And we’ll make our escape under the cover of black and gray umbrellas, out through the secret passage way and into the brisk, ozone-filled air.   All our troubles well forgotten.

It’s a nice dream, isn’t it?  To just skip out on all your responsibilities.  All your troubles.   Go off into the night free as a bird.  Not my luck, but sometimes I crave it.   And the worst part of it is that the only permanent cure is to face those responsibilities.

I haven’t eaten and I need to.  Not for distraction or escape

Tomorrow, I plan to rise and attack.  Laundry and scraping off down to the floorboards.  I want to get rid of half of everything, or at least a good few percentages.  I want to not have this huge weight of crap of clutter just dragging me down and keeping me tethered to its eventual, but ever kicked forward, removal.  I want to get to the future and not find all my crap there, staring at me, waiting for me.  It feels like you could sit at the cool table except for all these promises made to things in the past, kids that you aren’t even friends with anymore but you can’t abandon for some reason that no longer even makes sense.  It’s just a priority you hold onto until it’s been converted into this ironclad habit, an addiction.   It’s sad.  It’s tragic.  It’s not what I want.  I wonder why I always give in, even being aware like I am, of the reasons.

It would be great to be a better person.

All you can do is try in small ways and play the broken record one more time.   If we’re not done, it’s not time to stop.

Things it is good to remember when you know that you are offering the archive a really terrible post that changes nothing, commemorates nothing, salvages nothing, is hopeless and rude and makes you feel exhausted typing it not to mention trying to read it:

1. Global warming is real.  Snow spat and kissed the ground and melted away in less than an hour today.  Huzzah for chemicals destroying our ozone layer.    Huzzah for our race’s inevitable extinction.  I am safer and warmer now as a result.  Really, this is the global warming bubble that we’re sitting in right now, in the rosy, proto-spring glow of a future that will burn the flesh off the bones of our descendants.  If, that is, we descend.

2. It really only takes one good idea to set you off on the road you want to walk.

3.  Eventually, you will escape even if it means you get hit by an oncoming train when you forget to look both ways.  So cheer up.  It’s not actually hopeless.

4.  Everything sounds a bit more chipper accompanied by a ukulele.

5.  Or if that doesn’t work, there’s always ABBA.  Or a quick blow to the temple.  Or the last resort of the desperate, sarcasm.

I have a box of writing on my bed and I am desiring to create like a man on fire desires to be put out.  It is beyond want, or desire, or even need.  It is exigent.  It is breath.  It is happening even as we speak, or even as I type and you read for no matter when you arrive we are speaking to one another.  I am sharing and even in your silence, you are sharing back.

Things that are true.  I don’t like the idea of being friends with your girlfriend.  Truth be told, I’m beginning to hate you for giving me the opportunity.

I want to play my guitar and not explain myself to anyone.  I want the itch I cannot scratch to go away.    I want to write.

I want to have written.  I want to have played.  I want to have lost weight.  I want to have fallen in love.  I want to have changed.

It doesn’t work like that.  Did you know? Short sentences all the way to the finish line.  That’s how it works.  Both here and there, wherever there falls on the map.

It is Thursday night and my heart is getting cut up on my toe nails.  Oh well, I say, oh, well, the blood still pumps.   The eyes still blink and the pain doesn’t block the way the treadmill.  Nothing does.   I just want everyone to shut up.  All the vagaries of their sordid lives and their swelling happiness is dreadfully, onerously, perilously annoying to me right now.  Oh, I can’t take Kate Nash right now either.  Can she sing?  Can she not?  I’m leaning toward not and I usually like her, but I heard this cover of Seven Nation Army that she did and it was so failly that it almost hurts my eardrums.

Things I hate: an abridged list.

