I'm old school, baby...It's just how I roll...

The problem with dropping back into the world after dropping out is that you will never be quite the same. It changes you, making you a bit less able to navigate the so-called "real life." Think about the characters we know of the sort--von Munchausen, Crusoe, Gulliver...the message is pretty clear. Yes, of course we want to hear all about your fabulous tales, but you must be some sort of freak. Yeah. It marks you, if only with some sort of invisible, anachronistic rune.

Recluses are also weird in the public conception. Salinger, Hughes, the late great M.J. There's no doubt that nothing says "not like us..." like keeping your own company and much of that is just being out of touch.

I never wanted to be like any of these people, yet, here I am. I was trying to explain to teh therapist yesterday about how "sensitive" I was as a child and how the only relief I had from the anxiety of socialization was the moments I could steal by myself. (Luckily, this was not so difficult.) How I seem to have sought that peace for myself as an adult and how it seems now, ultimately, to be a source of regret. But at the same time, it was inevitable, a foregone conclusion. Fate.

They drug children such as I was now. Rightly so, I suppose. But I have to wonder if it is a bit like helping a chick out of an egg? Chicks like that fail to thrive and usually die. I wouldn't be who I am without that struggle. But at the same time, I know it would have been an unspeakable cruelty to allow me to founder in that emotional misery had there been some other choice. I was so lucky to be born to the mother I had--she was such a fierce protector of her wounded chick.

Anyway, what brings this ramble to the surface is pretty funny. Friend Patti and I went to K-town the other day to meet with a group of like-minded women at a local coffee shop. Friend Patti doesn't carry my stigmata since she is not here by choice exactly and fights the good fight to keep up with the outside world and its strange magicks.

We had a good time and it was the first time in years I'd been outside in a social situation in ages. And yes, I speak of Cocke County as though it were some hinterland shrouded in mist because that's exactly what it fucking is. Mist shrouded hinterlands-R-us.

Toward the end of the evening, we are listening to an attractive 20-something bemoan her attempts to connect with the object of her affection. It's a familiar tale, told again and again from caveman days. I love you so much I can't bear to talk to you and anything I say is going to be wrong anyway so maybe I shouldn't talk to you at all--whaddayou all think? Huh? Huh? Puhleeze??

Love sucks. Don't let anyone tell you different.

This discussion swirled around exactly what the perfect text message to send might be. So I say, "Hey. Look. What would be wrong with just calling her up and saying, 'Hey, would you be up for dinner tonight?'"

Everyone looks at me like I just intoned, "Yea verily, what say you to inscribing in cuneiform your sentiments on yon clay tablet and dedicating it to her honor with the blood of a virgin sheep?"

Someone rescued me by breaking the stunned gaze and saying, "Yeah, what's wrong with that?"

I haven't had a cell phone in seven years and apparently missed the point in polite society where a text message could bear the considerable weight and import of a heart, besotted, tortured or broken.

Old school, baby. It's how I roll.

The God of all Blackberries

The God of Blackberries requires child sacrifice, blood and scratches, owies laid open, knees scraped and elbows skinned. Walk into the brambles and shuffle the canes, picking as you go, but leave behind rich redness and pain. The God of all Blackberries demands a price, stinging skin pierced by thorns you didn’t know about until the lemonade spilled. And who is to say at the end of the day whether or not you lie when your red-smeared mouth proclaims you ate none, brought home all.

Take Three...

Did everyone have a fun Fourth? Have your fill of hotdogs? Damn, I loves me a skinless Nathan's, know what I mean? Me? I spent a pretty quiet day. Watched some episodes of Oz. Drank some hot tea. Mowed the lawn. Watched the fireworks.

Anyway, my buddy, Leslie, over at Leslie's Omnibus, lured me over to blog story writing with her Take Three exercise. It's a bit more constricting a prompt than I'm accustomed to working with, but I gave it the old college try. The prompt was to write a story in under 1000 words with the following three sentences:

I hate nature… and WalMart.

And that’s when Nana went commando.

Moments like this make me very, very nervous.

So...I give you for your blogging consumption...

