lycanthropia

And not a moment too soon says I, huddled safely on the sofa beneath the yellow wedding-ring quilt, with mineral water within arm’s reach.

Not that it’s particularly wintry here, or even cold; last night was down to freezing but then today I sat in the sun in the backyard and ate strawberries. So I can’t really complain. It’s just that I have a particular history with February, with its being a terrible month in which terrible things happen to me and/or I do them to myself. Climbing up mountains and falling down them and so forth. So I am grateful to watch another February sliding into the past and leaving me well and sound and mostly totally unscathed.

Pyewacket is blissed out passed out on my lap making typing nearly impossible, or I would say more. And maybe I will say more tomorrow once it is safely March, which is always a good month because my birthday is in it. And the equinox. And the start of spring.

I’ve been watching inane Youtube clips for hours, I won’t even link them because they have made me feel really dumb. But I can’t read for anything, can’t concentrate, I don’t know why. It is maddening. Out of I suppose boredom (which I have always thought was a mild form of anger or irritation) I finally unblocked my ex on Facebook and it was completely uneventful. I don’t feel anything, only a slight but sincere pity, which is condescending of me but that was what I felt tonight. Maybe another time I will feel another kind of something.

And I am waiting, waiting, waiting for the five PhD programs and the one fellowship to contact me. March is also the month of notifications so that is always kind of interesting, after a long winter of waiting, to see where you will be in a few months’ time, what address you will be writing on the boxes and the forms, or if you will be going anywhere at all. I am not even sure I want to go anywhere, but I know I probably should. Otherwise I will stay in this town and always have this physical pull of knowing roughly where he is and what he is doing. When I was in DC for AWP it was wonderful, I felt free and young and like a person again, this was maybe partly because we were walking everywhere and taking the Metro and it feels wonderful to get around on my own physical power, not eternally slumped behind a steering wheel like a drone, and also partly because I had a crush, and yet I think mostly because I was in a city without him in it. I felt so good. I want to feel that free again, in my city. Whichever city it will turn out to be.

My friend Laura sent me a very nice horoscope which promises I will have all kinds of revelations and insights; it says in part,

Your craving to be free is real. The restlessness you’re feeling is not something you want to medicate away, talk yourself out of, or pretend does not exist. It’s not merely spring fever, though that’s a good way to describe your whole life. Rather, what you’re feeling is your soul calling you to wake up to your beauty and the beauty of life….

On the other hand, in slightly dampening news my friend who is exactly one day younger than I am and who is a midwife tells me we will probably start being menopausal at around 45. I thought I had until 50, but clearly I really will be childless now, unless I adopt, which I might do some day if I have any money which I never will. I have hated having periods all my life but now I feel each one is actually, and I know this is so obnoxious you will want to slap me, but I feel each one is singular and precious. I don’t mind them anymore. Sure they hurt but then at least there’s something going on down there (which reminds me of late Texas governor Ann Richards joking about getting frisked by airport security because she was wearing one of those leotards with metal snaps at the crotch).

I drive around with the air conditioner on low, because I am always wearing a sweater and it’s hot in the car, and I listen over and over to Patty Griffin’s album Impossible Dream. I’ve had it for years but it’s like I’ve never heard it before. Songs like “Florida” and “Mother of God” and “Rowing Song” and “Icicles,” songs for which I didn’t much care six years ago, are now so desolate and redolent for me that I get gooseflesh when I hear them, driving along and singing, singing. They are natural songs for me to sing, falling easily in my range, with my sharp rural soprano that matches hers, the voice of those “hill women” with whom CD Wright identifies:

I have no trouble spotting myself: bony but strong as a weed, an abiding refusal to smile or sing; a relentless if not brutal honesty; streaks of the mean, the grotesque in humor. Thomas Hardy’s descriptions of the peasant yeomanry of England…are likewise faithful to my relations: “blond, grey-eyed, slim, with straight mouths, determined chins, independent and hidebound, adaptable to circumstances, free of outside influences, not complacent and don’t fight well unless cornered. Then to the death.”

