I'm mid-second week of adjunct teaching way too many Comp classes than the human brain could possibly handle. In fact, a friend of mine - a sweet, fellow adjunct often seen sporting a bow tie - explains it all to me as "Teaching malpractice!" He was sincerely worried about my health. And understandably so. Last night, I was up until 3AM again to only wake up at 6AM. It's only these nights before my big days - Mondays and Wednesdays (on my feet 8:30AM - 8:50PM). And, really, it could be worse. I'm not having to wear a hair net, inhale the smell of old meat, or risk waving the under-flesh of my upper arm past sharp spinning/grinding/slicing blades (God bless my mother). BUT, I haven't had much time to write. And I've had NO time to get back to CEllA's. I'm calling it "technical difficulties." We've lost our Comcast - our internet, tv, and telephone - because the bill had snowballed all summer until it became abominable. I am picking up a wireless signal from somewhere, however . . . and I think it's the PS2 of the teenage twin boys who live across the street (note: please keep my secret).

Meanwhile, I went to a high school football game last Friday and found something moving in it. My youngest teenager was the most dignified flute player on the field come half-time when they performed the scuttle that their band director has so creatively - oddly - titled "Alpha and Omega." It's a vicarious kind of marching band step-show. The flag core is awful. Come next home game, they'll be incorporating a plywood pyramid.

I'm out of practice with writing - just been teaching it like I know something (scribbling the latin words for the three appeals on chalk boards, reading poetry and imposing responsive "free-writing" to the sound of grumbling Nursing and Welding majors, etc. etc.) - but I've replayed a bit of the evening in my head until I finally had to write it down . . . Funny - I forgot that this blog can be a capitalized Escape. I'll get to my other work later.

~

Feasts. June bugs. Mayflies. Meaty moths. Mosquitoes. What is eating them is flying – spastic – above a smalltown green and white mini-war – Arabians versus Cougars. First game of the season. Home. It's all chippy shoulder pads and fresh knees and elbows. I’m really there for the half-time show. There’s a freshman flute player in the band who’s tossed away her summer to march and finally - on this day - wear a forest-green plume and heavy, brass-buttoned polyester in front of a set of crowded football stands. And before the sun went down, a news helicopter out of Indy dropped in and made us all feel special, made us all imagine our faces on the tube (when I was growing up, we NEVER had any helicopters drop in at our school). And the Arabian defense keeps sacking the Cougar quarterback, lifting him up off of his cleats and "planting him like a daisy" (Matt's words), and it should be fun to watch the quarterback get more and more nervous, to watch him think too quickly and throw the ball into the ground just to get rid of it, but I’ve got a bag of fresh, over-salted popcorn. My oldest daughter – who’s no fan of any sport really, but a fan of the opposite gender – is giving me names to pair with the numbers on jerseys. But my eyes keep drifting up to what seems like a parallel existence – a more brutal arena – where lazy, beady-eyed aliens with their exoskeletons are being eaten up by flying blind mice with sonar. The bats are flipping and twisting, dipping and lifting. The bugs are stunned into a stupor by the possibility of more than one vivid moon. In fact, there are a hundred moons, and they're all brighter than any moon they've ever aspired to fly close to. Maybe their deaths are blissful. They die believing there IS a Utopia, and the bats hit them fast enough that the bugs are denied the chance to think otherwise.

Matt and I argue for a few minutes at first. They looked like birds to me – like killdeer. Their wings seemed striped white, but maybe it’s a reflection. But I realize they’re not crying like killdeer would (so Matt wins). The things are just flying and circling. Search and seek. Dip and flip and eat. Having the time of their lives right above the heads of high school Pep Club (where the Silly String is flying out of cans, where the chants are less creative and far less moving than the All Black's Haka [but what do you expect?], and where sophomore boys have painted their nipples purple to impress their upper classmen. It is a new year).

There is a boy in the stands, standing in front of us in the undecided rain with a group of his girlfriends. He's creamy black and tall and thin, and neon stars and circles light up his tight white t-shirt. He's wearing dark "skinny jeans." All three of his girlfriends, in the football spirit, have painted thick black stripes under their eyes, and they're all leaning on the fence that lines the front row, making occasional fun of the cheerleaders.

