aha! after you.

i will finish this post later, as i am off to work in ten minutes and still in my bathrobe right now.

but i wanted to talk about chögyam trungpa, and the idea of our selves. he talks about the world-weary hangover that comes from us idenitfying as joe. if people ask for more detail (which they rarely do), we're joe the mechanic, or joe the stock trader, whatever. we start thinking of this as reality. and no one asks us "well what is joe?" so we're left with this feeling of subtle imprisonment, which eventually, like the bars at the zoo, becomes security. and would it really be compassionate to let us out after all that? how would we survive? (heavy eye-rolling)

emotions, called separate from thought, labeled wow. they're our EMOTIONS for christs's sake; very important. we take them very seriously. are we angry? WOW. that's a big (serious) deal, whether it's because we talk about it or because of how much violence we show. resentment is a kind of trap, an old roommate of mine used to say, and maybe all emotions are a kind of trap when we attach them to ourselves.

i got this from my current bathroom book, the path is the goal.

tom waits says about his wife, kathleen brennan (i got this quote off wikipedia): "a remarkable collaborator, and she's a shiksa, goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She's outta this world. I don't know what to say. I'm a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that's the nation where I live. She's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you."

ah yes, mr waits. spot on.

howls and meowls

feeling restless. that hurry up and wait kind of restless. it's a full moon, but i swear all that weirdness already happened. tonight is tame by comparison. yet i am not mellow enough to come home and read. even though i am excited about the books barfing off my shelves.

do you ever have one of those periods in your life that are refreshing while reminding you of the past? refreshing because they offer you back some of the simplicity that change used to bring. these days it's all too easy to make change difficult, to count all the reasons against it, to look at the patterns and say they are stronger because i have failed this many times before. but for some reason, maybe just a new perspective on motivation, i feel change to be easier now than it has been in a while. clarity? or more illusion? who knows.

i feel like breaking my habits, just to see how that shakes down. not to be a different kind of person, just to see what i'm like when i get up and leave the house before drinking coffee, when i feel a desire but don't follow it, when i do the thing i am thinking of putting off.

nothing big, but not nothing. something full of nothing? another balloon popped, floating away.

just in! being self helps

ha! sometimes i really enjoy the environment that comes with my job. customer comes in, buys some books, asks me where "those kids got their ice cream". i tell her about the place up the block that's so fancy you could ask for m&m's and guitar strings on your ice cream and they'd do it. off she goes. a little while later, the drunks outside the pub next door are getting all emotive. we check, and it appears the bookstore customer, parked right in front of the store, has a dead battery and wants to know if any of the drunk guys can help. the poster-child for drunk brits decides they should push-start her car (or at least, he's the loudest about it) and gets all the other smoking drunk people to help. keep in mind this is a major thoroughfare. so this little car goes careening off into traffic with maybe five big guys behind it. it starts! and roars off. and guess where the ice cream ends up? in the hands of the poster-child. that's how community works in big cities, i think.

it's probably a funnier story with the soundtrack of seven or so men laughing hysterically, eating ice cream.

trying to settle into a routine, a summer routine. finding it difficult. i still want to spend most of my time with the queen, but he works days (early starts, getting earlier) and i work largely nights. he gets weekends off (for now) and i get random weekdays off. so we see each other rarely, and not necessarily at our best - one of us is half-conscious. he's very sweet, coming by the store when he gets off work, and coming by for lunch occasionally. i wish i could visit his work, but its nature makes it impossible. more than half the time he isn't even in the far-away office anyway.

and i like having my own time. i do. i just have pre-worry about the quality of our time together because it's harder to be fully present with each other right now. and when i think about the idea of that being all it would take for us to forget the awesomeness, i roll my eyes. i mean, come on. but it's hard to keep teasing my worry when it's really worried. and he'll end up working sixteen-hour days this summer, he's warned me. worry worry.

okay, so find a strategy that helps with the worry, find a special thing that can happen in terms of shared time, and set a check-in date with self after the summer is over, like november, where we'll have had a chance to see each other again in real daylight hours. and show my love in the meantime. acknowledge that the relationship means a lot.

