sitting so long in the dark? The wine says, something is growing here. I am patient, ready when you are. The wine asks the water of the Earth, asks How is she? Does she miss me? Am I still a song in her ear? The water, in a rush, says, Not at all - onto the next - juice in every season. 

The water says The seasons are still changing but they’ve never felt like this. I don’t know where I’m going, don’t know where I’m supposed to go. The wine says it’s OK, no one knows where they’re going. The wine says, no one has to know.

OK OK OK the wine says to the water What will you do now? The water says give and take, give and take, and you, what about you? The wine slips into the water, an accident, feels like making love. The wine says Something is growing here, do you feel it? Are we free, you and me? Do we recognize it as freedom? The water says I’m a bit of you and you, a bit of me. The wine asks the water Will they still dance when I go? The water shrugs, the water touches all it can.

The water asks the wine Does the void answer back? The wine says all the time all the time all the time, in countless contradictory ways to the point of meaningful meaninglessness. But mostly, the wine says, the void tells jokes. The water rushes to Earth when it hears this, laughing laughing, filling the void how it wants to be filled. 

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1/29: I write amongst the smell of rubber, waiting for snow tires to be mounted on the Soul. Everything here is red and black and what used to be white. January slides into February this week, like day into night, like everything else. I dream of sex in a latex clown suit. Then I dream of my mom and dad at the beach, the sea eventually swallowing them both. When T & I got home last night, we retreated into our quiet distractions, had leftovers from last week, the cats never far away.

Now, surrounded by rubber and metal, I wait w/ my feet up. Behind me, bearded men talk to themselves while they work. In front of me, bearded men on the TV looking at pin-ups in a pawn shop. My nails all broke this week, cuticles dry from cold and clay. I lick the blood and tell them my mileage, hand over my keys. My tone of voice matches their tone of voice, necessary info only. This is how I am taken seriously as someone in-between. Age is a thing of accumulation and gender is a thing of make believe.

My hair still soft from Saturday’s drunken bath, all my hair soft and growing against cotton, against silk, against January after a storm. Everything stoic is still holding snow, heavier than darkness - I squinted at the world first thing this morning.

Sleep ended when the sun said so. I kept my home quiet, integrated back into the shadows of my clean, sexless sheets and the dreams I picked up. Of course this is my mind I say of course. I am home again, w/ all my windows casting light on mess and skin and wilting, wilting disguising growth. I keep my water cold for drinking and hot for bathing. Pubic hair is in fashion, can I say I told you so? I listen to the blues all the way home, like wah wah wah!

What is the way out? Through like tunnel, through like hole, through like digging, right? That’s what they tell me. Water always looking for somewhere to flow. Wine always wants to be swallowed. The way out is filled w/ air and light. It is expanding, it is expansion, it has room for all of us and more. The way out is never crowded when we start from the center of it. A chorus waits for us.

The way in is relative to the way out. Who wants to stay still anyway? Find joy in digging. Joy in making bigger, joy in anything bigger than us. Joy in knowing that the road before us has been tread on w/ bare feet and a craving, countless ways to get home (some longer, some shorter, some direct, some spiraling - you get it). You’ve got to feel your way around.

Restlessness, as I have learned it = Joy disguised as Desire, holding energy. Joy is underfoot, do you want to take it w/ you? You don’t have to.

Ins and outs grow cavernous, melting and freezing all the time. We do it inside ourselves before we do it anywhere else. How did you do it the first time? How can you do it better? See if you can reach the roots of you, the ones that can’t be moved. Joy is there.

To those in the dirt, I hear you. To those in the dirt, I smell you. To those in the dirt, yes, I thought I recognized you. We know the center the center, we know right where it is - OK, we know about where it is. I got lost a little bit again, changing again. This is not something I am meant to understand, not something we can control, just something our body can react to / to hold on or to let go, stare at the ground or at the sky, resist or do it again do it again do it again. I know I am hard to look away from when I am like this.

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1/30: Dog-Ear, free to read for now

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1/31: The light inhaled the dark and I woke wanting to fight time. The day's breathing so steady that I felt like an interruption, like any time left for us was gone already. I wanted the frustration off of me first thing but that too, inhaled and out of time. I wept for tenderness, the soft words I wouldn't hear and couldn't give to myself. I've learned that when I'm soft I am easier to step over. When I am honest, it is only from where I am standing. I hold my breath against the opening day and received no forgiveness. Stepped over and walked right past. Tenderness is taking it's time w/ me, like hopeful reciprocity.

When the sheets are pulled up, it is close enough to the bed being made. When the doors are locked and the lights are off, it is close enough to safety that everything else is extra. We have measured closeness by touch alone but there is more, there is more. It is nearly 8 AM and I don't have time for this, the year just beginning, the year never ending

I am the lie learning itself. I am the experience shifting w/in itself. I am eating up the  roles assigned to me but still speaking like them, speaking w/ my mouth full (the brain is the last to know, the body is the last to change behavior, mine especially, my slow-loving stubborn body, graceless in love but genuinely rooted, how growing in looks like growing out, my hair long & greasy all over). I am working w/ the weight of me, feeling sore in all the weak spots. I would rather be sore than feel this body betray me. I would rather carve out some discipline than to keep letting myself get away w/ it. I can’t wait until this doesn’t hurt anymore - yes, all of it all of it.

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