Blog Title: My Life as a Rabid Blog

rope to be cut

as the house gets progressively emptier and emptier. The possessions that I placed where they are or negligently tossed into closets, emerge like zombies.

But then they get tossed in the dumpster that my husband hired using money half mine
to throw my parts and things and potential art away

My calendar read
"A man needs a little madness, or he never dares cut the rope and be free."
Nikos Kazantzakis

Moaning and growning

and not in the good way. I just want to complain.
But it seems someone has talked to spouse about raising the Alimony. And agreed to a number which I would find acceptable.

I pack yp CDs. I have made so many mixed lists. And I have labeled three of them maybe. So will I fill my moving boxes. Of to be persnickety I want to pack only music I don't want or that I've already copied in to here.

despair and hope

Standing in the longest line I've ever been in, I felt hope that for after many years, there is hope.

My own life needs some of that. Some faith that everything will be okay. This divorce thing hurts a lot. More than any pain I've felt. There is no blueprint to follow
and I am alone now in the house that used to be mine and now is just waiting to disgorge all of my stuff. I'm trying to be all zen about it and mutter "nonattachment" under my breath. It is attachment that causes trouble.

So I meditate.

D I VORCE

As the market goes tumbling down, I have a damn house to sell and a marriage to dissolve. Every step is fraught. I find myself untangling computer cords and wool
and things of all sorts, all like the way the dryer will sometimes contort the sleeves and legs and body parts of laundry so that they all come out some amorphous useless tangle.

Today I visited with HIS attorney. I don't have one yet so I am representing myself until I can get Legal Aide to help me.

In between that I have to go to my Outpatient treatment three days a week. Before they will allow me, this Bipolarity that is me, to venture into the real world they make me talk and talk and listen and then talk. They tell me how many beers will get me drunk and how to adjust to the idea of being medicated for life.

After my week in the psych ward this is easy but I feel a sense that sooner or later the real world will force me to enter it.

And I come home to the same goddamned mess I left. A custody dispute. An Alimony dispute and a house for sale.

It's as if I lead a life going in one direction and now I have to make a U-turn. A hairpin U turn.

lightning and fire and flood and assorted other plagues

So I finished the damn book and realized I had to finish the damn marriage. And then got diagnosed as BiPolar So now I am one of those subprime borrowers with a sign on my lawn and a husband sleeping on the couch. I would say this ranks up there with most difficult periods of my life.

But the silver lining, I'm at exactly my ideal weight. And they have meds for some of these problems.

I am thinking that if I continue to blog, I've been mostly on hiatus lately. If I continue to blog, the entire tenor of my observations will be different.

Instead of focusing on ephemera and the side issues, I will now be narrating my divorce and the glories of freedom, counterbalanced of course with the devastion left by a marraige of 20 years dissolving.

And then I might have to occasionally pontificate on the concept of BiPolarity. Or rather not the concept, but the reality of being someone with such an impressive
mental disorder.

Useless

I took the utility knife
I like utility
And I made it the opposite
Defied Bentham and all those fuckers
With their panoptics
And morals
I was cutting away old rug
Shredding and pulling up
The footprints and detritus I carried on my shoes
In and out in and out

And with that knife I wrote your name on my arm
I watched the blood rise and watched it make the only
Letters I know that belong to you
Thinking all the while of your secrets and
If that is indeed your real name
It is now written on my left arm in blood

It’s a good thing you never told me your last name.

Preparing to sell

Preparing to Sell

Painting not the kind of thing that reimagines
But the kind where the brush covers
Fingerprints, brutish moves and the surface scars

I think of the story of how his mother ended up having a nervous breakdown
When he bumped the television cart against the door jamb
And how different I have been in such regards
Keeping my breakdowns to myself and my own failures
When perhaps sharing might have helped

But that is under cover now
Neutrals that will enable purchasers to envision their own lives in these rooms
Pushing paint into the nail holes and the corners
Covering every crevice every fissure
Let them find it all for themselves
After I am gone

For now the paintwork will be perfect and the future will have
Nothing that echoes the past

The A-word

We've danced around it the way we negotiate the house. There are places each of considers personal and there are the communal areas. There are conversations that are all about family matters and which proceed just as they always did. There are the ones where I ask him to do something, he refuses and says, "You'll be rid of me soon."

The other day I did spitefully drop some reference to the concept of Rehabilitational Alimony. So today while I drew him into a conversation about how we need to manage custody, he made use of one of his most annoying rhetorical (or is it anti-rhetorical mdoes)..."Let me just throw this out...don't respond right now....I just want to give you something to think about...." which really means, I get to say what I want and you have to sit there and listen and fume. "Remember," he said, "that anything I have to pay you in alimony is money taken away from the kids."

Mediation

First session of mediation today. It was as horrible as could be expected, but given that not much worse. We filled out forms and laid out the bareness of our finances. Excruciating bareness.

The fact that there are no assets makes certain things easier. Next time I go alone and tell my story. And as each day passes I think of new things I hate about Dewar.

I work on the house. There are moments when I feel about ready to collapse and it is as if my limbs have become jellified. The enormity of all the work and the idea of giving up a way of thinking embedded in me for 23 years. There are a few moments when I feel as if I have a glimpse of joy or self-determination. But mostly it's just kind of numbness.