A white boy with spikes of gelled hair sticking out of the front of his cap, slides by on the ground in front of the gang and shouts up “nigger!” And the black boy lights up like a Bic and jumps at him, diffident and thankful that his girlfriends have his back. The girls grab their friend’s skinny arms and call the little white boy an asshole. The white boy stops and does a quick Hitler salute to the Friday Night Lights. He says “White Power!” but it is without power and full of waver; it is limp enough so that the crowd can't hear him. It would seem that he says it not because he knows much of Hitler or ever wants to follow in his footsteps. He knows there's evil in the words. He's catering to his intended audience and taking the necessary actions to bring about reaction. He has probably tried similar things on his mother, maybe called her a Bitch to get slapped or stole her liquor. He probably melted in the attention of punishment and directed anger - probably has developed a craving for it that will require incarceration later. And the chain link metal surrounding the stands is a shield between the two boys; it protects the white boy’s pimply face – like he is imagining himself taunting a junk yard dog from the other side of the no-trespass zone. When the black boy reacts, the white boy darts – through a tunnel that leads under the stands and under the behinds of a hundred parents, most just as narrow-minded.

The white boy disappeared. But not before the black boy stomped off, head high, mind high because he KNOWS what’s wrong and what’s right. And his girlfriends were behind him. They expected him to. They didn't know what they were doing either. Their stomps shook the aluminum columns and rows that we sat on. Then we scored another touchdown, and the crowd exhaled with shouts and cheers and whistles, and the gang stopped to watch a minute before they lit the steps. The black boy was an epitome of hesitance meets determination. He was feminine but a feminine angry. He’d kick some ass if he had to. He’d been waiting to. Maybe the other kid had no idea what he’d walked into, how much piss had been waiting to pour itself out of creamy black fists and into the face of “typical.”

But nothing happened. Nothing happened that I saw, and I had even followed them - discreetly - under the cover of wanting a pop to swallow with all of the popcorn salt. I was going to break something up if I had to. I'd tell all that I saw to a local, white officer (that's all we have around here). I struggled for the next hour with the thought of telling the school counselor about the scene (he was hanging out down there on the track with a walkie-talkie on his belt, keeping his eye on the legs of the varsity cheerleaders). I imagined myself voicing the words "racial slurs." But then I don't like the school counselor at all. He reminds me of my ex-husband - crispy clean-cut, Lands End clothes, high-nosed. I doubted much would come of it. And this is the stuff that I grew up with. This was a repeated scene, and it was old.

I saw the black boy later standing with his arms crossed not far from concessions, still with his girlfriends huddled around him, and his face and white t-shirt looked clean. I didn’t see the white boy with the gelled hair again. My daughter says he’s not from this school. The black boy and his girls were all laughing, sucking on straws and dipping nachos. It had passed for now. I told myself the other boy won't come back, but I know that, if he did, he'd bring friends.

Back in the stands, I went back to munching on my popcorn - wishing I had a cigarette - and I drifted back up occasionally to the bats and bugs. And as the rain kept stopping and starting again, I opened and closed my dysfunctional umbrella, watching the score as it played out in the lit-up ecosystem that whirled above all the trim, planted grass. Finally, the rain fell hard enough to chase the bats away. The rain fell hard enough to make the second half of the game a sleeper. Nobody scored.

But we won the game – 28-0. Impressive. Everybody was wet, pouring out of the stands and towards their SUVs and minivans (even WE have a Windstar). The adrenaline had been lovely. But the fog had been building since half-time, reminding me of my bed's comforter. We slipped out early, just after the losing Cougars made a decent-enough punt for the hell of it.

Sometimes, normal settings appear way too trippy and so we require a glimpse elsewhere. I am all orientationed-out, and the head ache granted to me via textbook salesmen and their "digital assets" (outdated, cheesy, condescending avatars) gave me the creepiest dreams . . . Not far from what I found here:

Muzorama from Muzorama Team on Vimeo.

. . . are those same four pills every night before bedtime and that space that exists in between thoughts the next day.

