If I Could Only Be Dick Proenneke

I would grow my own, live off the land (as long as my low blood sugar allowed), and mostly alone. Although, sometimes I think I don't want to be alone so much as I'm protesting feeling alone for so much of my life. Ironically, it seems my desire to be alone is precipitated by a bout of loneliness. --that and that I can't stand the slings and arrows of American society, which grows more malicious, claw-tooth bared, and vain every day. Where is my tribe?

Other musings

In reviewing the music I most listened to over the last decade, I find mostly melancholy tunes by Bjork, Fiona Apple, and Joni Mitchell, among many others. I’m thinking of how silly this music is to me now, near age 43; how impractical and draining it all is. And I find myself preferring classical music once again, because it’s the most practical music out there. Of course, as a teen, through thirty-something, I always believed classical…to be the most strenuous and emotional music there exists—don’t get me wrong, I understand—in so much as the two classical music courses at college could bestow upon this lay-woman—that the work of a composer is a complicated brilliance, but all in all, classical is far more no-nonsense than your average hormone-angst-driven chanteuse. Classical reaches all the emotional depth of that other genre, and more, without the fluff.

Poem by Annie Finch

Dickinson

Of all the lives I cannot live,
I have elected one

to haunt me till the margins give
and I am left alone.

One life will vanish from my voice
and make me like a stone--

one that the falling leaves can sink
not over, but upon.