Date: 4/29/21
Time: 9:48PM
Going to bed hungry is a waste, and I'd rather die than invest in the mystery of wastefulness. Eating Rice Chex with thick milk in my little periwinkle bowl
slowly giving myself alternatives to Twitter
What I like most of all about myself is that I am very shy and share myself at a high vibration, because relationship is music and I seek the great duet, soothing tonality, tense and comfortable eye contact, harmonie melodie fingered bass the whole project.
I've vowed to return to my singing and made contact with a professional who could help me train, wrote out a whole spiel about the perils of music school, sent to the cloud
Date: 4/28/21
Time: 3:30AM
Divined some very stirring herbal messages from spirit last night. Herbs to focus on: alfalfa and nasturtium. Would also like a few beeswax pillars to line the bathtub sill. Getting into water ritual. Salts of different shades.
Trying to figure out where to go camping first. Need a "good" sleeping bag if I plan to pitch my tent before June. I camped last May (though it was in northern Maine) and the overnight drops in temperature made true rest impossible. Rigid all through the dark, left the tent as early as the sky started to pale just to get blood flowing again.
General sense of life saddling me with fatigue, and even feeling brain zaps again, like the summer I went off Lexapro. Pretty hell.
Added stinging nettle to my tea brew, it neutralizes some of the chamomile's sweetness, making things more broth-like (definitely a plus). Not sure if histamine plays a role in my landscape but let's try out an antihistamine; at very least it may soothe my liver :')
Date: 4/22/21
Time: 9:39PM
Picnic menu:
Purchased from the farmer's market:
And I had three different kinds of drinks for breakfast (nervous system brew*, orange juice, blueberry kombucha) (and then dark roast coffee from the bakery an hour later)
*1 part plantain, 1 part linden, 2 parts tulsi, .5 part chamomile. maybe eventually i'll make an herbal rotation section somewhere on this site...
Date: 4/22/21
Time: 9:39PM
Really want to bring my focus back onto wood carving and birding as soon as it gets warmer. I'd like to make a wooden egg and then try making a spoon. My "pocket" knife is poetically big but I am glad I have it. So far, it has cut sticks, apples, persimmons, paper, bark, very well. Also need to replace my sleeping bag as the zipper is broken and its insulation is effectively useless. I want to go camping so bad, fill a bag up with dry treats, peanut butter, carton of uncooled oat milk, cans of baked beans and soup, some produce (maybe?).
In one way, camping is just setting up an ephemeral bedroom outdoors* and I love figuring out how to be comfortable when there is plenty of space with which to shape my comfort. I like when my stations can moved from room to room or place to place. I want to live a modular life and be able to translate my modules of being into many different scenarios. I like to have a good enough handle on my rituals that I can bring them with me anywhere. Luckily my rituals are always changing so I have opportunities to practice all the time. But there are a few key ones that have been consistent for years.** I developed many iterations of travel modules through years of road trips, touring as a musician, and long-distance relationships. Building my own reliability. Camping sounds like a good next step
Hypothetically I could go anytime into the woods and start learning how to make a fire from scratch
*without leaving a footprint so heavy it changes the land and its creatures
**you're on the road, driving for hours and hours, in the middle of Ohio, you wake up in a strange house with two college boys, you open your crinkly grocery bag, get out your drip coffee cone, pour in your favorite coffee grounds, make yourself a bowl of oatmeal with blackstrap molasses and golden raisins, and enjoy the morning like you're home
Date: 4/22/21
Time: 5:07PM
Had a cool thought about making a web garden and inviting some friends to contribute daily material for our own little web town a la e-worm club. Each person gets one web page for whatever kind of content and everyone can see what everyone else is or isn't up to. Facilitating a lush fairy circle of digital mushrooms...
I keep rolling up my heated blanket so I can put it into storage, and then suddenly it's 30 degrees and my walls are thin, summer feels just a veil away and then I see snowflakes pouring down through my window
When it's night and I turn the red lights on, my room feels mystical and exciting. What's dull becomes interactive. I love my world-building and attention to/craving for sensory detail, textures, palettes. Lots of tactile trinkets in my room to keep me and my hands company.
Another spring season of wishing I had some synths and was on a road trip to California or Florida to play a noise show, motels, shoplifting lunch from W**** F****, having sensual encounters, finding people who want to find me, seeing my faraway sweetheart, hearing God in a chaotic drumset
Taking a moment to sit in bed, drink some water, and remind myself that recovery and healing needs to be fun too
Date: 4/20/21
Time: 6:00PM
Date: 4/18/21
Time: 9:18AM
There's been a fly in my room for a day or two. Silent and black and meandering. The tulips JB gave me are curling and on the cusp of withering but the bouquet Wren gave me is still erect and beautiful.
Today I will work on my website and my trauma workbook. But it is hard. I would love for my folding up to feel comforting and hibernatory and simply subterranean but it's sharper, burning, perilous - an estivation. Even the onslaught of avoidance behaviors tells me how much distress is vacillating through my body. The terror of revealing myself is palpable (the heart palpitations. What will be on the other side of this time for my body? I've recovered from things like this before. But my resilience is not weightless). The brutal snag between my pain-based fears and value-based clarity hurts me. Clashing, endless, distortions; "sense of self" theory doesn't always acknowledge that settling into a version of yourself means trusting that version.
In August, I wrote, If the brain is a predictive item - if the brain considers its only task to be convincing us of its predictions - can we forgive ourselves for our trauma responses?
Imagine. So sweet.
Date: 4/17/21
Time: 10:29PM
Am I fucking delusional after all? Maybe. Two fireworks (white and red) outside the window.
Every relationship feels like a mess so too yours to me will be tonight. Want a job but don't want to lose my weekly unemployment $318. Endless flow of cortisol and heart palpitations. My body exhausted itself racing through March. Watching You're the Worst and just dying thinking about the terrifying luxury of fucking up, making mistakes in front of other people, not masking.
Mess lens = neurodivergence, distorted interoception, C-PTSD, pandemic. Ruminating on how there's no escape is an obvious sign of anxiety.
One more month until the vaccination experience is all set. It's tiring to write with grace. It's nearly an avoidance symptom - is it fantasy, intellectualization, or dissociation?
An active attempt to write more beautifully. The long skirt of what? I am structuring my escape and may end up with nothing but a delicate sap. Simultaneous display of contradictory behavior. A little ways away. Tree, tree, tree. Taking a break from lyrical writing and trying to focus on just "journaling." Made noodles and tofu for Charlie, who brought peanut butter buckeyes to share. We'd like to go camping in the summer. I want to pet a horse.
Date: 4/15/21
Time: 4:53PM
Subject: Glass
You find it hard to ache like this. The body is a rotting apothecary and the fumes go on to nowhere. An aching prose. In order to explore its implications let us consider how we echo our muscles in poems. Every line break is a pause just long enough to slide into the soft tissue of silence. Punctuation concerns a phrase and uppercase breaks it. Whether we name what the letters are does not matter, their being is obvious. Your eyes draw a skeleton on the page, going from there to there. Let us pass directly to this skeleton's heart. Its cardiac muscle. The walls of a poem note with interest, as do many borders, its symptomatic nature. Outside, a story. Inside, a telling. It is obviously more complicated than that.
Date: 4/7/21
Time: 8:18AM
Subject: X
Outside of the normal. Forward or back. A car crash in a dream