Last night the sky opened up and some celestial jokester let loose with over five inches of water in the overnight hours.
What does this mean to me? It means the basement feigned the qualities of a swimming pool (which had probably been a life-long dream of the dreary little sub-space) ; a very filthy, hugely unsanitary swimming pool.
Of course, the entire aquatic transformation took place while my consciousness was wading through the deep waters of its own nocturnal delusions with these same wily gods taking hold of my attention in realms I have yet to find a map to. So naturally, no human intervention was available till morning.
However, the sump pump was a real champion and came to the rescue like some skinny, unimpressive, iron-based Don Quixote with too much time on it's hands...or components; thus sparing us the need for wet suits and water-wings.
Unfortunately, there remains yards and yards of oozing, black sludge, which the survivor in me keeps assuring my brain is entirely earth-based and not the blackened contaminates of raw sewage. I choose to believe that story having spent several hours in it already.
I am sharing this because I can't share anything else. I am too busy playing in the mud.
Yet in dealing with this natural bathospheric disaster, it occurred to me how many hats I wear. Or, in this case, perhaps, goggles and scuba gear. It is something we all share: Flexibility.
So, during this little break that I am taking between doing the laundry and getting online quotes for submersibles, I went through some of my old, old drawings looking for this one.
It refers to that adaptable format of changeability, mask-wearing and the brilliantly distributed aspects of persona that have allowed me to be simultaneously both Susan, the writer/artist AND the sanitation-man's version of Jacques Cousteau. Coincidentally, it even contains references to rubbish.
The poem is impossible to read in the illustration itself, which is why I learned how to type:
The faces that capture my eye
Pointedly fix on my need
To validate all that is human
Replete with my failures and greed
I court the world as a spy does
Varnished and fixed like the moon
Each gesture becomes a device
Befitting the face I assume
Suspect of everything foreign
I feign a contempt for debris
While secretly harvesting rubbish
To liberate remnants of me
* The drawing on the floor of the nervous smiley face confronting a gun has the caption: Go ahead! Make me have a nice day!
The sun is supposed to return to us in full by tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll be bailing.
