New Puppy

Dear Will:

I have a new puppy who looks just like Birdy but is far more wiggly and bitey than Birdy was.  But I remember we got Birdy at about a month later in her development.  But just as with Birdy, I'm not getting much sleep.

My struggle with her makes me miss my former fellow puppy wrangler.  I'm crying almost every day again. 

Some of these tears are about Kathy.  You remember her. You used to complain about how she had no other conversation but her children. She was a great leader at COCC and is facing death with strength and panache. I hope that I will be able to follow her lead when my time comes in two to twenty years.(I know I could just as easily die tomorrow as in two years but I'm basing my claim of two to twenty on the general peacefulness and healthyish nature of my existence.)

Sequel is beautiful, of course, and came to Bend with a full groom and painted nails. And beauty, as you know, is a prime motivator for me. Sadly, she also needs a bath now and I'm not looking forward to managing a shark in the tub.

Winston is annoyed with her and has spoken to her sharply.  I am so looking forward to December when we can start going to puppy socialization classes.

Missing you every fucking day.

Kake

Surprises Yet Again!

 Well, I should not have been surprised by this surprise.

My birthday morning at the Sylvia Beach Hotel

A few of years before his death I made a couple of collections of our letters and cards and put them in saved cookie tins.  I kept the tins near Will’s daytime chair so that he could look through them. The tins got moved around after his death and found a final spot downstairs. I hadn’t looked into them since I made them.  A few days ago I opened one of these tins, expecting to find a stack of cards from myself to Will.  And yes, there were a few cards from me. But there were also a few other things mixed in, including an unsigned note from a long-ago person I don’t know, written in a thin, right-leaning script.

The issue at hand was whether Will’s work at the University of Chicago was the equivalent of a DA at Idaho State University. As Will spoke of it, he’d been unceremoniously given an increased teaching load at some point, perhaps when the college became a university, simply because he didn’t have a doctorate. As he told the story; the only other person to be so targeted was one of the few female professors, also hired before change from four year. (I always appreciated this part of the story, as it illustrated once again how he identified with women.)   This note seems to be the last page of a set of responses to six or seven questions. 

“In conclusion I might note that I have done a fairly careful analysis of Professor Huck’s transcript from Chicago and I believe a strong case can be made for the claim that Huck’s graduate work there is equivalent to a D.A.  In this case the A.M. in Religion and Art would be the primary degree.The work done towards the D.B would be taken as an interdisciplinary component.The supervised fieldwork would be analogous to the teaching component.  I would be pleased to present this case but believe it is best preserved until the committee has the interaction sought in the questions posed above.”

Yes, dear readers, it ends on a question that makes me question.  With whom was the committee seeking to interact? Someone special from the University of Chicago? One of the stars from whom Will took classes?

How and when Will found his keepsake and then slipped it into this box is beyond my knowing. But how fitting for this to pop up when I was yearning so for him - this physical reminder of one of his core stories: how he fought the academic dragon and won. 

And how nice for the heavens to play with me again.

Even Better

 Well, in spite of all my whining yesterday, I managed to get the following done:

1) Went in to the office around 5:30 until 8

2) Went to monthly book club at 9 and had plenty to say about Fever in the Heartland by Tim Egan. Great book -- a horrible true story about the era when Indiana was owned by the KKK, told like a novel.

3) Walked the dog twice, once in a new-to-us park, Alpenglow, where Winston was admired by the Jehovah's Witness ladies.

4) Went to my expensive Exercise Coach workout.

Miss Poppy invites you to her Only Fans page. 😉

5) Took Miss Poppy to a meet and greet at Muddy Paws, where her nails will be done in a week.

6) Took two baskets (about 20 cans and bottles) of paint, fertilizer, and poison to the hazardous waste collection at Knott landfill and discovered the construction on 27th.

7) Raked the front yard and got the needles into the yard waste bin and watered both front and backyard. Also chopped off the limb of the laurel that would have been in the way of the fence builders coming on Monday.

8) Exchanged information with my house and pet sitter.

9) Re-watched two episodes of you-know-what. (And noticed how Joyce became spicier as Tom's retirement approached. See the episode Secrets and Spies

10) And of course wrote and rewrote yesterday's post, which originally had far more whinging than it does now.

Better

One of these will be my new best friend.

After posting yesterday and then going to meet with Sarah, my grief therapist, I felt much better. I'm still having trouble with my reactivity to disappointment and she explained to me that my emotion was anxiety about losing control. I have huge mental issues around control. This might arise from being tied up to be babysat when I was a kid.  Might not. Maybe everything I'm experiencing is normal and I just haven't heard people talk about it.

I still have a big interior desire to feel safe and being out of control in any way is problematic for me. My logical brain knows this is ridiculous because life isn't safe or predictable. I am not in control of much outside of my house and inside my house, well, I have a cat.

