and we'll get you fixed up in no time

Apprehensive

–adjective

1.	uneasy or fearful about something that might happen: apprehensive for the safety of the mountain climbers.

2.	quick to learn or understand.

3. perceptive; discerning

At the dawn of my life as a writer, this word was with me, it is with me now, and unless some miracle of confidence comes and blows a whole lot of pretty colored smoke up my butt, I have very few doubts that it will be with me in some measure until I die. In first grade, I asked a teacher to spell check the word in something or another, and she proceeded to tell me it was not a word. Well I'm here to tell her this: Honey, please. It's not just a word, it's a way of life Mrs. Hawkins.(P.S. you were right, 2nd grade was for punks. :)

It's a very confusing word because it implies both uneasiness and understanding, which are two words that haven't always been friends. Typically what we crave most desperately, comingin a close second to connection, is understanding, and when we cannot have understanding the uneasiness seeps in. It's like a slow flood through a neglected basement windowell. It drips in through the cracks of our knowledge and trickles down our walls and we never even see it coming. Moist misunderstanding saturates our carpets; a swamp beneath the tread of our lives. It festers, and eventually the stink of uneasiness comes once how very clueless we've been.

Apprehension does not imply this sort of slow progress. It implies the last of the stages of grief. This word infers uneasy acceptance and understanding. We know what is coming, what is in store for us, and both because of and in spite of this understanding we are afraid. It's a calmer fear because the danger has been assessed and we have been allowed the luxury of preparation.

I have lived with apprehension about my writing, my looks, my heart, my intentions, my future, my talent, capabilities, and most ardently, my relationships.

In a labrynth of loss and return and of the volatile rumblings of volcanic involuntary gypsyhood, I came to expect a certain selfishness from people. I began to expect certain selfishnesses from those around me regularly, and with time and growing apprehension to take those pertinences for my own at all the worst junctures, or after I'd already given nearly everything worth having away.

The point is not my innumerable fallabilities, it is that I am surprised. To my most delirious delight, I have stumbled on the truth. It started with a note from my cousin, Mikki, my childhood best friend and partner in crime, with whom I spent many panic driven evenings trying to clean the water spots off the giant mirrors after our baths so we didn't get in trouble for splashing. She told me that my family missed me so badly that they wanted to pay for a plane ticket for me to come there for Christmas since I hadn't been bothered to make the Idaho to Kansas sojourn any of the previous three years. At first I assumed that her extension relied mostly on polite pleasantries and the temporary nostalgia left-over from our time as Power Rangers.

Then a week or so later, I found myself with mangled feelings and a raised voice on a very long distance phone call, a very long distance from my happy place. A friend of mine, who I didn't even realize was a friend asked me why I was wasting so much breath and energy being angry, (of course he asked me in the lingo of a farm boy train engineer with a few very colorful four letter words for good measure). Assuming, basedon my previous understanding of life, people and relationships that I was backed into a corner, I began to defend myself, pretty snottily (I was in double trouble, and I'm only human). Because of the way my life was for a very long time, and because of the way my apprehensions always ran things, I found myself presuming to need a new place to stay since I had just pretty heavily insulted the roof over my head. I had definitely been uprooted for lesser transgressions.

I hung up the phone and went outside into the cold night expecting some sort of absolution from the prairie. Wishing for my conscience to be blown clean and the knowledge that I was, yet again, going to have to change everything, took hold of me.

"Get your ass in here and put on a coat, just cause your pissed doesn't mean you have to freeze to death."

And it was that simple. I was brought a coat. I was hugged, tickled, forgiven. I went inside.

A few weeks later another cousin of mine called who does a lot of work with non-traditional medicine and made me a very generous offer of help for my horrible eyes. His simple explanation, "Rachel, I love you. I don't care how long it's been. Come see me, we'll fix you up."

Have I really been this stubbornly afraid?

I have this song that I'm pretty obsessed with. It's called, "A Walk Through Hell." It's pretty amazing and it has this part goes like this "And I'll hold you in my weak arms like a first born, first born, first born." And you have to get in all three first borns, because the rise of emotion is really what does me in every time. I am suddenly aware of and uneasy with the fact that I may have been staring this sort of love in the eye all along. There are in fact tired arms ready to take me in, weary from being held out to me, when I knew I was alone. I understood that people were weak and confused, everyone around me as much so as I, and so were to be revered, treasured, but always seperate and on our own paths.

Our survival is based on our learning curve. How long does it take us to understand that the orange and black stripey cat thing likes to bite? How long does it take us to figure out that sticks rubbing together long and fast enough might make a fire? How long does it take to realize the guy who winks at us from across the bar is not dating material, no matter how good he is with his hair gel? So we learn, we think. We take the simple bits of information we can gather and we fortify ourselves with them and prepare for what we know is coming. Discovery shows us which things we are to be apprehensive of, and what is to be anticipated. What happens though, when our learning curves become malignencies, and all that we've been taught passes it's ripening point, and the rules change a bit. All the coins of our knowledge that we've managed to hoard becomes obsolete. What happens when we see a lovely orange housecat, who is dying to purr in our laps, but all we see is the tiger?

