Swing, Batter

At point of overwhelm, I always seek a swing set—and you— you're the rush of air that settles my soul. That explains the flushing burning way I said yes. I could have said more but baseball is a tired metaphor for fucking, and besides, This is not a competition; it's a fuck- damn Renaissance. Reckon you're Botticelli 'bout to splatter your essence upon the canvas of my pretty face. And maybe all you are is an itch to scratch. But my curiosity for the way your breath feels on my neck is more than idle. Like maybe we could swing just once. All's I know is when we're night-sharing one minute turns into eleven in the span of a breath I wasn't aware I was holding but I like to dive deep and I'm not afraid of your depths let me reach the Mariana Trench of your soul I have oxygen enough and besides drowning never killed anyone. Two truths and a lie. I like the idea that I can be soft for you: don't have to pretend to be ok when I'm not. Feel like a kid coz I've not been here before. You take my breath away with hand to throat. Line by line you subtly, brutally break me. This is probably a performance piece. But, as long as we're being self-aware, let me just say I am a slut for strong enjambment. I would spread my soul open here. You've not yet seen How hard my primal can get when we're in the throes of that. Rush at me, don't @ me. Reckon you're Titian with your sacred profanity coz fuck. Never thought I was a poet 'til you slid into my now and now I'm thinking, don't ever leave. You're the rush of air that settles my soul. a swing set—and you— at the point of overwhelm, I always seek. ©2023 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

Let’s go to a rock show!

Voodoo

I forget when the numbers in the years stopped having the same meaning they did when I was still Miss Mary Mackin' on asphalt, when I went through my own all dressed in black black black phase. I remember the art and the poetry and the love. I forget when I started counting backwards in decades to get to the time I remember feeling this full. Maybe this is why the more our lives become entwined the more I feel Most completely and totally me. It's something to do with your effervescent enthusiasm, the way it bubbles out of you, the way you can't control it, the way lowercase isn't really the way you ever do anything, really. And that's what I love the most about you: how completely and totally you you are. © 2024 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

I’m your huckleberry

Last Night

Within sight of the Houston skyline, or one of them, anyway, there's a backyard growing the most exquisite mushrooms, the type of which will twist your reality into something a little more amplified and in tune with the cosmic hum, if not sprinkle the shadows with sparkles. You can go there and breathe deep, maybe. Listen to music, probably. Dance, definitely. You'll remember that smiles and laughter are meant to be shared and that love is a thing that springs into being wherever dust motes take on the characteristics of fairies. It's gonna be 2 a.m. before the rains come, so you'll have plenty of time to get wasted, or not, whatever you prefer. But before that you'll walk to the friendly neighborhood watering hole with one pool table and a ringer that tells inappropriate jokes that are only funny because they're so inappropriate, and you'll meet a woman who's allegedly getting married (you never heard this part) but doesn't want to change her last name because she just got her Ph.D but she's off academia, actually, for the same reasons as anyone. So anyway you'll go back to that house, the one with the backyard and the breathing and the dust and the chandelier you want to get blown under, you'll go back there and you'll be on the back porch and a sound like static will wash over you and you'll say "Is that rain?" And it'll feel like something beautiful because love can't help but be beautiful in the presence of lives like these. ©2024 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

I’ve entered my Blue Period.

Three Months and Change

I've been living in Houston, Texas for a little over three months now. A quarter of a year in this damp, sun-dappled, shimmering, Mad-Maxian city that more than two million people call home. And in that time I've learned a lot. I would say Houston has taught me a lot, but Houston didn't teach me shit—it just gave me the freedom and the motivation to listen and I've done a helluva lot of listening and here's what I've heard:

1. Beauty is everywhere and everything is beautiful and beauty is in the eye of the beholder because it is your choice to see the beauty or to ignore it. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, though. You can choose to see it and there it will be, as it always has been. Beauty is transcendent.

2. There's no need to fear opening up and occupying and embracing the whole of yourself. Take up as much space as you need because you need that space to thrive. Space will accommodate. Also, you don't need as much space as you think you do because you've been compressing yourself for so long you imagine you'll spring out like some vacuum-sealed foam mattress but you won't.

3. You don't need a lot of things to be happy. Happiness comes from moments of connection and the reason the burst of happiness you get when you buy something is so devastatingly fleeting is that you can't actually connect with inanimate objects—at least not the way you can connect with living, breathing things. If you build your life on a foundation of more connections and less stuff you'll be happier.

