Objects In the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (an inappropriate post)

I hear the whir of the rope even as I turn into the parking spot, the tick tick of my own signal still going. I sit and watch in the rear-view mirror and then the side as he jumps over and over and over, the rope twitching under him, his dark skin shiny with sweat. I've watched him for years. He has gray at his temples. Later, he checks me out, pulling my fruit across the scale, ringing me up.

This Is Still Happening, Part Six, But There's an Upside, World War I Re-enactments and Poetry

The trench has now reached into the front yard, and in lieu of other treasure hunts, like yesterday's, or my going insane, I've decided to begin a World War I re-enactment. I will pit The Brothers as the Allies against The Husband as the Central Powers/Austria-Germany. I will be Wilhelmina Owen, the Poet, and stand at the front door shouting warnings about gas and the lie that is dying for one's country.***

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knocked-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

I will watch the three male species of The Family fight in vain to reorganize the World As We Know It and then fall with the 9 million other combatants in four miserable years. 

I, as Wilhelmina, unlike my brother Wilfred, The Brothers My Sons and The Husband, will escape the insanity by climbing into the Airstream that miraculously appears where the trench ends, still reciting poetry, The Mermaid swimming along right behind me.

Dulce et Decorum Est

***I've always gotten a kick out of those folks who do re-enactments -- they seem to take themselves so seriously. It's what I feel about people who watch a lot of pornography, too. I just start giggling and squirming and feeling like it's all so --- well --- silly. Anyway, the warnings about gas and the lie that is dying for one's country and the verses that I've quoted here are from the great World War I poet, Wilfred Owen. I've posted the entire poem here, if you want to read it, but don't if you're one of my patriotic, war-loving, ultimate sacrifice kind of readers. And dulce et decorum est means it is sweet and right and is taken from an ode by Horace.

Advice from another century

My friend Jody posted the above page on her Instagram this morning, and I just about fell over laughing. The first two sentences alone sustain me. If I were to court Insanity, what would I wear and how would he look? I imagine I might carry forth the naked metaphor I've played with over the last few months and wear nothing. Insanity, of course, would wear old-school faded Levis and beat-up Converse high-tops. He'd be broad-shouldered and weigh closer to too much than too little. After the courting, Insanity would read aloud to me from whatever fiction he was carrying and pay all my debts in cash. When we needed to get away, Insanity would insist on Bora Bora, a hut with a glass floor over the ocean. I think Bora Bora suits your nakedness, Insanity would say as he helped smear sunscreen onto my back. But listen to this, he'd say, the other hand holding up a scruffy Yeats, opened to Adam's Curse:

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   

We saw the last embers of daylight die,   

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   

That you were beautiful, and that I strove   

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Afterward, Insanity and I would dive down under the hut and look upward at the world through the wavy blue.

What I think about

when I think about Ms. Chavez.

In all seriousness, I'm loathe to write this letter -- it hangs over me, though, like an obligation, not so much a sword of Damocles, but weighted with all the symbolism I put into it. I've said it before, but I need to go somewhere by myself for a bit, escape to a tropical island, sit on a lounge chair in front of sparkling, clear turquoise water, read several novels, have crazy sex with a kind stranger who then leaves me alone to my books and occasional dips in the water, interspersed with good food and citrusy vodka cocktails.

Sigh.

I guess I'll go and write that letter.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.

Gustave Flaubert