At last the opportunity, but pretty tired now. Just a note. Typed on the iPhone, so lots of typos probably.

Fine cold snow has fallen all day and falls still, now, well after midnight. Ted the cat is out in it somewhere, huge he is orange and alpha, doing reconnaissance on behalf of his clan before he can rest inside for the night. ... There he is now at the front door. Back in a minute.

... Skip and brotherB and I went into town to see Skyfall tonight, afterward crunching home in the old Mercury slow down the sparkleice white sidestreets all by ourselves in the frozen night and sifting snow.

***

Watched The Shining recently, my new official SamMills Christmas movie instead of the Wonderful Life of ignorant and innocent times when I thought we'd all love and respect one another forever. Now in these years post-personal-apocalypse it's strictly murder movies for the holidays, and so I dreamed last night of JackTorrance, deranged and relentless, pursuing me through a great house from room to room, and then through streets and parks and apartment buildings. People tried to help, hiding me, distracting him, but he stayed on the scent and never stopped, until at last I came to a dead end (ha! the punnings of dreams ...) in an elegant clifftop apartment with its glass far wall overlooking the sea, and waves crashing on rocks far far below, and I turned just as Jack rushed and embraced me and we crashed through the glass and down down onto the stones and were broken there and dead. And then we went at it again, like a video game - could I run faster? should I turn this way instead of that this time? and so on. But I could see it would end the same no matter how many times I changed my strategy. No escape. Clearly.

So, you know, I turned 60 years old two days ago, no biggie, but I guess some part of me wants me to start getting ready for the big finish.

***

I've been working hard at the Friends of the Library used book outlet, changing it all about, cleaning, gleaning, removing dead volumes to make room for titles a little more vital. It's fun and arduous and slow - slow because the main storage unit is unheated, and days lately start out near zero degrees. Ugh. But I've also been acquiring decent titles at rock-bottom prices (the semi-annual buck-a-bag sale lasted the whole month of December). We'll keep them bills paid.

Cats Lobsang, Ted, and Piffle, and dogApple, are here on the bed ready for lights-out. But where's Greta? I've saved her spot. Leo prefers the silence and solitude of the living room's comfy chair.

Many days, many many dreams later, I creep back in. Not knowing why.

Christmas and birthday and solstice and massive shift in world consciousness taking place all at once.

Over the weekend I tested for UPenn editing. An in-house position in Philadelphia. As if! such a miracle could happen. Husband tells me it's very humid there.

It was 7 degrees F. here at 7:30 a.m. They predict minus-9 for Sunday night, maybe sooner.

Attended my first Friends of the Library Board meeting last night in my capacity as Bookworm Coordinator. Acquitted myself well, I think. More and more work to do there - maintenance and PR/marketing issues, shelving shifts and shifts in mission. A lot of educating.

Work to do here, as well. Books have been selling at almost an alarming rate, 3+ per day average (which means that some days I sell seven or more), all or most in two digits (and a recent one in three). Bills are being paid. I had a tooth pulled. BrotherB gets a pair of reading glasses.

And today, for the first time in many years, I will bake Cow Cookies for Christmas and mail them to my loved ones.

Finally, 'tis a season I can hang with.

Dream from this morning: I lived with my brother on a property up a mountainside, a sprawling acreage littered with debris and machinery. Two roads passed through the place: one came through my neighbors' property and ended at mine, an easement we used to come and go. Another road came across from right to left out of the woods, passing through and continuing up the mountain. Heavy machinery used this road at all times of day for some development going on up there.

It's funny - early in the dream these properties were simply adjoining rooms with double doors closed between them. They evolved into neighboring acreages separated by a fencewall and great solid double gate.

Anyway, once a day an old maroon convertible full of town thugs drove up the easement road/driveway, turned around in my yard and drove out again. I thought nothing of it the first time, but when I realized it was a daily thing I knew they were thieves scoping the place out for antiques and machines to steal. I chased them out at one point.

Among the discarded items lying on the ground all around were file cabinets on their sides and backs, drawers open or missing, contents blowing about. Earlier I had given a heavy tall filing cabinet to a friend. Now a truck arrived to deposit one exactly like it in the weeds with the others, stout greasy delivery guys fiddling with chains and pulleys to lower it off the flatbed. I ran to stop them - I thought it was the cabinet I'd just given up - but they continued unperturbed. I realized it was a gift from someone to replace the one I'd given away. Perhaps it had more value than I'd thought.

Atop a shelf or dresser pushed against the shared wall or fence between properties (or rooms) was something like a spice shelf in which several lizards were living, including a bearded dragon (again with the dragon). They weren't very large, and a little bird had befriended them and was nesting there, too. At one point I gave the shelf and its lizards to my neighbor on the property below, opening the gate and carrying it to to his porch, trying to keep the reptiles from running off. This was a large family and several members stood about watching as I handed it over to the indifferent old patriarch. Only then did I remember the bird and its nest, and peeking in I saw it standing panicked over an egg just hatched and two tiny pink moist nestlings bobbing about beneath her. I didn't know how to take the shelf back - did I manage to carry it home with me again? I worried about whether the mother bird would keep the babies alive after having been disturbed.

11.28.12 Wednesday

Day of gloom and wind - lovely day. Black clouds glower and lower, lower and lower. Wind hollers wild and fraught with extremity - respite from the nothingness and blah we have confined ourselves to. Glory! it is, a day such as this. I miss the woodstoves of yore, but the brave little propane flame does its best.

I made turkey soup yesterday from the boiled Thanksgiving carcass, most honored feast-day animal sacrifice in this mostly meatless home. It was the best soup I ever made and I ate too much, and then carob-blueberry mug cake after that, so that I awoke every hour on the hour all night for no reason at all. Flitting bits of tatterdreams escaping.

Misunderstandings and miscommunications among the LibraryFriends I'll soon be "coordinating" with have started already, and I haven't even taken up my post. The week's been rife with confusion, and today I must spend 2 to 5 p.m. in their midst struggling to keep my emotional keel even. I don't get how neurotypicals think, even the relatively higher-on-the-spectrum-than-most-NTs folks likely to be involved with such library stuff. Everyone clings to their bit of perceived power and works it to prop themselves up.

I say one thing, another is heard. I don't know how to bend myself to the sideways-speak that communicates little but makes others comfortable. And because what I do say is so precise and information-laden, it is not heard by them, and so sometimes sounds to their ears like something untrue.

So there it is. I finally understand the mechanism. I'll adapt as far as I can. I'll try to become stronger. Maybe I'll even learn to keep quiet.

***

In dreams - from the other night:

I lived at the far eastern edge of the L.A. sprawl in a small calm desert suburb. In central L.A. my mother was dying of cancer. I decided to pack up the car with my two little sons and move to be closer to my mother. By the time I got there, though, she had died. (She did die of colon cancer, 1999.) I was hunting for a place to live, looking at apartment after apartment. I made friends with a hippie couple who were homeless, also. They wore their hair in dreadlocks. The man was bearded, the woman blonde, both were mindlessly jolly and affectionate with one another. Their clothes were colorful gypsy patches and tatters. Somehow I encountered JoeW, a man who in real life had been my mother’s lover. (He was, in real life, a Harvard-educated prosperous corporate lawyer from New England aristocracy, one of several lovers my mother took from the Los Angeles law firm where she worked as paralegal - all of them married. Joe was a practicing Catholic who had not divorced his first wife, who lived in Chicago with their son. He was thin and tall- 6-foot-4 - and wore horn-rimmed glasses and nice suits. He was even-tempered, witty, and colorblind. Recently I've learned he's been placed in a Massachusetts care facility because he has Alzheimers.) Perhaps, in the dream, he'd taken care of things after my mother’s death.

Joe allowed me to stay in his apartment, with my two little dream sons, while I searched for a home. Going up the steps of the spiral staircase to Joe’s apartment my sonJesse climbed and swung on the wrought-iron railing. I whispered urgent reprimand in his ear and he stopped fooling around and went to play quietly or perhaps watch TV. I found old newspapers strewn on a table. They had articles cut out of them and were riddled with rectangular gaps. The mastheads were intact; one was dated 1947 and the other 1938. I tore a page from one, and then I realized 1938 was Joe’s birth year—these papers were keepsakes—and I was embarrassed. I had to stop Jesse from wrecking them, as well. I raised my voice at him and then noticed Joe meditating in a chair just inside the doorway of his room (there seemed to be no actual doors). I felt awful about having disturbed him, but he gave no sign that it was a problem.

Out on the street the next day with the folded up classified ads. JoeW is with us (my family and the hippie couple), also looking for a new home. The three factions compete affectionately for a single vacancy in a fourplex, an upstairs apartment. Its rooms have no doors, and the bathroom is surrounded by a low wall you can look over into the home of the downstairs neighbors—specifically, an elderly gentleman with a white mustache lying in a reclining chair. I"m a little uncomfortable with this, but the place overall is very nice and we all want it. Downstairs I find that at least one of the four apartments belongs to the stout motherly landlady who keeps busy in her kitchen concocting meals for the residents, as in a sort of assisted living. At the other end of the kitchen I see people sitting at little tables as though it were a cafeteria or diner.