4. Happiness as a state of existence doesn't mean that you're smiling all the time or that you think everything is great, because most things, most of the time, aren't actually all that great or even very good. What it means is that your undercurrent, your default mode, is trending upward. That default mode is permanent and stable. All the shit is transient.

5. Maybe that's my t-shirt: "Shit is transient. Beauty is transcendent."

6. Love can change your entire perception of reality if you let it—and you should probably let it. I promise nothing bad will come of it. I don't know, maybe I can't actually promise that. But I look at it like this—before you do a thing, just ask yourself if this thing will cause a blossoming/blooming/expanding/ enhancing of love or will it cause a wilting/shrinking/lessening/diminishing of love? Do the things that cause the former and don't do the things that do the latter and see what happens.

7. There is innate value in doing something new every day. New things have the power to open you and change you in unexpected and thrilling ways. And when I say "new," I don't necessarily mean going out of your way to do something completely foreign (although you can do that too, but that would be a lot)—I mean looking at your world with the eyes of someone experiencing it for the first time. When was the last time you watched a squirrel or a bird or a cat or a dog or a tree out your window like you'd never seen a squirrel or a bird or a cat or a dog or a tree before? If you want an example of what this might be like, there's a video out there on the interwebs (pretty sure it was originally a TikTok) of a Nigerian (I think) foreign exchange student experiencing snow for the first time. His roommate blindfolded him, put him in the car, and took him to the park. If you can experience anything as an adult the way this man experienced snow, you're at least halfway to enlightenment by my reckoning.

8. Seven was the longest item on this list because seven is my favorite number. There are three sevens in my birthday, and the first two don't count (I don't know what that means, it just sounded good when I typed it so I'm going with it). But speaking of favorites (of course I set that up), don't be your "best" person. Be your favorite person. Be the person you would be best friends with. That's who you are. Keep the things you love, jettison the rest. And no, it's not as simple as that. But if you de-emphasize and focus less on the things you don't like (hereinafter, "shit"), the shit will flow away. Like I said before, shit is transient.

9. So this title is based on a poem I wrote like a half a year ago, "11 Hours and Change." I wrote that poem because I was talking to this guy and we were kinda, I don't know, we were... speculating? Fantasizing? And but he was saying that I was a "safe" person for him to flirt with because I was so far away and if I were in the same city it would be different, but I was halfway across the country, which prompted me to look up the driving distance. I originally intended the "and change" to have a double meaning, but I did not foresee the extent of that intention.

10. I am now in the same city and it is, indeed, different. Different is good. I don't like to write about romantic love because it's written about a lot and I feel like it's oftentimes written in an oppressively idealistic way and I don't wanna do that. For a long time I wasn't even sure I knew what romance was, apart from what we're spoon-fed by the Capitalist Fantastic. Maybe I still don't know what it is, because it's probably different for everyone, it's a spectrum like everything else in this world that we're all seemingly just realizing is actually gradients and shades and not stark contrasts.

11. There are objective facts and there are truths. Your feelings and intuition can lead you to truth just as much, if not more often, than your analytical mind can. Respect your feelings and intuition. Nurture them and embrace them and above all, listen. I cannot stress the listening enough. I was gonna say more about this but it needs a new number.

12. Never have regrets. I never say never, but here I make an exception. Everything, whether it goes well or poorly, is a learning experience. To regret something is to believe that you would be better off if you'd never done that shit. But if you'd never done that shit, you wouldn't be where you are today. Appreciate the lesson it gave you. If you love yourself right now, you can't possibly have any regrets, because everything that's happened to you has led you to here. If you don't love yourself right now, you're still in the midst of the journey.

13. You don't have to be right all the time. Sometimes right and wrong aren't even in the equation. Don't think about being right—just listen. If someone likes something you don't like, don't say you don't like it —ask them why. Experience that thing through their eyes. Will you come away liking it? Probably not. But you'll understand more why people do, and that paves the way to more understanding, and more understanding = more love. See point 6.

14. Your feelings and your intuition are just as valid as objective facts. Embrace, nurture, and respect them as pathways to truth, because sometimes truth can't be realized in objective facts. You'll find there are gaps that must be filled in, and that's where emotional intelligence comes in. Embrace it, nurture it, and respect it.

15. When I say that you should feel things, I mean that you should feel them in every cell of your being. I mean that you should stand your ass up and shake that shit out. I am a huge proponent of Kitchen DancingTM for this reason. Let music infiltrate your body from time to time. Let it take over. Find what heals you.

