Blame-mongering, or how I am spending my summer.

On the one hand, I'm pretty enamored of the Resist-bot. Because of it, I could fax my senators whilst on the road. I could practically stand in an ancient monument with my cell phone in hand, wave the phone in the air to catch a whiff of cellular network, then speak my truth to my senators in voice-to-text. Or, you know, yell my truth. And then, of course, carefully proofread, because voice-to-text, whew, so many misunderstandings.

Of course, I did not stand in the middle of an ancient monument and do this. But don't think I didn't consider it. Because of the rage, which leads inexorably to the rage-fax. It's a whole new genre, I think. Obviously, I blame DJT. Alternatively, and depending on the day: the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Speaker of the House, the afore-mentioned senators, that one representative who is standing down after having been reelected, which, on the one hand, phew, and on the other hand, who the hell does he think he is?

Emergent genre: the rage-blog-post.

All this rage isn't good for a person, I know this. I blame DJT and also all the above, and also my poor character which is, which must be, the reason I am not sleeping well, or enough, which throws all the rest of my carefully made plans into havoc. Carefully made plans: get enough sleep. Relax. Get into a writing routine. Creativity galore! Also, enough exercise. A calm and centered spirit. Etc. If there's not enough sleep, none of this will work. I also blame Bruiser, who has begun an occupation of our bed that shows no sign of abating. He is a sleep-space tyrant. Also, a sweet old dog, and who doesn't want to indulge a sweet old dog? I would never be so cruel, although I have recently purchased a memory foam dog bed that I am hoping will serve as an enticing bait-and-switch for said sweet old dog, because by God, I need more sleep, else the infrastructure of my summer plan crumble and I am left in the dust, for which I will blame, obviously, DJT. &c &c &c.

So glad we got to experience this magnificence with these people.

A post shared by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Jun 15, 2017 at 11:46pm PDT

One last Chacoan window.

A post shared by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Jun 13, 2017 at 7:28pm PDT

Votive amulets from Greece.

A post shared by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Jun 10, 2017 at 2:25pm PDT

We're home and everything is blooming.

A post shared by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Jun 16, 2017 at 9:37pm PDT

So glad we got to experience this magnificence with these people.

A post shared by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Jun 15, 2017 at 11:46pm PDT

The traditional jumping over Jackson festivities.

A post shared by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Jun 17, 2017 at 5:55pm PDT

Well, anyway, here we are at nearly the end of June. So far I have spent many sweet hours with my parents and sisters, walked where the ancestral Puebloans walked, smelled the sweet blooming desert flowers of Santa Fe, begun distributing copies of my book (my book!) to people. Booked one reading, am working on a second (and third, fourth, etc.). Reveled in the glorious mess that is our garden. Slept like a champion, mostly, whilst on our epic road trip. Read some really good books and some really enjoyable ones. Talked myself, several times, down from the ledge of anxiety that is the life of a writer (shouldn't I have my next manuscript ready RIGHT NOW? and if I don't have all the poems ready RIGHT NOW what will become of me? deadlines are passing right and left!). Found myself engaged in work projects that seem like they should wait till September, but no, they have to get started now. Seen many friends. Seen lots of family. Seen many more movies than I would have predicted, including Wonder Woman, which is a wonder.

I'd like to cordon off my rage-generator and its motive forces and its discontents from my ordinary (and extraordinary) joys with, oh, let's say, a hedge of dog roses and tea roses and floribunda roses and wild roses. Roses, in other words, thorny and sweet-smelling and petal-laden and high on blooms. It would be better for me, and better for everyone around me. It seems like, though, the world is whole, and everything is (as Lauren Hill says) everything, for good and ill. Here's hoping that dog bed strategy works, and all my rage-faxes join in a great river of resistance, and I--and you, too--wake up each morning having slept well, to greet the day and get to work.

Done and done. And not quite done, actually.

M A N !!! has this semester been a whirl. I know, I know, all semesters are a whirl, but some are whirlier than others.

(p.s. did you know that autocorrect does not believe that 'whirlier' is a word? but 'whirler' is? well, aren't you fancy, autocorrect, with your auto-correcting ways. I'll show YOU a whirler, that's what.)

Anyway. Today at my work, at noon, I gave a little talk and it went well, I thought. And then we bound a dozen of those handmade books I can't stop talking about

w  a  i  t      I'll show you:

and then I came home and made brussels sprouts and purple potatoes hash, which is weird sounding but tasted super good, and THEN I consulted with one two three students and was stood up by a fourth and fifth W O E.

I would thrill you with the story of my daredeviltry in preparing the talk, but basically it involved not enough sleep for the second night in a row, plus additional risky decision making including last minute slides. BUT. The point is? I am now officially delirious, and I have this announcement to make:

[announcement:]  I AM DONE WITH ALL THE BIG DEAL STUFF FOR THIS SEMESTER.

And yet.

And yet?  I have, over the past three days, assembled a twelve-item list--that I am not sure is actually complete--of the things I still need to do before the end of the semester, and this list does not include the word 'grading.'

So, you know. Finished and yet not finished. Which is basically the semester and, as it turns out, life. Until, you know, you're dead. And I'm not dead yet. Ergo: twelve item list.

But now I really, really, really am going to bed,  THE END.

(sorry for all the shouting.)

A few thoughts on sleep, with inexact metaphors.

The people, these days, I have been resting an awful lot. Not today, not particularly. Today, I had breakfast with a poet friend, and then went to the Film Society for a couple of meetings, and then met with my colleague. And then drove out to a southwest corner of the valley to fetch my cell phone, but never mind. But yesterday, Sunday, I slept like nobody's business, pretty much all day long.

I think I am catching up on the sleep I haven't been getting for months. It feels compensatory. It feels like a kind of balancing of the books. It's like my sleep accounts have been depleted, like the way I was living my life was basically going to the Sleep ATM and withdrawing hours and hours and never putting any back. Does that metaphor even make any sense? I can see that it mostly doesn't, but I do feel like I have robbed myself--but why would I do that?--of something necessary and precious, and now I am going to sleep until I have paid myself back.

There is nothing so purely wonderful as falling into sleep--easily and without anxiety, just drifting into that dark, quiet place. That's what it has felt like as I have fallen into sleep over and over again, with no resistance, no fretting. Just falling into the dark.

I think I had my brief cold last week as a means of ensuring that I would do nothing, nothing whatsoever, but resting.

Currently, I am rereading a young adult book that I've read many, many times before. It is the perfect company for my sleep binge.

This sleep, it feels simultaneously like a luxury, like a kind of indulgence, but also like drinking water until a thirst is slaked. It feels like both things. Not that I feel I have much choice about it, but I am going to sleep until I have had my fill, until I am no longer indebted, but paid in full.

The Hightouchmegastore Guides for Living #189: Sleeping With Dogs.

1. First, acquire a very, very very very large bed. The breadth of the bed should be akin to a broad savannah, such as where the lions roam.

2. Divide the bed into as many people and/or animals as will be sleeping in it. Preferably, divide these sections with something that a dog cannot knock over, when the dog inevitably turns over in the night with a giant sleepy sigh.

3. Get into your section of the bed. Let the dog get into his section. Drape a drapery across the dog, if that's how you roll. Adjust the covers. Turn out the lights and drift into a blissful, blissful slumber.

4. If you have a smaller bed, you are screwed.

5. Wait: if you have a smaller bed, you must not allow your tender and sentimental heart to be stirred by the sweet sight of a sleeping dog.

6. If, when you gently call the dog's name to rouse him from his evening rest, to entice him to another all-night sleep location, if at that time he opens one eye in bewilderment, as if to say, what's that now? but I was sound asleep! do not be turned from your rightful path.

7. You may give the dog another five minutes. Ten minutes tops. In fact, as you plan this whole sequence of events, take the "first a warning, then a five-to-ten minute wait" factor into account, so your own slumber will not be delayed.

8. After five minutes, ten minutes tops, speak to the dog in a firm but gentle voice. Tell him whatever lets you feel okay about yourself, but say it and get the dog off the bed, out of the room, and moving on to his new sleep situation.

9. Don't give up, now. Sure, he looks cute there all nestled into the bed, like he belongs there with the pack, you, the alpha, and him, the doggy beta. Just think of the middle of the night when he will be immovable and you will be awake, plotting how to get just six inches more of the covers and scheming about how to turn over without losing all the covers. Keep that thought uppermost in your mind as you make that dog get off the bed and leave the room.

10. No, he can't stay for just a little while longer. Just a little while longer? No, he cannot.

11. Is he out? Good for you. It shows strength of character and resolve. You are the boss of that bed and of the sleeping you do there. Now settle in, finish the crossword, turn out the light, and take a deep, calming breath of the cooling air in the room and the almost-disappeared redolence of a dog who is now sleeping in his proper place, i.e. and to wit: not with you.

In the middle of the night.

This morning, I got up at 4:20 a.m. to take my daughter, who was home for a quick trip to be a part of a wedding, to the airport.

The horror!

I know.

What made it worse was a new phenomenon in my sleep world: the "I can't fall asleep because I have to get up so early" dance. It is an absurdity. I know that if I don't sleep, I will be wrecked from lack of sleep. I know it. And that makes it, somehow, harder to fall asleep. Also: what if I sleep through my alarm? And what if I have failed to set my alarm? My daughter will miss her flight! And there will be a disaster! Many disasters! Who can sleep with so many disasters, and all so imminent?

Perhaps yesterday, some of you read this in the Review section of the Times. "Rethinking Sleep."  (Oh, for sure. I'm rethinking it right now.)

One of the most interesting things in the article was the fact that a history professor began to research "the history of the night" (poem idea--get on that!), and found many references in historic and literary texts to what was called "the first sleep" and the "second sleep"--with a period of wakefulness in between the two sleeps which occurred around midnight and lasted for a couple of hours. Apparently this period was regarded as the best time for contemplation and deep thought, as well as for sex.
However:

Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain. 

Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result: we know we should be getting a good night’s rest but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. Related worries turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills or sleep aids, which reinforces a cycle that the Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has called “the ironic processes of mental control.”

