Coffee

8-5

I’m giving you a night call
to tell you how I feel
I want to drive you through the night
and down the hills
I’ve got to tell you something you
don’t want to hear
I’m gonna show you where it’s dark,
but have no fear

There’s something inside you
It’s hard to explain
They’re talking about you, boy
But you’re still the same

...muss es sein? Must it be?

I appreciate that life always has the capacity to surprise. I appreciate that me, the glowing essence, that I am resilient. The me that writes in cryptic words in the middle of night (or on a rainy summer sunday at 10 in the morning, as it were). The me, the me that is primal and urgent and slinkily duplicitous...she lurks.

The dance between superego and id is just something I am growing accustomed to, nothing more. Soap operas and literoticas may play in my head but I am capable of distinguishing the true literature from the smut, the unwanted words that I will not allow to decorate the margins of my life story.

However...
At this point, on this morning, I must admit that I am more interested in the thoughts trapped in the minds of the characters in the stories I read. I want to know their forbidden thoughts.

It grows exceedingly obvious that I was allowed to read too many books and watch too much television when I was a kid.

Deep breaths are necessary at this point. Too much coffee?
Yeah, that’s it.
The strain of attempting normalcy;
the strain of attempting to stay as far the fuck away from normalcy as possible.

Strikethrough text is necessary, at this and all points. O muse...

Speak of the devil
and she will appear

It is an irony (perhaps? never can quite nail that fickle bird down) that the parts of me that are dancing with fate are at the hands of the parts of em that create my fate. It is unfortunate that my id has such a loud voice, outmotoring and outdistancing the rational and reasonable at outstanding paces.

Just keep on singing, give it a try
give it a try.

List

8-3

In order:
1. The scratch of your stubble as you kissed me goodbye,
separated by our synonymous schedules in this dance of domesticity.
2. The bright morning sunlight turning your living room into a wash of haze
and gold through the thick draperies of decades past.
3. Hallways and staircases of indefinitely shifting size, in a thick sheaf of bound leaf,
that lead me down into controlled madness.
4. Friday’s hot coffee and sweet doughnuts,
bought for my employers as participation in new hire traditions.

I am feeling infinitely better and more control of life today than I was yesterday. I mean, I’ve only got 13ish dollars to my name (about 7ish that will be spent on lunch today) but other than that, everything is good.

Corey and I drove around together last night in the fog of music and smoke that we thrive on, driving over bridges and sharing the playlist. This morning I dropped him off at work with a kiss and a booty shake, and then went over to Stephan’s to thank him for being an awesome friend yesterday. He bailed us out in a very very big way, so I figured I’d show him some love. I spent a good half hour hanging out with him and giving him a shoulder massage, listening to chill music in the early morning gold that is his living room. Good friends and good times. :) I could tell it really made his day which was my entire goal, I just wanted him to feel as appreciated as he is.

After leaving Stephan’s, I took off my “passionate and wild and carefree” skin and put on my cardigan. 
Drove to Dunkin Donuts. Bought doughnuts and coffee and read HoL for a smidge while my order was getting put together...mmm that fucking BOOK. I am absolutely in love with the book and all of its meanings and twistiness and the feelings that it generates.

Right now I am savoring the feeling that rushes, pounding, like frozen shards of ice into my blood. This is a game, a fake plastic date, and since I am fully aware of that fact I can be allowed to immerse myself in the pretend for a moment, right? Nerves and skittishness, uncertainty and eyebrows. Checking my reflection in every shiny surface, existing in that state of hyper awareness that only appears in this type of scenario. Wanting to be aesthetically pleasing, even if only just for pretend.

Brain Spews

3-8-12

I think I jump around from journal to journal in a half-cocked attempt to obfuscate the chronology of my brain spews.

Broken free from the church pews,
I’m helpless to stop these brain spews
From taking over my everyday clues.

I’ve found a little spot of comfort, the corner of a Wendy’s restaurant. A small two-seater table pressed up against the wall with all of the windows.

I guess I’m just wondering how long all of this back and forth is going to go on - but more importantly, what does it mean? Why is it that my focus gets derailed so easily (and so constantly)? Is it just because I focus more on the day to day, or because there’s a part of me that rails against the plans I’ve (tentatively) made?