My reckoning is here. Now, that I am officially out of the jungle, maybe it's time to find out what each thing is for itself. I want to touch and feel and see and try everything.

I think what I'm trying to say here is, this just isn't working for me anymore, Apprehension. You've brought me through a lot, and I'm not sure if I'd have survived without you, but now we are holding each other back. I'll always love you in some way, but it's time we move on. It's not you, it's me. Okay that's not true, it's both of us. We've outgrown one another. I let you get bigger than me, and I'm too big to hide behind you. We have to let go, we'll always have Paris, kid. Wait....yeah, Humphrey Bogart does that one way better than me.

the deuce

I am not a big believer in happy mediums. You can ask my dad or mom, who are both reading this at some point and shaking their heads, either laughing to themselves with pride and thinking "That's my daughter," or wishing the other were within a hundred miles so they could say, "She's YOUR daughter." No matter how they feel, and no matter how little they agree on, they will both tell you the same thing; I suck at happy mediums.

A few days ago I had to google myself into a corner before I could convince myself to begin to work on my portfolio so I could BEGIN my freelance writng career. That night, I started working on my first novel. Yeahhhhhhhhh. About that.

It's just who I am. When I work out I run 5-6 miles as fast as I can stand, and I'm constantly and creepily looking at the screen of the person next to me at the gym, making sure I'm pushing myself harder, running longer, faster, and at a higher intensity. Not because I need to feel superior to them, but because I need to know if I'm just a lazy dork who THINKS she is doing a good job, or whether or not I'm actually doing a good job in the scheme of things. (Although I'm sure my ego doesn't mind seeing higher numbers.)

When I bake a cake? It's a four teir masterpiece with alternating layers of chocolate and white cake whipped up from scratch, with layers of homemade ganache in between and entirely coated in my freshly whipped cream and topped with slivered toasted almonds. I'm just weird.

When I cook? Chicken pot pie, with both the crust and cream sauce from scratch with real butter and cream and veggies sliced a la me. Served wheatfield golden and steaming.

I'm such a creeper. I waited a month to buy new boots, even though my old ones were nearly intolerably stinkerific, simply because I could not find the perfect boots at the perfect price. But I found them eventually. When I tried photography the first time? If every single photo wasn't gallery worthy it was hidden instantaneously, like the crazy uncle in the attic.

When it comes to people in my life though, I'm like a cat with a cardboard box. It's all good. The horrible Las Vegas t-shirt my boss brough back for me from Vegas? Exalted profusely and worn with pride, because ugly or not, he thought of me. If anyone else cooks, hamburger helpber is gourmet and if one of my friends writes "i like cheese," and wants to know my poetic opinion, I swear to you I will find something to like.

So what's my obsession with being the master of all things? I know I can't be the only one. There have to be other obnoxious perfectionists out there. So why can't I just make myself understand that nothing has to be perfect. And it definitely doesn't all have to be perfect the first time!

What this boils down to? I am stuck at the first paragraph of Chapter 2 andwondering if anyone knows hypnosis and can make me understand my own damn words. I just wish sometime I would give myself a chance to just do something. I want to bake an ugly confetti sheetcake and put storebough frosting on it, and know that it will be loved just as much. I want to go for a walk and say, "Oh, man, I worked out today! Pizza time!"

But instead, I don't work out. I cook and no one eats it, because really? Who can eat real cream and butter these days and not feel like they should go see the cardiologist the next day? And I write the first chapter of the first book of my writing career, and then I play on facebook all day because I can't find the perfect transition into what I need to say next. Because what if this story that is so beautiful and original and alive in my head falls flat because oh I don't know...I've never written a book before?

I need to be nice to me. Because expecting to change the world right this very instant, expecting to have a pullitzer winning novel by the end of the first chapter in the very first draft ever is getting me precisely squat.

....ugh..anyway. I gotta go see a cup of tea about Chapter 2.


(also..sorry there are no pictures lately. my internet disagrees.)

start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start.

It all started with a song about a star. A kind sleepy melody and a simple lyrics, the burbled up from a heavy, tired chest in the bunk bed next to me. My daddy wrote that song for a girl who broke his heart with her broken heart. It changed everything.

Because of what she did to him, and because of the only way he knew to tell it, the world held the soft glow of love and I could sleep at night. Words and I have had a closer relationship than I've had with any other living thing. Since the beginning of my always, they and I have been able to shape one another, and so I have chosen to use them. They will be my life's work. We will tell the stories that need to be told. This is where today's little conundrum pops up.

I chose to start my freelance writing career today. Make a portfolio, pick intense amounts of projects to send bids for, gather my reccomendations and become a writer, or something like that. So it's four thirty in the afternoon and i'm still staring at my computer. Nothing has happened, so I did what any sensible person will do, I began to complain to my friend Paul. This is how it went.

"I hate newton"
"Isaac?"
"No, fig. Yes, Isaac."
"But why?"
"Because objects at rest suck, and I'm not doing very well with finding a force in myself to make it go."
"Ah, but Newton did something nice for you too"
"Pfff."
"An object in motion will stay in motion."

Needless to say, Rachel was chastised and so much humble pie eaten that I in fact felt the need to unbutton my pants. So half dressed and needing to feel righteous in my frustration one more time, I went looking for sagelike advice from Google. I typed in "beginnings." Galileo was pretty useless, Lao Tsu kept saying the same thing over and over and over and over again, Rainer Maria Rilke, who I would typically side with over nearly anyone else had a fabulous idea;
"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning." but no procedural advice on how one actually gets around a beginning, because no matter where you think you are starting, you still have to start. The whole concept became a distracting tautological monstrosity. My brain in it's desperation to procrastinate fled to a land of inanimate "I am that I am" logic, and it was Moses and the stinkin burning bush all over again. I had to take a coffee break, it was pretty dreadful.

I was truly beginning to run out of steam. I seem to do that very easily about writing, because it may very well be the love of my life, and like any adolescent with a crush, I'm pretty sure I'm not good enough for it. The end of the quotes on beginnings was nearing, and the fickle tickleof inspiration was still far far far away. Then I found this: “I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards.” This quote more than any other touched me, but it still wasn't enough to make me commit the violent crime of beginning. What came after it was. There was that beautiful elipses and then the words Alberto Salazar, Sprinter. Inone word thinkexist.com told me exactly what he had started, and how many thousands of times he had to begin. If he hadn't, he'd have been Alberto Salazar, Stander. Alberto Salazar, Coward. Alberto Salazar, Spectator. Maybe there woudln't be any descriptor, maybe no one would ever know his words.

I've done everything I could today, except start. Which means I'm going to have to spend tomorrow and the next day and the next day coiled in my cowardly starting position. I'll waste the beautiful potential of all that kinetic energy as precious seconds tick by, and both what I want and the starting line sit exactly where they are, waiting for me to decide if I'm going to be a revolutionary or a receptionist. Starting lines don't make up their minds to get the heck out of your way very often, so I suppose I should get cracking on that descriptor, because if one sweet song from my daddy can change my whole life, imagine what could happen with a whole life of words.

-- Rachel Baxa, Writer. :)

forkforkforkforkfork

the sad truth is this: I have not written in almost two months. Whoa. I have written nothing, absolutely nothing. I haven't been able to complete a goodbye email, a scrap of poetry, or even a grocery list in many moons.

I've been listening.

Have you ever said a word over and over again until it was nonsense? Try it. Fork. Fork. Fork. Forkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkfork. It's hardly gibberish, it's worse because it's the same meaningless nonsense Mork and Mindy blabber, even to the insane and alien. Suddenly, a real thought is forced by relentless echo into redundant silliness. I've been listening to my thoughts become blather.

They had significance, once upon a dream. But in my silence they have circled and swum inside my head and through their dizzy dancing have been reduced to a hazy din as appealing and distracting as ceaseless buzzing of a tired fluorescent lightbulb. Not good for productivity or a glowing complexion.

I've done to my poor thoughts what constant fifth-grader repetition does to the word fork. By refusing the object it's purpose I've reduced it from a useful utensil to onomatopoeic balderdash. Suddenly, all I'm left with is a sound, an echo, a song, a game of no skill at all. Over the past couple of months I've gotten good at this game. TV, sleep, easy books, the same songs over and over again, and always that nauseating buzz of what I know melting away into what I knew.

I have been without a certain depth of conscience and consideration that makes me a person I could delight in being. Keeping confined to my own section of the Universe as I know it, I have reached out for very little, taken very few chances and never once allowed my own reason to get a word in edgewise. Being back home in the naked Northeastern Colorado landscape hasn't solved all my problems, but out that window under a sparkling layer of disappearing snow, is a cracking parched land that has finally, when I made myself look, reminded me of how untrue I've been to the girl i strove so desperately to hew from that exhausted soil.

All this time, I've been mistaking the alarm of my disloyalty for a petty migraine. A call to the truth about myself has been lurking in the drone I've learned to tune out, waiting for it's moment to remind me of the voice and depth I owe to my life. So that sucks. Wasted time makes me angry.

Fork.

pretty pretty princess

Today, I got to be a princess. I swear to G-O-D himself. On a random late-afternoon coffee run, I talked a friend into humoring me with a trip to The Costume Shop.

I was five stinkin' years old again. Iced coffee in hand, I made a beeline for the fat mascot heads. I looked Tigger right in his gaping hollow mouth and grinned toothily. I had to check a mirror to see if all my teeth were there in fear I had actually, physically regressed.

After that it was all down hill.

Even before i put anything I was knight questing for a single costume to try on. In fear of agitating a sweet dressing room attendant I chose a limit for myself ahead of time. I swept through rack after rack of other lives I could slip into and out of. Running my fingers across every sequin and bead that could have been mine in some parallel universe I lost myself to the imagining.

When I found myself again I was inspecting with surprising discretion an entire rack of romanticism. I found Shakespeare's Viola in a courageous, sturdy gown of tan and green. I found Juliet in a dazzling purple garb that sang out with loss and hope. Astounded and slightly abashed, I found myself in a sweet dress of delicate gold and white. With flowers on it. I kid you not. Fragile gold fleurs twirling shyly down the entire skirt.

If you know me you are laughing. Stop. I'm not kidding. This little tomboy will come put your lights out if you make fun of my dress. I'll never be able to explain how I looked into this dress and fell in love, when it is so utterly not me. And still.

When I slid it on, zipped it up, and adjusted my girls, I was shocked.

I lit up. I remembered hours spent in my backyard as a kid, with one of my mama's old bridesmaid dresses spread out around me. I felt our prickly grass against legs that had yet to be shaven for the first time. The far too advanced heft of a book in my bitten fingers, warbling Disney songs and waiting for my prince to scale the chain link fence. I shone. The black smudges squatting under my eyes were outshone by, (could it be?) a blush. Promise bloomed in my chest, and a sudden surplus of blood poured into my limbs lightening and stretching them.

Have you ever wrapped yourself in even the tiniest dream come true and watched it's perfect graceful drape from your shoulders and pool on carpet? It is effervescent. I blossomed in the light of it. Vulnerability suits me. Hope kick's purple's butt as the color that best lights my eyes.

I got back home just in time for some crappy news. I found waiting for me the tear stained trimmings of a life misattended. Just general pooptastic life stuff. You know.

I got a little overwhelmed, a little snuffly. Ok, I kind of cried like a baby. I walked into the bathroom for a tissue and watched my face closing up with exhausted frustration. I saw myself become ordinary again. I watched all that joy get zipped up behind someone else's betrayal. I got ugly, fast.

I was completely amazed at the careworn face in front of me. Where did the princess go? Joyful naivete gave way to a brow furrowed in amazement. Couldn't she live in this life?

The longer I looked in the mirror the more I began to wonder at the simple idiocy. I had chosen that dress because I saw in it the recovery of something so lost to me in my every day. These (oh so naughtily pilfered) pictures bore witness to the fact that the girl in the mirror and the girl in the dress were the same. Worse yet: same girl, same hair, same makeup, same day. Within hours of each other.

Fledgling bravery took root somewhere in the burrow that had formed between my eyebrows right about then. It flourished in an instant and even if it didn't magically transform me back into a princess, it brightened me.

My reverence must be preserved for that stolen fifteen minutes twirling in the dressing room mirror, curtsying to myself in the evening sun. The world musn't keep all it's princesses locked away in dreary towers of hardship, or even mediocrity. We must keep ourselves glowing with our fairy tale hopes. I should try harder to open myself, in spite of the world.

What? I should.


I should dress like this every day.

p.s. Thank you to the Costume Shop for indulging me when I stood in front of the mirror for far too long and talked to you about 90's cartoons. And thanks for not telling when you totally knew I was taking pictures with my phone every time you left the room.

you should thank me.

I saved your life today. No really. I really and truly did. If you are reading this page, I saved you from untold annoyance.

Today I denied myself for you. I put aside my childish self-indulgence for the sake of your comfort.

What did I do? Well, for starters, I refrained from putting a playlist widget on my page. I almost felt the need when sprucing up (a.k.a. procrastinating the actual writing process) to add an adorable little "iLike" to my blog.

I thought some Van Morrison and some Tegan and Sara might be cute. I thought it would give you a little glimpse into the labrynth of my frequently empty mind. I wanted to awe you with my eccentric and ridiculously cool tast in music. I'm twenty-one now you know. I have depth and range in my music selection and was entirely prepared to knock your socks off.

Ok. I'm lying. I did not save you.

I saved me. I put up the widget and then I came to visit my page. So I could get the full "wham-bam thank you ma'am" effect. Music + background + sweet text = a blog you want to go back to again and again. (I mean who really goes to a blog for what's written in it, right?)

Anyway, I got back to my page. And the iLike started playing over the top of my iTunes. Suddenly I got all flustered and in my annoyance couldn't remember where the controls for either music player were. So I just had to listen to that racket.

Let me tell you, The Kooks layered over the top of Dinah Washington should be considered an attempt to deafen a person.

So I took it off. I decided to save you from that horrific caucophony. You may listen to whatever inspires YOU while reading.

You can thank me later. Or by reading again tomorrow :)

borrow

From this distance her feet make no sound on the asphalt. It's disconcerting. I can see the sweet orthopedic roundness of her sneakers moving too closely to the ground to be silent. I can hear him talking of course. If I looked over I'd see his blue eyes aflame and his red hair glowing with the rush of whatever his mouth is saying. The action has a sound. But there is no sound to shadow her cheap shoes. Shuffle alone, no scrape.

I can hear cars rushing forward in their near-gravitational necessity to get where they are going faster, sooner, first. Maybe they are pulling her sound away with them. Maybe that sad shuffle has hitch hiked it's way into happier shoes.

Above the sneakers are the remnants of two long, pencil written notes, scrawled on brown paper sacks. They've been folded and unfolded a thousand times by clammy hands; probably crumpled up and regretted, thrown out by hands of hesitancy. Two brown paper notes, pasted around her ankles to the place where slender calves used to sunbathe on afternoons like these, some two-score years ago. You can see her dreams were written on it once.

But those ankles, even wrapped in all that worry-loosened paper turned tired silk-shirt skin, are too small. She's still a child under it. Ankles that small can't be anyone else's.

I can't look at ankles that small shuffling so close to the ground. . Things that tiny should think they could fly. She's wrapped up in that old wish-paper from head to toe. I know it's there, under a thick kitty sweater, out of place under this blaze. She's pulled it close around her: a blanket against the chill of her loss. Unjustly huddled under so many crumpled promises. It is an ill fitting garment, sewn for another.

She's only three feet from me now, and finally I'm found the scraping like snowshovels, scooping away the drudgery piled in front of each of her steps. Her sigh shakes out of her chest, and shakes the world.

I am not comforted by this arrival, but I know she should be.

Those tiny hands should be held. I should remind her she is a child. It's never happened to me, but I know how it happens. I know how I would scoop her bone china skeleton into my arms and pull her in. I would breathe her in to show her that I am unafraid of the cold, waiting aroma of time passed. Forehead to forehead she could see the absence of fear in my eyes. My bravery would vaccinate me against the hysterical fear of the age epidemic. I would kiss each of her knotted knuckles until my anxious breath loosened the knots in them. I would look in her eyes and seek out the place un-hidable in her eyes. I would wait until she felt the strength to lift her feet.

I would lay her so close to me that she could pretend again that my unlined shoulders were hers, and she could convince herself that the pallor of my freckeled skin was the tangible evidence of her innocense restored to her. She could have for all those elongated seconds the unlabored breathing of my chest, transferred to her, and the unmitigated glow of all my potential for as long as one can hold an old woman in a parking lot, without having the authorities called. I would not correct her. I would plump her with my youth, and pet her cheek until the burning rush of my own circulation had ironed away the days from her face.

My body would be her body.I would not shift impatiently, or brush away the flakes of her age from my dress. She could look into me, as if I were a mirror, and imperfect as I might be, return might retouch me with the softness of an implied, pretended nostalgia.

I would not promise her my life, or renewal. But I would stay long enough to see the first two steps after she left my arms appear as if they were in preparation for flight.

Unto our nuclei we would belong to each other. I would give that to her. Because I see ther child's ankles, and I know her hunger. Because she knows my weariness.

But she's not looking. And I've no voice for calling out and no breath. The ten, now twelve feet flight from my lips is impossible.

I'm sorry.

the melty crayons

I'm drippy. In every way you can think of. I've been a bit of a whiny melting mess. This big strong block of a Bohunk is softening, sliding down myself and pooling at my own base. I've become a slipping muck fo me to step through. And then the loveliest thing happened to me today.
I learned that melty can be pretty damn cool.

Maybe all this melting madness, this mud-luscious glory is it's own season.

Maybe a change of my state of matter is what it's going to take to make a statement about how I need to change what matters?

Or maybe the ridiculousness of my foot stamping, sleepy eyed, droop---

Maybe this nightmare pliability---

Is just where I need to be?

Or maybe it's a stairway...to someplace better

p.s. these accidental glorious little goodies were purchased at the dollar store, and the pictures were taken with my phone . :) and it was just the project i needed. I suddenly feel so much less droopy.

the Rumpelstiltskin effect

This is a chemical reaction. My reptilian brain sucks, basically. There are scientific explanations for why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. There is a shockingly beautiful, intoxicating, delightful, overwhelming, multisyllabic word for why my laundry isn't folded, why I don't have a new job, why there is a big fat plug in the faucet that's turned on full blast, trying to purge this feeling.
I read it in a book. I also paid a very nice hippie lady a large percentage of my savings to tell me that. I thought she was just going to tell me I was not right.I was broken. I really and truly assumed she would assauge me with kind words about how it was a terrible inability to do what I'm supposed to, but that she could give me medicine for that.Or worse, that all she would say was "Mhmm," and "I'm so sorry that happened."

But there are words. Real words that have an entirely different meaning. There are two words that mean i am not constitutionally incapable. In a thin volume, with a beige with darker beige cover are two words that turn my blood to the trembling neon hue of hope.

Tonic Immobility.

Those words are the biggest words in the whole world today. Those words mean that somewhere beneath everything there is a Rachel enhanced. Myself, aglow. It means that since it has a name, it can be fought. It means I will be my own, someday, maybe.

When a human being perceives danger, chemicals are released in the brain that are supposed to tell how to proceed. Our bodies are supposed to tell us how to go through the motions until we can really figure it out. If our senses gather that there is time enough to flee from whatever opponent accosts us, regardless of what it is, we are to flee first. Run. I could not run. i was not fast enough; there was not time or refuge. Upon the failure of flight, something rises up within us. More fear than courage, it boils within us if there is hope, and if our senses asses that we might have the strength, even for a little while, we fight.

For most of us those are the only instincts we'll ever encounter. The threat passes, or is fled from, or fought off. But mice, deer, possums, and Rachel's know of another sort. Mice go limp in the claws of cats, knowing they cannot fight, or flee. Deer stop dead in freeways, paralyzed in opposition to their very will to live. Possums play dead. Rachel's freeze.

We humans with our "higher functions" have another side effect of this tonic immobility called dissociation. We separate from ourselves. I would like to steal the thunder of this chemical reaction by saying that this separation is merely a manifestation of shame at being in the same category as mice and possums, but there is some parasympathetic nervous system chemically mumbo jumbo that would be very frustrated if I didn't give it it's moment. The privilege of dissociation is that I get to watch from the corner as I eff everything up. As theunstoppable ocean of my life breaks agains my immobile toes, eroding my perfect red nail polish.

The moral of the story is this, I got tired. I couldn't run. There was nowhere to go. And I was too damn tired to fight. So I froze. Like a snowman's pee.

But now, it has a name. Haven't you ever felt that burst inside of you when you can finallly put a name to the inescapable fears of your mind. It's like the delicious warmth of a sun-ripened raspberry breaking open in your mouth. Like the release of a bubble popping on a child's fingertips. The incubi that come to haunt you in the night are suddenly robbed of something when given over to their rightful names. The names seem to tame them, to lull them. It's as if you've been pushed against a wall and had your hair pulled and your nose bloodied by some horrible, freckled, snotty, bully and suddenly, his mother comes into the room and swats him across the butt.

It can be such a saddening feeling when it happens to the lovelier things of the world. It's almost worth knowing that when a sonnet tries to match that stomach as a hot air balloon notion it will fall nearly as flat as that chastised bully. All spiderweb flutterings of eyelash against our cheekbones can never compare to the real feeling of lips soft and kind and forgiving against our faces, and still we give them over to language. We seek out the words... AHEM>>>>>

Because I know it's name, it cannot have me, and that is my justification. In spite of the Rumpelstiltskin effect, I would bear faulty testament against all the sweet tinglings of my heart in the name of being able to look something in it's eye and call it it's rightful name.

And so I am encouraged, and thawed by two not so little words: Tonic immobility.

Thank you.

zipped.

"Why are you making me think about this?"


Because you have been not thinking about it for twenty years. I can only attest to the twenty years i witnessed and waited for you to think about it. Unknowingly, I demanded with my very presence that you be better, and could you not be better my four year old voice would sing you to sleep. I sang off key staccato songs about a Jesus who had abandoned you, like your father, like your brother, like your husbands did and would again, like your sons and daughter would one day as well. From my small round mouth came false ballads of a God who could lead you from your bed and the self-imposed night of your smoke-filled room, into a morning of exuberant peace. To your lost, broken heart, I must have sounded like the most vicious of perjurers.

It may sound strange after all this time. You must be angry that it has taken me twenty years to ask you, and when I finally have, it isn't the question you had craved. I could pretend to not know what question you had dared to hope for. You wanted to account to me all of your horrors, or to deny me the privilege of sharing in them with you. Starkly you have tatooed the world's trepsasses against you on your arms, on your face, on your heart, lest you forget and they affront you again. You have painted them in blackest ink across your teeth, so that every word may be filtered through them, stained and flavored with them. Yet the inscriptions on your skin are enscrawled in a dead and language, wrapped up tight and mummified so that it may never rot, never fade. The paintings on your teeth kept behind tight lips, which would never betray you.

I don't want to read them. I don't want to know those terrible things. I see the markings and can see by their shapes, by the angry downstrokes of every letter that they do not bring good tidings. I seek a different knowledge. I challenge you to show me your happiness. Your joys, few or multiple as they may be. Once again I am demanding something of you mother.

Don't deny me, when you have denied me so much already.

want some?

My mama never did, but she made sure to let Van Morrison let me know there'd be days like this. Sometimes i worry that I have some wicket backwards form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. I am the polar opposite of those people who become complete misanthropes in winter. Summer nights make me wistful, nostalgic, endlessly and tediously ponderous in some of the most obnoxious ways. Decisions are impossible. Starry night skies remind me of minstrel cicadas trilling ballads of all the nights I spent on swings at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, remembering a naivete i never actually possessed. I can spend hours remembering myself remembering a self I only hoped I was. It's enough to make your head spin.

No man has ever spent the time romancing me the way I've spent eons with the nighttime breeze romancing myself with these vivid daydreams of night skies and golden wheat fields that i'll never see as clearly again. Somehow the langorious days around me reflect in those in my head and form an infinite mirror, each remembered reflection more beautiful than the last, and there are never words to put it all down. I am never ever able to quite as aptly paint in black and white times new roman font the same picture that idles and hums around me enhanced and reflected again through the amber light of my nostalgia'
.

So it pools inside of me. Finally and eventually, right around September every year it brims out of me, salted with regret at my inability to say, to show, to share. I cry at the selfishness inherent in not being brave or smart or poetic enough to give it to everyone. To see or feel it. How it runs throgh me, heart like a drumbeat trying to pump it through ever inch of me, to fill every capillary with blood turned to honey, made sleepy by delight and the sudden knowledge of each cell, nucleus, mitochondria to sing; to glow.

My conscience thrums with it's imagined culpability in being unable to give it away. So Dinah Washington, the salt on my skin and I will be in the backyard listening to the blues, drinking ice tea, waiting for the nightfall, missing lightning bugs.

don't tell anyone.

That’s her. Standing there in the pink dress. Pigeon toes and dark sunglasses. Toes turned in in too tall boots. Choking back the feeling that even that dress won’t make her a little girl again. Won’t wipe off the smeared makeup her skin remembers, from too many nights fighting an innocence she’ll never tell she treasures. It’s hunting dear, clear as day. She’s looking for invincibility, hoping it will inspire her. Inspire him. To see her as she was, brave and wise under her freckles. Hoping those tiny fluttering sleeves with soften the harsh reality that with every passing second she’s farther from who she planned to be.

A shock of fuschia on a grey sidewalk, that dress is the last tether between her and a dream she thought she’d lost. Not a stitch of white on her body, there’ll be no surrender here today.

easy squeezy...stop chasing.

My long game needs some work. I have no damn idea what I want to “do with my life.” And I resent that question. That question has robbed me of the simplistic enjoyment of a hundred starry skies, of the sensation of my hair on my shoulders under a summer sun begging to melt away my fear. I sit up nights. Having arguments with myself. Existential debates. Long drawn out thoughts that end in me completely paralyzed with what I don’t know. Immobilized by the edifice of indecision; I am absolutely horrified but the irrevocable consequence of making the wrong decision. It’s pathetic.

But I also know that twenty-one year old existentialism is about as useful as a golden retriever chasing his tail, and very comparable. We will not catch the meaning of our lives, the faster we chase after it, the faster it has to go to keep up with us. If we do happen to catch it for a brief moment, what in the hell do we think we are going to do with it? Hold it in our mouths until hunger or our short attention spans force us to let go, Drooling on it until heat and the strange tickling sensation forces us to let go and breathe again, and we find ourselves on yet another madly twirling carousel of our own desire to know ourselves.

We cannot, for the most ridiculous of reasons, fathom that we are attached to our purpose, that it is following us as much as we are following it. And because we cannot see that we cannot miss it, lose it, or escape it, we waste our time and bountiful energy searching for what is already ours. We are children, in so many ways, upsetting ourselves with our imaginary disembodiment. I’ve spent so many precious minutes trying to catch myself, feeling disoriented and headless, trudging through a swamp that is not there. All my feeble attempts at divining direction from a sky dotted with a thousand destinations and no paths, rewards me with only a hundred constellations that smile down knowingly at me, twinkling with the mischief that comes from knowing the end of the tale in which someone you love is deeply entrenched.

The most terrifying thing about all of this, is that I KNOW. I know all of these things, the futility of seeking yourself. I feel the ringing truth that I am my only direction, and the things I choose to do and love and see are where I belong, no matter where I am, who I’m with, or what I’m doing. I know these things. So why in the hell am I the biggest tail chaser I know?

overdose?

Pickle number two, that's where I am in the decision making process.

Some people smoke, some people have security blankets, some people call their mother, or go get blitzed; but in my times of great plight, it's the vlassic stork that gets me through. I'm broke right now though, so instead of that cute little stork in his goofy blue hat appeasing me with talk of his crunch, it's Eden Garden Kosher Dills from the dollar tree. I have to admit, they are better. Don't tell the stork though, he gets pretty rough with that beak.
I'm doing okay. The upbeat wannabe punk on my stereo has injected me with enough optimism to pretend I won't finish this jar. But really, I fear that before I know it I'll be huddled in my bed, Max, the homosexual beagle on my lap, arms curled around the pickle jar as I nurse the last bit of pickle juice from the jar like a broke drunk on his last jug of Popov Vodka. My face will be puffy and all wet-looking, I'll and have heartburn and be pretty sure I smell like a salt lick, but still find the engergy to mumble the words to "angel" by sarah maclaughlan in a pitiful little voice.
I'll seriously consider finding my car keys and making a chaste pilgimage to walmart, straight to the canned goods/pickle aisle and straight to the checkout, but when it comes down to it, I'll be content to put my mouth to the jar and just hang out like that for a while, huffing the leftovers after drinkign the juice, not really caring about the stupid red ring that will be all around my mouth like warpaint when I finally get tired of the pickle fumes.
Through every major crisis and change in my life, there have been pickles. No lie. When, in pubescent fear, i transferred schools, my dad came to visit me and he brought me a gallon jar of pickles every other week. Ok, Every week. I needed them; for sustenance and moral support.
When I moved to Denver to nanny , my best friend showed up at my house on the morning of my departure with two jars of pickles and an easter egg full of silly putty. They were gone in the first three days.
Ingredients: Fresh cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, calcium chloride, polysorbate 80, yellow 5, and balls...sometimes balls like john wayne. I could take out a village with the strength supplied at times by those wicked little cucumbers.
I don't need a damn hug and I don't want to talk about it. I don't want your advice and I don't want you to make me laugh. When people make me laugh when I'm supposed to be mulling somethign over I feel this unbearable guilt, like I'm ignoring something important. I start to feel like some terrible little A.D.H. D. child who throws away his meds cause it's more fun to spaz out.

So I'm just going to sit here and mull this over with my jar of pickles, which by the way, only have five calories each. Can you say that about YOUR comfort food? Didn't think so.
I'll be fine tomorrow. That's just how it is.

mea culpa

The poor will lend it to their need; the rich, and the gluttons eternally find rest for it on the bountiful shoulders of excess. The less intelligent and the presumably naive find their scapegoat in their ignorance. People, on the whole, will lean against whatever intangible and completely unanswerable object they can for their impunity. When indicted for our crimes, trespasses, and the personal slaughters of our own hopes we can nearly always find some empty nook in the giant edifice of the unblameable in which to rest our own culpability.

Almost.

But for some more than others, the burdens of our own accountability cannot be surrendered so easily.

If I really thought you needed it, I'd invent a statistic to illustrate the overwhelming number of people who believe in God only for the massive capacity to harbor blame found in an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient diety, but you already know. In the troughs of our personal guilt, we have all found the heady release of being able to blame the Universe or any other all encompassing entity for what we have become. We hurl our anger at the sun, pretending to be disappointed in a clear blue sky that did not reach down with cloud fingers and turn our mouths away from that illicit kiss, put away that last dime spent, or mend that trust broken.

We seek out psychiatrists to hear our side of the story alone. Willfully ignoring the knowledge that in psychology there is very little objectivism, and that with only our sides of the stories, overpaid men in armchairs can condone our blame of everyone but ourselves with generic conviction.

A hundred thousand reasons why we deserve impunity for the hundred million small indescrepancies of our humanity.

Or we are the injured martyrs of the world, who know we cannot give the blame away, like old, broken toys at a garage sale. These masses, upon realizing their inability to flush themselves of the evidence of their faults, often make a childlike collection of it. They line their delinquincies up on shelves, the glass figurines which will illustrate to the world just how uniquely broken they are. They surround themselves with them and become curators of transgression. Reaching into hands so much bigger than their own, pulling down on their heads bigger and bigger castigations than their overburdened hearts can carry. Stealing for themselves remonstrances that perhaps should be reserved for the ethers.

But if we are among those strange souls who find mental pathways past the sentries of our bravado and self-preservation, we ultimately come to the realization that blame is not ours to give, or take. That seeking to control our liabilities and immunities is ineffective, whether we dole them out, or hoard them. We find that there is a great balance, calibrated only by the choices we make in each and every moment.

I don't know what happens then. But I'll let you know