24/30 - atatatata

i really have to stop doing this. it was right there, the memory, in my mind, i sat down to write it, i opened this window, i wrote the post number, and now i’ve forgotten what i wanted to write.

what was i doing. i’d just come in from a meeting. ah yes, the sheets.

last night i went out to get some sheets for nunu’s new bed but on my way there i saw a bookshop and thought i’d stop and check it out since the beddings store would be open for another hour and a half or so. needless to say i went home without sheets but i did get four new books. does that make me a bad mother? or a good reader? or a book hoarder given that i bought these books while being a full hundred or so pages into two other books (each)? i need a shower. bad enough that i’m going to go do that before we continue because i’m pretty sure the apartment stinks of me. does not having time to shower make me a good mother?

why am i always in such a hurry? just had another fantastic idea in the shower that has now slipped away. what was i doing. washing my hair. it’s not coming back, i’ll have to let it go let it run away like wild horses over the hills. i haven’t read any bukowski in a long time.

another cloudy day today and my mother has reorganized the pantry. she hasn't said anything about it she's just done it and now the lentils are where nunu’s cereal was and nunu’s cereal is where the snacks were and the snacks which are what i’m most likely looking for if i’m in the kitchen are somewhere i haven't discovered yet and have given up on finding for the time being which is probably for the best since mom is making lunch and it smells delicious. this is her love language. cooking yes but also displacing your things so thoroughly that you have to come to her to ask where anything is, making herself essential through spatial rearrangement. it's genius actually. you can't be disrespectfuk with someone when they’re the only person who knows where your cookies are.

nunu is experimenting with new sounds, new pitches. her signature talking point at the moment is something that sounds like hi dada or ratata. sometimes i’ll check on her when she’s supposedly napping and find her in bed eyes wide open hands stretch out in front of her playing with her own fingers and whispering atatatata with a look of awe as if she were whispering prophecies to herself, casting curious spells from her cot. everything happens little by little so subtle that you don’t even notice it because it is always happening at slowest and most unseen pace like the turn of the very earth it emerges in only the smallest ways tiny bursts here and there a new sound a new facial gesture a more sophisticated dexterity a deliberate pitch. we have this thing where every time i catch her eye i gasp in surprise like i’m just realizing she’s here and am in awe of her beauty. she loves it, almost as much as she loves looking at people’s hands. she’s obsessed with hands at the moment. she grabs my fingers while i type and tries to redirect them to her mouth as if what i'm doing is a misuse of perfectly good fingers when the real question is: are they edible?

pregnancy is like hiking up a very high mountain, the higher you go the harder it gets, the less breath you have, the less air there is to breathe, the more tired your hips are until you reach the top to jump right off before the mountain crumbles beneath you, and you fall and fall and fall into the underworld which is called post-partum.

the greatest magical tools at our disposal are our language, our awareness, and our imagination. with only those three we expand our own consciousness and the consciousness of others. acknowledgement, understanding, informed action, but most of us can’t get past the acknowledgement. how will we understand something we refuse to acknowledge? how will we act in alignment with the best solution if we don’t understand what we’re dealing with? are some pleasures better than others?

for dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return. philosophical nugget produced by a sound mind or angry declarative burn of a greedy king hoarding resources? you dare eat from my special tree you ignorant earth worm? you insignificant speck of dust?

in the opening chapters of the brothers karamazov three brothers arrive at the monastery for a meeting that their father fyodor has allegedly called to settle a financial dispute with his son dmitri. it's supposed to be mediated by father zosima, a holy man, in a holy place, and within minutes fyodor is telling vulgar stories, insulting everyone, intentionally making a fool of himself. he tells father zosima i always feel when i walk into a room that i am the lowest of all and that everyone takes me for a buffoon so let me play the buffoon because every one of you is lower than me. fyodor pavlovich rushes to embody the most base version of himself so as never to be caught or criticized or held accountable for his sincerity. he humiliates himself before anyone else has a chance to. no accusation of his character can hurt if his character is a manufacturing separate from himself. fyodor is a machine that produces humiliating behavior and records unfavourable and confused response as pleasure. fyodor would rather be loathed for his intentional assholery than even be assessed, considered for who he actually is. he extracts pleasure from the meeting of his behavior with the confused and disgusted reactions of those in his company, his performance is recorded as a pleasurable thing, a desirable thing on the body without organs, and so is born the residual subject, fyodor pavlovich the trickster, who makes those around him uncomfortable with his vile manner and unfiltered tongue. but is there a fyodor behind the performance deciding when to turn it on? or has fyodor become the performance that identifies with the residual subject that finds itself a tangential subjectivity with regards to the pleasure of intentionally humiliating oneself? fyodor pavlovich is another father who refuses to die and each of his sons reflect something back at him: dmitri, the chaotic trickster, ivan, the corrosive intellectual, alyusha, the one who needs to be loved by all. and the whole novel is about whether any of them can build something that isn't just a reaction to the harm that he’s done. can we make something new out of inherited wreckage or are we always just rearranging the debris?

the sun hasn't properly come out all day and my mother has been cooking and cleaning since she landed and shows no signs of slowing down. she found a spot behind the toilet that i'm choosing not to discuss and one of nunu's missing socks which had somehow found its way to the inside of the oven mitt. i don't know how. nunu doesn't know how. the sock isn't talking. the oven mitt refuses to snitch. dust nation lives to see another day.

until tomorrow <3