The Meat of It

"I was a dark dumb student, no hokey rookie daytrippin' on visions of chickens that looked like R. Crumb drew 'em." - Aesop Rock

Sometimes I wish I wasn't so transparent. Now I wear it like it was going out of style -- what better fashion trend than shirts with true camouflage potential, sheer in patterns of skull-and-crossbones, fleur-de-lis, and old French flora?

Went to Wes Wickham's welcome-back party tonight and I had a great time... until, of course, coinciding with feeling hormonally awful, I kept ending up in discussions with people who were very sad, or tragic by nature, or, yes - - by now you've guessed it -- I started to see my own sadness in everyone's situation. That phase, if you don't recognize it as it's happening, tends to shrivel your soul down to the size of a peanut.

Had a great time making pizza over the weekend, you know how it goes -- make the sauce, cook it down, slice up billions of delicious items into pizza-tiny pieces, grate most of the good cheese in the western hemisphere; combine with meat or not; bake; eat. I even made a white pizza with bacon and these DELICIOUS balsamic-preserved sweet onions and fresh basil and a couple kinds of sweet pepper. Two days of work, but sooooo worth it.

And fortunately, or unfortunately, since I can never figure out which, weekend was followed by two days of opportunities -- business, mostly -- and yet, I woke up weeping this morning from a dream about my older sister. WELCOME, three days of feeling-like-the-world's-going-to-end, super-glad I get to bleed for five days after that! Very grateful for all the good music that's been coming my way in the last three weeks -- it keeps all the end-of-the-world feelings at bay.

Here's hoping I don't hoover up every sugary item in the house right now.

Sooooo... I love rocks. A while back my fella gave me a tourmaline, a marquis-cut green one, and I just had it set in a ring. When I received stones or jewelry, especially rings, as gifts in the past, I felt ambivalent and conflicted -- rings symbolize boundaries and bondage as well as unity and devotion. I went down to the jewelers' place (awesome couple, married for 54 years, he's been a jeweler since he was 22) to pick it up, and when I somewhat apprehensively put it on, I was surprised by a feeling of lightness, of joy. I HAVE been reading Anne LaMott's "Joe Jones," so maybe it was somehow related to that -- tourmaline has always been one of my favorite stones, though, and green tourmaline is associated with creativity, prosperity, abundance, and compassion, and is supposed to represent life energy and life force. In rock world, there's a color of tourmaline for every chakra, and green tourmaline is supposed to open the heart chakra. Well, despite my apprehension, I feel like my heart is open. You have to risk your heart to love.

SWEET. Not so sick anymore, and really glad about that. I did many heroic things, including take a bath, read for longer than five minutes, and put actual pants (not weird sick-ville sweatpants) on!

Made a bunch of peanut butter cookies today, for someone who declares they will make him my slave. I can always use more slaves.

And, after much deliberation, finally decided on the shape my Halloween costume will take -- red devil sounds easy, but I had to choose among three kinds of horns, three kinds of gloves, four gowns, and three pairs of boots I had from current/previous costumes -- I had to secure a pitchfork/trident that would work (I wanted one that would light up when I poked somebody with it, but alas) -- it was kind of complicated. I love this holiday!

Aargh, I've been sick for four days now and my ribs hurt from coughing so hard. I hate those colds that have you so severely congested you can only sleep sitting up. And I had a bad fever for the first three days so I was cold ALL the time during the day, then roasting in the fires of hell at night, then waking up shivering at 3 a.m.

I'm loving the weird sense of reality that descends when you watch bad or good or just mediocre television for a long time, punctuated by naps.

OK, back to sleep.

This is an excerpt of "Places to Drink Outside in Halifax" by Amy Jones, from Maisonneuve #32:

Not many people know how a cemetery looks in the dark. But Abby does. She knows how the sky turns purple, how the moon looks like an orange. How the headlights from the cars on the road outside shatter through the heavy wrought iron fence and heave into sky. She knows the tombstones look almost fake, as if they were props in a play: Styrofoam cutouts painted with gray acrylic, sitting on bright green tissue-paper grass. How the Keith's monument stands high and mighty, pointing at the sky like a giant middle finger rising out of the mess below.

That mess. It is all wrong. Abby is drunk and indignant. Her head bobbing as she surveys the beer cans strewn all around the base of the monument. You're supposed to drink the beer and then place the can carefully at the base of the monument, or if there's room, find a place on the ledge. You can kiss the rim of the can or stick a flower in the mouth of the can, roses or daisies or whatever, or if you can't find any flowers you can use leaves or twigs, things lying on the ground. That is what you are supposed to do to honour Mr. Alexander Keith, on his birthday.

I'm so glad it's Friday. I've been snowed under with work, which makes me a) not want to work and b) not want to read or write. I feel bad for not wanting to work after all the hard-luck stories I heard on Monday, but I am working in spite of that. And, uh, except for this post I'm writing, ha!

