unnarrator > Status Update

Explain that you need to not live with recovering alcoholics for a while. That will convince 'em. Automotive update?

No automotive. Though many craigslist bookmarks.

I had one test-drive date today and the car owner postponed and then cancelled. Then I found out the recovering alcoholic in question has applied to rent a 1-bedroom casita already, and is all Happy Joyous and Free. Then I turned into a giant puddle of vomiting saltwater. Then I called my DBT therapist and got coaching. Then I washed my face and went to an Al-Anon meeting. Then I ran out of the open AA meeting crying. Then I drove to my house because the recovering alcoholic wasn't there (nor at the AA meeting, because he'd gone to the monthly downtown "art walk"). Then I petted my cat and called my sponsor and Mandarin. Then my eyes looked like giant cherry-red jellyfish. Then I had a massive raging crying-jag-hangover headache. Then I made a large turkey sandwich and ate it, along with a good deal of his tiramisu gelato. Then I came back here and just took two Tylenol PMs.

I got no car, no house, and no job. Also my "relationship" has holes through which you could comfortably taxi a Boeing. I have, however, read the works of Anne Brontë. That's gotta count for something, in heaven.

Mandarin says, when asked for my source of income, I simply show my SSDI letter. And then when they make witticisms about how undisabled I appear, I smile broadly and deeply and say I do not wish to speak of it.

In less than a week, he's taken care of his job for next year and his housing. Will he maybe now turn his attention to finding a therapist? Not bloody likely. Tomorrow morning therefore I go see this cute red casita, where I shall hole up for the next year and write DEMENTED DR. CRAZY-LADY PMZ, bahahaha sob.

http://phoenix.craigslist.org/evl/apa...

<3 <3 <3 <3

Also, Mandarin is wise. And I am seriously on call at any time to trample some motherfuckers.

AB! this for you! you must have it! and now I must bed, or perish, ay me.

http://www.emanuelgatdance.com/silent...

That place is TEH CUTE!

Then I drove to downtown Phx to look at the cherry-teh-cute cottage.

Then what happened?

(and also <3 and I love red houses and glorious the wisdom of friends on the phone)

Then I looked at that place plus three others. Then I liked the woman who has singlehandedly bought and refinished them. Then I liked the funky Mexican neighborhoods but none of them had a yard for Pye, only gravel and cacti. Then the first (red one) was cutest and I told her I would call her tomorrow after I'd slept on it.

Then it started getting really, really hot, in his car without air conditioning. Then I got flashed twice by traffic cameras on the freeway even though I didn't think I was speeding. Then it started getting hotter. Then I bought coconut water and water and juice from a grocery store. Then I stupidly called my boyfriend and left an inflammatory message asking miserably if we could still live together, and informing him shakily but frostily what kinds of things I thought I would need for that to happen (no Internet in the house, no cash withdrawals from shared finances). Then I also asked about his behavior in the last week and if he was really ready to change it or if he was still lying to me.

Then I turned off my phone and chaired an Al-Anon meeting. Then I cried and cried. Then people hugged me and told me they hoped I would find an apartment soon. Then I got out of the meeting and checked my voicemail and learned that my boyfriend had filled it full of battery acid. Then I learned that he was breaking up with me ("just NO, no to fucking EVERYTHING!") because I am controlling, manipulative, and insulting, and so NO to all of my requests/demands, and no, he didn't want to talk to me but he just wanted his fucking CAR back NOW, and don't call him or try to talk to him.

Then I was driving down Apache Boulevard for twenty minutes screaming. Then I was struggling to breathe and pleading, please, please help me, somebody please help me, please help me find the way to go home, I need to go home now, please help me and Pyewacket, please help us, please, please. Then I pulled up at my house but I could not go in, because he said he is through, finished, done. Then I was almost done having full-blown Victorian hiccoughing silent-screaming hysterics which were totally shameful.

Then I sat down in the shade and called my therapist. Then she suggested that I not knock on the door and beg him to talk to me but that I call a friend to come get me. Then after about half-an-hour I gathered my things and walked over to the thrift store. Then I stupidly sent a text message begging, Please don't make decisions now, please can we work this out. Then my friend came and got me.

