8:08 am Train!

Finally sent the Hubbin off to the University to teach in person today. Epic PPE but him still a nervous wreck even as he sits on the end of the couch thinking up things for me to do while he is gone. He swears I never told him I was bugging out next week for 48 hours of isolated revisioning even though HE was the one who told me to make the reservations when I was playing fence sitter about the whole thing. It drives me crazy he still thinks after 34 years of wedded bliss that I need to be told what to do in his absence. I’m only not doing this important stack of things because I can’t get you out from underfoot so I can work unimpeded by things like “Feed me Norman!” I ask him what he wants with the food I’m cooking for him not because I cannot feed myself but he demands the “l-o-v-e” of a homecooked meal even though my own cooking makes me want to hurl. “Vegetables,” he says. “Okay, I’m fixing you food I don’t even want, and ‘vegetables’ isn’t helping me,” I tell him. “Well I don’t want to get bitched at,” he says. Now it serves no purpose to explain to him that providing a useless answer to the person who prepares his food is dangerous territory if you don’t want to “Get bitched at” because autism is like this free pass for him and I’m the one who understands 80% of the time that he’s getting away with most of his behavior because I’m on the high ground with tongue tightly clamped in my teeth. The SAME way it looks like I do nothing when he’s around because everything he gets into the middle of turns into a complicated mess and NOT what I need to do. Yes, after 34 years I still lock the bathroom door because he’d give me pointers on that too if I allowed it.

Seriously, I’m just venting and best get back to the work of my real work before I have to consult the Oracle which is also just so much high theater because it’s really just 45 minutes of discussion about care and feeding of my menfolk. I don’t like the things I really care about coopted for the free use and enjoyment of spectrum boy and our offspring.

What I’m really trying to do is finish the story I’ve been working on about Thermopolis Wyoming. It turns out the story was much more complete in my head than it was actually on paper but that’s an easy fix. I just need a couple of days to myself listening to the explosions of snow control at a ski resort up the road from my hideout.

Meanwhile, I wrestle with the Dragon and try to get Google Docs to preserve more pre Trumpvirus exploits. I’ve got Hubbin looking at fire safes for my original work. Toni Morrison lost some of her work to a fire at her place. Nothing I do is on that level but it’d stab me right through the heart if I lost it. That urgency scrapes deep craters in my psyche. I have a lot of holes to dig before I get everything safely squirreled away.

*************

5/19/2019

Every place where I have battled leaks over the winter is dry this morning. A loud thud woke me at 1 AM and I slept soundly after that. By 6 AM the table is set for a day of quiet, midweek, rainy day self-time. The lump on my arm from the allergy shots is gone now. My other arm itches and burns like crazy. Still, a confusing mix of lethargy and jitters from the person pre-shot medication hangs inside of me. The morning wave of bird noise feels like I’m swimming in sounds.

Bird puddles.

Eating some thin, cold, attempt at oatmeal and some yogurt which is thankfully not so thin, I wade through the blather that precedes the text in my newest copy of Kerouac’s “cartography”.

Joshua Kupetz talks about Carl Solomon and the “new criticism.” One paragraph ends with the idea that the reader “ignores the otherwise meaningless prose.”

WHAT?

This phrase bothers me. Then it upsets me. If the reader, or the critic, decides some of what a writer has offered is meaningless, what do they even know about the thing? Should I decide the word “not” has no relevance as the zombies chase me across an apocalyptic landscape? Instead of “do not stop” I can decide only the “do” and the “stop” have meaning because after all, I do not need that kind of negativity in my life…

Wait, I actually do need negativity in my life? Now I need to stop? Danger is at hand but I’m trying to figure out if the word the author used aligns with my sensitivities and life experience. Do not stop? Do stop? Couldn’t they just say run?

I want the answer to be run. Run fast! Run continuously! Run! Run! Run! Meaningless?

Grrrmph… rrrrr…grk!

I am not going to worry about this any further. The long cry of the train echoes over my shoulder. Time to just be for a while.

Then coffee.

8:08 AM train! I bounce down to the dock and startle a kayaker as she drags a purple plastic boat out of the choppy water. The Ghost appears out of nowhere and scares somebody again! It’s a really bad habit and not something I do on purpose. It’s hard to fathom how I can, in the depths of my musings, and no small person, still be invisible to so many.

I have beat the train so this is my first moment of Zen for the day. Five orange engines, low brown cars behind, the black tankers, low matt haulers for a product made in Chewelah, and then yellow cars at the end.

Closing my eyes I wait for the final horn. The train is long out of sight before I hear it again. The orange and black curtain of my closed eyelids disconnects the physical certainty of a wooden dock. The park bench where I sit could be on a boat somewhere in the middle of a bigger body of water. I ticked the familiar sensations off in my head, St. Joe River, Puget Sound, sitting next to Mark Twain in Dubuque, the long lake out in front of the window of my regular abode.

Why am I here? I have to ask myself the question to make this practice useful. Remove the usual distractions. Find new distractions. Get outside of your own (the Dragon objects to my potty mouth). Observe and report other people’s (even if it’s relevant potty mouth). Drink lots of coffee. Go home rested, stronger in body and mind. Renew the joy of living. Open my heart to the power of loving myself and others.

Oh yeah, coffee the store is closed. No coffee there this morning. I imagine a lineup of Lake Ladie’s kids as they head off to school. I can and do make my own coffee.

Calling Hubbin before I trek back up the hill he advises me to tie down the awning before the thunderstorms arrived.

Now I have an urgent matter to attend to. The storm is coming. I welcome the wind, which blows the insects away, but it breeds a flapdoodle of chaos for my papers carefully arranged on the outdoor writer’s nook that I have created. I finish the last dissertation on Kerouac’s “circle of despair” and jump into the Deer Slayer to illustrate the point of what I have just read. Straight lines to the ideal? Heck no! The wind picks up to hurry me on my way.

*********************************************************************

Fight…fuss…fart Google shares my mother’s opine re my writing habit “Too many words.” Yeah, she actually said that when I gave her a copy of the first novel I was so proud of in 2005. None of my “writer” companions from the English department gave it even a cursory glance. A lot of people who consider themselves educated are really super full of poo. Maybe I’m full of poo too but I’m actually trying to finish something and give it a good fling.

https://images.app.goo.gl/JSSeqV3oVeky7e3JA