Saw a very sad incident on Wednesday before I went sailing. A young couple on their honeymoon left their two young Labradors in their car for a couple hours, and they came back to one dead dog and one barely-alive one. It was a pretty overcast day during most of the day, and they were visiting from somewhere else, they'd been on the road with the dogs for a couple of days. There were food, water, and two nice kennels
in the back of the little SUV. It seemed pretty clear that they weren't, you know, TRYING to kill the dogs. They were just sobbing when they realized what they'd done, while trying to revive the dog who was still alive. Passer-by reactions were not very helpful, either - I watched a few actually yell at the couple, the man standing with the dead dog in his arms and tears running down his face, as they were trying to deal with the tragedy.

That kind of thing makes some people really angry regardless of the context, I think because they feel helpless, but all I felt was sadness, for the dogs and the couple. After the animal control officer and the couple had gone up to the vet's office, there was a lot of heated discussion about dogs in vehicles, etc., and it's continuing, two days later. I've known a lot of people who've lost their dogs to theft from their vehicles, either because someone just straight up wants the dog and takes it, or the dog's friendly so off he goes. Someone related a really disturbing news story he'd seen on a local TV station about a teen-ager who broke into a car and deliberately injured the small dog inside.

A very friendly German shepherd I knew when I was younger, Max, belonged to a neighbor who was a long-haul trucker bachelor. When the trucker couldn't take Max with him on trips, his neighbors would cheerfully take care of Max, because he was a GREAT dog, he'd mind kids and escort them to and from the playground which was a few blocks away. Somebody drove up in the dead of night and just took him, right out of the fenced yard (someone was actually at the house that night and was awakened by the sounds, called the cops, but they couldn't get there fast enough). My friend Teresa's very friendly cocker spaniel was stolen out of her fenced yard one summer evening, and was recovered eight months later at a meth house in another coastal town about three hours north of here, but he'd been so badly abused that he hated people and the vet told her it would be best for the dog if he was euthanized - just WRECKED her and her son.

After that, I was really glad to get out on the water for the race. The Hatfield Marine Science Center was reading winds up to 28 knots, so we weren't sure we'd be able to go out, but the wind is always higher where it runs up against South Beach. On the bay it was a beautiful steady 10-to-15, just enough to keep the skipper (who grew up in Alaska) and me cool under the hot (well, 72 degrees) sun. More boats than usual came out for this race, and there were about four that were comparable to ours in size and class, so we had some good competition this time. But we still won. Afterward we went to Don Ho's place and ate king crab legs, tempura halibut and tuna! So glad he's back from fishing for a while.

Glad the weekend is here! Even though I'll probably be working some during it.

OK, so I feel dumb, but does anyone know how to work the date/time entries in LJ?

"I only wish LJ's "edit posting time" WORKED correctly. It doesn't." This was a friend's recent post and I have also experience this problem; when I tried to discover why, I was a little snowed on the whole 'how to find out" process. I went all through the FAQs, but still couldn't find anything.

SO, finally I feel like I should write - a friend and I were talking earlier about the numerous abandoned journals/blogs/diaries with which we've littered the landscape over the course of our lives. I hate thinking about the number, since each one means I tried something and failed. But, as she said, after many comments about perfectionism and self-censorship, "As I get older, I care less and less about what people think about what I write." We agreed that it was a good attitude to have if we're going to start a journal. I wish I felt that way more strongly - I tend to edit what I write to the point of, you know, deleting it altogether. I'm also inspired by a friend's decision to start a local blog for the community in which I live (which, surprisingly for the demographic, has no such animal right now). And wander has been an inspiration altogether: he's been a part of the LiveJournal community since 2000, so just through reading his archived posts I've been able to see how the net of awareness, knowledge and support is so strong.

But reading E.B. White's essays has given me a new outlook. He writes often in these essays about how much his writing SUCKED when he was younger (he gives a lot of examples, and they DO, but they fuel the point he was trying to make), or when he was experimenting with a new style of or voice in writing, or as change affected him. My teachers always told me that to do a thing well, you have to do it a LOT, and just trust that eventually you'll get better or you'll learn it's not for you. I have a lot of hope, since John McPhee, Lewis Lapham, and George Plimpton all wrote, at different times, about the gap between their abilities and the end results.

Earlier today, in the space of 10 minutes, I made a friend of a web designer because she had shared an interesting comment. I know it's not a new phenomenon, but I still love how quickly you can make a cyber-space connection that is NOT based on any of the following: geographical location, occupation, gender, face-to-face interaction, education, family status, income, background and yeah, sexual preference.

I feel more inspired to write as I encounter more LiveJournal entries. LJ really is that rare thing in the writing universe -- the old roundtable, the coffee circle, the newsroom, the "Ask Abby" mailbox, the living room -- where the people who like to write are also the people who care about each other.