Now I am here in the room I have until June 15 and I am salt-rimed with sweat and haven't eaten yet today. Now I'm going to take a shower and try to cool off enough to eat. Now I'm probably also going to take one of the anti-anxiety meds that I have been rigorously not taking since this all started, or started ending, or whatever it is doing. Now I am ashamed to tell you all this but I did it anyway. I did these things anyway.

Oh, the shame isn't yours, not yours at all. Love you, you're going to be okay, you're going to be okay. A shower's good, food is important, you will have a home. You can do this. <3

MOST EGREGIOUS GR OVERSHARE EVER

It is all because I have no blog anymore.

So I showered, talked again to therapist, have managed to choke down nearly half a yogurt and a great deal of coconut water. My brand-new friend Beth (who broke up with her partner last week—they share a mortgage, he's already started dating, she is devastated) is also taking a shower after having cried all day and then she's coming to get me and we're going to Chipotle and Sprinkles and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , in exactly that order.

That first casita, the red one, is super-tiny and I'd probably have to get a twin bed and sell my queen; but they are putting up a picket fence around it right now, and it has a teeny tiny dirt backyard, and water is included in rent; so conceivably I could grow some desert grass or wildflowers for the cat to sit in. And for me to sit in them too.

Oh God, I love you guys.

PS I looked at this one too which is bigger but I don't like the tile as much, haha, and it costs more. Though one could fit a queen-sized bed into its bedroom as well as a dresser. However I only get $860 for The Crazy per month, though I will almost certainly qualify to receive more without an additional financial partner. Trying to juggle such considerations as if I were a normal person, makes me feel quite thoroughly insane, even without my former/current/ersatz/future/maybe partner shouting into my voicemail.

http://phoenix.craigslist.org/evl/apa...

PPS also I looked at this one and liked its insides best of all (really nice writing office!); but the outsides is all gravel, as you can see, and how can my delicate fat princess-cat walk upon such unwelcoming ground?! Fie!

http://phoenix.craigslist.org/cph/apa...

New bed = new sheets and maybe a really cute quilt?

Am so so so glad there is somebody else going through thus near you/next to you if not exactly with you. You'll get your blog back. And I still love you.

OMG how did I miss these updates last night? I think I was drowning my sorrows in Miss Marple.

Then I petted my cat and called my sponsor and Mandarin.

Damn good on you, mate. Seriously that is just what you are supposed to do. Good for you for doing that, and eating, too.

I have, however, read the works of Anne Brontë. That's gotta count for something, in heaven.

IT TOTALLY COUNTS

Mandarin says, when asked for my source of income, I simply show my SSDI letter. And then when they make witticisms about how undisabled I appear, I smile broadly and deeply and say I do not wish to speak of it.

Mandarin is Wise. Also, if anyone gets sniffy with you, I think the ADA had some teeth pulled out of it but it's still pretty illegal to refuse to rent to someone because they're disabled. Also might you be eligible for help with housing payments?

Then I turned off my phone and chaired an Al-Anon meeting.

That. Is. Badass. I am just telling you that, right now. That's badass. Like when you watch Olympic weightlifting and go 'How the hell are they holding all that up?' Badass.

Then I cried and cried.

Crying is OK. Crying is good.

Then I sat down in the shade and called my therapist.

GOOD FOR YOU

Now I'm going to take a shower and try to cool off enough to eat. Now I'm probably also going to take one of the anti-anxiety meds that I have been rigorously not taking since this all started, or started ending, or whatever it is doing. Now I am ashamed to tell you all this but I did it anyway. I did these things anyway.

You totally have nothing to be ashamed of. You are actually HOLDING IT TOGETHER really well. You called people who could help you and asked for help. You did not drink, or do other stuff, or go in and beg, or set fire to his car (bet it was tempting!). This is awful and draining and scary but you will find a home, because you are making all the right actions. Seriously.

unnarrator wrote: "My brand-new friend Beth (who broke up with her partner last week—they share a mortgage, he's already started dating, she is devastated) is also taking a shower after having cried all day and then she's coming to get me and we're going to Chipotle and Sprinkles and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in exactly that order."

I APPROVE OF THIS PLAN

There is a really most awesome revenge scene in Tattoo. I (and several other women in the theatre) went 'YESS!' when it happened.

