Kat made her first bread (five loaves): not bad. Also, first bus trip to town and back.
Sitting at our kitchen window and looking out at our new birdfeeder, watching cardinals and titmice, such a treat to examine them almost microscopically: free pets, in nature!
In the year 2003, I will be 55: the door is always open.
She is tired of my talking always about things. Or, as I see 50 years later, facts. Not my feelings. [Seeing that pattern would take years of therapy.]
Kat and I are private people: we know no one we can drop in on.
Mail addressed to Ms Jnana Hodson
Some days nothing goes right – up too early, humidity and heat, killer sinuses – wife dragging feet and my late start to work.
They can’t fix the car today. The mess started a week ago with auto inspection. Mr. Muskrat (pointy nose, sunglasses, and cigarette, smiling) and Mr. Ladykiller (cigarette and fast-talking) selling Kat into shocks with alignment and inspection, but the car wouldn’t pass inspection because it needed new king bolts, $60. Next day, to Brinegar’s, for the king bolts and, surprise, rod ($75) … and a long walk to work.
Still, no inspection sticker: the horn wouldn’t work.
Off to Ohio, stopped by state cops (bears), right front light out – warning ticket – and then the Bloomdale patrolman.
After fixing the horn, the turn signals didn’t dink.
In the end, it was a shorted fuse.
And then our check bounced, adding a $5 fee from the bank.
That defeated feeling you can’t get ahead of the game. Can’t save, car’s falling apart, only a fool would write poetry and submit. The more you rework for them, the more you lose from your own life.
“Life is worth living only in retrospect.”
At dawn on the 4th, Nosmo (our black kitten) wasn’t back. The house seemed empty.
Chicago trip; we stayed with Celeste and Luis, edge of the DMZ twixt Hyde Park, University of Chicago, and South Side.
unstretched canvases tacked to walls
massive waves crashing into shore
cold, stiff wind
The Maxwell Street market, block after block of hot goods amid burned-out lots abutting the precinct station house and state college campus. Catholic church, Masses in Spanish packed every service.
Mirrors, mirrors.
Hyde Park, with Frank Lloyd Wright houses
and a Swendenborgian church
~*~
On opening a page, amid Sunday afternoon jazz, a startling confession: “So hard to say what I really feel.” Specifically, it was regarding the music, but the fuller scope came back to haunt me throughout the rest of my life.
With Kat at S. John’s, the heathen beauty of ritual: No music, a relief from music poorly done. I’m bothered by the emphasis on sin, which should not be applicable to those who have been baptized in grace, and also bothered by the political positions from the pulpit … especially interpreting scripture to support family when Jesus clearly called men away …
~*~
21:II:76, a rainy morning: Omkara, our VW, towed in again, the coil had fallen off …
Kat shaved her legs last night, first time in a year or more – their smoothness, newness turns me on, especially after sitting across from JB the previous night, she was dressed up, eyeshadow, too. Funny, looking at your own wife that way and so delightful. Not to take anything away from his partner, who could have swept me away, too.
Delightful? Or deceitful?
The high scolding scream of a little rabbit freed from our cat’s mouth as it runs shitless home.
Kat, with her wanting a divorce …
She wants affairs and a place of her own. So often she fights us yet often keeps us solitary, complaining of Aquarians’ love of friends and strangers.
How strange to see that latter observation, considering how solitary most of my hours in retirement have been.
Can’t take it anymore – her inarticulate depression, her months of “You don’t love me anymore,” her jealousness of my writing and my music, her desire for a divorce, her blaming me for our marriage, her resentment of my practices – my yoga, my Friends, my need for a meditation area, for silence (her yap-yap, her Qs w/out answers, her constant efforts to drain me: the meat, cigarettes, TV, radio, her desire to spend money, her efforts to push me out, to keep me from having friends or from having them over, her withdrawals, her Jekyll-Hyde snappings).
If she wants a divorce, OK. Half the bank account, half our goods, no alimony.
She can suffer in her own stupor. I’m tired of it.
Terrible thunderstorm about 6:30 this morning: green/gray skies, leaves scattered all over the yard, cornstalks flattened. No tornado watch or warning.
Car inspection. Needs new tires but Firestone’s out on strike. They tried to sell me retreads, no deal. I wound up buying Dayton Thoroughbreds, but the shop can’t balance or align them. [wonder who did].
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 