(That little autobiographical essay of hers was gospel to me at twenty-five.)

Nothing I have to say tonight is as galvanizing as those songs.

I am craving fettuccini alla carbonara pancetta from Giuseppi’s, an unexpectedly amazing ristorante cleverly concealed in yet another mud-colored Arizona strip mall. I would have ordered the pasta with a side dish of deep green grilled rapini and a glass of buttery oaky Chardonnay which is not a wine I usually care for but I liked the taste Beth let me have out of her glass when we went there. I may go tomorrow night, if anyone wants to go with me. To celebrate surviving until another March.

(The cat has moved to my feet and it’s possible to type now.)

(But now I can’t think of anything to say.)

(Which pretty much sums up February.)

isn’t it hard sometimes
isn’t it lonely
how I still hang around here
with nothing to hold me

Dearest ———,

Good morning, from the land where I say “morning” even though it’s 3 pm, because this is the first email of the day and so it is officially morning as far as WE are concerned.

Alas, in news of the crazy meds, I still can’t read for shit (flipping through/skimming Wilkie Collins every night in a most reprehensible way), but today on day three FINALLY the increased dose of Effexor has kicked in (37.5 x 3 instead of 37.5 x 2) and I feel so much better, I can’t even begin to tell you. And then I have the same bright thought I usually do after such episodes: “Holy crap, I’ve been really depressed!” It’s not an original thought, but one that strikes me every time with such force that only then do I realize how miserable I’ve been, and for how long. It’s so strange that a bitter little pill can make me able to do my life easily, as opposed to feeling like I’m being asked to push mud uphill with every breath.

I notice I am still driving looking through the steering wheel instead of over it, so I am not out of the woods yet. Although I skipped yogalates yesterday in favor of putting comments (!) on eight (!) papers. Now there are only 16 left and those trickling in. Somehow I will survive this.

It’s funny, I don’t yet know how to have a blog that’s not about the crazy and/or boyfriend Boyfriend BOYFRIEND. Today for no particular reason I remembered a dream he told me about last year, a dream in which I tried to give him a copy of The Ethical Slut, which he contemptuously refused. The male dreamer refused to take the book of wisdom from the feminine, in the dream, because he wanted his own male version—he didn’t want to accept the feminine’s version of what “ethical” meant for him.

It seems that every so often I still have to remind myself that what he did wasn’t polyamory, it was just dishonest.

Funny story: a dear recovering-alcoholic drummer friend (not my ex-boyfriend, there are multiple ones in my life apparently) left an Amanda Palmer video on my FB wall, and then, when I didn’t comment for a few days, commented herself sarcastically, something like “Oh thank you so much for this, it was so interesting!”—and what did I do? I reacted immediately and apologetically: “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, I’ve been really down lately and hadn’t watched it, I’m watching it now”—and I was watching it (and quite enjoying it) when I realized: I am still springing into action whenever an alcoholic has a hurt feeling and blames me for it, taking responsibility as though it were mine.

Translation: I am not allowed to date for a good long while still. But we knew this.

Although a good friend proposed that I should have a fling with someone, that it would do me good. Whereupon we had this conversation.

Friend: For example, where are you going tonight?
Me: I have a hot date with my sweatpants and a Robert Downey movie.
Friend [looks at me assessingly]: You should have a fling.
Me: I want to have a fling! Get me a fling! Why does no one want to fling with me?
Friend: Um, SWEATPANTS?
Me: Oh. Right.

And now I return to my gluten-free organic chicken nuggets (which I will make for you someday, with the coconut milk and the almond meal) and the Robert Downey movie (Zodiac). Frankly the sexiest thing I’ve seen in weeks was The Wire‘s mayor-elect Thomas Carcetti rebuffing the advances of someone who is not his wife. It gave me serious tinglegina. I am aroused by fidelity, now.

