Change feels like death because it is

On Saturday morning I'm driving outta the state I've lived nearly 30 years with a truck full of stuff and one orange cat. People keep asking me how I'm feeling. I have days where I have a lot of feelings, and days where I'm too drained from Taking Care Of Things to access my feelings. Then I feel bad for not having access to my feelings at moments when I am sitting across from someone I will miss very much, who I know I will miss very much, but who I can't feel the imminent absence of because it's still not happening Yet.

At other times, I just feel insane with greed for more time. For all that I'm inflicting this on myself, for the best possible reasons, I am greedy.

Yesterday, one of my closest friends tattooed the outlined of the Great Lakes on my back, moving from west to east. From Wisconsin to New York. Wisconsin sits behind my heart, and together with an older piece, I have Wisconsin shapes cradling two sides of my left lung.

And then there's the spot where the Mackinac Bridge, three different lakes, a hoard of intersections all converge at my spine, which hurt the most of the whole process. It also happened to be the boundary between Superior/Michigan and everything else. Those first two lakes I know. Intimately. Summers on Lake Michigan at my grandfather's house, perched on the flat shore rocks reading or watching the sunset. The bay where I cut my foot and needed stitches and my mother carried me dripping down the beach. The first picture of an endless vastness I would later understand was just child's play compared to the ocean.

And Superior, my second great love, iceburged in April and desolate. Flooded with tourists in July. The place I have been most myself, that lone woman driving her red Honda, stopping when she feels like it, camera in hand at every thunderstorm and overlook.

And ahead, there's Huron, Erie, Ontario. Places I know, but more vaguely. Shores I have stared from, but only once, years ago. Places that don't - yet - feel part of my world.

Pain is at the boundaries. Between land and water. Between skin and air. Known and unknown. The moment when you put the truck into gear and tilt down the hill toward the highway, slowly at first and then with gathering speed.

July roundup

Posts that should be on this blog right now but aren't:

• Love song to my summer CSA: a refrigerator bursting with green things, the dramatic fight against time as I try to use everything before it goes bad, and the inherent feast/famine cycle of receiving one large crate of perishables every two weeks.
• A list of the changes in store mid-August, when everyone in town changes households, and whole configurations of couplehood either conjoin further or pull apart or more people leave for grad school. It looks like Willy St. and the North side are the places to be in 2012. I'll stay squatting on my shelf by the Arboretum, a little solitary, with no where I can walk to except one lovely little beer hole and the Trader Joe's I've forsworn in favor of a co-op, but still within biking distance of most other desirable things.
• I got a new job. It will completely reconfigure how my time and energy are spent. Back to more reporter-like tasks (though I won't go so far as to say it's journalism). Science writing of a sort. I'm excited.
• Some failures in my non-job life. Some are the usual failures. Some are new. What have we learned about ourselves and what we owe the world, et cetera.
• Pictures of spiders, boats, bicycles, clothes flapping housewifeish on the laundry line, and this t-shirt I turned into a tank top. A view of the street at 6 a.m. A view out a window that you hope no one looks up into. The particular trickles of sweat inside your elbow when you talk on the phone in Wisconsin in July. And so on.
  

After the job switch, I plan to focus a bit more on longform nonfictional writing of various types. This blog is second on the list of venues to benefit from that kind of attention.

Errors in the pre-flight stage

Hello blog.

My poems are condensing into thin, tight little clumps of words.

I blame technical writing.

Also feelings of spareness and economy that the world seems to encourage. The fat, rolling lyrics of Richard Siken seem like a relic of the 90s.

Note that this generalization is based on one example.

At work today I found a poem:



Everything is going so well for the personal lives of people I know. It's hard to believe, some days when the peepers chirp chirp in the wetlands, that the political landscape is so fraught, that there is so much misery in the public discourse.

Then I stumble back onto the news and my eyes are full of laserbeams.

Oh, spring.

Also I shouldn't watch Dollhouse before bed

It is a time of strange dreams. Like: I kill my cat and someone I love and worry most of the time that I can't hide the evidence. only when I wake do I realize the void I've created in the act of murder. Like: I move back to South Africa and my fatherly-but-aloof editor hugs me when I submit my job application and says "Christina" like he already has an assignment for me. Like: an endless barrage of the #wiunion hashtag. I wake at 2:30 a.m. and can't stand to hear anything, not the cat purring, not my breath, not the water rushing through the pipes downstairs.

