i have always had a problem with 'making something' of myself. being firstborn to a very young mother, she always tried to encourage that and those were her exact words, go to college, get a job, 'make something of yourself.' as a result, as is typical with fbs and especially given the way my family structure played out (classic middle child=scapegoat, youngest=comedian, mom=enabler, (step)dad=problematic) i was driven to overachieve and i guess to a degree, still am (to the point where i just fixed the misspelling of 'overacheive' i just did-i mean, who really cares...) (to the point where the glasses in the cabinet that match should be all lined up in neat columns of three) (to the point where house, car, purse, backpack, whatever should all be properly outfitted with lots of writing utensils (since in the house i grew up in they were always impossible to find, would get lost after 1 use)) (to the point where i have driven myself so crazy over 'what i'm going to be' that i haven't chosen to be much of anything).

now, i never really classified myself as 'anal' or 'type a'. some of the overachieving tendencies right now stem from having too much time on my hands and also from 'growing up' (yikes), at least to the point where if i'm going to drink wine, i at least possess a proper glass, for both myself and a guest, if we so choose not to slug it out of the bottle. and i had, for all intents and purposes, a 'normal childhood,' whatever that means, if on the 'serious child' side who liked school and books a little too much and always had the lamest comebacks and would go home and cry a bit too easily. so it's not as though my mom or my family or my assumed role or my love for school fucked me up, or even if they did i really hate whining about that kind of shit and am not trying to whine.

it's just that i burned out so young. with paul, i just figured that out last night. the same things that haunted my childmind and made me resort to tricks like endlessly flipping the pillow and laying the other way on the bed to get to sleep (he did the same things, did you, firstborns out there?) are pretty much the same things that haunt me now: i'm no sculptor, or quilter, carpenter, architect, or even junkyard proprietess: i find it extremely difficult to take this chunk of me and shape it, or pieces (not peices) of me sewn or joined together to make some whole, or to arrange varied castoffs identified for their uses and functions when and if needed. i.e. 'making something of myself' (shudder). i do know a good amount about myself, but honestly, after a while, what good does that do you? somewhere along the way, i ran out of being able to try so hard, became overwhelmed, got distracted and daydreamy because it was fun, finally, fun. now because of some essential nature bullshit, it's not so fun. now it's just kind of full circle: what am i going to do with my life? what? what? what? what? what?

is it as tyler durden says, that we all grew up thinking we'd be rock stars and astronauts and movie stars (.....but we won't....), is that herowish mentality (after all, by overachieving didn't we all think we could 'save the family,' or at least keep our names or hides out of the next big fight?) the mother of all hangups, the bitch that wants only the best, the most, the shiniest, the strongest for itself, and could just get it if only.....if only........

thank you for indulging in this little self-counseling session, brought to you by "t's hangups, inc., llc."

(and there are no barking sparrows....)

mmm. i love those candies that taste like lavender. not the gum, tho, which tastes musty to me.

the person sitting next to me right now smells like i didn't know i sometimes used to smell, which is of morning damp tobacco smoke and hour old coffee...it is not particularly pleasant but is nostalgic. as completely botarded as it is, i miss the mechanics of smoking. i miss the little realizations and conversations and romanticisms (even if somewhat cliched-like those coffee/cigarette ruminations)that sometimes come about only because of it. that's about it though-i never realized what a little slave it makes you.

i saw this excellent movie called me and you and everyone else we know, parts of which keep popping in my head and turning round in there. all in all it was extremely well done, lots of parts to make you squirm but i like that sometimes.

hm. har. i feel like writing, but topics aren't really coming well, so i will give up and perhaps go make some soup.

they used to.

Dickens wrote an entire world in the line "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." He could have written that anytime and it would be true. I try to keep this in mind when i am feeling especially glum about the state of the world. what do i know, i haven't lived long enough to make an accurate judgement about what exactly is happening to us as a society, perhaps i never will be able to make one and perhaps i ought not to, don't really want to. what would that solve, after all, one person's lifelong observation of the world. write a memoir, for chrissakes. or just write.

the baby has been doing trapeze artist tricks in there, and it creates the god-weirdest ache in my cervix. 'ow, my cervix' is a curious thing to be saying a few times a day. i cannot quite tell which body part is causing the sharp one-two jabs. all of them, i think.

here is a tiny rhyme about it:

my baby floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee
it's my cervix vs. muhammed ali
punch and jab and kick and spar
out of myself is beaten the tar.



also, i'm so sentimental these days. over the weekend i almost started crying because of takeo spikes's achilles tendon thing. i don't even know what the man looks like, that's how much i follow football. but man, that's a tough row to hoe.