You.  This bra.  This silent house.  Everyone else getting what they want while I get to wait with a brick of salt.   The awkward shape of my guitar while sitting in bed.  Corners jetting out everywhere.  Old boxes of writing on my bed.   Every song in my ITunes.  All 3500+ of them.  The pain in my back that makes me think of death.  My lonely heart not being able to pretend it’s not lonely.    The feeling of your throat when you swallow it back.  Feeling like a hypocrite for wanting to be cosseted when my friends are in similar agonies and I cannot engage with their emotions.  Not being able to engage with anything.  Hope trailing away and turning brown with shame.   Unfollowings.  Pressure that never focuses into a headache.   Having let go because I couldn’t close my hands fast enough.   Being a step behind.  Facebook.   Spoons in places they shouldn’t be.  Rupert Graves being married with five children.  My cold, sick, toe-nail studded heart.  All the humor gone and frittered away.  The terrible assumptions I make about forever.

Sabra girl, time will cure me.

But what I have the time to do, when I give any care to it at all, it feels nice to start anew.  To start on anything.  Washed the pots and pans tonight which is a bit of a rare thing for me, but it needed doing and when I am at my best, I understand that either I have to do something or it isn’t going to be done and I have to live with the experience of it being undone.  That it’s not impossible to do one small thing with regard to my surroundings even if it feels like just one small thing is one  straw too many on this poor camel’s back.  And I bought groceries and cooked them and I have breakfast for tomorrow and lunch is fine, though dinner tomorrow might be with our meeting and I will have to take some care with myself. But then I have lunch settled for Friday, breakfast, too.  And dinner.  And that’s as far as the plan goes but as the plan is just to f0llow the plan I already laid out but chose to disregard because it’s not the usual manner of things.  I know what to do.  If I don’t do it, I live in the hoarders’ temple and worship the staidness, the rot, the inertia of a past that never was.

So I have the checkbook balanced, the budget looked at with a rather shocking uptick in dining out.   That’ll do more to dissuade me from fucking around than anything else.  I could think of a ton of things to do with 300+ dollars a month.  That’s a metric ton of guacamole.   Which nobody likes that much.  I love guacamole.  But that’s not justifiable or sustainable.   It’s weird.  When I don’t know or take care, I don’t want to know, it scares me to start knowing what’s going on with my finances because I get the idea that I’ll just use that money in a whirlwind and it’ll somehow slip through my fingers if I’m aware of what I earn and how I spend it.  But when I start tracking – and of course this directly applies to my relationship with food – start tracking and dealing with the fact that there are limits, I feel so good.

I feel like I want to make good choices.  I want to do right, and yes, Miss Ohio, I want to do it right now, in this very moment and I want the gold star for doing it.

Anyway, that’s not all that interesting.  It’s true and it happened, but not so blog-worthy.  I thought I sort of hand something vaguely interesting to talk about, but now that the day has been spent, I would rather just crumble it up and throw it in the hamper and let the wash take care of it instead of prancing down a catwalk in forty-five minutes in the wear of the day.   Whatever grand beauty there was feels gone or at least distant.

So we’ll have to improvise.  The snow I feared last night did not show up to frazzle my driving in the morning and I bless whatever Mother of Nature or Father of Timing put that one together because my heart was much more at ease this morning as a result.  I am grateful for this small thing that might not matter to anyone, but mattered to me.  But the snow did turn up when we had a our giant meeting for people my age group.   A wet, spitty, ether haze of a sky which left me cold and a bit achey, but it, too, for all its apparent fury, didn’t settle and become anything.  Sort of like the event itself.

It was fine, don’t mistake me, and people came away happy and excited and it was a good meeting.  But it also made me realize how profoundly I do not relate to people my age.  How warily I look at anyone under forty.  How much I judge my peers and am sure they are judging me.  It’s sort of like high school isn’t a place, or an experience, but a shroud that cannot be pulled off no matter the heat and it always trips me up as I try to spin away.  I’m sure no one cares.  I’m sure everyone thinks I’m fine if they think of me at all.  I was just talking to this guy, my age, with a beard and kind eyes and he’s making this light joke and I know he’s got a girlfriend and I laugh and spin and trip away (in a metaphorical sense if you can follow this screed at all) because I can’t even visualize what he might think I’m thinking.   I want to be brave, meet his eyes, but I feel my eyes are radiating my heart and I can’t control my heart lately.  So all I can do is flee.

How terrible.  Truly.

