So it's Saturday night and my son has finally fallen asleep after cutting a tooth all afternoon, grinding his voice and weeping and sometimes laughing for no reason at all.  All Friday night he does the same, until 3 in the morning, and at some point we give up on calming in the bedroom and dose with tylenol and trek into the living room to watch video of deep-sea jellyfish shimmering and pulsing and try and relax and ask every creature in the deep sea, "why ARE you?".
I wish I could say I got a nap sometime this afternoon; I'm trying to get dressed for dinner but even though it's been eighty degrees all weekend, the nights are somehow cold, and I can't get out of my sweater so I write and draw and stay under a blanket all evening.  My son will sleep a couple hours more, then we will go eat and, god willing, I will finally sleep.
help! I need sleep. 

http://www.remyholwick.com

that's all.

It is thanksgiving and we, (sweet son and I) are at my mother's giant sprawling rickety spidering house on the side of the hill, I am half awake after a day of travel and two days of eating bits of sugar off the counters and from the rims of mixing bowls and my son is squawking and squeaking at my mother.
So for this one day we put aside ambition and observe what brought us this far-- that's bittersweet, but now that we are here I know why we couldn't have some of the things we thought we needed/thought we couldn't live without, and it's sad, sure, but let's put that aside and understand that where we are is good.
It would be nice to make a list of things to be thankful for, but this has been a hell of a year an I can not do all the small things up to this point justice, all the little bumps and kicks of my son coming to being and all the growing stronger and happier, so suffice to say I am thankful, and my son, although he still hasn't any idea what it means, is too.
I want to write something very different right now, but it will wait.

Listening to the new Conner Orberst album. It's good. I like it better than some of his Bright Eyes stuff. He sounds older, and a little less dramatic. It has a couple happy songs even. Thank god. I feel like that's been my trajectory of aging. Good to know it's not just me.
Scrapped that story with the letter-- but i promise I'm not being flaky. The color testing was still necessary, but the premise of that story wasn't really grounded enough to say what I wanted.. honestly, I wasn't even sure what I wanted it to say. It mirrored too closely some stuff in my life that just doesn't have enough closure for me to be able to step away from and understand in enough depth and with enough distance to retell it in a meaningful way.

Does that make sense?

The new story, the one I finished laying out early this morning, is about what we remember and what we forget and what makes history. Two people go to the museum-- one retells the events of the last ten million years while the other struggles to remember the last ten.

In other news, why the hell have 64 people viewed my blog before 7 am?
did I suddenly become insanely popular on the east coast? That'd be great. Keep it up, east coast. More likely, myspace is misreporting or some guy on crack left my blog open and keeps hitting "refresh" compulsively. again. and again. Real fast.
Or it's Courtney Love. I read somewhere that she posted 60+ whole blog entries in one day. I think that qualifies as "unusual". And it certainly qualifies her to hit refresh that many times.
Go Courtney.

a bigger color test. still just a scribble, but there's more of it now.

it's just a color test; I'm usually drawn to black and white but thought it might be fun to try 2 color. Not sure about this story line, and obviously this is just a mess... but I thought it was cute anyway.

