When I’m trying to lose weight, giving up sweets is never a problem. I could have a chocolate bar in the house for two weeks and not finish it, but I love salt. The savor of it, the piquancy, the way it brings out other tastes in food. I love the smell of the salt marsh and big flakes of sea salt and bowls of salty chips. But lately tears have been the seasoning in my dish of sorrow, an ocean of tears, enough to sweep me away like Alice in Wonderland. And while they bring momentary relief, they also come at inappropriate moments, seemingly for no reason at all, sometimes with no warning. I’ll be in the check-out line at the supermarket and suddenly I’m overcome. Or sitting at the computer in my office, I’ll begin weeping. Or I wake up crying in the morning with no memory of a bad dream, just the hard landing from blessed unconciousness onto the unyielding tarmac of daylight and reality. I know there’s an ebb and flow to grief, and I’m trying to trust that this salty sea of tears will recede and I’ll develop a taste for sweetness in my life again, or at last.

Are you thrilled that we’re at Friday? Not only Friday but a 3-day weekend? I’m sure that if I were on a perpetual 3-day weekend I would get bored (really?) and have to come up with a project to break the lovely leisure, but right now I am so excited to have a stack of books, a Tempurpedic mattress and plenty of Prosecco. I will take a walk on the beach and love every sandy moment. I’ll give my hair a deep moisturizing treatment and shave my legs. Ideally, there would be a thunderstorm, but if we don’t get one, I’ll turn on the White Noise app on my iPhone and pretend it’s raining outside while I’m reading inside.  I’ll make up another bag of clothes I don’t wear but am saving for when I’m a bag lady during the 2nd Great Depression and give them away. Goodbye, cheesy black lace Libertine skirt I bought at Target! What was I thinking? Next weekend I’m traveling to take this workshop and will need to pack my extrovert side, so this weekend is all for being a happy hermit. After years of wishing I could be more like my high-alert friends, I’ve finally learned that I need to balance being around people and trying new experiences with periods of being quiet and alone and recharging what has been depleted.

I don’t know if this message was a response to a boarded up store in the neighborhood where I work or just a cry from the heart.  If the latter, I get it. There are so many things I’d like to undo:

I wish I’d been a better daughter.

I shouldn’t have thrown that Irish coffee at an old boyfriend in the middle of the street one night.

Being self-conscious instead of self-confident.

Saying yes when my brain shouted no — only about a million times.

What’s his name — wow, undo it.

Sitting on my bum so many years instead of exercising.

Withholding love, trust, a simple hug in order to maintain a resentment or a wall.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have to fall down and get dirty and get up and do something different they’d want to undo later. Over and over. And when you start undoing, where does it end? So many good things connected to so many regrettable things — if you start to unravel one, the others come loose, too.  So no undoing, but maybe just understanding.

I had drinks with my Tuesday friend (on Thursday) and learned that a mutual acquaintance whose talent and phenomenal success I’ve always envied has moved out of town. When you’ve spent a lot of subliminal creative energy being jealous of someone, it leaves a void when you don’t have that straw (wo)man to fight. I had to ask myself what she had represented in my life that was so thorny. Some career trajectory I’d missed, some talent I lacked, some spiritual certainty I’d never have? Envy is embarrassing because it makes you so small, even if no one but you knows about it. Of course I can use this as an opportunity to do soul searching or at least to face what I’ve felt and name it–but oh how mortifying, how human!

* Sometimes I don’t brush my teeth before bed, but I feel so guilty I get up in the middle of the night and do it.

* My recent bedtime reading has been books about death on K2, the second highest mountain in the Himalayas. Problem is that I’m so freaked out, I can’t get to sleep.

* I have to have white noise to drown out my overbusy brain at night. Still I often wake up and write a note to myself in the middle of the night which I can’t decipher in the morning. Still wondering what “buspry” means.

* I have a great fear of a giant Palmetto bug crawling on me in the night. I’ve lived in SC since 1985 and I’m still terrified of these Jurassic Park insects.

* I’m not a morning person, but I have a job that starts at 9am. Brutal, inhuman, demoralizing!

* When I took Ambien, I would get up and eat in the night, apparently still asleep. When I woke up one morning sprawled out in a pile of cracker crumbs and walnuts like the last one to leave a Roman orgy I knew I had to give it up.

* Now that I have a foundation under my Temperapedic mattress, I need a ladder to climb into bed. I feel like the girl in The Princess and The Pea, my second favorite fairy tale. My favorite is the gruesome and Grimm little tale of Little Red Riding Hood. No wonder, then, that I love grisly murder mysteries and true-life tragedies as bedtime stories.

* I’m not a cuddler and I feel bad about it. Coming home to my own bed and bedroom is always like a big sigh of luxury mixed with a little loneliness. I’d like to be a hugger, and I wish it came naturally to me to call someone “hon” or “babe,” but it just doesn’t. I guess I need to meet either an equally repressed man or one who is naturally demonstrative. But still, I really don’t want to call anyone “hon”.

* I spent five or so years living with the wrong lamp. I loved my handcarved hula girl but she was just so tall that I had to sit up out of the edge of sleep in order to turn the damn thing off and then I’d be wide awake again. I just gave her away and I miss her eccentricity.

A friend of my daughter’s called it The Fear when she was in high school even though she couldn’t really explain it.  I call it The Dreads. I think Churchill called it The Black Dog. Moods that stalk you, inducing either general universal anxiety (what if the oil spill creates a dead ocean?) that has no answer or a personal sadness that you just can’t shake. I’ve had it lately, despite the latest/greatest antidepressant my doctor can find and a life that is just so incredibly lucky. We give it these names in order to distance  ourselves from it or cut it down to size, but I think it’s the knowledge of our own mortality and the questioning and questing that goes along with it that dogs us.  That dark shadow is anathema to us, because we are busy being the best we can be, getting empowered, waiting for the Universe to grant our dearest wish, buying stuff to fill up the empty rooms of our soul house. It’s such a tightrope we walk — to love the light with all our might and at the same time, acknowledge the dark that waits for us at the end. And I probably cudgel my brain about it way too much–that’s why I love Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Recipe for Happiness Khaborovsk or Anyplace.”

One grand boulevard with trees
With one grand cafe in sun
With strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
Man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.

The only upside to being sick is taking hydrocodone cough syrup. You’re still sick, but you don’t seem to mind it as much

Every time Sally Field hawks Boniva on TV, I want to break one of her fragile wings.

I know handmade crafts are the hallmark of hip sustainable eco culture, but why is so much of it ugly, and will felting ever die?

I’m terrible at conducting job interviews. I never trust myself not to hire a secret psycho, which has actually happened twice.

My new guilty pleasure is Kelly Cutrone on “The City,” but she scares me.

Every time I apply self-tanner I look like I’ve been rolling in dung.

I spend more time reading about writing than actually writing.

I find it difficult to cry in front of people, so I probably come across as unfeeling.

Sometimes when I’m cooking, I pretend I’m on a Food Network show and talking to an audience. So nerdy.