I'm going to be Quiet Today

Above the peninsula off of the south western most coast of Washington state, clouds pooled heavy in the atmosphere.
Days coped up in the little red house gives one a sense of comfort so soft it is stifling.
A sore throat, a slight concussion from ramming into a sharp cornered piece of furniture,
wrapped around in tight coils, directing the course of the meditation.

The days become weeks, marked by the short visit from a friend, the contemplative shower
in mid morning, the rush to gather up one's self a heft the groggy mass into the daylight.
Days weeks, moments days, without a care for the day's name as now there are so so many more to remember.

Friends become as estranged, distant family, forgot.
The lover you live with becomes as a close pal, living in a house just like yours.
Love isn't what you thought it would be, now.
Life, and it's so called time becomes too short, and fat with confusion.

They say open up, and life will too, like a flower open up to your senses.
They say, don't care so much about others and what they think, you will benefit.
They say production, education, moving and knowing the names and functions of all things you touch
are things so important, they define your name.

So my name then, is not the name I was given when I came into the world?
So my name is what I make it?
So I should have this power of creation and sight to become the energy I move?

So many enter my space and judge the energy there, as though they can hear my intentions spoken like words.
They coment and try to put my attention into place for me, with their supposed divine ability.
Always my throat aches with confusion for their well meant gesture for they are always far away from what is.
Or am I wrong then, and they know better about my life and how I should be, with their years and names and qualities they have evolved and created for themselves, and the world as they see it.
To open up, to share is futile. It's impossible to be seen in completion by anyone else, so to base anything on what is deciphered there, is foolish.

Wake up to the rain clouds, let them be, I say.
I can see what is a blessing in my life, I can see the fruitful essence of my little world.
I can feel also, the shadows and foolishly arranged battalions placed in ignorant strategy around my psyche.
There is a time for all things. The sort of dull roar of youth will pull at my insides till I am ripe with confidence, until then, sometimes ache will sound through any blessings presented.

I'm going to be quiet today.

Double Dark Americano, Hold the Spazz

Everyone familiar to me knows that given exposure to most mind altering substances, I am bound to give in, and partake.
As a barista by afternoon, every time the weather changes and every two hours, I check the grind. Which entails extracting the essence of espresso beans- not just pouring hot water onto ground coffee!

The rain comes, I check the grind.
The glorious sun comes out, I check the grind.
The breeze finds it's way into the joint, I check the grind.
Knock the grinds into the nice, dry portable in an even manner- make a big messy, heavy mound at the top. Tap everything in place, smooth it off even with the basket lip. Tamp the aromatic sand with thirty pounds of pressure, into a perfectly even cake. The gasket from steam to cake has to be at peak pressure and temperature, to that has to preheat.
Finally the time comes to push the button and count till the shot glass measures one ounce, but, first you bless it- you wipe it clean of any not compacted grind.
If the grind is just a hair too coarse or fine, the thing is shot. ha-ha.


So, being the coffee romantic I am, not a perfect drop goes to waste. The shabby ones I don't touch.
Today, the coffee was perfectly extracted after the shift change fiddling.
When Ben came to the shop with his Bishop, or Pastor, or Preacher- I actually forget the preferred term, the end of the day sun was heating up the place and every other customer was ordering the essence of the mind.
But the grind was off and I couldn't mend together the required kind of time for tweaking it.
Which chaps my ass.
Then, as is customary for some reason with Leigh's cappuccino, my foam started really lacking oomf and continued being pathetic or burnt.
Once Ben showed up.

I tell you what.
When I worked as a teller at the credit union ( I do not recommend it), my till was always off when Ben showed up. Whether it was at the beginning of the day or close to closing, my ability to count failed me as my heart bippity bopped and my cheeks felt sore from trying so hard all day to knock that doofy grin off. Many an embarrassed phone call from yours truly, to some poor credit union sod, explaining mu huge fuck up and manager fixing, when Ben was around. Not to say it was always and only when he was around, but this works for my story.
And I don't know why.
I don't think of naked things.
I don't think of grade school crush things, or any sort of crush things.
I don't think of much.

And oh holy shit, I think I would have made a better Breve blindfolded.
Poor lil guy.

All I can say is, he's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, but not in a romatical way...
However, it's not like I shake uncontrollably and make terrible coffee in the presence of beautiful art, landscape, other abundantly gorgeous Suprunowskis or powerfully moving music. So maybe I was just over caffeinated and glad to see that he's up and around, after that nasty car accident.

