n: vb: the spice of imagination
I’ve been quiet lately due to heart-break and travel and people dying and things beyond my control. I’ve returned fragile and in need. In need of work, in need of support, and especially of care.
If you can, please take a moment to look over this looking-for-work page I’ve created and pass it around on all your social media. The more eyes that see it, the better a chance I have. You never know where a connection might lead.
In an extraordinarily unexpected twist, I’m going to Minneapolis tomorrow as an extra tag-along driver to help facilitate someone else’s trip. I was only asked about it today. We leave in under four hours. I think I’m packed, but I’m not entirely sure. I was at a house party earlier that had a livingroom DJ who wore a pillow on his head. I was there until three in the morning. It kind of tired me out.
I had to look it up to make sure, but Inktea Cole is there, as is David S, and after some restless facebook posting, I now have a place to stay, a borrow bike, and Stranger-Here Karen is going to drive up from Madison to meet me. I can’t even remotely pretend this is a responsible financial decision, but Chris A. decided on a whim to help fund my trip, “shine on your crazy diamond”, enough that I’ll be able to eat along the way if I’m careful, so in spite of my unemployment, in spite of my complete and total lack of any kind of income or next month’s rent, I’m going.
I’ve been coming back to life. Embracing the weird is just part of that equation.
Oh, also.. I sort of accidently dyed my hair green today. By sort of, I mean completely, so much so that I look like a dryad. Um, whoops?
Today is the first day of the year 5772. I wish I felt more hopeful.
Returning from Seattle, I looked out at the crescent of water visible from the highway near the border to see the the skies over the southern, U.S. shore a bright, joyful blue, (flooded with the scent of flowers when we drove through it), but fading northward until over Canada was silver, all gray and bleak and rain. It felt too pat, too apt a metaphor to be real, yet there it was, undeniable, painted in uncanny symmetry.
There were no apples in honey for me this year. Instead I dropped some sweetness off at a doorway up the street and stayed home, cleaning my room, unpacking from my trip, putting more aside to sell. I may have returned to familiar surroundings, yet this doesn’t feel like home. Everything is drenched in stress. Unemployment, lack of rent, debts and bills I can do nothing about. One of the cats broke her tail in my absence, no idea how, but because we don’t have money enough for a vet, it has gone unexamined, except by my inexpert fingers. I hope she isn’t in much pain. Meanwhile, the first of the month looms, a darker shadow every day. David is unemployed now, too, as the bookstore chain he worked for is closing down their shops, and my welfare cheque is being held, as I am due for an audit, so our finances are in an even worse state than before. Even so, I am considering quitting welfare, as a way to alleviate some of the depression. Fighting the world without a net is harsh, but independence is worth more than security.
I am tired today, exhausted almost to the point of sickness. Absolutely everything hurts, my body a canvas of bruises faded to a spectacular spray of purple and green and yellowy red, my heart a tight and unhappy fist. Depression has closed over me again, a horrid glue I can’t wash off without resources I do not have. I am hungry for more than this, for sunshine, for a place where I don’t know anyone, where I have something to do.
So I am lurking on-line, examining work-visa options, all of them rushing away from me faster than I can run, opportunities closing each day I creep closer to thirty. I feel absolutely trapped, too poor to make requirements, too undereducated, too sad.
If I don’t find a way to escape before my next birthday, I’m walking out.
Given that my recent job interviews have all fizzled, my relationship has horrifically dissolved, and my birthday is fast approaching, I have decided it’s finally perfect timing to use up my plane ticket to visit Van Sise in New York city*.
I am going to miss Rafael’s Folklife and a few other things, (my original birthday plan was to set up a Whole Beast Feast, hit up the 40th Annual Folklife for a day, then hitch-hike with some strangers to the 10th Annual Sasquatch Festival for the rest of the long weekend), but given my present circumstances as a connoisseur of sad situations, it just seems like a better idea to be gone. Every night my dreams ache, my body wrenches with unhappiness, yet in the morning, I can’t seem to find reasons to be awake. I lie there motionless, wrapped up in nothingness, unable to conjure any appetite for life, any thread of grace, any desire at all for my bland, banal hopes or disembodied future. If I had a job or were in school, I’m sure it would be different, I would feel that my life was moving forward instead of slipping away, but as it currently is, a lonely narrative of inevitable failure after inevitable failure, all I want is to be away from here, all I want is escape.
*Originally we were going to wander around the southern states, visiting Atlanta and New Orleans, rounding off the trip, if we were lucky and it was delayed, with the last Space Shuttle Launch. Instead his work got in the way and the already-purchased plane ticket was cashed in for credit and put aside for a visit with him later.
I found out that the computer dot in Kashmir is my godmother’s amazing best friend, Joy. One down, 800 to go. All these mysterious places, I’ve been learning the world map a little at a time, just from peeking into where everyone seems to be. (The most interesting bit, I think, is how accurately my map globally describes what areas are spread with internet access.)
This summer weather makes me wish I drank alcohol. It rains a little, is cold at night, and when I open my eyes in a sticky hot room, companion in my bed to a clutter of books, an antique hunting horn, a handful of plush roses, my feet tangled in a pile of clean laundry, a wish for a wine bottle flashes into my hands. It’s part of being unemployed, of feeling that my accomplishments are accumulating too slowly to change anything. I want the melodrama of a morning swig of sour intoxication to insulate me against the passage of empty time. Not that I’ve ever managed to be drunk in my life, my thought comes fleshed only in media, but French television shows, Spanish movies full of lovers and taxi-cabs that drive too fast, one hand out the window, hair being tossed back by the weight of the sun, make saturated hydrocarbons look fun, meaningful and nice instead of unpleasant, a wretched taste similar to cassette-head cleaner.
I skipped out on Graham‘s movie night to visit with David and his last night of the big-screen TV he’d rented for World Cup. (As of today, he’s back off to Macbeth it up at the Caravan). We watched Requiem, took a dive into the perturbing anthropology that is modern television, and just generally stayed up too late eating pizza and drinking tea strong enough to dye skin. (Dear me, You Forgot the Pizza in the Fridge, Leave a Note on the Front Door for the House Sitters, Otherwise it Will be Two Weeks. Sincerely, Your Sudden Realization). I think we packed it in around four in the morning, but stayed up reading in bed until closer to five. The New Yorker, Lila Says. Comforting to be so domestic. The younger kids who stay the night at my place, crashing over after movies so we can all have breakfast the next day before work, they don’t know the subtleties yet, they can’t sink into it.
Our first blanket arrangement was called the Too Hot War, but that one sank into the swamp. So we built a second blanket arrangement: the Too Warm War. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. So we built a third one: the Cold Toes War. And that one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, lad, when you get people like us together, the strongest castle upstairs of England.
