trixclibrarian

• 2013-05-15 60 notes

  i’ll give you this much… in truth

  There are the demons you invite onto your lap for introductions, friend-making and enlightening conversation. And also because you’re desperately trying to soothe and calm them and keep them from tearing your house apart.  These are the demons that need tending. 

  And then there are the demons you absorb. 

  My own certain solitude has become one of those — one of those grafted in and soaked up demons. It now lives in a beautiful kingdom inside of me that I can visit quite easily simply by opening a door. A door to a land where I am, as truth would have it, okay and okay alone. Okay with whatever I can manage to get from the regular everyday friendliness life will always have to offer. Actually somewhat relieved not to have to bother with anyone when it comes right down to the bottom line. In that world I am truly all my own. There lives the me that knows it could walk away from everything, anytime, and still exist with some consistency of character.

  I am telling you because I want you to know that I have this. This sure place. This I’m not at all worried place. This I am more important to me than anyone (except my own kid) place. I can get there any time I want. Any time I need to. What’s more, I never feel thrust there anymore. I can go whenever I want and only when I want. The door swings and I am not afraid to wear those hinges down to nothing.

  You might think that at least sometimes I write to satisfy an urge to impress you. That I write in order to people my nights with readers and the potential for feedback. Or that I write to be good at it. But it truly isn’t about that, not even about the attention. The simple truth is that I write because I feel like I have to. Writing is the door, the hinges, and my own hand upon it. It is the way through it. The only way I know. Writing has become the soothing emollient. 

  It is the cigarette, the whack off, the distraction and obviously the favored most favorite compulsion. As it so happens, it is also the avenue directly through to my own personal truths and intuition. It’s a road that takes me into the depths and away from all that I feel dependent upon. It is turning my back on anxiety with a chuckle and not a single white knuckle. It is my tic, my perseveration, my salvation and my damnation. It takes me away and it fills me full with the same drain that empties me. 

  It is also our insurance policy. If I disappear you know you can find me here, alone inside myself. If you need to disappear you know I have a place to go to hide until you come back round to find me again. It is dark and it is good and it is constant and it is mine. Let me share this reassurance with you. Please take it as treasured truth. 

• 14 notes

  she being…

  It was a small escape artist of a sound that came out her throat and first sent them down the road toward the great consensus. A reflexive blip, an involuntary murmur caught up short and ending in an abrupt tic of a hiccup delicately gulped. It was shy, brief and nonchalant — over quicker than the sentence that described it. It might easily have gone completely unnoticed. 

  But he caught it. Turned his head at just the right moment and scooped it into the wrinkled cup of his ear. Unavoidable. As if for him it was as impossible to miss as the tiny intake of breath and the sigh a lover leaves pressed to a neck accidentally in the heat of the moment. It was a hurricane of soft sounds amplified.

  Automatically he looked to see what was the cause of it. What prompted it?

  He saw the book of poems, open in her hands — cummings.  He knew then, exactly what to do, and he thought to himself, “let the mutual consenting begin”. 

• 2013-05-13 31 notes

  what a place to find ourselves

  Cavorting. How do you stop? And how do I stop collecting such compelling, evil play partners? All these years allied with the psychological harvest, the consolation prizes I picked up along the way in exchange for the stuff I really wanted but didn’t get. What do you do with this stuff when your wishes finally come true? Are you seriously supposed to give it all up?

  Doesn’t it make you feel paranoid at all? At least a little bit suspicious. I mean I’ve managed without those quintessential wishes up to now, anyhow. And how reliable, really, is good fortune likely to be. I guess it becomes a matter of consoling the consolation prizes as they turn obsolete — with the wishes-granted stealing all their dreams. 

  Consorting with the indulgences, then, one last time. With the revenge plots, the cigarettes, the alcohol, the bad relationships, the self-recriminations, the internal confusion, the desire, the weed, the hormones, the horniness, the successful academic-ally-inclined student so willing-to-please. The well-mannered hostess, the good mother, the good daughter (yes, occasionally it was me), the rebellious teenager, the menopausal, middle-aged adult, joking.