We all took a break from househunting and rested at a coffeehouse, like a Starbucks, located near a little recessed amphitheater surrounded by a low wall (much like the one near the creek at Chico State where I went to school in the '80s). I sat at an outdoor table with my snack but noticed JoeW sitting on the top step of the amphitheater: I could just see the top of his head on the other side of the wall. I got up and approached him, chattering happily, but when I stepped into the aisle and turned toward him I saw that he was deeply engaged in chanting namyohorengekyo with two robed Asian monks, young men with shaved heads, seated near him on lower steps. He held wooden prayer beads in his hand. Yet again I was mortified to have disturbed him. He got up then and walked with me, still even-tempered and unperturbed by my thoughtlessness, infinitely patient. I said to him, “I had no idea you were involved with Nishirin Shoshu.” We sat on a bench in the growing darkness. I straddled his lap and sat gazing into his eyes, which avoided mine all through the dream. Suddenly I realized something. “You’re grieving, aren’t you?” I said. “I’m so sorry. You’re still grieving for my mother." I said, “I have Asperger’s syndrome. We process grief quickly. Death doesn’t mean much to us.” I got up and stepped back from him respectfully. He stood and I embraced him with great love. But oddly somehow at that moment I was very small, like a child. ...

I decide then that JoeW should join us - we should move in together and share a big house somewhere. Then he would have family around him and it would be good for him, and maybe feelings would grow between us. (I thought he might feel love for me but was too shy or polite to express them.) He didn’t reject the proposal. ...

The following day, or perhaps later that same afternoon, we negotiated the downtown L.A. streets thronged with people and food carts and distractions. I was trying to keep up with the wild hippie couple and keep hold of my sons' hands, but then I lost track of Joe. I searched the crowd in panic. I spotted him standing perhaps 20 feet away watching me serenely as the crowds gradually engulfed him. I think I still could see his face when the dream ended.

Day of gloom & wind - lovely day. Clouds glower and lower, lower and lower. Wind hollers fraught with wild extremity - respite from the ongoing blah we have been confined to. Glory it is, a day such as this! I miss my woodstoves of yore, but the brave little gas flame is doing its best.

I made turkey soup yesterday from the boiled Thanksgiving carcass, most honored feast-day animal sacrifice in this mostly meatless home. It was the best soup I ever made and I ate too much of it, and then carob-blueberry mug cake after that, so that I awoke every hour on the hour half the night for no reason at all.

Flitting bits of tatterdreams escaping.

Misunderstandings and miscommunications among the LibraryFriends I'll soon be "coordinating" with have started already, and I haven't even taken up my post. The week's been rife with confusion, and today I spend 2 to 5 p.m. in their midst struggling to keep my emotional keel even. I don't get how neurotypicals think, even the relatively higher-on-the-spectrum-than-most-NTs folks more likely to be involved with library stuff. Everyone clings to their bit of perceived power and works it hard to prop themselves up.

I say one thing, another is heard. I don't know how to bend myself to their sideways-speak that communicates so little but makes them feel comfortable and safe. And because what I do say is so precise and information-laden, they can't hear it at all, and so sometimes it sounds to their ears like something untrue.

So there it is. I understand the mechanism. I'll adapt as far as I can. I'll try to become stronger. I'll learn to keep quiet.

Nearly midday, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Up since six, as I do nowadays, because in this period I am sleeping immediately and well. Night before last I fell asleep to a Youtube lecture by Gary Snyder at a Berkeley féte in his honor. Last night I slept to one by Robert Hass on Czeslaw Milosz. He preceded it with some tangential remarks about Tomas Tranströmer, who had won the Nobel Prize that day (“His poetry is drenched in Swedish weathers,” Hass said).

Ah! Husband is awake. The water runs in the upstairs sink, and now the TV comes on: horseraces are in progress. An announcer shouts with adrenalined urgency as the horses approach the wire. Next, the post-race commentary and analysis, a lower pitch and more considered velocity. Then a repeat of the race or maybe another race from a different track, narrated in excited chantrhythm as the animals pound the turf and vie for position around the turns.

He’ll want coffee. I’ll put the water on. But then I must turn here to last night’s dream. These dreams anymore seem like increasingly severe writing assignments, the challenges greater and greater - now see whether you can put this one into words, or make any sense of it ...

***

Okay, so here it is. Sort of cleaned up.

It was like several dreams stitched together badly, with figures common to each segment. I lived with a character played by turns by John Malkovich, by my most recent ex, and by a local poet of comically humorless and perfectionist personality who was briefly an acquaintance of mine when I had my bookstore. Mostly by Malkovich, though, channeling his sadistic dilettante persona from Portrait of a Lady.

After a single sexual encounter with him I become pregnant with a son. He became very excited about it and insisted I stay with him in his mansion. There was a dicey moment when it occurred to him that the child might not be his - why should he take my word for it? I was desperate to convince him I’d had no one else in many years. Because it was true.

The Malkovich man had an older friend, played by someone like ArminMueller-Stahl combined maybe with OssieDavis, kind, mature, concerned. This friend was always nearby to correct or repair or soothe anyone or anything that might have been harmed by the impatient Malkovich character’s outbursts of violent temper.

I was intimidated, almost cowering, terrified lest I trigger Malkovich's rage or even his disapproval. (In this respect it actually was quite like living with my ex ...)

There was at this point quite a bit of bleed-through from a simultaneous dream about Cleopatra. She was pregnant by Caesar and was confined to a slab-bed where she lay gestating a child while keepers watched. She was kept drugged lest she escape. It occurred to me that the historical Cleopatra had given Caesar a son against her will.

In the dream I was trying to resume my freelance writing career - was working on several articles and finishing them in good time. I was happy that my mind, no longer buffered and baffled and wrecked by kidney ailments, worked well and thought clearly. A woman phoned to give me further instructions about an article I couldn’t remember having been assigned. There were adjustments to make in my approach to the “dissection article," she called it, and how was it coming along? I thought I dimly remembered starting such a piece, but I’d forgotten all about it. I lied my cheerful response and then hung up. Panicked, I began a search through the premises for unfinished pages that might provide some clue. The work was due the next day.

An older woman servant or friend who stayed near and assisted me made a good-natured joke. The Malkovich guy turned on her and demanded to know what she meant by it. I cowered quietly, sensing the unfairness and grateful I wasn’t the victim this time. I almost spoke to defend her, but his angry glance silenced me. Then, to shift the energy, I abruptly handed him a pen. He became angry with me for interrupting him. I tried to defend myself, but he wouldn’t hear it.

He kept two monitor lizards as pets, one of each species - Komodo dragon and Nile. They were permitted to run freely in the house, and I was always trying to keep my bare feet away from them. At one point we rode around town in Malkovich’s fancy car, all of us, plus a housecat and the two dragons. M parked the car and left me alone in it with the animals. I tried to keep the reptiles from eating the cat. I tried to keep my bare feet out of their sight. The Nile monitor was very black and leathery and primitive looking, like a small fierce hungry T-rex wearing alligator skin (nothing like a real-life Nile monitor).

We returned to the house, where some children had left the back doors open, and I feared the lizards might run away. What I actually feared was Malkovich’s anger - at me. The older Armin-Ossie man quietly collected the reptiles, who hadn’t escaped after all, and closed them up in a small room. He carried the creatures lovingly in his arms, like babies.

Source:www.travelblog.org/Photos/245895.

It had been raining for days, the area flooded, chest-high in freezing gray water. The Armin character went out to explore a protected place near the standing foundation of a washed-away building, a sort of porch. He leaned to look underneath, and I called out to him to see whether my missing pages were there.

Two fat ruddy beerboisterous shirtless older men swam and hollered happily in the floodwater. One had forced his two small children or perhaps grandchildren to swim with them there. They were miserable and cold and frightened. The boy was hardly more than an infant, just able to walk. He was naked in the icy water, splashing and gasping in panic. I pleaded with the oblivious granddad to let me bring this one inside, and he finally agreed. (I stopped myself from feeling concern about the little girl, who was maybe 5 or 6.) I leaned from the back step and gathered up the naked baby and held him hard against me. He sobbed and shivered. His flesh was slick and cold in my arms. I found a puffy white blanket to wrap around him, and soon he was quiet, and I could feel him relax against me in relief.

Oh, the long slow descent is exaggerated, I think. It only seems long and slow. Don’t depressions always seem that way? Even the little ones. Anyway, yesterday I noticed that transiting Saturn, having finished up its second return to my own (these conjunctions with our natal Saturns happen only every 28-30 years or so, and are life-changers) - I noticed it had advanced to my Ascendant, is conjuncting - conjoining - currently, my Ascendant, and has been for a while, and will continue there for a while, and I realized it had brought on my heavy restless and despairing mood. Not so long, maybe. I felt better then because I knew it would end. It would be a period of soul-searching and hard work. And because I expect to see yet a third return, I don’t consider this period to be an end-of-life summing-up Saturn return, but another phase instead, a leveling-up of spirit.

I had some dreams. In one, Wednesday night, my elder son walked around with a big fat belly hanging over his belt. I called to him to please care about his body, that the imbalance would ruin his back, but he only rolled his eyes, as he is wont to do in my dreams.

