All Images and Text Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Michele Marie Summerlin Shimchock. All rights reserved.
All Images and Text Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Michele Marie Summerlin Shimchock. All rights reserved. I know a lawyer who will eat your face off if you use any of my stuff without prior written permission from me. Thank you.
"It would have to shine. And burn. And be / a sign of something infinite and turn things and people nearby into their wilder selves / and be dangerous to the ordinary nature of signs and glow like a tiny hole in space / to which a god presses his eye and stares. Or her eye. Some divine impossible stretch / of the imagination where you and I are one."
An excerpt from "Something New under the Sun" from Steve Scafidi's Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer
Merriam-Webster Online describes *prosaic* and *daze* as the following (and I am forever fascinated by the etymology of all words English).
In fact, when I was married, I almost bought the entire Oxford English Dictionary in print, but it was expensive, (it, now, runs almost $1,000.00!) and I knew I would be getting a divorce in the very near future, and since said divorce, I have been brokebrokebroke. Seriously, broke. But I *will* own it in some form, some day.
Main Entry: pro•sa•ic Pronunciation: \prō-ˈzā-ik\ Function: adjective Etymology: Late Latin prosaicus, from Latin prosa prose Date: circa 1656 1: a characteristic of prose as distinguished from poetry: factual b: dull, unimaginative 2: everyday, ordinary; (heroic characters wasted in prosaic lives — Kirkus Reviews) — pro•sa•i•cal•ly \-ˈzā-ə-k(ə-)lē\ adverb
Main Entry: daze Pronunciation: \ˈdāz\ Function: transitive verb Inflected Form(s): dazed; daz•ing Etymology: Middle English dasen, from Old Norse *dasa; akin to Old Norse dasask to become exhausted Date: 14th century 1: to stupefy especially by a blow: stun 2: to dazzle with light — dazenoun — da•zed•ly \ˈdā-zəd-lē\ adverb — dazed•ness \ˈdā-zəd-nəs, ˈdāzd-\ noun
I know this blog is in its infancy; it really hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet; it hasn’t discovered its purpose. But I would be okay with it if it wanted to remain without a specific purpose.
I do know, however, what it is not. It is not a business-centered venture. It has no specific formula for success. It is not a marketing device and is not designed to make money. It really isn’t even a lifestyle blog, although it does and will contain tidbits of my life as I try to live it. Who knows? It may grow into vignettes of how this one woman survived life, still breathing but not unscathed. And with a few of the poems that carried her through along the way.
And I know why I named it Prosaic Daze. The words are often prose as distinguished from the poetry I post here. However and more importantly, I named this blog Prosaic Daze because I want readers to know and understand that, sometimes, some things considered dull, unimaginative, mundane, or banal can simply dazzle, stupefy, and stun you with their inherent beauty.
Because there is beauty in all things; sometimes, you just have to let open that third eye to find it. Sometimes, finding the beauty in plain, ugly things is all that will carry you through to the next vibrant sunrise. And the sun *will* rise.
I had a conversation with my half-sister on Tuesday evening.She is 25 years old, married, and has two children.She also had a relationship, if a somewhat fractured one, with our father.But I believe all of my father’s relationships were fractured because, from the beginning, he was a broken man.I imagine he descended from the womb like that.
Those of you who know me are probably saying, “What?!?Sister?You?You’re an only child!”For all intents and purposes, this is true.I am the only child of my mother, who divorced from my father some time shortly after my first birthday.But I still have a picture of the split second following his moment of brilliance when he thought it would be funny to shove my face smack down into the cake’s center.Had I known then the things I know now, I would have been pissed.I should have screamed and cried and flung my limbs all about until someone took me out of that high chair.But I didn’t do this, so maybe I enjoyed it?That was a long time ago, and my memory is a little fuzzy.For the record, however, I never shoved my own son’s face into his first birthday cake.
