limits belly fire it occurred to me that the works of the great minds were gathering dust on shelves while I was hunting for the "new" word the classics were begging to be reread 040329 ... Fido life is radial most times - for we, not he, or she or me or sher, can break our bastard vices - it is a tethered life for us, my friends, within our tiny portions of the space - but try as as I might to sleep right sound, I sniff out those foreign spices 040907 ... tender_square i could hear the hurt in her voice disguised with anger as it came through on the crappy cell connection. how do you think it feels, she said, entering that car with you and mom when you have the relationship you do and i'm out of the loop? why does it have to be a zero-sum outcome, i wanted to ask. what is it about me being closer to mom instead of with you right now, my sister, that makes you feel threatened? but i didn't go there. rationalizing fails to strike a balance with her temperament. i reach out to you all this time and you only ever text back, she lamented. so i guess we were having that conversation now, the one i'd tried gracefully avoid for weeks. i know you're getting divorced, she said sardonically. (like it was some secret she wasn't supposed to know, like i'd be upset with mom for sharing information about massive changes to my life with family.) i didn't reach out to you, i reasoned, because i know you've had your own stuff. she doubled down on the guilt, mentioning how we used to talk on the phone at length before. and i had to tell her that was when i wasn't going through my own issues, that i had bandwidth then that i don't have now, that i couldn't be the person she came to with her stuff—because she had so much stuff, always—and i had my hands full with my own. when we talk, i said, it's mostly about what you're going through; you ask me one question about my life, give me a minute to answer, and then shift it back to yourself. well, there it is, she said. thanks for your honesty. then, she hung up bitterly. 230112 what's it to you? who go blather from