Yesterday, I intimated that the big posts are the birthday posts, event posts, the threshold type of posts and that yesterday was leading up to something miraculous today.  Some revelation, some genius piece of writing, something evocative and human and deep that expresses my immortal soul.  Well, I don’t quite know how to get there from here.   Today has been great.   It has not been the stuff of legend, I’m afraid, even with Assassin’s Creed driving me forward and onward and upward into the aerie of some Italian city rooftops.   I am up there, to be sure, but it feels like I’m just up with the pigeons.

A light dusting of snow, the news website promises.  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  I could lose my lunch at least over a dusting of snow.  It’s that terrible a phobia, that stupid of one.  But I can’t go lay out the tarps for the twelve miles between here and there or institute some policy of targeted global warming, so what can be done?  Breath and sleep and gutting a few nearly incomprehensible Templar jerks, I guess.

Off and on I wonder about Facebook.  But on birthdays it is nice to have a swarm of people – even including people you have to question the motives of – all take a second to acknowledge your existence.   And the compliments are lovely, too.

And I do want to make apologies to all the Mamie Van Doren fans who found me this past week because I chose to title a post recently, I think Tuesday last week, Mamie Van Doren.  And while that may, to the outset, seem like a complete non-sequitur for what that post actually was about, it wasn’t really, because there was this whole anecdote about our trivia team name being Nun Reform School which was an actual game that my sisters and I played as children.  My older sister was the teacher (we didn’t really emphasize anything extraordinarily Catholic in this game) and she gave us lessons and we learned geography and read stories and answered little quizzes if I recall correctly, but we also had to learn to make our beds and pretend to behave lest we get demerits.   There was some chart of doing right and doing wrong and I remember how important I felt it was not to get any demerits.  Funny, how these silly things find reflexes in our future lives.  But I was explaining to my younger sister who didn’t have as clear a memory, that there was this MST3K movie Girls Town about a Nun Reform School for wild girls like Mamie Van Doren and her bullet bra and instantly, she took a shine to the name as a result.  I am a fan of Ms. Van Doren and that movie.  I don’t really have a great deal to say, but I think of all those stymied googlers out there thinking “Here’s a whole terrific page on Mamie Van Doren” only to find…hah, my terrible, wheedling voice poking them from across the internets.

I didn’t call it Nun Reform School because I think somewhere in the archives there is a post called that.

Well.  Happy Birthday!

So it was Sunday and there was sleep and rising and baths and getting myself sorted and my face painted and then, very quickly, it was time for my birthday lunch.   I was pretty delighted that I was able to maintain my calm given what my birthday looked like last year – I will do my best to go back and link it here so that the contrast is apparent – and last year, I was OTR, I was crying uncontrollably, unconsolably even as I was aware of how stupid and unimportant my tears were and I was making promises in my head about the new year and the new person and I was just a frenzy of anguish.  This is not an uncommon event.   Birthdays, though maybe even not everyone in my family would know this, are the best chance I have to become a maenad.   To feast and gad about in adoration and love of everyone and then the epic-ness of the day gets in my head, the sense of what the day should be or should portend or where I should be at that deadline of a day wallops me and I get punch-drunk.  I curl up within and let everything sour and everything break my heart a thousand times and I become accusatory and really terrible.   I think my family doesn’t know this because it’s so internal.  I don’t want them to find me ungrateful so I just spend the day needling myself and needling them and it’s such a horrible way to spend a day celebrating the fact that you’re alive and still have potential and reason to take in air.

And today, because it wasn’t so bound up in the birthday requirements, was lovely.  We had a great lunch – my father who rarely sees reason to leave the house save for work and couponing it up at the grocery store, came and enjoyed himself – my sister’s boyfriend and she came and were pleasant to be around.   We had Chinese food which was excellent.  I was given gift cards which I will glory in spending.  I had a good experience.  And just like the man said, I value that over things.  I don’t care about the rest of it, really.

Tomorrow will turn up and there won’t be any particular magic and nothing will rise from the dead and catch me by the throat by the virtue of it being the year of the dragon or the sun returning to the same spot it was at 28 years ago.  No return of Saturn that I can spot.  No heart bestowed upon me, meeting me in the dark.