I also have a picture of my father with my mother’s brother.They were close, and, to this day, Henry says, “Danny taught me how to be a man.”I wish someone could say the same for Danny.Hard liquor, Budweiser, cigarettes, and women: these were a few of his favorite things.He married five times before he died.Apparently, he was pretty magnetic and smooth—parts of him I never knew.Well, I never knew much about him anyway.But I know he loved his cigarettes so much that, in spite of having a softball-sized cancer tumor in his lung, he continued to smoke.Lung cancer killed him in February 2007.I have his obituary on my desk, which I printed out from a Google search.I was planning a reunion for Father’s Day that year.I thought it would be a good time for my 10 year old son to meet his grandfather.Well, you can’t have a reunion when the guest of honor is dead, and because we were so estranged, I didn’t expect to cry, but I did.A hard, long, guttural, lung-shuttering cry.It must have been the surprise of it all.He was only 50 years old.I tried to find him some years before, but that Google search only turned up information on his “fourth or subsequent” DUI.I chased that phantom-man around every jail and penitentiary in Northern Virginia, but he was nowhere to be found. He must have had a good lawyer and used all the back child support to pay the attorney's fees.
Habits die hard, and you can’t escape the double-helix.I didn’t even have to be around him to live his kind of life.I was a chain-smoking, drunken philanderer who tried to commit suicide and spent some time in a PsychCenter—all between the ages of 15 and 30.But I’m trying my damnedest to turn over every green leaf in my path.I wish I could ask him the burning question, “Why did you try to commit suicide?”I will forever wonder what the answer would be, if it would be anything like mine.
I also have a half-brother who is 27 and another half-sister who is 20.Christmas of 1992, I went to visit my father, his wife, and my three half-siblings.I believe the youngest was just 2 years old at the time.I spent the entire afternoon at their house just catching up.My father was too embarrassed to drink his Budweiser or smoke his cigarettes in front of my legal guardians, one of whom was a preacher, so he would excuse himself to the fridge then head down the hall to his bedroom where he lit the stick.One time, I followed him back to that room, and he explained his embarrassment over the drinking and smoking.And he was nervous talking to me.It was as if, at any moment, I would morph into Medusa and command my head of snakes to bite his face off.That day, I think my father spoke the most honest words he would ever say to my face.Actually, that was the last day he and I ever spoke. I was 17.
Our father did the same thing to the youngest sister that he did to me, the whole out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality.She just wasn’t old enough to insist on a relationship like the other two could.And until I can talk to her directly, I’m just saying that by the time she was old enough and could rush to his side, she probably had no desire to do so.Anger is hungry and powerful.I know that by the time I was old enough, I lived too far away, and by the time I lived closer, before the days of the Internets, I didn’t know how to find him.I’m still angry with him to some degree, but hell if it isn’t hard to stay mad at a dead man.Besides, he’s coming to see me in my dreams, uninvited, of course.Sleep is hard enough for me to do on my own without him showing up all crazy hours of the morning.
Our father’s habits covered him like a thick skin, and he took pride in them like a Boy Scout boasts about each of his earned badges.Our father was famous for calling up to say that he’d “be there in a few minutes, get the bags packed, be waiting on the porch,” and then, he would never show up.I would sit outside on top of my suitcase on the wraparound porch for hours, watching the daylight fade to dusk and dusk turn night.I would insist that he would be there; “He’ll be here.”But he wouldn’t be here; he was always somewhere over there doing something other than that visitation thing, and my mother would drag me inside, eventually—all kicking, screaming, and flailing limbs against an ink-black sky.This was a pattern he repeated often, and he even repeated it with my siblings, too.Further, he was a chronic job-hopper.Always one step ahead of the Department of Child Support Enforcement, and if he wasn’t that one step ahead and they caught up with him, he certainly would be that one step ahead first thing tomorrow.
I’d like to know about the good things I inherited from him, if I inherited anything good from him.Maybe I’ll ask him one night in my sleep, and maybe it will be him and not just some figment of him, and maybe I won’t be so bitter and hardened because it really is hard to stay angry with a dead man who was born so broken in the first place.
Inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938, A photograph taken during her tenure with the Farm Security Administration
I. Security
The government controlled the development process, kept a tight grip on the negatives, dictated just what and just how much truth was released to the public. But they underestimated the power: speed of the shutter, grip of the lens, how one woman could harness blatant lies told by natural light. She could photograph a soul without a single body trapped in the picture.
II. Agency
We did not know, some sixty years prior, we’d been caught in a frame. The taxed-out state of soil not yet evident, sold undisclosed. We did not know our new coat of paint would peel like dead skin from a clapboard farmhouse in the heart of drought. Can we be blamed for our love, long dead before the purchase—a gray-scale field, one thousand rows, monochrome rainbows bled fruitless to frowns?
Here, lately, with all the topsy-turvy things going on, I regret that some pharmaceutical company hasn’t come up with an anti-nausea medication for your life events and subsequent emotions. Maybe they have, and I just haven’t been informed of what it is yet. Maybe it’s Thorazine and a rubber room? But this is why liquor was under my employ for so long. Nights after days like today, I would love nothing more than to down a fifth of vodka and club sodas, all fizzy and salty and tart with a twist a lime. And tomorrow morning, I would wake with a hammer keeping time on my eardrum and a long string of sick balled up in my stomach like twine, but at least the chalk would have been erased from the blackboard. Tomorrow morning, I will actually wake up with all the psychic weight I will carry to bed with me tonight.
And my thoughts on faith will have to come another day. In fact, my thoughts on faith could fill a book in three or four volumes.
So, I’ve returned to the Tarot because it knows more than I do. The Tarot just knows. It takes your energy and manifests it in a spread. I trust energy; it’s ubiquitous. I had the great pleasure to meet up with some friends from college on Sunday and was given a reading by K. K is incredibly perceptive and intuitive and an all-around smarter-than-your-honor-student girl. She used a deck and spread with which I was unfamiliar, but the sentiments were the same.
The Querent card is the first card in the spread and it represents you, the person asking the questions. I didn’t ask a specific question; I just wanted a general reading because it had been so long since I’d had one. My Querent card on Sunday was Oppression, which I feel is pretty self-explanatory. And afterward, some pretty deep and deeply personal discussions ensued between the three of us. It will not be the last time.
Later that night, I had a specific question, so I broke out my deck from its dark wood box, carefully pulled away its silk covering, and proceeded to shuffle and shuffle the deck. I focused only on this one question and repeated it aloud until the cards started to get warm. I spread out a Celtic cross, which is the spread of my particular liking.
People read in different ways, and some may say that you are supposed to hand-pick your Querent card, but I like the deck to tell me how I’m feeling because, sometimes, I lie to myself to make myself feel better—like picking the Queen of Pentacles when I’m really the Three of Swords.
In relation to my question, the Querent card was the Knight of Wands, Reversed. The Knight of Wands is the card of Growth and Enterprise. He is a free will, Minor Arcana card, which means the Querent has the power to turn it upright, should she choose to do so, of course. In His reversed state, the Knight of Wands feels powerless, awry, disorganized, chaotic. He lends himself to a journey, but is the journey postponed or even worth taking in the first place? Certainly the other cards in the spread further illuminate the path to the ultimate outcome, but I’ve begun to see a pattern develop in the Querent, a pattern in me.
Tonight, I had another question because this is all I seem to be right now—question bones and query skin—and the deck tells me that I’m feeling a little Eight of Pentacles, Reversed. Mind you, some cards reversed in the Tarot deck can be a positive thing. The majority of the time, however, reversed means trouble, difficulty, or delay. The Eight of Pentacles’ focus is on productivity, but in its reversed condition it implies that a slow-down or impediment is evident. A lack of tools is indicated, and the “work” environment is mediocre, at best. On a literal level, perhaps, it’s suggesting a different place of work or a whole different career direction should be sought. And I’m okay with this. This is what I’ve been trying to do for the last three months. But it’s what the Eight of Pentacles, Reversed, suggests on the figurative level and in relation to the actual question that leaves my lip quivering just a bit.
A pattern is developing in the Querent, and that pattern is me.
My mother has a few stories of her own to tell. My mother’s stories would be enough to give you lockjaw and twist your spleen. My mother’s stories are fetched far beyond any modern-day soap opera story line.