There is probably no answer to why this happens.
I would call it a crush, but it is not that involved, emotionally.
Physically, I thought my face would fall off if I tried to stop grinning and blushing, and that I would surely have a fugging heart attack.

But, anyway, click on 'nasty car accident' up there and read about this dude.

I don't consider myself religious, or even interested in religious culture of any denomination or system, any more. I was hungry for it at one time, but it ran it's course and I am now more or less bumbling around Jung's idea of individuation, with a healthy dose of Zen in there somewhere.
Christianity is fascinating. Sociologically for one thing, how it is saturated in social involvement, socially accepted and socially dependent. Culturally, psychologically.

I'm sure Jesus loves everyone, but he loves Ben more, and that's just fine with me.

Story Telling

The truth is, nothing much matters to Rhododendrons.
In the experience of one Waxy Sullivan, the genus tend to have an awful lot to comment on, but truly don't care about much of anything.
Oh, sure, they will let you know if the weather is a bit out of their comfort zone. They shrivel up like over cooked sausage and drop their leaves like dramatic little starlets, heart broken at the end of the scene.
But, as Waxy came to know, they come back every year, with wry new branches needing a cutting!

In fact, a purple star trek Rhodie once gave tell of a 'dendron wide conspiracy when this little show goes on.
People might think the plants need to drop their leaves in order to conserve energy for the cold snap ahead, but oh, they are wrong.
Rhododendrons love being  nude.
Nude Rhododendrons without full, lush leaves and endless clusters of blossoms do not appeal to the human species during the growing season, but secretly indulgent, seemingly struggling nude rhodies in the winter tend to coax about a feeling of tenderness in a gardener. Come spring time, before they know it, Rhododendrons every where are snapped out of their hedonistic slumber with the warm touch of woolen gloves and cold, sharp steel.

Snip, squeak. Snip, snip-squeak, snip.She made note that her pruners needed a good oiling.
The thush of cracking dead wood and cool dry leaves made a new song of percussion each time she brought an armful of clipped Rhododendron to the wheel barrow.
The garden of the day for Waxy was on a property some hundred years civilized, on the bay of a puddle called The Willapa.
Oysterville was the place to be a gardener, it had all the necessities. Developed, mature gardens owned by financially developed, matured individuals. No business license required so long as nobody asks- think freelance with the weather. Think fifteen to thirty bucks an hour, depending on the job and tools required. Oysterville was a Rhodie mecca. Waxy finds the villagers endearing and generous, while the Rhododendrons tend to find them smug and dull.
Ever the Rhodie complaint about the lack of attention they received from their keepers.
"Generations of these movers, and ne'er a skilled or an intrested touch."
The particular Rhododendron she was working on stood so tall and broad that Waxy could crawl under it's lowest branches and be completely out of sight. Such a thing occurred to Sullivan as a daydream might fall upon an imaginative and stubbornly bored twenty some years dumb individual. She went about it in phases, incorporating long days of weeding for when she needed to be more conscious of time or when she had some social performance scheduled, as the dream of being hidden under Rhododendrons or old, droopy Cyprus  seemed to leave her all day with a craving for it. The things she once dreaded like the monotony of gardening, the loneliness of it, were now things which filled a soothing bath of metaphysical time she never wanted to leave once she 'got in'.

The noon hour became antsy to be embodied, and Waxy had to empty her wheel barrow and bit the rhodie fare well.
The cats at home were glad to be revisited by their upright walking friends and greeted Waxy and Ed with yawns and needy purrs. Ed fed them a fresh scoop of kibbles and started hungrily rummaging through the kitchen as Waxy began scrubbing the soil from under her every part, and polishing her eyes, hair and lips.
At seven minutes till noon, the two of them piled back into the old blue truck, one to the coffeeshop, the other back into the garden. With a kiss sometimes said out loud instead of administered, they parted for a time everyday at noon but never fully in thought.
Ed kept her in thoughts of his future; projects, goals, sorrow and joy.
Waxy thought in broad brush strokes, thickly sprinkled with the glitter of thoughts of Ed.

