lycanthropia

Oh shit, this doesn’t mean I have to start writing something interesting now? Because I don’t think I can actually do that.

So I won’t try. Caveat lector. Move along now.

Today’s another gray day, with those low fast-moving wispy-curdled Gulf clouds scudding overhead. If my childhood memories of Texas winter are at all accurate, I can expect more such in the next couple of months. If I get to stay here. Pye sits in the doorway and looks at me like there’s something I could do, if I only would. I pet her, tell her I’d make it sunny if it were up to me. Though I’m starting to like lying in bed half-asleep listening to rain.

Last night I discovered that if you go running when you’re terrified, you actually run a lot faster and farther! Which makes sense—it’s what all that adrenaline is meant for, after all. I’m nearly back up to where I was when I arbitrarily quit running August 1. I will never stop again, unless I break a leg or something. My goal is still to be able to circumnavigate the dirt path around Rice University (3 miles) by the end of the spring semester. Be nice if I could do it at a pretty swift clip, too.

After I showered, the neighbor and I went for half-price Tex-Mex at the glorious El Real, which is housed inexplicably in an old movie theater, then came back to my place and drank beer and talked &c. assiduously, taking breaks to watch Fearless, a Jet Li wuxia flick, ostensibly for my Women & Gender in World Cinema class? though that’s weird because there aren’t actually any women in the movie? just talking girl-shaped fortune cookies wearing Chinese kimono?

The word “spinster” is in my head a lot lately, and I can remember when I was a fiery second-wave undergraduate and I was all WOOOO YEAH BABY LET’S RECLAIM SPINSTER AS MEANING A COOL WISE INDEPENDENT WOMYN! and now where did that go? Where’s all my Adrienne Rich when I need it? Why is that word so cobwebby and chin-hairy and ringing in my head like unto the knell of doom?

Besides if spinsters spend the evening the way I did last night, I can’t really complain.

So, okay, my days may be numbered. Our days are numbered anyway. If Maman’s death taught me nothing else.

On Saturday I got to spend a couple of precious hours with my blonde Amazon godsister Z. We hadn’t seen each other in maybe five years. I was over an hour late, thanks to Google Maps having sent me to another restaurant called Santa Fe Flats in a totally wrong part of the city. So I drove furiously up the 249 to Tomball, fuming and cursing and half-weeping, having to stop at Target in the middle of urban nowhere and buy an actual paper map, I was so lost (everyone in the store looking at me blankly, “Where are the maps?” um yes well we don’t have an ANTIQUITIES department).

But when I parked and got out of the car and saw her face, looking so damn much like her mother’s, I burst into tears. I think I hid it pretty well, but maybe not. Her children both beautiful, flawless the way toddlers are. Her two-year-old daughter’s enormous blue eyes and textbook blonde curls. As a family they make my heart hurt, in a good way. And Z. is hilarious and sharp-tongued and wry and brainy in all the same ways she always was. She should be the state governor.

Coincidentally Santa Fe Flats turns out to be the only New Mexican restaurant in town, which meant they have real Hatch green and red chile, and I ordered huevos rancheros Christmas-style and blasted out all my sinus cavities, and then my headcold was GONE. Just GONE. Chiles are magic.

Z. told me she comes to Houston a couple of times a year, so I didn’t hug her goodbye as desperately as I wanted to, like clinging to her clothing and refusing to let go etc.

Driving home weeping, I found myself strangely missing that horrible time in the hospital, and the long months afterward. I don’t even understand how that’s possible, but there you have it. I remember these size 2 shorts I bought for like $5 at K-Mart one afternoon because it was so unbelievably hot in San Antonio. I’m sure they wouldn’t even fit on one leg now. I remember locking myself in the bathroom so I could methodically beat my face and upper body. I remember reading all five Harry Potter novels in four days (an exercise in escapism which I do not by the way recommend). I remember long whispered phone conversations with various boys, mostly conducted in the laundry room with the door closed and the air conditioner roaring. I remember trying to write about it, and never succeeding (though I still have it in the back of my head to try again). Everything that happened so visceral and on the surface. Everything so painful but extremely alive and real.

(S. and I dancing manically, totally silently so we wouldn’t wake her, in the hospital room when we realized Maman hadn’t thrown up for nearly six hours. Grimacing and flinging our arms around in joy.)

