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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 The weather brings the homeless to the library today. Early, a man sleeps outside, belly and bicycle visible in profile. He is waiting for the police to take him to jail to sleep it off. And in the library--booze on unwashed breath, yet another layer of stink exuded from ppl who wear three sets of clothes.
Which makes some sense: your validity-seeking wardrobe is rolled up, washed but musty, in the bags you carry. This is, if you're a man. You can strip off what stinks and take what some folks call a "Porto Rican shower" (thanks, Richard Price, I think), wash up your pits and slick back your hair, and wrap yourself in the wax of a Speedstick. Shave, if you have a razor form the shelter. You can, and you will, dress yourself in wrinkly chinos and a shirt that doesn't quite match. You were drinking last night, and you wonder if the antiperspirant will kill the revenant alcohol coming up from your pores.
At some later point, you decide that nothing you do or do not do will factor into whether or not you get a $7.50/hr job. You are you, and that smells too, so you do what you want to and what you can: buy a pint of cheap vodka, find a shadowy alley on the north side of town, and kill it. You know it doesn't take long.
What you know: you will doubtless be too drunk to get into the shelter tonight, so you say, "Eff it," and proceed to drink yourself to the hospital, or to jail. These things happen. You will shit charcoal for several days, and get Valium through an IV line.
Things are worse for the women. There are a few that do the layered-clothes deal. Most of them are bone-thin, but a few carry weight. Cortisol, or the world on their shoulders.
I have something to do. And no time to do it. I wanna complain on that so-called director of the Salvation Army. Let's see about THAT, Miss Mary Nasty Word for Female Dog. Almost forgot my nickname and pw there, haven't been here for over a week. Things are not good. Especially since I must go off Klonopin.
I took in a "boarder"--this in a cardbord box of an apartment--for four days and didn't get anything but a mess and a screaming match for my services. Very very egregious thinking, there Hoss. And now I refer to myself in the third person as I make and erase typos, the make and erase almost a pattern. Look for patterns in the seemingly random. Perhaps I should call my stress-addled mother and ask her to bring the boxes and go predictably insane over at Eastern State, this area's psychiatric facility.
Asked Mr. Michael, via e-mail, if I could camp at his place until Until arrives. He may have secret debts in the bag, there among all the other secrets, but he appears well-to-do: he has a Lawn. This morning, the newscasters were going on about lawns. Must be nice, a lawn. Something almost solid to pass out on. Anyway, Michael never answered, and this has been over a week ago. Dude, I'm freakin' HOMELESS, don't you GET it?
Or maybe he DOES get it, and has BEEN getting it, for a long time: there will be no UNTIL for me. Put me out to pasture, let me eat the lawn, and then shoot me. Get it over with. I'm just taking up air and space, brutha. What an existence this has been.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~&~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wednesday, March 24, 2004 And, oh yeah--tears for the Vet as it went down. Slo-mo destruyudo of some dreamy, weird years. I am so afraid I'll never be able to get home. I don't want to stay here. Really.
Remaining time: 28 minutes. Wonder how much damage I can do in that time. Got some possibly good news yesterday--this older man at AA is letting rooms and floor space to alkies who are having trouble getting back on their feet. I might be able to get a little money from a charitable organisation to give to the landlord, so as to keep him as a reference and "do the next right thing," whatever that means. I won't dwell on it, for I may get the bees buzzing again. I just got a bug in my ear, though (this really does happen--I've seen it in emergency rooms in Philadelphia). I'd like to undertake a series of editorials on the topic of the dearth of services in Lexington for single homeless women. You got kids, you got a place to stay. You got an abusive partner, there's a hole in the wall (and security guards) for you someplace. So you make a few mistakes and screw up at the Salvation Army, and you're not allowed back in. You're not violent, you're consistent with your chore assignment, you don't come in dirty, although you do NOT want to have to be up and about at six a.m.. Still, the director, who doesn't care if you live or die, refuses you shelter. AA says you're supposed to pray for these kinds of ppl, and eventually the trouble you've had with them will go away. I don't get that, and probably never will, but I am trying. I will take what I can get, from whom I can get it, and try to be appropriately grateful.
The editorials. I've never written a query letter in my life. I know there is research involved, but I don't know where to start. All these things, these components of being a writer, and I'm clueless. I'd REALLY like to disseminate the data on what a single homeless woman with emotional and substance-abuse problems has to deal with, speak on the homeless culture in this town--I've always thought I could pick up rock'n' roll journalism, the sort of stuff that Rolling Stone publishes, like I could pick up a bottle of beer. No sweat. No tears. No bleeding. But I sometimes get hung up on shaping something--I just roll with it and it gets large and in charge, truly out of hand and a flag-flying mess. This is a call to anyone out there who practises/studies journalism, or who knows of some up-to-date books I could get hold of, to respond to me @ <trixii916x@hotmail.com> with the information I think I need right now.
