Blithering Blathers & Nattering Niggles

Oh, no.

I’ve got so many words to spill it’s as though they’ve bottle-necked in my throat. And something’s coming. I can almost taste it.

Up until Sunday night, I’d been relatively quiet for days. When I say this, it will seem like a lot, considering I just said “quiet” – but truly, in the grand scheme of encounters a typical person might have in a week's time, I repeat, I’ve been quiet.

I’ve spoken to Rw, my children, my parents, my sisters and my beloved Alexis. No one else. Not even Habib at the Quick Stop, who normally asks after everything from my miles-per-gallon to my take on the Obama administration. “Do you like him, Democrat?” I wouldn’t engage, backing out the door with a tight-lipped grin. 

I’ve dodged the chatty mothers at my son’s school, certain I’ll say something to the effect of “I could give a shit if your washer is broken and no, I don’t drive to damn Oklahoma for bargain flip-flops, bless you and the time on your hands! Yeah, stop looking at my eyebrows, I haven’t had time and P.S – You’re too old for fucking skinny jeans and why the hell are you wearing a bedazzled trucker hat at 9:00am… or, ever?” I won’t mean a bit of it ugly, truly. I’d likely even say it sweetly. But, well… then.

See, I’ve been quiet because I have something to say, to spew, to preach but it’s of the untellable nature. It cannot pass my lips. I cannot give wind to the words because who knows whose ears they might fall upon?

Plus, I don’t know what it is.

Then that thing I keep tasting, it’s got me frantically clicking Send and Receive in the toolbar of my email. Refreshing my phone. Checking my post box. But here’s the thing: I don’t know what it is I’m expecting to arrive at any of these various points of contact, or what exactly, specifically, pin-pointed and directly – it is that I need to say. So to a degree, I fear it. Does bad news cometh? Or am I simply waiting for the right person to ask the right question?

Or maybe it’s just the writer’s version of Spring Fever and I need to simply pick up the pen… and bloom.

It was confirmed last night that it is indeed the remaining edits and revisions to my book that still loom large, that I’ve been putting off by any way possible. Plastering walls, digging and planting vegetable beds big enough to feed a third world country, making “special boxes,” blogging (um, hi,) baking brick-hard cakes, organizing my goozillion photos… Creating elsewhere so as to avoid getting down to business. Because I hate revising. It’s painful. Like waxing the most tender of spots. Tugging one thread in Chapter 3 that might unravel a page (or more!) in Chapter 44. I’m certain in moments gray matter has leaked from my ears.

Then it’s the legion-sized group of folks that have walked with me, eyes on every word, thoughts throughout my pages, feedback, support and swift kicks in the ass who remind me that they’re all waiting. They have expectations. If it’s one thing I’m good at – it’s meeting expectations, if even only in the oddest (and tardiest) of ways.

And then I do this, spew it out – and I’m silly. It’s silly. These are such great problems to have, but it would be most Un-Jenny to do it without a bit of the vapors. Where’s my velvet settee to swoon upon, back of hand across forehead?

So yeah. I’m working on POV and making it ten times the bitch it really is. I sit with it and it’s just not so hard. Only involved to the degree of sitting slack-jawed and brow pinched in the glow of my screen for hours on end readjusting those threads. Puppet mastering. Dancing with my characters. All along it’s been them, the characters, nagging at me, waiting for my attention. A dear friend and incredible author, Suzanne Frank, said it best – it’s surgical. And it is.

In other news here are some words for you to chew on, adopt into your vocabulary and use: cede, nascent, engender, papist, catapult, ire, legion, cat-nipped, recalcitrance, beetle, snatch, acrimony, salted, caustic, flam-diggory, rancorous, persnickety, consonant, puckered and filmy. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ve got work to do. Expect it.

*So I dreamed...

Lately they’ve been so vivid, like the way I dreamed when I was pregnant or had a nicotine patch attached or dropped a square of acid prior to bed (or so I would imagine on the latter.)

