Note: Finished this 7/3/24, but calling the proofreading done and posting today.

I think any pregnancy—especially pregnancy after miscarriage—can have stressful aspects.  It’s a state that straight out the gate removes the blindered illusion of control.  Mysterious unseen things are happening inside your body (as indeed they always are, but these things don’t feel so quotidian as the miraculous fact of our everyday corporeality) that command a hyper-focus, and while you can eat or not eat this and do or not do that, mostly you’ve got to sit back and let whatever it is happen.

CW: Pregnancy loss.

Note: I wrapped up the writing of this thing literally the afternoon of the evening I went into labor—March 31st; Jamie would arrive midday April 1st. Twelve weeks later I’d scraped together the time to give it a rough editorial read-over and was ready to mark the official conclusion of the “fourth trimester” by at last posting this roving kitchen-sinky pre-baby time-capsule of thought. And on that day—June 24th—Roe was overturned and I really just couldn’t with my own bullshit. Still very much in the disgusted rageful grief muck of the overturn, but figured I’d finally get this up today at cuatro meses. Regarding Roe, I will say that these last four months with Jamie have only and exponentially deepened my strong belief in the absolute sacredness of choice—of if and how and with whom (if anyone) and when. Taking away any potentially child-carrying person’s power to decide these things—insofar as one precariously may in these wild and holy and humbling realms—is so simply and completely wrong I cannot find other language sufficient to express my sense of the wrongness.

At the beginning of 2019 Rama and I entered an in-between. Mid-February we uprooted from the Oakland pad, leaving behind newly wed Madz and Jeff, and in their exclusive care the ladies (with the idea of a future “custody split” sitch when Rama and I had at some unknown future date settled ourselves into a yet-undetermined place). The extremely crudely sketched plan was this: to spend some months with my folks and bro in Huntington Beach tackling projects and hanging out, then to bop up to Nevada City for more of the same with Ram’s pops. Then to perhaps “honeymoon” at last—romantical pretext for a roving multi-week (or couple-month) international gallivant. And upon our return to seek a more permanent spot to plant ourselves.

I wrote this a few months back, but didn’t feel like trying to tweak tenses etc., so please consider it back-dated for late March. Also I’m sorry for redundant pictures—I’ve been experimenting with newly acquired Adobe Lightroom, which has been heady and amazing, but also has somewhat broken my brain re: seeing pictures properly, so I’ve (as ever tbh) erred on the side of excess.

Rama and I haven’t had a lot of nature time hunkered down in the Hubs.  We (nearly) daily hit the beach in one form or another, but Huntington beaches are the converse of the rocky-coved Nor-Cal coast, with its jagged black descents, craggy pines, wind-pruned chaparral, and untended tangles of asters, yarrow, buckwheats, and sage.  

The Wild Unknown Tarot Guidebook explains the nine of cups card strangely: 

Alas…the card of wishes come true.  When the nine of cups appears, worries and fears will be cast away.  A new phase of peace and harmony awaits.  The world seems to be granting your every wish.  Good health, happiness, and even material gains are heading your way.  Enjoy.

I’ve been infinitesimally chipping at a dauntingly long writing project (with a couple others simmering on the back burner), but lately I’m stuck on the same maddening section, keep re-working the same clinker sentences into clunky overwrought monstrosities.  So I’m going to step out of that for a sec.

It’s the end of 2017, and I’ve been very much in that looking-back, looking-forward kind of mindset.  Incidentally, it’s been more than a year since I successfully completed a piece of writing—a startling realization.  I would not, in years past, have hesitated to excoriate myself for the lapse, particularly since my writing rhythm was hard-won, ox-shouldered over many devoured hours into established habit. 

Tuesday night was the worst night's sleep of my life (unless I've blocked out worse ones), and its endless tossing, turning, temple-throbbing pillow-punching was the night-capper to what had been an extremely crappy evening, where smug anticipatory party vibes disintegrated into burgeoning panic, disbelieving despair, a very unfair fight picked by me with Rama, followed by my pacing around the house in a lost and sobbing haze until I sank at last into a deep and hopeless grief and “went to bed.”  I woke up ass-crack early Wednesday morning (after what, cobbled together, might have been two hours of actual sleep) with an immediate sense of a sickening wrongness, followed closely by the aching heart, leaden gut recollection of a new reality.  It felt like I'd woken up the day after being freshly dumped, or like my mom said the morning after a death. 

