Procedure

They expect me to sit in the chair in the corner. Human behavior in this room with nothing but a chair and a mirror is that the person will sit in the chair. It's the expectation of a calculated system.

I wait with the door open. My phone is locked up. I count all the objects in the room, including fixtures and outlets and door handles (both sides), and I include myself sitting in the chair. Forty-eight. This number is pleasing because it is divisible by eight. I do some neck stretches. There's the play I'm writing that I could think about, but when I'm away from it all the characters lead other lives, separate from the play, like they have day jobs and my play is a diversion.

Some song by Rod Stewart is playing through the tinny speaker on the ceiling (object #14), and I'm reminded of how much I don't like his voice, but he had that jazz album that wasn't bad. Didn't my friend Danielle sing one of his songs in a high school choral concert? She was on the homecoming court. Maybe the song was part of the event. There's a connection between her and Rod Stewart in my brain.

The blouse I wore here is a size six petite, too big in the waist, too short in the arms. Another Alice in Wonderland item of clothing I thrifted. It has gussets and placket buttons, and cuffs that fold back to reveal my wrists and two inches of my arm. Dan said I looked skinny in it when I left for this appointment, noting the looseness. None of my clothing feels right on my body. I prefer the outlandishness of costumes, where proportions are malleable. 

The carpeting in here is dark shades of greens in a pattern of varied circles that touch each other and remind me of lumps of moss. The hallway has a thinly striped carpeting of lighter shades of green. The patterns do not match. There is no door threshold strip, and some of the weave has come apart, spiraling up like a weed from a sidewalk crack.

I watch the shadow of another woman as she gets dressed in the room across the hall. The shapes and patterns the shadows make are as beautiful as watching leaf patterns on the ground. This thought strikes a low gong in me. All the leaves are falling now, and the leaf shadows will go with them. Bare branch patterns, arterial, will replace them. I wonder about the life of the woman behind the door, the woman in shadow, who nodded to me a grim acknowledgement as she left for her procedure. Why is she here? I hope it's routine.

I kick my feet to the music, tick-tock them, then move them in opposition. I do the same with my shoulders. This has taken some practice for me to do. Getting mocked about it in a theatre class started the practice. How urgent all the younger-than-me students in that class were. I resented their futures, and loved their enthusiasm.

Didn't I have better thoughts when I was in my 40s? Why can't I just be content sitting in this chair in the corner, a half naked human being with an ill-fitting blouse waiting for her? It seems all my friends who are in their 40s now are leading shinier lives than mine but I know this isn't true. My 40s weren't all that great. My mother was in decline. Helen will be in her 40s in ten years, and I will be ...

The math of that thought is a dark corner I avoid by observing the empty chair in the other room across the hall. It is a nicer chair than this one, I decide, because it's lines have an elegant mid-century modern style. It's arms are polished wood. My mother would have commented on that chair.

Now I am uncomfortable enough to stand, unlock the closet, and rifle around my bag to find my phone. The phone, that devil that promises to connect but divides me from the real world. I'll text Dan to see how he's doing. 

The lab tech arrives to walk me to my test. She's probably 42 or so, thick dark hair, big brown eyes. Lovely. "Hello Jennifer," she says. This week I talked to a receptionist who told me my full name was the same as her best friend. Jennifer Hill. 

My astrological chart reminds me that I am not that special, and my karmic lesson is to learn that others lead lives that are different from my own. Even the other people named Jennifer Hill.

Everything for me right now is 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, present, and accounted for, part of the system.

Unrelated and Related Fragments About Ownership

Everyone has hauled out their holiday decor overnight, and now each home dances with projected snowflakes, or an inflatable chicken dressed as Santa bobs in the wind by their front door. Yesterday I found myself in the wonderblitz of Target, considering lights. You can buy them by strings of 200, coiled on large plastic spools, for $28 each. I'd need at least three to cover the tree by the barn. That's a lot of money for something that is impermanent. I decided to not buy anything for the holiday and dig around in the attic when the mood strikes. Then I bought thirteen dollars worth of toilet paper and left, but not before taking a slow stroll through the makeup to ask myself, "Do I care about this anymore, either?" The answer was no. I do not, but part of me wants to. The sparkly part.