Maybe it’s just a matter of balance. Yes, I can hold a steady nine to five and wear cardigans and plan a wedding one handedly and enroll in IRAs and all of those niceties... but in order for that to happen I need to be able to smoke a blunt and take some shots and drift into oblivion. I need to be irresponsible and lose my license and let the laundry go untended.

I’m sure that, as I grow older, the meaning of “balance” will shift as it has already many times over.

There are two forces constantly fighting for control of my existence, always shoving the other out of the way.
There is my drive to be an exemplary and successful young working married woman, headed for home ownership and child-rearing and laundry and SUVs...
and then there is my drive apparently to be some sort of anarchist punk... or something like that. Multicolored mohawks and hazy rooms filled with smoke and a bass system that rattles its way through your entire being... This is the voice that says “all of this is fucked, so fuck it.”

And then, in the middle, is me.
Whatever that means.

Sometimes I can feel an uprising of anger caught in my throat (caught. because I am far too nonconfrontational to ever unleash it upon the world) and I can’t help but wonder what it is. Where does it come from? I’m not angry at my own life anymore, like I was as a teenager.

Maybe I’m angry at all life. I’m angry that I have to feel so personally divided and I’m angry that there will always be a struggle of some sort (nothing is ever easy) - I’m angry that I am allowed to feel petty things such as boredom and butt hurt when overall my life is pretty damn awesome, and I’m angry that I am mandated to feel guilt when I can’t stop the influx of petty into my life.

Maybe I’m angry that I have such a white-knuckled grip on a simulacra, on shit that never even existed.

Incongruent

(written 7-25-12)


It is the plight of my book-reading film-nerd soul that an improperly resolved storyline hurts me in my anger place.

Bad ending make Keri cry hurt!

Heh. There’s so much to talk about, so many words that I need to squeeze out...but jumpstarting my pen is hard this morning.

I suppose because all of the hallways and staircases in this house of mine are shifting again, and, as usual, I am helpless to do anything but stumble blindly into the uncertainty before me. Wandering and, in a practiced dance with futility, wondering where everything will be once the dust settles.

Family of souls, tangled, eternally resonant.


It strikes me as interesting, the mild draw that humans feel to a descent into madness.
As if, ever present in all of us, there is a voice that speaks to us of chaos and absurdity.
Destruction.

The not-talked-about relationships between movies (all of American culture really) and violence-versus-sex have been on my mind a good amount lately, and the ways they directly affect me have been directing my trains of thought. For instance, the idea (and vivid accompanying mental image) that I, along with my fellow humans, accept that asphalt and concrete and buildings all around us are normal things, silently rejecting the truth and facts of sizzling pavement glop being poured over the face of the Earth. Scorching and burning and melting.

It may sound like a stretch to connect these two thoughts, stretching a thread between violence in movies and parking lots, but as I was pondering the gnarled and marred flesh of the ground underneath the sidewalk I walk on, I couldn’t help but think of Harvey Dent’s open and pitted jawline. Of Gustavo Fring’s bare cheekbones laid visible beneath rent skin.

I see these things as congruous.

(Congruently gruesome, the cruel some pay
no mind to what’s on mine.)

As for incongruent...watch me now as I put on a skirt and some good sensible shoes to go help make someone else’s fortune. Watch me as the steam slides up out of my coffee cup and up into the air, my mouth open and brain absent.

Ugly in the Light

(written 7-19-12)


Ugly in the Light

clarity's eluded me the entirety of this plight
i held myself up like a saint just fighting the good fight
but standing here before this mirror i see another side
in the dark i dwell and always tell of lessons there to learn
i took a seat and patiently awaited there my turn
but with the spotlight over me i'm starting to discern
i'm ugly in the light
ugly in the light
in darkness i'll reside
so ugly in the light
so shoot my love up like a drug and feel its glorious high
your head will spin as you begin to feel the stars align
but soon you'll wake, your heart will break and the beauty there will die
i've something to confide
i'm ugly in the light
so in darkness i'll reside
so ugly in the light

The lyrics and the grit of this song really speak to me. Particularly the third stanza... it restates in plain english a feeling that I’ve had inside my chest for a while. I feel sometimes like there is some primal jungle power inside of me, a sensuality touched by Bast and a hedonism fueled by Bacchus himself. A mischievous desire to touch all and love all but in a way that they are not sure they have been touched or loved, but they know somehow they've changed.

So shoot my love up like a drug and feel its glorious high
your head will spin as you begin to feel the stars align
but soon you’ll wake, your heart will break and the beauty there will die

I’m listening to the song I linked, “Ugly in the Light” by Katie Grace Helow. Feeling...quite peaceful. I’ve got the gentle body hum of someone who spent a long time on their feet and finally gets to sit down. Kicked back, I watch the late summer afternoon quietly drifting into view through our plate glass porch window. A golden ochre hue of dog lays on the carpet beneath my feet, lazing in the silent happiness that I too am feeling. Silent. Happy. 


I know the urge to touch your face and feel your being’s shape
I am an unknown stranger, but you feel the comfort take
And soon you will know me
And soon you will know

Hey you, come here and talk to me

(written in May)

A different day, another viewpoint.

I think that it’s brainless
To assume that making changes
in your window’s view will
give a new perspective.

I agree with this in varying degrees on varying days of the week...for instance, it’s awfully hard to have anything other than a contented smile on my face with this view.

I so greatly wish I had a beard to stroke so that I could rest against a tree in Memorial Park on a gorgeous Sunday in May, wearing flannel and plucking at a ukulele in between smoking cigarettes. I’m trying hard not to be creepy but not staring at you is equally difficult as you drum on your tiny guitar to the music in your earphones.

Oh man. Sometimes I forget that real life is more entertaining than television. I say this as I sit on a sheet spread out on the grass of Memorial Park, notebook out, watching the people around me. All of them different and every time I people-watch the characters randomly refresh. There is the aforementioned beard-stroker-uke-picker, there is a guy practicing moves with a small orb that are straight out of Labrynth. I kinda want to go sing “Dance Magic Dance” to him but alas I shall refrain. :)

I like to imagine that every stranger has passionate sex with the partner of their choosing.

How do you shout to a fellow person out chillin’ in the park “hey, we should chill together, my name is Keri!” or maybe perhaps “I am down to do the things you want to do, and I am content to lay in silence next to you!”

Home is wherever I'm with you

(written back in January)


Home is a familiar feeling, a state of mind that I reside in. Home is a constant, even through moments when I feel like I lost my key. Even in these tear-blinded wandering moments when I feel like a little kid walking home after school only to find I’ve been locked out...

But I’m never locked out.

The best thing about the home I’ve built (and I have built it; painstakingly, organically, slowly and joyfully) is that it follows me around, like it’s been surgically attached. I’m never more than a day or two out from catching a glimpse of home in my peripheral view and going “oh yeah! Check you out, hot stuff. You awesome home, you.”

Home is resting my freezing toes against your warmth as you play your silly boy video games. Home is having my headphones in and tapping my popsicle feet on your bare thigh. Home is the fact that I have a quota to fill per hour of letting you catch me smiling at you. Home is the fact that, in the rare moments this occurs, you let me cling against your chest with silent tears tracing down my face and dripping off my nose because the world got a little heavy for a minute. Even though I’m sure it scares you when you see me losing against the storm clouds... but I think you understand now that by your presence alone you bolster me with the strength to fight them off. I joke about it “filling my meters” when we get skin to skin and I cling tight to you pressed up against that nook between your head and your collarbone, but I’m dead serious. I honestly can’t remember how I used to cope with life before I had the evanescence of your warmth, the luxury of your touch.

Home is cradling your head in hats made with my hands, knowing that I have touched literally every inch of the yarn that keeps you warm.

House of Leaves - Page 49

“You okay, Truant?” Lude asked.

But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow and blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent and sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din.

A thousand and one possible claws.