Aww, a yard with flowers....the one with wood floors looks nice, plus 'Walk to the Bikini Lounge!!' Heh. I am really glad someone else is there with you, too, and that you have your therapist and M to call. And P to cuddle.

I have no idea what the Bikini Lounge is; but hey, one can WALK to it!

We like revenge scenes; also cupcakes.

For the first time a few days ago I actually considered what it would be like to take a large sharp object to his hundreds of precious rare cacti. He once had a friend whose angry girlfriend chopped up the friend's drumkit with an axe, and he informed me that harming musical instruments or plants was a total dealbreaker. But cacti can hurt you back.

Soon I will have Pye to cuddle. Right now she is in the house with him. I take her to get her summer haircut on Monday, she will hate me for three days afterward.

I know Sassy Gay Friend would bitch-slap me for this ("Look at your life! Look at your choices!"), but I still love the struggling, raging, recovering, extremely human and fallible and alcoholic sonofabitch asshole. And I shred inside when I think about splitting up our life together. I just do.

Huh, look what I said once! Good heavens.

http://theunreliablenarrator.net/2007...

unnarrator wrote: "I have no idea what the Bikini Lounge is; but hey, one can WALK to it!

Dude me neither. One lounges? In bikinis? Bikinis draped across the lamps? ceilings? Bikinis used as cunning little table-napkins?

But cacti can hurt you back.

Yeah no, some of those spines are terribly sharp. Does he have any nice antique instruments? Mandolins? Concertinas? Sitars?

I still love the struggling, raging, recovering, extremely human and fallible and alcoholic sonofabitch asshole. And I shred inside when I think about splitting up our life together. I just do."

Aww, well, yeah. Love makes you do the whacky, as Buffy says. (OMG Sassy Gay Friend pretty much RULES.)

“And therapy’s not some kind of blank check so that he gets to say anything he wants, and then feel superior when you finally melt down.”

Well! VERY APPLICABLE.

The Letting Go, pace Ms. Dickinson, has always been laborious and slow for me; I think personally it’s a side-effect/job hazard of being a romantic/lyric poet. When your job description is basically to be a rememberer—to notice and memorialize everything that others don’t—and you come out of a relationship where the other person is in some kind of state of deep denial/misguidance about what happened—then the instinct kicks in—”I must preserve and document and annotate and curate the truth! Otherwise my experience of passion must have been meaningless, and I can’t live with that.” —To be sure there are some incorrect premises in here but it’s how most writers are hard-wired and I think it kind of just goes with the territory.

Yes, yes, yes. See, you already know, you do. I struggle with that too - wanting to preserve, memorialize, cherish everything (ask me about my HORRIBLE FEAR OF DEATH! sometime, it's REALLY entertaining). Writing often seems like the one permanent thing in an impermanent world - and what's often seemed like the worst thing about loss to me isn't just the loss itself, but how you get over it and recover and move on and lose loss, that's the whole point. (MY NEUROSES, LET ME SHOW U THEM.) But....yeah. Just yeah. She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Good old Keats. It's what Faust wants too - If I should bid the moment stay. The Romantic disease, I guess.

Anyway, cupcakes and yeah I have NUTELLA. Poor Keats, no Nutella for him.


(I love the bit about how some people need to be in another country before you can love them. Or, just maybe, the moon.)

Everyone else has said it better, including you, but I approve of the cupcakes and the foreign film with the hot angry girl.

I ended up going to sleep, because ill-advised midday four hour naps are what I've got instead of cupcakes, but everything I said in the e-mail still holds, and I love you.

And DAMN was she angry. But, you know. Totally understandable given her whole situation.

(Actually Allyson and I kept chortling inappropriately during certain scenes that were apparently supposed to be Suspenseful, because they were so heavily accompanied by Suspenseful Music, as in, people are researching excitedly because they've found a lead at last! Accompanied by closeups of photographs and energetic arrows being drawn and faces being circled, etc., like early goofy X-Files; and then there we were smothering our guffaws. But in actuality it was all terribly Suspenseful, even without the music.)

So anyway we ate dinner and we kept it down and we gossiped about MFA skool and we saw an engrossing scary movie during which, for a brief shining moment, the three of us did not think about the fact that men are wiping the floor with our still-beating freshly detached hearts. And the former/ersatz/whatever Brujo (who, damn, sure said a lot of wise stuff on my blog *before* he lost his mind) left me a voicemail; but I'm certainly not listening to it tonight.

