Send in the Clones
-
Scared
I am desperately trying to come to terms with the unfortunate fact that I have been in a place of fear pretty much all my life. Let me put it another way. All my life, I have been afraid. Sometimes I feel snarling and wild, an animal backed into a corner. Fight or be eaten. My claws come out. I hate this. Rage hurts. It burns like fire. Sometimes I feel like hurling myself down a deep dark hole, never to be seen again. I think this would feel peaceful. At least, I think, the pain would stop. Sometimes — most of the time — I just push most of…
-
Perspective
I am greeted this week by a view of diffuse brown and green mountains tapering off into a distant haze, clouds melting up into white gummy skies. From up high, everything looks soft and peaceful. There is no hint of the constant frenetic undercurrent of movement that is so apparent when you drive down the mountain into Northern California freeway traffic. Things change when you look at them from a different vantage point. I spent Sunday night not sleeping. I knew I was “processing,” a catchall term that really means “going over and over in your mind all the stupid things you have ever done/said since the day you were…
-
Proof Of My Powers
An actual IM conversation with my son, 14. He had a headache and I said I could fix it for him: Karen: Go to sleeeeep, you are getting sleeeepy NW: yes Karen: look into my eyyyyyyyyes, you are very sleeeeeeeepy NW: yesssssssss i am sleeeeeeepppyyyyy Karen: you will do everything I sayyyyyyyyyyyyy Karen: you arrrrre in my powerrrrrrrrrr NW: yessss i will follllowwww commanndsss Karen: cluck like a chicken! NW: bock bock Karen, to herself: IT WORKS! THREE HOURS GO BY Karen: when you awake, you will not remember anything. You will not remember being a chicken, or robbing that bank, or running naked through the halls at school. But…
-
The Time I Blew My Nose And Brains Came Out
I’ve been sick as a horse. Wait, do horses get sick? And how would you know? Whenever you ask them questions, they just say “neigh.” Ba dum bum. You can tell I am feeling better, because my really bad jokes only emerge when I’m feeling pretty good. So I went down to Portland a couple of weeks ago, the place that was built atop an ancient unicorn burial ground (I did not make this up — it’s on Facebook so it must be true — but they only bury the really really ancient ones so they leave the perky young ones to prance around and make rainbows)(unicorn euthanasia)(don’t you love…
-
Unveiling
Two posts in one day! See if you can hold down the excitement.
-
What I Really Need Is A Good Operatic Soundtrack
Well! So I can write Poignant and Painful! Isn’t that just made of awesome? But! There’s more than one way to skin a cat, which means, well, ew. What do you do with a cat skin anyway? It’s far too small to make anything useful out of. A hat, maybe? A cat hat would be sort of cool. Here, pussy! As long as it’s not the skin of a cat you actually know. That would just be sort of wrong, except maybe as a tribute. You could keep your cat’s head on the skin and wear the hat so it looks like there’s your head, and then there’s your dead…
-
I’ll Have To Keep My Post Titles Short Now
I wrote this about a week ago: About a year ago, I drove out of one world and into another. I thought then that I had left certain aspects of the old world behind, but I failed to see the invisible trailer attached to my black Honda CR-V, the one carrying the pieces of who I had been. When I started writing here I wrote as if that trailer didn’t move the 3000 miles along with me, as if it was just The New Me here, the one that didn’t feel as if it had walked out of the two-dimensional world of a Mother’s Day card. In the past year…
-
Where I’ve Been Lately
Yeah, I’ve sort of missed blogging, but I’ve been busy. It’s this alternate-reality thing. No, really. A few weeks ago I discovered I can slip into this other form of reality. It’s way cool and yet sort of frightening at once, so of course I like it, I’m fascinated by it, and I can’t wait to do it again slash never want to do it again. So this is what happened: Matthew put on some music, and I became immobile. Went somewhere else. Spent an hour looking up at the skylight and the trees and whatever other little slice of outside I could see, the rain dripping on the glass…
-
Acid
I am about 3 weeks late on a deadline. I am never late with deadlines (except for a notable exception because I can’t seem to operate Google Calendar). But this one requires going deeply into something, something I just don’t want to touch. But I have to. It calls to me, whispers to me at night just as I’m drifting into sleep and makes my eyes snap open as if on springs and my heart suddenly pound. I push it away with safe thoughts, good thoughts, and push my leaping heart back into my chest. It wriggles, fishlike, for a moment, then lays still, obediently pushing blood into my arteries…
-
Why, Yes. There It Is.
omfg it has been busy, with little sign of let up. Twelve hour days have melted in sixteen hour days, and this parttime gig is now paying me about a buck an hour. And, oh, I should be announcing it with fanfare (we launched! last week! and the site—Super Eco—totally rocks! go see!) but sadly all I can think about is the fact that the letters double themselves on the screen and make it nearly impossible to see. Last week it was cold, and I was in Pennsylvania. It snowed there. My heart froze. I hadn’t seen three cherubic faces in seven months, hadn’t held them in seven months, hadn’t…