How I Live Now

Here you see how I looked this morning when I sat down to write a spell, like Blanche DuBois or I don't know, Laura Bush might, in my kimono top and pearls. A real southern tragedy with sloppy lipstick and no bra, liable to show up drunk at the country club and skip church on Sunday. It's embarrassing to show these pictures I have snapped of myself, embarrassing like everything I have done as of late. The more I promise myself to stay off Facebook, the more I find myself ranting on it, the more I tweet the less sense I make. My emotional and spiritual state is shabby-chic, dignified and pretty pieces falling to ruin.

Yesterday I drove to the store, pulled into the parking lot, and then drove straight home. I was supposed to be getting something for dinner, but SOMETHING FOR DINNER is a puzzle that triggers a nervous breakdown these days. I have tiny nervous breakdowns every time I go to the grocery store. Sometimes they are not tiny at all. Every time I leave that place I am a bit more decrepit than I was before.

The brain is dizzy and in its own wonderland. Last night after seeing a promo on an American snowboarder, I dreamed we had moved to Lake Tahoe. I fantasize about adding tirades against Transylvania County Schools in the acknowledgement section of my book. Thanks to Transylvania County Schools, this book was in real danger of never being finished. Thanks to TCS, I have made a mockery of myself on social media. Do you know my children had school one day last week, at this time when even eating and peeing are unwanted intrusions? I don't understand anything anybody is talking about, I cannot keep up, I cannot create structured sentences anywhere outside of the book. Don't touch me, I am in labor, get the kids out of the room. Aside from Tahoe, all my dreams are of being trapped. I use my ruby lipstick in place of red slippers, smack your lips together three times, find your way home. I wake every day with the gnawing feeling that there is something I'm supposed to be doing but I can't think what, so I make coffee and put on my pearls and sit down to edit my book.

The elusive thing I'm supposed to be doing is life and this is what editing looks like on me.


(PS: Please know that Noah has been making many dinners and doing all the cleaning, which is even more than he does already, in normal times when I'm not a crazy editing book birther) (Please know I have pizza and sushi on speed dial)