I'm okay when I can let go and let God, when I'm not worrying about what is happening next. When I'm high. Sarah told me I can use the skills I use when I travel to take care of myself when not traveling. I'm fully able to manage the difficulties of traveling by myself even when, as I showed yesterday, I'm in full-on grief tsunami.  I can drive and cry. And I can be having fun and still cry. Unfortunately, not traveling means I'm in Bend where I don't fit in.

I am okay with crying every few days. I miss well Will. Sometimes I even miss sick Will. And every week at least once I have the memory of putting my hand on the cold, embalmed face of Dead Will because that was the last time I saw him. So crying is okay. Crying is normal and natural for the kind of widow I am.  What is still challenging are these other mental things:

1) I continue to have trouble caring about what I am doing in the world. I would like to care about writing enough to deal with the discomfort of writing and the promise of cruel and biting comments if I ever put it into the world. This is ridiculous because no one actually cares about my writing. So I wouldn't get negative reviews because I wouldn't get ANY reviews. 

 I would like to care about the suffering of others enough to deal with the discomfort of volunteering around other people and working in the chaos that is part of many volunteer organizations. At least with this issue, I have money that I can put in my place.

I don't understand why my "will do" isn't stronger than my "won't do." I don't understand why wanting to do something doesn't provide me with enough mental energy to actually do it, if the "it" is uncomfortable and challenging.

 I have no motivation.

2) And then when I AM motivated, when I DO care about what I'm doing, I freak the fuck out when things go wrong. I react to rejection in such a huge way.  Even tiny things.  Like I'm probably not getting into a COCC class on which, for some reason, my brain had based my entire fall writing project on.  My brain kept telling me, "OK, I'll take this class and get the motivation, being around other people, to continue with one of the novels." So when I found out Tuesday that I probably wouldn't get in, my brain started telling me how terrible I was, how I'd never do anything worthwhile, and why did I even bother trying? 

Would Eyegor please steal me a different brain?

But no need to worry about me.  I'm fine.

And I will soon have a baby to take care of and won't have time for anymore of this whining.

 

 

Sad Movies

 

I made this little video in the hot set at the Oregon Film Museum (which should be called the Oregon Goonies Museum). I was in wretched shape when I left the coast on August 23. The male voice at the beginning was just a guy that I asked to "press the button" on the camera. As you can see, I didn't think about getting rid of the card that shows that I'm on a set until the very end.  This other movie is a filmification of a Powerpoint I made in 2021 as a way of dealing with the grief I was experiencing then.

Thank God for my Grief Therapist

 So I've been off and on having a challenging time this summer.  Travel has been great but whenever I've been in Bend I've not been healthy.  Lately, the negative self esteem has been riding me pretty hard along with the grief and my fear and anxiety.

I started crying at the beach and since then each day has had a period of tears.  The trigger? Watching three Bette Davis movies on TCM - including a 30s mob movie I'd never seen, in which she plays a hooker and Humphrey Bogart is the fighting district attorney who talks her into being a snitch (and yes, she did get stitches).  And then listening to a TCM podcast about John Ford. The presence of Will's non-presence was ... well ... present.

My grief therapist reminded me that grief comes in waves and that I am not a monster.  She understands that when she says nice things about me and my brain is in a particular place, I deny them. Nevertheless, I trust her so she must think that I am not a monster. And she's someone I tell everything to.  Including that I don't believe her when she says I'm a human being.  Then we laugh together because of the mental gymnastics my brain does that are not healthful for me.  And then I feel easier when I can bring my present reality to the light -- I feel like the heaviness dissipates.

I wish my brain didn't have this need to hate myself. If I retry psilocybin I will use this as a target -- my narcissistic self loathing. 

The new puppy should help with that as well.  And I have more work to make the house puppified.  I have to redo the puppy gate and put the gate with a cat door onto the cat's closet.  Also want to go through the huge tangle of dead (?) technology, figure out what wires I need and what I don't, which means having to finally get the two VCR/DVD players set up. I want to watch the video of our Russia trip and see if Will is on it.  I think we watched it shortly after our trip at a party?

Which reminds me I've also never watched my '89 Quake video. 

ITV's Bentley production, Midsomer Murders S19E5

Ah.  I see I'm drifting.  Back to John Barnaby and Death By Persuasion, a wonderful blend of Austen idolatry and technophobia focused on drones.

Love

Dear Will --

Back around the turn of the century I trained my heart to stop falling in love.  Or rather, I trained it to tell my brain when I was falling in love so that I could stop having a relationship with the person it was reaching toward.  I did this because I loved you and I loved god and I wanted to be a good person and I had come to understand that the poets were wrong, that the movies were wrong, that the entire romantic industrial complex was a fraudulent enterprise.

Loving you and caring for you was a different kind of love than the one the movies were about. It wasn't as pleasant. It didn't come with any highs. It never saved me from my depressions. But it was holier and better for me.

