Double line

OK, 2010. Get thee behind me. Line yourself up over my shoulder and watch stalkerishly, fire flares over my head of the moments of joy that you offered, pinpricking my pupils and tripping me over against the loose cobbles of the just-about-to-happen, fold your sweaty dog-eared lesson-pages into the pocket at the back of the Moleskine, tug my diaphragm with my failures and broken promises and long aimless reaching, but Please Stand Behind The Yellow Line.

Tide

I have wandered the day with the wrench and screwdriver and scummy sandpaper of adulthood, sorting out yet more bank-related things, next-week related things, the vaguely benign orbit of today-tomorrow things, dishes and laundry and wet clean hair, punched sofa cushions and sorted recycling tanged lemony with the sadism of the everlasting and inexorable.

I am so dog-tired coasting the wash and pull of heartbreak, the most of me dragging the future flinty-eyed toward my chest, hauling stubbornly with my back to the coil of slack rope so I cannot be reminded how much remains, but the least of me tiny, fervent and vicious in not letting go, screaming doggedly at the top of its voice with unhysterical, single-minded resolve combing my insides with nails and carving out spoonsful of my lungs with technicolour scenes of reconciliation.

My shower leaks.

Doors

One of my most basic terrors is that I have nothing to say. I don't even know what this fear really amounts to -- something about uniqueness, something about dilettantism, something about failure, mediocrity, immortality, worthiness, what?

The hope that phosphoresces gently in the damp complex of caves in there is that if I keep opening doors in my mind, if I sort of write myself notes like a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way back to forks in the labyrinth, then I might find something on the other side of one of the doors. Or I might find that the breadcrumbs say something themselves.

Untethered

I just sent some emails which uncouple me from all the things which make me part of a story I once told about myself, unclipped like the safety chute and suspended in the freezing cold air and terminal-velocity roar of what I really wish. Holy shit, the terror is like metal and fire and the mind-altering moment between hammering your thumb and screaming blue murder and I am clasping my hands and curling my toes and eating a boiled egg sandwich as though it might contain salvation but oh, how good it feels to have torn the fist clutching my diaphragm into the wind, to be free of the crippling nausea of agreeing to things that I have convinced myself was bravery but is really another way of endorsing my perverse theory that if I forgo the thing I want, the sacrifice will save me from bad things.

Bring it, bitches. I know all kinds of fear.

Or maybe not

I am just one of millions of overworrying anxious idiots. I'm at peace with the parade of minor-league holy-shits in my head. Or more than I was ten years ago, anyway. But then there is the Big Background Stuff.

My current BBS worry is:

Possibly, I am a loser.

I put this to my mother. She said:

Okay. So?

Which was a fucking good point. She is known for those.

But since that is the right way to be thinking about it, let's not. Saying that you're a loser, much less saying why, is precisely the kind of onanistic hairpat-baiting neurotic crap that makes you a loser in the first place. But we losers like to pretend that if you say it, you have to show some (loserish) balls by justifying your fervent loser dogma. The thing is that I have this habit of doing something until I might have to stop proving that I have the potential to be good at it and just goddamn get the hell on with being good at it, and then I bail. Dilettante, right. Pronounced loser.

So of course I'm involved with a doctor with all the saving lives and insane shifts and no sleep and forced on-demand justification of every freaking move you make and having to stand up gracefully and willingly under constant public critique without yelling stick it bitches what the hell would you know? Which I'm mentioning to make clear that the obvious fact that doctors get automatic not-a-loser passes is not an empty bit of hero worship, dickwad surgical consultant or three notwithstanding.

It's so textbook I could puke all over my shoes. If I had any shoes, which I don't, because of the whole enforced-exile-one-suitcase-life-in-storage painfest, so what I have is my North Face snow boots, a pair of Birk Arizonas and the black high heeled boots with the ankle buckles that Pluvialis calls my Stormtrooper boots which are in the collection because they happened to be in the first box of clothes that she and my friend Shiny Hair opened.

My kingdom for some chucks.

It's my party

Last night on the phone to The Green-Eyed Doctor I fell apart, semi-predictably. As in didn't see it coming, 20-20 hindsight. Wandering my alien city cushioned by the weather-smoothed grooves of long friendship and the heartbreaking unseen relief of facility with language I felt ordinary and me-ish. As it turns out, I hadn't felt that way for some time. Which is both duh-worthy and meta-duh-worthy, because duh that I'm not in an emotional place where the Bleeding Fucking Obvious even approaches ... well, bleeding fucking obviousness.

So I'm lying there in the dark with the phone between the pillow and my ear believing that half-truth that it makes a difference to the person listening whether you cry quietly but unmistakably or give in and bawl your eyes out. According to the cracked-out logic attending this theory, quietly-but-unmistakably wins you partial Keeping It Together points; bawling 0 points.

