I’m coming here to write after the kid has gone to sleep but before I get to the hampers of clean but wrinkling clothes and the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Because I’m wanting to make this the chore. I need this to be the chore. Did I brush my teeth? Did I eat breakfast? Did I take a shower? Did I write?

Just kidding. Daily showers stopped a long time ago.

I have been dreaming about a tub. The tub that came with our house is one of those “looked nice in the magazine” tubs, a modern clawfoot with absurdly high “shoulders,” which I guess are there to prevent the wavemachine of your back from pushing a tidal up and over the back of the tub? But in reality means that not only do I not fit in the tub lengthwise but neither do I fit widthwise, which is a real cock-block of a move, tiny tub.

I got into taking baths as an adult in my late 20s. After the extra-strenuous, extra-dirty days on the farm, I would soak in the tub. I would read the New Yorker magazine, not caring if the pages got wet. (I would then take a quick shower to rinse off the dirt that lifted in the bath leaving me to stew in it).

When I moved in with J, once or twice she “made a bath” for me; she boiled water to offer a warm-up half-way through. She liked to soak. We went to a couple of nearby hot springs for weekend getaways–anytime we went through Santa Cruz we’d rent a private tub.

The last time I went to the private spa tubs, it was about a year after I broke up and moved out. I took a week off of work–I had a speaking gig in Monterrey one week, and the farm conference in Pacific Grove the next, so I rented a little basement room in the hills above Santa Cruz. The first night there, the place flooded. The second night, my host invited me to dinner; I watched her make food for her giant sheepdogs with human-grade chicken and rice and vegetables, then I watched her make steak and potatoes for us. The third night I walked into the little town, listening to the Beastie Boys Book, nervous I’d get hit by a car–and took in a band play a tiny art studio, not much bigger than my tub. After I checked out I drove down the mountain and soaked for an hour, naked, all by my lonesome, with green tea beside the jacuzzi.

Like this post, that trip didn’t have much substance. At the speaking gig, I read a poem with the word “cock” in it (that’s the second in this post), which even startled me. I wanted to read from my “Nightwork” chapbook, because it was new and I wanted to sell copies, so I fit a poem from it into my presentation, but the mention of my own penis through me off. And what the fuck, anyway? I was reading to a roomful of retiree writers. They didn’t want me to poetically flash them. I sold a few copies, nonetheless…

The woman I was seeing at the time was mystified why I would go into the hills for a week by myself. I’m trying to think; around that time she had invited me to go on a trip with her friends, and I turned her down–so it wasn’t just that I was going on vacation without her, it was that I clearly didn’t want to go on vacation with her, one way or the other.

I think my thought was that I was going to read Iron John and write poems, as I had done on my 30th birthday, a week before J. and I got together, 3 years prior. It felt like a bookend, no pun intended, to a chapter of my life.

But it was also so boring. Yes, I went to the Monterrey Aquarium, as part of my pay for the speaking gig. I went to a coffee shop and I went to the art studio show, I went to the spa. I don’t remember what I did at the rental all day, besides masturbate. It was a no-account vacation.

“What do you do when there is no flow?”

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.

I am dreaming of a tub that fits me, and a retreat into the mountains, to be still.

Meanwhile, laundry.