Once you’ve mopped up her radioactive urine, once you’ve wrestled her delirious and naked back down onto the gurney, once you’ve helped buy her two years of time but ultimately lost her, does other stuff really matter? Probably not. It’s become my guideline for life. Kind of like my friend’s criterion for a bad day: if a PortaPotty hasn’t fallen over and trapped you inside, you’re going to be fine. (True story!)

Whatever happens to me academically, professionally, personally, at some point I’ll stop breathing and then none of it will matter, only my friends will have to throw out a horrifying number of notebooks, and I sincerely apologize to y’all for that right now, but I just can’t bring myself to get rid of them yet.

Not sure what I’m trying to articulate here, but then I never really have been. Only I have to say somehow, although it’s embarrassing, that I’m grateful for all the support. I now understand why they call it a wave. It has been like a wave, a benevolent tsunami (which, that’s just a gross metaphor) of messages and comments and emails and it’s exactly like they say, I actually can’t respond to them all, but your kindness in writing/sending them flabbergasts me because it’s so undeserved. Okay this paragraph is really starting to make me writhe. I’m just trying to say, thank you; and now there’s nothing to see here, move along. My solemn vow to my loyal readership of 10 people is that I will now get back to the usual uninteresting posts about psych meds and weight gain and cat hair. (Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the state of the carpeting. I haven’t hoovered ONCE since I moved in. You can see Pyewacket’s favorite places to sleep, because they are all soot-colored.)

And here, to start us off in the right direction, is last night’s completely pedestrian dream: I was jogging and my ex’s little white Honda pulled over, he wanted to talk to me. For some reason I got in the car, sat down in his passenger seat and we spoke briefly; I was sweating and out of breath. He said sadly, I still think all the time about getting back together with you. I looked at him: But then you apparently always decide not to. Him, weakly: Yeah, I guess so. Me: Huh. Sucks to be you. Then I got out of the car and went back to my run. Woke up to the sound of rain and the sharp smell of another man’s sweat.

One bashes on regardless. Love you.

I am of course embarrassed now by what I wrote a few days ago. That whole self-pitying shtick about letting someone out ahead of me in traffic? Oh please, I am the pushiest driver ever and besides have never put friendships first in my entire life, always, always throwing them under the wheels of my privately ruthless ambition. Nice try, but I am too damn old now to get out of the game, not knowing any other; and not too old to give up on myself quite yet. Almost, but not quite. Fifty. Maybe fifty. I can’t jack it in at forty-two, I have to give myself at least until I’m fifty before I hubristically decide I’ve failed as a minor poet.

(The soft abrupt collapse of my body that started last year, though, the thickening ankles and neck and waist, the melting chin and the receding hairline, all that is still true, and dismays me, to my amusement. So I’m starting #c25k over again tonight, after 3 months lolling about deconditioning. I’m not going to want to do it, but as my former therapist used to say brightly, that’s fine—I don’t have to want to, in order to be able to do it anyway. Apparently vanity is the only thing that will motivate me off the sofa and onto the pavement. It sort of surprises me to discover how vain I actually am, when all these years I thought I was one of those people who didn’t care about my appearance, slobbing around in thermal underwear shirts and men’s jeans. Come to find out, I was secretly apparently very proud of my ankles, otherwise why would it distress me so much that they’ve vanished?)

Also I had a revelatory moment in Intro to Doctoral Studies on Tuesday night. I’ve given up hope of anything interesting ever happening in class and, along with the other painfully bored students, now bring in my laptop and furtively surf or do other work during the three hours—so my moment came while studying the CVs of my peer-professors. Thanks to the raging political paranoia of the state in which I teach, the eyes of Texas are upon you / all the livelong day, all CVs and syllabi from public universities are uploaded and available, presumably so that worried parents/legislators can make sure we’re not teaching Marx, which, apparently, many instructors have perversely decided to do for the first time just as a response to being thusly gawped at—et alors, I have of course twisted this resource to my own purpose, and download the PDFs 1) to help me decide what professors to work with, and 2) to study the career trajectories of those people with whom I went to undergrad, and to try to figure out what they did vs. what I did and where we diverged. How can we all be exactly 42 (me and the three new hires), and they are associate professors with spouses and children and 3+ books apiece, and I’m, well, me? What was the process via which we became ourselves?

