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September 11, 2005

watch me while I gravitate

The patients remind him of a horror movie called The Night of the Living Dead. They all walk slowly, as if someone had unscrewed the tops of their organs like mayonnaise jars and liquids were sloshing around inside.
^{Stephen King, The Woman in the Room}

But when they played the tapes back, they found that ... other items had intruded. Someone speaking, fast and urgent, in what might be Polish. A twittering, like small birds in a wood ... Once, a woman's irate voice...
^{Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black}

The Husband suggests the design of my blog should be "a single tear drop." We are sitting at a table on an Alexandria sidewalk when he says this, having lunch with Moo and Herself and taking a break from the art festival we've been wandering through. He is having a Corona beer and I am having a margarita, and it is a muggy Saturday afternoon and we are having a pretty good time. At the table next to us is a middle-aged couple, sitting with their little girl and next to their table is a buggy covered with pink netting: their new baby is inside the buggy, asleep. The mother and I start talking to each other the way mothers will, telling stories and comparing, and I am halfway through a story when I reach a point where I can either say that The Husband and I do not live together, or I can change one tiny detail so that we--Moo, Herself, The Husband and I--so that we remain, for the length of the conversation, a functioning and cohesive Unit: a normal family, on a normal family outing, on a normal weekend, in our normal life together. I hesitate for just a second, and then finish the story.

I understand that The Husband's remark is meant to be taken facetiously but not really, since he is not in favor of how I write my blog, which is to say from the point of emotion, which is to say that many of the entries sound like I am sad. He doesn't realize that when I sit down to write I might have a very different outcome in mind but something happens when my fingers are on the keyboard and how I'm feeling tends to leak out--but often I don't even realize "how I'm feeling" is how I'm feeling... it's almost like being a medium, channeling somebody else's impressions/emotions/ life, holding it in or maybe not picking up the phone until I sit down and I look at the computer screen and I think, maybe "I'll write about what I had for dinner" but when I hit Preview and read what I've written there's not one thing on the page that remotely resembles a story about meatloaf.

Posted by JudyLa at 03:30 AM | Comments (0)