  The miserable, the depressed, the victim — oh! how I’ll miss them. That feeling of barely getting by every single time. How will we say goodbye now that the good stuff of real-life-wishes-come-true has come along? Even if these things have been the only real-life there was up to now.

  Sometimes I think that, at the very least, I should throw them a going away party. Other times I think I should run away fast now and long and as hard as I can. And never look back. I also consider leaving with them, all stowed-away and thus ready-at-hand for the moment I change my mind in retreat. 

  Now I guess I understand why so many people choose to participate in 12-step programs. It gives them something to do, to distract themselves. Something else to focus on, a neat list of tasks. So they aren’t so aware and distraught by the fact that they are changing. I am changing. Changing just like I am. 

  So this is when. This is when I realize that I am no longer looking for someone to tell it me it is all going to be alright. I’ve adopted my own mantra. Seeing and saying again and again: everything is already all alright, moment to moment to next moment. No need for indulgences beyond that simple truth and deep breath. 

• 32 notes

  my mom is a nurse and she says raw fish is bad for you {but mothers and medical professionals don’t always know everything}

  frayed ends and soap and wax and bowls of tangled ropy pasta no-one eats spaghetti one straight-laced laid out noodle at a time. the meal is out of control and therefore it is supposed to be a knotted mess that flings itself in inconvenient directions like your chin and the front of your shirt.

  if a food accident leaves a mess someplace on your outfit that doesn’t show, is it still  called a stain? is it worth time scrubbing and at what point do you take the risk of applying chemicals that could be toxic, just so you can safely say every surface is clean, even the hidden ones. 

  what about the flavor of it? after you have fingered all of it are there more or less germs in each bite? how about the surface where you stretched it out and flattened it? what does the added control of eating organized food from the tabletop rather than the scrambled bowlful indicate about your morality? does the fight into neat lines of dough somehow make it more right and tasty? doesn’t it need salt and a vessel to catch it?

  it did not come from a net, afterall. so yes, i am whining about it. i’d much prefer sushi, say a nice pan seared ahi tuna, well garnished.

• 2013-05-06 37 notes

  practice threading the will

  Here is the best thing about yoga:

  There is a posture…imagine a thread strung up from somewhere deep beneath you, in the earth itself and it breaks the surface of the earth into your physical plane, up the through the space you occupy with your feet parallel and ankles and legs directly under hips under shoulders. The thread pierces you at the taint and proceeds up along your spine, not unlike an instrument string - a thread of “will”, if you will. It stretches along your spine, all along the “chakras” through your navel, heart, throat and up an out through the crown of your skull. If you imagine the force of mother nature tugging it, lengthening your spine, stretching and pulling that thread of will taut and ready and vibrating —

  This is the best thing I get from yoga.  This is what yoga gives me. 

  I take that posture and that ‘will of string’ strung in and of me and carry it, playing it, thrumming it into other things. Things like other yoga postures with my muscles and body bending and spinning on and hanging off this thread. I take it into power walking where the thread pulls up and out my crown tugging, it keeps my eyes up and directly in front of me without lifting my chin or tilting my head back. The posture puts my weight in my heels and allows me to flow forward, a tiny bit like a cartoon character with slide-y feet a spinning blur. I bring the tautness, the stretch it into sex, when it feels like that thread naturally strums more and less against and entangled with my clit. When I can hang my entire body off and over another human being, my weight balancing around and across them, what better feeling than being suspended from another human body as if my partner is a clothesline and I am a silk blanket, gravity yanking, wind wafting. 

  All of this yoga business, stretching and training and practice is really just about that: this core posture. How it pulls you up and into the world and relaxes you down in it. This lengthening of *spine* - in the literal and figurative senses. This practice of flex and flexibility, the torque the tension and the release of adaptation and evolution and change and the dynamics of all flow. We move in along around away and back again and again to this posture so that we can know it and experience it fully. So we can bring it into our moments and let it carry us from moment to moment both connected and floaty free.

  Why? Why this posture, Why this stretch and strumming? Why this need to build and lengthen the spine?

  In service of breath. It is here that we can most, most easily, most deeply, breathe. Breathing being our only hope of life alive.