It’s very interesting and I believe I have learned something. Not too sure how revelatory the somethings, but here they are:

• I dropped out of college when I was 19. That put a small crimp in things. And I didn’t finish till I was 26. Yay lycanthropia!

• During those years I was waiting tables and working in bookstores and travelling around on Greyhound and writing songs. I keep forgetting it, but I spent all of my early twenties wanting to be a singer-songwriter and battling a great lot of anxiety to do this. And as it happens, just about the time that I really got started with that, the year I discovered alcohol and won second place in the college talent show and played in my first coffee shop and somehow scrounged money together for guitar lessons with Jaimé Morton (David Wilcox’s former student) and hung out one idyllic weekend afternoon with the Western Mass songwriting group (at the time Jaimé, Dar Williams, Richard Shindell), and got more money together to go to Song School at Telluride, and take master classes with Janis Ian and Jonatha Brooke and David Wilcox, and get bitten on the ass somehow by a brown recluse while camping in the Colorado woods—just at the same time all this started happening, and I wrote what I thought at the time were a handful of real songs—I also met the Parisienne, and Joseph, and took his class, and wound up in the psych unit for the first time, and won a summer fellowship to write a terrible novel which I never finished, and, ultimately, wound up reading English at Cambs, and bit by bit, traded lyrics for lyric.

(It’s always funny how we all thought Jaimé would make it and Dar wouldn’t, because Dar was so shy and mumbled her lyrics and Jaimé had such a big warm gorgeous stage presence and was such an astonishing guitar player. This is how life takes us and decides for us. This is how life lives us.)

Somehow all this was oddly encouraging, to understand more clearly why my careering trajectory (bouncing around unevenly) is so different from that of my peers, who got a quiet first book out promptly after their MFAs and then patiently doggedly slogged their way upward through prizes and contests and publication, without deviation from a path, while I went on instead to distract myself very thoroughly with, apparently, serially imploding relationships and editing and adjuncting and freelancing, and took haven in the small eddy/backwater that Santa Fe can be, the impenetrable hedge it can offer those who want to hide out. I observe all this without judgment, it’s just what happened. If I’d gone straight from BU to Columbia as I was invited to do, things would have turned out very differently. (Not least: my then-husband, who worked as a quant for Cantor Fitzgerald in London, would have been killed in 1WTC on 9.11.)

These are the ways we blunder through. I feel philosophical about it this week, as opposed to stinging and cauterized.

This CV-review moment also reminded me as to why I may butt heads with these professor-peers aesthetically, why I’m instinctively confessional and obsessed with phanopoeia—because when you spend five or six or seven years teaching yourself, album by album, the entire Joni/Tori/Ani playbook, with a sidecar of Polly Harvey and Dar Williams, that’s probably going to happen. I have all these inky notebooks, hundreds of pages of chord charts and tablature and lyrics written out by hand, as I painstakingly taught myself one song after another, because we didn’t have the Internet yet and the only way to figure it out was to study it, the way you’d study Marvell or Fulke Greville, and this is how I misspent my youth. Sitting at a guitar/piano and rewinding the tape over and over so I could unravel some knotty chord or garbled lyric or tricky bit of phrasing.

Understanding all this about myself was oddly cheering. This is how I got this way. If I want to reinvent my aesthetic it’ll take at least as much work, immersing myself in the same ways and with the same intensity; but as Tito used to say, “If it’s work, it’s only work…and it is yours to do.”

Finally, part of this week’s mental/emotional turnaround wasn’t just hormonal (I’m such a materialist—part of being lycanthropic) but: Hopkins. I brought “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire” into workshop, managed to read it without my voice cracking, just all my hairs standing on end, but then made the mistake of trying to repeat his final words, and—

“I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life.”

That he could say that. Of all men. Immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.

I’m memorizing this poem. I want to be able to bust it out in case I’m ever imprisoned, paralyzed or bed-bound. Hopkins died when he was 44. Shouldn’t I give it at least two more years before I conceitedly write myself off?

Somehow this combined in my head with Mona Simpson’s reporting her brother’s last words to be: “Oh wow oh wow oh wow.”

And hearing that Georgia is better. We have a little time. Small window, reprieve. Before flesh fade, and mortal trash / Fall to the residuary worm.