The guy who just might rescue me for a month has a computer. He said that the other occupants are burning up the phone lines with their on-line activity. I don't want to burden him, so I'll use the usual 'puters, but I will be looking for some data. I think this just might get me going.
got the bit in my mouth--again, and out of time
hoss Tuesday, March 23, 2004 WARNING: Borderline material to follow. But understand first that the bumblebees and starlings are fast awake in my head, buzzing, squawking, harbingers of havoc coming on.
Unless someone can perform a de facto rescue, I'm soon to be homeless. I cannot tell if I am overdramatising my predicament. The Salvation Army won't have me. Volunteers of America provide services to women with children. The local YWCA deals with women who have been physically abused. Nothing going on for singles like me.
No one will hire me. Had a potentially abrasive encounter with a new-on-the-job functionary at this outfit, Affiliated Computer Services, located in an industrial park that is almost impossible to reach without a car. I took a little quiz for a mail-sorting position. Reading, words--those are my heart. The instructions were unclear: didn't say whether or not to identify imaginary persons by their imaginary names, or their imaginary titles. I went for 'title', and missed two questions, and was brusquely told by the trainee to come back next week. Not, I was thinking.
I looked on-line at what might be open for me. Then I went back and got in line with the idea that I might explain to this woman that a) the instructions were somewhat unclear, b) the lobby was very noisy, and c) I wished to take the test again, as I needed some quiet in which to take any written exam, and had no reliable situation.
The little trainer slut bitch was condescending as most judges I have come across. Young enough to be my damn kid, I tell you, any and all. She seemed to have been taught the 'broken record' technique, which has been designed and used to shut annoying ppl up and/or down. Endless smug repeating. Stupid remarks, like "The production area is noisy." Well, I wear earplugs when the need to concentrate is on me. Told her that too. She was the same little wench I saw when I last went in with a manic, talk-happy acquaintence-boi. He came onto her; she dug it. Ignored me as well. Now he is employed--used to see him here, in the library, all the time. He's gone. Either in the bughouse, or working.
Okay. I do not want to go back there. These temp services talk to you and smilingly indicate that yes there is work, and yes there is a strong possibility that [you] are gonna be put on somebody's roster. You call them a few days later, and nothing--they're cool, they treat you as though they had told you something that you should know, and as though you do not know it. Employment writers tell you, bug them. Show them that you want the job, regardless of how sucky it might be. And I thought I did, and I'm still here. I must give off that about-to-implode stink, that about-to-flame-out-and-into-ash vibe and dirty glow.
So--I'm doing okay on the Klonopin taper. I just don't know where I am going to sleep. Bad impulses raging. Lions at the door.
maybe c ya later,
horse and bumblebee :-( ! Thursday, March 18, 2004 This is the Green Mile, innit? Fine title for a blog. Might even take it to one of those high-profile blogsites, where some high-profile someone might get hold of it and think, I must save this person's final rotten thoughts--my posterity, riding low on my pimpled arse--and put out there what it's like for one woman to finally go down. Will there be water in the headgear? I dunno. There will be electricity nearby, and perhaps the precise truncation that can be delivered only by big threatening machine.
Well, if this is the Mile, there are no threats. Or the threats are so confluent that they form a gelid wall of almost nothing. Nobody takes me seriously, old wench that I am--well, I know that, goshdarn it. I want to lie down in electric water, so addicted am I to the blue pills and censure. Again I have failed the Family. I might as well ('mize well', my mother says) be in the Mob and waiting for the coolness behind the temple and then--questions will be answered. No one with a working brain will talk to me. I am so damn distraught.
That farking guy. I wasn't feeling gutshot when we ran into each other yesterday and he was Mr. Chivalry. An antidote to Missing Michael. (This guy sitting next to me is stinko drunk. I wish he would take his own breath away. But I won't rat him out. We drunks must stick together, regardless of how we manage to do so.) But he saw my innards for a second too long, saw the age in my face and body, and knew about the concrete shoes and bed in the trainyard, and wanted to be loose of all that negativity. He seemed to walk with purpose behind me as we made our way from Drywall Ghetto into town. He came with me to sign up for a computer, it looked like. I signed up for mine and went upstairs and he did not follow. I figured I would act preemptively, make up for the sorriness of last night, and get lost pretending to read magazines. I did that. And I came back downstairs and got another computer. He is nowhere to be seen. I saw that nowhere coming and worked it Now I am purely alone. I'm not sure if I ever really liked it.
