picture worth a thousand words

who's afraid of an old mid-sized industrial city?

oh...i'm not even sure what the hell i'm gonna write about. i just know its been a while and i start to feel this need to post SOMETHING...ANYTHING....lest i lose my blog status and you will all wander off and forget me.

the eternal search for where to go next continues...balanced relatively well by lovely weather, a big yummy handspun blanket i'm weaving and lots of praying mantis, which are just about my favorite bugs ever. right up there with wolf spiders, inch worms and cicadas.

these past couple of days i've been toying with idea of returning not only back to new york, which is nothing new, but back to rochester....specifically the southwedge which is my old neighborhood from my sordid youth.If i were to get super specific i'd go back to swillburg, which is now being called part of the southwedge in some not so successful attempt to gentrify that tiny neighborhood.
i don't think i could return to swillburg. evenon the off chance it is all crack house free and queer friendly these days. i've too many bad memories there.
like getting chased by men with baseball bats. and that guy that blew his brains out in the street in front of our house.and being dropped off at the end of my street in the early morning after my first date rape experience. he was 26. i was 15.he picked me up in a bar.that morning it was cold out, i didn't have enough clothing on, i think it was a school day.
the smell of poverty and alcoholism that permeated our house.

so no, probably not heading back to swillburg. but the southwedge extends all the way over to mount hope cemetery and the river and up to highland park and all the way downtown.

i think i'm recycling around in my real estate search. after a spell of looking here in new mexico, its a giddy thrill to take a look back home where everything is so economically depressed that you can pick up a house for 30k....hell, i've seen them for 8k on the north side. ofcourse then your in an area thats really suffering, houses boarded up, not a grocery store or anything for that matter anywhere in sight. strange to think that my family hails from the northside. my great great grandparents from lithuania had a house there. my great grandparents had a general store on st. paul blvd.

but still, compared to here, where you can't get a house at all for less than 200k, and that won't be nothing special. 120k in rochester will get you a fucking palace.

so i dabble with dreams of home, in all its working class glory. i know that old city . i can wander the streets in my mind. i know them all. its where i first fell in love. where i came out. where i dreamed about the world beyond. where i slept in doorways and ran around on rooftops and burned up all that youthfull immortality.

my teenage years were all about escaping that place. now its some sort of full circle fantasy for me.

we can't escape who we are.

i bask in the thrilling idea of getting in my car and driving east.

sunflowers' love

when you're in trouble, go into your dance

i've been horribly depressed....and stressed....and generally kinda flipped out.
it hasn't been pretty.

i'm feeling a bit better these last couple of days. scraping myself together.
managing to laugh at things. this is crucial.

its scary when i can't find the laughter.

ive managed to plaster over the chaos w/ a thin veneer of -its okay-. for now anyway.

i seriously can't take this isolation anymore. and while its not quite as extreme as it was in chacon,and at least i'm not hungry now and i have running water and plenty of electricity, i'm done with it.

at my wits end.

coping mechanisms are worn out and ragged.

like an old poem of mine, "...some old car with tics and dings and rusting parts beyond repair..."

i feel i should have made a bigger leap when i sold chacon. this here place is too similar. and w/ gas costs getting higher and higher its harder for me to go places and its just as hard for people to come here. and theres too many animals....blasphemous but true, and most of them aren't even mine. but at one point in the throws of my breakdown i was convinced i needed to not only get rid of the sheep and chickens but also the dogs and cats...all of them. no dependents...i suspect so that i could then truly spiral downward into certain disinegration or demise w/ out feeling like i'm abandoning anyone. but alas...a long as i'm still here there's still animals that need me...they aren't mine and its my job...dammit.

its easy to romanticize this life. the farmer, the shepherd, the spinster. i do it, when i can. altho i fear its now one of my newly defunct coping mechanisms. i'm going on 6 years of no tangible community. everyone i know is really really far away. no one stops by. ever. my last 4 birthdays have been just me...as well as christmas, new years, all solstice and equinox passings....you get the idea.

this past week i've felt distinctly like i was slipping through the cracks.
you know...
if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it...does it make any sound?

so....if its now -operation end isolation-...what do i do? i look almost religiously for a place to buy w/ my ever dwindling nest egg from selling the chacon cabin. but w/out any mortgage capacity its slim pickins'.usually something that would be at all attainable is just another middle of nowhere situation...and on the verge of needing to be torn down not lived in.

and even though renting can be a mine field for e.i's, i look for rentals in town but everything would require my entire ssi check...and then some.

santa fe civic housing is flat out NOT accepting section 8 applications right now..."maybe starting next year". with the economy tanking and the housing scene so fucked up its no surprise everyone and their mother is after section 8.homeless shelters are seeing record numbers as well.

lingering in the air is still this idea of building in my friends backyard...but oy veh...we're a long way from reaching consensus on that...so like i say...it lingers...and i'll tell ya, i'm not too fond of havin' all my eggs in a lingerin' basket.

but like i said, for now i've managed to paste over the fear and futility with this eerie calm. a hard earned skill.
I weave,i chat with animals like doctor fucking doolittle, i watch movies, i dance and stretch, sometimes i pace and talk to myself or stare out the window.
sometimes i start to weep...just a little
and i sing while i do the farm chores...
"what if your hinges all are rusting
what if in fact you're just disgusting
razzle dazzle em' and they'll never catch on....."

like butterscotch

lips
and chocolates fingering
tongues in a caramel dream time meltdown

a resurrection from certain doom
there was a numb nothing

just a shell of me

then a cracking sound

then everything was chocolate milk toffee
coffee cake crumbling
all over the bed
all over my skin
dream it endless
dream it too good to be
true
broken
and sweet.

many morning glories

the horse pasture down below is absolutely COVERED. its quite something.