. . . are computer word games and quizzes with radial buttons.

. . . are the big things breaking - the toilet, the air conditioner, the oven - breaking the flow of simply "going" or simply sleeping or melting the cheese on homemade spinach/tomato pizzas.


. . . are a method called avoidance; Scrub re-runs; empty job agent result newsletters; forgotten names; missed phone calls from my mother; piles of bills; neglected literary fiction; My Lunch Money Low Balance Notifications; Anderson Cooper 360 (Obama looks tired); my children whining and wanting; roast beef, mashed potatoes and sweet corn at Mamaw's on Sundays; Orientations; Julie miserable; dirty dishes and laundry; not writing.

Today, we broke out and drove the four year old to the quaint little water park in Middletown. We bought Pepperidge Farm cookies and Goldfish and had a picnic amongst the bumble bees. We observed the locals and their anti-social children. We gave yogurt to babies. We drove home in wet blue jeans. :)

I'm behind on too many things (not new news). My journal is requiring a bit much of me. Namely: printer ink and personal focus. But, I'm determined to turn it into something BEFORE the official end of summer. It will be my own birthday present to myself. It's hard when you start reading through things and find poems about farting or written in creepy medieval voice or illustrated with a pic of naked chick with nothing but a pot leaf covering the depth of her split. I'm feeling a little strapped and alone on this one.

I've been staying up late to catch virtual fish.

There was no flood this summer. There was no flood of anything. A flood would've been monumental (especially if it reached way up here) and leveling; it would've brought us all eye to eye, had us sharing our shovels and sweeping out the mud in teams. Instead, we all just seemed to swim around in the humidity, across the kitchen to open the fridge, up and down the stairwell, dogs hairs stuck to everything with a texture (black hairs on the white things, white hairs on the dark things) - with the ac broken and all. The downstairs toilet is still broken - you have to remove the top to put the floaty back in place over the hole (and, no, I can't just buy new toilet innards - I've tried it - they don't fit. The toilet is ancient and likely cheaply made in the early sixties, like the rest of this house). I wish this house was haunted - maybe we could sell tickets to seances. Frogs are haunting the above-ground pool. We haven't touched the checking account for weeks (crickets chirp there in the empty darkness). But there are plans in motion.

I'm taking on a new title - "full time teacher" (albeit the title's hooked with the ugly and nonbeneficial term "adjunct") as opposed to "full time student" - a role which I had filled for eighteen years (off and on, here and there), a role which I thought defined myself quite well. I slept off some chest congestion and a headache yesterday. Wasted the entire day curled up on the couch (because the upstairs was 130 degrees - and the bed felt like a swamp) with my lavender-scented eye cover on, but I walked through possibilities, and I talked myself out of being pissed off at the world come 9PM. This morning, I got up and took the dog for a walk. I cleaned house. I organized things. I've declared the kitchen table "my office" because . . . it feels right. I have a milk crate for files. I have pre-formatted syllabi to claim as my own. A McGraw-Hill book that's seemingly worthless. Open shell, step in, fill the plaster.

I found an astrological prediction in Nuvo that made me stop and cock my head (these things usually don't do this to me - I read them, but I've all but rejected the prissy-ness of the Virgo and declared myself all Chinese Astrological - The Year of the Tiger was a good one and, besides, it sounds more powerful). Here's what it said: "Two annoyances that had been bugging you before your exile have been neutralized. But you've still got at least one more to go, so don't relax yet. In fact, I think you should redouble your vigilance. Check expiration dates on your poetic licenses and pet theories. Scrub the muck from your aura, even if your friends seem to find it 'interesting.' And learn to read your own mind better so you can track down any disabling thoughts that might still be lurking in remote corners." It didn't seem as though I'd neutralized any annoyances since my exile, but . . . if I thought about it hard enough, I could find them. Maybe I just liked it because it used the words "exile" and "vigilance" and "poetic licenses." Maybe I liked the cue to "scrub the muck" from my aura and the suggestion to read my own mind better. Of course. Hence, write, right? Give it to me, and let me see what I want to see in it. Death to the Author.