And this morning I dreamed I was with Noam Chomsky and Malvina Reyholds and we were organizing a movement of some kind. People came to our venue, a social hall in one wing of a sprawling motel, to get literature, hear lectures, take part in discussions. One night the regional leader came to speak and the place was thronged with screaming fans as though he were a rock star. He was only a speaker, a middle-aged intellectual in a suit, but the crowd was wild. Part of the event included a sort of halftime entertainment. A flock of Monarch butterflies was released and they fluttered skyward in exquisite murmurations, beautiful rhythms of coalescence and dispersal, until, exhausted, they landed all together in a gorgeous pulsing swarm on a rafter and were gathered up again. Then the motel management descended and evicted us because they were hostile to our political views. They were angry. Soon low-flying Korean bomber planes filled the skies dropping bombs everywhere. I fled with two small children, helping them escape. Then I circled back to gather some belongings from my home. A large red fox bounded out of some woods and ran alongside me, fleeing also. At home I stuffed the front of my pants with books hoping to look pregnant and so smuggle them out. I was going to have to walk out with a child, a little dark-haired girl, and I was going to have to abandon my pets—my five cats and my little black dog. Mr. Chomsky told me to take books of information about our movement with me so its message wouldn’t die. I chose three from the shelf - volumes 1 and 2 of its basic precepts and a third about Native American rights. These were large heavy books I would have to carry everywhere in my arms. I understood I was going to be very tired carrying on this work. I decided to leave a big bag of dry cat food open in the garage for my housecats, and to crack a window open so they could get used to going in and out and become wild again without me. I was griefstricken to leave them. Mr. Chomsky said he would drive me out in his car. I begged him to let me take at least my little dog. He agreed reluctantly, fuming as he drove.

***

In this waking world we had a satisfying Thanksgiving day. Husband worked upstairs until 4 o’clock. I was alone in the kitchen all day and felt a little lonely there. I baked three pies and whipped both potatoes and yams, steamed asparagus and sauteed Brussels sprouts in caramelized butter. I’d cooked up the cranberries the night before. Roasted a small birdbeast and made the gravy. Thanksgiving is just a vehicle for gravy, in my opinion. I made one emergency trip to the store for a baster and some buttermilk and a new oven thermometer. We had some organic wine with the meal, a little on the young side but very nice. Then we took a walk in the twilight and blue chill. TheAlturas streets were empty and quiet. Hawks came home from the fields, soared low into the great trees around the football field, settling for the night. The three of us arrived back happy to be too warm in the oven-heated house, and then we had our pie together in front of the TV and watched The Last of the Mohicans.

Husband went upstairs after that to watch his TV alone, and brotherB was happy to go to bed and he fell asleep right away, full of Thanksgiving food, and I watched his beautiful face for a while as he breathed. It seemed every bit as angelic as it had the day he was born. He glows with a holy aura sometimes, especially now that he’s becoming healthier. I had an anxious thought about how he might die from his defective heart one day, just like that, and leave me. Caught my breath to keep from sobbing. The Saturn conjunction, remember. It’s a sad planet.

So I made up my bed with newlaundered ivory cotton linens and down comforter and crawled in after a hot scrub in the shower, sat up in bed so clean, in my T-shirt and flannel pants, trying to stay awake until my hair was dry.

Better today, as long as I don't think about writing projects.

Outdoors the weather is still grim. Still gray. And drizzly to boot.

But I'm paid today, and soon brotherB and I will shop for feastfood. In the afternoon pumpkin and pecan pies will be baked, cranberry sauce concocted, to prepare for tomorrow. Just us three at tomorrow's table, and the creatures, but I am so thankful for us. So very very grateful.

For heat in the stove, propane in the tank, gas in the car. House payment covered.

For online friends. For flesh-and-blood humans - they exist - who listen to my words and attribute no sinister subtext, but understand them for what they mean. Which is all I ever mean.

The world at large gets better and better, it seems obvious to me, even if my own puny world collapsed long ago. I love this world very much, and I love the vast vibing void we drift in.

blessings

I have resisted writing sort of stubbornly these past days and weeks. I think it may be impossible for me, for my mind, to focus, when in a relationship, on anything but the relatee. Even in Beloved Husband's considerate absence he is ever-present to me, as my attention fixes on encounters and confrontations past and to come.

I find myself, for three-and-a-half years now, in a slow, steady descent into a soft, shallow, nonclinical depression - a resignation. From time to time I fight it, I rise up and toss off a flurry of verbiage, but it all goes nowhere. As do I.

It's no one's fault. It's the byproduct, I suppose, of my ADD - which requires an unnatural and absolute isolation for any project to approach completion - and our poverty, which renders impossible most obvious solutions - separate residences, a retreat, help with housework and meals.

If before my 58th year I'd known about my neurology - my high placement on the autism spectrum and concomitant attention deficits - I'd have avoided most of my life's pain and suffering, avoided inflicting most of the pain and suffering others endure because of me. No marriages, no children, no partners. I might have known better than to risk them. For all the joy and wonder I have known because of these, I have given joy to no one - not intentionally, but because I only perplex. Strange person in an alien world, a creature everyone misunderstands. Especially myself.

I whine like a teenage girl today. Must be the weather. Grim, gray, with ferocious winds.

Dim memories of dreams from overnight. I do remember that the worlds were vast and acutely detailed, as they have been for several such vague nights in a row. I lived on a mountainside, in the midst of evergreens, under snow. Children ran about. Eight-year-old neighborDeaven was there. He stood at the side of a busy road and peed in the shoulder snow.

In real life, book sales have been booming. As an adjunct to this business, I volunteer at the local FriendsOfTheLibrary thrift outlet. Most of my stock comes from there. It's heavy work. My health seems to be holding up, though, although handling so many books aggravates the arthritis in my hands. For this, I find quercitin-and-bromelain supplements sovereign.

9 November 2012 2 a.m.

I’ve semislept for an hour or so to the stammering drone of the Carl Sandburg documentary poorly relayed via the iPhone’s PBS app, which starts and stops, rebuffers and reverts to audio, and restarts restarts restarts until when it finally halts altogether only 20 minutes of the program has been got through after an hour of trying. I wake all the way up then and kill the app and roll over to find catGreta moved close to my body in her sleep. I extend an arm and she chirrups extending her own alongside it, claws gently grasping at the tips of my fingers in her contentment. But I can’t get comfortable and finally I realize the light through the long high uncovered window above us is uncharacteristically bright, even for the damned orange street lamp that will invade. Could it only be the new snow reflecting? I climb to my knees and blink out through the glass. And it dawns on me that I’ve left the rear porch light on, cruel into the back neighbors’ windows, surely. And wearily I pull my heavy body on its swelled bones to my feet and around the bed to the bathroom to relieve my bladder and then around and down the narrow hallway to the back door to flip the switch and give darkness its due. Back in bed I hunt for something to write with lest I forget an inspiration dawning in my restless mind, but I find no pen, no paper at hand. I won’t be angry with myself this time. I have come to accept that this just happens, however many pens and spiral journals I stockpile around myself: when the time comes that I need them, none will be at hand. I return to the living room and my desk there, find nothing in the dim light. On with the floor lamp and even on my desk find no writing pen, only felt-tip Pilots that will not serve. At last I locate a flowerpot that holds three gel pens of a type I favored three years ago, and I grab them all, and a journal notebook, and return to bed. The first two of the three pens are dry and I toss them to the floor in disgust. Thankfully though the last pen will write and here I form these words.

The inspiration is this—a memory of my forgotten project, the need to return to those semitrance states that gave access to my childhood as I lived it, to return and remember on the page the magic of it before I drown in misperceptions inflicted by a new comprehension of my inborn maladapted neurology. I want to remember innocent. What was the memory, exactly, that caused my start just now? It was so sweet and green. The animals sleep here oblivious to my wakefulness. Greta curled now tightly in to herself. Ted and Piffle, Apple and Lobsang occupying the bed’s lower two-thirds. Obese Ted’s asthmatic wheezing like a concertina rhythm every night all night. I hope I can remember to give him acidophilus. What was it? The memory is gone, now. After all that, the impulse fades, the certainty and the handful of perfect words propelling - all sunk into oblivion.

Regardless, I must write this thing and not forget. I won’t start tomorrow—I’ll be up all night, now, and too sleepy. Then errands and Skip’s flu shot tomorrow, and Deaven will sleep over tomorrow night, so I’ll have him to feed and entertain. Saturday, then—if I have slept tomorrow night.

Where are my pages? Where have I put them?

The cold is here. Rain and snow alternating today. CatGreta, who spends her days outdoors, is perplexed. Wanting out, rushing back in, wanting out again. This would be a good day to bake cow cookies, now that I have a stove, if only I had chocolate chips. I'll have to get some when I go out to mail my book orders.

Oh! here's the sun, and even though it still isn't 40F degrees Greta is OUT, and peacefully ensconced in the vacant-lot weed field near her favorite ground squirrel burrow. I suppose "peacefully" isn't the right word ... "Alertly," then.

Halloween came and went. I carved two big pumpkins. BrotherBrian was a vampire, as he is every year since I bought him rubber vampire teeth he has no other excuse to wear. I made up his face with the pointy eyebrows and hairline and the pallor and the bloody mouth. All evening every few minutes he trotted off to the bathroom mirror to admire himself and I trotted outdoors to watch my jack-o'-lanterns glow in the dark. We had five trick-or-treaters, including the neighbor kids (three) and a pair of sisters aged maybe 7 and 9 dressed as a fairy princess and a Greek goddess, respectively. I suppose no one wants to walk all the way down an empty vacant-lot-lined street just to get to the one little house at the end of it. Plus it was raining.