But I have love, nonetheless.  I have a guitar.  I have stories in my head.  I have so much more than I can even say.

Distracting gimmick post due up for you today.

Nothing like a hot steam shovel to get you going in the morning.

I am well, you needn’t worry your little head about anything else.  And I mailed my package, so you certainly needn’t find yourself staying awake tonight to wring your hands over that.  And I’ve got the other thing covered, so we can turn our thoughts to other arenas.  Like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 – one I haven’t seen before – Robot versus the Aztec Mummy.   Which is just as one might hope.  Hilarious and stupid and distracting.

There was that.  And I am suddenly, a few hours and slices of pizza later, slowed down to a snail’s pace.  I don’t know what to say, what to do, I want to play some games and move on to tomorrow.  But the law’s the law – even though I invented the law – so I have to hurry further into the ever encroaching darkness and try and outrace the parade.

How did the day go?  The day went swimmingly.  I walked about and made stupid jokes and we went to this Japanese restaurant that had very weird rules about who could sit where and how many and this couple came in and wanted to sit in a booth but their waitress had to apologize three times about how much she would get in trouble if she let them sit at a booth in case of a lunch rush and the tone of her voice made you think that there was some manager in back who would beat the shit out of her if she touched one of those reserved table signs.  But the guy kept pushing it, even though they turned the table around so they could both sit on one side.  Like he thought it was a stupid rule, which I don’t know – I’m not in the food industry, I don’t know if they have a rush if everyone would complain worse about having to sit at those roundabout bar circle things where they’re served from the center when they’re in a group of three or more.  Finally he relented and I calmed down and picked at my teriyaki chicken and my sister had the most gigantic bowl of ramen I’ve ever seen in my life, filled with hardboiled eggs and kitchen sinks and all sorts of bizarre things.  Then it was off to the races and to the strange world of big box stores in the middle of a Saturday.

And I returned home tired, but not insensible, and glad I went.  Mostly because my best intentions would hardly get me dressed.  And I wanted to be out in the world, seeing faces even if it’s not proper to stare.  I do not think it’s healthy to spend whole days indoors all the time, you start to think crazy things.  So I’ve spent the last hour and a half with my friends who are remarkable and dear and I’m watching Mass Effect trailers and I’m happy that I’m celebrating my birthday tomorrow.  Kind of will keep the real day just for me.

Things to do this evening once we stop all this singing you cannot hear.

1.  Write one thank you note.
2. Get the bread off the couch before the cats get it again.
3. Make a mix cd with songs I haven’t heard in forever so that I can appreciate my Mumford when I take another crack at it.
4.  Practice my countries.  143 of 196 last time! I am improving.  Soon I will know every country in the whole entire world including Sao Tome and Principe!  And, of course, Djibouti!
5.  Throw away some of this trash.
6.  Trim my nails so I can get some more guitaring in.  My fingertips hurt too much yesterday.  Can’t delay again.
7.  Wreck my Wreck This Journal some more.

Um, what else, what else?  I’d take ideas but by the time you see this I’ll be tripping the night fantastic.

Today has been secretly excellent.  We got some needed funding.  I got compliments out the wazoo.  I decided to just be in love with the world instead of waiting for it to prove worthy of me somehow when I am far too ridiculous for anyone to fall in love with.  I much prefer being happy to pontificating about happiness.

I am happy because I have wonderful friends who come to me for advice and actually take it.  With whom I can talk about makeup.  I haven’t had that before.  Which is a great shame because I enjoy the hell out of it.

Oh, there is a neighbor across the way who is slightly younger than me.  And is a great goddamn nerd.  And according to my sister, is cute, and a Trekkie AND a musician.  The fact that he lives with his mother and may have some kind of issues  is neither here nor there.  According to her he is a wonderful wit and a possible genius and thought we were younger than we are and I think I’ve heard him or someone singing.  This is quite a development, akin to realizing that Mr. Bingley has just let Netherfield, because our existence in this great Longbourne we have come to call home, is relatively man-free.  There’s nobody within a country mile, so to speak, who is even, to put it horribly, “eligible” for simple consideration.  These are my non-scientific findings.  So I haven’t even seen this person, and I am happy to know he exists because maybe it’s symbolic of a turn of events.