From the french passager which means "to pass by"

I have been reading about the passenger pigeon, which reportedly roosted by the hundreds of thousands over areas of hundreds of miles in Wisconsin at one point. Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon and the last known of them all, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. I always think about her on my birthday.

I have been reading Wikipedia and even Wikipedia is enough to break the heart:

"One method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flock landed near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger."

I think Wisconsin, my birthplace birthright and motherland, ought to be filled with dark clouds of pigeons.

Love Train

Oh Wisconsin. I love you so much. It's the kind of love where I want you to be even better than you are because it will be good for you, not because it will be good for me. For what it's worth, Wisconsin, I think a train would have been really, really good for you. Especially a train that went from Chicago to Minneapolis and stopped in Madison. Think of that glittering modern future, laid out on tracks. The movement of people is the movement of ideas, and the movement of ideas is a good way to stimulate a knowledge-based economy. Not to mention ship goods efficiently in an age when oil is increasingly dear (money-wise and environmental-cost-wise). You know, no one outside America really knows Wisconsin? We are a wasteland. North of Chicago, south of Canada. I want everyone to know how lovely you are, how good and caring your people are. Even when sometimes your people are actually a lot like people everywhere - dumb, easily mislead, and yes, sometimes actually selfish and not at all caring.

My 5-year plan, not so much a plan as a "Eureka!' scribbled on a a napkin, includes grad school. Even though I believe firmly in sticking to a thing you love even when it's cranky and run by idiots and not so fun to be around, I've now, today, this minute, decided I am not going to bother applying to Madison. Not even as a "might as well give it a try." I have lived here so long. I am curious about other places. The near future is as good a time as any to seek them out. That's still at least 2012, anyway. Maybe the world will have ended by then, like they say it will.

We live in interesting times, friends.

Seasonal synesthesia

Even the word "December" is airy and light. Cold, but clear-headed. If somber, than musingly so. A seriousness in which you discover things the snow (snow!) has buried.

Forward

Dear blog. I want to talk about politics, I want to talk about poetry, and I want to talk about the things I am doing that are not my job.

There is just too much happening.

I do miss my cat, though.

Also, I kind of want to give Wisconsin a big hug. We'll make it, guys. In one form or another, we'll make it through these politics we do not like, which scare us, which make us clutch our guts in pain at their illogic, and we'll do what we can do limit the damage, and when we get the chance, we'll turn things around in a better direction.

I hold up the hope that the new Republican leadership will somehow stumble upon success by accident, and, worst case, I hope they are somehow right about what will fix this state's economy. Because that's better than them being wrong and all of us suffering for it.

This week has been like a dream, crawling from one bizarre task to the next. Today I am in a strange city with no time to really explore it, after a long night wandering a hospital, befriending nurses, breathing in time with the beeping of a thousand different machines, trying not to gawk at the neurosurgical patients with wires and tubes streaming from their skulls like futuristic hair.

I want more than anything else to be home in Wisconsin, stirring up the strange brew that our politics have become. I am trying not to be scared about the future, but I am feeling particularly fiercely in love with/loyal to the concept of "a Wisconsin" now that its fate is in the hands of people whose values are not mine. This is probably normal for political losers. I just feel like there's more to hash out, and I feel personally responsible for fixing it all, somehow. This is narcissism, truely, but I'm not alone.

November

I spent my election night at the victory party for the guy whose victory I feared most. Some thoughts on Dane101 today.

Then I went home and said goodbye to an old friend.



I'm a one-cat cat lady now. This was also my first non-goldfish pet death, so I'm wallowing in it a bit. I think burial feels especially grim when you walk away from it with a shovel in one hand and a lantern in the other.

There are good things ahead, though.

My apartment is 50 degrees right now because I hate calling my landlord more than I hate being cold. Cold is an excuse to hide in bed with a book/cat/cup of tea, so it's actually pretty great. Actually.

Southeaster

I decided to compile a list of today's wind-related news. This will be updated until I get bored with wind.

7 a.m., Dodgeville: Winds down power line, close US 18
7:40 a.m., Sun Prairie: Semi rolls over, blocking traffic (maybe this is not wind)(but it is probably wind)
8 a.m., Milwaukee: Tornado touches down in Racine, other ill omens and portents
12:30, all over: School's out!
1:30, Madison: Fallen tree limb cuts wires, damages roof

Also at work we were told not to use the external doors (they're heavy, they could knock about and hurt us), and had to creep from building to building via tunnels and skyways. I discovered more crazy art as a result.