it would be my fortune that just as i finally procure a library card, the library closest to me is closing, permanently. the flourescent paper that declares so is quite sad. though i accept that some libraries *have* to close, and that the 'system' is doing its best to keep all areas of the city well served. we have been lucky so far in that (previously) we were in the top five cities for libraries per capita, or something like that. also, most other libraries charge you to request items and to rent movies, buffalo's didn't (but will starting october 1st, blech).

also there was a fairly entertaining dylan doc on pbs last night, which continues tonight. some of the footage was quite astounding, it provided a nice pictorial/video supplement to the 'story,' which was basically dylan's own 'chronicles: vol 1' with some interviews of contemporaries thrown in. that's why i say 'fairly entertaining' since if you read the book, the film (at least this first part) isn't telling you anything you don't already know. plus if you are a big dylan fan you will most likely already know a ton of this stuff. but dylan's own commentary is a great deal less miserable and vague than seen previously and he actually gets a light in his eyes during a few reminisces. it occured to me, both reading the book and seeing the film, that fame like his is not in the least enviable. you have three, maybe four generations putting all this meaning on songs, words, feelings, and attitudes you can never recreate. deifying you. you yourself may have never known the meaning, and after a certain time, your life changes and you probably don't care like you once may have. you tour, you keep performing since that is your line of work, but (most of) the crowd is expecting those old washed out now threadbare anthems you've done thousands of times, in countless versions, endless cities, in front of hundreds of thousands of old timers and kid hippies, for decades. i'd be pretty miserable as well. but, at what price fame. and i'm making him sound all played out and used up, as if he relies on all those old tunes to get him through, when really 'love and theft' kicks ass. judging from a show i saw a few years back in columbus, he has himself an excellent time playing from that. he's writing his memoirs and appearing in films by martin scorsese, about him. i guess life can't be too bad.

last night i dreamed of two massive eagles with especially large claws, flying just a few feet from the surface of some pristine lake who knows where, hopefully somewhere on this earth, a secret place on mama nature's body as yet undefiled by man's repugnant touch...

anyhow, one of the eagles spotted its catch and swooped down, scooping with its claws but missing, so very quickly it plunged itself into the water in a shallow arc and emerged victorious in the air with a monstrous, delectable salmon. it was awesome. i felt that.

yesterday i witnessed a very happy, very large man riding an old fashioned aqua blue bicycle.

a few days before that, i got to see my baby's face in 4D.

the world is fucking amazing, in't it?

sparrow (finally) caught a bird and left it for us for a present. unfortunately, it was not discovered until it set to stinkin in the 'junk' room we don't use that much. so paul swept it up and dumped it in the trash. i feel bad because i had always kept it in mind that when cats do that it is truly giving a gift, and he should be praised and thanked appropriately. well, who knows when he actually dropped it off, and since the reaction was less than stellar, he may not ever do this again. aw. sorry, little hunter. carry on, do.

matthew's zoo pics reminded me that sometimes at night from our room (which opens up to a backyard porch), we can hear some kind of zoo animal warbling? yowling? lowing? bellowing? moaning? singing? crying? yodeling? ....some combo. the first few times i heard it i thought it was a far off dog, perhaps ill, whose howl got distorted over the distance. then for some reason i thought someone had a llama in their backyard (hey, i have pregnancy brain, ok??? and the pseudo-mansions around here have some big (and of course, fenced and bushed) backyards). i did not even think about the fact that we live near the zoo until our landlord, who came over to fix something, asked if we've heard the zoo animals yet. duh! anyway, it's quite impressive, since it is quite a few blocks away, but also very sad. a plaintive, displaced sound. i will not go to zoos because i get too blue about the whole state of affairs. there's a lot of arguments and counterarguments and reasons and pros and cons and the like, but what it all boils down to is it just makes me *sad* that they're in there. as for what i am going to do when the baby is four or five and wants to go, i do not know......

also in the hood some moneyed folks were having quite the backyard karaoke party last saturday night. yikes! four reps of dancin' queen, each sung by equally hideous though surely different generational females is quite enough for me. i will not enjoy that song evermore. it was fabulous free entertainment though. abruptly, it stopped, which led us to believe that some other moneyed folks may have called the police for disturbing the peace of our perpetually quiet area. p and i were saying how a party in our house would be unenjoyable b/c the neighbors and hood are so still, and music/noise would surely be frowned upon at least. a shame. i miss you, north pearl!! do i feel an ode coming on?? i do, i do!!

ode to north pearl

dearest railroad style apt
i miss that funky brick wall in the kitchen
what became of the courtyard sludge bucket, (surprise!! (ha))
and now no jaunty sparrow climbs that rickety escape to the roof.