My mother’s stories are sad and true.
My mother was born in 1955 in Barcelona, Spain. For a few years, she lived in Caracas, Venezuela. For a few more years, she returned to Spain, and a few years after that, she relocated to Puerto Rico for about six months. Her siblings, who were still in Caracas, joined her there, and this is where they lived while waiting for their green cards. Their mother, my grandmother, had been in the States for quite some time trying to build a decent life-nest before they arrived. They all have stories: my mom, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle.
But they aren’t stories any of them want to tell.
When my mother moved to the States, she was 14 years old, and she lived in New Jersey. She spoke no English, but she went to an American high school, went to every American class. And, yes, she did have to walk to school…in the snow. Back then, there was no such thing as ESL or English as a Second Language; it was FOF, or Fight or Flight. Perhaps it was SOS, or Sink or Swim. And she fought a good fight, kept abreast with each labored stroke because she learned how to speak English by watching Sesame Street and The Monkees, which explains her life-long crush on Davy Jones. She tells me that learning to speak English was one of her most difficult accomplishments--next only to raising me, that is.
My mother first married at age 19, married a Southern, roughneck boy. He was my father, and he is dead now and comes to me often in my dreams as if to make peace, but I digress, and he deserves a story all his own. No one ever told my mother that there was such a thing as birth control, so, at almost 20, my mother gave birth to me. Our birthdays are just over a month apart. I’m a Cancer; she’s a Leo, and sometimes, when she wants (or needs) to, she will eat me alive and spit me back out with a different perspective. My mother did a lot of growing up in a very short amount of time, and it was hard on her. I don’t blame her for anything, and I like to say that we have a great relationship, albeit a very long distance one. But this is not to say I don’t have a bone to shake at her, because I do.
Learning to speak English on her own was so traumatic for my mother that she made a secret vow to herself that her child would never suffer like that. Her child would only speak English, and this was a promise she refused to break. I understand where she’s coming from. I really do. But every single day, I wish I could speak Spanish. I feel like there’s a hole in my cultural tongue. It contributes to my crisis of ethnicity. And when you fill out as many job applications as I have been, it becomes a repetitive crisis. Ethnicity and race? Um, I dunno. As many things as I do know, I don’t know how to check off these little boxes. Do I check Hispanic (Non-Latino)? Do I check White, even though my father’s mother was American Indian? Can I just check Two or More races and leave the Ethnicity blank? I don’t speak Spanish, and I cannot prove my grandmother was Cherokee.
I’m without a community, but I certainly look and talk like your plain-old, average white girl.
And when I get a job making some money, I'm buying myself The Rosetta Stone software.
I love Gertrude Stein, not because she was a lesbian and an expatriate, although lesbians and expatriates rank high on my admiration list. I love Gertrude Stein because she was imaginative, inventive; she challenges. She challenges and far surpasses any boundary of what is (or was) considered “mainstream.” Tender Buttons is to me, to this day, an inspiring work of literary art. Both of these poems were born of Tender Buttons, and one even borrows from it.
Servings
…and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot and the steam rises; sequent torsos stretch to the light pull of the dusty stove fan. Its heat and red-hot rim, an exposed eye, hold me. Those bodies weeping, bleed kelly green, harmonic bend of tired spines press against the steel pot, stainless. This makes it art, found in a life so grown from dirt.
**********************************
Dreaming of Gertrude Before Morning Comes
Short days and nights shorter still and still is night when I no longer write the cycle begins again and again again and then I wake just wanting to take a lover and no belongings but this longing to run away.
“Individually, we are difficult. Together, we are impossible.” He said this to me yesterday, after our first joint-counseling session, and he is right.
We are energy people, and the energy is often palpable, perhaps a little salty, the consistency of homemade playdoh. But he, in particular, has the ability to manipulate his, to shift it, squeeze it, ball it up, and hurl it across the room—should he choose to do so. I, on the other hand, cannot do this. This is not to say that my energy does not shift or sway; this is to say that I cannot control it. We sat there together on a tattered couch in the center of a small room and watched this poor woman choke on what could only be felt but not seen. She didn’t know what to do with us; she couldn’t take a position, and she didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. She had seen him once before. Neither of us will be going back.