Plus, no doubt, the fact that there's something farcically ego-bruising about the person who is the raison d'étre for your collection of joyously unutilitarian underthings listening to your nose fill with mucus. Which thought is also a gender-political nightmare and just another thing to punish yourself with while you worry vaguely about the phone shorting out because the earpiece is filling with tears. Saline-liquefied mascara climbs under my eyelids and burns gently there while I pretend like Completely Emotionally Together is a line on my CV under "Other Accomplishments".

I can hear The Doctor containing his withering opinion of my lachrimal token economy, incredulous that I thwart him in our mutual desire that my brokenness be unbroke. With hard-won and superbly neurotic mastery I butter on another gratuitous layer of irony by being able simultaneously to endorse his scorn and be humiliated that he is silent about it because I'm crying like a goddamn girl.

After I've dried the phone I read David Foster Wallace on lobsters and the adult movie industry until envious writerly desires take over my damp, dog-eared shame and I fall asleep to blackbirds greeting the dawn with German accents.

comma, The

My frame of mind at the moment doesn't really deserve the friendly, boxy appellation "frame". That would be something you could hang on the wall, maybe in the bathroom or the dark part of the hall, or in a pinch you could stack it in the attic next to the other crap in dubious taste. Because it's handy and oblongish and flat, you see. Which is not the current state of my mental. Another thing which is friendly and boxy is grammar and syntax. No wonder we understand one another. Sustained prose, however, is another matter altogether, so while I spool up something to say later, six observations:

(1) Many odd juxtapositions work brilliantly and make, like bringing something out of solution, a very particular kind of satisfaction unique to the combination of things that ought not to go together---an unexpected scent of bread in a library; Gill Sans with overwrought gothic drop-caps. However, my 1792 edition of Hume's History of England (13 vols.) sitting next to my collection of Ravilious' interwar period Persephone dinnerware is not one of these.

(2) Which is annoying me to an extent wildly disproportionate to its relative importance, which is surely microscopic bordering on negligible.

(3) My prose style is utterly fucked by trying to write my thesis. Are you hearing this stuff that is coming off my keys? What the hell was that last thing I said? Could I possibly sound any more pretentious, uncomfortable and over-sub-claused?

(4) The convention of alphabetically listing entries beginning "The" under the initial letter of the following word instead of under "T" has apparently died.

(5) I would be outraged.

(6) Except that I am a command-F whore who still has to sing the alphabet song under her breath in the library.

Dissassembling

The ability to 'compartmentalize' is often touted as a Good Thing. You should already be suspicious about the bona fides of that claim, because, lord god, how ugly is that word. If you have to -izeify a perfectly ordinary noun having nothing to do with the glittering, spectacular garbage heap of lost treasures and crucial detritus that is the interior human experience in order to describe that experience --- or even worse, in order to say how one ought to handle that experience --- you should wonder why. I have a certain sympathy for the thought that it's a Good Idea to distance one's feelings about one's professional performance from one's sense of oneself or one's belief in oneself as a desirable partner or whatever. But seriously? Who the hell actually does this? Does it really help? Or does the effort of doing it basically amount to whatever grief you would have gotten from letting all your shit bleed into your other shit in the first place? I am not sold, people. I do not buy it.

Still, I'm struck by the sense that I am made up of parts. Not in the boring and straightforward sense of having many different, conflicting aspects of myself, but real parts -- modular pieces which attach to one another with special grabs and clips and quick-release snaps like on a backpack designed to appeal to those with a fetish for the 'technical' in technical gear.

Once upon a time, I had a certain interest in these pieces, and their tendency to spring apart or rearrange themselves at inopportune moments when you would go looking for your ambition and find it gone, or possibly it's gone and clipped itself to something else that's hanging out in my head while I wasn't looking.

So I'd go looking. Or I'd idly rearrange the pieces, making soft mental hmmm ... and uh huh ... noises.

When you're in the right frame of mind, you can fondly call this navel gazing. But when the metaphor is not a metaphor at all and you are really coming apart, it is like stepping on something soft and squishy in the dark and finding it is somehow painful into the bargain. And then doing taking another step and ...

Oh, lord. So boring.

I like the outside much better. Rain, rain, go away ... I need something else to say.

Not-so-deadly

I've been thinking about some maligned emotions. Of course, emotions generally are pretty maligned -- particularly any real breadth of emotions. We're apparently supposed to exist in a constant state of moderate satisfaction or vague annoyance. No big emotions, please. Big emotions aren't emotions, they're overemotional. Kindly stop overreacting. Pardon me? I'm reacting too much? Heaven forfend.

Which brings us neatly to those famous sins. The one that's been exercising me lately is that gleaming, metallic-flavoured behemoth, Envy.

I keep hoping that over time, life will gradually wear away my various and spectacularly robust kinds of cluelessness. Progress is slow. My skull apparently supports sanctuaries where it will always lurk. A few years back, however, while wondering in that diffuse sort of way about the diffuse sort of malaise I was labouring under, I managed to uncover the interesting fact that I was bored out of my mind. Gadzooks! So simple! I rubbed my clammy palms together, cackled like a sugar-hopped fiend, donned my supervillain alterego duds and set about un-borifying my life.