S*&tF+_kD^%m. Please make this be over. I don't want to retrace it, any of it, any longer.
shot horse WARNING. ATTENCION. BORDERTHOUGHT RUN RAMPANT BELOW.
Last pg// opens with, "They're gonna tell me I'm not eligible for squat...", and that is exactly what happened yesterday afternoon. It appears that I hadn't been listening to the first person I talked to, who never claimed to be a social worker, which I just blindly assumed she was. I didn't listen to gud to the second person, either, a man who looked like a good-natured sea lion, and seemed--never a guarantee, mind me--kind of sad that he had nothing more to offer. All that was left to him was a slip to give the landlord on the second of next month, plan being that the landlord sign off on my rent being past due, and bada bing, bada bang, three hundred bucks to take me to the middle of that foolish month April. Overbaked memories of an eighth grade dance in the gym, bleachers smelling of cleanser, floor wax, thoughts of sex and a whiff of weed. I didn't know that my three friends in the universe--Karen, Maria, Kim--had bribed the luscious Doug to dance with me. 'Pieces of April,' some ancient song I'd download if I knew how so I could wallow in that last year before I started skipping tracks like a passenger liner another country out from Bangladesh.
Yeah. That's how it felt. Dropped on me arse, and nothing to look forward to but the muddier shades of dereliction, a good death served up in the trainyard behind the Salvation Army, where it has been decided that I cannot stay.
Feelings are not facts. Okay, not facts, exactly, but they lay down the roadmaps of thought, and thought organises them into patterns that suggest if not dictate action. My feelings have been negative for a long time b/c certain experiences have shown those to be valid. Doug is basically as good as popular children get, and dances with me, even though I am by consensus a Sweathog (there, I said it, and not the guys in the ancient Bronx, either). I find out the next day that he'd been bribed by my so-called friends, and there it went and so it goes, a chattering gospel whose weight is in the sheer volume of its words. So I feel pretty shitty: adding to this is a mistake I made as I saw it happening. This Guy, of brief mention, and whom I find not only interesting but attractive, left his treatment program. So I did the impulsive (feeling/thought/action/bad action/try to fix it/it won't be fixed/I've done it again and set myself up to be wounded much like a cancer-lab rat/and that happened, or at least I think it did/and the dude stayed over and acted as if he didn't know me) borderline thing and said he could stay in my unkept apartment. Duh. I could feel it go south, it was outta my mouth. Four months straight sober, he buys some beer as a sort of experiment, and my insides turn jiggly jello, and I'm thinking, home run--home fackin NOTHIN', MAAAAN (he kept calling me 'man', which is a step away from 'ma'am'--both neuters) because Dood drank a beer and started snoring.
Alcoholics by nature do not know how to have relationships. Arright, I wait a year, and I'm not an alcoholic anymore--but all that mental mess remains, and I am lonely as I ever was, stuck in a room with some rude b*tch below me banging furniture and blaring some rap DVD. I can have a relationship with my clitoris, and I do, and I know she hears the rhythm of my right elbow against the floor, and damn her white-girl posse, I just don't care, because it is STOOPID to expect anything in what is left of my life to go right anymore.
Darn the errors. Today they just seem to fit. Wednesday, March 17, 2004 Ratf_ck. I put on a dress--a bag, really--and go out in this lovely lovely weather to interview for an as-needed position, about 30 hours tops a week, and the DON and the staffing coordinator agree that because the census is down, there wouldn't be any hiring going on today. Even as some woman and her boyfriend filled out applications for the same position I'd been there to "talk aobut", as the director had put it Friday. And of course, she told me that if anything "came up", she'd give me a call. Suuuuuurrrrrrrrrre ye will, b____. This never ends. At the noon meeting, all these YUPpie types were bitching about the jobs and bosses they had--and I wanted dearly to have a job and/or boss to bitch about. That's all. I don't ask a whole lot, at least not right now.
Later today, I have an interview at a charitable agency that might be able to pay for a month or two's rent. I'd gone to the clinic where I'm seen for the usual Chinese menu of psychopathologies, and picked up the necessary therapist's letter--to find that she'd omitted the drinking problem and included "with narcissistic features" after the BPD. I don't know if she was trying to help me out here: nobody in this state gets a so-called "drunk check" any more, and narcissism is thought to be a more significant predictor of poor job performance than is plain old alcoholism by itself. Narcissism, once it presents itself to the clinician (self-lovers almost never show up under their own steam for that trait in and of itself--they consider getting shit from others a by-product of others' jealousy of them, and so on, but of course they are so damn superior that they can handle it, and do so well), is even more difficult to clinically address than is borderline. Dismal, yeah, but I'm hoping that she can help me drum up some longer-term asistance than might ordinarily be offered.
