everything i tell you is hearsay

I like: Shopping, sunshine, being the center of attention, mimosa, my friends, fried chicken and waffle, copulating, going on trips, laughing, soaking, gossiping, drinking, exploring, and mexican food. And my weekend contained all of this.

Oh, yes, that hat? It says birthday princess. Hells yeah.

Had my birthday brunch at Meriwether’s on Saturday with all of my favorite friends (less a few who couldn’t make it) and had a really awesome time. I blew out my birthday candle with my laughter, so that’s always a good sign…

Sunday I went with Mr & Mrs Pencil over to Bend to see David Sedaris give a reading. Which was hysterically funny. All I can say is, I now have th burning desire to learn more about Nicaragua.

Turkish soaking pool and a free show came next. I had no idea McMenamins offered a “Humping Hideaway” in the corner of the pool, but apparently the couple that was in there when we arrived got some sort of memo we missed. Plus, after they got done dry (?) humping in the corner, they changed right there in front of us. I was not expecting to see wet naked ass that night, always a pleasant surpise!

The weather was amazingly beautiful right up until we were headed back to Portland, but anytime it’s 65 in late October, I am for it. Took the McKenzie Pass back across the divide, and though a remarkably twisty route and thus not the most time-efficient, incredibly scenic and interesting.

Still have the actual day to look forward to on Wednesday, not to mention starting the new job tomorrow. My thirties are already extra-bonus awesome!

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one’s senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.
– Norman Douglas

So after months and months of frustration and looking, I finally found a job. And it’s a pretty good one too. I’ll be doing mostly administrative stuff, but some admitting and patient screening that will hopefully strengthen my nursing school application.

Plus, most fortuitously, the job is in an Optometric clinic. And, one of the doctors does vision therapy. Which they offered me as a part of my benefits package. And it’s funny, because getting this vision therapy was the main reason I started looking for a full time job and put school on hold. Turns out though, most health insurance packages offered at my pay grade don’t include vision therapy in their coverage. So this works out perfectly.

Eye doctors always love me. Who knew my wonky eye was going to come in so handy?

Ahh family fun!

We went out to the haunted fantasy trail last night. We were treated to dry weather of moderate temperature and a waxing moon to set the spooky-ness at full blast. We got out to Wenzel Farm after dark and the whole place was lit up. Aria has expressed some trepidation about going after dark, thinking it would be too scary to take, but we all agreed it was much more fun at night.

We did the haunted castle, wandered back through the woods, and ran the pirate ship labyrinth all as usual. Managed to jump out and holler at key moments for the rewarding shrieks of my child. Good times.

Technically, this place isn’t a pumpkin patch. They bring in pumpkins and scatter them around the trail, and if you want one, you can pay $4 to take one home. Considering I’d only be paying .19 cents a pound down at WinCo, I was not having any of it. Aria already had a pumpkin patch pumpkin, plus I had one left over from the pumpkin carving party I attended over the weekend. I felt like we were well stocked.

As we were winding up our visit Aria began looking around at the various pumpkin options available. We climbed the final hill up to the parking lot and I told her again I had no intention of paying $4 for a pumpkin when I already had one in the car. So my sister and I walk over to the car and get in, talking about the pictures we had taken and whether they’d turn out. I start the car and hear the pounding of little feet running toward the car. I turn around to see Aria sprinting up to the back door arms full of a gigantic pumpkin. She opened the door dumped the pumpkin in the backseat, climbed in over it and said:
“Come on let’s go!” To which I replied.
“Where’d you get that pumpkin?”
“Well, you said you didn’t want to pay for one.”

Now, I realize that the responsible and parental thing to do would have been to lecture her sternly, make her return the pumpkin, and apologize. So, what I did instead was laugh my ass off and let her keep the spoils of her illicit pumpkin-snatching exploits.

I have a faulty moral compass.

So, occasionally I will have this weird, but basically cool thing happen: I will fall asleep, sometimes dream, though not always, and wake up with a song-fully formed-written in my head. I have learned to keep paper and writing utensils handy so as to make record of these sleep-songs, because if I just go back to sleep thinking I’ll remember them in the morning, I wont.

These songs are always at least as good as what I can write when I am fully awake and engaged in the songwriting process in earnest. Sometimes better. It happened to me all the time when I was a child, but I didn’t have the presence of mind or musical language to translate these songs into anything permanent. Sometimes I would wake up crying at how lovely and necessarily transitory they were. Now I have the means to capture them and I’m struck by something else: they’re always happy, too.

Anyone who’s listened to my body of work knows that this is, in itself, unusual. My frame of mind, intellectual and emotional propensities, and singing voice all lend themselves more naturally to down-tempo minor key songs about… well… that one guy. Even Aria pointed this out to me the other day as I was writing a song. Her grandmother asked what it was about and Aria said
“Probably the same thing ALL her songs are about.” to which I replied,
“Oh, yeah? What are all my songs about?” she rolled her eyes
“_____”
Oh. Right. Him. Although, as it turned out, I managed to make that one about a flood instead. Uplifting stuff!!

But last night, in the cradle of slumber, after having some WHACKED OUT dreams, I woke up with the first verse of a song, sweet and cheerful, twirling in my head. So I wrote it down. And I like it already. It makes me happy to sing it. So, I guess I do care if I sleep. There is some good it can do. And I have the Red Paper Flowers to prove it….

Which is supposed to help, but sometimes doesn’t. No amount of breathing is going to change the fact that things are scary and sad. It might change the intensity of the scary or sad feelings, but they don’t go away.

If only, like Hansel and Gretel in reverse, I could follow my own breath forward to unlose myself. I suppose that is what’s happening, if only in slow motion. Progress so incremental and elusive to observation as to be mythical.

And the temptation is powerful and recurring to keep my breath inside, to trail after it back into myself and hide there away from the light of the truth that hurts me so much that it steals the very breath I mean to pursue.

But instead, mostly, I chase after it out. Though it carries with it noises and meanings that would otherwise stay within, and I’m unsure they should have got out at all.

I wonder what I take in, and what goes away from me further, with each successive breath.

I am a sentimental sap. I cry at movies, and t.v. and songs about Michigan. I don’t know why, but it has always been so. I become unaccountably attached to inanimate objects, like my 1980 Datsun 510 Station Wagon which I WEPT over having towed away many many months after its practical purpose as a mode of transportation was completely over. I’m not a pack rat, but I do care about holding on to a handful of things that have special resonance for me. And this is more true for books than anything else.

When I was born in 1977 my grandparents gave me (via my parents) a beautiful book of fairy tales as a gift. The stories are dusky without being dark or scary, the illustrations are phenomenally beautiful and intricate, and this book has been the measure against which all things fairy have been compared ever after.

As one might expect, this book, being as old as I am, has seen better days. The cover has come completely off, pages have been missing from Thumbellina since I was tiny, and small rotten offspring belonging to my sister have drawn in it. So, I have been on the lookout for a copy in better condition for quite some time. Being out of print, British in origin, and 30 years old has not made tracking one down an easy task.

Then suddenly this morning, I looked on Amazon and a little tiny bookseller in Grants Pass has one in good condition for an utterly reasonable price. I was nearly beside myself with joy. So.

I’m making a pilgrimage to southern Oregon to fetch it. I loved the last trip I made down south more than I would have predicted, so I’m very much looking forward to making my way down there again. And I like the absurdity of driving all the way to Grants Pass to get a book I already have just for the sake of immersing myself in the past.

At least according to google image search. Or maybe an upsetting gastro-intestinal event.

But I cant tell because there is no mirror in front of me at the moment to reflect it since it is what I am experiencing at this very moment. The conflict I mean.