some like it lukewarm.

It's so weird to wake up every day and feel it, feel the thirty-six years all settled into me, pressing down on me, and to rise and stumble because the years don't just feel heavy, they also have wreaked serious fucking havoc on my ability to walk gracefully.  And this breath, my GOD, my mouth, it's truly like I am renting a pet hostel from an extended family of miniaturized nutrias, that, while I've slept, have done nothing but have stinky nutria-sex all night, in my mouth, and it's warm and rancid and dry and my teeth feel like small, cheap, generic Legos, all clattery and clumsy.  But that isn't the worst part.  The worst part is my hair.  Not the gray chunks (which used to be, even up until several weeks ago, merely strands.  Separate strands of gray kind of quietly spreading throughout my hair.  Turning into a fucking gray-hair army, it seems; they're uniting in a subtle-yet-discernibly hostile takeover of my scalp.  I don't care as much I thought I would, though).  It's the FRIZZ.  The curly hair that has always been my bane, oh, it continues.  Not the curls.  The old-lady frizz.  It's AWFUL.  It's like Einstein and

oh who the FUCK am I misleading with this?  This lunacy.  It ain't me.  I'm not writing it for me.  I'm writing it for you, today, and it feels like complete bullshit.  I have to just face facts:  I can't make myself write.  I thought I'd try, but all the trying is doing is giving me a pain in my gut, and there's a streak of bile headed for my mouth as I clatter these stupid horrid words out.

I can only write when I can.  No matter how hard I try to convince myself that I'm in charge of this thing, this setting-down-of-words in long, pale strands, I cannot cheat. 

It doesn't seem fair.  So many seem to be in such firm control of their writerly parts.  I am in as little control of them as I am of my hair going gray, the skin on the backs of my hands growing thin and the veins there looking more luminous and blue and traveled all the time, the apparent transparency of this aging and of my participation in its full-throated bloody rapacious scream, and that's fine, I suppose.  It has to be.  Seriously, I could kind of care less, because I'm so caught up in the minute scrap of control I have over my writing, after all of these bloody evidenced years.  So many stories I ache to release in a sublime thrust all over the page, so many stories I want to vomit and shriek and spurt and shatter and whisper and they're all holed up inside me like so many useless children I'll never birth and I'll be gasping my last stupid breaths and the only thing I'll leave as evidence of my existence, finally, is the terrifically bad nutria-sex stank.

When all I ever wanted to do was write.  (Well, and sing and dance and fuck and strip and gyrate and snowboard and drink and carouse and bust up assholes with my sharp fists and get high and talk high-falutin' multi-layered trippy nonsense with all them stupid fuckers.)

(And drink good, black tea and climb into the hills and smell the damp under the trees and examine the underside of a fern, acknowledge its curly edges and the wee rust-brown spores gracing the lengths of each branch, and read the classics and consider just what so-and-so meant while staring down a bloody sunset with glittering eyes, then finding someplace simple to rest and eat my little sandwich on hearty bread and a hearty lunch of William Carlos Williams or Vonnegut or Salinger or Dostoyevsky or, oh, beloved Fitzgerald.  Rising, strong in my body and fortified, enriched, in mind.  And THEN off to the strip club for a night of hilarious banter with drunks after -- and during -- my silly stripper antics.  Sometimes accosted by a frisky friend in the dressing room, sometimes pleased by it, sometimes annoyed, always intrigued.  Who would want to touch me, embrace me, kiss ME?  Why?  It's all so strange, our mingling, as people.  As creatures.)

I've stored up enough experience to get me through the early to middling years of parenting, I think, but - will I drag it out and kick it into some kind of literary shape as I would do if I could but MAKE IT SO?

I must bear with myself in this unquixotic struggle, this banal battle of unholy proportions, while I fight to dare my muse to strip, while I use all my wiles to convince her to pull those drawers down around her ankles and shove her naked ass against some stranger's steamed glasses.

And I'm gonna do it, no matter the shame coursing through her now.  She'll get used to it.  Grow to like the feeling, even.

Comments

[flutter]

I want nothing from you that you don't want to give.

[jaelithe]

But, you wrote, there!

[Kathi D]

I hate to be an old poop (not really) but 36 isn't old. Not even close.

[daisybones]

I think it's interesting that some of my favorite bloggers write really well about not being able to write. It's like backwards-meta-writing. Unmeta. Or like... anti-matter for the brain.

The paragraph about your muse? Stripping? That is brilliant. I send you groggy love; all I gots today.

[toyfoto]

I used to like to write ... of course, I don't have your talent for it. And now that people tell me ... go. write. It just feels wrong.

Maybe sleep would be better.

[Kady Liang]

have any good black tea lately?