This morning I made my way up the narrow steep stairs to my attic office and thought, as I cleared the top and saw no bat shit or mouse shit, How pleasant it is to live pest free. I thought those words and advanced towards my desk, where I sat down. But as I sat down I saw first one, then two flies, house flies, black and convivial. They landed near me, but would not allow themselves to be killed and one, having made several escapes, landed on top of my monitor where he sat and rubbed his arms together, taunting me.

Then I noticed, on the floor, a mass of tiny ants swarming, as ants do when they are devouring something tasty, and then I realized that there was another fly, who had fallen there, and was being eaten. Several hours later, having eating what they could off him where he lay, they departed, leaving his carcass behind.

I used to think that I had infestations, I had a mouse problem or bat problem or ant problem or a roach problem, but only recently, and only thanks to my house, which, over time, is losing its status as a thing apart from me, in the way that my body, as it fails me, becomes my whole self as it wasn’t when it worked and I could do what I wanted with it, without thinking about what it was I wanted to do, have I realized that I live surrounded by teeming and buzzing and crapping armies, they are all around me, they run through my walls and up my siding and they scamper on the roof. Some lie sleeping above where I lie sleeping, although not, actually, while I lie sleeping, but the point is that they are there, breathing in and out, fulfilling their purpose as living beings, as I fulfill mine.

The universe is an infestation.

The exterminator returns this week.

On Friday the first graders paraded around the school in vests cut from paper bags and decorated to look like book jackets, and their parents took pictures of them. Some people filmed. I don't know what the occasion was, but I participated nonetheless, showing up at school with John in tow and calling Henry's name, so he would look at me and I could capture him on film. At the end, Henry handed me his book jacket to take home. I can’t throw it directly in the garbage. But he's not going to wear it again, and we're not going to frame it. So I will save it, in a box in the attic, for an unspecified amount of time possibly including up until my death.

A friend and I went to see Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution a couple of months ago, before it closed. I’ve driven her a few places now, and she always screams while I drive. She always thinks I’m going to kill us. In fact, I am, according to my record, a very safe driver. I don’t have accidents. I never hit other cars with mine. Sometimes I think that’s because I’m living in a dream state in which nothing real can happen. I don’t tell my passengers that, though, since that would frighten them.

My parents live on a bumpy road that ends at a highway. Once, when I was a new driver, I drove down to the highway with an apple, and as I waited at the light I started to eat the apple. I had just taken my first bite, and the apple was in my mouth, held to my mouth by my hand, when the light turned green, and, as I made the hard right turn onto the highway, I had to, at the last moment, remove my hand from the apple to use it to turn the wheel enough to clear the center guard rail, and ended up spitting the apple across the car. Then I tried to reach for it on the floor.

Now that I think about it, none of the art at the show was about driving. Yesterday we passed a boarded-up Gaseteria and I felt a wave of real sadness at this image, and the idea that twenty years from now, or at some point relatively soon, all the gas stations will be boarded up, obsolete, and we will drive by them in silent electric cars. All those beautiful old cars, useless, I thought. I hadn’t realized I was so attached to the internal combustion engine. Since then I’ve wavered between the position that everything becomes useless, so I should stop being such a baby about it, and that everything becomes useless, and that this is deeply sad.

I had a lot of criticisms of Wack!. I thought, by and large, that the artists could have done better. I thought I could do better, even, in the alternate world where I was a visual artist and halfway handy with a saw. I felt a little sad about this, a little betrayed. I wanted the women who made revolutionary art to have done their homework, to have better understood the art that brought them to where they were, and to have worked harder to make art. I’m not talking about you, Judy Chicago, or you, Carolee Schneeman. But Kirsten Justesen, the person who pasted a painting of a woman in a box on top of a box? Yes, you.

I had been watching the Whitman program on the American Experience, and thinking about “As I Ponder’d in Silence”:

As I ponder’d in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands,
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
Know’st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
The making of perfect soldiers.
Be it so, I answered,
I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance and retreat, victory deferr’d and wavering,
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the field the world,
For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I above all promote brave soldiers.

And I suppose I felt that Whitman had been concerned with the things these women were concerned about, but had based his concern on thousands of years of history and writing, and had worked on making poems out of this that took his whole life to make. And I felt disappointed in these women, but, at the same time, in myself. Whatever I am, I am not yet a revolutionary. I want us to continue.

I have broken my ankle, and my story was rejected today. John brought the mail to me while I lay on the guest room bed and watched a program on Walt Whitman, taking careful notes. Outside the gardeners were here, and two of them, I could see through the window, were jousting with rakes. Initially I thought they were playing lacrosse. Which would have been safer than what they were doing, but also less likely. The story came in the envelope I had sent it in, addressed to me in my handwriting. But there must be some mistake, because I would never send my story back to me. I would accept it, and publish it to great acclaim.

I can lie on my stomach quite comfortably, with my foot either up in the air or resting on a pillow. In this position I can forget about my foot. I can touch my feet together. I can scratch my injured foot, absently, with my hand. I just can’t stand on it. In other words, while I lie on the bed and watch Walt Whitman, I can do whatever it is I want to do, and I forget that I am injured. And when I send a story out into the world and it has not come back, that doesn’t hurt either. Oh, I am tender, though. I am really tender.