Eating Poo

Puppy or not, you're just not supposed to do that. It is wrong. So is getting a puppy on a minutes notice just a week after finally deciding you are not going to get a pet of any kind. That you simply cannot take care of one more thing. That enough is enough.
Coco is 9 1/2 weeks old, cute and soft and full of sweet puppy eyes. She sits, she shakes, she chases her tail. She pees once in a while in the house, the moment she comes back inside from a long outdoor romp. I yell. I am not as patient as I would like to be. I am not as cool or calm or tolerant or full of unconditional love. Coco reminds me this - stares at me like "huh? WTF? What crawled up your behind?" as I holler "NO!" and grab the furry little love nugget, wanting to hurl her into the great unknown, but placing her somewhat gently outside instead.
In certain ways, my life has been a series of potty training and tolerating something. First it was my own unbridled passion for life, next my addictions, then my kids, then an old dog who never should have had to die, now Coco. The mortgages don't care what is happening, nor does the laundry, or the clients, or the boss. Only the heart cares. Mumbles something incoherent, whimpers a little, cries.
Feeling alone in something, at the same time that the crowd is nearly suffocating you doesn't help - but then, even that doesn't make the experience unique enough to warrant the unrequested aide one so desperately needs in the midst of such despair. So the puppy barks (!), leaps up at nothing in particular with a monomaniacal zeal, falls on her chin, wonders at the finality of a slammed door.
I am trying to choose between now and the future as if I could. Trying to calculate loss. Running years, like numbers on a calculator...counting moments that have passed that I somehow think I missed.
If love were perfect, it would sit when you needed quiet without having been asked. It would shake for no cookie at all. It would nuzzle into the broken crook of your heart and exhale warm glue into the fissures. It would not pee on floor. And if life were perfect you could wake up happy and stay that way, for an entire hour or a day or a week or maybe even a series of years that floated by slowly like a single spiderweb thread through a a windless summer afternoon. If men were perfect they would love all our little disasters and women, they would smile at the toothpaste tube and children, they would never feel the disappointment of a promise you never made and certainly never meant to break. But, there is pee on the floor and a blob of toothpaste on the mirror and a lot of tiny disasters everywhere and it is late and the children are exhausted just from being alive and.....the laundry thinks it is cute all crumbled in piles pretending to be done.
I gave the dog a bath tonight (she is called "the dog" when I am faining ignorance of how she ended up here in the first place) because earlier today she ate poo. At least, I am 99.9% sure it was poo. (I am holding on to that last .01% because I believe in miracles and unicorns and even rainbows in the midst of hurricanes of shit). So I gave her a bath and she was so tiny in the big tub; so tiny and scared and confused. And I was thinking, maybe we are all a little like this - cute and fluffy terrorists when we're running around letting our shit hang out - and then tiny and scared when the unknown comes calling. I don't know, I was just thinking that. Just for a minute.

Sunday Morning

I want Sunday to start with a little "s", as if that way, I could trick the following day into not noticing it's turn in line. When did I begin to worry about tomorrow? When did I buy into Monday being a poor broker of time, the bastard child of an incomplete two-night stand, some sort of uptight nanny? I digress. Remembering to center around the self, rather than run headlong into the tragedy of self-centeredness, I find myself ever talking a big game and slipping behind smoke and mirrors with an "I know I'm gonna get caught" grin and a craving for a cookie. Or 12.
Sometimes I think it would be better to think before I speak, but mostly I am either exhaling the impetus in my chest or putting it on lockdown, ears burning - metaphorical fuming galore. Once in a while, there is a memory....of not being willing to suffer....a calmness, that reminds me no thing matters but this, now, and breathing.
I'm either pulling a Ghandi or stirring up sh*t. Balanced between the two is the little me that's at last unaware of my size. I betray her though, in writing....desperate to give longing a voice...melancholy a microphone.......desire a dance partner.
Three hours into Sunday - sunday - sun day....here in Santa Monica in a canopy of fog...thinking about church and GOoD, how capitalization ruins everything, space.
If I've told one person about the insatiable whole of being, i've told a thousand. Trans-versing back and forth between Me and me and I and i and obviously, not yet having had a moment free.
Then there is you. YOU. How the silence between us is enough. How your quiet soothes me.
I never wanted to be in love. I wanted to be filled.
Who would've thought it was the emptying that mattered?

town council

it is hard not to want to run - either for the hills or for town council...when the belligerence of bureaucratic red tape leaves a little whip mark on your face. i eat chocolate and talk way too fast on the phone. i google legos, ramble through e-bay, craigslist, turn to email, chew. one house is too big, one lot too small. an ego excavated, another bent into tiny pieces of busy-ness that annoy. we tolerate with shrewd boredom the spinster and her allegations. i find half a pretzel and some string cheese at the bottom of my purse.....and announce it...at just the wrong time.
remember when we were just so in love with being in love that every act was a sort of celebration of the grace of being able to do it? i burned the pans with every artichoke, you ate my salmon lasagna even though by its very nature, it was inedible. i blushed when you looked at me. now, it is not the being in love with being in love but the loving the lover that's so irresistible. your warm hand across the small of my back in the middle of the night - the coffee in bed that always has too much cream but is the best i have ever had because you brought it to me. the way you wrestle with the boys every freaking night right before bed - winding them back up after i have just calmed them down with warm dinners and baths and books. how you cannot help but make me laugh when i am mad. all of this i come home to while i imagine the town criers are alone. these are the reasons for the incessant comments and calls to order, the fussing. if everyone could just see in the other the way he loves that one special person specially - with a roundness or a forgiveness or a soft heart, the war would be over. you know the one.