sometimes transliterated ‘dostoevsky’

I look awful. My face is puffy. My eyes are overlarge. My head is terribly unstable. Hubble keeps telling me my speech is slurred. He’s right. The muscles in my throat are tight and uncomfortable. But that’s not it. That’s not the cause of the slurring. I just don’t feel like opening my mouth enough to elocute. I want to roll my tongue in large exaggerated jabberwocky gestures. It loosens up my face.

I used to do this all the time when I was a kid, whenever I was sick. My sister HATED it. She still hates it and tells Hubble he should hate it too. My high school choir teacher called me obnoxious. Once, in college, I had a professor ask if I were on drugs: “Buffy, are you…are you stoned?”

You can sod right on off.

That’s what I wanted to say. It was exactly how I felt and I’ve always found it a fabulous turn of phrase. 🙂 Then he went and gave me a C. I hated those things – Cs. They were average and I was already average enough without them. So, I went back later that week. To explain. I left with an A. I didn’t thank him.

This afternoon I went to bed and slept for three hours. I thought it’d help. The sleep. It didn’t.

Once every five years, my brain explodes. Oozes out my ears. In cold little streams filled with something very hot. I always think ‘this is something Dostoevsky would write’ just before I think ‘how do you transliterate that name’ and ‘how did he ever write at all’. Then I remember how, or think I do. Because now, when that part of my brain that normally sits quiet doesn’t quite sit quiet any more, I do some of my best stuff. I’m not sure that one is at all related to the other. But I know it limbers up my mind. Frees me of all sorts of inhibitions I didn’t know I had. But it leaves me feeling awful. Just, lousy. Really out of sorts.

It’s hard to write when you’re really out of sorts.

I might read poetry. Poetry helps. Spiritual things. Not the deep stuff. Song of Solomon is sometimes nice. I used to be partial to Oswald Chambers. Elizabeth Gilbert is okay too. The Guru scoffs at Gilbert. And that’s fair enough because he is The Guru.

I used to read the New Testament in Koine Greek. Then I admitted, but only to myself, the only reason I did it was because it looked more impressive than reading it in English. Classical trumps Germanic. Any day. I don’t think that way anymore. Anymore, I read Elizabeth Gilbert. Eat, Pray, Love, my darlings. That is all.