On the morning after the election, I want you to understand why it was important to volunteer my time to the campaign.
Obviously, I want my son to understand that working for what you believe in is important, (I have a 4 month old boy, John Henry) and I want to be a good example. I've been a terrible example these past few years. I used to volunteer all the time. In high school I ran the middle school mentoring program. I helped teach children, and I assisted teaching middle school courses. I volunteered with social programs at the first assembly of god (betcha didn't realize that, mom, you thought I was just rock climbing!!) In college I protested, I cleared trails. The last couple years have been totally selfish, and I know it's easy to say "I'm tired" or "I'm busy", and therefore I'm entitled to a pass, but that very sense of entitlement is what has gotten this country so turned around. When mcCain declared "everyone, you're all 'joe the plumber'!", what he meant is that since everyone is a hard working, honest, tired american, we are all entitled to take all the tax cuts and money we can get in our free-market bid for the american dream. This is flawed, and this is the way I live. It's the way we all live, and if I and we continue to live like this, it's the same as supporting McCain, no matter who you cast that ballot for.
The truth is that we ARE all busy and tired, and it doesn't give ANY of us an excuse to consume freely from the greater world, pursuing our own personal goals, while taking a pass at participating in creating, maintaining, and bettering that same world (it's simple conservation-- extra ANYTHING can't be created from nothing or destroyed completely, so what you take has to come from somewhere, and what you put out MUST go somewhere). My son, and his entire generation, need to understand, from the very beginning, that it's NEVER ok to excuse yourself, no matter how busy you are, or how tired you are, from putting out into the world as much as you use up.
I'm so grateful, this morning, that John Henry might not have the luxury of a goverment that teaches irresponsiblilty and encourages citizens to turn their backs on problems: one that encourages loans of money to people with no clear plan of return, that refuses to aknowledge global warming as a disaster or even a problem, that refuses to sign onto Kyoto in sheer blissful ignorance of reality, or ignores the growing population of poor people in his community, country, and world. Thank god he won't be entitled to a worn-out sense of "manifest destiny" that has always allowed America to take what it wants, whether it is native land, hawaii, or iraq, and provides an example that encourages citizens to think locally on the same scale.
As these luxuries, dubious as they are, dry up, it's important that I as a parent want to-- and HAVE to-- change my own life, in a big way, to be something he can look up to.
It's going to be hard, but it's got to happen. We are so lucky that we, busy as we are, and tired as we are, have the resources, the hearts, and the sense of purpose that we can work to create a sustainable world. We must never let ourselves think that we are entitled to a "pass" on creating this world just because we are already busy using those resources, those hearts, and that sense of purpose, to purely selfish ends.
My son is awake, and I have to feed him...

(it's such an emo, bleeding-hearted pun; get it?)


I guess that it's some combination of the changing seasons and the birth of my son that transforms the passing of the autumn weeks into a sort of calendar-driven turnstile, and it's some new combination of passivity, defensiveness, curiosity, and good old-fashioned longing that lets me admit through it, one after the other, a string of the People I Really Thought I'd Never See Again.
Aside from the initial shock that comes with wreckage-style loss and re-gain, there are two things about this: first, in a sense, these people are ghosts, and I am unable to look directly at them and it's impossible to relate completely because they're all transparent, filmy, and able to drift through walls and space and time, and I am not; second, they are so very solid in spite of this that, when I run my fingers across their surfaces, I can not help but hit up against all the places we used to fit together and I can't deny it, can't pass over it, can't move through it, so I must aknowledge that some of the things that fit before just don't anymore, and I or we have built myself or ourselves up enough that maybe these places just aren't accessible, are all scarred over, are safe now, but maybe or maybe not worthwile anyway.

Another (surprise!) message reaches me this morning and it's such a trend that now I have to write about it.
Hello, November.

My son is asleep and soon I will be, too.
October pulls itself out from under us like water receeding from a shorebreak; ignoring this or maybe in spite of it, I dunk myself in the not-metaphorical ocean off Venice Beach and it is cold in a way that stays with me all afternoon and I can not shake-- the long los angeles summer is over and so it is officially Too Cold For The Beach.
The looseness is gone, too, and the lazy long days tighten themselves up as my postpartum life and skin have tightened back up around their respective skeletal structures ; the year is once again bordering on november and it's one more year where I wake up, alone, at five am--because I like it 5am--, put on coffee and draw water into the bathtub and wait for the sunrise at the long heavy wooden table.
In the car i try and answer "what's it like with the baby", but it's s tricky question because there's no big change to report. I have a son, but am still me, and even though now it's really me and John Henry, too, he's only addition, and isn't coupled with any real break from everything that came before-- a little subtraction, sure, a stretch-marked summer given away for adjustment and recovery, but no real, lasting break.
I am now us. One of us is asleep now, just past nine-thirty in almost-november, and one of us will be, any minute now.

a girl named annie in sf has this on her arm, done after my work.
so cool! I love it.