Of course, Lude didn’t see it. He was blind. Maybe even right. We drove down Sunset and soon veered south into the flats. A party somewhere. An important gathering of E heads and coke heads. Lude would never feel how “empty hallways long past midnight” could slice inside of you, though I’m not so sure he wasn’t sliced up just the same. Not seeing the rip doesn’t mean you automatically get to keep clear of the “Hey I’m bleeding” part. To feel though, you have to care and as we walked out onto the blue-lit patio and discovered a motorcycle sputtering up oil and bubbles from the bottom of the pool while on the diving board two men shoved flakes of ice up a woman’s bleeding nostrils, her shirt off, her bra nearly transparent, I know that Lude would never care much about the dead.

And maybe he was right.
Maybe some things are best left untouched.

Of course he didn’t know the dead like I did. And so when he absconded with a bottle of Jack from the kitchen, I did my best to join him. Obliterate my own cavities and graves.
(obliterate my own gravities and caves)

But come morning, despite my headache and the vomit on my shirt, I knew I’d failed.

Inside me, a long dark hallway already caressed the other music of a single word, and what’s worse, despite the amazements of chemicals, continued to grow.

Important

7-13-12


I’m sitting in Centurion Cafe (where Rhianna works) forcing myself to eat some sausage and write some words real quick about this silly week that I’ve had; starting with jumped-to conclusions and a touch of personal stigmata, ending with reconciliation and a laugh at symbolism.

I resent what inspires me;
the struggle between apathy
and irony

For the record, little notebook, I feel back to normal and, dare I say, at peace. I mean yeah I know that I don’t know anything about anything right now, but I know who my friends are and who my love is.
This is important.

All that being said... I love House of Leaves. It’s rare that a book is dense and easy and light and oh-so-dark, all at the same time.
Like...suddenly being made aware of the very limited scope of human sight. Suddenly being made aware of the unknowable blackness of “behind” which is always there, always.
In broad daylight.

Oh man, my existence is a puzzle.
Dasein...muss es sein?

Sidenote, here are some things I am currently appreciating. Obviously House of Leaves is awesome, and I equally appreciate that it is Josh’s book and that I spent a half hour this morning and yesterday morning reading it at his apartment. Good creepy goodness, not to mention how immensely satisfying it is to have someone to read/talk books with. It’s fun to livestream my commentary to him, especially when he points out stuff that I missed. I know it’s silly but no one except Jon (and honestly this played a very large part in my overlooking all of Jon's eventually deal-breaking flaws) has interacted with me like this in regards to books... at least no one I’ve dated. I’ve noticed recently that I haven’t been reading. I have stacks and stacks of books that I haven't even looked at since I bought them... poor sad neglected books...lol.

Things I also appreciate... I appreciate cracking a smile on a baby’s face and the way that a toddler falls asleep (though she doesn’t want to) when I stroke her hair and sing to her. I also love when I’m writing next to her and she’s trying to grab my notebook and pen...hooray for toddler life. :)

No words of consequence

7-9-12

Oh Muse, help me tell the tale of a woman who would still refer to herself as a girl. Help me tell the tale of a woman whose heart is large enough for a person to climb inside and make a home, and still somehow big enough for another person to follow...and another and another and another.

Oh Muse, help me shake these ill-conceived thoughts and half-realized epiphanies loose from the crannies. Help me put words to these intense flashes of vestigial emotions in the hopes that I can clear the cobwebs and be done with them. I imagine my brain to be the chaotically organized library of an eccentric professor with stacks of books and papers and torn slips with hastily scribbled memos peeking out all over, and I keep meaning to clean it all out... but it’s not quite that simple. With each stack of miscellaneous memories and ideas lies the distinct possibility that some old trains of thought will get roused, stirred, whirring to life like some ancient mechanical widget shaking the dust off and following me around, buzzing around my head. I can’t help but wonder if every human silently deals with the parade of phantasms lurking in the darker recesses.

Oh Muse, why can’t dead things continue to be dead?

But let me tell you, Muse, that this is no new phenomenon. I have had the undercurrent of Nostalgia flowing constantly deep below the sheetrock I am comprised of for as long as I have had memories to recall. When I was a girl I was nostalgic about being a child (short lived as those days were) and as a young woman I waxed poetic about being a girl, about the “days gone by, lost forever.” And now... and now I am still a young woman. I am a young woman who has read too many stories and fallen in love with too many fictional characters. I see now, I see how this has affected my thoughts. I look around this cluttered library and realize how the fiction and nonfiction sections have all been placed in the same stacks. I see how I have begun to fictionalize real people and give them the same love that I have for storybook heroes. Real people that exist in the same universe as myself, real people that and oft are affected by the ripples of aftershock I feel whenever I accidentally kick open a long closed book.