No, I'm going to bed and dream of Swedish serial killers. And the fierce tiny women who hunt them down with nine-irons.

Moira wrote: "“And therapy’s not some kind of blank check so that he gets to say anything he wants, and then feel superior when you finally melt down.”

Well! VERY APPLICABLE.

Argh; I noticed that as well, dammit.

We really do need a fresh new GR thread to discuss the HORRIBLE FEAR OF DEATH, methinks. For I feel certain that we all have things to say on this topic....

"And what's often seemed like the worst thing about loss to me isn't just the loss itself, but how you get over it and recover and move on and lose loss, that's the whole point."

OH yeah. Pass the Nutella, John.

(To this day I think I could love many people much better if they were on the moon. Wait—does the moon have wifi?)

unnarrator wrote: "We really do need a fresh new GR thread to discuss the HORRIBLE FEAR OF DEATH, methinks. For I feel certain that we all have things to say on this topic....

WE SURE DO. What is that new one that just came out, 'It's Not As Bad As You Think it Is'? Heh.

(To this day I think I could love many people much better if they were on the moon. Wait—does the moon have wifi?) "

Now this reminds me of Rochester telling Adele the fairy tale about Jane living on the moon. //facedesk NEED MORE COFFEE

unnarrator wrote: "certain scenes that were apparently supposed to be Suspenseful, because they were so heavily accompanied by Suspenseful Music, as in, people are researching excitedly because they've found a lead at last! Accompanied by closeups of photographs and energetic arrows being drawn and faces being circled, etc., like early goofy X-Files; and then there we were smothering our guffaws. But in actuality it was all terribly Suspenseful"

OMFG it WAS like early X-Files! No wonder I loved it so much. Ahahaha.

Noomi Rapace was just so damned fantastic. She WAS Lisbeth. It's not often that I think movies are better than the books they're based on, especially books I really like, but Lisbeth was even better off the page than on. (What TRULY cracked me up were the gender-swap-style scenes where she's like 'We fucked, now I'm going to sleep in my own bed' and he's all 'But I just want to hold you....')

AND the best thing about the actor who played Bloomqvist was how goobery and sentimental his face/big blue eyes were. Perfect--and how he would actually TRUST people, whereas Lisbeth knew better, and was infallibly able to discern when they were lying/corrupt/users. She's, like, my new Al-Anon heroine. And he SO doesn't know what to do with her...it's hilarious. Allyson and I were cackling gleefully in our seats.

unnarrator wrote: "AND the best thing about the actor who played Bloomqvist was how goobery and sentimental his face/big blue eyes were"

OMG he was such the Sensitive Man, and she was just tough as nails. Also the way he was a chick magnet (they toned it DOWN for he movie) was hilarious. OH STIEG.

Speaking of Stieg! The latest addition to my collection of articles about literary couples: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-an...

Umm, fear of death convo starts for me with Julian Barnes' Nothing to Be Frightened Of, to be the tedious one who keeps going back to books. Since I don't get to go to movies anymore, leastways, not ones sans talking animals.

Mara wrote: "Umm, fear of death convo starts for me with Julian Barnes' Nothing to Be Frightened Of"

BOOKS ARE NOT TEDIOUS

(dude I heard that so many times in seminar. 'Ms Russell is the one who never fails to drag us back to the text!' This was not usually a compliment.)

That one sounded good, but I might be too terrified to read it....I have Talking About Dying Won't Kill You, ha ha, and a bunch of Zen books, and The Last Year or something (live as if it were your, &c). But really, there's the golden oldies:

Unto the Death gois all Estatis,
Princis, Prelatis, and Potestatis,
Baith rich and poor of all degree:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He takis the knichtis in to the field
Enarmit under helm and scheild;
Victor he is at all mellie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Or there's always

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life's lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

....Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

I guess for me it starts, in some ways, with this book. Cuz I wroted it?

(But now I want to read that Julian Barnes. Also, has anyone read John Diamond?)

unnarrator wrote: "I guess for me it starts, in some ways, with this book. Cuz I wroted it?"