A dream given to Waxy during a slumber of tangled bones and death depicted Ed and his once upona time lover, Rose. They play acted a scene from Waxy's past when her heart's first desire sat in a pick up truck, getting licked and tickled by a flirtatious and eye grabbing young, but older than Waxy, dark mysterious woman. Ed played the part of yesterday, and Rose played the part of the delicious little snack. Ih ner dream, Waxy sat in the passenger's seat, as hidden as if she were camouflaged in shrubbery, too devastated to speak. When the two retreated into the drunken tent of animal love, Waxy's dream self walked from the truck, to the ocean and sobbed with her whole dream body, creating a tsunami of tears and whale shit, waking her to the second day of glorious sun of the whole year.
This dream clouded her cappuccinos with spongy foam, and her house brew with the acridness of over processing. 
Rose was a thing to Waxy, more close to an idea than a person.  A thing, symbolizing the life of the man she unexpectedly fell ass over tea kettle in love with in the summer of her freedom, a time capsule of what once was his life, which is very important to her, but a thing that should be buried except for some far distant predetermined date when it is dug up and remembered in the light of day. It should not be spoken to.
But it is. Rose and Ed pass messages in the darkness of cyberspace, as familiar persons in a familiar way.
When Waxy sneaked a peak at the inbox of Ed's note passing device to reassure herself that he had better things to do than keep up a double romance type-thing, she found a message from Rose so riddled with errors and abbreviated statements, she could not decipher it's meaning.
Ed had responded to it with the letter K.
So today at the coffee shop, the barista was confused, dreamily sad and felt pretty poorly about sneaking a peak at the  personal device of communication as she had. In between drab lattes and bouts of small talk, Waxy wandered the gardening section of the book shop and learned that Rhododendrons are toxic to most plants, and are known to impair the development of young begonias. She tucked the thought into her mind for morning when she would be weeding the beds  in Stanley's garden, around one particularly busy gossip of a rhododendron.  

Winter's Bone

Winter's bone by Daniel Woodrell was a quick read for me.
The way this man combines a wordy paintbrush with the complicated inter workings of a poverty stricken community in the Ozarks is just like being there. Suddenly this young woman you are reading about is so real and while it pains you to imagine the things she is put through, it is amazingly hypnotic- the twists and turns life tends to take, and you can't stop looking.
During times I was not reading this book, I wondered often, "what's going on with Ree right now?"

I recommend it. The story establishes a close to the earth importance of community without lovey-dovey idealism.
It shows a family ripped to shreds by drugs, insanity, and undeniable pangs of hunger. It shows a violent, scared people teaching and learning lessons the hard way, in the snow and ice. Thank goodness the thing ended with a new light shined on the bad guys, a new future for the good ones.

This southern-esque flavor has me wanting more.
Flannery may be a little more dark than I am in the mood for. Instead of picking a book from my next to read list, I looked around Adelaide's with Cyndy's help and found Carson Mc Cullers, a woman from a 1930's Georgia. The title I chose is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which she wrote when she was twenty three.
So far, I'm loving the insight she displays, rotating through characters as narrators. I enjoy the meaty-ness of the story, but the dialogue seems interchangeable as if some of the characters speak from the same mouth.
Also, as much as I love to sit in the sun, reading something in a southern drawl, I am of a generation far from 1930, let alone 1930 in the south. The depiction of Black American characters is annoying and difficult for me to read. I like the broken grammar and sentence structure which seems to bring the Southern dialogue alive, but I'm snobby to lines like "And so he were l-l-laming his fists against this here brick w-w-wall." which only come from Black characters, whom are given names like Willie and are called lazy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cultural differences. I get it, Carson wasn't trying to be an ass.
I do adore southern writing, but have a difficult time with the cultural differences, particularly hose conserning race, which tend to be a hot topic for the genre.
I will read this through, and stick to more contemporary writers in the future. I like the families, communities, the religious/spiritual undertones and long descriptions of sweaty weather, or as in Winter's Bone, the mean ol winter, at the end of the rut road.

A Matter of Time

It's like a burp, or one of those backwards hiccups you get sometimes when you are in the middle of a long, descriptive sentence, only its on the psychological level, and somehow it morphs you into something bad.
A big enough to be frightening muscular, gnarling, huffing and puffing troll-thing now stands where you just were.
There's a circle of faint objects spinning around it's head not because it was just bumped, or smashed with an anvil or anything, the thing is just always disoriented- that's how it comes.
The thing bawls and screams, throws anything not too precious and which is not nailed down, into pieces all over the floors of your life. Rips flesh from idea, and love from bias. The damage is not sufficient enough, strewn next to the troll thing's feet, so the troll reaches out to cut, rip- hurt those around it and when not allowed it's violent compulsion, draws back within you and cuts deep gashes in inconspicuous places.