we have flowers here too
though much less crack cocaine
i used to walk in antique daydreams
streets leaking slowly histories.

you will be restored to some former glory
huge and barely lived in by two busy people
maybe some echo of a good time will resound in the closet they'll preserve,
i sure hope so, the baby was conceived there.






i won the lottery! my uncle gave me a scratcher called "fat cat" and laughed because i'm 'fat', then i went and won a benjamin. ha ha and hell's yeah! *someone* i know says unfortunately it's not yahoo money this week, but i say screw that, mama's buying herself......hm. what? it is funny how when you're not working you don't need and want things the same way. or maybe i am in the detached from material items cycle. before i might have blown it going out, eating, drinking, carousing. i think i am finally learning how to be quieter.

maybe i could go to some pub at say, three in the pm, play a bunch of jukebox songs and have a pepsi (which sometimes causes my eyes to roll back in my head it's so goddam good: allowable but slightly naughty...) there's something so awful about going to a bar when you're pregnant tho. i can't remember the last time i was in one. am i missing anything? nah.....

it's baffling when two people who have been married quite a long time suddenly hate each other, and have so many vicious things to say, and messy proceedings begin. it only makes sense for communicating well to be the base of one's friendship, love, relationship, commitment, marriage, what have you, yet still pathways of talking and emotion get unusable if they ever were to begin with, and shows like jerry and maury rack in the moolah......and divorce lawyers get rich, and people continue on with the ridiculousness of all these diversions from truth.

hate is still passion. passion is a kind of love. so when people really go at it, they're just distracting themselves from some kind of powerful feeling they don't want to admit is there. where there are feelings, something ought to be salvedgeable, yes/no?

this is just one piece of the baffle box pie that has been placed in front of me as of late. do i eat or just sit there with my thumb in it?

the beautiful (but still baffling) hunk of the pie: the human knitting up in my belly is almost complete. he or she does a lot of rolling around and a fair amount of kicking and punching. i am hoping she or he will be a dancer, or an acrobat, or maybe start a fight club. all in all it has been a lightning fast pregnancy so far and holy shit, i am soon to be someone's mother. milk is going to come out of my breasts. that is some insane business right there.

dr. cl, i very much appreciate your concern and reply. it helped. also, your tour pics are grand. we have a good friend who teaches architecture at fayetteville and moved there from up here. and *i* was an english major as well....which i never knew about you, so it seems we have something in common.

springf, i hope you are ok....screaming in the car helps a lot too.

for a cd that is perfect for walking around in this shifting weather, i highly recommend "a ghost is born" by wilco......beautiful and bittersweet, just like summer's end.

life can be going along just fine, nothing too terrible or too good, endless cycles of work money bills (getting and spending, we lay waste our powers....) and the pleasantness of sun, flowers, walks, friends, entertainment of course to interrupt, and while some may call this boring (such as myself), what we (i) may not realize is that it is idyl in a pure form. hazy days, no particular place to go, future goals just that (future) and all seeming possible or impossible, day into night and a minimum of human drama equals a muddy utopia, swimming in waters made thicker by absorbing so much quiet.

BOOM!something happens. worry, revenge, regret, penitence suddenly stab at you, in the night of course to make it worse. tears threaten, time tears, you wonder just what have you been doing with yourself all this while. no book is going to tell you, it's only all inside the one you're not writing, you're not reading yourself, the words are there but you do everything in your power to cover them up, to do what you think you should.

you tell your family, your friends of a tragedy. you cannot express how right now you hate the beauty of configurations of cells, correlations of systems, the perfect or haywire machinations and secret stealth of these electrified sacks we all carry around. you realize we are all destined to fail one day. things go wrong. the cliches: numerous: life is precious. why, then, are we here? an awful, no-answer question.

friends, family say the things they think they should, that anyone would. it's ok, but just once i would rather have someone say something utterly ridiculous, proving the faulty-ness of us all, the random misfirings that go on within: "mynah birds cry at midnight," or "please pass the fruit compote." but who am i and what am i to refuse what i know to be gestures of comfort. black-hearted, bitter, like tea, i fear.

i sometimes wonder if intelligence is a detriment, does anyone else wonder that?

scrawling a pie crust recipe from a decades old cookbook (lined with notes, hole punched index cards inserted, pages half falling out-- something like a spellbook), receiving dictation, advice to practice. "once you start making pies, dear, no one will let you stop." she tells us she made the crust, then set out for fresh berries, daunted by a stand that wasn't there.

i listen and feel warm, that a whole sunday could be spent this way. that at the end of the day you have something no one in their right mind would refuse, and it was whipped out of its separated, lonely parts into a thing of magic, something that makes people happy. blue stained teeth and large grain sugar melting on the tongue.