JK

Stories have power. Stories reflect and shape, both. We are creatures of story, and they're worth our reflection.

I've especially enjoyed a story told as an animated show intended for young audiences. One which corporate decided "didn't fit that brand" (*cough* queer *cough*) and cut, but which pulled out a satisfying ending nevertheless. In its first episode our main character frees people imprisoned in the "Conformatorium" for being weirdos. It's delightful from jump, is what I'm saying.

 It occurred to me, in the hours, days, after experiencing something I’d wanted my entire life- a total solar eclipse- that while the wealthiest can zip around the world to experience this any time an opportunity ariseswe can’t move the heavenly bodies.

Clearly I knew this. It’s only an entire metaphor. Even Jareth the Goblin King- love of my adolescence and with me in spirit ever since- moves the stars for no one.

 

But I didn’t know it.  In my bones. Somehow. I didn’t understand it on some level that I feel I do now.

 

The two and a half minutes of totality in the woods of northern New York was a deeply holy experience for me, and as I’ve watched other people discuss the event, I can’t help but wonder 

what else do we find fascinating that's beyond our control
what do we find terrifying that's beyond our control
that's almost everything

new life, ultimately
death, ultimately
the seasons





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Winter rolling back in ushers me back to vaguely contemplative writing, and whatever was pingponging around in my head for the day is set aside in place of the above, which I found in my drafts and have no memory of writing. I do remember, however, the feeling it describes.

In all the great traditions, it is in stillness and quiet in which one can fall away into the infinite.

So what does that mean for my ADHD ass?

I miss blogging. I miss having people to write for. I miss collecting thoughts from the day into something that passed for interesting enough. I miss making parallels and connections, writing about how I figured out how to do a thing that could help someone else do the thing too, collecting photographs that pleased me. My blogging died in...



2017ish I guess. For good reasons, it was a rough time. And then the Internet moved on and I moved on, and now maybe we're shifting back.

Why not.

Hello.

1) I ought to be planting onions. They’re mostly planted as it is, hundreds of tiny little greens slips with their trailing white roots. I myself haven’t planted any of them. I’ve been too tired, too sick, too busy with other work, so the job my spouse and I have done together for years on some frigid windy spring day was this year done by him alone under a hot sun where wind would’ve been welcome. I was recovering from the week-long knock down by my booster for the pandemic sensation that’s sweeping the nation… again. It feels like I’m always too tired, too sick, too busy, to get done the things I want to do and ought to do, and my mind is about fifty steps ahead of my body, enthusiastically pointing at the things that make my life- aspirationally- and my physical form is panting, lagging behind, wondering which of the various maladies in my life story are to blame this time. Making peace with the tangledness of their web is probably the work of these years, the end of my 30’s. But I got to have a 30’s, and so re-imagining my 40’s to accomodate the unexpected turns of my life’s story, the world’s story, shouldn’t leave me too bitter. I’ll plant the onions. Or I won’t, and there will be fewer to go rogue in their cardboard boxes on the basement shelf next April. What on earth things will be like by next April, I can’t think about too hard. Either way, I’ll have planted the onions, or I won’t have, and it probably won’t make or break my story.

2) I smell like old eggs. It got cold too fast last fall, and there were unexpected turns in the family doings, and so we have too many chickens right now. (If you’ve ever butchered chickens outside on a cold December Satursday, this perhaps makes more sense to you.) With one third of the family mildly allergic to eggs but with lots of growing to do yet so we don’t fuck with allergens, one third not officially allergic but gosh eggs need to be eaten with caution or else there’s hell to pay, and the remaining third a single human soul who can only eat so many damn eggs… We have also too many eggs. With no one to share them with because we live in an isolating age, and I can’t instant message eggs to my friends, sometimes I have to deal with old eggs. And now I stink like old eggs, mixed with the vanilla skin lotion I tried to disguise the smell with, topped off with the grapefruit notes of my child’s pump soap I used desperately trying to get the egg-vanilla smell off me. I smell like a bakery in hell. But at least I know my nose works.

3) It’s hard to write an essay with a cat’s ass in your face. I used to shoo the fluffy orange hindquarters off to the side but since the arrival of the kitten, my orange tabby has been pretty scarce. So when she decides to demand snackies two hours early, with an ass in my face, well I remember what it’s like to be the oldest, and I let it slide. But I don’t give her the snacks either… except on days when I remember she won’t eat them if the kitten’s around, and since the small menace is nowhere to be seen, I carefully unscrew the lid and I give the cat her crumbly brown tablets of joy.

4) The hundred Ought To’s are calling so loudly it’s hard to hear my own thoughts. The self indulgent journaling that’s passing for essay writing feels like the lowest of priorities in a 2022. But it’s always going to be a 2022, and worse, and I might as well YOLO my afternoon. Whether essays or onions, neither will make it to my epitaph, and it’s cooler in the house.

5) I don’t have any tattoos, but if given the opportunity some day, I want the little artwork by my child from the year after the car crash that didn’t kill us. One more thing that didn’t kill us. To celebrate the not having been killed, I threw the only party I’ve ever in my life thrown. I was nervous as hell, I overplanned and overcooked, it was all mapped out great- and so of course it poured down rain to humble me and I had to somehow put all those people in my house and I probably panicked my way through the entire thing- people I know from totally different aspects of my life all in one place together, what was I thinking- but my point is, we decorated for the day with small watercolor paintings strung on cheap plastic ribbon, banners which hung until only a couple months ago. I assume I was the first of my child and I to doodle the design of the skull with simple lines for limbs, holding the balloon that announces “YOLO” to a world that discarded the phrase as passe before I probably ever even uttered it, but I love it unironically and use it without shame. I like his rendition better than mine. I remember too his perfectionist frustration with the piece, a drawing in thick pen which I loved instantly. (There’s an essay in that.) It has ever since hung in a frame by my bedroom door, the physical center of my house now that I think about it. Only three years, really? Since that party. I didn’t have to decide whether to throw one on the second anniversary of that day in which I particularly did not die, since by then we were huddled in our corners, figuring out work and school and life in a world suddenly much more determined to kill us. Every day now feels like a memento mori party, for those of us who are still here, for now. Going forward though, the date is also my niece’s birthday. What can compete with turning six? You don’t do that every day, after all, and so far, I’ve not died every day of my life. Why make the fuss about that one. But I do want that tattoo. YOLO.