slow it down Angie come back to bed rest your arms and /rest/ /your/ legs/ (Lumineers)

My           thoughts           have been        Slinkies

 lately.

Like the way when you hook a slinky in a circle and then pull on it and the energy makes the coils just keep going around and around and it's stuck in a loop that you don't realize is a loop because you can't see the whole slinky and today you're only as big as       a        dust     that's sitting on one of the metal coils and all you can see both ways are spirals and spirals of silver that look so complicated and hard until something happens in your life that makes your eyes ten times bigger (for just a moment and then SNAP back but there's a different taste in your mouth this time) and all of a sudden you can see the whole damn slinky and the little electric energies/edges of individual thoughts that are sparking around and around and around and used to blind you but are actually just winks and you didn't realize how sick you felt until you got off the ride.

"Of what use is genius . . . if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception, without due outlet?"

"Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. It's chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find without question." (Emerson, Experience)

somesomesomesomesomesome       body      convinces you, whether you realize it or not, to just stop. Just stop digging and sit in the dark for a while. And then you're actually able to see that you're in a hole. And it's still dark and you know you'll probably be here for a while but you might as well start to make friends with yourself and your loneliness and ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I like to think critically. Have been encouraged to think critically. Have accomplished things by thinking critically. I had a professor who liked to talk about the life of the mind. About dedicating yourself to academic exploration. Which certainly has its fruits.  But excess makes you stick your head in the sand. And when your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and you see the dirt in front of you, you think I've got to keep digging deeper, that's how I'll get out of this. Think think think think think. And then you start wondering about the meaning of life. And then you start realizing that everything is subjective perspective. It's all persesubjunctivity. Which isn't a word. Which means it's not real. Except there are no real words. Just assumption tied to sound. SIGNIFICANCE. Say it out loud and feel the way the word begins by first hissing through your lips and then moving straight to the back of your throat with the hard G. Bite your lip for the F. It pops out of your teeth with the I. Hiss back to the front for the last syllable. That's all. What's real? Cue existential crisis. Unravel. Dig deeper dig darker.

Thank god Colleen laughed at me and invited me to swing dance. She's got a great smile and knows how to laugh at things. she promises that later we can have some tea and belt out Adele on my dinky keyboard (only known cure for angst) and be really indulgent because when we sing Adele we get to own relationship suffering that's not even ours ( track: Someone like you ) for a good hour and then leave it and go to sleep next to the mountains

Another day another dizzy and

                               



                                           Just                                                        stop





My bones finally had room to speak. Hungry and I fed them.
                                                                                           with putting my gut into things
                                                                                            with being bad at dancing
                                                                                           with less reflections      (mirrors and more)
                                                                                            with a plane ticket





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Still not oriented. But it feels like up. Like lighter-ness     still muggy muddle but it's different than when digging straight downandonly (different taste in the mouth this time) still not oriented. Not going to be oriented this       t      i m     e            a     r o u n d  .

But moving    (!)

Tuesday, July 22 2014

Dusk. A little humidity but it keeps me warm. The ducks are eyeing me, inching closer, thinking I have food for them. When I don't throw anything they full out waddle towards me. Impatient and shaking their big hips. Sassy mommas.

Mist still hanging around in the pockets of these hills - stubborn eraser marks against a clear deepening blue.

Feathers and reflections of light poles like snakes in the water.

Monday, July 21 2014

It's been one of those three day stretches of grey and rain in Boone. I welcomed it. My sleeping schedule has been pretty erratic, and I'm likely to be taking a nap at any point in the day. Fading in and out of consciousness while rain comes and goes - thrush against pavement - fine and delicate. It makes the sound of wind in overripe dogwood trees.
                 Then spatterings. Sleep. Car wheels make tiny wakes in the road and I wake up.

all this rain makes me depressed is the topic of a lot of small talk. It used to be a bad habit of mine to use that template ( all this _____ makes me ______) as a reason to be less whole than was real.

Growing up - growing out - growing into -    shed         reworking our gumbee selves and trying to climb out of ovens that we stayed too long in and now we're hard and we have to twist and painfully crack our crusts so we can remember how to let things pass through us again

The hardest time of growing up (thus far) was when Melanie was 17, Savannah was 15, me 13, and Calvin 11. Three teenage girls, each with hormones that, when interacting, disrupted the earth's magnetic field. At one point, when we were all PMSing at the same time, my mom got so frustrated with our high pitched bickering that she tied all of our long ponytails together.

Blond, brown, and strawberry-blond curls wrapped and knotted.  We couldn't believe she actually did it, so we just stood still for a minute with our backs to each other, a thick mass of hair in the middle. My mom couldn't believe that she just did what she had always jokingly threatened. She covered her mouth with a hand to hide her smile.