Anyway – last night I dreamed that I had this cat, not my soul mate Kitty The Cat that I have in waking life, but another cat… with retarded paws, bless his toes.

In the dream, the poor disabled cat (that honestly, wasn’t much cute so I must’ve accepted him out of pity and commiseration with my own aching feet of late) could hardly walk. I took him by covered wagon to see a surgeon renowned for correcting cleft pallets in third world countries, as though paws and pallets were interchangeable. I got there and he himself had a cleft palette, though uncorrected, and a crazy-long pinky finger on one hand that dangled apart from the rest of his digits like a crooked Redbud sucker. This made me admire him more.

Whatever happened there, I do not recall, but I brought ol’ twisty paws home bandaged and found all the writers with whom (in real life) I spent an amazing week in Taos last summer, waiting for me at my house. One of my fellow writers had painted many groups of canvases, put them on stretchers and hung them all throughout my home. I was touched and pleased… even if the art wasn’t necessarily (or at all) my bag. One painting in particular spoke to me though and I studied it - a heavily textured rendering of a cobalt blue whale. Another most brilliant writer, Mr. Goodnight, was in my kitchen cooking Cornish game hens and in spirited debate over legumes with my Daddy, who said lentils were as gaseous as the Republican party. Mr. Goodnight lit a pipe and waxed poetic about the differences between grain legumes and forage legumes. They were solving the world’s problems.

Then I was frantically preparing for my boss-man, Howard Garrett, to come visit the bandaged-footed cat. He’d called and in his East Texas drawl said he wanted to “meet the lil’ fella.” All I could think of was how disappointed the Dirt Doctor would be that my vegetable garden wasn’t finished, some of my root flares were yet to be exposed and GASP! I bought a house with two Bradford pears and he was going to know I fostered these junk trees! I begged my writer allies to get digging. Suzanne Frank was there, and she used my French silk stockings as garden gloves. It worked for her.

There was a knock at the door and I walked down the ever-long white (but now hung with Josh Ayers originals) hallway to the front door. Instead of Howard, there was an Arabian man and woman who insisted that I get in their black suburban with them. “But Howard… he’s coming,” I told them and after many a harsh barked and harked words spewed from the couple (to which I rudely replied “I don’t speak squirrel,”) the woman showed me a tube of the most lustrous, moist, color saturated lipstick I’d ever seen. My eyes sparkled and I grabbed up that ol’ retarded cat, jumped in the back seat and abandoned not just my writers and family, but my enroute boss-man.

I was pulled from my dream by Bird, swatting my shoulder, saying “Ma-ma” in cadence with every connect of her palm to my skin, Giddian tickling my ribs and Richard standing bedside saying “wake up baby, it’s ten already.”

Well, what the fuck does all that mean? I haven’t slept to ten o’clock since 1999.

So I dreamed…

*I’m certain this helped someone somewhere out there… somehow.

It's Killing Me...

This burning question. The mystery of it, wondering at what thoughts passed through their minds in the minutes-to-seconds just prior to doing it. It makes me feel hollow without hunger. It makes me nauseous. It pisses me the fuck off.

It’s suicide, and it’s killing me.

I’m writing about this now because not even two months into the New Year and my community of friends has suffered the loss of two great souls this year, who decided it was their time to leave. I’d have to use my toes in addition to my fingers and still run out of digits if I were to count how many people I’ve known in my lifetime that have offed themselves. Some incredibly close, beloved friends and family, some acquaintances, some just buddies that I’ve partied with, some of my dearest friend’s mothers or fathers, some of our family friend’s children.

All of the obvious questions spring to mind – was it really that bad? What can be THAT bad that you’d end your own life and subject those left in your wake to such a punishing, dismal journey of understanding, enduring the sleepless nights wondering what they could have done differently, leaving indelible marks on those who loved them?

