thoughts from rubber and the road

Northbound this morning I thought of you, brother. You driving southbound, in the Comet, noting to yourself that speed kills. You went south to support a friend in need; I went north, the one in need.
My first trip in the new truck, the dog you never met curled in his crate, tail over his nose, I imagined. Five short days from yet another birthday you aren’t here for, I feel the same thing I always feel when your absence rears its head. Alone. There is just no end to that, it seems. It wasn’t a speedy death I worried about this morning or really any death at all. It was everything else.
The road didn’t take me past your house, and I was glad, even though my heart still wishes I could hear you give directions one more time to “E M, like Auntie EM “ Street. I wondered if I ever would understand you and Grace, if you ever got over the hurt, and how on earth you did. I wondered what advice you would give me now, and cursed the circumstances that lead me to wish your counsel was available today. No one else has the words - that was always your job.
Sometimes, there’s peace in miles rolling under wheels, sometimes in the music I hear, or in something only found alone in a car with your thoughts, popcorn crumbs and static interrupting songs you haven’t heard in years, but like enough slow down and hope the song ends before the signal fades. I am trying to hold onto the moments of peace I found in those moments today. Recently I’ve been told my talent is in words, and my failing is in human contact. It seems my desire to write for a living falls right in line with my personal failings. I think this is a good thing to find out, but it cuts deeply.
I don’t know what I expected, ever. I only know when I don’t have it. It’s like that job interview question, “where do you want to be in five years” although I never say it, the only answer that ever rings in my head is “happy”. It’s maybe why I’m not such a great employee.
Changing everything doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. I did that once, 6 years ago, thought it made things better, today I’m not sure, and I’m not sure it will help things if I do it again but I’m going to. Last time I left the people that cared most for me behind, this time, I’m going to them. The people and places that I may never tell anything to, but their presence and their concern may just be enough. Enough to keep me from feeling like someone left a door to a cold winter open in my chest. Wind raging and stinging so cold it brings tears to my eyes. Drafts so cold as to leave me feeling like a solitary tree on an open plain, bent from its force, and unprotected.
I don’t choose to fight this one alone, unprotected is not where I want to be. Maybe I should have made friends with pain when I had the chance, when it was what kept me company night after night, day after day, but I didn’t and I won’t this time either.
On the road, I remember roll call in your class, the comment that made everyone giggle when a student wasn’t there, “absence really the strangest sort of presence”.
It’s the truest thing I know today.

A crisis of faith

During a conversation, this phrase ran through my head. Unfortunately it ran through my head because the words that were being said about me made me think that the speaker, through no fault of their own had been having a crisis of faith, in me.

The idea that I had so deeply let someone this important down, and for so long, was nothing short of devastating. Feeling gut shot, I stumbled through the next 5 days a husk of nauseated, shaky, sobbing grief. How I had let this happen, a slow progression of all the things I hate about the complacency that comes over time in close relationships. I spoke and they heard things I could never mean, think or do; and they spoke and I just didn’t hear, again and again.

A traditional crisis of faith is defined by me in non secular terms as a crisis demanding an uncompromising decision – one that sufficiently reconciles the cause of doubt with the belief or the discarding of the belief altogether. Although faith is generally used in reference to a higher power; and I am *not* comparing myself to a deity, I do believe faith is something we all feel, in the people and often, world around us, religious or not. In some ways, faith is beyond definition, those of any religious persuasion have faith their chosen God exists, cares for them and is all powerful. Intellectual disparities matter not at all.

So what do you do when you find yourself as the source of so much pain in a loved one there seems no way back to forgiveness and love? When all that has gone before, has seemingly been discarded, or at least written over in black magic marker, by the harm you inflicted? I am feeling sorry enough for myself, and don’t want sympathy. I have never ‘hung in there’ before, when the hurt comes, I leave. How does a classically faithless girl find redemption in the heart of a loved one? Where do you even start?

I HAVE TWO DOGS THAT HATE EACH OTHER, AND NOW I HAVE ONE WITH 3 LEGS*

They say the more things change, the more they stay the same. I disagree.
Things ‘round here are changing and nothing is staying the same.