And speaking of sweatpants, I am on my last clean pair, and my last clean pair of knickers too, and I bought socks after AWP but am even down to my last pair of those. Also Pyewacket ate a gigantic wad of grass and then was psychedelically, grandly sick all over the bedsheets, so tomorrow = laundry day.

PS—there’s a longish post in me on Zen and sexual ethics; and a review of three different extra-dark chocolate bars; but sufficient unto the day is the bloviating thereof.

Lying in the dark, dabbing on eye cream and half-asleep already, thinking, I let her down, I cannot tell her what she needs to, must believe. Thinking, I am barren myself, how can I hold out any promise to her, even though I feel it in my bones to be true? That her glow will not be wasted? That she will meet someone big-hearted enough to meet her head-on, and fully? Then I think: I am the bad witch at the christening, I can’t hold out any hope. All I have to offer is what the poet called “that consolation prize, literature.” All I can say is that when men and women again and again backed away from me in a cloud of many words, so many words but at the heart of all the words burning the single bright rosebud NO—when they all found me wanting and pushed away from me, I wrote. I wrote straight out of that rejection. Everything I’ve ever written has come right from that fire.

So if I am honest, that is all I can offer. Not a promise of a someday brave-enough, man-enough lover. But of what to do when again and again there isn’t anyone true enough for what is au fond a relatively simple task: just being there day after day, like coffee or bread or dogs or shoes. (I don’t find it impossible to do—difficult, yes, but not impossible—and have never understood why other people find it so hard.)

(I know when I see my ex-partner next, if I ever do, he will say how much he’s missed me. And I will smile, with my head to one side, not a pleasant smile, and say, “Yet not prohibitively so.”)

Write, sweetheart. Don’t waste your time writing to your beloved, now, but write it bigger than that. Write love poems and epistolary poems and furious blood-curdling cold hatred poems. That’s all I have. I’m sorry. I wish it were more, or different, or more peaceable.

But the truth is that what I have is no peace. I have only those ragged, uneven ink tattoos that prisoners make on the backs of their own hands.

Suddenly the crazy is in full force, exactly as if it were November and me not yet stable on meds. Within three days I’m too depressed to drag a brush through my hair.  Just walking from one room to another feels like moving through wet concrete. Everything tastes like cardboard and it’s hard to hold my head up. I can’t sit upright even when driving, I kind of have to look through the steering wheel. One of the yoga teachers asked me tonight what was wrong and I just looked up at her blankly, without words even to begin to explain. It’s bewildering and frustrating to take such a big step backward and not even know why, what caused it, what I should do about it. Was it the pinot grigio? The toaster waffles? The two days I accidentally forgot to take my antidepressant? Was it last week’s upswing and poem-writing, was that hypomanic, is this the inevitable crash?

It’s kind of hard to care, to be honest. Mostly I just am focused on doing what I have to do.

So I make an emergency therapy appointment to talk about what to do next and am in my therapist’s office, randomly showing off my new blog (we’d been trying to work on some of my procrastination issues, so I’d brought my laptop along). I scroll down, narrating various photographs/entries, until we get to the picture of my ex I posted a few days ago. She starts laughing.

“What?”

“Oh well, just—I mean, talk about apparently insigificant actions that leave the door open for targeted problem behaviors in the future!” she responds, in fluent DBT.

I stare at her for a beat. Then I start laughing too. And then I take his picture down (though I was proud of the colors and composition of the photo).

Sometimes I love behavioral therapy.

Though we still don’t know why I’m so depressed. I left a message with my pdoc’s receptionist, to see whether I should maybe double up on meds for awhile. And otherwise I just keep dragging myself along.