Unfortunately, the other times in my life when I've been as sad and frightened of the world as I am now I was able to move forward by falling in love.  I won't do that anymore. Probably can't.  I'm hoping that the new puppy will serve something of the function of a beloved object.

I've been cleaning up downstairs and I ran across your old teaching Norton and took some pictures of your notes on Andrew Marvel's "The Definition of Love."

I see where you have written "Despair, hope, & fate control Love's whole world." I wonder now if this was what you were feeling at the time you were teaching. You so rarely said anything at all about your feelings, good or bad.  You just seemed to act on them and left me trying to interpret your actions to figure out your emotions.

The book marks I found were from a 1982 desk calendar, though there is nothing to indicate when you wrote these notes -- they could have been written anytime before you retired, anytime you were teaching BritLit. Nevertheless, I like to think of this as part of your lecture during our separation, because the poem speaks of spiritual connection through separation.  It's a paradox of the sort that the metaphysical poets liked.

I know you enjoyed teaching these poets in part, as you once said about Donne, because they required interpretation.

I was always touched by poetry.  Whatever I read under a teacher's guidance became important to my thought.  I drew it in and considered it.  I didn't understand that people who actually taught poetry or any other form of art appreciation, could become impervious to the meaning and feeling contained within the poems. They could talk about what they read without needing to be moved by it. I always had trouble understanding that - the idea that you could teach something and not understand that people might be moved to act upon the text that you were teaching. If something is important enough to be taught, it's important enough to be taken in, thought about, and acted upon. But when I would ask you what you personally thought about certain ideas you talked about, you would say, "read so and so" about that, rather than giving your personal opinion. I didn't understand why you would do that.  I still don't.

There's so much else I never understood about you. I didn't understand how your brain worked. I didn't understand why you would get so angry at certain things and people. I didn't understand, through the first 10 years, why you wouldn't talk to me about emotions or relationships, why you would listen to me share big heart things with you and then go on talking about the garden or dinner. I didn't understand why you ignored me, why you were silent, why you didn't seem to care about my thoughts and feelings.

If I'd been an adult when we got together, and if I'd had a completely formed brain, I really would have left you early on. We probably never would have married.

But I wasn't and we did. In my 1970s letters to Lee I regularly wrote that I needed to leave you. But something in both of us kept us together, as though it were important to the universe that we remain bonded. Later, when I asked you why you never divorced me, you gave me two different answers at two different times: "Because I didn't believe in divorce," and "Because I loved you."

I never looked into your eyes but I felt that chain of love connecting us, a chain that prevented us both from abandoning the "project" of our marriage (oh, you would have hated that term, but there you go.)

The feeling of "being in love" was, for me, the tip top of the mountain emotional experience ... and I know it was absolutely heroin. I knew this by 1982 when we saw Liquid Sky, a film that made the link between love and heroin explicit. Romantic/Erotic love made me happy, got rid of my underlying sadness about being myself, made me feel worthy to be alive. I remember your explanation, back around 1980, about why companionship was better than being in love.  At that time, at the age of 27, I didn't accept or believe you and we went into the hard time of C. and separation.

But C. turned out to be just what my heart wanted -- an abusive narcissist who "love-bombed" me, used illness as emotional blackmail, and once I left you started telling me what a terrible person I was.  He too was a gift from the universe -- attractive, intelligent, Harvard educated.

I remember when I read that poem at the free read in the Bengal Lounge.  He had liked the poem and I read it very dramatically and got applause and as soon as I sat down he slammed my reading, telling me it was horrible. I wasn't demure enough.  He was a person who, unlike you, seemed to find me attractive (which you never did, as I was always too fat) until the time I said I was attractive as a friend of ours and he laughed at me and said I wasn't and never would be. And then, in Utah, there were all the terrible arguments with him telling me the he loved me but that I was a terrible person. Finally he said we should break up and I said that was a good idea. I remember a final meeting with him in my apartment where I was so scared he would do something violent and I was agreeing with everything he said just to get him out. 

And after that there was J. and dead Mike and getting out of Utah.

And it all worked out.  Sure, there was the bump of S. and my deep embarrassment over that. But by then you had accepted without approval my wandering heart and it's peccadilloes. It was after that experience that I finally studied the concept of romantic love and realized that it was a mental illness. Even though "falling in love with" C, then J, then S, helped me initially, motivating me to continue with my life at difficult times, it wasn't a helpful strategy in the long term. These loves were ultimately damaging to me as each one began with the other treating me as wonderful and ended with the other treating me as a monster.

When I am in love I am a monster. Only you, Will, had the magic to tame that monster by considering me a beloved, if bothersome, friend.  We were indeed parallel lines who could never completely meet but were forever bound. 

Are forever bound.

Love,

Kake