Oh Muse, help me learn the difference. Help me understand that all there is is this moment that I am in and that in real life a book can only be read once.

But muse...as easy as it is to understand the source of the problem and also the rational path to my own peace of mind... well, it is not so easy after all. It is not so easy when I am cleaning a stack of papers and books and I am suddenly struck by the astounding nature of all of my life, and the idea that love can only be generated. That love, even old and obsolete love, continues to exist and must be accounted for in the history books. Indeed, in order to properly sort out and index this brain of mine, muse, I have to let myself be taken on these involuntary field trips of the psyche.

Unfortunately, and perhaps most vexing to me, I have to take these journeys alone. There is not a soul alive to whom these stacks mean anything besides myself. Even the ones closest to me wouldn’t be able to discern the real meaning of my cranial consumptions, but I don’t expect them to. I am intimately aware that each person’s mind is a booby-trapped playground all their own with an individual set of “shit I can’t bring myself to let go of for unspecified reasons but probably mostly because I’m selfish and stubborn.”

So off, alone, I go.

You may ask, muse, what exactly it is that I’ve been blabbering on about. Well I’m not exactly sure and that is what keeps my fingers in constant motion.

It started the other day when I tripped on a small stack in a far corner, one that I had long thought was archived and dispensed of. So I stopped in my tracks, right then and there, and I got to work. Clearly this was a decision that produced mixed results. Basically, muse, I should have left well enough alone.

Don’t get me wrong, muse. This tale is not one that shatters the earth, it does not have our heroine making terrible decisions or deciding to turn her life upside down solely to chase an extinct feeling...nothing of that sort. Our heroine just wasn’t prepared for the face-to-face meeting that blew through the mental library like a sudden gust of sharp wind, leaving her to shuffle through the now-scattered pages yellowed and musty with age, the pages that HAD been indexed and archived.

The event itself was no major thing. The aftermath, when picked through and objectively observed, was only a slight annoyance. Each moment and each scribbled word carries the maelstrom back into the past where it belongs, where it can’t affect judgement.

On the surface simplicity

Ocean pulls me close and whispers in my ear... the destiny I've chose all becoming clear.

There are feelings that I can't name, emotions too complex for statements or newsletters. Sometimes all it takes is the combination of a song and a scent, and other times it's an eyebrow accidentally raised that says too much.

There are times when the boxes I keep are accidentally opened, out of carelessness or arrogance; boxes that perhaps should have been locked. Smoke creeps out and licks at the new air, salacious and inviting, strands of fluid vapor forming a beckoning finger.

Come.

Ocean reaches for me and I dip a toe in. I dip a toe in because I don't want to fully relent to her clutches, but the shimmering vision of vapor simmering has me shaken and vulnerable.

Ocean pulls me close and whispers in my ear, she whispers to me like the forming storm clouds whisper to the shore. I can see clearly a secret that most reject as her cool lips brush my neck.

Come...come and see the directions of the sea. 
See the waves thrash and break against the shore.

See the currents that would go their own way...
The conflicting crashing currents that all do what I say.

There are dark reaches in my mind that sometimes decide to speak up.
There are dark reaches with tiny fingers that can pry lids off of boxes.
Dark reaches that are awakened by the scent of Irish Spring and the sound of exasperated sighs.

Words

Overpass Songs

I have this romantic vision stored away that pops up from time to time and it most often is triggered by a particularly ecstatic burst of melancholy. Yknow, the mindfuck moments where you have no idea if you’re smiling or about to cry. My vision is less of a vision and more of a memory that I have come to use as an archetype, as if words fail me but this one snapshot of a memory has the power to explain this deep awareness I suddenly feel. 