Success has its perils.

I have tracked the interesting people down. I live in a world of wall-to-wall smart people. And I have some friends. Friends who've written prize-winning books, who've thought thoughts, who've, you know, Done Things. Some have money. Some are famous. Some have written works which are on the syllabus at this very university. Some understand things of which only two or three people in the world have any sort of grasp. Some are the sort of people who are so brilliant, so charismatic, such human works of art that even when they are standing around minding their own business eating a sandwich and looking at the clouds, they attract others like them, so that you know people who know people who run countries and sell the movie rights and hang on the walls of the Tate and inform governments and are members of secret societies and good god knows what else. Some of these people are the same people. And they're such people. There are some assholes around here, and these people are not they, I assure you. They're so sweet, so warm and real and funny that seeing them is like discovering that out the back door of your house is a huge garden full of trees and flowers, bees and flashing-eyed wild creatures, that somehow you've never been able to get out into before.

Sometimes I'm so envious I can feel the oxygen in my lungs prickle up and turn to microscopic snowflakes of desire. I want what they have! The effortless brilliance, the casual irony of complete mastery, the mild-eyed matter-of-factness about the mosaic of genius and general stratospheria that has become the wallpaper of their world. I drink tea and coffee and talk about something-or-other and breathe gently through my frosted lungs and long to make the air hum as they do.

Deadly sin! If strength of feeling goes for anything, I should be eating my heart out over this. But I don't believe it for a second. My envy is big, but with little fangs. The kind that chew slippers or maybe old tennis balls in the garden. It bites fast, and holds on tight, but it doesn't want to tear out your jugular. OK, once in a very long while it wants to tear out your jugular.

Maybe if I was feeling happy-clappy I'd say that all this is just a kind of generous admiration for the wonderful and accomplished starlets I know and adore. But that would be a crock of shit, it really would. I want want want. I don't want to take it from them, but I still want it. Oh, how I want it. And how frightened I am that somehow the garden gate will be closed and I won't be allowed in any more!

But still. It's the last and sincerest word in flattery. Not that any of them will know that, because in the first place my snowflake-lungs are a secret. And in the second, even if they read this they'd never suppose that it was about themselves.

They're way too bloody unassuming. Bastards. Anyone would think they have insecurities and envy of their very own.

Groundhog Day

So of course it would have been more wittily postmodern for me to have posted this on actual Groundhog Day, which was last week, but I wasn't thinking about this then. Eh. Bygones.

In every pampered, first-world existence such as mine, there are all sorts of troubles. Loneliness, worry, financial insecurity of a not very threatening kind, intellectual insecurity about whether or not one's really any good at one's job, emotional insecurity about whether or not one's really lovable. Loss and grief and bleakness of all manner of stripes.

The problem I'm having now, though, is sameness. All of the parts of my life seem to have an unremitting, slightly malevolent familiarity. I hear the faint strains of "I Got You Babe" constantly in my head. I'm just so damn bored. I can feel my eyes folding into Bill Murray's sad-clown corners in the face of the week, the thought of the same students, the same discussions with those students, the same seminars, the same things in the supermarket, the same books on my desk, the same odd hybrid intellectual/low-brow smalltalk, the same ritual dance that my dissertation supervisor and I have been doing around one another for four years, the same, the same, the same.

If I were Truman Burbank, The Truman Show would be ludicrously economical. You'd only need two interior sets and about 50 extras.

The sameness is not an illusion, but I know that the cracks in it are what keeps me from driving into a quarry with a groundhog at the wheel. If it were really the same day, I'd see the same things, always. The same people walking around at the same time, the same pigeon taking the same bath, the same puddle with the same leaf floating in it like a tiny crinkly brown boat. But I don't.

Last week, I was coming home from work earlier in the afternoon than usual and there was a boy walking ... perhaps to a music lesson? He had an earnest, slightly abashed posture, and carried one of those paper wallets in his hand, along with a backpack that dwarfed him. He wore camo-print cargo trousers and had mussy, mind-of-its own, straw-coloured hair which he smoothed every now and then, as he walked.

I thought how unusual it was to see a kid walking alone here. He seemed tiny, and sort of robustly fragile, like a dragonfly or a fine steel guy-wire. I suppose he must have been 10 or 11. I suddenly had a fervent, fleeting, staggering impression of what it would be to have a child, to have this big-small, breakable-indestructible, wise-innocent person wandering the world and smoothing his hair.

Today, the cherry blossoms are almost peeping out from their brown twig huts.

Tomorrow will bring something different.

Newd

Soon there is a new moon. They are the harbinger of, no kidding, new beginnings.

I hope that is true, because this blog has made me excruciatingly aware of the fact that the things that run through my mind are on a schedule like the meals at a psychiatric facility. Mondays, stew. Wednesday, roast. Sunday, pancakes. Tuesday, haiku. Thursday, existential angst.

But I do have a new pair of boots. Watch me blaze trails.