This weekend could not have been better.  Today we carved pumpkins, and I love carving pumpkins, I love gutting them, squishing all their slimy guts and seeds through my fingers, scooping into their sides like ice cream til they're nice and smooth, and then drawing pictures on their skin.  It feels like 5th grade, like falls on Frisco Street, and then David cooked up our seeds and made a tasty Sunday snack.  David always knows how to make everything more fun.  And earlier, we played Triple Yahtzee and drank hot chocolate, and then we saw Where the Wild Things Are, a real triumph, and watched football and baseball and all the right teams were winning, and then, in the long in between, I read books, I sat and read forever, I read some soul-expanding poetry and some of that awful writing that you just can't put down and some Native American memoirs and some stories from Lake Wobegon.  I have been starving for books these days, and I won't say I got my fill, but I got a good helping, that is for sure.  And the days were wide open enough that I could wander, I could stop to sing a song or dance with Bump or fold the laundry or write letters that I will never send.

And just now, I got to see 3 fellas whose music I used to love, long about the 10th grade, and they were just as funny and honest and beautiful and harmonizing as ever.  I wore my new beret.  I was a little self-conscious but maybe a little proud too.  I can't believe they are still making music, 10 years later, it makes me feel like I am a true fan, that I have loved them for a full 10 years, but really, there were 4 or 5 years in there somewhere when I wasn't so much concerned with them.  That's ok, though.

"I ain't cutting my hair til the good Lord comes." - Joshua James

And for once, though I let out a long sigh at the thought of Monday morning, back at the grindstone, I feel like the weekend has been medicine instead of a whirlwind, I feel a little more like myself, or a lot, and everything is not paralyzing, and I don't even know that I realized I was paralyzed before.  But it is nice, it is nice.

this is what my heart says.

from my journal, untranslated, just because:

Inside of me, I feel big and open and so satisfied. Outside, my toe is tapping to no rhythm, antsy, achy butt, crouched, not quite here. I want to shed it all, and I want to be chapped-chested. sandy and red. tree bark on my hands, tough from climbing. I want to crouch. You know? I want to make my own path. I am so bored by trails. The woods is for making your own way, for discovery.

Do you know what just came upon me? Happiness. Thank you, sweet Universe. Oh you.

I am so numerous. I am a thousand songs, but half of them are just impersonations.

There is a scene out the window that I want to eat. yellow leaves and iron bars in the sexiest curves. I am drunk on them, I want to stare, googly-eyed. It is like a Tim Burton cartoon, dancing up to heaven. There is a white umbrella. I would pull out my camera, but it would look like a nothing squished in a square.

Feel the music pulling up you soul. literally, feel your heart lifting in the hands of the song. so physical.

We are all wrong about everything. meaning, everything is right, we are all wrong in our wrong-naming, it makes me shiver, not shiver, it makes me tremor in wonder, why won't this song go on forever, why? I am sick thinking of it ending. It is a vision. Goodbye, mystical rising.

The others mute my delight, they have rules, they call it weird, and they want words, normal words, about the weather and television, which I love even, but not the way they discuss them. Everything must be stripped of its transcendence when in public. But that is only for those like me, like me and young Black Elk, who fear judgment. The brave will leave it glistening on their tongue, and it shines into our hearts, a connection, a joy. Damnit, I love everything. Everything is lovely. I will say it, and you will say "Unh uh," and I will say "Damnit! Yes!" and then I will convince you, you will see it through my eyes, and if you won't, to the trash heap with ya.

Can I be incommunicable for a few years? Won't it help me grow, to withdraw for a bit? and then I will come out singing. I don't want to withdraw forever, or do I? If I withdraw, my skin will get skinnier, and then how will I ever speak? without fear of being torn to pieces? I do want to speak, I want something spoken, not for them so much, for myself. They say that is odd too, they say "Of course you speak to be heard," but do I? Some days. Mostly, though, I want to create so that I will be a creator, what power. Most people need a them to say "Yes we approve, yes you are a star," but I know how wrong thems can be, or how fickle, how much it can ache to place your value in a them, how big the fear of changing grows once you have gotten their yes. I love the space I give myself to be, to discover, to say yes to what I will say yes to.

It's such a pleasure
to touch your face.
-Jo La Tengo

They say "I want this for you, everyone deserves a this," and that makes me pine. They want it for everyone because it is their joy, but I have joys of my own, and I let myself believe it when they tell me "Yes but those joys are nothing compared to-" Maybe you have never dug your fingernails into my joys, Mrs. But I have more joys at my fingertips than you could dream up, here in my snowy cabin of fireplace firing of solitary.

You see, the treasure is not in the treasure. The treasure is in you, in your eyes. It's in your treasuring.

This is a secret. Keep it safe.

Oh, in 6 days, I will be washed up a frigid shore with shrimps and Spanish moss and lesbians and ice cream cones. windows windows and marshes and gardens, clear air. cool sheets, flat screen football. It is not even the windows or the overstuffed furniture. It's, there is this smell. I love the smell of that place.

