"a pain in my heart, a burn in my throat"

 I wonder if I should be dedicated enough to writing in here that I pre-write some entries for post-surgery days when I'm not feeling focused enough to write.    But, I'm not feeling especially inspired as to topics to pre-write, maybe today I'll poke around the internet and see if I can find prompts. (if you have someplace you go for prompts, or prompts of your own, either would be greatly appreciated).

 

I've been looking at old entries, for a couple different reasons, and I've been coming through my internal bank of half-remembered lyrics and something that makes me cringy about both is exactly how much of my mind and my moods are matched with a certain period of Ani Difranco's career.   She and I parted ways, devotion-wise somewhere around Red Letter Year, and I'll still go to her concerts because they're still amazing (though mostly we've been going to the ones where Peter Mulvey opens) and it's usually obvious the audience shares my fondness for her older work and she caters to that, and I've seen more than one concert where the audience backtalks her on some of her weird gender essentialist shit.  (both not all women have uteruses and not women are mothers)   She's an important part of my history and that's never going to change, but that doesn't mean I can't also outgrow it a little bit.

 

Nonsense has developed this adorable if lightly tragic response to anyone laughing loudly, she comes and leans on us with her deeply concerned face, apparently trying to save us from ourselves, and the more rambunctious the laughter, the more vigorous the saving.  She just tried to save me from one of Colbert's meanwhile videos.
 

I picked up a book in porter square today about feminist ways of getting and staying sober, read the first fifteen pages, was intrigued, opened to a random page and read about how the author had gone to an AA meeting in a church, had a predictably bad experience, but then went upstairs into the church and prayed.  So of course, I put it back on the shelf and walked away.

I was trying to describe witchcamp to Delight today, and how I'm still struggling with this bone-deep agnosticism, how I can't really get my amorphous longings to attach to a particular deity, how he people talk about being called by someone or something to a particular path, I wonder what it is I'm missing.  But I can find symbols, I've often had good luck with symbols, so even if I can't link it to anything larger, I'm down with trying to put new words to my longtime fascinations with keys and knots and the like.  It's almost certainly going to be about finding a story to tell myself that makes sense, even if it's never going to net me any spiritual smugness or a belief in an afterlife (and the idea that I might conflate those things says something I'm not quite prepared to examine tonight).