I went running tonight and passed under a window full of many people cheering and the sound of barking dogs. My first thought was, "Dog fight."

On the way back, I passed under the same window, and remembered there was some big football game tonight.

Went to Minnesota to see some long-losts. My brother would have been there but instead we traded places and probably passed each other on the interstate near Osseo. The leaves are starting to go-go-go. My friend Amelia took this photo of my butt and my favorite sweater, then we climbed a mountain and ate too many desserts and became lumps fused with the floor, occasionally saying things.


Just before Baraboo on the numb-butt restless part of the drive home, all the sunflowers were like this:


Next paycheck I am getting a low-budget camera (the above photo is someone else's) and going back to see them shrivel up and die. Tonight, a lot of writing of the least fun kind.

Welcome home forever once again.

Spring's not technically here, but I always think it starts with March anyway. Even if it snows again, it's going to be feeble halfhearted snow that melts quickly and featherdusts the bones but doesn't get down deep. If you stand outside at midday, you can hear the trickle of little melts springing up like leaks in the belly of a barge. Winter's funereal barge. The unspoken promise is mud, and the smell of autumn's dead things finally decaying. Old grass, old leaves getting out of the way. The sharp edges of the air smooth out, fill up with smell and sound and color. Precipitation speeds up, is fuller and faster and wetter and scrubs at dirt instead of covering it up. Things happen, we lurch out of a stillness we may not have even noticed. The word that's overused is "quickening."

I came back from South Africa mid-march last year. I landed in the Twin Cities on a day when winter was fighting hard for a comeback, and then decided to hang out for a few days with my friend who lived there. That was terrible, a legitimate bitter cold. Coming from a summer hemisphere, I had no proper jacket, and spent a lot of time in a borrowed hoodie worrying about losing my fingers. But the sun was so bright that it didn't really matter, and the buds on the trees flashed their neon every whichaway.

Everything is changing

The inside scoop on state government

I was on the floor of the Wisconsin State Assembly for about an hour yesterday for a 10-minute ceremony honoring a man whose death was a big loss to Baraboo. Which was lovely, but I should not have worn the shoes I did.

Of the Assembly, I observed --

1. “will convene at 10:30” actually means “will take role once at 10:50 and again at 11 and still say we convened at 10:30 and then introduce a visiting kindergarten class and give someone a plaque and hear a few symbolic resolutions and then break for coffee by 11:45.”
2. Those absent had other representatives asking them to be excused. Like high school when another kid faked a dentist note for you, except representatives don’t need to give an excuse because they are the government.
3. Phones at their desks. One rep gets a call. Laughs, says a few quick words, puts down the phone. Makes a face at another rep across the aisle, who is apparently the caller, because he makes a face back. They clearly have an elaborate inside joke.
4. One very awkward co-ed legislator hug. Like, you could see them calculating exactly how to articulate their joints through the entire process, including precise number of back-pats before withdrawing.
5. One of the reporters who clearly is there often because he has his own seat at the table (I’m guessing Jason Stein) has the same style of notebook that I prefer. Steno rules, guys, because it’s small enough that you can hold it steady while writing standing up, as well as turn pages pretty quickly, AND it fits in my shoulder bag, but it's still big enough that you can fit lots of meeting notes onto each page if you happen to be lucky enough to be writing sitting down. The only downside is you can’t fit it in a back pocket like the "reporter's notebook" style. Yeah, this is boring.

Freezing fog

This weekend was foggy, then freezing foggy in southwestern Wisconsin.

Some pictures I wish I'd taken myself.

Business time

This morning I walked into the Wisconsin Department of Revenue headquarters to file my taxes for the third time this year. The first two times, my returns disappeared and the DOR never ever could find me in their computer system, even after the Post Office confirmed that my delivery had been delivered. Do not pass go, do not collect $650 owed to you by the state of Wisconsin, do not repay your creditors.

This time, a very nice woman entered all sorts of meta data into a file devoted specially to me, stamped my paperwork, and handed me a photocopy of that stamp so I could prove that my return had been physically received by a living breathing person who knew in what hole to pigeon me.

The key to my success? I suspect BUSINESS HAT.

This is how much I wanted pancakes tonight. I think the waitress thought I was homeless, even though I downplayed how far I'd walked.