butter my butt and call me a biscuit
Thursday 23 March 2006 | I like a cookie
The infrequency of these posts is beyond appalling. Oh, sure, I certainly have my reasons: protracted horrible breakup with Voldemort; bizarre and quite probably failed attempts at reconfiguration with the Librarian and his family—beginning in September when I ran into him at the son of Albert in the juice aisle and dropped my cans of cat-food tuna all over the place, continuing through their attempts to keep a thoroughly Stockholmed me from jumping off a cliff post-Voldemort, and only terminating abruptly on 21 February when the Librarian died a thousand deaths in two hours during which he was certain I’d gone cliff-jumping anyway; all-consuming job as web editor from which I was only recently deservedly if summarily sacked; direly morose seasonal affect; raging perimenopausal hormonal horrors; weekly writing deadlines which given all the other stuff began to seem leviathan; and not least the repeated fixated belief that only if I crawled under my office desk would I be safe from it all. I actually spent some time at the newspaper thusly lurking, though I don’t think anyone noticed this. Anyway I hope not.
Then, three weeks ago, Eloise disappeared. Then, one week ago, gardeners found her body, and the Brujo sat next to me as I touched her, sobbing, trying to find the wounds, my uneducated attempt at an emotional forensics: Had she suffered? Had she been wounded and looking for help? Or had she literally not known what had hit her, before rejoining Bastet’s daughters in the summerland?
Not to say that the last six months haven’t also held wonders, as in, will wonders never cease. Apparently they don’t, because not only were Mandarin and mes parents and the DBT and Persephone and various other Zen girls unflaggingly stand-up and available and supportive, but then sometime in the blasted blackest days of winter this faery of a brujo turned up. And thus he was by the multiverse provided, conjured almost as it were out of thin air, apparitioned from the aether while I was still wailing, pace Lucy Grealy, I will never have sex again!
(Ann Padgett, exasperated, fond, patient with her two alternating responses: “You’ll probably have sex again before I will,” and “You can’t start saying that yet when you just had sex this morning.”).
Augmenting carnality is the rich dark burnish of maturity and casual educational assumptions. “I don’t think of it as Jungian,” I expostulated last night over brown rice and some ostentative content I can no longer remember. He sat with drafts of the third part of his novel strewn across my white damask stolen tablecloth, their frayed notebook paper besplattered with ancient coffee stains. Fionnula, his slobbery black Lab, goggled happily first at one of us, then the other, ever hopeful something exciting might happen. “That’s too wacky even for Jung; it’s more like, I don’t know, Milton Erickson.” He agreed but continued unhesitatingly and only stopped mid-paragraph because I was looking at him with what I can easily imagine to have been a transparently moonstruck, greensick, besotted face. No one knows who Milton Erickson is, besides me and Mandarin. No one. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just in big, big trouble.” Again. When I said fool me once, shame on you; fool me a dozen times in two decades, what the fuck is my bleedin’ damage. When I said, I walk down a different street. Why is there a direct connection between my corpus callosum and my clitoral bloodflow. Why does it make me want to take off his pants when he recites Yeats unaffectedly, casually compares something to enantiodromia, writes deadpan performing arts blurbs (e.g., the Irish step-dancers who “forge in the smithy of their shoes the uncreated conscience of their race”). Why, why, why after all this time am I still a brain-slut who doesn’t dispassionately assess before she tumbles into heterosexual monogamy and thus, inevitably, a corresponding world of pain?
Help me I think I’m falling / in love again…
And now I’m eating Trader Joe’s corn-and-rice cheesy poofs and Not Writing, when there are two big things due tomorrow. I have some kind of lurking migrainous sensation. And I’m supposed to have dinner with Persephone tonight and I think I’d better call and reschedule. I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything, but watch Caché and write and eat random unhealthful things and brood and scribble and call Mandarin and write and write and sleep. Oh yes.
I would not step from my path to spit on Voldemort if he ran screaming down Marcy Street with his dishevelled retro-hipster blonde hair on fire. And I suppose liberation will only come when I’d do so for him, with no further thought-energy than if he were a complete stranger to me.
I’m still not unstockholmed. On verra.
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