Light and Darkness

Is this the swine flu?

Of course not, but I am sick. Too early to tell what I'm coming down with but it is something. Achy. Headache. Throat a little tender. Stomach is yucky. Lethargy. Sleepy. Uncomfortable all around.

I want nothing more than to sleep right now but I can't get comfortable. My neck is killing me and I can't find a position that supports my spine that isn't making me scream out. I may have to take something to knock me out. I work and have to be there for some equipment installation. I may just call an employee in to cover the rest of my day once the install is done. Eh! I guess it's better getting sick now than during Mother's Day weekend with the mountains of cakes needing decorating.

I am not a good sick person. I don't go to the doctor when I should which only aggravates any condition. Then when I am sick, I don't rest very easily. And I want to eat everyone's brain when I'm ill because I'm so eh! feeling.

Eh! I need to go to bed. Now, where the hell is the lortab?!

Illumination

Black and white photo of the neighboring parking lot. The bulb in the outside lamp has been flickering on and off, calling for me to change it. I had to enlarge the photo, taken with my cell, which distorted the view. But Emmaline and I both had the same reaction....the lamp looked like the moon over a city. Used the Craquelure function in the Filter menu with a little more blur.

Enlarged black and white, distorting the image. Like the blur.

Stunned Discontent

What do you do when you know something has gone differently than you know with absolute certainty it should have gone; and you can do nothing about it really except sit stupefied and try to interpret the situation as to why? Are you more angry than sad or disappointed? Do you mournfully accept or actively rail against?

Violet-ful

Landscaping for apartments or other publicly shared spaces can be ugly. Beautifully manicured grounds are sacrificed for Inexpensive shrubbery to fill spaces. No doubt that the bush in the photo below serves a cheap purpose. But in the negative exposure...on the inside of the bush where the secret dreams are kept safe from laughing jeers...are violets screaming for attention.

I'm pretty too, it says!

From a Thursday afternoon

I liked how this one turned out in the frame. The wall and the stones seem to evenly take up their halves of the photo. The contrast of the materials. The colors. The slight perspective change. Pretty cool...I think.

This photo reminds me of two things. The first is this story I think I read when I was a young teen. I believed it had something to do with ghosts and a certain location in Europe someplace. I don't recall the details just the important fact. This person seemed to travel through time, though briefly, walking down this stretch of cobblestone. The other is the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I want to write the secrets of my soul upon promising pieces of paper and stuff the crevices. 

I almost named this one Maya for her story. The tease of a tree and the sky. The bars are from a fence that lines the property between my apartment complex and the neighboring one. The larger beam in left center is part of the support system for the second floor apartments. When I walk upstairs to my apartment, I always think about their strength. In this photo though, I hope neither of those utilitarian uses are suggested. They make excellent walls for my cage.

In a petri dish

In a recent email to a friend, I mentioned how I analyze and investigate and probably overthink things, particularly words, entirely too much. Lyrics to a song, favored had found their way into my brain; and I mulled over them days after our conversation was over. They sat in a petri dish within me, I referenced when I could no longer keep my interpretation of the song to myself.

Words do. They sit growing and feeding and creating. I can never purge them from my soul once they find their way in. They beget emotions, negative and otherwise. And something is born. Perhaps a poem of my own or movement of change or simply an aha! moment.

This poem.....I can't stop thinking of it. In February's issue of Poetry Magazine, I read Stephen Dunn's poem Connubial.

Because with alarming accuracy
she’d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of—this tic, that
tendency, like the way I’ve mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt—

I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.

...

And now it grows.

In the dark....

There's an awesome, sexy Nina Simone song about two lovers in the dark. Oh, how I wish this post was a declaration similar to that song.

No. No, this is simply me laying in my bed, staring at the bright keys of my cell phone and trying to drift to sleep. Two dogs lay at and on my feet, resting solidly. And I suffer from the lack of such sweet repose. Instead, by body aches as do my ear and throat. Rest would heal my sore body and yet, I am awake in the dark.

It is promising that the screen blurs more and more, and my face yawns excessively. I believe I can now sleep.

at 8:45p

I am waiting.

I bet Ms. Lescheck hated me.

My kindergarten teacher. I don't even know if I'm spelling her name correctly since I'm doing it phonetically. I'm sure if I go digging out the kindergarten report cards, I'd find it. Laurel Bay, South Carolina. Ah, fond memories.

Anyways....I'm exhausted as I am always. Lack of sleep. Restless sleep. Eh. It's havoc for my bones and nerves and emotions. Since I don't have an early day today....yay, me for scheduling myself for a later day....I decided to take a nap. I am the suckiest person after a nap (sorry, Ms. Lescheck!), at least a nap that is longer than twenty minutes. I scheduled an hour long today keeping in mind that I'm a crabby cunt after waking from a longer nap. So....what did I do? I slept from about nine until two-thirty.

I'm not too unbearable. But naps also make me physically ill. I get nauseous and head-achy and disoriented. Now, I don't understand why an actual sleep doesn't do the same thing. It's the same bloody thing. I lay down. I close my eyes. I dream. I toss and turn. I fret. I wake periodically. I am sleeping during a nap. No explanation why napping leaves me foul and irritable and physically ill.

The last few dream-times have been filled with a man. The same man. The dreams aren't entirely unpleasant but they're not satisfying at all. Eh. Dreams...the dumping ground of the conscious mind and our daytime frustrations. sigh...

Incidentally, an awesome story about my kindergarten teacher. A few years ago while I was still living in Pensacola, I was helping my mother in her shop. A woman came in with a couple of her kids, boys about in their prepubescent or adolescence ages. Somehow we were talking about duty stations and we both had lived in Parris Island, which is one of the biggest stations for the Marine Corps. I mentioned Ms. Lescheck for a reason or another. AND one her boys had her as a kindergarten teacher as well. I'm, of course, at least twenty years older than her children; and despite understanding that she was a young woman when she taught me, probably in her early twenties, I found that so amazing.

Sunday Morning Joys

crisp 50 degree with no jacket
clean palette of blue sky
Bear Naked banana nut granola
a cold Braeburn apple