Do You Ever Have Those Days?

The above is an experiment. I'm writing this entry while on a bus between cities, and I'm sharing the ambient noise of my trip with you, which you can ignore or listen to while your read.

I'm also having one of those days.



Do you ever have those days where you feel really skinny even though you know objectively that you're not skinny, like you're somehow starving from the inside? I'm walking around feeling gaunt and arguing with the reality of my second chin.



Do you ever have those days where you congratulate yourself for slowly decreasing the cream you use in your coffee to almost nothing because you've decided dairy products are probably evil, only to realize that deriving such a strong sense of moral rectitude from dairy denial is probably a sign of spiritual desperation?



Do you ever have those days where you are pretty sure that even your cat is actively judging you for both your general appearance and your refusal to get out of bed at the tail end of the longest winter ever in the recorded history of humankind?



Do you ever have those days where you walk into a place like the bathroom pictured above and think My success has taken me to such great heights that I wish we had time travel already so I could go back and tell my high school self how awesome this is?



Do you ever have those days where you leave the grossest bathroom in all of Saskatchewan only to find that your bus is leaving without you, and you end up running down the side of the highway through slush and mud, yelling at the bus, and thinking, again, Oh what great heights my success hath wrought?

I'm kidding. Sort of. I am travelling on a bus to another city at this very moment, and it really did almost abandon me at the place with the worst bathroom in Saskatchewan, but even though today has so far been humbling, I'm actually grateful for it. I'm slowly learning that when I get taken down a peg or two, there is more room for laughter and less judgement.

Right now? I'm laughing at the ditch mud on my jeans while I eat fistfuls of white cheddar popcorn and listen to Reggie Watts' "Fuck Shit Stack" something totally tasteful of which my mother would approve.

And what are you doing?

Feeling Reflective and Twee? Yeah, Me Neither.

The Palinode and I took a trip out of town to see family and old friends last weekend.


If you're in Saskatoon, go to Turning the Tide Bookstore. They carry consciousness-raising literature, and you'll care about stuff more afterwards.

I had no time whatsoever to be stepping away from my computer, but I'd been working 12- to 15-hour days for weeks running with no weekends jambed in there to bookend the stress, so I didn't really have a choice. I value my sanity at least as far as it can keep me out of the poorhouse.

My eyes needed a break, too. Spending that many hours staring at a computer screen does a number on the retinas. Everything had taken on that sparkly, migraine aura, disco ball effect, which normally only happens prior to a migraine or when one is on psychedelic drugs. I was just half-blind and unable to read.



Things I Am Terrible At

1. Saying no
2. Knowing when to stop working and start playing
3. Valuing this meat suit that lets me walk around and do the stuff I like

Things I Am Really Good At

1. Making things, such as these silly dolls
2. Creating the space I need if the right one doesn't already exist for me
3. Staying sober

I let myself go enough over the weekend that I even forgot to take photos, which is pretty much a reflex for me at this point. I was surprised at the end of the weekend to find that I had taken only one photo since my panic-avoidance self-portrait in the back of a car at the beginning of the trip.



I keep saying over and over in different ways that I want to make a daily practice of letting go, and then I get busy trying to make the whole world happier and forget to eat my next three meals, lose myself to anxiety dreams, and start my old pattern of beating myself up for not doing all the things all over again.



I can see it clearly, though, now, and pattern recognition is 90% of this part of the struggle.



Clearly, I'm feeling reflective. It's annoying the hell out of me.

And just like that, Oskar snaps me out of it. He whines all the time all over the place, because he's an anxious monster just like me. I tell him to shut up, but he never does. Instead of shutting up, he just tries to whine more quietly, which makes his voice thin and wavering. He sounds like a tenor whining balloon crossed with an 80-year-old lady in church choir.

I need to find my bootstraps and pull myself up by them.



I keep learning things from my stupid cats.

I'm going to write a book called Things I Learned from My Cats, and then I'm going to punch myself in the throat for being twee.

Finis.

I'm The Jerk Who Goes To William Faulkner's Rowan Oak And Gives It A Thumbs Up On Video After Saying "It Kinda Depresses The Holy #?@! Outta Me"

As many of you know, I recently took a trip down into the heart of Mississippi with Jett Superior, Deb Rox, and Laurie White. What we were doing down there nobody knows, but it was a hell of a good time.



I wrote a little about the trip here and here, but I really don't know what else to say about it. We road-tripped through Alabama and Mississippi, we ate barbecue, we met the Bottle Tree Man, we visited Robert Johnson's grave, we ate burgers at Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero Blues Club, we entertained ourselves in the parking lot of Wesley's Boobie Trap, and we ate more junk food than is advisable if you value your internal organs and understand that actions have consequences. Molten hot wing ripple chips and licorice and onion dip and pizza and chocolate cake are only good before you swallow it all down together into your digestive tract.

There is some unintended sexual innuendo in that paragraph that I'm just going to back away from right now.



Anyway, the whole point of this post is that, while I have very little of substance to say at the moment about my trip to Mississippi — there was so much laughter and tears and talking and doing things that it will take a while for me to put it all together — I do have two three-minute videos that I shot down there.

The first video was shot at about 7:30 on the first morning, and it gives a short little view into the shack we called home for a few days. My brilliant commentary? "It's like an effing museum" and "It's like this fantastic... I don't know." I really need a script writer.



I want to live there forever and ever amen while I listen to the delta rain patter on its tin roof. That was a little slice of earthly heaven right there.

This second video was shot while I walked around the grounds of Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner. Who goes to Rowan Oak, a site of pilgrimage for writers all over the world, mind you, and says "it kinda depresses the holy fuck outta me", apologizes to their mother, declares their video a "yawn fest", and then gives Rowan Oak a cheezy thumbs up? Me, apparently.

I told my mother I had shot video of Rowan Oak. "Really? I'd love to see it," she said. "No, you wouldn't," I said, "unless you want to hear me swearing loudly on the grounds of American literature's royalty." She didn't.



I REALLY DO NEED TO HIRE A SCRIPT WRITER THE NEXT TIME I DECIDE TO SHOOT VIDEO. I doubt anyone is going to be hammering down my door to ask me to shoot their travel videos anytime soon, unless you like my meandering, foul-mouthed, completely uninformative style. Call me.

So, I stayed in a place that was like an effing museum and had Rowan Oak depress the holy fuck out of me. Stellar travel account, Schmutzie. Stellar.