I tested negative for Covid yesterday morning. It's been a long two weeks of feeling taken over. I'm still coughing and tire easily, and toothpaste tastes fusty instead of minty. When no extra line appeared on my test I had the impulse to call my mother to share the good news. She would wonder what I'm talking about, gone long enough to have never heard the word "Covid." 

When I was unpacking the toilet paper, I noticed a man was standing by our newly sorted shed, his red umbrella popped like a mushroom in the rain. I pointed him out to Dan, then I saw the man punch numbers into his phone, and Dan got a call. For the next few minutes Dan politely explained that the shop is closed for the season, and yes that information is on the website, and today is Sunday, we live here, we're closed. It is obvious we are closed. The property is under a good deal of construction with a path being replaced by the house, so there are pallet piles, large stones, and heavy equipment in the driveway. The barn is closed, the farmstand is zipped up. There are no signs saying we are open. But this man was insistent in his need to shop, to browse, to consume. When I saw his wife step out of our shed, I was stunned. Who just stands in a total stranger's shed as if it is a bus stop? They sat in their car and kept Dan on the phone with questions for a long while, saying they would place an online order and then Dan could bring it out. Then they spent more time browsing on their phone, and must have decided that it was just too much to bear. They left without any announcement or fanfare. In spite of my frustration with people who act this way, the hostess in me hopes they noticed the charming ducks, dibbling in the mud by the pond.

I looked up William the Conquerer to read about him right before I fell asleep, just because his name popped up in my head like a real estate ad while I was walking down the hallway to the bedroom. I didn't realize he ordered the compilation of the Domesday book, a survey listing all the land-holdings in England along with their pre-Conquest and current holders. Adelina Joculatrix is listed in the Domesday book. She was a jester and owned land, unusual for women. I wonder if anyone ever showed up in her shed, demanding to be entertained. I wonder if she kept ducks.

The Physical World

The soul straddles time and the infinite. The soul resides in that untoned flap of upper arm. The soul, your soul, if you believe you have one, exists with all the other souls that have ever and will ever exist. The soul is immeasurable and also changeable. Your soul lives in rain and snails and tree roots. The soul frolics as a rat under straw. The soul dozes like a lowercase l. The soul is yellow, no, red, no, it's the color of that feeling you get when you peel back several layers of wallpaper and find you are holding a handful of palimpsest. The soul, your soul, found mine in all the noise of the world, all the static and yawping, and like two magnetic tricky dogs we snapped together. Even though you don't believe in souls, I sure like yours, and how it insists on the scientific, the known, the physical. The soul is theory. The soul is hypothesis. The soul is part dendrite and mitosis and the bedroom light switch. The soul loves its body and doesn't want to leave it, but when it does please leave a window open or cut a hole in the ceiling, because the soul is not all magic (that word it digests), and is given to clumsiness. This soul isn't a professional soul. It's new in its oldness.

Some Sunday Images

On my way to a friend's house yesterday I saw a porcupine by the side of the road. I've never seen one "in person" before. It was armored, showing off its boundaries. They prefer the safety of forested areas, which I was driving through, but it must have lost its way and been anxious to see cars instead of understory.

While at my friend's house, I spotted a fox in her backyard, twice. She has chickens, and like me with the ducks, is on alert. The second time she went out to shout "like a wild woman," I realized the brownish blur I saw was her neighbor's dog.

So, did I see a porcupine? Or was it a discarded, upturned scrub brush? If I believe I saw a porcupine, did I see a porcupine? Such is the way of thinking for those who wear glasses. Our visions are questionable.

That same drive produced for me a number of images I enjoyed, questionable or not. The first being a sycamore, trimmed to stubbiness for the fault of growing by a powerline. The tree had put its energies into growing a branch that curled around the powerline without touching it. A brilliant and childlike defiance.