This evening, my son tried to get me to watch a bootlegged version of Tranformers II that his girlfriend got for him (filmed in a German theater), but I couldn't do it. Ya' know, I have accomplished a lot this summer. I haven't written much on here - but I was deemed a "teaching consultant" by the Indiana Writing Project. I just wish it had gotten me a little more to live on in regards to loan money. I've scribbled and scribbled and filled up two half-sized mole books - surely there's something worthy in there. I read "Cousin Jimmy's Onery Services" to a crowd of blank faces. And Matt managed to pull off a life-altering trip to Vietnam.

Meanwhile, I think my mother has taken my sister's cell phone away from her, and I want to slap her around for it. I need to hear my sister's voice. She had a plan to start college in our hometown in the Fall - where I started and where she got her AS in secretarial duties so many years ago. Our mother might've wrecked her plans. Mother may be annoyance #3, waiting to be tackled in the rickety construction that is the paragraph. Wait, I've already done that (once or twice). It helped . . . a little.

I feel like the biggest loser. My poor neglected blog. My poor neglected writing self. Being in "job limbo" has sucked away my creativity. I've written cover letter after cover letter, pleasant e-mail after pleasant e-mail. Meanwhile, we've had to pack up and hang out at flea markets to gain extra cash. Meanwhile, we had to miss the trip to Atlantic City, the chance to drive for twelve hours (by ourselves) and watch talented writers read with the twinkling Taj Mahal behind them. I shouldn't even begin to write all that I've been through. Our yard sale was a flop. Our camping trip down south for the 4th was a flop. In fact, I think that's what has made me avoid blogging - this evil chain of thoughts that erupts at night, telling me that I have to write about a thousand things if I write about anything.

What it all comes down to: exhaustion. I blame the computer and I blame cigarettes. I blame the three slobby teenagers and the needy Border Collie. I blame the television. I blame Chuzzle on Pop Cap games and Word Path on Facebook. My minutes just burn away, and I feel enormous amounts of guilt. The fall is not bringing new classes with it, and it depresses me. The best I can hope for is a few adjunct teaching positions at the community college - central indy locations. I am being negative here. There are still resumes and cover letters in the works. Administrators are slow.

I have been doing all of these parental things. I'm trying to be a band booster (which is really hard when you're poor). Tonight, we're going on the buses with the high school band to see a drum core or two march around the bottom of the Lucas Oil Stadium popcorn bowl.

At least this little blurb is a start to writing again. Sorry it sucks. I can't say I'll try harder next time - I would just end up intimidating myself.

For once in days, I am the first one up, the only one up. I made the coffee. I filled up the big urn that we use on the weekends and I'm waiting for the little red light to kick on so that I might fill up a large mug. I ate generic Oreos with blue icing (Spring!) for breakfast. I restarted the dryer. I turned off some lights that had been left on all night. I didn't want to do it, but I smoked. It made me dizzy.

This morning, before I got out of bed, I tried talking to God. I tried to rename it. I tried to see it as a woman. Draped like Lady Buddha, I guess. I tried to recognize all of the buzzing cells in my arms and legs, toes and fingers. It didn't work so well. I needed a true breeze on my face. I needed to hear the birds over the fan. I needed to convince myself that I was comfortable.

Now, I've read a little. I felt inspired for a minute. I had an idea . . . What if I took my memoirs - my creative nonfiction - and twisted them? added to them? changed them here and there as I see fit? as I wish? I have had this sinking feeling that I'm neglecting my imagination, attempting to capture all of these half-truths in what might've really happened, in what I half-remember. I should perhaps just shake the term "nonfiction." I want to paint.

In the Summer Institute, this invitational course filled with smiling teachers around one long stretching table, we've been asked repeatedly to write about our childhood. I'm burnt out on it. It doesn't interest me much anymore. I feel like I've already scraped the bottoms of all memories worth scratching around about. This weekend - for the 4th - we'll be traveling south to camp and hopefully catch another crash-up derby - at best, a trip to a local bar.

This morning, I am attempting to talk myself into talking a walk. I'll have lots to do when and if I return.