16. Your body knows what it needs, you just have to listen. Yeah, here I go with the listening again. Listen. Every fucking craving you have is connected to something your body needs. Research it. Give your body what it needs to thrive. Your body is the conduit for you. Nurture it. Love it.

17. You do not have limits. Stop telling yourself you can't do something because you absolutely can. Do you want to do it? Fucking do it. What are you waiting for? I couldn't move from Nashville until I could. And before you accuse me of woo, I had literally less than nothing when I set out on this course. I still have less than nothing but I'm currently at least as happy as a cat rolling in catnip and I count that as a win. Tell yourself you can do the thing you want to do and then go and fucking do it and don't accept any excuses. Check in with me later.

18. This is probably how cults start.

19. Re-read point 6.

20. This is a long fucking list and I love you for having read it. If you got anything from it, I love you all the more, but if you got nothing from it, I love you even so. Because the only thing worth anything is love and the things you give from it.

©2024 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

Logic Trance

Moments we want to last a lifetime, moments engraved in our souls. Realizations that happiness comes from within, that happiness these moments pull forth and make radiant. Times I can scarcely remember who I was without you by my side, without you filling and fulfilling each heartbeat with significance. Places our lips have touched, our hands have held, our eyes have met. Places our souls have vibed on the same frequency, our limbs have intwined. Times we endured the untogether of apartness but never knew who what when was missing, turns out it was nothing but also these Realizations that wherever there is truth, there is also beauty to be seen by those who seek out Moments we want to last a lifetime, moments engraved in our souls. ©2024 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

(For My Favorite) Catastrophe

Catastrophic, adj. (3) involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in state is what I mean when I say meeting you was catastrophic. The way your eyes soften when you look at me—catastrophic. The way your hand feels on my skin—catastrophic. The way your mind captures my heart. And my eyes are full of stars today because we use the word magic without irony. And you said we should write more poetry together (And we should, and we will, but) which is what we do when our cheeks lips limbs fingers faces meet in moments I am only careless enough to share with you. Thank you for stitching your heart on my sleeve, for scratching your name on my every exhale, for seeing me. You make falling feel more like soaring, and for you I'd fall at least a thousand times more if it meant landing safe in your arms. Catastrophic, adj. (3) involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in state is what I mean when I say I am not the same person I was a half-second before you opened the door and welcomed me home. ©2023 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

2023

If you’d told me this time last year that this time this year I’d be where I am right now, I’d have quietly suggested that perhaps the holiday season was getting to your head a bit. Hell, I said it myself, the day I drove down to Houston for the first time: “Ain’t no fucking way my fucking ass is moving to Houston fucking Texas.”

Famous last words.

I ended 2022 in the liminal space of a Schrödinger’s relationship that was simultaneously clearly over and not over yet. I was mentally, physically, and psychically drained. I was also ready to turn over the proverbial apple cart of my life because I knew nothing I’d been doing for the past seven years or so had actually gotten me anywhere I truly wanted to be.

I needed a push. And I got a push. It wasn’t the push I wanted at the time, but pushes seldom are. Do you think when mama bird pushes her fledgling out of the nest there’s a brief second when that little bird is hurtling through the air at terminal velocity and feels betrayed? Coz yeah, it was something like that.

But then, mere moments before that little bird crash lands, those wings start flapping and that little bird soars.

Okay, it doesn’t soar. It ain’t pretty, a fledgling flying for the first time. It ain’t pretty, but it works. And like that little bird, I spent the early part of 2023 discovering who and what I am, and who and what and where I’m meant to be.

Turned out that was Houston fucking Texas.

In my mind, the best relationships are the ones that accentuate and emphasize the parts of you that you love the most about yourself while simultaneously uplifting the parts of you that you maybe don’t like so much and saying “hey—all of this is okay too. Maybe it ain’t my favorite, but it’s part of you, and you’re my favorite, so yeah, I love all of it, even the parts I don’t like so much.”

It seems that to get what you really want, you have to actually ask for it—which is to say, first, that you have to believe that you deserve to get what you want, that you deserve to be loved for everything you are, that you deserve to be fucking happy for once.

The midlife crisis is over. Now we enter midlife ecstasy. I said that last night and, punnage to the side, every exhale has his name written on it. And forever feels like a small word for such an unwieldy and unpredictable thing, but at the same time, even the most active imagination has its limits and I can’t imagine any place I’d rather be or any person I’d rather be with.