***

I dreamed this morning of Charles Olson. That is, the dream was not about Charles Olson, but rather he was in the dream, toward the end of it. I had moved to a cheap ugly flatroofed house off the beaten track. It was brown. Looked as though it had been cobbled together from old paneling. But it was roomy, three bedrooms, three baths. Sort of dim. And trashy. It was on low ground by itself next to a cornfield, directly behind a high hill that shielded it from a busy highway. I lived there with my brother. In real life here in town there is a violent little man who wanders about in camo clothes raving about conspiracies and survival. I know his mother, who never has been strong enough to get him to leave home. He used to visit my bookstore and harangue me there for hours. This little man was a character in my dream. I let him stay in my house in a back bedroom of his own. I worried a little about my friends thinking that I always bring home crazy people. Thinking I'd done it again, and getting discouraged with me. The house was full of people for some reason, visiting because of some occasion. Crashing there because it was near the college and it was free. One of the overnighters was Charles Olson. I was in awe of him, afraid to speak to him. He strode about the place being large, ashes dropping from his everpresent cigarette, pontificating to his young male minions, who followed him around like so many pilot fish. He was preparing a manuscript. He needed to make copies of it. I had a small copier and offered to make the copies for him, but he preferred to use his own, a large and complicated machine I was unfamiliar with. As he placed the first page of his manuscript under its lid he was called away. He told me to finish the job and then rushed out of the room, in too much of a hurry to explain to me how his copier worked or to hear my stammered questions. I went to the machine, which was engaged in slowly scanning the page. The buttons were numerous and tiny and placed closely together. I carefully lowered the tip of my right pinky finger onto what I thought was the correct button - "start," perhaps - but instead it depressed the button next to it, weirdly labeled "wash." To my horror I saw little jets along the length of the copier glass issue sudsy water under the lid, drenching and removing the type from the page. I fumbled desperately trying to find some button that would reverse the process. Olson turned up then and was, yes, angry with me. I tried to explain my mistake, said I couldn't find a way to make it stop. "You turn it OFF," he replied. He never looked me in the eye, so disgusted was he, and he grabbed his papers and bolted from the room. There was more to the dream. In one bathroom the doors sealed tightly, and one filled the entire room with water in order to bathe. I was upset because a man had drained it before I could use the bathwater; refilling it was time-consuming, and who knew when there would be more hot water? The house had a narrow hallway that was crowded with academics moving quickly back and forth as they got ready for their symposium. My bedroom was off this hallway and wide open to it, having a wide space where double doors were meant to close but missing the doors. I tried to pull a scrap of curtain across the gap, but it was far too small and my room remained exposed to everyone.

I dreamed about an orphan boy who had been crippled with polio. He was perhaps 7 or 8 years old, black hair, olive skin, thin bent over and walked with difficulty. No one would adopt him, so he was due to be shipped out to the big concrete orphanage forever warehousing place. The social worker in charge of finding him adoptive parents, in her desperation to save him and as a last resort, took him up the hill to the vast rambling shack of a thin overworked motherwoman, black, who already had adopted 14 children. She agreed, resignedly, to adopt the boy, too, and add him to her brood. She stood at a stove stirring soup in a large pot as they talked. I think she resisted at first but finally was convinced to accept him.

I dreamed about many other things. In memory I see faces and have impressions of places and clothes and movements. And I can't articulate any of it.

***

The world is gray and white today and very cold. Some snow fell overnight and continues now midday to fly sideways across the block of yellowdeadweed vacant lots we look out on from our big windows here at the Old Same Place. I am sleepy. My bones hurt and there is a catch in my back from having slept funny.

Hot shower. Bufferins. Grab brotherB and head out for groceries and bookscouting. Over the weekend we brought home all our winter clothes from storage, so I have many warm sweaters to choose from.

A little snow overnight, turned to rain by 7 a.m. I heard the big wind start up around 1, pounding the house, Figured that cold front was sliding by.

Good sleeps lately, good sales, good homemaking. Writing, not so much. Now that we have a real stove it seems almost like a real home here at the Old Same Place. Hotplate & microwave don't really work, hearth-wise. Goddess has no place to hang.

Goldfish in the trough out back are slowing down some. I noticed when I fed them yesterday they'd grown a lot in the last couple of weeks. Ravenous, they are, packing it on for the Big Sleep. Amazes me how the troughwater can freeze but somewhere a little pocket of not-ice exists for the fishies to hunker down in 'til the thaw mid-Spring.

Pages to keyboard this morning, mending to finish and iron, books to wrap and mail. Quiet. Grimgray & chill. Winter's dipping a toe in.

The propane fireplace, our only heat source, came on for the first time this season on October 17 at 4:55 a.m. The smell woke me. Stench of burning dust - acrid smell of old dead skin accumulated in the iron interstices. Ugh.

October 18. Frost on the lawn. Orange morning light slants across the yellow weedlot, goldbrown poplars behind: it's almost a caricature of autumn, impossibly perfect, best fall ever.

Is it fall because we hurtle from solid safe green bright summer into the dimfreezepit of winter?

We're ready, I think. I think there are down comforters and big white pillows at the bottom.

Yesterday and the day before the local propane purveyors plumbed a T'd pipeline under my house and ran a connection up through a hole in the kitchen floor. Now, where never there has been one before in this tiny former office building, a (very used) secondhand gas stove sits in its kitchen, and last night I cooked our first meal ever here sans hotplate and microwave. I was cookin' with gas. You're all invited here for Thanksgiving.

An interesting week behind us here at the Old Same Place. Some disappointments, some confusions, but much accomplished and a lot of love thrown into the bargain.

It was a record-setter for sleep and dreams. I slept easily (hooray!) and woke early to write down several every morning - vivid, detailed, atmospheric dreams that all the same (and in the maddening way of dreams) defied description except in skeletal particulars.

In a lengthy one from last night my Grandma Erma grudgingly bought me a queen-sized bed with stereo and TV built into the foot of it. When the policemen (?) delivered it to my room they wondered how I could live in such a decrepit joint - ancient-of-days linoleum bits clinging to exposed weathered wood, peelingwallpapered walls full of holes that let the weather - and wildlife - in. I laughed and said I'd grown up in just such a room and found it comforting. I especially liked the little lizards who visited: I greeted a little green gecko poking his head in high on the wall.

In other dreams I moved to New York again and again, and again and again was ripped off by scamming real estate agents and scheming thieves. I took hikes along dusty trails and encountered soldiers playing war games. Walked a gauntlet of loitering menaces alone in a latenight city park. Phoned Billy Idol while on a date with James Marsters (Spike!), who teased my hair into a beautiful bouffant.

Anyway, I do not want for material this week.

In the brick-and-mortar world, the bookselling business is great. I have almost 500 titles posted online and sales have made possible little improvements: I got a filling in a molar, and the exposed plywood on the roof of my house has been shingled over, and the propane guys are going to plumb for a stove on Monday. (A stove! No more hotplates!) On the other hand, Husband had to rescue me from an unpaid water bill, and I argued with the storage people to have their lien-lock removed. All our winter clothes are in there and my payment wasn't that late.

I gave up on the garden tomatoes and pulled the plants up, heavyladen with green orbs as they were. The nights were down in the 20s F. all last week and there was no hope. They ripen in the trailer now, slowly slowly on the vine. We have yet to taste one. It was a weird year for tomatoes.

I leave you know. Time for work.

It's very very autumn out there.

Long time no speak. The tenterhooks I hung from pierced deep. Mute nostril anxiety.

The publisher requested I take a third test last Wednesday using an actual chapter from an actual manuscript currently in production - "one of our better ones," they said. The edit must be light. I had 24 hours.

Except I really had far fewer, because the request arrived midafternoon Tuesday and I wouldn't begin the edit until the next morning: my wordmind is uncooperative late in the day; by evening it is all but absent. 'Twas ever thus.

So instead I prepared for the edit by whipping through a printout of the chapter to get a sense of it, make some marks, and to research the quotes and sources for accuracy. If this was one of their "better" manuscripts, I was loath to imagine what the problem submissions must look like. The work was turgid, flabby, meandering, almost unreadable. Several quotations contained errors. It would be a drag - or an adventure. Surely the latter.

I was able to sleep that night (a miracle!) but awoke at 4:30 to record a dream. My gut said get up and edit now, so I did. And good thing - I worked until 25 minutes before deadline at 1pm my time (3pm theirs), with time out to feed animals, breakfast my brother, take a walk midmorning to clear my head.

I changed out repetitious words lest they enrage or hypnotize the reader, changed the voice from passive to active when it seemed warranted. I removed detritus and tightened the language (I had been told "judicious pruning" was OK to keep the book length within bounds). To preserve the colloquial tone I relaxed the few sentences that were arch and academic. And of course I caught every error and corrected for style.

A moderate edit of bad writing, with fact-checking and a spit-shine thrown in for good measure.

And from Wednesday through late yesterday afternoon I heard not a word back. Until, in response to my gentle inquiry, I was told they'd gone with another candidate. That my editing was heavy-handed, the extent of the rewriting unacceptable (although "excellent"), and if they ever came across a manuscript so bad it needed a "complete re-do" they'd let me know.

I was stunned. I had simply edited. I had not done anything substantive, no developmental reorganization, no rewriting whatever. It wasn't a light touch - I am not accustomed to let embarrassing writing stand, for both author's and publisher's sake - but it was far from heavy. It was a moderate line edit of the kind I spent thirty years doing before dropping out due to illness in 2002.

I did shed a tear for the loss of anticipated income, but I did not feel sad. I know I am good; I know I knocked that infernal chapter out of the park. (I also know I was a physical wreck by the end of the series of tests: am I really up to resuming this work?) But publishing has changed a great deal in ten years. It was revealing that, when I searched for correct spelling of a name in the test "Acknowledgments" in the first test, I found the final version of it in a scan of the book page at Amazon. It was rife with errors (including the dreaded possessive "it's") - in the published book!

Publishing really is broken. And I'm still out of work.

The I Ching tells me to write a book, instead. I'll keep sending resumes (help! I need a paycheck!), but for now it's back to the projects for me.

I awoke at four twenty-two
in time
to write my dream down
and start work by four-thirty

My dream
I bought my grandparents' farm at auction
Everyone remarked
about the vigor of my bidding

but I had the resources
every cent I'd need
in my pockets
Then, landowner, I

set about repairing
the land - the great smooth bog
at the back of the property
wetland for wildness

I fed with my presence
They hailed my arrival there
galloping to the gate
or swimming

flying, even
The wild animals loved me
even when the cropless farm failed
and the mortgage fell behind

At the crossroads
I organized
pluck every leaf
and label it for sale

my children frantic
filling the little bags
I must make a sign to place
along the highway

in letters large enough
for the passers-by to read
"lemon leaves" "parsley"
"artemisia"

Awake now I remember
the good parts
the animals, the blue ponds
the pocketsful of money

but down to work now
It's late here in California
when they await your product
in the East

a snuck silent breakfast in the small house
browned banana
from the basket, and o.j.
and a great bowl of almonds

The cagebirds shriek
at my lamplight (shhhh!)
cats and dog soft little snores
from the blanketbed

I switch the machinery on
This is Test Number 3
the whole farm
is counting on me

Last Tuesday morning I awoke from a vivid dream. A gentleman asked me, "Would you like a job? "Oh yes!" I said, and he led me to a spartan room containing only a table and chair. "I will need a computer," I said. He glanced at his colleague. They seemed to think this was unreasonable. "It will have to be a Mac, though. I never understood DOS." They left me there with some papers. Was it a test?

Wednesday morning I awoke from another dream: I was newly employed, late for my orientation as new employee, entering the small company headquarters, settling into my seat in the small auditorium where the talk was in progress already.

Thursday morning, in what passes for my reality, I received in email an inquiry from a publisher who wants to give me editing work (I had sent round a volley of resumes about six months ago). Two dreams of new jobs two days in a row, and then my first offer of work in 10 years.

But, inasmuch as it has been 10 years since I felt well enough and competent to do editorial work, I have lost all my contacts and references from the decades before, and I have no recent work to point to other than an edit I did last year for a friend who self-published her book. Thank heaven for that, because I was able to show that edit to the inquiring publisher. They responded with two elementary tests they said were being given several candidates, from among whom they would choose one to offer work. After three sleepless nights and days laboring in a state of mild panic, I turned in the tests. Now I wait.

I reassure myself: even if they do not choose me, this proves my resume can get a response, and so I must prepare another volley. It's autumn, when publishers must gear up to get their titles in print before the holiday season. They're panicking, too.

4 a.m.

I
I wonder whether yoga
might save my hip.
The month's money's gone already.
Our new dentist got it
just for his howdy-do.

Every night I wake up earlier
in the morning, from the pain.

Why does switching the light on
ease the pain? I wonder.

I never thought I'd get so old so quick.

II
On eleven September
the morning sky
remained black
at five-twenty-five.

Outside
lowdwindle wanemoon
blazed like a razor
against the black

and painlaser stars.

I meant to sleep
but instead woke early
not even the tips
of the fringes
of dreams retreating,

only my bones
grinding away
when I wasn't aware.

III
These pets believe that
because I'm up
it must be time for breakfast

and now the lightbulb's
alerted the cagebirds too.

If I give in now
they'll only be famished again
by nine.

These several days ill, a mono episode behind moving the livingroom furniture around on - Monday, was it? Anyway, sore throat malaise and screaming arthritis in hands hip knees shoulders. Was sorry not to be sprightly for the visit of artguyJim of Yolo (photo below), but we had good talks on Friday and then lunch and long afternoon coffee yesterday. He looks fabulous in his new thin self, cut hair, and brightwhite walrus-y mustache - like the Spaniard he is, with his long dark face. He brought us a half-dozen bags of VHS tapes he no longer wanted (he's a compulsive collector of video and needs to eliminate anything he's replaced with DVD). Sick last night, I couldn't sit in the sitting place to watch movies with Husband, so we organized it around my bed and watched together from there, brotherB cross-legged on the floor. What did we see? Oh, Blood Work for the boy film, a late Clint Eastwood entertainment. For the girl film, The Apartment, a black-and-white Billy Wilder winner from 1959. Very sweet.

And, too, I posted a half-dozen of the rarer tapes for sale online.

It was satisfying to show Jim the little trailer he gave me last December since transformed from its rat-poop cat-pee trashfilled disaster into a tidy colorful comfy writer's shed. (Oh but if only it had a toilet!) He got a chuckle out of it.

It's been sort of a dreamy week, in nightsleeps. Nothing spectacular but strange plots and twists. An image from last night's dreams - outraged high-schoolers carried a 20-foot typewriter platen (on which was painted the word "typewriter") down the street in a protest parade. An elderly teacher had created the giant thing decades before for the generations of young ones to come to express their societal disappointments with. It gave him satisfaction to know they still used it for this purpose.

In reading, I miss Mr. Olson sorely and have tried to make do with other messed-up artists, reading Recovery, John Berryman's autobiographical novel ("it's all true" he wrote in introductory remark) about drying out from his third alcoholic psychosis. It's not very good or interesting but I'll try to finish it.

I put ambient forest-bird noises on the iPhone earlier today, plugged into a small speaker, for the lovebirds (in the cage on the kitchen refrigerator) to hear and respond to. I left it on my bedside table playing away while I started some laundry down the hall. The lovebirds called and shrieked happily for a bit, but then the ambient sounds stopped and they went quiet again. When I went to investigate I found the unplugged speaker in the middle of the bed and the phone nowhere to be seen - and catLobsang crouched there, tail twitching. some crawling and creeping and stretching retrieved the phone from behind and well under the bed. I started the noises up again and watched as - sure enough - Lobsang went wild, attacking the phone again and again until I rescued it and turned it off.

Huh.

I don't know what the typewriter dream means, exactly, but I suppose I will return to trailerSylvia and finish typing those final poem drafts on my old Smith-Corona Skyriter. Today? Tomorrow? Very hard to jump in the river again, or even find it, once you've been drug out on dry land for a spell.

Finished at last the Olson biography

my spiral scribblenotebook spilledover in keepsakes

and of course the figure I'd approached
with such distaste
and condemn
became in his misery isolation and endconfusion
beloved of me
forever.
I am glad I know at least this version of him -
I get it Charles
it's all neurology
for you and me
bless you bless you

carry on

So why study the life and work of an artist you've never liked? Because you follow an impulse and do not question it, just move toward understanding. And over time you get why the impulse came - to hold up a mirror, offer a glimpse of self-knowledge you might not get otherwise. Readings in Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life(Tom Clark, 2000):

[Olson's] dread of the blank page remained strong, a residue of his fear of the formal occasion of composition, whose challenges awakened in him old demons of self-demand. ... [H]e would sidestep the problem by doing his writing elsewhere, on quite literally any scrap of paper ... which came to hand at the moment of inspiration. (pp270-71)

and

"I have started so many birds of it [the Maximus series] not yet brought down I have to watch that the gun don't haul me up in the air, from firing itself dizzy." (p. 235)

and

his compulsive phobic relation to temporality: "I have been 'rushing,' sort of, stealing all the time I could get all my life.... It has always been a race.... [It] was compelling enough for me to continue along the same course even without interruption ... almost any time lost from the pursuit was more than I could stand." In his battle against time, family perennially lost out. (p. 274)

As good an example of Aspy obsessiveness as I have read. And on and on. Me hermano.

Speaking of brothers, artguyJim writes that he will visit us next weekend, driving up the 350 miles from Yolo to attend the annual Harvest Ball in Eagleville/Surprise Valley, 50 miles further on from here. Jim is a sculptor-in-wood of some renown, at least in California, and the person who throws the party is a former student of his, another sculptor of some renown, at least in New York. Oh but it will be very good to see him, who is like family to me in his kindness and camaraderie over the years. I own several of his sculpted pieces - mostly famously and beautifully a pair of carved rattlesnakes coiled around one another within a rattle-shaped box, a large piece I keep in storage because this house is too small to display it in.

Cool days and chilly nights. The light, the air feel and smell already of autumn. Big changes ahead, for certain. Tomorrow night we will be pleased to witness the Blue Moon of August 2012 rising over the Warner Mountains. It must be time to rearrange all the furniture ...