I don’t really think I’m complaining, but aside from the physical location of my home, I barely recognize my life. My Dad had often marveled at the number of job changes I’ve had. For him (and maybe his generation) he went from 25 years in the military to 25 years at a private corporation. The idea of his daughter changing jobs, and even careers, especially at my “advanced” age was not easy for him. I think he thought I was chasing butterflies and in a way, maybe I have been. I’ve admittedly sort of followed a path career wise, and not cut a path. Somewhere along the way, I decided that when the thing in front of you seemed right, no matter how different, how out of character, how risky, how ‘not like me’ I gave it a shot. This is said to sound as though I was full of confidence and positive feelings, because I rarely if ever was. Somewhere in my genetic make-up was a healthy dose of ‘make the best of it’. So I did, or at least I tried to. Along the way I found some things I liked, some I definitely did not, and a few I utterly disliked. Also, I discovered some things I was really good at, and some things I really wasn’t good at. Lucky for me, I also discovered just a couple of things I genuinely loved.

Veterinary medicine was my first grown-up love, anesthesia was the first thing I was really damn good at, dog training and horse back riding swept me off my feet, regulatory writing helped me find a lost love of creative writing, (also, it showed me that I’m really bad at telling people what they want to hear and not just what I think.)

Talking to a friend this afternoon, I had the realization that if all the mistakes I’ve made in my life got me where I am today - I am not so sure I can even call them mistakes. In particular, if all the bad relationships I’ve had got me to the one where I’m finally with the guy that when I call him on a random Tuesday afternoon and tell him I’m bringing home a three-legged foster dog that needs some rehab and some love responds with “I can’t wait to meet him” and not a list (even if it is legitimate) of why I shouldn’t do it. I think I’ll just be grateful for those missteps.

I don’t know that I fully recognize my life from the outside, but from the inside, it feels better, and more like home than anything in years past. Things, they are not easy these days, money is tight, loved ones are on borrowed time, cars are getting old, debt isn’t shrinking, and the lottery is looking more and more like a viable retirement plan, but, I sent marshmallow shooters to friends a few weeks ago, and bought 2 for the house. From now on, all arguments will be solved via marshmallow war.

Take that lousy economy, stuck up doctors, crappy long war, “mosque” protests, still high unemployment rate, and mounting school debt.

I'm packing marshmellows and I know how to use them.

*love you Daisy.

Pear Shaped

A long absence, indeed.
Thirteen months ago, I, along with so many others in today's world got laid off. I did some contract work, received unemployment, and went back to school. For the record, I'm still in school, graduation date is yet to be determined, but it's coming along nicely.

A month ago, I started a new job, and it's a job, and I'm grateful for it. It's not perfect, but what ever is?

Now, on the other side of it, I can admit how comnpletely I fell apart after losing my job. Nothing prepared me for the level of failure I felt. I tried to stay positive, and quickly threw myself into school and the bit of contract work I got, but the uncertainity really set my on my arse. No matter who was looking at me, I only saw my own perception of myself, a failure, a disappointment, in their eyes. It cut so deep I stopped looking. I stopped everything. I buried myself deep in papers and grades and dog training and looked only into the chocolate brown eyes of my dogs, who love me... anyway.

I am not proud of the things I did and didn't do during a lot of the last year. I neglected the ones dearest to my heart. I didn't do wantonly, but I did do it. Although I've said I'm sorry, many times over, it never seems enough when you know you've hurt the ones you love the most.

Maybe because I'm getting old(er) this stuff, this starting over stuff, is just plain hard. I know I'll find my way, I don't have much 'quit' in me. I just hope I can find some of those old friends along the way, and that they'll find it in their hearts to forgive me.

What do you do with a drunken sailor?

I knew I would write this morning, because I dreamt of Mark last night. It was like a visual reminder, if you want to write, do it every day, something he told me and we all found out he definitely did when we cleaned out his house. Mark was riding around in the back of an old Nissan Sentra, one with bumper stickers plastered all of over the back of it. This car exists in my real-time life. It belongs to one of the women at the farm that drives me crazy. Mark was there, arm draped over the back of the seat, leather jacket, white shirt, singing in a Bob Dylan twang to my friend Staci. Staci, was laughing loudly, and glancing alternately at Mark in the rear view mirror and to her right at me in the passenger seat.