Maybe that’s what falling in love really means.

And yeah, feels like I’m a completely different person at the end of 2023 than I was at the beginning of 2023. For all the faults and flaps and failings, this was the year I learned to fly.

©️2023 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

Fractal Russian Nesting Dolls

What can you say about that phrase about containing multitudes when multitudes actually turn out to be infinites, the way I could go on forever trying to pick apart the gears that make you tick without ever quite being able to fully capture the pendulum swing that goes tock on a grandfather clock that gave us a clause to celebrate a nostalgia we once helped create together before either of us ever suspected we would one day be together. So you call our love language inside conversations, the way we gots jokes inside of jokes inside of jokes inside of real deal deep intellectual explication of our aesthetics both in art and in the partners we choose to layer up with on a winter that arrived in mere hours after we had both been wearing shorts earlier that day. The weather in Houston is completely schizophrenic sometimes, which is not to say anything bad about schizophrenics since we both hate ableism and like Houston, it being my hometown, and it being the place you fell in love with me over daiquiris and the kind of surprise midnight anal that happens when your bodies are writing the writhing scripts your heads will just have to catch up to like an underdog that reminds you sometimes the most intimate thing you can probe is also the place where the trash gets taken out, since home is where you make your best messes, and since some messes are worth getting into for the sensation of cleaning up later. And yeah, that’s a metaphor for an audience of one, since no one will get that one better than her, so here we are manifesting another of them Fractal Russian Nesting Dolls, which feels an appropriate thing to call them, since I am always telling everyone how communism was and remains a good ideology to have and to follow in the objective fact kind of way, and not merely in the value judgment kind of way, and any conversation with me might get there eventually, even my pillow talk, where we will get all dialectical materially and show how hormones can shift thinking until we don’t even know what is and isn’t flirting, since it all feels like the color red.

©2023 by Mike Hilbig

Note from Jen: Mike wrote this for me based on a little comment exchange we were having on the Facebook post where I announced we were an Official Couple™ after he wrote a much longer and more eloquent post on the same topic. And then he asked if I would post it on my Tumblr since he's not really on Tumblr anymore, so here you go.

Jen's Dating Chronicles: Installment the Eighth

I'm breaking a number of rules with this post, but someone who might be smarter than me but definitely isn't but still is at least in some ways said that rules are made to be broken, or something like that.

And it's funny because the whole point of the dating chronicles was to basically make fun of how shitty dating and hooking up with random people is, because that's something worth making fun of.

But this post isn't about that at all.

This post is about falling in love. It's about how sometimes, the thing you were looking for is right in front of you—you just have to give yourself permission to actually look for what you really want, instead of settling for something that's good enough for hand grenades and metaphors.

Never in my life have I known a single person who was able to so eloquently and occasionally elegantly tick every single one of my boxes, even some I didn't know I had.

The way I discover every day some new thing that I didn't realize I loved for someone to do until he was doing it.

And it's also funny because when I started dating, I wasn't looking for love. I didn't even know if I was capable of falling in love again. I mean, I felt like I probably could, but.

I feel like I've always been very realistic about love and this has been my downfall. Because I've always thought the romantic ideal was such bullshit, like, you'll never find anyone who works for you on every level, the odds are basically insurmountable.

And we're both poker players but he probably plays more aggressively than me. I don't know because we've never played each other, probably because he's afraid he'll lose although he claims it's because heads-up play is boring. Sounds like something someone who's afraid to lose would say.

So it's also funny because both of us agreed to take things slowly, to be cautious about this, because we knew our feelings were formidable and fulsome and we didn't want to fuck this up.

A month and change is slow, right?

I started dating in April. It's now October and I have a boyfriend. Not just any boyfriend, though—a boyfriend whose brain is in sync with mine, who meets me on every level, who inspires me every day. A boyfriend I can't imagine my life without. And I've never been happier or more excited about what the future holds.

We are going to make beautiful art together and I swear to fuck this is the last installment of the dating chronicles. Unless it isn't.

©2023 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

New home, who dis?