Stubbornness is maybe my best trait when it comes to battling depression. I get very dogged and just automatically, mechanically carry on without varying my approach. It may be a trait I learned as a Zen student, for that matter: Just follow the simple schedule. You don’t question, you don’t have bright ideas about how to do it differently or better, you just eat what they put in your bowl and sit when you’re told to sit and clean the temple when it’s time and then go to bed when the candles are extinguished (or “disenlightened” as a Swiss friend used to say, much to my great delight).

So I woodenly ate my frozen lasagne and took my evening meds and now I’m putting myself dutifully to bed to read Wilkie Collins and then go to sleep. Sleep is the great relief, a period of time during which there are no pointy thoughts, just vague bad dreams I can’t remember, but not that brain full of shrapnel which makes almost every thought conclude, “…and thus you are a terrible person who doesn’t deserve to live.” It’s funny to think that all that mentation and ratiocination, masquerading so cleverly as real rationality, is actually more or less mere manifestations of brain chemistry. Or anyway thinking this makes the brain-shrapnel less deadly. At least it gives me something to say back to it, like Scrooge trying to scare away the Ghost of Christmas Past by telling it it’s but a bit of undigested beef.

And I hate everything I’ve just now written, but in my obdurate way I post it nonetheless. I did manage before the crazy hit full-force to send out six batches of poems, and I’m still waiting to hear from three magazines and one book publisher anyway. If I can’t have love, I’ll have literature, the consolation prize. I am as mulishly determined about this as about putting clean sheets on the bed even when I don’t want to, because the other sheets are indescribable from all the cat hair. Love you all.

The last couple of posts have been a little angsty even for my taste, which is saying something. I don’t know why, but the crazy’s really been acting up the last couple of days. Well, let’s chalk it up to the pinot grigio (the remainder of which I gave away to a good friend) and move on.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about artistic big sisters—artists who come sometimes just a few years before me, whose work is slightly (or hugely) ahead of mine, who give me permission to do something I haven’t had the nerve to do before—the ones whose lipstick and sweaters I try on experimentally, padding my bra with some Kleenex to see how womanhood looks on me. Here are a handful who’ve been on my mind just in the last 48 hours, even in the midst of all my self-engrossed February miseries.

Pam Greer

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, music was really bringing cultures and races and religions together. It was so ripe and sweet and had all these flavors—incense and patchouli oil and sitar, Ravi Shankar and Buddhism and chanting and Tolstoy and Keats and Homer, R&B and Fillmore East and West, and so much stuff happening. I wish we’d had a time machine to take all of the young ones—Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys and Smash Mouth and Nirvana and the White Stripes—take them back to that time of revolution and music. I can’t even come close to describing it. In 1975, I went home to Colorado, and I was skiing in Aspen with Jack Nicholson and Hunter S. Thompson and Ed Bradley, the late CBS correspondent who went up there and bought a home. At that time we were listening to “Hotel California,” Funkadelic, Philly soul and Motown. It was still acid and coke and weed and music and just a wonderful communion. And then the ‘80s came, with the business and the stock market, and that’s when it all changed.

We were singing at the Reverend James Cleveland’s church in Watts, and the third day we were there, the Watts Riots broke out. The city was burning, bullets were flying and we were stranded. One church member took us into his apartment, so there were literally 30 kids and six adults in a one-bedroom apartment. After three days we got out, because we were running out of money and food. After that, the tour was over. It was scary, seeing a black community in absolute war. I was 12 or 13 at the time, and that was the beginning of reality for me. I realized America was at war.

Rebecca Solnit

Being told that, categorically, he knows what he’s talking about and she doesn’t, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world. Several years ago, I objected to the behavior of a couple of men, only to be told on both occasions that the incidents hadn’t happened at all as I said they had, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.

Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history has helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women are out there on this 6-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining Things, but it’s part of the same archipelago of arrogance.