Mowing mowing mowing made a nice smooth yard of many greens and textures - the "lawns" comprising alfalfa, salsify, white and yellow sweet clovers, white clover (not enough!), wild asters, dandelion, bull thistle, sow thistle, and some actual grasses. The feel of the place really is quite sweet when the greens are all tall and flourishing. It's like standing in a fallow field: one keeps alert for foxes. Alas, however, it is yard, and must at intervals be cut. So yesterday all day I dragged the machine around the place and carted heaps of moist green clippings to the compost piles. Nothing burns hot as alfalfa there. And then afterward set the oscillating sprinkler going to recover everything in its slow rhythms.

I wish I had the physical juice to make a garden. But that ain't happening anymore. So I have some big planters filled with squash and tomato and herb plants, comfrey and yarrow here and there. We had an early frost night before last and probably last night, killing back the vegetables' outermost leaves. It's hard to get a full growing season at this altitude. I must do more research to find seeds for species bred to Siberia. Well, High Country Gardens for one is a good catalog for that. I must make room to start things indoors - invent a hanging nursery for the east windows. Then maybe one year finally we may get to taste a homegrown tomato.

Rough week, rough weekend. Not for the household as a whole. But for me a series of fumblings and bumblings and frustrations at every turn, howlings and wailings and weeps, topped off by an ill-conceived jaunt yesterday evening to show my support for the recent marriage of a friend.

I thought the town's name "Adin," which is 40 miles west of here through the mountains, yet for some reason still conceived of it as Canby, another, smaller town only 20 miles west on the same highway. So I misjudged the travel time and the expense of fuel, and spent a week's grocery money on gas and was 30 minutes late to the celebration.

I was surprised and glad, for the couple, to see the large size of the gathering in the little community hall there. I had my brother with me; Husband wisely stayed home, more accepting of his social limitations. And he had to work.

But I drove forth bravely, as always envisioning happy smiles of welcome and hugs and dances and new persons met and befriended. And as always confronted instead with the vastness of my capacity for self-delusion. I knew exactly one person there - the bride - and she was preoccupied, naturally. I had met the new hubby and he greeted me warmly, but as I was about to utter his name my anxiety froze my brain, convinced me it was wrong, and I faltered over it, seeming to have forgotten it instead. Thought paralysis - the Aspy reaction to social stress.

So B and I sat alone at our table on the periphery, fidgeting, watchful for our friend the bride so we might tell her how lovely was her dress and exclaim over her rings and wish her well. She walked from table to table, chatting and laughing, but returned to the front of the room before getting to us. And then a grace was said by the local pastor, and the entire assembly stood as one and rushed forward to load their plates with feast. My spirit sank through the floor: I would never be able to join a throng of indifferent unknowns in order to fill our plates, and anyway the question was moot - the offering was lasagna and bread and three beautiful decorated sheet cakes, all delicious-looking to and inedible by my brother, who has celiac disease (gluten sensitivity), and by me, determined to stay wheat-free out of solidarity.

We hadn't come for the food, anyway, and my stress level peaked with the forward rush of the crowd, and I took brotherB by the hand and fled with him out the building's back door. To compensate a little for the beautiful food he did not get to eat, I bought him a chocolate bar at the local mercantile, and then we drove sedately over the mountain passes and past the pastures with their hundred cows and finally into our driveway. We walked in the door, and Husband inquired, and I burst into tears.

So it is resolved: henceforward, however much I want to attend such events, however close I may feel to the celebrants, my response will be "We are unable to attend social events, but our thoughts are with you." And they will be. Because I do love people so much. But they terrify me.

Focus hard to come by lately. Strategizing around the ADD - using guarana to simulate Ritalin, for example. It works but then my heart beats too fast. So I switched to the 5-Hour Energy stuff. Gave me energy but scattered my brain absolutely everywhere. Guess I'll stick to coffee and meditation.

The house trim paint chose this year to peel mostly off, and the painter I found to remedy that turned out to be (as so many solvent-workers seem to be) a binge-drunk who ultimately disappeared with my paint and my money, having covered most of the trim while not having sanded or filled anything, and leaving the back door area paint-free. All I have for him is a cell number and the local bank manager he gave as a reference. But the painter won't return calls, and the manager isn't comfortable telling me where the painter lives. This weekend I'll buy a quart of exterior paint matched as close as I can to the gray he used and finish the job on my own. My own fault for giving cash to an alcoholic - before he'd finished the work. I'll keep a card with local AA meeting info on it to give him if he ever turns up again. These guys are fairly helpless behind the solvent damage their livers take.

Smoke persists, but today seems better than yesterday. Firefighters will contain the Barry Point fire to the north of us by the weekend, I have read. It's surpassed 150 square miles. I don't know how the fires south and east of us are doing; surely they are contained by now. One was approaching 100,000 acres, last I heard, and the other 70,000 or so. Saturday last came the blessed rain, all morning the soft even downpour that helped workers get a handle on this mess. Breathing has not been easy for anyone, and the line for asthma meds at the pharmacy last Friday was lengthy and loud.

I cooked my first green curry last night. Used every pan, bowl, and cooking appliance in the house before I was through, but it was delicious, and now that I've done it I'll know how to streamline the process next time. Matters are complicated somewhat by the fact that I have no stove, and must use three hotplates that function with varying degrees of cooperativeness - one doesn't get hot enough, one always gets too hot, and the third stays at middle heat. Lots of pan swapping and shifting. Burning and boilover. Undercook, overcook. Alas.

I've finally reached the final third of the Charles Olson biography. I didn't like him to start with and now that I've learned so much about him I really don't like him. But I am curious to know how the story ends, what becomes of the peripheral persons - wife mistresses babies rivals chums. I wish I had more respect for his thought process, but it was so ego-entwined that all his ideas seem tainted and suspect.

I'm returning to The Awakened Self: Encounters with Zen by Lucien Stryk. By the time the Olson is finished the Stryk will be underway. This one's a reread, maybe even a third go. I find myself drawn to zen from time to time and because I retain so little of what I study I find myself having to read the same basics again and again. Maybe some understanding will stick this time.

And I've begun rereading Jung's Man and His Symbols, as well. I first read it when I was in school 30 years ago, and I can use a refresher. Husband and I have been working with dream symbols, myths, and fixed-star astrology.

Have you ever experienced a niacin flush? I never had. I thought I was immune to it. But I took a handful of vitamin supplements an hour ago and suddenly I'm all over maroon and itching like fire. I can't type one more word! Agh!

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Nord, California, 1978

An old man lives in the grain bin across the road. The owner of the property there ignores him. The bin is always surrounded by pigeons. I wonder if the old man feeds them? What does he eat? He gets up early in the morning and emerges from the bin with a gunny sack and spends the entire day walking for miles down one side of the railroad track and back up the other, gathering flotsam for his sack. He probably doesn't smell good. How does he live in the dark like that, in the bin? He walks and his back is straight and his stride determined and of course he's a little crazy. I asked Gary Corea, my neighbor, about him. Gary told me that the old man is well educated and says some surprising things. Gary said, "That ol' man don't do no one no harm. Stays the summer there every year. He's got the gentlest, kindest voice you ever heard, and he says the damnedest things."

Smokechoked. Nose & lungs filling. How to cool the baked house overnight with windows shut? Sometimes a moment when a feral gust kicks a hole in it and the sky may be seen and a deep unencumbered breath inhaled. Two weeks at least of this misery but imagine how it is in the valleys around. We sit on a plateau. Imagine living in a bowl. New line of thunderstorms - shall we call them lightningstorms? - said to approach in days to come. Extra firefighters arrive at the campgrounds.

Out window: catGreta hunts in the barren yellow field, a graceful black form slinking around dead weeds to groundsquirrel burrows. In here dogApple growls under her breath watching the deer step across the field's far end. How she longs to escort them! Everything out the window colored in feeble sepia or washed in diluted pisslight.

And so we move on. Continuing in Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, I find all kinds of resonances:

[Olson's] inability to control his addictive 'whoring after culture,' his involuntary adherence to the role of hopeful artist as past generations had defined it, brought him nothing but shame. ...

Now, faced with money problems that were obviously temporary but very real, he stubbornly dodged the whole annoying work issue, squandering what little cash he had in compulsive book-buying sprees, sometimes spending whole afternoons prowling dealers' shops in search of the one line, lost in an obscure volume, which might spur him forward to new writing discoveries. ...

And once he finally stumbled into his vocation - teacher - some delightful description of his initial classrom forays:

Drawing unexpected connections with breathtaking speed, he leaped across space and time, linking Troilus and new astronomy, Frazer and Freud, field physics and Frobenius, projective geometry's 'gains of space' and epic poetry's timeless mythic archetypes, creating an open-ended architecture of knowledge that placed twentieth-century man in vivid relation to cosmic patterns of eternity. ...

"We are a perpendicular axis of planes," he declared, "constantly being intersected by planes of experience coming in from the past - coming up from the ground, the underground tide - going out to the future."

Confused though his students might have been by such utterances in 1948, said one, "We got his big message: stick to where your passions take you."