I love deeply and hurt easily; I am not quick to anger. What I do not know is this: how to forgive. Forgiveness is an art form, like putting a brush to canvas or modeling tool to moist clay, and you may do this a million times before you are good at it or have a complete peace. Lao-Tse said, “a thousand mile journey begins with one step.”
Seven years ago, my then-6-year-old son looked at me out of the blue and said, “Momma, you’re just like a cat in a tree.” And to this day, I say he’s too intelligent for his own good, but I took those words to heart. I have been thinking about those words for the better part of seven years now. Why would he say that to me? And, why, exactly, does a cat climb a tree?
I’m no animal behaviorist, but my first and foremost guess would be that a cat would climb a tree for protection from a predator. Or, because the cat is, by nature, a curious animal, and the added height gives it a certain perspective it otherwise does not have with its feet planted firmly on the ground. Maybe the cat was just checking out the world around it. Or, perhaps, because it just needed a quiet crook of a limb in which to cradle and take a nap. But that cat may have been hungry, too, and trying to satisfy its primal instinct to feed by hunting an unsuspecting robin as it was just about to light in its nest. A cat could climb a tree for one or none of these reasons. But, if that cat is me, it’s in that tree for all of those reasons.
Seven years ago, I was finishing grad school and my marriage had fallen gravely ill. Saturn was beginning its seven year transit through my astrological house, and Saturn is one stubborn, messy, slow-moving, bossy little bitch. Seven years ago, I did not fit in my body, and a fifth of vodka made me just liquid enough to be comfortable, if only for that night—and every night thereafter. The bad days didn’t seem so bad and the worse nights didn’t matter at all if I couldn’t remember them. Seven years ago, I was suffering a crisis of identity and crippled with existential depression. I don’t suffer so much with the identity issues anymore. I *know* who I am more today than I ever have. I’m just not too confident in why I am who I am, and I’m certainly not confident that I like her all the time.
I am a sensitive person. Overly so, in fact. And I have a teensy weensy problem with perfectionism. Addiction runs rampant on both sides of my family, and because of this, I never even had a chance. Because of this toxic cocktail of brain chemistry, I have struggled with depression for the better part of 20 years, which is, now, more than half of my life. I have tried just about every antidepressant under the blistering sun. I have seen cognitive behavioral therapists and psychiatrists and licensed professional counselors. I have self-medicated with all kinds of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, and I know this probably makes me look like I ought to be locked in a sanatorium somewhere, but this little space on the World Wide Web is my canvas, and I want to paint it all the ugly colors of truth. And, trust me; you’re in trouble when you can’t confront the truth. I am sober now. I no longer drink, and I don’t abuse drugs. I also do not go to AA. And I would *love* to quit smoking, but I can’t seem to make it longer than two weeks. No matter what, I will continue to try. It’s just that cigarettes are my one last crutch, and some days, I feel so broken that they prop me up.
I am depressed in spirit, and I know it’s going to break my mother’s heart to read that. I have been let down and abandoned time after time, and my fathers haunt my dreams. Especially my stepfather who is still living. I have struggled—for myself, for my son, for others—and I know this is why I can’t sleep at night. In fact, it is 1:30 a.m., and I am still typing. Currently, I am living based primarily on the support of others. And when I say living, I mean food, water, heat, housing, toilet paper. This is disturbing to me. I have a friend who is battling a bedbug infestation many states away from me, and I worry about her living out of plastic totes and Ziplock bags for the next 18 months. I worry about her loneliness, and I dream about it at night. I know I can’t do anything about natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, mudslides and tsunamis, but that doesn’t mean I don’t *want* to do anything about the hurt they inflict upon unsuspecting people. I haven’t been able to watch an ASPCA commercial, or a plea from the Christian Children’s Fund or St. Jude’s for that matter, since I was a small child. They make me want to vomit, and I will cry. I can’t force ugly, mean-spirited, hateful people to believe in peace, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.