Then our anger caught up with us again and we reached our hands back and yanked at each other. We were rotating in a tight circle, our heads jerking and bucking. But it worked. By the time we had figured out how to get our long, curly hair untangled, we were all friends again and laughing.

Poor, poor, poor, poor, poor Calvin.

Although, he is so far beyond his years in understanding girls. Your welcome, brother. And yes, I too am glad that the hellish fever dream of puberty is over.

Friday, July 11 2014

At work yesterday I was digitizing some old cassette tapes as part of the "Cratis Williams" collection. The warm, cantankerous, wavering voice of an old Appalachian woman sung out a Scotch irish ballad into a hand held recorder made in the seventies.  I imagined the hands that held the recorder to have swollen knuckles and splotchy red pink tan skin. The foamy headphones warmed my ears and I folded my legs under my long skirt. It's a great job, being a research assistant in Special Collections. The Cratis Williams collection has been an interesting one to curate. Williams used to be the dean of the graduate school here at App, and most of the collection are recordings of his own lectures or talks he gave on radio shows. His voice is really kind and rumply and he travels the country to talk about how special Appalachia is. I like it because after a few hours of listening to the Appalachian accent, my bias and instinctual reaction (one of dislike and inferiority, and I'm ashamed to admit it) goes away and you start hearing the poetry and rhythm and style of these people who drop the hard g's that I grew up with.

But the latest cassettes have been recordings of mountain folk singing their old old ballads. These Appalachian ballads are sung by old people living in hollows and valleys who I am certain have warm, crinkly kind eyes and richly lined faces and smile lines. But the ballads themselves remind me a lot of Grimm's fairy tales. Meant to teach something moral in a horrifying way. But the latest one was about a man who stuck pins and needles into babies and then drowned them in bath tubs. Not clear what was being taught there.

About seven minutes into the tape,  the scream of a little girl cut through the recording. I jumped in my chair, my cross-legged knees banging into the desk.The old woman stopped singing.

"Whachu cryn fer?"

Mumbled, muffled noise. I didn't hear the little girl speak.

More shuffling and the screaming stopped. The old woman began her ballad where she left off. A minute later, the little girl started screaming again. There weren't any giggles. A loud old man voice started shouting. Twenty five minutes of the woman's creepy ballad sung against a backdrop of a child's screams and an old man's shouts.

It was a really eerie thing. I still feel a bit unsettled about it. Listening to that recording reminds me of the weird, contradictory energy of the Appalachians.

The way a fierce, tight brutality runs in these people. It's un-rippable and it's coiling through stone and it's about making a home in an inhospitable place. The same way the relentless whip of the winter wind here scrapes and smacks everything into hard, bent shapes            - -

         - -   these people have roots.

And then there's a summer night like tonight. Walking down King Street. That mountain. The way the light hits the green is incredible and soft. Old people in lawn chairs at the Jones House. Most of them don't have an expression on their face but they clap loudly and holler when the song ends. Their jaws hang open slightly cuz they don't care to stop what their bodies want to do anymore. The air tastes like laurel. Sweet, pressing harmonies that strain, rising for fifteen seconds and then finally finally rubbing up against each other. They make you smile and cock your head and then nod and you say, "damn" in a fragile way. 

The band on the corner of Anna Banana's.
We drop our packs because they're doing a folksy version of "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and somebody has bongos and the weirdness has a great beat. We almost start swing dancing but then the song ends. We thumbs up them and keep walking. Cut through hilly alleyways. A guy on a motorcycle almost runs us over. Speeds up when he sees us. Rudest guy in Boone. But we pushed to opposite sides of the street and laughed and for the next fifteen minutes you lamented that you didn't pull out your camera quicker. Would've made for a great picture. Hell, with this light everything would be a great picture.

We make it to the old venue across from char. Live big band and everything. Swing dance is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. To keep up, there's no room for self consciousness or thoughts. Body wisdom talks to your body wisdom and you kick your heels up and the smoothness is like the rush when you drop real quick on a roller coaster except more fun. It's a boh oh oh oh own thing.

Shuffle and stomp and toss your hair over a shoulder. Ponies. Eventually our hands get so sweaty that we lose our grip but it's okay we'll both just keep spinning and reaching out for each other.

Saxophones and trumpets and a classy lady voice cooes into the mic.

We dance and laugh when we try to make it sexy, try to match that sax that gets in through your toenails and works its way up up up.

Coffee ice cream and lots of water to wash down a really dizzy and stylish night.

Things hold on so tight here that sometimes you forget that a moment and a moment and a moment just happened until you don't. 

Connor, Sam, Doug, Emily. good company.

this is about holding hands.

riversummerboone

This is my first summer in Boone. Summers that aren't summers spent at home in South Carolina are still disorienting to me. Sometimes I miss the crawling heat of sticky air up my spine, under my clothes, the tops of my arms burnt and freckling.

Before I ever thought about my dirty glass eyes, I looked through them in earnest.

I see eight adults and twelve kids packed into a tiny shack that sits contentedly on the edge of the Chechessee river. I see them all dancing in a moonlit spring tide. The dock is under three feet of water on this one night of the year. They can't see the end of it and laugh when one more step is a soft dark plunge into the river. Surprised by the lack of impact, their knees tingle.

The kids try to see who can touch the bottom first, digging up pluff mud with their hands to prove it. The adults hate this. There was a boy who drowned last year. He dove to the bottom and sunk his feet into the ambiguous brown. When he pushed his arms up and down he didn't go anywhere. His feet got suctioned to the bottom.

Pluff. A good name. An onomatopoeia for the sound of anything that touches the bottom of salt-water rivers.

It is day and I see them catch stingrays off the dock. It is evening and the sun hits the marshes from behind. Yellow green reflections and an undulating orange sun fills the landscape. It wavers and persists, suspended. They take a johnboat out to catch dinner. My dirty glass eyes watch my brother cast a shrimp net. He stands on the bow of the boat. His feet are maps of sophisticated oyster cuts. They sting a little. His red curls are pushed to one side by the wind. He bites an edge of the net in his teeth the way my uncle taught us. The tiny lead weights threaded around the bottom of the net taste smooth and salty in his mouth. He spreads his arms wide and grabs the farthest ends of the net he can. His burnt shoulders flex. One. Lean. Two. Lean. Three. Lean. His arms swing through the air. They never stop adjusting for the shifting weight of the net. They never stop calculating. When he is taut and long and at his most reaching he releases. The net flies high, no longer a part of him but he still leans with it. It spins and takes a fuller shape as it drops.

It’s about to touch the surface of the water and it's an impressive circle. The weights make the ends snaggletoothed but the net itself puffs up beautifully for just a moment before it races through the water, following the lead.

Sink sink sink sink. Plastic line runs through his fingers. Chink. Lead weight hits bottom. Pluff. Calvin leans back, pulling the line up. He grabs the bright blue bunched top that's green in the brackish water. He shakes it out on the floor of the johnboat. Shrimp fall with shivering plunks. We all race to pick them up by their tails and put them in the cooler.

We ride back home and wait in line to shower with the hose outside. Seven of us wait with shampoo in our hair while Melanie washes it out first. We laugh and spike our hair up until each of our heads is a foamy white hershey kiss. It's dinnertime. Buttery grits and shrimp leak through paper plates and make our laps warm and damp.

There is one tiny TV in the house and nobody uses it except sometimes for jeopardy. Grayson (we called him MayDay) crawls into my lap when we watch it. I scratch his head and smell his little boy smell. Apples and laughing. All twenty of us shout the answers and argue good-naturedly and we take dance breaks if our favorite soul music comes on. Bare feet on cool, sandy linoleum twist to ain’t no mountain hiiiiiiiiiiiiigh enough ain’t no river wiiiiiiiiiide enough.

The first person to wake up woke everyone up with coffee smell and unsuccessful attempts to not trip over all the leaky air mattresses and soft bodies molded to the hardwood floor. If you pressed your cheek to the dark brown floorboards and closed your eyes and did a big inhale you'd smell the rich, dark, sweet soil that lives next to the river where raccoons run up palm trees and fiddler crabs lift their claws at you and you believe a little bit in the Gullah voodoo.

Something about the way Spanish Moss hangs like old people hair.

Weeknights we watch the big shrimp boat next door come in every evening and after they tie it up they let us jump off the bow. Savannah takes pictures in black and white.

Grayson frozen in the air, his brown body a sharp, triumphant outline against the sky.

By the end of the summer, the sun has crisped our faces and made a harder line between our bodies and the rest of the world. We know our shapes better.

It's a different heartbeat in the mountains. Somebody showed me how to look at my dirty glass eyes. Sometimes I don’t remember how to look through them. I’m in college and always trying to think my way towards something. I'm trying to peel away the gum and the crust, and squeeze a hard pit in my palm. If I'm not careful, I'll forget about the wisdom in those softer bits. The cartilage and flesh that make up everyday experience. The feeling of sand on cool linoleum floors.

 I don't want to be consumed in my truth seeking. I don't even want to always have the big picture in mind. Excelsior and all that. I'm not the whole trembling mosaic of place. I'm a tremble part.
My ego just flew away on the tail of a Marvin Gaye song. It will come back. This is a good scab to pick at. It's a good hurt to feel again and again. Everything’s much fresher underneath.