anaesthesia

I would like to reconfigure Blogger so there's NO titles. My titling lately has seemed banal and accidental and reminds me of when I worked at the arts magazine run by the PBS station or at the alt-weekly - the quippy two word title. No thanks. Same with tags. I used to do tags, and sometimes I lazily tag, and I have been told I would have more readers if I tag, but still I, for some reason, revolt against that system. I am in a state of stasis. Of waiting. I have to have this dumb procedure done on Monday, what will amount to minor abdominal surgery, so instead of just taking it as part of my week, and just dealing with it, and being all buddhist about it, I've halted all production on life, basically, and am just waiting around for it, and treating myself extra-special and careful.

I ordered books - the entire George Miles cycle by DC, The Orange Eats Creeps - and have told myself - when you are in bed recovering for the two days or whatever (HOW I ask myself, is this going to be different from lately) you will read and get into the dark dark space you need to get to work on your hiddengirl-tryptych. But instead I will probably just watch TV on my computer. Right? I feel I'm *always* wrestling with the ideal writer-I I'd like to be - kind of the Simone deBeauvoir model of writer, waking in the AM, working in the morning, taking a lunch and stroll, returning to work and writing and reading until late in the PM, etc., and there's the writer I actually am when I have leisure time, which is all I have here in NC because I can't find any work, and in the past week since I've finished Heroines - which is basically very very close to being a depressive. Squint maybe and you'll see a difference. She's occasionally taking a note. Maybe that's it. Yet when my occupation was college-student depressive, or waitress-depressive, I also took notes. Maybe there's no difference.

The anaesthesia's office informs me I need to take off my newly done bright yellow toenail polish for the procedure, which irritates me. Which makes me realize I haven't gone under for twenty years, maybe almost exactly, almost exactly to the month twenty years, when I had my scoliosis operation at 13, and then I was under for like 9 hours or something ridiculous like that. Yes twenty years end of July, and if my mother was alive that would be something I could remark on, really, to someone, as our anniversary was always our special day, for the first decade that's the day we'd visit the orthopedic surgeon, and then after that even she'd still take me out to lunch on my anniversary, as she called it. But remembering too that the day before my surgery my mother took me to her hairdresser's, and had her do this immaculate French braid (do they still do French braids? I remember their perfection, their hurt) as I wouldn't be able to wash my hair for a week or something, and then got my nails painted a hot bubble-gum pink with sparkles, and the AM of the surgery, having them insist on undoing the intricate plait, and removing the nail polish, that same hurt and humiliation when the nuns would do it, the angry march to the girls' room, gripping and reddening, and I remember just sobbing, just sobbing, I think mostly more than anything because I felt my mother was upset, because I appreciated the ritual, the concern, and I felt this was undoing everything. I have strongly resisted that feeling, of everything come undone, while simultaneously cultivating it.

Instead of being a writer lately I've become my own office worker, firing off emails for Green Girl, working on all the publicity for that, figuring out stuff for the ebook for OFA that it looks like is coming out in the fall, entering Book of Mutter into *one more contest* (always always one more contest), submitting the first chapter Rooms by request to a journal (perhaps I can just publish all the sections, and then post the links online, and readers can just piece together the whole book, an alternate type of publishing). Gah. I'm good at all this but it's again this other person, this other person I can be, the pitbull, and it always has interfered with again this ideal writerly-I. One of the main reasons I quit the alt-weekly is because I knew that the powerbroker me was at odds with the space and wait needed to learn to be a writer. I still think that's true. I dont' know if that's true. Maybe that's true. I need to go under in order to write. But all October and November will be about is bobbing to the surface. My tour is ornate, for me at least, ornate and expensive and a bit hyperventilating (as an adj.) I will be on tour living out of a backpack for 14 days straight. I will need to pack clothes for 14 days straight. I refuse to bring a heavy suitcase, as it's bad for my back and my neck and I like to be minimal, my model of being is the style hunter in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, her clothes from Muji with the tags cut off, so everything will have to be out of my carry-on sized backpack that I took to Scandinavia. No fancy dresses then for that leg. T-shirts. Pants that can roll. I rehearse the packing list in my head the past few days. I am ridiculous. Like Louise Bourgeois who once wrote that when she travels she dresses strange. I do that too. It is like I am readying to clothe myself for the outside world. So for now I stay, like a mole, in the dark, prepared to go under.