His life, foreshortened as it was by the alcoholism that seems the inevitable refuge of every male (artist or not) who is so obviously high on the autism spectrum, seemed destined for greater things even than he managed in his confusion to accomplish. No one understood these neurologies back then. With their (our) retarded emotions, inability to function as adults at the ages society expects them to, confusion as to purpose, and yet an unquenchable thirst for learning (the child's inbuilt seeking that in our case does not switch off in the adult), and curious inability to interact effectively with humans in the human world, the high-spectrum character doses himself more and more heavily with anesthetic until - JUST AT THE MOMENT WHEN HIS MATURITY WOULD CLICK IN AND HIS GIFTS BECOME OBVIOUS - he succumbs to its physiological effects.

That's my theory, anyway. I read this same sequence of events over and over again in the alcoholic male artist. Kerouac, Pollock, Olson. They never knew then that this was nature's weird painful way of holding them back until they might blossom in old age.

Females, whose hormonal makeup enables them better to mimic the neurotypical world and blend in at least a little, seem less likely to succumb to substances, but if they have made families, they seem equally inevitably to end up stranded in some remote place, completely estranged from the love their youth brought them so abundantly. I do not refer to myself only but to my female forebears who each in turn have ended up this way, and also to every stranded mother I have befriended out here in the wilderness. Bewildered, they are, to a one. What did I do? Where did they go? We can reach out no better now than we could then. We are wounded animals at our core, and the best we can do is crawl off to be alone.

But I've figured it out, kind of. The closeness with offspring seems to persist until the child is in his or her 30s. Then he stands solid on his feet and no longer needs to reach out to Mom. In neurotypical families, this is when Mom takes over the reaching, calling and visiting and sending little gifts, doing the chitchat required to keep the extended relation strong and vital, earning her contributing role of grandmother. But us folks who score 25 and above on the diagnostic spectrum (Husband is a 28; I am a 34) have no clue how to do that. Our efforts are awkward, sporadic, and after the first failure or two makes for sufficient embarrassment, we retreat, confused, and wonder why everyone around us gets those visits and calls and gifts while we get only silence and dark misunderstanding.

I fear nothing can be done about this. It's a matter of hard wiring. Certain areas of our brains simply don't connect properly. We contain vestiges of wild animal behavior. Terrors and solitarinesses. I don't want to be tranquilized into a false sociability. So perhaps I will fade away.

And now it's time for my own old age to kick in. I feeled somewhat healed and certainly more mature than I was for most of my life. Wait, though ... No I don't. I feel exactly as I felt at 6 and 10 and 14 - those childhood years when I was regarded as a litte adult with wisdom beyond her years - and I stuck there into adulthood - when I was regarded as an incompetent infant.

I think you have to be here to get it.

Anyway, back to work.

Skipped study for a couple of days: I had gotten a response on Facebook from an old high school classmate - the only classmate I'd been able to find - and it turned out to be my old nemesis. The rich kid, the smart kid - the two-points-more-in-IQ guy who used to ridicule me mercilessly whenever I mispronounced (or he thought I mispronounced) a word, etc. He went on to become a doctor, a renowned blood expert, a professor at a decent university. I found the 60-year-old version to be kind and open, and we had such a flood of correspondence over the course of three days, the relief of it overwhelmed me, and not much beyond the wrapping and mailing away of my precious library, bit by bit, has happened.

But now, after the sharing and the healing, the inevitable silence resumes. Bye-bye now. His three grown children are off at good universities, his 26-year marriage is solid as a rock, and I am left to contemplate the difference financial security and parental support and guidance can make in the life of even someone from the same tiny farm village I went to school in.

I found myself weeping in gratitude that he was able to accomplish so much, and yet I did not envy him. My lessons too benefit the collective, at least in my soft conception of things. And I still have a little bit of time ... and even if I don't, maybe something will last, or that wild gene I carry will blossom elsewhere down the line.

Still much study, very little writing going on here at the Old Same Place. Actually, for the past ten days I have been preoccupied digging up and posting for sale any valuable books and DVDs from my little collections. I have nearly 200 listed now, and not too surprisingly they have been selling briskly, one, two, and three per day. I say not surprisingly because that's as it always happens with fresh-posted books: the as-new and sought-after titles will fly out immediately. Eventually the dregs will settle and the sales doldrums set in. But we will not dwell on this. I am very grateful for the little injection of extra income that will keep the fridge filled while I pay people to paint and repair the house. The trim has been rescued, although not well. (Husband overheard one painter say to the other, "There's good enough and then there's perfect. Around here no one will pay for perfect." I was expecting Best Work. Sadly, once again I got Good Enough. If I'd known there was a choice I surely would have paid for it.) Next, I get the roof repaired. Plywood is showing through where shingles have blown away. I wanted to replace the whole shebang, just like I wanted to paint the whole house, but only piecework is affordable.

Still pushing through the Tom Clark bio of Charles Olson, and the reading peripheral to it (Yeats, Pound, and next up, Melville - repeats for all; refreshers, I guess I could call them). I have to return to my own work soon. When I get thrown off course/schedule I have to wait for my frustration and irritation to evaporate before sitting down to it again, lest I forget the wordrhythms (sensitive, elusive critters). This is I suppose another Aspergers/ADD deal. Lovely finally to have these pegs to hang excuses from.

Days continue witheringhot, near 100F, and fires all around make for constant twilight. Big meteor showers tonight and tomorrow night surely will be obscured.

Not yet two hundred titles listed in my seller account
yet the books are selling swiftly, one or two per day
at good prices this time, not like
when I had 7000 and most were worthless.
That's because these are not some vestigial inventory
but because these volumes belonged to me, were cherished by me,
were sought and bought at some expense
of time and money, one by one. I loved them. Love them.
Now must shed them because we're sinking fast
again. My books like bobbing little life preservers. Still
the ones that have no moneyworth--the titles of no interest
to online buyers--the titles I get to keep, hurrah!--I smile
with downturned mouthcorners, happy to have them,
my jewels no one understands the value of, my various hard editions
Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, John Milton
amd Zbigniew Herbert--my Dickensons Audens and Carruths
and their cohort--you can't give these away.
Thank the heavens.
The rest will feed us through the summer
and our future moves will be lightened
by a box or two. Full bellies for now and no harm done.
All the same, each little package I mail away
bears the invisible print of my
sometimes bitter kiss good-bye.

Best get out and mow the back 40 before it gets any warmer. Baling might be the answer there. Not only has feral alfalfa taken over the yard, but it has been allowed to run riot and even go to seed and is so tall I will have to elevate the mower (poor thing!) several inches just to get through. The weather was so hot, I will say in excuse; I couldn't face the toil. But now of course the weather is just as hot and the toil is many times amplified. Familiar story.

I bit the bullet and posted many books for sale online yesterday, using the non-pro-bookseller rate. Less will be removed from my account there every month but my priveleges are fewer and a chunk of money is taken out of each individual sale. This means I will post only fairly valuable books, which I had planned to do anyway. I have about 50 titles up.

I didn't want to go there again - bookselling - but we pretty desperately need cash. The house trim is peeled and exposed and cracked, and if something isn't done to rescue it soon it will be permanently damaged. So a housepainter is coming here today with a variety of grays for me to choose from, and is letting me pay in installments, and over the weekend he will prep and fill and paint the trim. Only. The house itself is in good shape, still. But even this expense is fairly devastating, and so - back to bookselling. Not that it will bring much at this point. Even back when I had 7000 titles listed I only netted $500 a month. I can't see how my 50 little books (so far) will do much more than inconvenience me. I just have to keep culling my own collections and posting titles every day, I suppose.

Walked with husband yesterday evening as the moon rose. Used phonecamera close-up to photograph the scene, and this made for a nicely fuzzy, sort of impressionistic snapshot of moonrise. I was surprised not to remember my dreams this morning: it must be the first times ever that the full moon hasn't delivered me a stunner.

These places & persons as things & spots are all inside any one of us. ... the whole world & all experience is, no matter how real, only a system of metaphor for the allegory (Keats called it) a man's life is.
- Charles Olson

Some chemical smell, oldfashioned shoe-polish or melting electrical, overpowering here but not a stroke (yes!) because I lose the scent when I walk through other rooms. I've checked the outlets and the cords, put the computer to sleep ... is it coming through this window? Someone burning plastic? Ech, nauseating.

I'd wanted to have the Thing finished, what I'm writing. I finished final edits on paper yesterday late morning, meant to keyboard them early afternoon, but as I was winding toward the work (lightening anxiety by organizing rooms, thereby organizing mental energy, as I do) Husband descended to start his own day. I told him what I was doing and that I had a deadline. He congratulated me and proceeded to talk virtually without stopping for breath until nearly suppertime, and me practically in tears. I still do not know how to express needs firmly. I had expected him to coffee and withdraw, which he does every day without fail. But not yesterday. And oddly enough not back on the day when this material all came to me in a rush I had to get down or lose it, and so I lost much of it, back in December.

Anyway I blurted finally that I had to get going, and he asked to remain in the room then reading quietly, and so I went outside to water plants and unconfuse myself. When I returned he had gone upstairs. I sat down then before the text column on the screen and soon realized I was so weary and overheated I would lose the music that sang to me so clearly just that morning. So I closed the file, showered, curled up for sad nap.

No one's fault, I decided. Something wants me to slow down. And it was true, after the morning's edit I was burned out. So why can't I begin work today? Husband has promised not to talk to me until evening. But I am groggy today - where's the jar of guarana? - and having doubts again, and since the deadline for online submissions where I wanted it to go is midnight tonight, I'm afraid I will rush now and damage it.

I'll get to it, in a bit. I'll take it easy. Other, later deadlines are out there.

Anyway, eventually I'll have a MacBook and can do computer work in trailerSylvia.

I received a bushel of cheap used books in yesterday's mail. Husband accepted the packages at the door, to my embarrassment. Why books ordered on this day and that over the course of a month must always arrive at once on a Monday I will never understand.

I finished reading Brother Souls all teary-eyed on Sunday afternoon, and so today I've started several other books hoping one or two will grab hold of me. Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg's Composed On the Tongue account of his acquaintance with Ezra Pound at Rapallo. Poor EP! All Ginsberg seems to do is sing him Hare Krishna. But I love the words he finally squeezes from the otherwise stubbornly silent 82-year-old Pound:

[Ginsberg]"Ah well, what I'm trying to tell you - what I came for all this time - was to give you my blessing then, because despite your disillusion - unless you want to be a messiah ... anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?"

He hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.

"I do," he said " - but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along, that spoiled everything - " This is almost exact.

... and I responded, "Ah, that's lovely to hear you say that ... " and later "as it says in I Ching, 'No harm.'" (pp.8-9)

Olson will be more difficult to crack. He seems so lacking humor or joy. But he shares my birth date of December 27 (though his is 1910), so I am curious.

Those are the two volumes near to hand as I type. There are others.

I was thinking yesterday how adult life is like a kind of exile in a foreign land and when you approach old age you want to go home again, live as you did as a child, where things are familiar. And so people who grow up in the countryside go off to cities and then return to the country late in life, and I, who formed my Self in central Los Angeles and have sought remoteness most of my adult years since then, now long to immerse myself again in urban energies.

I think maybe it's immoral, environmentally, for humans not to live in cities. Perhaps the only ones who should be allowed to live in the wilderness are holy persons - farmers, monks, and such. Then we would have to learn how to make cities healthy and livable because we could not flee them.

But who would want to live in such a restricted world?

[Midafternoon addendum: I sought Husband's brief company for coffee at lunchtime. When it seemed clear his (otherwise welcome) stories would continue again for a while I stood abruptly in his midsentence and said "I've got to go." And he said, laughing, "I'm so proud of you," and stood himself and kissed me. God sent him to me for many reasons, but surely one of them was this lesson.]

Image of Charles Olson from pavellasmusic.wordpress.com via Google

As you get older, you husband your attentions, they seem to concentrate themselves more, you are more fluent about less. You use your energies and, with any luck, they burn with an intenser light. ... One can't get on if paralyzed by the grinding knowledge of the brevity of life, and the ephemerality of works. And getting on is our most important duty, a vow we make in the worthiness of the baffling endeavor of remaining human. One part of being human is sometimes failing to keep the faith. For a writer, who spends his time so many fathoms down in the murk and complexity of the human personality, periods of "savourlessness" are inevitable. As I say, they usually presage an on-coming change, and the only way to initiate that change is to pass through (not around) the temporary melancholia. You can't reach dawn without enduring the night. Wishing won't make it so.

            --John Clellon Holmes

Mild summer. Dry, because this is desert after all, but, once you've acclimated, the 90-degree days are kind of pleasant. It takes most of the day to reach that temperature, after all. And nights are cold, so we're lucky there. It's the searing light that gets to the plants, but they seem to be getting used to it.

Coming off my third monthly three-day greenapplepurge. I didn't do so well fasting this time, and so yesterday was very difficult. But I was well by day's end and it's another month before I do that again. Meantime, discomfort is gone, again, and I continue to dodge the surgery bullet.

Oh but I was so hungry I stuffed myself with bowls of stew last night, frenzied almost. And was finally calmed.

Husband continues to instruct me in astrology. Finally I understand progressions, and that adds a new dimension to self-understanding - and other-understanding. How the natal sun advances around the chart at a degree per year (and other planets by something likewise) so you can see how you have changed and grown over time, encountered and overcome challenges (or not), and so on. My own sun has moved from the thudding Capricorn of my birth, through the disconnected Aquarius of my middle age, and now shines in Pisces, of all places! Which makes such sense, as I have remarked often on my sensations of feelings thawing and love understood.

I was ill three days with my chronic mono after doing all that heavy lifting last weekend (damn! I didn't take my tinctures to prevent that, it was so long since I'd been sick), and then with the fasting thing I was out of commission all week. I worried yesterday that it might be that I've forgotten how to be well. I am so accustomed to my bed and pillows.

So I must remember my tinctures and vitamins and brotherB's, too, and to drag us outdoors for walks every day in the sun. B's becoming sturdy again, too. Almost a full head of hair now.

Have I anything of interest to say? Evidently not. I hear husband running water in his bedroom sink for brushing teeth, and now his TV goes on and the urgent sounds of a broadcast horse race trickle down the stairs. From brother's room the clunks and thuds of dresser drawers opening and closing as he put his clean laundry away. Lovebirds screech from the kitchen. Doves coo from the powerlines out the window. dogApple sighs in sleep at my feet.

We had chosen CarmelValleyVillage as destination of our planned Great Escape from the ModocPlateau, a concrete location to visualize living in and so create an energy to follow out. Lightning can't strike unless the stricken object first sends up a little tendril of request, and we imagined that's what our picturings were, in the energetic scheme of things.

It made sense, because Husband's siblings and mother all live in nearby Monterey, and his children from former marriage live or visit nearby. It would make it easier to keep in contact. And I had grown up in Southern California (when I wasn't exiled to the Iowa farm of my grandparents) and could easily imagine the environment there, familiar enough.

But the picture wouldn't hold, much as I loved the hot smell of baked earth and manzanita I conjured, and the sensation of dappled shade.

Next we chose Chicago, where Husband grew up and lived and worked for many years. He misses it often, I think, and still has friends there. I had no sense imagery to put with it - my only contact with Chicago was a 30-minute airport layover en route to New York in 1982 - but we collected photographs and websites and I was getting to know its layout pretty well.

Although it never felt quite right.

New York might never have occurred to us if we hadn't played around one day with location astrology to see where our planets and asteroids were best aspected. And there it was, New York City, shining like a great beacon across the basins and ranges and plains between here and there. As though made for us.

So here's a street map of Manhattan on the corkboard at the foot of my bed, and this week a promising series of dreams located there, in which I always get an apartment easily and easily afford it.

I think it could be the place for us to stay, for a while. That's what the stars say, anyway. Now to do something to make that lightning strike ...

"Knowledgeable." That's the key. It was only after beginning the input of new book inventory into the old online bookseller account that I remembered. It came up fuzzily, with a fringe of little question marks, but soon enough I had full recall of the fact that no money can be made whatever UNLESS you have listed at least several thousand titles. For one thing, there's the monthly fee for using the web site. For another, all that competition means that even a five-star rating can't help you much.

Sobering. What am I doing??? I thought. Do I REALLY want to get into all this again? If it isn't a full-time activity then it's just a giant energetic drain with no hope of profit. You're either in with both feet or not.

So ... not.

Whew. That was close.

***

Labored a third afternoon yesterday in the heat and dust with friendKathleen emptying the Bookworm shelves and making a space in my storage unit for the boxes therefrom. Today I lounge and study and recover, grateful for the unexpected gift of cool gray the morning brought.

I just read a study that says persons, like my brother, who have celiac disease, more often than not react to corn gluten, too. This explains why he hasn't bounded back as strongly as I'd hoped when I changed his diet two years ago. He has regrown about 60 percent of his hair, and I noticed yesterday a bunch of pale whiskers just visible on his pale cheeks. So we have made some progress. My main concern is bone loss, though. He gets smaller by the day and has developed scoliosis. I trot him 'round in the sun every day and give him supplements, but corn has been a big part of our diet.

Out with it, too, then. Damn.

Spent yesterday afternoon in bowels of local Friends of Library "Bookworm" used book trailer clearing shelves of decades-old compost to make way for (finally, at long last) fresh stock. Much of what we removed will be "recycled" at local junk store or landfill, but I was privileged as volunteer to skim the cream, though not as completely as I would have liked. Found a couple of volumes that will go for 50 or 100 dollars, but I may spend tomorrow rooting around in the stacked garbage-book boxes (awaiting Monday pickup) for more.

Today we continue - I have offered a free corner of my storage unit for the group to store the boxes of high-graded material soon to be donated to another FOL group 50 miles to the north, which is starting its own shop and needs good stuff to get off the ground.

I am so incurably mercenary I can't stand the thought of any possibly valuable volumes being lost, even though the idea of returning to my old bookseller daze makes me queasy. It was something I did while my mind recovered from emotional breakdown mid-2000s, when I couldn't think well enough to do anything else. I enjoyed it. Eventually though my physical health broke down, too, and in 2010 I got rid of my entire 20,000-volume stock to make space in my hovel and to rest for a few years. I can't believe I'm into it again, but the profit potential when one is knowledgeable is seductive - especially if, like me, one is barely surviving on minimum-wage dole while attempting to create "art."

Flat dry heat and relentless hammer of UVs returns. The plants burn and curl no matter how moist the soil.

I dreamed last night of an old African woman who fed the famished inhabitants of the drought-stricken interior from the gardens around her hut beyond the mountains, in a green moist crescent up against the sea and sand.

Nights chock full o' dreams lately - New Moon.