In the meantime, I write part two of my weird poem/prose thing which nobody in workshop, not even me, likes, and I watch Deadwood and David Lynch and Wanda Sykes, and pet the cat, and go for grilled cheese with the neighbor, and sing angrily in the car when I am alone, and wake up at four a.m. chilled by ghosts, my hair standing on end, and “all the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

As Mr. R. says, we bash on regardless. Let’s get to it, people. Shit is on.

Because it’s been too long.

1. The sleep mask I’m sewing for myself, inspired, I’ll admit it, by the memory of Hep’s elegant one in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I made a pattern today and cut it out with pinking shears—one side is purple flowered satin, the other side is turquoise blue satin, and I found some little blue ribbons to serve as ties. No more summer sun waking me from my peaceful slumbers! The cat just scrunches her paws up and covers her eyes. I who have no beautiful black furs must sew my own.

2. I have a psychiatrist. That may seem like a strange thing for which to feel grateful, but I’ve been through such dark periods in my life without any help, and to have someone who’s competent and smiles at me across her legal pad, pencil paused, and asks, “So what would you like to do next?” is amazing. To say nothing of having insurance, and enough cash for co-pays.

So we’re playing med change again—I figure I get two more chances before I have to stop and be stable on something before I move. This time, we taper off Zydis, add in a sleeper—oh Lunesta, you and your eerie greenish-pale moth!—and see if I can be on Effexor alone without getting hypomanic. Summer is of course already kind of a trigger for mild hypomania all by its lonesome. We shall see. I said, if I start cycling can I call you? And she said I could snag a same-day noon appointment. This is a good thing.

3. Also, she has an enormous elderly silvery charcoal-gray poodle named Elvis who, when I entered the office this afternoon, walked straight up to me and tried to hide his head under my skirt. I love Elvis.

4. Smooze! These amazing triangular fruit ices from Indonesia, that Beth got me hooked on—I just finished a pineapple coconut one, but the mango coconut are my favorite. They’re little and cold and perfect, now that it’s officially summer and is like a kiln outside from 11 am—6 pm. Which makes the cat very cranky. She’s outside now that it’s midnight and cool, frolicking.

5. These two Bill Withers videos, because Bill Withers is gleaming with sweat and without guile or pretense and hits every note right where it hurts; and the drummer occasionally and inexplicably grins like a maniac. Which is probably because, as Ms. F. rightly notes, he has taken ALL THE DRUGS. Also, am I imagining this or is the bass player sitting in an easy chair?

6. Same Ms. F., who talked me down into my reality again today when probably no one else could have. “I know you are ready for partnership, and you’re GOOD at it. You are READY to wake up every morning with the same person, you’ve spent the last few years becoming AMAZING at loving someone unconditionally. But babygirl he is not it. He is NOT the love of your life. And it is just not good enough.” One art quilt, coming up.

7. The Firefox add-on LeechBlock, which makes it impossible for me to see websites with the words “cactus” or “polyamory” in the titles. Also I can now no longer read people’s blogs either. Which is really, really good. Because passive attempts to communicate, however unconscious and no matter whose part they’re on, seriously fucking blow. (And thank you Ms. M. for the link! It gave me no excuses. Easy to install, easy to set up.)

8. The Couch-to-5K running plan. Because six weeks ago my ass was like WELDED to this sofa; and tonight, wearing new turquoise sports bra, purple shorts (yes there’s a pattern here) and new size 9 Brooks trainers, I ran (well, or jogged, or sometimes kind of stumbled) for twenty minutes without stopping to walk. Twenty minutes! I don’t think I’ve done that since I was thirty. It feels amazing, I love hanging out with my exercise buddies and watching the water ripple on the ridiculous town “lake,” and the moon set, and people pushing baby strollers and walking dogs and fishing, and I think: Running is something I can take with me to Houston. Something to have in a brand new place, something familiar so I feel a little less alone.

9. Finally realizing after many fruitless hours on Craigslist that I’m actually looking for a garage apartment, so that Pyewacket can have a back yard and we can continue to enjoy the bucolic near-rural life we lead here, with roosters and hollyhocks and bougainvillea and orange trees and black widows. Trusting that I’ll find the right place for us.

10. Having washed a set of sheets today and dried them over the shower curtain rod—so clean crisp sheets on the bed tonight, after my post-run shower. Which I am about to go take. Oh and

11. BONUS, both courtesy of my Facebook friend R: the New Yorker gives us La Palin’s version of “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Longfellow, plus the funniest tweet I may have ever seen: