This has been the itchiest summer I can remember since I was a kid. Mosquitoes lie in wait for me to step outside so they can try to bleed me to death through my feet. All they manage to do is keep me awake at night with the itching, experimenting with various itch remedies, pondering the usefulness of parasites. Trying to remember the symptoms of West Nile.
Survival of the fittest. Let he who is without malaria cast the first quinine pill. This calls for Jynnan Tonix.
I slept a long time today with a pillow over my face, half convinced that staring at screens is turning me migraineful. And here I am staring at another screen.
I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, and it got me thinking about predators in a way I hadn't before. I liked the book, my second try at it. I put it down a couple of years ago, put off by the biology, not ready for all the nature. I'm finally old enough for it.
Barbara Kingsolver is 58 this year, the same age my mom was when she died. I only looked her up to make sure she wasn't dead, or worse. Every suicide I hear about scares me. The only solution is to avoid the news, because we haven't figured out how to stop swallowing bullets, jumping into nooses. But she's alive. I just had to check.
Because now I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, but sometimes I have to go back and reread for the chuckles I missed the first time when I read it looking for clues.
I mean, you see lots of clues in lots of things. Coincidences, clever word plays. They don't all mean everything you try to pack into them. It's exhausting to keep putting pieces together like it's one big puzzle that's going to come together in the end, because it won't. Or, shit, maybe it will. Don't ask me. Maybe it will.
But the clues all point different directions and none of them answer my question, which drags a bunch of little questions behind it like little wooden ducks on strings and becomes so selfish, I don't even ask it in the end. I just keep reading for clues and studying pictures, looking for anything familiar, afraid I will find it, afraid I won't. I don't think it always looks the same, I don't know if it always comes from the same place.
My brother is planning to board a bus on Saturday and head for North Dakota. He doesn't have a job, or even an interview lined up. He says his ex wife's step brother wants him to come build a smoker. I guess that's sort of a job. And I guess he'll have a place to stay, at least for a while.
I'm all kinds of worried. I can't even sort out all my objections. I guess that's why I'm awake so late. I told Alan I'd give him the blankets he left here, and Eddie threw in a couple of paperbacks for the bus ride. I can get a care package together to send with him.
I guess the rest of his stuff can go to Goodwill. The army cot, the mostly empty plastic storage containers, most of it stuff I bought him anyway, just the stuff he didn't take with him when he left that last time. Big stupid knives and bits of welded metal.
Probably I'll hang on to the knives.
We had a cookout for Alan on Saturday. I got him a cake that said congratulations, but I was still hoping he had an actual job when I asked to have that put on a cake. I probably would have gone with "good luck" if I'd known, but the steaks would have been the same. Over the course of the evening, I got sharper and snappier and should have left before biting Eddie's head off.
I asked if it counted as a fight, but Eddie said no. He ditched me after dropping my brother at his motel, a ditching I thoroughly deserved, and I curled up alone, feeling like I'd swallowed a wasp that wouldn't die. I felt the stinger bounce around my chest, sliding with my pulse, hot and mean. It started just behind the top of my sternum and slid in a rush of blood down toward the bottom, tracing a circuitous route as if it really were following a blood vessel. Or a twisty slide. When it got to the bottom, it reversed, climbing back up. I curled up around it and didn't sleep for a long time. I woke up in time to ignore Eddie's text messages, but I left my phone in the bedroom to avoid the temptation to reply. After a couple of hours, I finally came back in to see if he'd sent any more messages, and he was already calling.
So of course I cried, and I was surprised when I did. I'm no good at fighting. I always assume it's the end. Right, this is where you blow up and I say something horrible and you leave and you're never coming back. And we're both sorry, but we can stuff our sorries in a sack.
It's not so much the horrible things I say, it's the contemptuous way I have of saying them. I get all sneery, and the nastiness just drips off the words. Here, have some of this vile and poisonous resentment, all hot and juicy and made fresh for you.
So of course I'm going to die alone, but probably not today. Because he said he was sorry too, and he said I wasn't really all that bad and he should have come over instead of leaving me to wonder, and I said what are you going to do if we move in together? Go stay in a hotel? Because I said something shitty? Because I'm really sorry I said shitty things, but I'm probably going to say something shitty in the future, and I should really be held responsible for that in an adult sort of responsible way. You know, in person. And he said that's why we definitely need two bathrooms. Because he knows I won't follow him to the bathroom. And he said it didn't count as a fight.
But I think it counted. And I think it went okay.
Survival of the fittest. Let he who is without malaria cast the first quinine pill. This calls for Jynnan Tonix.
I slept a long time today with a pillow over my face, half convinced that staring at screens is turning me migraineful. And here I am staring at another screen.
I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, and it got me thinking about predators in a way I hadn't before. I liked the book, my second try at it. I put it down a couple of years ago, put off by the biology, not ready for all the nature. I'm finally old enough for it.
Barbara Kingsolver is 58 this year, the same age my mom was when she died. I only looked her up to make sure she wasn't dead, or worse. Every suicide I hear about scares me. The only solution is to avoid the news, because we haven't figured out how to stop swallowing bullets, jumping into nooses. But she's alive. I just had to check.
Because now I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, but sometimes I have to go back and reread for the chuckles I missed the first time when I read it looking for clues.
I mean, you see lots of clues in lots of things. Coincidences, clever word plays. They don't all mean everything you try to pack into them. It's exhausting to keep putting pieces together like it's one big puzzle that's going to come together in the end, because it won't. Or, shit, maybe it will. Don't ask me. Maybe it will.
But the clues all point different directions and none of them answer my question, which drags a bunch of little questions behind it like little wooden ducks on strings and becomes so selfish, I don't even ask it in the end. I just keep reading for clues and studying pictures, looking for anything familiar, afraid I will find it, afraid I won't. I don't think it always looks the same, I don't know if it always comes from the same place.
My brother is planning to board a bus on Saturday and head for North Dakota. He doesn't have a job, or even an interview lined up. He says his ex wife's step brother wants him to come build a smoker. I guess that's sort of a job. And I guess he'll have a place to stay, at least for a while.
I'm all kinds of worried. I can't even sort out all my objections. I guess that's why I'm awake so late. I told Alan I'd give him the blankets he left here, and Eddie threw in a couple of paperbacks for the bus ride. I can get a care package together to send with him.
I guess the rest of his stuff can go to Goodwill. The army cot, the mostly empty plastic storage containers, most of it stuff I bought him anyway, just the stuff he didn't take with him when he left that last time. Big stupid knives and bits of welded metal.
Probably I'll hang on to the knives.
We had a cookout for Alan on Saturday. I got him a cake that said congratulations, but I was still hoping he had an actual job when I asked to have that put on a cake. I probably would have gone with "good luck" if I'd known, but the steaks would have been the same. Over the course of the evening, I got sharper and snappier and should have left before biting Eddie's head off.
I asked if it counted as a fight, but Eddie said no. He ditched me after dropping my brother at his motel, a ditching I thoroughly deserved, and I curled up alone, feeling like I'd swallowed a wasp that wouldn't die. I felt the stinger bounce around my chest, sliding with my pulse, hot and mean. It started just behind the top of my sternum and slid in a rush of blood down toward the bottom, tracing a circuitous route as if it really were following a blood vessel. Or a twisty slide. When it got to the bottom, it reversed, climbing back up. I curled up around it and didn't sleep for a long time. I woke up in time to ignore Eddie's text messages, but I left my phone in the bedroom to avoid the temptation to reply. After a couple of hours, I finally came back in to see if he'd sent any more messages, and he was already calling.
So of course I cried, and I was surprised when I did. I'm no good at fighting. I always assume it's the end. Right, this is where you blow up and I say something horrible and you leave and you're never coming back. And we're both sorry, but we can stuff our sorries in a sack.
It's not so much the horrible things I say, it's the contemptuous way I have of saying them. I get all sneery, and the nastiness just drips off the words. Here, have some of this vile and poisonous resentment, all hot and juicy and made fresh for you.
So of course I'm going to die alone, but probably not today. Because he said he was sorry too, and he said I wasn't really all that bad and he should have come over instead of leaving me to wonder, and I said what are you going to do if we move in together? Go stay in a hotel? Because I said something shitty? Because I'm really sorry I said shitty things, but I'm probably going to say something shitty in the future, and I should really be held responsible for that in an adult sort of responsible way. You know, in person. And he said that's why we definitely need two bathrooms. Because he knows I won't follow him to the bathroom. And he said it didn't count as a fight.
But I think it counted. And I think it went okay.
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