• 2013-04-03 28 notes

  apparency

  She entails such seeming. Visibly poised framed by the ceiling corners. All lush grays and black fur trim thick sophisticated with long lashed eyes slanting elegant fixed steady beseeching blinking and winking slowly wide above what looks like a gentle subtle knowing smile.

  Her limbs move selectively in successions with great grace a ballet dancer strong sleek dark muscled agile flexing. Marching joints joining in intricate tapping patterns to stimulate continuous quivering leading to abrupt jerks of shiver generous. Pleasure tickling touch releases the dynamic formidable beast of a spider eyeing you carefully.

  Abdomen swollen bulb no finer spool for the threads of story undoing you into a rapturous wrapped wad of meat. Then see her sticky silks in presence emerging presents organic gifts freed out her belly cast away and toward.

  Imagination bears its coming in your direction sleek smooth coordinated and loosed with expert polish into a fountainous spray of silver white rope in waves of concentric pattern yawning.

  On the verge of flinched eyes you wince and squint let rise the shield of your own wrists and forearms just before recognizing she is likewise bumbling trembling stumbling.

  Sticky yarn an unruly prop caught snagged on her backmost leg raised quick with sharp barbs fast pulling more clingy string loose from her but it blows on the slightest air current and overlaps several legs fling like wet fingers trying to be free of the net yet it grabs her enfolds and cuddles her clutches fondles and holds her like a tantrumming child. Calm against herself. Entwined breathing heavy smiling through now goofy crooked head tipped resigned to her own clumsy bewilderment. 

  A world of bewilderment between you two.  Who knew or ever might have guessed such deep incomprehensible welcome unknowingness. 

• 2013-03-31 26 notes

  when it’s you, you’ll know it

  The hypocrisy of being either tolerant or intolerant of intolerance is greedy. Inevitable.

  I believe the world as we know it is mostly far beyond repair. This is the truth of living in the world of the way things really are. The reason it is not tragic nor bitter is that from this point of view life is still unquestionably worth living. Living well. 

  It feels ironic ? I guess so or maybe it is comic or just purely curious with a grin would work, too. At any rate, it definitely seems silly that we want to save humanity so badly we fail to savor it, especially in our youth. 

  My own hypocrisy is that I got so pissed off at the grown ups for denying it - humanity, that is - in my preoccupation with denying them I lost all sight of it, in myself. 

  Yet the final lovely sensual bottom line is that I can still find glorious effortless celebratory energy inside me when I see how well — in spite of all our tendency toward pure evilness, we have preserved our passion for story. 

  The only thing worth relying upon is change, love. And I’m in. Forever, nothing if not all in.

• 2013-03-01 22 notes

  eggcorn

  The thing about online romantic (sexual) relationships is…well, they just never work. 

  For all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it all just eventually becomes wanking off alone in the dark. Talking with a friend recently, we explored how impossible it is to “be in love” without substantial tangibility built in. Our physical selves are just too important to ignore. We need them, three dimensionally, to know who we really are — ourselves and each other. Even once we do know more, about each other and ourselves, we all have to stay grounded in our bodies on a daily basis or we are not whole humans. Physicality is a necessity to rich intimate interpersonal negotiations. 

  Anyway, that being said, I think there are still valuable things to be gained from having the “online lover” experience. The above insight being a prime example. 

  Beyond that, it is an abject lesson (malaprop intended) in exactly how much all of this “in romantic love” relationship stuff is simply absolutely made up. Even in real life, we mostly invent it. Why not just face it, own it. The standard “falling in love plan” involves a great deal of fantastical pretending. It’s a really keen act of creation.

  For example, we pretend:

  • no-one can possibly understand us like our newly beloved
  • the beloved understands way more about us, way better, than they probably do
  • likewise, we assume we ‘get’ the beloved way more than we actually do
  • even knowing and understanding all this, all this everything, about our beloved we will still stay consistently and eternally excited and enthusiastic about every detail of them without any other sources or kinds of stimulation
  • the beloved’s very existence will forever make everything easier and better
  • all disagreements with the beloved will be trivial and temporary
  • and best of all we won’t ever feel lonely for one second ever again

  As good as all these ideas feel, they are not real. All (lucky 7) of them (& more) are false. So, I guess what I am trying to say is, we invent our real life relationships everyday, too.  An online romance can remind us of this. 