I have not wanted to write my verbal doodles for a while now, too distracted by the mess left by my bad.
Too grossed out to entertain the thought of publishing my thoughts.

I see now that what ever the mind scientists want to call it, my life will be polkadotted with messy troll shit if I am not diligent!
And if there is a place in this world for plain ol' wanderers, a purpose for the personification of one thousand puzzle pieces from one thousand different puzzles in one box, why shouldn't there be a reason why I stop running from my ugly- face it and try to love it like a painfully ugly mutant of my own design?
It's about damn time for me to quit trying to find the money and the dr. willing to name this thing, and some how free me from it.
Oh ali, you know better!
I am trying to decrease my raging testosterone levels with anti-androgen water pills, in hopes that the hormonal rollercoaster will ease and my ups and downs around you-know-when become less violent, aggressive- agitated. But the cycles we swim in- no reason, good for nothing blues are a natural thing. It's understandable that a conversation might hit at hurts, or whisper to things almost forgot- but there is a force just as powerful as rage, which is a little more complicated to conjure up, and I don't know what I want to call it yet. Grace? Acceptance? Maturity?
It's what it takes to force the amygdala out of it's hijacking terrorist costume, and back down into the brain where it belongs. To take that grouchy snap and breath through it, be honest in a careful, patient way with the folks around you about how you are feeling trollish and maybe should leave the room, or re join the convo at another time.

And it's a matter of time before the fear, and hate and other residue leaving nastiness flush out of your mouth. Those flavors take time to get rid of. Maybe it's a number of laughs achieved within that time, or a song at the right time during that time, or a nice note telling you someone is thinking about you after having isolated yourself from anything nice for a time. I don't know what the magical proportions of good things required to clean up and make you nice after a visit from your troll, or someone else's bad thing. But I do know it's a matter of time.

I will be moving forward into the second week of my re established barista career. I like it there. Though after only a four day week, I am somehow sick of classical piano. I have requested some tasteful jazz. Maybe as I earn my stripes I will plead for Dylan, Nelson and Baez.
The baking thing has been shrunk into a covert operation, where I bake muffins and cakes in Someone's private kitchen and serve them at the store under the guise that they are ligit and legal. They are delicious.
Today it was coffee cake muffins, and Cranberry Orange Pecan bread.

Tomorrow morning, I will talk with Nancy Main about a legitimate baking apprenticeship, complete with some sort of wage for my time.
She is one of these super accomplished women in this area. I hear her name all the time, and about the delicious and smart things she does. I would be an absolute fool to turn down an opportunity to bake beside her, but I am SCARED.
If my inner self was carrying a coffee cup, the thing would shatter into a million pieces on it's saucer before I even took a clutsy step, I'm shaking so bad.

All of the burners on the stove and the oven element are functioning again, thank goodness my man-friend has such handy skills! My bread has been sucking ever since!
Perhaps I will cross stitch a homey framed piece which reads, 'salt your fucking doug, bitch!' for the kitchen. I don't know what it is, but after baking loaf after loaf of homely but workable bread only to find it tastes like glue just chaps my batoot! Of all the other little intricacies I pay attention to, so often the salt alludes me till the end, when I remove the bread fromt he oven and wonder what it will taste like. Oh yeah, it's going to taste like flour. Damn it.
Fred told me the morning after I stayed up late to bake bread for the next day's breakfast, that I yelled out "God damn IT!" in my sleep , loud enough to wake him. Well, I'm glad that i am fairly open about my cursing problem. Had that been the first time he heard me utter the words, he may have been offended.

The garden is going along. Still no potatoes- I think we have maybe missed it.
THe onions are still alive! The broccoli lost two or so of it's ranks in the wind storms, but the ones that have held on have really held on and seeds have sprouted in their midst. I'm hoping for a double harvest- we LOVE broccoli!
Garlic has sprouted and is out growing the onions. The squash are looking pale, but I couldn't keep them inside any longer. Our indoor tomatoe experiment is making me anxious. The Early Girl has four big tomates and has for a LONG time which show no inkling of reddening for us, while the roma has pooted out a whole wopping four toms, none much larger than the top section of my thumb. at least she stopped throwing her flowers all over the place! The poppy seeds I mentioned earlier have gone gang busters behind the house. I am actually wondering if too many of them are viable- a carpet of sprouts I tell you! Hopefully they won't all murder one another with proximity because theose posies are to die for!