There is a very short list of worst-nightmare-extreme things that could happen with potential to destroy me to such a degree and give me pause to even consider this, but that’s me – and the reasons left in notes, or left shrouded in mystery by those who leave nothing and give no warning – while you can never really know what any one person goes through in a day’s time, nothing on my list were possible factors for the ones I know who have left voluntarily. But, everyone has their own BOBWOW. (Best of best, worst of worst.)

I do not understand it. I cannot comprehend it. I wonder at it in quiet fascination even though it makes me hollow and angry. Those last thoughts. I’ve watched What Dreams May Come a thousand times and am left chewing on the concepts the film depicts, hoping some to be possible, praying that others are not.

Some say it takes tremendous bravery to take oneself out and I imagine in those few amniotic seconds prior to the actual act, it might. But if they’d only applied the same bravery to life… now, that would be courage. I cringe when I say this, only because of one particular near and dear who took his own life, what I went through with him in the days prior, having intimate knowledge of just where he was in his head, feeling responsible for not saving him and aching still for him over it all, yet – I remain (with all due respect) thinking it to be the ultimate weakness, the worst kind of cowardice. Rise the fuck up. Face it. Fix it. A lesson that has taken me thirty-six years to actually grasp and understand is – this too, shall pass. Everything does.

After attending the funerals and hugging the mothers left by their children, the sons left by their fathers and having to turn pictures of me and the above mentioned voluntarily-departed face down out of sheer blinding anger, I feel I’ve more than earned the right to pipe up about this. Disagree with me, its okay. None of this comes without the deepest root of empathy, sympathy and the keen awareness and knowledge of being one of those… left in the wake.

To those of mine who have left this way – I love you still and my grief and missing you nulls my anger and forces me to forgive you. To those that threaten it, hold their family and friends hostage over the possibility of it, I say – first, come here and let me whip your narcissistic, selfish ass. Then, go crawl under a rock and find you some God, get you some Jesus. Wait it out, you chicken shit. To those who might privately consider it? Make your list. What’s the WORST that could happen?

You live through it. You survive. You win, you triumph and at the natural end of your days? You realize that it was all worth living. 

Suicide is bullshit.

A Fine How Do You Do

Well hi, hello, how do you do? It’s me, Jenny and this is my blog which I’ve come to hesitantly but by demand.  I'm a writer and this is what we do. So what about me? I am the girl version of Peter Pan. While I am the ripe age of thirty six, and enjoy the maturity, wisdom and hindsight being so affords, I remain the same little girl I was when I was five, seven, thirteen and twenty one, except better. Smarter. Prettier, even (I was a late bloomer.) But I retain the same mischief, whimsy and wonder that I came into this world with.

Here are the two most important things about me: First, I am a wife. I’ve just celebrated my eleventh wedding anniversary with my husband, who I call Rw, Richie Wayne, Sir or when he's in trouble - Richard. Believe me when I tell you being his wife is the best thing I’ve ever been. In some circles, it’s a bit taboo for a woman to identify herself as a wife, and instead is encouraged to have a fierce independence insignia in all that she does, but that’s not me. I am part of a unit and while I am exclusively me, I do not work without my mister. So, I’m a wife. Then, I’m also mama to two little souls who even when they’re naughty, even when I’m covered in baby snot, spit-up and other unidentifiable smears – my reflection in their eyes and the way they show me myself speaks at things like destiny.

And here are other things I'm known as and for: Editor, Daughter, Sister, Best Friend, Aunt Extraordinaire, Godmother, Old Soul, Believer, Gardener, Chef and all around Sage. Those now, are in no particular order.

Some of you will come here and read my writings and rantings because you love me and take interest and give support in whatever it is I endeavor. I thank you in advance. Others will come out of pure curiosity. Others still (and you know who you are) will come for stalking and/or fodder. But I hope all who stumble across this by whatever means and motive will read something that speaks to their soul, gives pause for thought or simply provides a giggle. I welcome all and might just talk about some. All's fair in love and war -- and writing is both. 

And there’s all that. Here we go. This is life through my lens. Buckle up, I’m going to use the F word.

Jenny