barnfall
Built in 1858, give or take, this is the barn at my grandparents' house, the center wall of which finally gave way during one of our numerous high wind warnings as the endless transition from sort-of-winter to sort-of-spring unfurls.
Fond memories of playing in its even-then collapsing structures and hidden spaces throughout my youth, the misadventures created and had, through the rafters and among the subletting racoons, of leaping from haybails, etc etc.
Assuming it doesn't totally collapse in the meantime, controlled demolition is scheduled for the end of September. Racoons will have to find a new home.
In the interim: scavenging for bottles and antique glass and pieces and parts for various projects and assorted dusty mementos of my youth, of connection long on the fritz but in the process of rewiring.
As is the wont of memories and connections had and returned.
Just realized that a.) my first book is ten years old & that b.) I, too, am ten years older.
pataflaflas and other means of heartlandic sanity preservation
I am stuck in The Work so I will write this to give my brain something else to do.
While I first thought that I was drumming again because it helped my hands stop hurting (it does, still) and it helps me think while I'm working (drum while you work) I'm starting to think that it might be because drumming was the thing that got me out of this place 20 years ago, bound for the land of music schools and R's being A's and A's being R's.
Though the source of much of my pain is physically – and thankfully – dead, he's still there mentally (as I said to my therapist, I need you to help me mentally kill someone who's been dead for seven years - ten now) especially in resurgent thought loops, (everyone's laughing at you) the more trapped I feel as the situation surrounding elders spirals into apparent infinity and the seeming reality of my lack of future becomes more real.
Perhaps in this resurgence in stick-pickings-up, I'm returning myself to that state of centeredness and sanity preservation that drumming once brought me – though to discount its onetime usage as a way to really piss off that source of pain, a metonomic fuckyou to his delicate ears, would be to do its boundless joy and widespread utility a woeful disservice.