This post will not be eloquent.

If you've ever seen a fire in a trashcan you'll know how my brain is working right now.

In the pottery class I took in Alabama, we used trashcan fires to set the glaze on our pieces after they were bisque fired. Raku, it's called. The Japanese developed this way of taking a perfectly lovely plain fired pot, painting it in poisonous chemicals and ground up glass, refiring it until it was all shiny and molten, and then throwing it into a trashcan full of sawdust or wood chips or newspaper and letting it all catch fire. The point is having no idea how that last chaotic crucible will end up marking the pot. It's a total surprise, and you have to be at peace with the fact that you have no control over how it turns out.

I used to love the idea of something starting out so calm and meditative-- making a pot on the wheel gets to be like muscling all the knots out of your soul-- and then just tossing it into chaos and hoping you'll recognize it when everyone starts digging through the ashes with an iron pole and claiming what's theirs.

Now that life seems to be trying the process out on my brain, I'm not so enthusiastic.

I'm losing someone important to me and I had no idea it would feel this way. Emotions are ambushing me and they're never the ones I expect. One of my students protested a grade today and I felt like putting his head on a pike right outside my door in the smelly, institutional looking hallway with the posters that say, "Now's your chance to SHINE!" And then in the next millisecond I felt absolutely nothing. A Visa commercial made me cry tonight. I laughed my ass off alone in the living room moments later at a cartoon in the New Yorker about limited edition "Dick Cheney to Harry Whittington" sympathy cards.

The fact is, everything I look at reminds me of my grandmother but the minute I try to say something, or even form a coherent thought about it, the words melt right back into me and I don't recognize a single one. I get it now, why babies cry sometimes for no evident reason. There is a unique torture in experiencing something and having no words for it, no way of understanding why it feels the way it does.