YOU WROTED IT ZOMG. If I buy it, do you get $$$?

unnarrator wrote: "(But now I want to read that Julian Barnes. Also, has anyone read John Diamond?)"

....no but that looks awesome.

Not a penny. Ghostwriter. Hell, I'll send you one.

unnarrator wrote: "Not a penny. Ghostwriter. Hell, I'll send you one."

Well, fuckedy.

Aww that would be v sweet! It looks right up my alley.

Moira wrote:

"BOOKS ARE NOT TEDIOUS"



Did I call books tedious, Ms. Russell? I did not, I said I would be the tedious one.

Kind of a, hmm, pop-y book but what struck me from The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World is how this one Nepalese or something guru dude said that the key to a happy life is to think about death for ten minutes every day or something equally prescriptive (been quoting that for years, am too lazy to look it up). And then last night I got slammed with Gass/Rilke life and death philosophy stuff, this paragraph bugging me:

Nor does one need another ideology to reject Rilke's view that life and death are in the same continuum as though one were infrared and the other ultraviolet. Plato, in the Phaedo struggling with the idea of significant contraries and the problem of relations, tries to argue for the immortality of the soul by suggesting that life is dependent upon death the way warmth is connected to cold; that the life/death continuum is therefore a matter of degree; and that without death (as is the case with "right" and "left" and "high" and "low") we could not understand or possess life. One is made from or comes out of the other: the cold an be said to "cause" warmth, and short things make tall ones possible. Rilke makes the point repeatedly. But the argument first confuses a condition like death (which is not a matter of degree) with dying (which is). If I am not running but standing still, my stationary condition should not be understood as very slow running, or my running, when it occurs as very fast standing...."

You get the point. This is before he compares the Rilke Angels to Liebniz/Berkley monads.

Alls I got is 1) Paula Becker's death made Rilke sad and so me too and 2) more than once when I have felt abandoned I have imagined I felt a lump heralding and presaging etc. and there's this flood of warm liquid panic. And oh, yeah, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors helped with that.

In the meantime? I am still waiting for my own ghost-autographed copy of Being With.

Mara wrote: "Moira wrote:
"BOOKS ARE NOT TEDIOUS"
Did I call books tedious, Ms. Russell? I did not, I said I would be the tedious one.

Ah, yes! Right then: BOOKWORMS ARE NOT TEDIOUS

one Nepalese or something guru dude said that the key to a happy life is to think about death for ten minutes every day or something equally prescriptive

Oh my God that would drive me into a panic attack of monstrous proportions. Gahh. (Yay monkey mind! as Natalie calls it.)

This is before he compares the Rilke Angels to Liebniz/Berkley monads.

Wha? //cries

more than once when I have felt abandoned I have imagined I felt a lump heralding and presaging etc. and there's this flood of warm liquid panic. And oh, yeah, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors helped with that

OMG, I got her kid's memoir of her dying/death, Swimming in a Sea of Death, only it looks too upsetting to even sit upright on the bookshelf as if it were just another title. I buried it under a bunch of Stieg Larsson and Woolf (SYMBOLIC).

Also OMFG OK if this is the Fear and Trembling of Old Mortality thread I must inflict upon you all Larkin's 'Aubade' which I have only read like two or three times in my adult life and yet which sizzled its way into my cerebellum:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

AUGH.

I was quite relieved to read in a Larkinbio that when he sent the poem to the TLS editor it quite spoiled the guy's holiday, or something. Apparently he went off and came back STILL haunted by Larkin's almost perfect poem (yeah fuck you too, A.N. Wilson).

Thirty years ago this week, on December 23, 1977, the TLS published "Aubade", one of the greatest, and bleakest, and indeed one of the very last poems written by Philip Larkin, who was himself to die in 1985.

Office correspondence exists from the season of the poem's publication which refers to the poem as "Christmas without the baby".

Talk about something needing a content warning. I find 'The anaesthetic from which none come round' pretty horrific, myself.

DANG, Larkin! You and your sizzlingly good Xmas wifout the babby. Holy POEM that's brilliant.