Can we talk for a moment about setting words 

v

e

r

t

i

c

a

l

l

y

?

It makes them difficult to read. Still, businesses put up their banners and flags that announce what they are selling inside with each letter stacked on top of the other. I guess it has to do with economy of space, but I wish we'd stop setting words in this way. When read from behind, which is possible with most of these banners since they are printed on thin fabric, the reader has to sort out letterforms that are backwards and up and down. Funhouse signage. In a way, my brain loves it, and rises to the challenge, but does it in ways that can be unsettling and revealing. Yesterday's sign announced a WINERY. Read from behind, and vertically, I saw MISERY. My eyes only caught the last three letters of the word, and filled in the rest of the spaces it saw with MIS.

How many words end in ERY and have three letters at the start that might announce a business? BAKERY. EATERY. Even CELERY would be a better choice than MISERY. The CELERY store.

On my way home I stopped at my daughter's apartment to drop off some Girl Scout cookies. Her apartment had that Sunday quiet about it. A pot of soup gone cold on the stove, books and art supplies on surfaces, cozy slippers cast off on the floor. Her heart wasn't Sunday quiet though. We had a conversation about boundaries, red flags, what we will allow in our lives, what we hope for the most. I told her about the porcupine I saw, or thought I saw. A vision, I see clearly now, of all those things we were going to discuss.

Good Morning

January is all about long shadows and blue light. The bodies of trees, the reflection of light on lingering snow. Lines everywhere. Angles, angles, angles, not that far from angels.

The woman in the room next to me at the dentist had a laugh like a goat calling out. She found the weather hilarious. We'll laugh at anything at the dentist, just to be liked. There's a lot of forced comedy in the dentist's chair -- one of the most vulnerable places for a human -- leaning back with your mouth wide open. The gateway to the body. Anyway, she sounded like a goat, which I found funny, not false.

I don't like wind. I want to be pals with it, but it just messes with my internal equipment. It throws me off balance, makes me eat my own hair, slaps me in the face. I try to find the positive in it the way you try to seek the kindness in a bully. "It spreads seeds," or "It has other moods, like breezes, which you like, and look how it makes the trees dance," but when it's cold and I'm lifting 50 lb. bags of feed, we're not chums. Sorry.

Which brings me to meditation. My hands are in my lap. and I am paying attention to my breath, and then the instructor's voice tells me to let all the negative thoughts go. It's like being faced with a plate full of marshmallows, and being told not to eat any. Marshmallow gorge fest. I don't even like marshmallows, so I'm not sure why I went there with that image.

GMO seeds are "brokenhearted seeds planted by a brokenhearted people." - Rowan White. 

I love the word brokenhearted, because you can turn it inside out and it still means the same thing. Heartbroken. Of course, you have to lop off the -ed ending, but you get the idea. It's like a really disappointing reversible jacket.

Is there anything better than eight puppies for a mood lift? I saw eight puppies with the mother dog yesterday and was so delighted. Everyone at that vet's office was smiling, including the dogs.

Mustard is good brushed on cauliflower if you roast it. I added some dill. That's my recipe for the day.

I wish I had deeper thoughts, but you get what you get.

When I write the word "the" I give up on it after the letter t -- the "he" looks like someone stepped on it.

A book I ordered arrived yesterday from Thriftbooks, so late I forgot I ordered it. "One Hundred Poems From The Chinese." Kenneth Rexroth's translations. I think we had this book at Paper Kite at one time, and sold it. I was never into the Chinese poets when I was younger. Their stark images and humor speak to me now as I hear doors closing behind me.

Coffee is cold. This was worth it.

Clowning and Goat Muck

While mucking out the goat shed, and peeling the fence out of its deep blanket of ice and snow today I thought:

The purpose of clowning is to make others feel. Like a good poem, clowning shows us what connects us as humans, what makes us human. That includes sadness, anger, boredom, belligerence, fear, weariness, humor, joy, lightness, disgust, judgement ...