Hippie Chick Gets Us Busted at the Walmart Parking Lot

Donnie threw a hand up to shade his eyes, looking across the Walmart parking lot and the four-lane highway to the county sheriff's depot. The wind blew just right, 10 mph the paper said, wafting right into the right-hand corner of the Wal-mart parking lot. The monthly marijuana burn was about to commence and Donnie was looking forward to a free contact high.

He squinted and spat, kicking some garbage left by the fireworks vendor who'd vacated that bit of concrete that morning. Walter and his hippie chick girlfriend pulled up in the parking spot next to Donnie's truck.

"They started yet?" Walter hung his head out the car window, his squinty ginger eyes fading into the freckles of his ginger face and ginger hair.

"Nah, but they moving everything out onto the bonfire."

Walter and the hippie chick joined Donnie on the tailgate of the Ford truck.

"Hey man," said Donnie, "You got any crack?"

Hippie Chick scowls. Walter rolled his eyes. "Nah, Sasha don't let me do none."

"It's not natural," Sasha the hippie chick said as she jumped from the truck and began dancing a jerky, inelegant dance, not at all inconspicuous.

"Moments like this make me very, very nervous," Walter said, as shoppers turning into the Walmart rubbernecked at Sasha's dance, her hairy armpits all exposed. He passed a few hydros into Donnie's silent palm while Sasha wasn't looking.

"She's gonna draw a crowd."

"No shit. Rentacops too, prolly."

"So where'd you get these? I thought your uncle had your granny?" Donnie popped the hydros.

"We done got her back. Unc let her get away from him in Home Depot. She got one of them lawn tractors started and that's when Nana went commando."

"Christ, man! Shut the hell up! I don't want to hear nothin' 'bout your granny's va-jay-jay!"

"You perv!" Walter shoved Donnie in the arm. "I mean she went crazy! Mowed down half of lawn and garden. Put three guys in the ER before they stopped her. Anyway. Court ordered her back with us so Momma's got control of her meds and social security again. Unc's madder'n'hell."

Sasha pirouetted, bare dirty toes gripping the concrete as a cloud of blue, marijuana-flavored smoke rose from the depot and came roiling across the parking lot. She spread her legs wide, picked up the hem of her blouse and fanned the smoke into her face. She wasn't wearing a bra.

"Let us thank Gaia for her bounty!"

"Fuck me, what the hell is she on, Walter?"

"Mushrooms. Jimson weed. Tree bark. Christ, I dunno. She don't take nothin' less'n it grows in the woods."

Sasha stripped her top completely off.

"Make her stop, man! Woah--that's more 'nature' than I need. Shit man, Walmart done called the cops," Donnie said as the city cops came peeling into the lot.

"I hate nature," Walter said, "and Walmart."

Revenge of the flying things...

I'm sitting sewing and watching the second season of Dexter. The rain is pelting down hard and the dogs are laid out sleeping in that way they do in the summer--you can see them soaking up the air conditioning through their skins, spread out as though they could unzip their fur and lay it on top of the vents. Wave it around to catch the breeze. There is a calamitous knocking coming from the laundry room like someone is hammering. Jesus Marimba, I think, what fresh hell might this be?

I go into the laundry room and the racket continues. I see nothing out the window--my first thought being the electric company geniuses have arrived with some insult. I walk outside and there is a great fucking woodpecker dismantling the house near the utilities connections. In that short amount of time, he's done an impressive amount of damage and revealed a carpenter bee nest.

So, I guess this means I need to put "paint the house" on the long list of crap I can't afford to do. Ack! Splpppt. Now I'm wondering if this is retribution for the yellow jacket holocaust I brought about recently.

Nearly Juneteenth

June has sort of snuck up on me. The rabbits are everywhere and bold as Jehovah's Witnesses coming into the yard to bring me their good rabbit news. My poppies and hollyhocks are blooming. There's a slider turtle big as a turkey platter down in the frog pond--it's been wet enough to keep water in the pond for the first time in two years. Still needs dredging but there are tadpoles jetting around the willows that sprung up during the drought. Willows love wet feet.