Decommissioning

That's what my real estate broker calls getting rid of all of my clutter so that the house will look all sparse and open and inviting to people who want to imagine their own cluttered lives in it. Decommissioning means that I am going through closets and boxes and drawers and coming across things that wound me. All day long I get wounded by photographs. For some reason the wedding photographs keep rising up from under socks in drawers and amid papers students never picked up. We are drawing into what would have been our 20th wedding anniversary. I suppose it still will be that, it just will not be something we celebrate. In the halflife of waiting to see if we will sell this house that I have come to call a "housebatross" and figuring exactly how you get a divorce around here, I am finding my days have a rather limited range. There are terrible times and less terrible times. And then every now and then, almost like lightning and just as quick, a moment of joy. This will be over. All of this stuff that I am decommissioning will not have to weigh be down.

the book and other things

I finished the damn thing and sent it to the agent who claims he will get back to me in the next two weeks.

So now I can blog again.

But I also am filing for divorce. So perhaps that is why it took so long to finish the memoir. Going back over the things that made me who I am I realized what things I have accepted without question and once I started questioning all hell broke loose.

But in an odd way I am happier than I have been in years. Worried and occasionally hit but moments of panic, but mostly happy to be getting my life back.

Hysteria

Classic Verse by TS Eliot

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her
laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were
only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I
was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary
recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her
throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An
elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly
spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: "If the lady and gentleman
wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ..." I
decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be
stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might
be collected, and I concentrated my attention with
careful subtlety to this end.

the future of blogging

It's really only because I have to finish this book and the moment has been long past due. And I am almost almost able to reach towards the line.

I am going to not blog until its done. Assuming I don't develop a nasty Tertris Addiction problem that will be within a few weeks. So look in May.

from Li Po

The water sings over the rocks

Between countless hills

Of shining mist and lustrous grass.

poem

But what I really learned was the art of framing.
My frames looped
together formed my picture of the world.


I learned the art of the minature,
locking my eyes
on a tassel on a lampshade,
the shadow on the carpet,
lace curtains,
tea cups,
boxes which I collected
from the first music box when I was 7.

A white rectangle with small feet
Inside red velvet
Compartments
Places for rings and bracelets
Seed pearls and rhinestones
And beneath one red velveted
Slat
The heart
The mechanics of music
‘All I want is a home somewhere….”


Containment was my art.

A relative

Reading Tomorrow

Oedipal moment

three hours at home

After the pick up and the groceries and the unpacking and the feeding before the panic about what I am going to teach tomorrow, philosophical questions of great import have been broached.

Such as
the difference between always and almost always

Possibilities:
a. if a centimeter was a second and the second is doing,
it would be a centimeter of time

b. almost always is one time
away from always
and always is all the time

Answer : I win

arguments about nail polish, dresses, time, dogs

discussion of how dogs might do a thumbs up or thumbs down sign
speculation on whether dogs who lack an opposable thumb are genetically unsuited to anything resembling film criticism

discussion of the styling of Factory Girl in which daughter says that if life was good she would dress like Eve {sic] (not Eve the literary critic of gayness, but Edie) Sedgewick in that movie every day

When offered the suggestion that while a great deal of the clothing in that movie would be inappropriate high school garb
perhaps elements that might be translatable.
Girl sighs.
Girl says, "That's why I hate going to school."

Mother takes new video camera given to her for her birthday.
She films daughter while forcing her to admit she would be willing to drop out of school if she could wear cute clothes all the time.
Mom points out that daughter favors clothes like Manolo whatznik
and so not being in school would not be the best longterm plan for a girl with expensive tastes.

Girl sighs and says, "But look at this gold sweater with the plunging back...

in the woods

still
a week tomorrow

more

The Russian was wearing a brown leather jacket with ribbed knit sleeves. He had a ear phone thingy clipped to his face. My son said, He's a salesman. Everyone hates salesmen.

Russians in a Lexus

Already kind of in a bad way because of the biopsy and the job I didn't get, etc, etc, and today in this frenzied I'm going to have to take the kid from this place to this other place when I pulled out of parking space precipituously and bumped into the fender of a silver lexus. It turned out that this machine was the property of a Russian couple with a first grader who insisted on jumping up and down shouting, You crashed into our car. I had to correct him suggesting that perhaps his English was a little lacking and that the word "crash" was somewhat inaccurate considering the fact that their car had only a smudge of paint on it, whereas mine was mushed up pretty badly.

(More rant on this in a bit when I am feeling less devastated by the rudeness and poor sartorial sense of Russians)

I had a nightmare last night about eviserated computers and rape with objects, and then this morning the news of rape, minus the computers came on the radio. So close to home...

the weather improves. I listen to music. There are slight signs that the world is not hellish.

I am preparing now to go away into the country alone again. It is time to finally finish this damn book. It is time to immerse myself in it and then to leave it behind me. Of course this means preparing it to enter into the world where it will be batted about, rejected or dissected, chopped into bits and misunderstood. But better to see my offspring abused I suppose than keep it locked up in a drawer forever.

perhaps it is a crisis of faith...perhaps it is the weather or the hormones or something in the water. Sometimes trying to be a writer seems to be impossible. And I wonder about my penchant for choosing impossibilities. Do I wish to remain in a permanent state of dissatisfaction awaiting my big break? Do I want to flagellate myself daily with the words I haven't written and the words I've written but haven't sold and the words I have written and have sold but which haunt me anyway?

I am stubborn and I want to do what I want to do. But I've always believed that hard work would pay off at some point. Not a big pay off. A little one but one nevertheless. Maybe I don't recognize the little payoffs. But there are many days when it feels as if I am incapable of doing anything right. All I can do is write and draw and be this absurdly artistic and creative person. I wish I was other and could concentrate better on things or add up numbers or be organized. I have frustrated people who think I am this way deliberately. But I am not.