And I cannot stress enough the gut-punching importance of love. But you’ve got to be open to it, and, after all this time, I still have trouble with this. I have labored very hard to make it through the last 34 years of this life alive. I am a dedicated and hard worker, although I may be a little too exacting. I just want to know when, and if, living gets any easier.
When I push all other real-life disappointments aside, like not being able to find a new job or not getting married before the end of 2009 or not truly, honestly being able to quit smoking, there has been one recurrent source of simple joy this winter season: abundant snow. And I do mean abundant. I think the Roanoke area has gotten a total of 39 inches of snow this year!
Before this last storm on Friday, February 5th, I found myself terribly anxious. I wasn’t tired enough to go to bed, and then, once I forced myself to go to bed, I found that I couldn’t sleep. My body hit the sheets around 1:30 a.m. I woke up at 2:30, 3:45, 4:30, and again at 5:30. Each time, I lifted my head, checked the clock, and then looked out the window to see if the Boulevard was covered with white, fluffy stuff. You would have thought I was 10 years old and hoping for a snow day excuse from school (or work, even, as an actual adult), but seeing as how I no longer am a part of either the work or school communities, I had no viable stake in the snow. I believe I was genuinely excited about the simple prospect of it. So, finally, around 6:30 that morning, the road was snow-covered, and I dragged my groggy self from under the warmth of the dark blue down comforter, headed downstairs, and poured myself a piping hot cup of my specially-blended coffee: chocolate/hazelnut/French roast. I stood at the front door for quite some time, sipping and staring, in what I can only describe as a state of sheer bliss.
Take a moment to think about the word marvelous or its root marvel. Merriam-Webster defines marvel (noun) as 1: one that causes wonder or astonishment, or 2: intense surprise or interest: astonishment. It dates back to the 14th Century, and its etymology is Middle English. To me, snow is a marvel; I marvel at it; it is marvelous.
We are supposed to get a few more inches of the fluffy, white stuff tomorrow, and I know a whole lot of people are already tired of it, if not despising it, but not me. I am not a hater; I truly love it. Something so cold, something so dependent on cold, warms and radiates from my heart. So, while VDOT was asking people to be smart and stay off the roads, I was gallivanting around town and taking pictures. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them.
Or perhaps, they just trained and ingrained a certain belief system that, now, I find very difficult to alter. When I went back to college full-time in 1998, my son was fourteen-months old. Although I had quit my full-time job a couple months into this new school routine, I found that it was nearly impossible to be a wife, mother, student, and studious—all within normal waking hours. It became customary for me to wait until dinner was done, dishes were washed, the baby was bathed, and he and my husband both were in bed before I settled in to take time for myself, to nurture me, to grow me, to discover and exercise my intellectual and creative bodies. The hours between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. were mine. The house upstairs was still, but downstairs there was energy, a burning frenzy of learning, an affair with words.
For me, writing became a solitary act. And it remains so today. It is not something I can do sitting in the living room, with a computer in my lap, with the television on, or with an audience on the couch next to me. It’s something so much more sacred than that. It’s also something that most people do not, will not, or simply cannot understand.
I’ve always been told I’m an all-or-nothing kind of girl, but that’s not the kind of girl I want to be.
Tell me, how does one find balance? And what or how much does it cost?
I've included this poem here for my friend, Leigh, because I know she's been concerned with some of her work in and of couplets and has been grappling with craft. I wrote this poem during a very rough time in my life. My marriage was falling apart; I was trying to get through a difficult and demanding graduate program; I was trying to be a good mother for my young son; I was just in the beginning of what would be a horrible and all-consuming, years-long struggle with serious alcoholism. Quite frankly, I'm surprised I actually came out on the other side of all that. But, hey, we've all got our battle scars... Right?
A daguerreotype was one of the earliest forms of photographs, developed and used around the late 1830s/early 1840s. They were usually made of silver or silver-coated copper plates and were extremely sensitive to light. Therefore, to be properly preserved, each daguerreotype was housed in its own case that closed with a clasp. Back then, people were pretty leery of photographs, as a common belief was that with each photo you posed for a layer of your soul was taken from you and forever trapped.
My former father-in-law had a truck load of these, and he loaned me one to share with my History of Photography class. She was so beautiful that I had to write a poem for her. I believe the current home of all his daguerreotypes is the Virginia Musuem of Fine Arts in Richmond.
In light of all the traditional winter weather we're experiencing this 2009-2010 season, I thought I'd take you back to Winter 2001. I distinctly remember feeling very discombobulated while filling up the bird feeders on a December morning. I wore an old pair of clam diggers, a short-sleeved t-shirt, and flip flops, and it was winter in the Mid-Atlantic.
Today is Day 10 without cigarettes. Or nine full 24-hour periods. Without. Cigarettes. And it is Day 3 without nicotine. That’s right! Not a single bit of nicotine. Yay for me! No heartburn-inducing gum. No taping nicotine patches to my biceps with super-duper, double-sticky, flexible medical tape. Nada. Zip. Nothing. Absolutely. No. Nicotine.
However, I have been mainlining sugar straight down my throat-vein like my very existence depends on it, and, in a way, I suppose it does. But it’s a long shot. I’m not really worrying about the whole decreased-metabolism-thing yet, (and I’m sure I will when the button pops off my jeans and I have to spend $150 to replace the bathroom window), because right now, it’s all about getting past the 16-year love affair with the most addictive substance in the world.
Oh, good lord, do I love me some cigarettes.
In addition to the small milestone I reached today, Mr. UPS Man delivered a care package from my mom. Nothing lifts your spirits like a care package from your mom! I got all kinds of goodies: four different kinds of lip gloss, mints, minty gum, sweet ‘n spicy ginger chews, chocolate-covered toffee and espresso bean bits, a new purse and wallet, a beautiful journal with new pens and highlighters, and…a new/used computer (which promptly crashed upon installing Kaspersky’s Anti-Virus and all 26 of Microsoft’s critical updates). So. I’m sitting here looking at it now, its 300th restart of the night, and all I can say is: bless its tiny, little processor-heart.
I’m sorry, Mom. I know I’m the only person who can muck up a computer with anti-virus software.
Once I can figure out how to get it up and running without crashing, it will be a wonderful word processing tool. It will be just like that playwright said at the December PEN Women’s meeting; I can take my little notebook to the coffee shop or the Waffle House and write and write and write without all the evils of the Internets tempting me. You know, in that perfect world where one writes stuff that people actually want to read and other things like student loans and gas bills don’t exist. *Sigh*
On an up note…today was one of those days in the Blue Ridge Mountains where it snows all day long but never amounts to much on the ground. One of those snow days where it’s simply pretty just falling like it does—with none of the headache. So I decided that I would get up off the couch, tear myself away from the never-ending job search, and take some pictures.
Trying to capture snow falling without actually going outside...
This shot was taken from the breakfast nook... That's my snowed-in Subaru, and yes, it IS all-wheel drive. What you don't see? The hellacious dip between the driveway and the street. I scrape bumper-to-asphalt on a clear, dry day. My neighbor, Crazy Man, doesn't even shovel HIS dip. And THAT'S sayin' somethin'. Besides, neither of us owns a front-end loader or other necessary equipment to remove all the snow that the City plows *off* the street and *into* our driveways.
View from the front porch... (I've actually ventured outside by this point). You can't even tell there's a water tower and mountains over yonder, can you?
That's Subi, the first new car I ever bought. I put 25,000 miles on her in 9 months when I traveled between Salem and Lynchburg every day to teach 137 high school seniors College English. It was great, GREAT fun, in hindsight. I'd do it all over again, too. (Because I'm crazy like that)...
This little bird lives with its partner in a hidden spot off to the side of the front porch. It's terribly suspicious of me, even though we've been meeting like this for years now.
I thought about posting another poem tonight, but after reading through them, I decided I hated them all today. I'll try again tomorrow. Perhaps I'll even write a new one...
