Hallo,

It has been many days since our last communique. I'm soaking my feet in cold water to lower my core temperature. Necessary things without a/c. I did get a free sb drink today. They're card machine/reader was malfunctioning- maybe melting because of the heat. And so not only do i still have my freedrink on the card but my venti soy extra shot latte was on them. Total score. Jesus must love me sort of moment. I can't say I managed anything else today but yard work for Marge my preschool teacher and I did superglue the stone on my ring and set about to watering everything. Weeping obviously at the abysmal state of the garden.

I am obsessed with things like, where do I put the book case? Do I mask the nook or set the bookcase back- oh ok and I did spend a soul sucking hour at home depot buying paint and bits- and that leads to more questions like well do I want a 2nd drape set or maybe I just go with blinds and take back the café curtain rods. I'm sure if people whoever they are go back to read this - or any of a stack of missives, they might draw a knife or a gun at themselves at the mundanity of it all- but they'll know the minutia and then it'll be up to 'them' to draw the broader stroke of singleness, life with cats, the obsessive way she writes about home renovation must have something behind it. And why over the last 9 years of blogging has she brought up missing cabinet doors and why did she paint her living room like a cave? Possibly, probably no one will care. And someone will chuck everything into a dumpster as some ironic turn and insult to my entire life. Not sure why i'm thinking of these things. I was dismantling some of my albums-- making chaos, decluttering in order to make streamlined memory remembered. Which strikes me as pointless and a little sad, these batches of life photographed and how lots of them just pass from existence. Although I went to a wedding shower on sunday and I was around a handful of people I've known off and on for 18 years because of the co-op. You never know what you do or learn or love or obsess over or grieve will crop back up into your life. Not unlike pending 20 year reunions.

As I was writing this I received your letter. And then I had a video chat with jeju sarah. And so let it rest.

The day started with my senile marley yowling into the echoing hall, and the dawn breaking over the mountains and clouds coming from the north east to an overcast morning. To my indulgence of two English muffins with all their nooks, crannies, butter and fruitspread, plus 1 egg. Salt and peppered.

Last night I watched this documentary called girl27. Sort of horrifying. And had some annoying unresolved story threads- but it was good. It was about this girl that was raped at an MGM function back in 1937 and the lengths that they went to cover it up-- the mother bought off, the witness bought off (his kids traumatized because of it), the doctor, the lawyer!, the DA!. And besides that yes, some vindication65 years later, but really, the power unforgiveness and unacknowledged trauma- what it can do to a person- how it didn't just devastate their lives and rob them of their gifts and dreams, but the culture of secrets and pain pervaded and infected their kids too- and their kids kids. Yikes. And the documentarian though he brought those things up didn't want to comment further but let it lie. A good/bad thing. For instance this crazy fact- Clarke Gable had an affair with one of his leading ladies. She was catholic and deeply shamed I suppose. She hid herself away until she gave birth, gave her baby UP for 18months!!!! into an orphanage!!! and then adopted her back! And would not relent about this secret everyone knew about until much past her daughters wedding- AND actually went so far as to ask that her daughter tell her granddaughter she was adopted! THE HELL! Talk about bondage.

Anyway the trash people came and though the automated arm slowed considerably, the 100+ carpet is out of our lives for good. Just like secrets if you give them up and over. They're not lying their stinking and getting eaten by moths and then soaked by sprinkler runoff and let to mildew in a driveway for 2 weeks. There you have it.

Now back to antiques roadshow and mustering the strength to finish medieval forest.



 

Penelope.

Hello, from across the continent. I'm listening to Bon Iver and Param is by my feet. And I'm up past my usual bed time of 10pm at least this last week. I can feel the rhythms evening out as each thing is accomplished, and hammering asphalt intermittently during the day as my upperbody building exercises is enough to make my eyes lightly mist up in encouragement that even that - this measurable output 1/3 done- Sure even as I sat and sighed deeply in satisfaction at 2/5 gardenias planted I noted that they're being attacked by something and that the 2/3 is long as the day is hot in August. But still. We do what we can. We do it where we're at and we don't wait to be anywhere else. To suddenly have money. For pigs to fly. For things to alter themselves when they have always been the way they are.

Mom said that painting the bathroom was not akin to climbing Everest and I quipped and she hurumphed. But each room I think is a mental and emotional battle against my own internal grudges. Deep-seated. Grooves that go really far down into my own heart of darkness. Grooves that have me loosing my shit over craptastic drywall work- lines everywhere, lines cracking through the primer, drywall not flush to the door jamb, weird fucking wonky not perfect shit. I look at the spider like smash I made in the enamel of the bathtub- 3+ years ago by now and I think I made that. I was tired. I swung and I missed and I knew I had to put the sledge hammer down. But this drywall business is just half-assery. I get it. I'm guilty of it, like the floor- there's lines aren't there. But this guy they hired and my dad know better. They aren't novice hacks. I don't know why it enrages me so. Maybe because I feel i'm doing this by myself against the stream of fuckall. I had worship music going for a good while just to push through the inevitably toxic mental churning.

Still it didn't stop me having to scream at someone (poor mom) of the shit job- surely someone has to know. Someone else besides me in my own head all by myself, as I spend each day fighting the gremlins from room to room. And then of course somehow got into a fight with Amber where she was prompted to hold against me all the things she's done for me that I thought were generous of her but apparently not, so of course I should do just this thing out of 'you owe me'. Don't you? And I was reminded of the MM part where he talks about how we economize relationships- and I thought ok i'm not going to do that. I won't tit-for-tat this. But then it led me to wonder what other resentments other people were stacking against me. It goes to what we can possibly repay. We can't. I'm in enough debt as it is- I simply can't keep account to balance out friends- but it's a new way. A new groove. To burn the ledger- and how to love through and in that space. I can't say I know what that looks like.

It's control too and the perfection you know time and money can execute for you. To just have it done. To not labor. As if nothing is learned, gathered or built in the doing of things. Are they really time stealers- or are they like washing the whiteboards or waxing the car- the discipline of carrying through and doing and being mundane creation and maintaining- and how we behave in those spaces and the decisions we make to keep going- hacking at the asphalt, letting the lines lie- weeping, gnashing and then rubbing the imbedded gravel out of our knees and we keep going- to find peace in an imperfect space. To find peace in ourselves.

And then in those meditative spaces I think- God, you must not care about me as I sit here in this imperfect mess and you don't deliver me from it with bags of money or a husband or a friend who won't inevitably hold it against me if I ask for help. And then I hear, it's not important. But I think that's me thinking what God would say, and then I argue back but it's important to me. But then I think what's the aim and the aim isn't perfection, and I think God would agree with me on that. And then what it is - relationship- in those spaces with God and myself in the concrete, and in those spaces in my heart that all of these things trigger. Pondering the verses below as things fly through my head, as I shrug my shoulders from the tension and crack my wrists from the overwork. It would be better if Jesus be my arbiter- against accusations of who I am in the world and to others. It will never be enough without him. So the power of such things must be to walk in faith through them- the small that would make us small- to define myself not by the cracked lines of an atom among many, but by him, who makes me heir and calls me daughter. I have to believe I'll be the better for it.

^2cor10:3 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. ⁴ The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. ⁵ We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.