Zzzzzzzzzzzzz........

OMG this blog is so BORING! It's just me reacting to the New York Times!!!!! I don't even want to read it!!!!!!!!

My creative imagination is coming back, thanks to Tom Robbins. I used to love all that shit, the acid-soaked weirdness of sixties novels, the magical realist brilliance of Marquez, the ghosts of Toni Morrison, the American mystic travelers who weren't about to argue with stuffed shirts over at the Grey Lady so much as just live life the way it ought to be lived. It's all well and good to talk and argue and march and vote; it's something else to step beyond the vanguard and live on the outside, damning and redefining the edge.

I can't believe I haven't had a day job in two years. TWO YEARS. Thanks to my meager comedy income, the largess of my husband's extravagant grad student stipend, my grandparents' incredibly valuable post-mortgage Brooklyn home, and the benefit extension afforded to married people, I have the blessed luxury of this time to be making half a living. I also have the now to contemplate, think, create, do. My life is starting to take shape in my head, and it doesn't happen in an office building.

I'm still figuring out what life is: what it means; how it's best lived - by all, by one, by me; what art is within it and around it; when it begins and what happens when it ends. I feel like once I've figured it out 5% of the way, then I'll be ready to have kids. Right now I'm hovering around 3.5-3.8% lucidity.

Anybody who's taken five minutes with this blog knows I'm a harsh critic, especially of myself. Sometimes I can let go. Sometimes I wake up and my skin isn't even crawling, I don't even hate the vehicle of my body or the discomfort of the present moment or the tasks and neuroses I have yet to untangle, and I can just flow. For some reason, this is one of those moments. I don't know if it's something I ate or the temperature or how much sleep I got, but this precious moment of open is upon me.

I remember the miserable godforsaken pathetic panicky twitchy insecure lump I was during my semester abroad. I'd been in eight hours of outpatient therapy all day every day for weeks ahead of my departure. Something about living my life in the correct order and getting to do what I felt I deserved to get to do without having to stop to fix all my broken inside parts made me force myself over to Spain. The people who helped me there will always, always mean the world to me, for I asked a whole lot and they gave. But I also remember one day just feeling absolutely, completely, totally okay. The discomfort of my constant panic attacks and internally itchy hatred of my own skin and my own thoughts rolled out like a fog, and everything became crystal clear. I thought maybe it would last; it didn't. I wasn't the dilatory student of Buddhism I am now, but thinking back I probably chased it a bit. But I also was able to stay there, experience it, be in it. Nothing brought it on; it was not like the euphoria of new love or the non-stop excitement of a big day that can bring about the same type of presence. It just...was.

What a gift.

I have that again today. And I am trying just to be.