Historically I’ve best connected with visual art aided by language.  I remember the first time feeling a painting had “opened up” to me—it was my sophomore year of high school and we were on a Girl Scout trip to London.  O the dorky but it was gonna look choyce on my extra-curricularly-challenged college apps, and it enabled me at age sixteen to “go abroad” (as I’m sure we called it then because we were your stan-pro Liz Bennet-obsessed adolescent girl-nerd anglophiles) with my two besties Liz and Teri.  Whatever you may say of the Girl Scouts, those bitches know how to make an itinerary—the scope and efficiency of our touring was creepy-cray.  We saw a lot, and it was a formative trip in many ways (like we discovered brie, tomato, and basil on baguette, which would become the staple sandwich of countless picnics back in the Hubs), but I especially recall our visit to the National Gallery. 

A good friend and I tend to get balls-deep via text (notable because I’m very impatient with phone-typing).  A couple weeks back she told me she was having a “thin place” around her romantic past—within a handful of days a selection of exes were making various reappearances, not in dramatic torch-holding, getting-back-together ways, but as gentle phantoms paying mild visitations.  I enjoy when women get all bluebearded like men do, gathering their “conquests” into a relationship chamber to be regarded not as exploded suns, but rather examined as collected reflecting-back facets of one’s own mirrored self (a bit o' purple prose for you there—jaysus).  I appreciated this subject (as opposed to object) vibe in my friend’s narrativizing, and beyond that I was struck by her turn of phrase: “thin place.”  

I’ve been grappling the last couple weeks with a piece of writing that started out simply enough, but has since transmogrified into something of an idea monster, all-a-wiggling with unruly flexing and flailing tentacles of thought.  Not by needs a bad thing—it’s very satisfying to throw together a mess of apparent irrelatives and order them into an approximation of themed meaning.  I tend generally to think and therefore to write like this (downright headache-making for a couple of my more tradish college paper readers), and I really love reading this kind of writing.  It was so inspiring for me to discover Rebecca Solnit, who has made a successful career out of this sort of thing, though she’s a bazillion times more aloof and erudite than I, and isn’t afraid of sentences like: “Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert.”  O the pithy.  Anyway, in order to write in this way without sounding insane you have to keep it stylistically tight, and your brain has to be ex-tree limbered-up and lithe.  I haven’t been on my A-game, not with my scribin’ nor more generally.

I turned thirty May thirteenth.  Big deal and not a big deal.  I'd already started to think of myself as being thirty probably sometime during my twenty-eighth year to heaven, and furthermore thirty was never my Scary Year (thirty-five, SATC-style, may have been, though really I don't want to have any overburdened age).  Rama turned forty about a month before I hit my own milestone, and as I kept saying, because I'm an asshole, "Rama's turning forty reeaallly takes the edge off my turning thirty."  So douche, and also true--being with someone a little older really helps you feel like a whippersnapper wood nymph PYT.  But here's the thing I've mainly been mulling over before my birthday and since: how much does Rama's simply being in my life (ages irregardless) mitigate the weight of this potentially millstone-y marker?  And existential ego terror in general?

I'm wildly behind.  We're halfway through July, and I'm trying to wrap my mind around recapping a couple mid-April Nevada City visits.  The last few months have been bustling, which I love, but it's tricky finding in-between-times to write, and let's be real--writing even the silliest bit of nothing takes ages.  As the weeks and months go by I get progressively more meh about recounting events that have for me lost some of their sharpness; I realize I'm somewhat obsessive about detail, and slackening memory makes me feel scattered and reluctant and only snowballs the delay.  Plus I'm feeling generally verbally rusty and off-rhythm.  But my bellyaching about The Trials and Tribulations of The Writing Process is entertaining to no one, least of all me, and I'm hell-bent of preserving via le bloggity some these past months' funtimes, even if it's more picture-y than wordy.  I'm up in NC now, hiding from the heat while Romz and his pops get some late-in-the day work done on the porch.

Rama and I crawled into la cama practically immediately upon arriving back in Oakland--not the first time I've ruled that shut-eye supersedes showering.  It felt really good to sleep in a bed, which isn't to say we're by any means roughing it when we camp.  Rama has Rama-ish-ly dialed in our camp sleep set-up, and it's completely comfy.  Man with a plan, right after we met he went out and purchased two big green Coleman bags to zip together (not for hike-in camping, obvi, but since leg room in the bag is paramount to my peace of mind they're dope for our yoozh bourgie car camping).  As to padding, for at least the first year of our campvibes we used stacked-up moving blankets, very princess and the pea style, which is totally sufficient but cumbersome to pack.  Rama bought a queen air mattress for my ma to use when we camped with her in Santa Cruz, and we've used it since and never looked back.