Dana Levin

Levin’s aching but restrained third collection is an attempt to quite literally come to terms with the deaths of loved ones (“The father died and then the mother died / And you were so addicted // to not feeling them, you told no one about the clamp / inside,” writes Levin). To find the terms she needs, Levin (Wedding Day) hunts in some very far-flung places, including Tibetan and Aztec rituals, Wikipedia, correspondence with close friends, “the symbol book” and the University of Tennessee. These poems are alternately cryptic and crystal clear, though Levin says, in the stunning “Letter to GC,” “I would be disingenuous if I said ‘being understood’ is not important to me.” Of course, what language we can find for grief is often ambivalent and complex, as these poems attest. Levin delves into esoteric mourning, burial, and religious practices—”They weren’t really gods, they were / ‘emanations’”—resurfacing not so much with answers as, to paraphrase Frost, momentary stays against confusion. She finds little in the way of lasting comfort, but much permanent poetry.

Margaret Cho

There are things that I have held onto for decades, these events that define me, that control my everyday lady actions, even at 42, even at the lady successful level of charmed existence that I lead. No matter how many dreams I have dreamed and realized, these nightmares still haunt me. I’ve never grown up really. They are small things. Barely a blip in the consciousness of another, but a deep unrelenting scar that aches for eternity in me. [27 January 2011]

What I was unprepared for was the tidal wave of compliments and comments and generalized insanity about what I perceive to be my (relatively) unchanged body. Of course, I think I look great now, but I thought I looked great before. I am sure I am insane, but I am the type of person who receives and answers a compliment with a pang of suffering at having not heard the praise before. I don’t take in the sweet words, I only remember the times when they were not forthcoming. I live in the lack. [9 November 2010]

I had a nightmare that night where I was trying to eat the inside of a loaf of unsliced wheat bread and my teeth were stuck in the doughy middle, falling out and staying in the bread, bloodying the thing, making the hard swallows thick and copper tasting. I have many dreams in which I lose my teeth because when I was little a young gay man was killed outside the bookstore that my parents owned. He had been gay bashed and they never found the people who did it. it was so horrible and terrifying and we found his teeth outside the store for weeks afterwards. Ever since then, broken teeth are scattered throughout the landscape of my nightmares: sometimes mine, sometimes his—but they are always there, the teeth. [25 October 2010]

Winona Ryder

Ryder’s in [Black Swan] for maybe ten minutes, and all of them are crazy and important. She’s the former ingenue who refuses to go quietly when Cassel pushes her aside in favor of Portman. The character is a raging mascara-smeared wreck who embodies, in a Ghost of Christmas Future kind of way, everything the movie has to say about the terrible toll performance extracts from young women.

It’s about ballerinas, but it could just as easily be about actresses. And maybe it is, really. Ryder’s 39, a former ingenue herself, and casting her as the cracked-mirror version of Portman, who’s ten years younger and an exemplar of a breed of actress that essentially didn’t exist as a Hollywood commodity pre-Winona, opens up all kinds of meta-resonances. It’s the best role Ryder has had in years, but you could imagine some actresses having second thoughts about steering straight into that subtext.

Ryder didn’t, though. “I thought it was a cool parallel,” she says. “Being replaced by the young thing. I know that definitely happens in Hollywood. It’s harder to find good roles, and suddenly there’s new girls. I’m at that age I’ve been warned my whole life about.” [...]

It’s hard not to look at her arc and the arc of somebody like Robert Downey Jr., who starred with Ryder in 1988′s 1969 and then again in Scanner, and was a far bigger mess than Ryder before he became a superhero, and wonder if Hollywood and/or the American viewing public has different rules for fallen women and fallen men. But maybe she would have wound up here anyway.

Sitting here putting away the pinot grigio morosely, I just realized: tonight is the six-year anniversary of me trying to kill myself on Atalaya Mountain with sleeping pills and cheap brandy and hypothermia but then blacking out and down-climbing and getting search-and-rescued and admitted to the psych unit at St. Vincent at like 5 a.m. and not dying after all, unlike Hunter S. Thompson who successfully dispatched himself that same night.