  Now, I have nothing against inventing and developing soothing ideas and notions and even worlds in our heads as a comfort. We are meaning makers. It is what we humans do best. 

  And I know some of you think I have a romantic chip on my shoulder, but I assure you, I don’t. I love all that romantic shit. I am highly susceptible to every bit of this pretending - I am an overgrown child, after all. But I guess I can’t skip over this notion I have that romance can still exist and even thrive, if we take a more realistic look at exactly what it is, how it works, and where its true value lies.  

• 2013-02-28 16 notes

  in {& out} of her shoes

  It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when you know. Maybe there isn’t one exact moment because, you know, you spend so much time ignoring and disbelieving because you really want it to be true. So any sign that it is, must not be looked at too closely  It is dangerous. You might scare it away. And you sort of want to. But obviously not entirely. 

  Still, when the very young woman, who walked like a cowboy, strolled into happy hour that day in literally her first pair of heels, I knew then. Smiling eyes at me on her way down the sidewalk in indiscretion, I knew I was in trouble, then. 

  In retrospect, I guess, it is good (trouble) that I let it go on, even so. There were bad lessons there and things I needed to know even more about. Things I had no idea about at that moment. No. At that moment, I knew nothing. Because there is no mind swipe quite so powerful as an attractive woman dressed up specifically to catch your attention. Particularly when she already owns it. 
  

  There is no vision more positioned to scramble your brains to eggs, than the woman you already harbor barely contained lust for attempting to draw your sex in - in spades. I’m thinking the effect of primping for purpose is an even more potent force if you are also a woman. It’s confusing. This delicious role reversal. And she was correct in assuming it was fantastically irresistible.

• 2013-02-24 18 notes

  unstrung & singing {freewrite}

  A most uncomfortable sensation, not the needle but the thread that follows it through. Your skin moving inside friction pulled, tugging a tiny glump of you out into hazardous waste bins of future toxicity. Perhaps you never needed stitches and for you it is that accidental incident when you dental flossed your finger or the fishing line grabbed reflexively that saws an unknown stroke across four inner knuckle creases with a slick grinding, carving a ditch there. Maybe a string yanked in haste from a cuff when a scissors or clip was out of reach and the burning itch when the thread slices you. 

  This is how romantic relationships have come through my life. Imagine me a single vertical patch of skin extended down and into the rest of me — who I am, with the top of my head being the outer surface. The crowning point where the needle first penetrates. Dragging the string behind it. Then it follows down through my brain, my throat into my torso, whip stitching legs together, squirming the needle, subtly shifts lean to grab a pinch back and forth between my legs. The thread that I am strung on trailing always. Until there I am, a bead beaded spinning against that constant scritching friction inside a string that is inside of me and does not truly belong there. 

  And then the endings. Oh the agony and irritation of unstringing oneself. No libation is adequate anesthetic for the removal of a foreign object that you willfully used to replace a part of you. Similar friction but now the rope has grown barbs facing backwards, each tug powered by you scraping more and more of those sweet inside linings out into the trash. 

  Yes. Unpleasant. Such unpleasantness. Yet the most compelling feeling we never fail to pursue with every ounce of gusto we can muster until it becomes, finally, so much less than new. So predictable, the uncomfortable feel of the procedure, artificial leisure, the false — not ever really hope anymore — of rescue. 

  Now, I am a bead relieved of all strings. An energy bubble, with a tiny hole in the middle, hallowed out by all this strung out experience. I sit inside there. The space all those times running the rope through created is the clear sight line I see through. I sit back safe in this energy I create and move freely, at least, since I have no idea what I am doing. 

  I like to think of myself stretching and swinging, wrapping myself around the relationship strings, a circus acrobat graceful in artful ways. Sometimes I might even wrap myself so closely there is the illusion I’ve strung myself through again. But then, looking focused intensely you can see — I am intact just flexibly enraptured. In the next moment I may be swinging like a monkey from string to string. Playing life. Me, the skin on the thumb thrumming the universal instrument of love that makes its own rules as it goes along. 