Our destination was some sort of cookout. Mark headed for the barbecue and didn’t come back for the rest of the dream. Staci and I sat at a long picnic table, laughing about something and were joined by a couple, a couple that clearly couldn’t find any other place to sit, judging by how uncomfortable they seemed sitting with us. It only got worse, when Mandy arrived, plate in hand, her well behaved food sitting in its sections ever so careful to not touch. Soon enough, the couple disappeared too. I cannot blame anyone in my dreams or my real world that feels the desire to evaporate when I am with these two women. It’s a little bit like watching twins that have their own language. There is a divider, while not meant to be entirely exclusionary, it does create a space between the us, and the not us.

There was no major revelation in this dream. I had no great insight, or million dollar idea. The world’s greatest novel was not born in this dream last night. I do think it had a message for me. You see, yesterday, was one of those damn days, the ones where I feel that everything I touch turns to complete crap. Where even looking back, what’s in the rear view mirror looks like ruin, both the places and the people. Right about 4 pm I hated absolutely everything about the last 20 or so years. I couldn’t find a nugget of goodness in myself or my ‘doings.’ Fortunately, I know that these days come and they go. I still find them hard to deal with and in truth, spend most of them crying and feeling inept and without value. I think, the dream was reminding me of those who love (d) me the most, those that do see the good in me, even at my worst. I think I needed that reminder, because it is now, during winter, that I can be dragged into believing there is no good, no hope, left in the world.

There is in fact, a poem that ends with this line “nothing now can ever come to any good” it is a poem about losing someone, and the first time I heard it I felt as though it had been etched into my sunburned skin with a shard of broken glass. It is an amazing thing, the power words strung together just so can have. I only need to think of the poem, the images it creates in my head, some memories, some conjured by the words, and I am standing outside a funeral home in Fairfax Virginia on the coldest day of my life while a man named Archer sits inside at long shiny wooden dining table talking to my mother and sisters about “the remains.” I left before I punched him, but not before I reminded him that the remains had a goddamn name.

I felt better this morning, just a little. I suppose it could have been the dream, or just the bright sunshine through the blinds and the cold dog nose pressed to my forearm. In that, there is hope to share.

Meet me in Banner Elk next October.

Fat black sharpie in hand, I crossed off yesterday’s date on my calendar this morning, mentally ticking off the days until the new year. Just four to go. I thought briefly about the past year, about the big things that have happened, and wondered even more briefly what 2010 would hold. Usually, I just feel hopeful at the end of a year, this year, there’s a good bit more fear mixed in. A month or so ago, I met with a real estate agent, got a rough, non-official appraisal on my house, just in case I need to put it on the market this spring. I told myself then, as I do each time I tell this fact to someone, I’d rather sell my house than lose it. It’s true, but it makes me unspeakably sad. I don’t know that I had envisioned the step that came after this little Cape Cod house, but I feel confident it was never, ever, leave it before I lose it. Deciding it was too early for such dark thoughts; I poured another cup of coffee and headed for the couch.

The early darkness of winter makes me nuts and truth be told, a little sad. I don’t know that I’m one of those people that are truly affected by the lack of sunlight, but my spirits sure are. Yesterday morning, sick of just about everything, I shoved myself out the door to the gym, determined to chase the winter doldrums away. I took a new class, one whose ad has one of those perfectly sculpted females on it, and the slogan “Pressure makes diamonds.” This, to a different person, would have been a clue. In early November, I got a horrible cold, worst one I’ve had in years, knocked me back for a good 3 weeks. On Thanksgiving Day when I went to run the turkey trot, I hadn’t run a step in roughly 2.5 weeks. I had no grand hopes; and that turned out to be a very good thing. I ended that run a full 5 minutes slower than the year previous, but with a really cool shirt (purple, with a turkey on it!) and a flier for North Carolina’s newest marathon. I wore the shirt on Thanksgiving Day. I put the flier on my desk and looked at it nearly every day. A week or so ago, I pulled it out and mapped out a training schedule for the half-marathon. I am not mentally ready for school, work (I hope) and full marathon training; the half will have to do. The week starting tomorrow is week 1.

Twelve weeks from now, I hope to have been successful in consistently training for 13.1 miles. I hope 2010 looks better than it did early this morning. If I have put my house on the market I hope it’s because I cashed in a winning lottery ticket, and am moving to Belize, or perhaps, just because I got a job offer somewhere else and am moving by choice, not out of necessity and fear.