Easter Sunday Joanna Concert & Kamala's B-day

Pre THE-BIG-FOUR-OH festivities I'd picked up a couple shifts for Erica, and so worked Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights, doubled Saturday, and then capped the week with Easter Sunday brunch (which was underwhelming truth be told--we'd stacked staff to the hilt but failed to anticipate most Easter folk wouldn't be particularly keen on bar dining, which lopped off a good portion of our business).  Because of trabajo I couldn't make it to the Easter/Kamala's birthday celebración en la casa de la mama de la Rama, but I woke up early Easter morn to make birthday and Easter cards respectively for Rom's mom and granny.  (I seem to be on a watercolor card-making kick with this bout of Aries b-days--my ma's, Kamala's, and Ram's.)  Rama in turn made the cutest springy bulbous bouquets of mini tulips, irises, and daffodils--I'd told Maggie at work what we'd been up to that morning, and she said something like, "God you guys are such nerds," which laughed me.

Rama was feeling the possibility of surfing Deadman's last Monday.  We weren't stoked on the dubiously "pre-traffic" six a.m. wake-up call, and so slept until a civilized hour, then passed a leisurely morning waiting it out with Poundy and the cats at the casa.  It was a very windy day--unequivocally my favorite kind of weather--and I threw open all the windows so it could gust through the house (to Lola's lawless pleasure).  After some general tidying I stationed myself on the bed to pay bills, etc., and Rama made breakfast: a wee bowl of TASTY kale with lotsa lemon and Braggs (I could have devoured an enormous one), and a curious open-faced half English muff with fried egg over kale bits mixed in with melted jack.  It was good taste-wise, but difficult to eat--it didn't help that we dined in "my office," i.e. bed, and without sharp knives.  I just really don't like messy sandwiches that get on my hands--it's a visceral aversion.  After brek Rama also did some bill-pay, then reckoned the 'fuck had probably dissipated enough for us to venture into the city.  The pre-bridge was still snarly, but Rama evaded much of it with his brilliant navigational trickery.

It's been a sort of drudging couple of weeks with Rama hard at work on his rental, but I reckon it's good to stay put and do-the-do from time to time.  While R's had his honker trained to the grindstone I've been steadily check-marking my own illimitable lists--I've always been terrible about staying on top of tedious practicalities, but I seem to be becoming better about it, growing up minorly despite myself.  I think I've finally bored of the old "struggle of will" "devil on my shoulder" shit, and I'd rather not wait and let procrastination inflate a piddling task into a looming ballooning thing, when I can instead just get 'er done and be done.

Liz's ma opines Valentine's is "for the birds," and she doesn't mean the love-birds, though the couple-centrism of the holiday is my major gripe.  There are I guess many reasons to disdain this most-hated of days.  There's the tried-and-true stance of lampooning its sinister greeting-card-company origins and their commodification of luv, where we're supposed to go all gooey over Hallmark hooey and hideous heart-holding bears and cheesy red-lace teddies.  (Don't even get me started on the grating proliferation of rancid diamond company radio commercials.)

Rama's pa Richard's birthday is January 29--Sunday the 31st we headed up to Nevada City to celebrate and visit.  Madz had managed to get her Monday dinner shift covered and was able to accompany us; she'd been working a lot and a mini-retreat was very much the needed thing.  We had a late departure; Maddy and I worked brunch, and then were dragging our heels packing after.  

I’m de Huntington Beach (oft abbreved to HB, which I have begun to refer to as “the Hubs”).  There the sun is pretty much always shining.  It’s a fetishized clime with its aggrandized azure and nary a cloud, but sun-uninterrupted becomes humdrum, especially for one complected more toward freckling than godly bronzage.  Living down that-a-way I relished the rare rain day; El Niño ’97 had me in kiddo ecstasy.  I remember vividly hearing the word’s “flash flood” on the car radio and experiencing frissons of anarchic glee.

I've got a (much) longer bloggity in the works, but I wanted to post an ultra-quickie before we embark for the day on a northerly.  Emma brought this James Baldwin quote to my attention yesterday: