29 July 2026

Two years ago, after grasping at many plausible solutions (therapy, muscle relaxants, acupuncture, etc.) I was prescribed psych meds for chronic belching (symptomatic of anxiety, turns out). In addition to making me hornier, these also made my dreams vivid, operatic, but instantly forgettable on waking. They did little to address the belching, which has since become a mild habitual somatic background event.

As beautiful as those dreams were, I missed having dreams I could recall, as well as the ability to readily recall names (of people I didn't know, fortunately), so I spent June titrating down off the meds until I could safely do without them.

Last night asleep on the couch with the dog I dreamt about Nay and somehow we patched things up. It was exactly the sort of dream I'd been missing: a person I knew, a situation I didn't, a dream that offered a closure I couldn't approach in real life with either a surrogate parent or an actual one. (I don't dream about my parents anymore, thank goodness; in those dreams I was only ever trying to kill them with my bare hands.)

Nay often fantasized about life in a cabin in the woods. I know that I realized this house for the dog more than for myself, but I also suspect that he was not the only one I was trying to make a home for.

28 July 2026

Three books I read years ago but am thinking of often now, and together:

Derek Jarman’s MODERN NATURE, a diary of two years in his life at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, working in solitude by the sea between intervals of life in London;

Iris Murdoch's THE SEA, THE SEA, in which a stage director renounces the theater and impulsively buys a house on the Lincolnshire coast to get away from it all, but naturally brings his faults and obsessions with him;

John Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, a memoir of a months-long cross-country drive in a camper top pickup with his aging dog, contemplating his own fate.

All three I read in Rockaway. I'd read Steinbeck in high school but I imagine it would have taken me longer to come to Murdoch or Jarman (both of whom I have read more deeply in) had I not also chosen to be by the sea.

That choice – and the undoing of it, and what has followed – has been my stuttering, incoherent day-to-day preoccupation for longer than I'd like to admit.

Steinbeck meanders to the West Coast and back (as I did twice in the past three years), wistfully assuming this time will be his last but with less to say about it than most Americans who have also done it assume they should (myself included). Murdoch ensures that, whatever humbling transformation her sometime bucolic maritime protagonist has undergone, he returns to London. Jarman dies.

So what business do I have living on a landlocked acre ten miles outside Ithaca, a place where I know virtually no one, in a house with quirks more aggravating than charming? Is survival a good enough reason? Was this the only path to get there? How would I find out otherwise?

In a drywall frenzy this past weekend, enclosing cavities between studs. A garter snake sashayed lugubriously from under the shower surround and into a gap in the floor that I had not yet identified. I briefly squealed which brought the dog running tail a-wag to the pantry to administer kisses, always happy to be part of the process.

No apparent entrants (reptile or rodent) even on a rainy day, now we test whether steel wool and gap filler are all it will take to keep them out.

6 July 2026

A mouse reappeared in the kitchen this rainy night, precisely two weeks from the rainy night I trapped the last. Rooted around tonight for the remaining traps and found one with a partial snakeskin leaving iridescent traces in the glue, a mirror of the snakeskin found in the gravel in front of the house yesterday.

I razed the garter snake haunt weeks ago, a primitive fire pit built a few feet from the front door, convenient to the kitchen cupboard where the traps are best laid. (Compared to NYC, the mice here are naïfs; the two I've taken each lasted only a few minutes from baiting to disposal.) Notable that I have not seen the snakes in the yard since but though stealthy they clearly have not gone far from their preferred food source. In driving them off I broke one of their tails, an inadvertent act turned a haunting omen in a moment not long ago when I was more consumed with the notion of my own fate.

Funny that (in principle, at any rate) I should mind snakes in the cupboard less than mice. I have lived with mice and found them uniformly unsympathetic creatures; snakes, while alarming, are possessed with a certain hauteur. A recurring nightmare as a child of falling into a swarm of snakes carpeting a neighbor's front yard; a memory of an agitated water snake by the creek in flood; my mother’s unreliable story of the constrictor approaching my crib; the shrieking surprise of a garter dropped onto my head as a pubescent prank. (Are these comparatively mundane household encounters only untroubling because the present is too exhausting to keep up with?)

The cupboard is pitched over an open crawlspace long since slated for enclosure for reasons other than pests; recent events suggest it should be advanced in priority. A contracting job well done may deter them permanently. I think of the D.H. Lawrence poem where he is awed by an adder, then throws a rock to drive it away, and then regrets it.

The archaeolgical salad spinner has been casually replaced for a princely sum. I imagine david would not approve, as I do not.

5 July 2026

Drove back to Newfield from Chestertown after two weeks away. Fourth round trip in as many months felt like coming home in a way it hadn't before. Spotty showers turned to steady drizzle; Cappy and I lay down on the bed and fell asleep. Woke myself for a grocery run and went all out, since the larder was intentionally bare. Allowed myself to look for things like bread for the first time rather than trying to beat the clock while the dog waits in the car. Making peace with the notion that life in this house will not be disciplined like the last (one weekly trip to the store; pots of yogurt, then oatmeal, prepared twice weekly, etc.) for a while to come, or for the arrival of a prep surface.

Excepting of course the david stein Memorial Salad Spinner, which has finally succumbed to entropy and must be replaced. (david's cheese bell happily upcycled from the end of the old driveway; why was it so important that I be heir to it, or to anything else?). I am accustomed to instigating purges, but this time the judgments are not mine and I dare not refuse them. How could so many eternal things simply break after a month in storage? Better to be a narcissist and call it a cosmic conspiracy.

Did a lot of knitting while gone, less and less adequate the further it proceeds. What a joy and wonder it would be to get rid of every lick of fiber and fabric in the place, to create something hideous and never look at it again!