The wind bites a little, the kind that pulls a little at your hoodie and makes you dig your fingers deeper into your pockets. It’s around five thirty on a winter night and the sky is in full force in an ombre watercolor that starts out around navy and drips down into pale sunset orange. The streetlights are on but not quite necessary and headphone cords dangle down from your collarbones. Looking up into the sky makes the breath a little colder and every step taken is one less you have left. Though the warm home waiting for you is an enticing destination, you’re not particularly looking forward to the walk being over. 


In the days when I wore that bittersweet melancholy wrapped around my shoulders, with me constantly, I found intense beauty in the overpass I walked under on my walks home. The lack of light turned the architectural beast into a thing of mystery, a device of advanced technology shrouded in the fog of the unknown. Tall shadows cast onto the sidewalk in the shape of chainlink fences painted my path as I lifted cheap WalMart work shoes one after the other. 


Pondering the deepest and most mundane thoughts my stream of consciousness has to offer, the stars line up suddenly as my iPod starts the next song which promptly stops me in my tracks. Strains of melody drift straight up through my brain and into my bloodstream. The overpass and I, beings of depth in the dusk.

The Faces: Static Voices

Words about my mother:

And I can almost see you, a memory vivid in my mind of a moment I was not present for. A summer afternoon in a world before Internet and cell phones, a world of bright yellows and greens. A world of 8-tracks and vinyl records, pants hugging your teenage hips tight against the realities of adulthood. You are young and vibrant and gorgeous, with your distinct laugh waving through time and space back at me, and this is the you I wish so desperately I could have known...before you were broken down and reassembled into a woman whose dreams were long past and whose idea of opportunities revolved around layaway and Goodwill. Before the cigarettes stained your fingers and years of washing dishes cracked your palms and knuckles. I know the beauty in you, and I can see it clearly. I can see who you were before the relentless waves of heartbreak beat you against the rocks again and again. I am fully aware that I, your distant daughter, the one who reaches out to you twice a year from 15 miles away, am now a co-conspirator of that heartbreak.

The beauty of rolled down windows and homemade bellbottoms is tangible to me and I can touch these times that I was not present for. I can touch your waist length cherry red hair, curling down around your face. The freckles on your pale skin shine gold when the sunlight filters through the trees and hits your cheeks just right. Before you met my father, before you met my sister’s father, Ventura Highway played on the radio. You were a barefooted hillbilly roaming the countryside, free as the air and far out. You were doomed and didn’t know it.

How can I face you when your wrinkles remind me of the 18-year old you used to be? Silence is easy but silence is hard, with guilt wracking me. Twisting my lips shut bruises in ways invisible to the naked eye, and I am isolated here. I can’t turn fully away from the woman who bore me, but you are not that woman. You are not that girl. I can catch a glimpse of her face in the corner of your eye when you speak to me, and I remember dimly that my birthright is somewhere still in you. The girl who glided giddily through rooms of hazy air and distorted guitar riffs, she is my mother and she is somewhere in you, diluted and waning.

Macho Man

Things Keri Geeks Out Over Part 3:

So I have a longstanding love affair with Macho Man.

It's freaking true. My dad was a big wrestling fan when he was younger and I knew him just from watching tv all the time, and as I've grown older Macho Man has found a very dear place in my heart.

It started with these guys, who love to do Macho Man impressions (and they do them side splittingly well):

My darling husband and our great friend Nick, champions of the Macho Man impression!

For real. These guys can have me crying begging them to stop once they start in on the Savage impersonations. "I said I can't sing and I can't dance but I can make romance, yeah!!"

Then this summer an amazing thing happened.
It all started when we were preparing to leave for Bonnaroo. We had to leave on Wednesday to get there by Thursday night, but everything was going wrong. We were having terrible luck. Our car rental got screwed up and we were having trouble with the bank giving us money and all sorts of crap. Earlier on that day Corey had bought a little stuffed shark with tattoos on it from Wal Mart and we proclaimed it our mascot, but after all that had gone wrong I joked that it was our mascot that was causing the bad luck. Of course we don't believe anything like that, but I was getting so stressed to the point where I was starting to get snappy at Corey and taking it out on him (which I absolutely HATE and avoid doing at all costs) so I took my mood into my own hands and decided to laugh instead. "We gotta get rid of that shark," I says. So we made a big deal out of removing the shark from the roster, effectively firing him as our mascot . This detailed ceremony involved tossing the shark out the car window into a CVS parking lot. :D We couldn't leave without a mascot though. On a lark I grabbed a Macho Man action hero that we have, tied some yarn around him, and hung him from our rear view mirror.