So there’s that.

“The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment…is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.” (Simone Weil)

Wake at ten and don’t get out of bed until two, paralytic. In the night, three in the morning, be awakened by overwhelming desire for the ex-lover, your craving for his breath, weight, scent, voice. Suffer astonished the visceral totalizing reifying memory of being locked with him tightly, both of you always a little surprised by it, that in middle age and after nearly five years you still had so much passion for each other. Feel it all over again, in a writhing, face in the pillow, frightening kind of intensity, thankless and grim. Having fallen so hard for him in such a lasting, domestic as well as cerebral, kind of way. Feel that permanence still ringing in your bones. That you were entrusted with beekeeping something sacred, and he has departed with such apparent willingness from it. And that you are left here alone, as Winterson said, on a rock hewn out of your own body, alone keeping the sacred fires. Write poems as tatted doilies that don’t soak up nearly enough blood, microscopes rather than telescopes to plumb a fathomless night sky. Go six months without so much as seeing him and then be awakened in the middle of the night almost able to taste his mouth he seems so near, and it is as if no time had passed at all, so sudden and uninterrupted as to make you laugh with astonishment. Distract, distract. Play Scrabble in a coffee shop, drink cinnamon plum tea, rosy and honeyed. Drink liquor only because now you can. Chat with friends, chat, chat. Take a cold shower and chair a twelve-step meeting in your black leather jacket, because you’re a rockstar. Laugh breathless at yourself, as in love as any schoolgirl. Light the pomegranate candle and look at his picture, which a friend has called sinister. Know that the circuit breaker of the body cannot be turned off no matter what the disaster, no matter how thorough his betrayals. Know that hugging a pillow can open the heart chakra from behind, through the shoulder blades, and induce sobbing when the chest feels wrung dry. Know that if he came through the door, even the cat would recognize him, would turn her belly upward for kisses. Know that he won’t come through the door, won’t call, won’t write, is gone. Feel the body opened, emptied and waiting, poised like a clear glass in the seconds before bright water could be poured in.

Suddenly the blog is too small for all the things I want to say, all the words that are burning in me—suddenly the piece of paper is too small for the poem, I drive down to the college town for therapy and stop at a drugstore to refill my psych med prescriptions—$90, my co-pay having mysteriously gone from $25 to $45—and I also buy poster board, I am going to write my new poem on the wall with markers, try to visualize it, try to make a bigger space, to use different colors, to say different things. Suddenly there is all this sparking creativity and I have to grab a pen while driving to catch the words as they zoom past, suddenly things seem enormous and yet possible, suddenly, suddenly.

Wonderfully subtle berry flavor, creamy color, and SPF 20

Is this a bad thing? Is it an insignificant thing? Is it hypomania? Is it relief that I don’t teach again until next week? Is it a symptom, is it pathological, or just a natural part of being a person and therefore creative, this sudden uptick in mood, this sudden expansiveness? After buying meds I spend more money I don’t really have, I buy organic strawberries, a lovely new lip balm, mineral water, socks. (Though I need socks, mine are all growing holes and I don’t know how to darn socks as my mother did, putting a light bulb inside one of my dad’s dress socks and threading black thread carefully up and down through the warp or weft of the knitted heel.)

I go to a poetry reading, Jeannine Savard and Cynthia Hogue, both with new books from Red Hen Press, and afterward browse the bookstore and buy Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White because all my friends are reading it and it suddenly seems I must read it too. Suddenly I remember, music! music exists! and I drive around the college town listening to Tori Amos and Eva Cassidy and belting out songs along with them, driving past my ex’s house and refusing even to turn my head to look at it. On my cellphone I call friends, leave messages sprinkled across the continent. Suddenly my solitude seems thrilling and filled with information, rich with meaning. Suddenly.