• 2013-02-23 21 notes

  Imagine If…

  Imagine for just a second, a world where you could have all the romantic, sexy, intense soul-satisfying, comforting gratifyiing, validating Love you wanted. It would be easy to find, easy to navigate interpersonally,  easy to enjoy and easy to give and to receive inside the relationship. Obstacles would be few and mostly fun challenges. Imagine you could have this, right now, or at any time, guaranteed. 

  The only “catch” if you can call it that, is that there would be strict inhibitions, rules, yea impossibilities that stood against all forms of domestic partnership. You would not be allowed to reorganize the major pratical aspects of your life based on this romantic love. You could make changes and move from place to place and have different careers and join a bowling league and every single other thing you wanted to do  would be exactly the same, it would all be up to you. But you would never be allowed…well basically, romantic love would never stand as an option, as an impetus, for changing your life. Significant practical personal change would have to come from someplace else.

  Romantic love would never be a “magic ticket” for anybody. It would be more like…a creative endeavor, or a hobby you were passionate about, or eating. All things of utmost importance. Necessities, I would argue. But none of them are typicallyseen as a source of total life rescue. Rather, they are ways we express ourselves. Ways we express ourselves best. If they have a meaningful impact on our lives it is because, dare I say individually, we will them to. But we know in those cases, we are the source, the motivation for the change. No hobby can change a boulder. You get the picture. 

  So, if all domestic life partnerships were off, if people had to organize their own lives, even when inside the context of romance. Well, I think that would be kind of nifty. I think the world might even be a better place. And I’m almost one-hundred percent completely sure the writing on tumblr would be way more interesting and varied. 

• 2013-02-22 27 notes

  Dear twenty-something-*boy*-in-the-cafeteria-line-who-I-eavesdropped-on-while-I-was-waiting-for-my-cup-o’-soup,

  You are stupid. And lucky. So far. First because I resisted my urge to educate you right there and then in front of those attractive young women. And second because…well you are so idiotic I don’t even know where to begin.  But, lord knows, I’m feeling obligated (for the world’s sake) to give it a go. 

  Of foremost importance: If you are unprepared for parenthood - even with a condom - you should not be “fucking” that “girl you like” and describe as “pro-life”. Condoms are almost as fallible as your logic in thinking you can “beat off” all the “mature sperm” as long as you wank it within 48 hours of doing your nasty. That’s just crap. 

  It is almost as ridiculous as that other thing you said, that thing that all the most aggressive sickening men say: “I can pull out in time, baby, I’m *that* good.” Excuse me while I laugh until I cry. 

  Finally, your fear of getting a vasectomy because you are afraid the color of your jiz will change just proves you are *way* too emotionally immature to be playing around with real sex. So please, do us all a huge favor, save us from more unwantedness and ignorance and go back to slapping yourself silly alone or with porn. Whatever it takes, just…please. 

  Twice Terrified, Sincerely. 

• 2013-02-16 14 notes

  avoiding a lifetime

  note: I have started doing journal free writes following evening meditation. I did this one last week and honestly forgot all about it until I reviewed my journal this morning. Then I realized that simply writing it had had a very positive unconscious impact  - as I have been feeling much less resistant and more clear and capable about getting things accomplished and finished at work. So I decided to see if I might milk it just a wee bit more by releasing it here. It’s pretty much long and boring, even if you are really interested in me but…regardless. I’m hoping to get something out of the exercise and maybe someone else will, too. giant awkwardness and vibes. jc

  When I was a kid, I remember thinking about things that would create anxiety. The thought triggering the anxiety was typically some unknown or slightly unknown situation and the idea that in it I would not be near enough. Rather than express it, acknowledge it and own it — this fear — the idea was to pretend it didn’t exist. 

  Distracting activity was best for this and it was my mom’s specialty. She was the champion of “good” (often productive) distracting activity. For example, “going to the library” was literally the way to, and ultimately became the joking family code for, avoiding unpleasant feelings.

  As a young child, this was an adequate strategy because everyone in my life reinforced the  notion that people who did things “right” and followed the rules automatically grew - to know everything necessary to always proceed successfully and with great confidence. No-one ever said it was normal to feel insecure or uncertain, they all just said it was silly and I needn’t, shouldn’t, worry or feel that way. 

