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Thursday, August 30, 2018

Oh hi, menopause!

I've cried more over Chris Cornell's absence than I ever did about my own mother, dead over twenty years now. I knew my mother; we were very close (for some of her life anyway). I knew Cornell's music and how it affects me, still. I'm almost 50 years old. Such mixed feelings about all that.

I'm crying tonight listening to Burden in My Hand. Now I'm tripping out on Cat Stevens 1976 concert on YouTube (I was 7 living in San Diego at the time and there was a Tea for the Tillerman tape floating around the house which I played and played...thanks mom, for not always being a fucked-up active Mormon and giving us a break from that once in awhile even though it's still shit on my shoe).

Last entry here was exactly four years ago.

What good does writing do? Not much, is what my conclusion was, and so no writing. Maybe I can write something for myself that will do some good, now. I've been reading a lot of good writing (novels) this summer that I feel has done me good.

What is good? I keep feeling the same things over and over. Is that good? Can I just taste a bite of the non-binary for once in my life?

I stopped going through old photos from childhood. The last time I showed them to anyone was to my then-friend Robin, about four years ago, and I felt despairing afterwards. The photos were mostly of just me. I threw most photos out and scanned some, out of some bone-deep need to archive, some biological need for ersatz preservation of what, self, I don't know what. For who though? Nobody is ever going to see those.

I wish I could re-orient myself, how could I do that? So that I didn't feel so shitty for being alone and lonely, and unable / unwilling to try making new friends (that hasn't worked for so long, I always end it, the smothered and judgmental feelings take hold of me); that I could just commit to one goddamned thing for once: be alone, so be it, accept it and my fucked up coping mechanisms, stop. To stop seeing all this mess as a personal failure.

I was just now reading Annie Hartnett's Rabbit Cake and the 11-year-old protagonist runs to the bank of the Chattanooga river where her mother went sleepswimming and drowned; she wanted for the thousandth time to be able to talk with her mother about things. I haven't felt like that about my mother since I was a kid. Even if my mother was alive today I wouldn't go to her to talk things over or ask her for advice. I am still so relieved that she is dead (even though she fucking haunts me daily). I'd like to see her more as the fucked-up/whole composite person she was and feel sad and even glad for her instead of the persistent creeped-out feeling I have when I think about her.

I loved Melissa Broder's The Pisces; it's a book I think I could have written in substance and style. I loved Melissa Broder's Twitter for about two minutes after I read The Pisces (having never read Broder's Twits before) and then I got bored of the repeat (clever and raw as she is) and it reminded me so much of myself that I wanted to upchuck. Just shut the fuck up already (everyone).

I once saw a painting, maybe it's Britt Wilson's? She's a great cartoonist. The painting was a nest of baby birds, mouths open wide as the widest, thrusting front and center and huge, hungry, unrelenting, strident, demanding. Maybe there was a worm with guts all over. The painting is terrifying, it gives me the creeps and the crawls and I'm riveted even on the memory of it and feel compelled to go and find it but I might not and enjoy the propulsive memory of it even more.

As I was typing that last sentence, Chris Cornell on YouTube said that he was terrified during his first acoustic performance because it's terrifying so he grabbed something from home on his way out the door (pointing to a red countertop old-style phone) and that started a thing so now he carries it with him to each subsequent acoustic performance. He said terrifying only two beats after I typed terrifying.

To be continued (somewhere), because I can die now in peace, having been witness to a pretty innocuous but utterly cool synchronicity with Chris Cornell, even though I'm grasping for straws, ha ha.

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