Scar Tissue

Highway 17 is the four lane scar that runs the length of Gloucester County VA, puckering the landscape with strip malls, car dealerships, and corrugated steel mega-churches. I marveled at how altered it had become over the years. Old landmarks were gone, and the Super Wal-Marts of the world had arrived to swallow up wide expanses of wild country bramble with hellish, heat rippling asphalt. A typical but none the less heartbreaking scene these days.

Gone was the old mill house turned rollerskating rink my friends and I haunted all through Jr. High. Gone was the dirt road to nowhere we had,in high school, affectionately christened "The Zanoni Screw Stop". It was there, in breathless curiosity, I touched "it" for the first time. Oh yeah, I was a bad girl.

Yet as I turned off the highway, down the back roads of my youth, the rural landscape seemed for the most part intact. It was still that strange mixture of farm country,and wide brackish rivers that have supported "watermen" and their families for centuries.

I sat in the parking lot of the marina situated on the edge of the York River lost in thought. It was here I had spent every summer from age 10 to 20 in the community pool. This was the place of my first summer job, and and a few years prior, my first summer crush. The job was as pool life guard, and it was the first I truly "wanted", so I took the certification class at the nearby coastguard station. I spent 6 weeks the previous January dragging grown men ,"coasties", twice my size out of the pool in mock drowning scenarios. Not as bad as it sounds, actually. The crush was a boy, not much older than my 14 year old self, who was staying with his family at the marina. On their house boat. The thing had a piano in the living room, I kid you not. We spent a week of summer afternoons on that boat, listening to "The Best of Bread" and necking on the couch. His kisses tasted like salt water and Chapstick.

From the marina, I drove down to the beach where I played out my childhood. Time folded in on itself, and I was four years old again. Sitting on the dock on a warm summer night, wrapped in my beach towel, and munching fruit loops out of a plastic baggie. Watching enthralled, as my father and his friends caught blue crab with bits of string, bait, and a net; I believed he was magic. To my four year old eyes, my dad could do anything.

I was not prepared for the tsunami wave of nostalgia that rushed over me as I revisited my old stomping grounds. I did not expect to feel anything but ambivalence. I had run away to an out of state college, eighteen and angry at family and friends who I imagined had never understood me. I had left heartbroken over a boy I loved with blind teenage passion, but he was selfish and cruel, and left me unsure of myself. I was more than ready to leave this small hick town where I felt invisible, and blamed everyone for making me feel that way. It was easier that way, easier to look outward rather than in.

I drove for hours, from place to familiar place, and the overwhelming sense folding around me like that beach towel was of home. For the first time I felt free to enjoy the memories of growing up here, even the painful ones, without them being blurred by the bitter film of regret. This place, for whatever it's worth, helped shape the person I am today, and I am grateful.

Trifecta of Crap

- Getting on the scales this morning - nothing has changed. Realize I haven't really worked that hard on "dieting" so all the workouts in hell have been for naught. Neat.

- Driving to work in wicked bad traffic amidst the SUV zombies yapping on their cell phones and doing their make-up (sometimes both. I kid you not!). Obsessing about what the scales didn't show, feeling ugly, resentful, mean and spectacularly sorry for myself.

- Sitting at my desk this morning just trying to deal when all four of the mysoginistic, neanderthal men I work with get up en mass and oogle out the window at some poor woman walking to her car. They procede to snort and gafaw about how "thick" she is. That "yeah, her legs are thin enough, but then she gets really big". They laugh as she gets in the car and the car shifts with her. I sat there mute, mortified, blinking back tears of shame, embarassment and anger. Hello! Im right here, your "thick" co-worker - mother fuckers!

As I stuffed my ear buds in and turned up the music to try to tune them out I my anger turned inward.
Me - you should say something, stand up for her, for yourself!
Myself - but Im all alone, they're going to turn on me.
Me - Coward!

I feel like a booger dangling from the nose hairs of life..... GAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Black wind Blowing.

Yesterday I was restless. All day long pacing around my house pretending to clean, but never focusing on any one task long enough to do anything other than leave finger traced notes across my piano. Dust Me.

It felt like those energized moments right before a big storm. Everything is still, but you can feel the atmosphere building pressure.

A drawing of breath before a primal scream.

I imagine how an alcoholic must feel when faced with giving up booze. To have to give up something used to comfort, and to numb. The idea of letting go, of living my life, feeling my emotions, no longer diluted by the protective haze of food fills me with a nauseating dread that boarders on panic. Oh, wait - that is panic.

The actual paradigm shift I have to make to be able to do this has to happen now. If I don't do this now nothing will change and I will never....anything. I will be stuck in this dusty cage of my own making. Bring on the storm.

When in doubt, post a poem.

I've been wracking my feeble brains all day to try to come up with a post worth reading. I'm sad to say I have absolutely nothing of interest to say. I feel sort of empty. Perhaps it's yesterday's soul sucking that's catching up to me, and today was more of the same. It could be that it's cold, and dark, and all I want to do is curl up in a comfy chair with a good book and cup of tea. It is time to hibernate after all... but I digress.

Instead of a post of my own, I want to share a favorite poem of mine. I hope you enjoy it.

Overweight Poem
biscuits with honey running down into the deep crevices
thick dark bread cut into fresh chunks and butter waving over the terrain,
red berries and yellow cream

am I thinking of these things
or you?

Love fills my body,
all the crevices
for the first time. and I feel
heavy
like the September limbs of an apple tree.

Feel opulent

and don't like this opulence.

Coming from a man who knows less than I,
one who, like my father, talks big
and goes away;
one who, like my father, loves deep, a lot,
and goes away/has many others.
And I want it all.
A man who is everything.
Everything I can find in the refrigerator,
or the fruit bin, or the oven, or the larder, or the cupboard,
everything in the silverware chest, the freezing
compartment;
I want him to be handsome and brilliant and
making a mark on the world, rich, responsible,
older. Someone to rescue me.

The British Museum, perhaps.
Something that will last well.
My favorite foods do not keep well;
must be gotten fresh each week.

I never know how far
for the sake of wisdom
to carry a metaphor.

Diane Wakoski(1965)