Also, a psychiatrist at NIMH did a sleep study in which he deprived his subjects of artificial light at night. At first they slept soundly, but not too long into the study, the subjects began to wake up for a little while--a couple of hours--then go back to sleep:

It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity.

I will pause, so that you may reflect.

In any case, I am now off to bed. My eyes are hot and I feel dangerously close to losing it, over nothing at all, or not much. If my sleep is seamless, bully! And if it is segmented, I will be thinking deep thoughts. I'm sure you'll be able to feel me thinking them, way over across town, where you're awake, thinking some deep thoughts of your own.

The hammer.

Tomorrow, the vague thoughts I have been loosely entertaining since last May about how I'm going to do this and that and various and sundry whatnots--these thoughts are about to get specific.

I'm talking about how I'm going to figure out a time to go swimming, of course.

No, not really. I'm talking about syllabi-bye-bye (that's my little tribute to the Backstreet Boys, all right?). Tomorrow. Is when it starts.

I am pretty sure that a flood of amazing and transformative ideas will coalesce/reappear/appear for the first time once I start thinking in the concrete and not in the whenever. I'm pretty much counting on it. But first, I have to go to bed and sleep for a milllllion hours. It's a prerequisite.

AWP: the awesome first day, and how it will be different than all the rest of the days.

Technically, yesterday was the first day, since we (the estimable Dr. Write and I, moi, myself) arrived in Denver, and we picked up our registration stuff plus had snacks at Bubba Gump Shrimp, and I am not lying:

Waitress: Have you seen the movie Forrest Gump?

Us: Sure.

Waitress: Would you like to play Forrest Gump trivia?

Us: Will there be prizes?

Waitress: Yes. They may not be prizes that you value . . .

Us: [shrug. Collectively.]

Now is as good a time as any to point out that there were two other esteemed persons in our party at Bubba Gump Shrimp--friend P and elder statesman poet, whom I'll identify with the initials A.G.:

Waitress: What was the name of the girl Forrest Gump was in love with?

Me: (too, too quickly) Jenny. (luckily, I did not say Jennay, but I almost did.)

A couple more trivia questions ensued. Our prize?

Waitress: Everyone raise your hands. Now, give each other a high five!

Woe.

However, when the same cruel trick was played on a table nearby, we watched with interest:

A.G.: I want to see how they react when they find out what the prize is.

Me: Schadenfreude.

Ha. I made A.G. laugh. He will never remember my name, but he said, on the way out, that he would never forget that he had heard the word "Schadenfreude" uttered in Bubba Gump Shrimp. So I'll always have that.

HOWEVER: though yesterday may have involved picking up AWP materials, today was in fact the first day of the conference proper, and the people, I did it up proud. I attended and took copious notes at:

• a session on prose poems
• a session on putting together a book of poems
• Dr. Write's session on the new domestic fiction
• a tribute reading to Craig Arnold
• Nikwalk's panel on coming of age in the personal essay

And then, we ate dinner at H Burger, which was swell, because they had (a) amazing fries, and (b) a good veggie burger, and (c) I was unbelievably hungry. I was the kind of hungry that, when they brought my drink, in my case a lemonade/iced tea combo, I could feel it trickling into the empty space where my hunger was raging. That's because breakfast happened when the sun was not quite up yet, and lunch was some crazy seed bar--seriously: a bar made out of seeds and some slightly sweet hold-the-seeds-together stuff--and an apple. Which, the people, tided me over, but I think we can all agree: a seed bar and an apple are not lunch. NOT lunch.

After the entirely satisfactory dining experience, we met up with some people down in the teeming hotel bar which had the immediate effect on me of sending me, with kisses to the friends I wanted to see, fleeing back to my room.

Which leads me to this point: many many sessions in a day at a conference can be good. Each one of those sessions today was rewarding in its own way, and I am pleased to have attended. However, I have learned the following life lessons:

• I am exhausted.
• Eat lunch.
• Time to go to the book fair.
• Sleep better. (I am looking for an implementation expert for this bullet point.)

After fleeing, reflecting, and resting, I went down to the keynote address by Michael Chabon. As exhausted as I was and am, that was excellent. He is hilarious. I loved it. And now, Day One is concluded, I am several poems behind on the National Poetry Month extravaganza, my eyes hurt, and it is time for bed.

Here's what four hours of sleep'll get ya.

• can't follow a logical train of thought for more than two, or possibly two-and-a-half, steps.
• shoulder hurts.
• the sun is extra dazzling, possibly blinding.
  
• too tired to go to a movie with college daughter, even though she's leaving.
  
• can do the New York Times crossword puzzle (to be fair, it's the Monday one).
• can't cook.
• the Jazz won (I'm pretty sure that the lack of sleep and the win are connected).
• the way the teams in the Western Conference are packed in like clowns in a clown car seems like a terrible, terrible injustice.
  
• there are things I know I have to do for tomorrow, but I can't figure out what they are.
• slightly irritable.
  
• will totally be in bed by eleven, asleep by eleven fifteen.