Anatomy of a Dress

In August, dramatic alignments from Venus to several major planets suggest one of your biggest needs is about to be met.

My dog just spent an hour chasing a FROG around the yard.

SO MUCH JOY

First substantial meal since Thursday last night. Woke up in a much better mood.

Love love LOVE:

Too many greyhounds at the Hipster Bar (where I made myself wildly popular by spinning Prince and MM’s Jesus Christ Was An Only Child on the jukebox, right out of the gate!) turned into two days of violent, pointless retching and so now I am forced to question, in addition to the wisdom of howevermany vodka-grapefruits, the integrity of the pollo con mole I had for dinner at upscale mexican restaurant Mi Cocina just before. I am weak and shaky, every muscle in my body is sore, my stomach is burning and aching, I am running out both ends and I’m tremendously exhausted.

Which is at least partially why it’s taking me a week to finish the last 15 pages of Trickster; the truth is I don’t want it to be over. I just received Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a likely choice since I am jamming on nonfiction and in love with the showy, temperamental feline plants these days. Still, I can’t let Hyde’s book go.

This afternoon I am curled up on the couch, sipping lukewarm gatorade and watching season 1 of No Reservations, the only part of cable that I miss. It’s nice to be untethered from work, but not under such circumstances; I’d vastly prefer 5 hours by the pool to sweating out a rotavirus in the cool semidarkness of my apartment.

When we have forgotten the latter portion of these paradoxes, when the way we live closes in around us, feeling like a web woven by strangers, a deadening pattern and not an enlivening one, then, if we are lucky, the Monkey of the Mind will begin his mischevious chatter to wake us from our torpor. For those who are particularly thickheaded he will begin with the trope-a-dope routine, showing them how taking the code too seriously leads them again and again into a kind of self-torture (whose pain will leave as soon as they see that the code itself is theirs to play with).

Lewis Hyde

Sutra: open boat, preparation for travel:
Why do you want to be around such mean people?

I am so small that it feels dangerous;

tropism, fists furling,

waters perpetually lit in the blood fog.
we are one body, smells heavy as suet.

I am both of us moving towards as a single eye, slit open;

wanting what you want

frequency for the deaf, vibratory subrosa.

between us an ocean stills in undertones that approximate tenderness.

dress flesh on the picket because all I can do is need.

Sutra: between places of being

On my way to Bethlehem, I hold a broken cigarette
Trill of waters, to be safe the little one / soul even –
That was strength, not pulling back, containment.

Some inner refuge connected girl–
released new ways of being
Context: sorrow weighed a fortune.

The way to the temple / through a narrow mountain crag
Surrounded by people I don’t know
I have to turn my body into a blue star to get to the top

Gretchen Mattox

Yesterday at breakfast the waitress came and stood near me, refilling my water slowly and murmuring so that only I could hear that I had a very calm energy, and my presence soothed her because she could tell that I wasn’t demanding anything from her in that moment. My energy was more subdued than calm, but I took the compliment for what it was and smiled up at her shyly. “Come stand near me anytime you need,” I advised.

Subdued because work has been a roiling pot of insanity. I mean just….well whatever. I would quit — I should quit — and spend my last 2.5 weeks in Dallas bored and restless, reading books and watching movies and wishing passionately for my life to start already, to throw off this truss of a cocoon and fly, HELLO, but I am kind of lusting after a refurb Macbook (also, my 2005 iBook is death-rattling and I am terrified–terrified, I tell you–of being without a computer,) and so. I go in and bare my teeth in a simulacra of a smile and charm the pants off of everyone around me and rake in the stacks of cash and march grimly home to do it again. I dislike the job so much I am not even drinking to dull the pain.

I am shopping, however; after breakfast I wandered over to Buffalo Exchange and accidentally spent $100 on 3 sundresses, a pair of sandals and this incredible wool sweater. The sundresses made me feel infinitely better, and though I lost my yen to be out in public and skipped the (becoming more urgent every day) needed eyebrow wax, I did stay home and give myself a pedicure while I shot the breeze with Greg.

This morning has been its own adventure–after a fancy dinner last night (OMG there were fried oysters and my life will never be the same), Soccer Captain and I retired to the Four Star Hotel he’s been put up in for his month-long job, and after tossing and turning all night in a shockingly narrow bed, capitol of the land of Six Dollar Red Bulls and Oops I Just Bought an Episode of Nurse Jackie–I spent two hours dealing with a car out of gas, a freak thunderstorm with no driver’s side window, a slipping transmission, getting horribly lost and driving forty minutes in the wrong direction during aforementioned transmission-and-thunderstorm debacle, and a burgeoning ear infection. To which I say: Soccer Captain, You Can Keep Your Fancy Digs.

Ugh, and now I have to go to work. My point of meditation this week:

Onward and awkward!

This evening while I was being adorable and slinging beers, I caught a story on Campbell Brown that a dealership in Michigan is giving free AK-47s to purchasers of new trucks. One lonely man on my left, one on my right. I threw my hands in the air and made incredulous noises. “AN AK 47?!?! What could you possibly DO with an AK 47? Who NEEDS an AK 47?!”

Man on right says, “Uhh, you DON’T.”

Man on left says, “Oh, that’s for when they come to repossess your truck.”

AND THEN I NEVER STOPPED LAUGHING.