April 2009

Yesterday, a murder was committed in my household. In a moment of fleeting and senseless violence, my beloved companion – let’s call her Hewlett Packard PC Notebook, although I was usually wont to call her Buttercup – was brutally and fatally attacked. The perpetrator? Jasper, who in a fit of baby frustration grabbed her and pummeled her and flung her to the floor, where, with a flicker and a hiss, she died. As an infant, he cannot be held criminally responsible, but he does face at least twenty years of being regularly reminded of that time he killed Mommy’s computer and Mommy had a nervous breakdown.

I am bereft, I am bereft. Also, I am living in the Dark Ages. It’s quiet here. (It’s a Dark Ages with smartphones and wired public libraries, but still. I AM WITHOUT LAPTOP. I might as well be without arms.)

(No, not without arms. WITHOUT AIR. I am trapped in an airless box with only teeny holes and a drinking straw through which to suck oxygen from the outside world. A drinking straw, and not the bendy kind. And its ends are all chewed up and flattened and OH GOD I CANNOT GET AIR.)

(*faints*)

So, my laptop was murdered and I am seriously, seriously limited in my connectivity. Which is, you know, a disaster, because my livelihood depends upon that connectivity and seriously, how is one supposed to make one’s living as a writer in the Internet Age when one is equipped only with a smartphone and a library card? (You try battling teenagers for the Internet-connected computers in the library. They’re jonesing for their MySpace, and they will cut you to get it. Or at least they have that look about them.) And in the meantime, I have articles to write, books to pitch, posts to post, and a brother to look for (I’ve just learned his real name, which gives me something to search for at the precise moment that I am unable to do electronic searching. Wherefore art thou, Google?) And my husband is going tomorrow to have his boy parts snipped and I’m all ambivalent and confused about that and really kinda need to write it out but gah. Am thwarted. Am thwarted and bereft and lost.

(Also can’t read online commentary about Lost.)

(Shoot me now.)

*Also can’t monitor comments, so. This post will have to remain a comment-free cry in the dark.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Needful Things

April 27, 2009

Jasper came into the world with a bang, in a hulksmash explosion of blood and birthmatter and pain. And when they handed him to me – he, as full and round and alert as a baby many times his age – he reached for me and clung and suckled with the same ferocious determination that [...]

85 comments Keep reading…

Dress Your Family In Tutus And Sparkles

April 24, 2009

Look, I`m not even going to ask you if it`s a form of child exploitation to dress one`s boy-child in a pink tutu and publish it on the Internet, because a) I already know the answer and b) I`m not interested in hearing from anonymous commenters who wish to inform me that u will turn [...]

Keep reading…

Sufficient Unto This Day

April 22, 2009

Last week, I almost quit blogging. Almost. I wasn`t going to say anything about it. If I had quit, I would have gone totally silently into that good blogless night. There wouldn`t have been a post angsting about whether or not to quit; there wouldn`t have been a post proclaiming some long goodbye. I was [...]

103 comments Keep reading…

And Then, There Was Monday

April 20, 2009

Emilia is going to be okay. Last week was full of worry – she was so sick, and in pain, and doctors could only guess that it was something either totally mundane or wholly terrible and all we could do was keep her comfortable and watch and wait to see if the scariest symptoms would [...]

68 comments Keep reading…

Flush

April 15, 2009

I wrote this post two days ago, when the world seemed very slightly less dark, and then – as the moon moved directly in front of the sun and blocked its light – decided that I couldn’t post it, because reflecting upon my daughter’s tyrannical approach to love scraped all the wrong nerves on a [...]

59 comments Keep reading…

This Dark And Mourning Earth

April 13, 2009

And so God continues to call children back to him, and I – who watch helpless as my sister lives this loss, counting down the years, months, weeks, days, minutes until her son’s heart stops beating and she must make her peace with a last goodbye; I who know nothing of this pain, except from [...]

Keep reading…

Pitiless, The Mercy Of Time

April 9, 2009

When a family loses a child, we feel it. Whether or not we knew that family, whether or not we knew that child, we feel it. We feel it because the shockwaves of that loss – that loss as felt by the mother, the father, the family, the friends, the community, that loss as felt [...]

Keep reading…

A Story Not My Own

April 7, 2009

This story that I`ve been telling about my brother – my lost brother – is not my story, not really. It is becoming my story – that is, it is becoming a story that matters to me, a story that involves me, a story that I am driving forward and that is driving me forward [...]

Keep reading…

Mondays Are For Zombies

April 6, 2009

It’s Monday, it’s raining and I think that my house might be haunted. It’s either that or the cats are messing with me. Odds are good either way. Yeah, Monday. What’s there to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times already by the Boomtown Rats? 1.) So my mother calls me Friday afternoon [...]

Keep reading…