An unfortunate casualty of the rains has been my ancient walnut down in the glade where the sentinel chimney stands. I need to see if it took out the chimney. It most likely did. Looks like the ground got so wet that it couldn't support the tree. I asked around and there evidently isn't much call for walnut wood anymore. They used to make gunstocks from it--it's a beautiful wood--but now they use maple. Still, I'd like to find a way to get the massive tree lifted out of the little holler so I could at least cut it up for firewood. Wouldn't mind having something carved out of it. It was my favorite tree on the property.

I've been sewing, making nightgowns. I like to sleep in Victorian chemises. I'm about to cut up an old favorite to pattern it. Or maybe I'll try to pattern it without cutting it up--takes a while for cotton to reach that tissue thin, soft as puppies state. It's right before it shreds into nothingness leaving us naked and exposed to the rough muslin of life.

Let me tell you what I really think...

about Tennessee doctors.

The most ironically named healthcare organization in the world, Mercy Health Partners, has granted me an audience after a year of them refusing to return my phone calls and, notably, of them leaving me to writhe in agony in a pool of my own feces for five days. That, you may remember was back in September (my birthday week) and I've been in therapy for PTSD ever since. I had begun to find a sense of peace with that when they called asking me to come kiss their ring or something. But of course, it all came roaring back and now I'm back to not sleeping and major crazy time burning in effigy and calling down curses upon the Assholes and the Assholes they rode in on (aka Rural Medical Services).

It's not good for me feeling rage like this. So, I deflect with humor as much as possible. But with all things truly hilariously funny--there's an edge to it. After all, it's only funny if the baby carriage actually does fall down the stairs or if the pain patient actually gets poo on themselves in my case. Anyway. I agreed to go to the appointment and now I find myself wondering if I'll be able to get through it without erupting into a Medea-esque crazy bitch rage. Or making unending references to their soullessness, lack of medical ethics or insatiable desire to kill kittens.

Do you remember the Germans episode of Fawlty Towers? If you are too young to remember this, go find it on YouTube. In it, Germans are staying at the hotel so no one is supposed to mention The War. So Basil (John Cleese) spends the entire episode making Hitler references.

How am I supposed to get through this appointment without mentioning The War, for God's sake?

Order up!...at The Legendary...

My friend, Brad Green, asked me to submit something to The Legendary, a journal he's joined as editor. Brad has one of those strong, flavorful and most definitely virile Southern voices--the sort you expect from Texas. If you haven't checked out his blog, Elevate the Ordinary, I encourage you to do so. Read A Visit to a Tittie Bar. I like that one. A lot.

Anyways. I sent him a selection of what I had coming off the burner at the time and they chose The Adamantine Heart and Love Cats.

The Adamantine Heart (excerpt)

It's easier than you might think to turn your heart into Adamantine. It sneaks up on you while you are trying to get love right. It blindsides you when your teenage boyfriend drowns in a freak accident. It slides into you when your steady fellow in college smacks you around. It happens when your mother dies, then your father dies. It happens when you walk in on your best friend, hanging nude from your gravity boots while your husband, in a hood, whips her with your riding crop--the one you actually use on your horse.

Love Cats (excerpt)

Out on the pier they'd stand, looking out to the ocean with opal eyes, boding bad luck. They'd throw things into the sea from time to time. Someone said it was the ashes of their vanquished conquests. Someone else said it was the tiny bones of their hearts. And still another said it was a stack of handwritten valentines delivered into their hands by scores of damaged lovers. No doubt they were a couple, slinking through the night, all black eyeliner and sadness.

Many other excellent stories from writer friends-- Tim Yelvington-Jone's "Grace," Dawn Allison's "No Fear for Flowers," Frank O'Connor's "Raindrops," and many more. Go read!

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In other news...if you are whining because I'm not on Facebook more often--well, it ain't gonna happen until I get high speed something or other. Takes me six hours every two weeks to do what it takes most of you 20 minutes to accomplish on FB. Facebook's interface is about as elegant as a pile of dog poop--so, I've got better things to do than watch the swirling beachball of death and rebuilding my permissions every 20 minutes. But I love you guys and have no problem answering emails.