Well, I’m still here instead of getting done what needs to be done so release me from my bonds, oh, wordpress, set me to flight so that I can have a lovely, rapturous day tomorrow.

It is this: “How is this year going to be any different than last year?”

Because really, if I make the same choices, how is it anything other than textbook insanity to hope for different results?

How can I justify anything if I justify everything? I mean, if all it is habit and therefore changeable, if I never change it does it matter at all that I can?  Does the power exist if I don’t use it?  Am I asking so much of myself?  Am I so terrified of change?  Is the perfectionism getting me any closer to anything if we can all agree that perfect doesn’t exist? Is it pulling me away from great and real things? Am I so concerned with the pleasures and protectionism of now that I can never deviate in any real way towards my deeper, perhaps soul-level desires?  Is life always going to be such an intense scrutiny of behaviors and intentions?  If it is, what is there to hope for or be excited about? If it’s not, then what frees me from the constant self-review, the contemplation of my existence?  What’s the trigger for fresh thought?  And what motivates that beyond a week or a day or an hour or a minute of good intention?  What will, what reason exists in me to force action on that desire for change on a permanent basis?  And if  I’m terrified that I could change into something that’s only a farce at the exact same moment I know that fear is propagated as a hipsterish reason to never change?  How do you believe in your own authenticity?

Why would you doubt it?  Why would you tell yourself you don’t deserve to work for and realize your big, outsized, impressive dreams?  Why would you settle for a pickled, shriveled  raisin of a dream?  Why would you stop in the middle of the road and sit there, frustrated at how you’re not at your destination?  Why would you assume you know everything?  Why would you find yourself at 27, nearly 28 and mostly assume you know less than nothing?

Why not turn everything on its head?  Why not stamp your foot and draw lines and fuck up and fail and draw new lines and spend your years assessing the standard and moving towards it?  Isn’t that all anyone alive ever does?  Why would you throw your baby out with your bath water when you don’t mind your baby?  When it doesn’t even cry that much anymore?  If everything is equal and the past weighs as much as the future and you have your ass settled on the fulcrum of time, why not get up and walk?  Why not say, okay, that was today, and today was remarkable and tomorrow can be better?  Why not lust for self-improvement?  Why not -in this instant – imagine ourselves as being capable of all that we hope?

This is the exact thing that is my downfall, but for the next couple of hours, I’m milking the damage for all it’s worth.

Today kicked my ass.  I looked awful.  I had a headache after I rushed through breakfast, the leavings of which the cats knocked on the floor, luckily on a waiting towel I happened to have left there.  Clever cats, terribly messy, lazy me.   I couldn’t get any traction at work and there were just meetings I dazedly sat through, nodding instead of really comprehending what they were asking me to do.  I just filed it under, oh, good – more work.  And it’s stressing em out that I can’t get to the things I love.  Even now, because we spent all day re-arranging seatings, I’ve got two hundred nametags to carefully cut out tonight and my beautiful guitar is sitting there so damn soundlessly and my finger is softening up and my ukulele in its box like it’s in a coffin and I just want to move my arms and drive all of it to the side like flotsam and jetsam in my wake.  But alas, life doesn’t work that way for any of us and we wouldn’t be much impressed by it if it did.

We have to carry on.  I think the weirdest, best, and mostly worst part of today was that I was trying to fix one of my errors and the person who came in to have that error fixed brought me said truffles.  And my boss, as I was explaining the error said he was mad at my co-workers for not doing work they could do on their own and giving it to me to do which put me behind.   I don’t know.   It was very disconcerting to try and take the blame and resolve things and people aren’t either understanding you or they’re blithely putting it aside and moving on.  Wish I had that skill.   So.  Things aren’t perfect.  Nobody hates me or anything.  I’m completely sunk in.

But, I have little windows of strength.  Little windows of purpose.  They’ve kept me going this far so I will keep hanging onto them.  False lashes and a dress tomorrow.  A hot bath.  Your undying love.