The thing to watch for is the collapse, the charred despair that sometimes follows these periods of excitement, the deflation and the accounting for. Today is also my late friend’s birthday, or it would have been his birthday, and I still don’t know what to make of the fact that I can remember him so vividly, his soft percipient laugh, his thin voice, the angle of his body in a blue cotton shirt and jeans; and that he isn’t here anymore, and yet is still so very here in my mind, is confusing. It is confusing. And I don’t know why he did it. I mean, I don’t really know why; I mean I do know in some way, I have made attempts, essays on my own life, essayer as in to try, to try very hard; but in the end my fear and my dumb animal survival instinct won out both times, Plath’s old brag of the heart, I am, I am, I am.

I don’t know. I know I am obsessed with this image of the nest, the nest with eggs in it. I am going to paint it tomorrow, draw it and paint it, I am obsessed with blueberries and the color blue, rich soft crayon blue, I am obsessed with the fragrance of vanilla and with playing the piano, with trying to reproduce vanilla and blueberry on a keyboard. I can’t play the piano right now because the casita is too small so both electric pianos are in storage under my bed. Instead I am sitting here eating strawberries and playing this keyboard. Each letter has a color and each number, like each musical key. I never have thought anything about this, I always assumed that was the case for everyone. I don’t know, perhaps it is.

The best thing to do is to put myself to bed at a reasonable hour, the influenza of this particular star can cause a body to think she can stay up all night working, writing, playing and doesn’t need sleep, and not sleeping is the worst thing for it, hastens the crash. So to bed with me, soberly. And regular meals, not just grazing but “food off a plate” as my BFF and I call it. I am also obsessed today with celestial maps, constellations, representations of galaxies and stars. I want to write a book called Celestial, or, no, a book entitled Constellate. I want the cover to be a rich dark blue shot through and riddled with scattered stars. I haven’t ever before attempted a public prose representation of what it is like to have all the ideas and words and possibilities multiplying combinatorily in my head, factors intersecting and cancelling each other out but then replying with new iterations of themselves and ghosts of those selves refreshing and multiplying again.

If that makes sense which I rather doubt.

So instead of trying to figure out what I’m wittering on about, watch this about-to-go-viral video. For some reason with my current mind-ground I think this is the funniest thing I have ever seen, a giant baby trashing a bar drunkenly. Is it because toddlers do so often seem like tiny belligerent alcoholics? (Thus the wry designation in AA, “King Baby.”) Is it because my ex and I have seen similar persons inebriated in Mexico so many times? Is it the tiny wristwatch, fanny pack and touristy hat with which the baby has been outfitted? I don’t really know. I just know I generally start cry-laughing around the point when she stands up unsteadily and knocks over the palm tree behind her table. I guess this is what MFK Fisher thinks headwaiters are worried about when she writes with pride about being able to hold her liquor. Babies are all little tipplers, as this video plainly shows.

And I’ll try to write more coherently or anyway less hysterically tomorrow.

The students never know what is really going on inside my brain, which, thank God. It has saved me, my carefully constructed teaching persona. I wisecrack my way along, feign aplomb, antic my way through the syllabus, clown against my inner waver, challenge them with active learning not least so they won’t notice my hands shaking. Me to one student: “Please tell me you’re not on Facebook. Please tell me that is not what I see.” Her: “I’m posting all the funny things you say as my status updates!” I make commanding close-the-laptop gestures and frown dramatically. They know both that I am not angry and that I am exacting. I ask a question and the entire class responds except for one young man, so I immediately turn to him for the answer. “There’s nowhere to hide,” I tell him sweetly, and when he protests: “And there’s no crying in baseball.” We get through the hour and a half together, somehow. They’re going to be horrified when their seemingly super-fun English teacher hands back a bunch of Cs and B-minuses next week. I count on that reality check to bring them up short and induce panic. I teach by means of confusion, misdirection, frustration. My teaching style thrives on irritating students to a point just short of rage.

And I tell myself, twice a week, driving to school: There’s no motherfucking crying in motherfucking baseball.