  So there was an underlying message, I guess, to just trust - that if I kept up whatever it was I was doing right, everything would always be okay. But it never really seemed okay - not even to begin with - it all felt like a slighty-off fantasy.  A good imitation of how it was “supposed” to be but underneath the surface, hollow as a plastic shelf of a doll housed life, where you could see the windows and curtains and lamp light painted on and you knew all along there were no real rooms, no real people, no real stories inside. 

  So I read a lot. And I felt confused a lot about how much more vivid and layered and complex and interesting the world of these books and their characters were. I loved to be there inside these stories, as opposed to the flat, tired, real world.

  Being good was so easy but not all that rewarding and in truth mostly boring as death.

  Read More

• 29 notes

  me & my idea of you

  I find myself softening to the memory of you. Not that I would ever trust you to be a real human again, but I can look back on when I thought you were and in this way I am beginning to understand. Myself. Along with that, the legitimate and authentic feelings that I let this idea of you awaken in me.

  Interacting with you, I gave myself the experience of being full-on all-out me and having someone “get it”. I allowed myself to believe in my raw form’s capacity to inspire not merely tolerance but appreciation. To sink in the warm soft comforting quicksand that is immersion in total never-ending shared conscious space. (Thank goodness I didn’t manifest it fully to its suffocating end.)

  I don’t know now how much of any of that was reality but I experienced it genuinely, then. Before you, it was so sadly only a distant intellectualization. Now and forever more, it has deepened my belief in honest connection and the power of collaboration. Particularly when fueled by effortless letting go, of logical goals and of the power of traditional prohibitive limitations.

  You were the catalyst for me in these ways. You brought the story into my life that made this dear truth first turn real. In exchange for that I can forgive us both.

                      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~    

  You also fueled the idea that I was having a meaningful impact without specifically trying, or engaging in performance, but rather just enjoying being. Myself. Beyond that, the idea that I didn’t have to always focus on my impact to access incredible magic feedback energy. 

  Even without immediate tangible or social validation, I came to experience the sensation of being seen. I felt for the first time since my kid was born, the universe recognizing my legitimacy.

  Furthermore, I was not required to walk a plank or stage, drown or accept a diploma, or even to acknowledge or give thanks. I didn’t even have to realize I was doing it. Having an impact, that is. I learned to sense the world’s acknowledgement of me. A sense riding inside me, felt but unspoken, awareness yet periphery.

                      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~    

  In all the honesty of a nutshell, I suppose my connection to you (however false or true you were) introduced me to the notion that intimacy with another can feed intimacy with yourself. That’s a powerful pill for a squirrel (like me) to swallow or stash in her wintery provisions.

  Yet, all along it has been my decision, to remain open and digging to find the best in me, regardless of how it eventually plays out. It is, without question, worth it. 

• 2013-02-11 30 notes

  good girl

  And some days the wind itself makes the world too hard. The long walk in from the parking lot in the cold to spend the day next to the person who once crushed you is too much to take even if you have healed. The reality of all those excuses for life filling your time is too much to tolerate when breathing alone takes every ounce of energy, given, however generously in too small drops spaced too far apart. You feel the lack of it in your blood stream like a chemical injected intravenously but it fails to pass you out into full-blown unconsciousness. Rather a limb. Only a limb. One small arm or leg of a life. Kept moving in confusion a passenger to a body fully unaware of its function or purpose. Spurned around in circles of mucky swirls, filmy foam bubbles of less than anythingness. 

  This then. This film. This intolerable film is what makes your throat inside open wide in the panic of fight or flight and there is no apparent cause or even any metaphysical justification for runninig. So standing your ground becomes little more than the lump in your throat formed from that never ending gape of a glottis, preparing itself, demanding fleedom. And in response nothing, but your resistance. The recipe makes a tangible feeling that’s painful across the expanse of each cell in your breathing apparatus. The undeniable urge to cry that becomes your entire day. Exhausting. Worth nothing.  You go on as if honoring some moral obligation to…

  continue.