11 and Change Redux

Knowing just 11 hours and change was all it took to find myself in your arms, where I can breathe like I finally belong somewhere. So feels kinda like we're late nights and debauchery, how I'm drunk on your smile, high on your kisses that melt on my lips like some kind of metaphor. Knowing you between my thighs feels equal parts threat and promise to show there's more than one way to get sticky. So feels kinda like we're sunrises and exhaustion, how we stumble and laugh and stay awake for fear of missing out on the next best moment. Knowing not even best-case scenarios accounted for what we tripped over along the way to the next chapter of an unwritten story. So feels kinda like we're high noon and sweaty, how humidity is the great equalizer but I don't mind suffering with you. So feels kinda like we're golden hour and magic, how there's nothing better than your smile when we share tomorrow's inside joke. Knowing if anybody ever asks me what's worth driving 12 hours for, I'd tell them this. ©2023 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

(Read the original)

Jen’s Dating Chronicles: Installment the Seventh

I'm breaking a number of rules with this post. Broken rule the first is that I told myself when I started this series that I would only write installments about people once the "relationship" was over or had run its course, and that is most certainly not the case here. Broken rule the second is that I told myself with installment the sixth that I was done and I wasn't going to write any more of these, yet here we are. Broken rule the third is that I never give identifying details about any of the people I talk about in these posts, but said strict anonymity seems a bit past the point here, and especially given broken rule the first, and more especially given that the person I'm about to tell y'all about was once a member of the Tumblr Writing Community, such as it was way back in the day, and that makes anonymity seem silly and pointless, even more especially given that I have posted pics of myself with this person on this very blog. Three. That's three broken rules. Three is a number. So yeah. Sometimes there are people just sort of hanging out in the background of your life. That's not to say that you never talk to them, or that you don't consider them to be friends of a fashion, or that you've never shared any deep or thought-provoking or emotional content with each other—we read each other's writing, for fuck's sake. But things don't click until they do. We didn't meet on an app, at least not a dating app, and not unless you consider Tumblr a dating app (some of us do, tho, it seems—I've had more actual relationships through Tumblr than through Tinder or Bumble or any of the others that purport to shove people's faces in your face so you can find someone to play mate with). And we weren't strangers, not really, even though we'd never met in person. We started chatting about writing one day and that conversation became a conversation about something else that became a conversation about something else again and so on and that conversation has never really stopped since June 21 when it started. So maybe that explains why, on the first of July, we were on the phone and I jokingly intimated when we were six hours into what would become an all-night phone conversation, that rarest of breeds, that if I'd gotten in the car when we first started talking I'd be halfway to him by then. And we kinda laughed about it and it was kinda funny but also kinda not funny because it planted a seed in my mind and that seed grew immediately and had to be harvested pretty damn quick and that's when I said, "I'm driving to Houston tomorrow." And then I passed out on the phone. This is the sort of thing that happens when you're on the phone all night. And then I woke up at 11 a.m. and my first thought was, "Did I really just say I was driving to Houston tomorrow?" And after I'd determined that wasn't some sort of fever dream, I commenced to trying to talk myself out of driving 12 hours and I just couldn't come up with enough reasons not to. I really couldn't come up with any reasons not to, apart from the "driving 12 hours" part, because I don't know about you but that doesn't exactly sound like the best time. Although, if I'm honest, I was less concerned with the driving down and more concerned with the driving back. If things went well, the driving back would be bittersweet. If things didn't go well, the driving back would be annoying. Neither bittersweet nor annoying are pleasant. So basically there's no way that the driving back would be a good time, even if the driving there wasn't the best. And yet. So off I went on Sunday, and you know what? The drive wasn't all that bad. At some moments, it was even really fucking cool. Was it the best? Eh. And then I got here and ever since I got here everything has been amazing. Sometimes there are people just sort of hanging out in the background of your life. And then, one day, they move into the foreground and everything clicks and the world comes into focus like things are just a little brighter and a little sharper than you ever noticed them being before. But before I left I assured everyone I talked to about this venture that there was no way in hell my fucking ass was moving to fucking Houston. I'm allowed to be wrong. So that's where I'm at right now. Falling in love and moving to Houston. One thing I didn't see happening any time soon, the other thing I didn't see happening ever. But ain't that the beauty of it? Take a fucking risk sometimes just to see what happens. It might suck, but it might also be something grand.

And just in case you’re wondering what happened to the guy from Installment the Sixth—he lied to me. Don’t lie to me.

© 2023 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller

Welcome to the Jen and Mike Show, brought to you by the Queen of Tumblr and Published Author Mike Hilbig. Details at 11.

I don’t know how to tell you that I’m a completely different person today than I was 24 hours ago