meditate. make dinner. consciously live while time is passing.

it's weird how often my strategies boil down to eating and sitting and doing my own thing. i wonder if that's really the secret to peace? that and trust. trust the relationship, trust my self, trust the person i am with.

caribou!

gallant moment in time

late at night, for some reason, restless. downstairs at the goodwitch house, cat sitting in the dining room at night, the queen upstairs sleeping with the regular housecat, beautiful and black.

a cake in the oven, product of a moment's decision; cupboard cake (cake made with whatever's in the cupboard) with yogurt, cherry butter, eggs, sunflower oil and saskatoon berries, flavoured with cinnamon and maple syrup. a few eggs and some celiac flour, poof. (well, the poof might actually be the baking soda.)

hung out with the wife tonight on the back porch. she's a-glowing, enjoying her own space. we chatted, mostly on her end while i sat, kind of dazed. we talked about future living arrangements, life plans (as long as there is life, there are plans for it).

great day off today; bit of housework, bit of reading, bit of errandry; lot of mild catching up and downtime. i love these days. the cat relaxes, the house gets lived in. moments are savoured, pulled apart and chewed up.

this is a form of richness.

general effusiveness

such busy, busy days. for me (translation: am not sitting at home in front of the computer).

quick story: pigeon got into bookstore's furnace ventilation system through panel left off furnace on roof.* pigeon ended up at the other end of the furnace system, pecking through ceiling grate on the first floor, shitting all over the carpet and worrying an animal-rights-inspired customer browsing. of course, we couldn't get the grate to open, only to bend. eventually, i called the queen, who came riding down in his white steed and accomplished the pigeon rescue by opening the ceiling panel next to the grate and propping the furnace vent itself open by cramming bad romantic suspense books between its bits. for his trouble, he got some free vinyl and the knowledge of one more pigeon out there, free (as a bird?).

now, it has been another day since i started this post. interruptions; queen and i went to pick up stuff we successfully bid on at the book release/punk? show/silent auction for humanitarian efforts in iraq we went to on friday night (after my two meetings; that does not count for a day off). the show was great, and the band we went to see excellent. the show on saturday night was also great; several bands at a local drinking hole. i enjoyed plainclothes and touchitandyouwillsayow.

on sunday, we jammed with our lovely friend, a little bird who lives on the edge of town. he comes in rarely, so it was a special treat for all the gnomes. the occasion also marked the first time the queen and i jammed since we fell in love. i felt sort of euphoric. another friend of the queen and little bird's came by, who likes to play a lot of metal and is amazing on classical guitar. he jammed with us a bit and then "had to thrash" so did so. i went out to the fire in the backyard. there may have been scotch.

the queen and i are moving into different kinds of learning with each other. hesitancy is coming up, viewpoints we differ in are being discovered. i feel very lucky to be with someone who is passionate and intelligent, who is patient and sometimes makes mistakes. who makes me breakfast in bed and then teases me mercilessly about the silly things i am sensitive about, including my inability to tell when i'm being teased (which has led me to plaintively question "is this banter?" whenever he says something i hope isn't true). who loves me and receives my love. i just end up feeling cheesy when i try and talk about it. spout spout. effuse effuse.

i have been invited to continue living with the lovely woman i am housesitting for. this means she gets a nickname. i have known her for years, she has a lovely black cat and this old beautiful home. she works on poverty issues (among others) and strives for a balanced and emotionally authentic life. she plays the fiddle, drinks wine around the fire and has a deceptively innocent face. i will call her the good witch.

emotion: amazingly lucky to live three houses up from the queen and the wife. and to know all the people in between. brewing contentment.

yesterday evening around the fire, the queen and i were conversing about different kinds of scotch and their growing and distillation processes. little bird laughed (i love it when shy people laugh) and said he could see us discussing important things together when we are both ninety.

people keep saying these things. it reminds me to take it one day at a time, even as i want to skydive a message across the sky proclaiming eternal wonder at this amazing connection.