And wouldn't you know it...everything started going right. We didn't have a single problem for the rest of our trip to Bonnaroo and back.

Macho Man guarded us through Atlanta

Macho Man guided us at 6 am when the sun started to come up (we drove all night)

Macho Man guarded us through the mountains

Macho Man is still hanging in the Explorer, watching over us every where we go. My dad, knowing our religious affiliation *and* our sense of humor, chuckled when we told him the story and how Macho Man saved our trip. He shook his head and said "well, at least you believe in something."

And I do, dammit! I believe in Macho Man. I believe in the power of a man so freaking insane and hilarious that it could keep me and Corey from harm  :D Yuk yuk. I wanted to write about this today because I got the random urge to watch some of Macho's old interviews. They are freakin' hilarious and I ended up turning them off because I was choking back laughter and tears all day. Here are a few favorites:

 The draw to Macho is easy for me to pinpoint. He's absurd and confident and hilarious. Corey and I have long discussions on whether Macho was just playing a personality, or whether Macho was just...Macho. I like to think that he started out just playing a character but that Macho Man slowly started to take over Randy Savage, until at the end of his career he was all Macho all the time.

I googled Macho Man pictures and I changed my desktop to this. I mean, just look at the guy! He is my hero, and definitely worthy of the small amount of faux idol worship we have granted him.

RIP, Macho. RIP.

And when I return, the trees will know my name

So many words are swirling around in my brain, it's hard to get them out sometimes. It's already December, and I feel like I have to shake my head every few seconds just to make myself remember that. I don't mean to go all Keanu or anything, but dude! Whoa. Whoa. 2012? Already? Dude.

 I needed to get out, so I took Clem and we went wandering.

Our apartment complex is the only thing on our road, and if you leave the complex and go walking it isn't long until you reach some good old fashioned beauty. There's a bridge and a creek, and this lovely spot that makes me think of Arthur and his Lady of the Lake. Clem and I parked our butts here for a bit, with her trotting around sniffing at stuff and me just chillin'. Thinkin'.

Thoughts of life, the way it changes so fluidly, filled my brain. I get such a kick out of how silently time passes and how next thing you know you're a completely different person than just a few years ago. I tend to get wistful and sentimental a lot, it's a huge part of my nature. I just...love everything, dammit, and as such I get overly emotional about stuff. Stuff like where I live now, the places I used to live, people I used to know and places I used to go. Stuff like the fact that everyone and everything I know now is only temporary in my life. When I let my brain go, I vacillate back and forth between sappy thoughts of how far I've come and how in love I am with everything around me (it is not unheard of for me to whisper out loud "I love this moment right now, every part of it)...and then back to being ridiculously sad about how transitory everything in life is and how there's no guarantee that any of the lovely people in my life will be there tomorrow. 

Laying on my back, I entertained myself by pretending that the trees all knew I was there. I imagined that the tall and slender trees above me were aware of my presence, and felt that I loved them. I was in full daydream mode, pretending that years from now when I come back here (as a mother, a seasoned wife, an old lady) that the trees will remember me. It comforts me to think that there is some part of the places I go that knows I was there...as if I still belong to these places somewhat, even after I've moved on. As if when I go back to these places, the trees will say to each other "Oh I know her. She's a part of all of this."

 

The fact that these trees towering above me possess no sentience is also the reason why I take so many pictures of this live I lead. I know that when I return to my former homes and haunts, the only tie I have is my own memory. My own failing human memory. It's a bit of an irony that I fall so deeply in love with every little detail of my life and yet my brain is incapable of remembering them. I know in 30 years I won't be able to clearly recall the black iron street lamps that dot our streets, the ones that make me pretend I'm in Narnia every time I drive home. Someday we'll be out of our tiny one bedroom apartment, someday we'll have kids and a house and all that jazz, and I'm sure someday I'll crave to be back here. In our first home together, with our first pet together.

Under these trees, these beautiful and striking trees. They won't know me but I will know them.