Someone told me a few weeks ago that those wooly bear caterpillars are predictors of winter weather, if they have a lot of brown and very little black it means that we are in for a hard winter. Curious about this I went looking for more information and discovered that right here in North Carolina (Banner Elk to be exact) there is actually a Wooly Worm Festival in which the highlight is a Wooly Worm race which ends with the Mayor pronouncing the winner (no doubt he has to pronounce it loudly to wake the spectators) and examining the caterpillar and declaring the winter weather forecast. However bizarre this information, there is some scientific research that backs this up. The one I was examining that day a few weeks ago was nearly all brown. Even without a mayor to pronounce it, it appears this winter is going to be long one. I suppose you can’t argue with a wooly bear caterpillar. So, I won’t. I will hope, just a little more this year than in years past, for a correspondingly brighter spring.

Baby, it's cold outside.

I am struck by the parallels between writing and running. Every question a hopeful runner asks themselves,, is the same a hopeful writer asks.
“How do I get better/stronger/faster?”
“How often should I do it?”
“What do I need?”
“When am I a ‘real’ runner/writer?”

When doubt is winning the war, these turn into declarative statements,
“I’ll never be better/stronger/faster.
“I don’t have enough time to work on it.”
“I don’t have what I need.”
“I’ll never be a real runner/writer.”

This may not be news to anyone. For me it is a reminder. A reminder that running was and still is hard, and that I am capable of hard things.

In running, you just lace up your shoes and get to stepping. I know this because I did it. Less than 24 hours after I quit smoking, I started running.

Now, approaching 5 years later, it is those earliest runs I repeat in my head when I need encouragement. I still see myself, in those blue addidas running pants with the 3 white stripes down the side heading down into the weird part of my old neighborhood, the part where all the houses were dark brown wood duplexes, and there were no street lights. At 4 am, it was dark down there. That part, despite being all downhill, was often the hardest part, to this day, the first 3 to 5 minutes of nearly every run, still feels like a really bad idea.

The next long stretch of road was all flat, full of weird 4 way stops, and the house that was in the news, an elderly lady died there that summer, and no one knew for a very long time. Well, no one except her 47 cats. The entire house had to be demolished. For months, it was just a large dirt spot in between houses. A dirt spot that, I swear, still smelled like cat urine. It was here I got my rhythm, where I got my first inklings of what I thought a ‘real runner’ felt like. I have found little else in the world like the power of moving through t he world powered only by my own feet and brain, and maybe a little Rob Zombie. I remember running along this road, wondering if people would look out their windows as they started their coffee pot, see me, and think 'look at that crazy runner’. I hoped so.

The third stretch of these runs was my nemesis. The hill at E. Maple. Initially, I couldn’t run up even one quarter of it. That changed over time, with practice.

The last stretch, quite literally the home stretch, past the elementary school and the Getty-mart, down the street that ran right to my little condo and the visitors parking lot where I would cool down and stretch. Still alone, still in the dark.

Many more runs came after these first ones, many races too. Yet, it is these practice runs my mind returns to when I struggle with running, and now with writing.

I would quite staunchly defend myself to anyone who declared me not a ‘real runner’ because I can’t run a 7 or even 8 minute mile. I run, therefore I am a runner. The clock does not define me. It may define them, or maybe not them, but something in their world that is important to them. I can, now, let go of that. I have met those people, at races, on the trails, even in shoe stores, they can’t be bothered with so called recreational runners, they have splits to make consistent, or better, to make negative. They have qualifying times to meet; and other very important runner-things to do. I am wasting my time in their eyes. It’s good that I am not looking at myself through their eyes. I see them as dedicated, competent, passionate, and in love with the thing that running has become for them, and not so much the act of running itself. I could be wrong about this.

When I sit down to write, it becomes a lesson in truth-telling. Will I say what I really feel about something – or will I be cowed by the possibility of discovery, and what those that discover it will say, think, feel about me because of the words on the page.

My brother once wrote a poem, a poem that he said was a lesbian, and that poem fucked many other woman poems. He said it, just like that. He wrote it, it was published, and he gave, sold and distributed that book to friends, family, even our parents(!), students, and strangers. He had no fear of saying exactly what he meant, of being exactly who he was.

I think my question about writing isn’t when will I be a real writer, but when will I brave enough to expose the real me. When will I whip out my promiscuous poems (lesbian or otherwise) with pride and not fear?

The truth is I don’t know. So in the meantime, I will follow the path that made me a real runner.

I’ll practice.