I think of two things: one, the corpse meditation regularly undertaken in Vajrayana practice (which always makes me and Mandarin laugh at those weekend-couple-workshops styled as "tantric"—"Okay, honey, I stowed the corpse in the back of the Prius, let's go!"), some of which I've done, but not much...and the unforgettable moment in a Being with Dying workshop when Herself asked the assembled, "How many people are mostly afraid of dying because of the pain?" and EVERYONE'S hand shot up. Then she asked, "And how many of you are more afraid of annihilation—of the extinguishing of your consciousness?" And she and I raised our lone hands. And I looked around at the other 60 participants and was SPEECHLESS. What is WRONG with these people?! Even Woody Allen knew that "I wouldn't mind dying, as long as I knew I wouldn't wind up DEAD at the end of it."

And on that note, I'm taking more ibuprofen and going back to bed with...the second Gretchen Lowell serial-killer novel, heh heh. The second paragraph begins with a description of a decomposing body! It's grand stuff, really. Larkin would be envious.

PS "warm liquid panic" is rather brilliant, as well.
PPS I only have 2 more copies of BWD, so...maybe I get more when it comes out in paperback?
PPPS something to be said about Gass/Rilke/Plato, when I get my brain back. It went into the neighbors' yard and they need to throw it back over the fence, because I'm scared of their dog....

"Most things may never happen: this one will...."

unnarrator wrote: ""Most things may never happen: this one will....""

I KNOW. Doesn't it just make you want to CLOCK him? It doesn't help it's so damn beautifully written, either.

unnarrator wrote: "DANG, Larkin! You and your sizzlingly good Xmas wifout the babby. Holy POEM that's brilliant.

And that was printed on DECEMBER 23RD. Man. MERRY XMAS FROM THE TLS. And there's that supposed legend that suicide rates go UP during the holidaze, right? Imagine being in a blue holiday funk (fought with the wife, hate the mother-in-law, job sucks, &c &c) and you start reading the paper and find....THAT. Yikes.

the corpse meditation regularly undertaken in Vajrayana practice

....OMG, I never could do that in yoga classes. 'And now, the CORPSE position....' One instructor was nice and called it the Sponge. Ha. I would always cheat and squinch my eyes almost shut and recite poetry in my head, or something.

"And how many of you are more afraid of annihilation—of the extinguishing of your consciousness?" And she and I raised our lone hands. And I looked around at the other 60 participants and was SPEECHLESS. What is WRONG with these people?!

omg....yeah, that's like the time I tearfully asked T if he didn't mind dying (straight up atheist, that boy) and he said something like, well, since he wouldn't still be existing, he wouldn't be unhappy he didn't exist. ARGH.

The second paragraph begins with a description of a decomposing body! It's grand stuff, really. Larkin would be envious

<33333333 Gretchen. The ending on that one is great, too. There's a kind of big surprise about something that happened in the first book, I'll be really curious to know what you think of it.

http://www.iheartgretchenlowell.com/

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The Case of the Most Hijacked Status Update Ever...

Scared to do the Gretchen because three days after I finish the first a second grader is abducted from a Portland school and we're getting notes from the superintendent and ugh, parenthood adds a twist to mortality/vulnerability stuff I am not even going to talk about. But I finished Gass and reward myself with Larsson.

We will just add to it endlessly! It will become the LONGEST MOST DIGRESSIVE UPDATE EVAR.

three days after I finish the first a second grader is abducted from a Portland school and we're getting notes from the superintendent and ugh, parenthood adds a twist to mortality/vulnerability stuff I am not even going to talk about

Aww yeah man, especially don't read # 3 then. Poor kid. Damn.

Mara wrote: "...and ugh, parenthood adds a twist to mortality/vulnerability stuff...."

Oh honey. I can't even imagine—only I can, barely, because of Ian McEwan. (((futile but impetuous and heartfelt interwebs hugs)))

Nother one: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archi...

unnarrator wrote: "The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world."

Boy, she was just marvelous, wasn't she?

"I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."

I hate what GR has now done with status updates. Just when I got DEPENDENT upon them—zip, all gone. :o(((

unnarrator wrote: "I hate what GR has now done with status updates. Just when I got DEPENDENT upon them—zip, all gone. :o((("

I really REALLY don't like the new feed design they have. It makes it impossible to find stuff, at least for me, and I miss updates frequently. FROWNYFACE. >:-(

AGREED. Where can we complain vociferously and articulately? Aren't you on some kind of meta-GR forum, Moi?