Mal is long and lean and (Good grief, I sound like a George Jones song…) and makes everything look effortless. Marie is like a little Tasmanian devil. She moves faster than any non-Olympian has a right to move and she laughs the whole time she does it. Me, I just make weird faces and hurt a lot.

I had a trainer in college who tried to get me into meditation. When he realised I couldn’t count to five without dwelling on something I shouldn’t be dwelling on, he suggested I try fatiguing myself to death. ‘You’re young. You’ll live. And you’ll have a clear head.’

I took up boxing. Lost 20 pounds in 17 days. Was finally able to do proper push ups. And learned how not to ruminate for the first time in my life.

What I’ve done this weekend. Isn’t anything like what I did in college. But I still can’t laugh without feeling like I’ve been beat about the torso with a baseball bat. Laughing. Sneezing. Pretty much even breathing…hurts like a dickens.

Marie just called me to giggle. ‘I really don’t feel it.’
I’ll give her until the morning.

Mallorie called and said ‘I can barely turn the steering wheel. It hurts so bad.’

And hearing her say that makes me feel some better.

But not much.

A friend of mine told me to go to bed an hour early. Use that time to read. It’ll help you relax. Only reading never helps me relax because I get too excited.

I spent Friday afternoon at Borders. I picked up “CRANFORD” by Elizabeth Gaskell. It’s a tiny little thing and I had to have it turned out for my book club on Tuesday.

I’d forgotten how much I loved it. Just like I’ve forgotten so many others I read when I was young. Really young. Sometimes too young.

Like “WAR & PEACE”. I picked it up the summer I turned 12 - because it was the biggest book I could find and because my teacher kept asking ‘Are you sure?’ and making random comments about a plot line she knew nothing about.

By the time I finished I realised two things. Henry Fonda made a crap Pierre, and my teacher had never read the thing. But beyond that, there was so much I missed. So much reading in between the lines I didn’t do because I was too busy tripping over words like Bezukhov and Rostov and Andrei Bolkonsky. I’ve read it four times since then and picked it up again recently when my sister rediscovered Anna Karenina and we both began to wonder What must he be like in his own tongue?

I can’t sleep now. But I don’t dare try to read. Because then I’ll be up ’til morning.

I spent all day drinking coffee and eating nothing, then came home to Burger King at midnight. I don’t know if it was the hour or the not quite food but just after I fell asleep I fell down the rabbit hole.

And that’s about as close as I can come to describing the dream without sharing the 4,000 word short I wrote to commemorate it when I woke up Saturday morning, thinking about a coffin and a train and a man named Mark Twain.

The post below is taken from yesterday’s 6am writing session.

When or how I knew is still something of a mystery because it all came at once and with such force, the way knowing sometimes does, I wasn’t sure I knew at all.

I looked at the napkin, yellowed with age the same shade as Sarah’s skin; and at the silverware, Edwardian and platinum; and at the box, the coffin that held it all together, and thought about how it wasn’t really empty so much as full.

With Sarah and her full flouncy skirt sitting upright in it and leaning over the lip to chat with the girls in theirs, like you’d lean out of the bath to reach for a robe or a towel or just to have a word with someone on the other side of the door.

The other side…

I wanted to cry. Not the kind of full-on-everyone-can-see-and-hear-you type of cry that had never been my sort of cry anyway. But the kind that fills your insides in a low hot simmer and threatens to boil out your eyeballs and through the tips of your ears and nose and fingers and toes - if you’re not careful.

I looked at one of the other girls, looking at me, and saw she was about to spill over too. Those big watery eyes - more like an anime than any plain girl from Palo Alto. (She wore a badge that said said ‘I’m from…’) She held out her hand - Sarah and the other girls still chattering away like a barnyard full of chickens - and said without saying ‘Give it. I’ll tell her’. And I was happy for her to do it; but heart-hurt too because, who was there to tell me?

We were in Iaeger at The Hollywood Dairy Bar. A diner-type joint on the shoulder of Route 52 in McDowell County, West Virginia.

Pa was talking about hot dogs and how ‘you can’t beat ‘em at this price’ when a red pickup drove by.

“Me and him,” Pa pointed at the passing truck, “We was in a a gunfight one time that’d make Matt Dillon cry.”

The Euro and I nodded. Gun fight. Gunsmoke. Not really paying attention. Until my grandfather started talking about bullets and dynamite and dead men in Davy.

Will blog about the glamour shots later.

“They was hid up in the mountains. Prisoners the Company brought in to guard the scabs. All with rifles. Them bullets was singing past my ears all morning long. They’d light bundles of dynamite too, just like firecrackers, and KABOOM! One day we had 42 charges thrown down on us between 9:30 and 1:30. And weren’t no law would come up there. Why, the constable lived right down the road!

“Now this was the Mohawk mines. But I had a good friend get killed on the picket line in Davy. Shot right through the head. And nothin’ ever done about it. ‘Course nothing ever was done about them things. ‘Cept when Sid Hatfield got caught up for those Pinkertons gettin’ killed. And him gettin’ killed too. Right there on the courthouse steps.

“That was at the same mines as ours - Mohawk. Old Sanford Cline said he’d never seen a thing like it. And he was in the war!

“Now that Sanford was somethin’ else. The Company’d bring in truck loads of men. Try to get ‘em through in one big push and we’d always ask ‘em to respect the picket lines.

“Sanford’d walk up to ‘em and say ‘Now boys, I’m a peaceful man who don’t want no violence. I’d be pleased if you’d just turn around.’ They wouldn’t turn around for nobody but Sanford. ‘Course he had a 45 sticking out of both pockets.

“Them was bad times. But a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do to be a man. And them companies weren’t treating us like men. Payin’ a dollar a ton and that in scrip you couldn’t spend no where but their stores and their houses. And them keeping prices so high and rent no workin’ man could afford.

“The union saved many a body, boys. It saved me. Course I don’t know what it does now. I had my first heart attack on one of them picket lines. And they never had me back.”

I got up at 4:45 yesterday morning to go to the gym. Alyssa, my trainer, completely kicked my butt. At one point I had to take five and head to The Ladies because I thought ‘I’m either gonna pass out, or puke, and neither of those will look good on this carpet.’

I had to roll out of bed this morning because I did 200 walking sprinter lunges after ignoring them for a week and couldn’t stand myself up in proper fashion.

It feels fabulous.

But I still wanted to call my workout buddy, Mal, at 7am this morning and ask ‘Do you hurt too?’

He was looking very handsome when he left me this morning. But they always look handsome when they leave us. Don’t they? It use to be me going away for business and pleasure. For two weeks and six. Now it’s him. And I watch too many disaster movies to keep any kind of head about me when he’s in serious transit. Snakes on a Plane. I mean…???

You know those 1000 calorie muffins you get in coffee houses as an alternative to the better and buttery pastry dripping with almonds and fruit glaze because someone somewhere started the rumour muffins were good for you? I just tried to eat one. It was chocolate and awful. I’m beginning to realise the key to emotional eating is to start off with something you hate because it’ll make you too ill to try anything else for the rest of the day.

That’s not sound advice. But at least you’ll be too annoyed with your gastrointestinal track to worry about the man you’re missing.

Maybe.

“Because of the Anagrams dispute it has been decided to devote the rest of this space to a page specially written for people who like figures of speech, for the not a few fans of litotes, and those with no small interest in meiosis, for the infinite millions of hyperbole-lovers, for those fond of hypallage, and the epithet’s golden transfer, for those who fall willingly into the arms of the metaphor, those who give up the ghost, bury their heads in the sand and ride roughshod over the mixed metaphor, and even those of hyperbaton the friends. It will be too, for those who reprehend the malapropism; who love the wealth of metonymy; for all friends of rhetoric and syllepsis; and zeugmatists with smiling eyes and hearts. It will bring a large absence of unsatisfactory malevolence to periphrastic fans; a wig harm bello to spoonerists; and in no small measure a not less than splendid greeting to you circumlocutors.

The World adores prosopopeiasts, and the friendly faces of synechdotists, and can one not make those amorous of anacoluthon understand that if they are not satisfied by this, what is to happen to them? It will attempt to really welcome all splitters of infinitives, all who are Romeo and Juliet to antonomasia, those who drink up similes like sparkling champagne, who lose nothing compared with comparison heads, self-evident axiomists, all pithy aphorists, apothegemists, maximiles, theorists, epigrammatists and even gnomists. And as for the lovers of aposiopesis –! It will wish bienvenu to all classical adherents of euphuism, all metathesistic birds, golden paranomasiasts covered in guilt, fallacious paralogists, trophists, anagogists, and anaphorists; to greet, welcome, embrace asyndeton buffs, while the lovers of ellipsis will be well-met and its followers embraced, as will be chronic worshippers of catachresis and supporters of anastrophe the world over.”

- Monty Python

I haven’t blogged much this week because the monitor makes my face hurt. I’m obliged to attach myself to it for five hours, most days, but more than that I haven’t the heart for. Sinuses are causing the left side of my face to divorce the right. I’ve grown a whole new wrinkle this month from wincing.

——

Last night my grandmother told me the secret to a happy marriage. Smile. Alot. Whenever he talks. Even when you’d rather cry. She told me more things too. I’ll write about those later.

——

I spoke to His mother on Sunday (Mother’s Day in England). She said it’s a shame we’re not around in May. And it really is. A shame, that we’re not around as much as we use to be. I adore his mother. And not just because she says “Come to Venice with us” and can run in four inch heels.

——

I don’t even know if He can swim. I say this because I’m suddenly thinking about canals. We lived by one for five years and spent a lot of time walking along side it and talking about Lewis Carroll. He says he can. Swim. But I’ve never seen him. And I’m not one of those vast right wing conspiracy sort of girls but…

——

Speaking of fascists, this is a Polaroid I’ve just repaired. The kid with the Hitler-Hair is me. (Actually it looks more like a Hitler Mustache.) My oldest brother - younger by 2 years - is the one sporting the diaper and curls. The baby is my sister. She didn’t grow hair until she was seventeen.

Just kidding.

She was fifteen.

——

The woman in the Hitler Hair photo is my mom. He keeps saying ‘You’re starting to look like your mother’ and ‘I don’t know how I feel about that.’ And always looks very confused when he says it. My mother wont let me cut her hair. But I’m gonna guilt her into it with Locks of Love. I’m gonna guilt myself into it too.

——

My brother won’t stop cutting his. Hair. I keep saying ‘You should grow it out. A lot. Until it’s all curly-perm. That would be awesome.’ But he hates the word awesome and just looks at me like I’m stupid and then gets really quiet and all mannequin-like as I put hats on his head and say ‘Hold still while I do your face.’ Only he never lets me do his face because he has this thing about makeup and how men shouldn’t wear it. I tell him ‘Hunters can be pretty too.’

——

I’m going on a shopping trip this weekend. Only I’ve run out of things to want so I’ll probably just eat a lot and try not to think of the Haitians. Only I just thought of the Haitians so I’ll probably just drink vats of tea and be all judgmental about how much money everyone else is spending.