Off in my own little one this morning, writing mush, just heartfelt mush for Brad and Omar. There are more ways to say I love you than there are stars in the universe. If it were not so we would not keep proving it, we lovers.
There’s no cream, so I’m eventually going to have tea. I’ve already played with Buster and brushed him, gotten some 90 Micron into me, written four hundred new words, had an entirely pain-free morning widdle – which only happens about 30 percent of the time so hey, we must grab these little happinesses as they go by is this not merely a truism but a mechanism by which daily life may in practical terms be a-accomplished? she stammered… the keyboard barfed up an a so I stuck a hyphen in there and called it done.
I can go from piss to philosophy in seconds, so, do not try me, world! I have the words to roll you back again.
I find myself very blank and unthinking in most ways though. I am pressed on all sides by anxiety, and it is not all my own. So I think this feeling of blankness is an accommodation; if I am not reactive I won’t be making as much trouble. Of course, past a certain point, absence from human affairs starts taking you backward. I’ve spent my whole life, literally my whole life, trying not ‘to have it all’ but ‘to have all that I could reasonably attain without destroying myself as a creative being’, which involves a lot of decisions.
Having children never seemed like a decision. It was ordained. I felt it then, I felt it again as I typed it. The horror of childrearing and bearing that many modern women feel now is alien to me, but not anathema. I was among the last women who didn’t have reproductively impactful amounts of forever chemicals in my body during my pregnancies, so I remove myself from the pool of people who get judgy on modern women not wanting to have babies. I have always been vocal in my support of the childless by choice. I understand the demographic arguments against the falling birth rate, and I reject them as propertarian and against self-interest (in planetary capacity terms). If I as a science fiction writer can posit three or four different social responses to a globally crashed birth rate (which is inescapable for reasons of deteriorated human health), each with their costs and benefits, how many responses can a whole nest of human civilizations come up with, depending on how resources are deployed? I still have hope, despite the countability of life.
Poems and songs turn over in my belly. something in there is wrathful, and something sad
it’s just gas
my brother said