My only worry, to be honest, is that I take and take and treasure, but never give. I cannot help but think that this must lead to a certain spiritual obesity, but. But then you have to fight and finagle just to get them to want what you give, they will call your song a cheese river or hopelessly naive, selfish and indulgent, nails on a chalkboard, boring, or, or absolutely most devastating of all, they will call it: unremarkable. Is giving worth being rejected? Do I want so much to give? I will only give when my gift is a gift, I will not beg to give.

This tabletop is a wonder, so colorful, it splatters all over me, I splatter back. splatter.

Yes, only give when it is a gift. Of course, you cannot give in this way with 100% accuracy. Sometimes I love carrying others as burdens, I love the weight. That is not true, but it is a thing that deserves striving. Sometimes friends are burdens, we knock up against each other and step on toes because we are so close to one another and I love it, I love being bunched up in a bundle with others. And if I love to carry, I must let myself be carried now and again, not just when I'm sopping in sorrows, but when I am crazy and careless, when I am so loud and annoying, I must let myself be carried, I am not so heavy. figuratively speaking.

Can I say it again? Can I be a broken record? I am so happy to be living, to be just living, to be normally living, with a job no bigger than the money. I think of Grandma Edna, what an average life she lived, she played cards, she laughed all sweet and dainty, she raised the children in an apron, she burned the beans, and I think, could there be anything more grand? anything more desirable? than playing cards on Wednesday nights? than leaning on your 55 year old alcoholic daughter as she leans right back? than making pink lemonade for the grandkids and painting easter eggs? Can there be anything more beautiful? There was not a dry eye at her funeral, a tunnel full of people, touched by her life, so grateful to have known her, feeling a scoop of themselves missing with Edna Whitson gone from this world, can there be anything greater? See, and this is how I know I want to be known. The solitary is sweet, but it is not it all.

"Please. Call me Edweena."

He really is astounding.  I am endlessly fascinated by him.  He thinks so much that he is completely normal, but living through a breathing machine and being wheeled around city streets and dark smoky bars on a table with an assistant is just not normal.  He calls these wheelings "strolls," like "I was strolling down 14th Street last Wednesday."  This is the thing, too: he lives through his words, his narrations of his life.  I am pretty sure that whatever he is actually doing wherever he goes is a pretty clunky affair, hoses everywhere and he crumpled on a table making small talk through a computer, but he smooths it all out with words like "stroll" and "Kim and I were talking." 

He also writes fragments of fiction in which he speaks of things like movement and spoken conversations with familiarity, as one who experiences these things all the time, never acknowledging the strange dissonance between these completely ordinary things he is speaking about and his actual experience of the world, these things are metaphors for his actual life.  I think it is this dissonance that makes him so fascinating, the dissonance and his complete disregard for it.  I, for instance, am terrified and embarrassed to write about things I have never experienced, it is one of the things that is keeping me from writing a short story or novel.  But Mike never lets it phase him, and by speaking in metaphors, he convinces himself and all of us that his experiences are just like the rest of ours. 

There is a certain beauty to it, but it can also be a danger, he frequently finds himself fantastically depressed, his only experiences of the world leaving him feeling hollow and bored, and his narration of his life makes him think that this too is normal, this is just what life is, this hollow feeling.  But dear Mike, could it not be that your condition, your inability to move, to make one voluntary action, to reach out a hand to help another human being, to feel your own usefulness, to touch the world in any way beyond sight-seeing and druggy pleasures, could it not be that all of these things make your own life particularly miserable?  Would it hurt more to have a particularly miserable life? rather than believing that life itself is unsatisfying?  I can't tell. 

I am not saying that your life is awful, unliveable.  I am just saying that certainly it should not be taken as a representative for the whole, of course it should not be, and maybe if you could understand life, the world, as something broader than what you are experiencing, you would have a little bit more hope about existence.  It is just, there is a denial in your narrations, a tinge of self-deception, and it seems to me that life works better when we are not deceiving ourselves.  Or maybe it is this.  You will be a little sad either way, maybe a lot sad.  But if you could identify the source of your sadness and of your general melancholic temperament, that it is at least a little bit caused by your condition, then you could actually deal with the sadness, accept it, and you can gain several notches of self-understanding, which is most satisfying and helpful.  As it is, you know the pain, but you have got its source wrong, you blame it on life itself, and this leaves you throwing punches at the air.  You can never hit the target before identifying it.

These things are not exactly what I mean.  I am searching for words.  It is a most unique situation.  Also, isn't it silly for me to think that he doesn't acknowledge his handicap's role in his own personality?  Surely he recognizes it, but doesn't bother putting it into words.  I don't know.  He seems to say, as often as he gets the chance, that his handicap has never really bothered him.  Surely it has, right?  Surely.  And he would not be a self-pitying disabled-kid for admitting it.

It is amazing to me how much even the most extraordinary people want to be normal.

Oh well.  Right now, he is documenting the greatest adventure he has taken in his life, a trip to New York a week or so ago, and so his mood is up. This is what I'm talking about, though.  A trip to New York easily could have killed him.  Life demands so much more of him.  Even this, he doesn't acknowledge.  I am sure, absolutely certain, that there is a story behind all of this.  And Mike, I would love to hear it.