Today is St. Paddy's Day. At home--Philadelphia--this is a big deal. You puke on a cop, the cop bops you with a billy club, and then goes to the nearest Job-Johnny to change uniforms. Here, it's a little different--lower percentage of Irishfolk, and if said Irishperson dare take a misstep in a public place, the cops get all happy-assed because they get to waste an hour taking the hapless drunken eyes-a-smilin' SUCKAH to jail.
Somebody train the cops to catch real criminals. Yeah, I did it and nobody put a gun to my temple in the course of matters, but why do I have to keep on eating it all these years?
I am a childanthrope, I suppose, b/c this kid across the way is making all sorts of noise, squealing and dragging thunky jewelry across the counter, and all manner of happifying stuff that their mothers seem to love. As if NO OTHER KID had ever done that before. JUST PRECIOUS, AIN'T IT?? You certainly appear to be well-to-do enough to have dropped your adorable spawn at the local upscale spawn-care facility, so why the f_ck are you bring it in HERE? So that we can enjoy its poopy ass TOO? (Once it's all washed up and properly grilled, I'll take mine rare.)
They're gonna tell me I'm not eligible for squat, I just know it, and once that has been done, it'll be the dungeon for me.
sad old horse Tuesday, March 16, 2004 I've got two horns up me arse, I'm twisting in the wind, there is blood everywhere, and the proctologist is waiting. Another way to put this would be, I've got a question about my living/neighbor situation: the water buffalo downstairs has gassed up the head of the lipid-disordered wench who lives a few little boxes down from hers, and that fat skank, who has an illegal dog in her box, made a weak throw-down to me today as I was leaving my own box. I had heard laughter, a sound that raises my hackles and puts holes in my heart. Unnaturally, I turned to look for the source, and there were two fat girls, one the dog owner, grinning in my direction. The perm-headed one wanted to know what I was looking at. I wanted to reply along the lines of, "Something that shouldn't be outside," or ,"Something ugly and stupid," or, "The fat cunt who shouldn't have a dog in her apartment." Convincing myself that I was taking the high road, I kept mum. Truth was, these bon mots came to me two seconds too late, as they tend to; and truth is that I like dogs. This one is an unusually hyper Dalmatian--it barks every time I go to look for my mail. It barks stridently, as though O-bin-L is at the door. I don't know if the thing is picking up on its owner's feelings, but it can be pretty loud. However, I don't want to see the dog in the pound as a result of me being ticked off at both the fat women and my failure to stoop to their level with a cutting reply.
And there are these concerns--if I ratted out the dog, would the (W)ater (B)uffalo downstairs retaliate for her buddy with noise and even more thumping and thudding? And why should I have to worry about this sh*te when more pressing things beg to lose their power and lie down and die? (I mean, when I need to get certain items of my life in better order, why am I inundated with petty crap that messes with my concentration? My powers of concentration are not that good these days.)
The bottom line is that I hate being called out with no smart reply at the ready. I hate that, as a chronological adult, I should care so dearly. Part of me wants to make friends, but all of me does not know how. This has always pained me. Being found "crazy" without due process pains me, too. I suppose I will have carry on with "different," but ignorami judging me like this--and me burning with spite and hurt an hour later--it's all...nuts. I am not going to live in a $375/month box forever. As big as I go on about being, I'm a lot smaller than any of the parties involved, save that poor dog. The dog's barking doesn't really bother me--its owner's conduct does. I've swum in this slurry, muck on my person and legs tiring, going down, for years so long feels like forever. And I had to cheat to write that. Great. Just farking great.
This should have been on the emotional illness blog, for there it stands, a case study in borderline personality thought. I seem to be a kinder, gentler borderline--if I do act out, it's almost always to hurt myself. And the five years of hard, pitiable drinking that followed my dismissal from the local R.N. factory my last term there: I'm thinking I'm starting to see that that mess was a bunch of acting out designed to inform those persons who chose to bar me from finishing on the basis of a bad joke I made that they had destroyed my big old buttocks. Somewhere in there was the warped design to bring my crash/burn to the attention of the powers that were. My just lying there on the floor, surrounded by three nights' worth of beer cans, my skin sticky with ferment, often half-naked in the swelter season here--I wanted to send them a picture of that misery that I believed they had inflicted on me. I wanted them guilty of murder, even if they didn't actually die.
Man. Now that's messed up bad. Quicksand, backstroking in a suckhole of my own making. I need to talk to someone about this. Someone who will, no doubt, tell me what I just told myself, but will help me buffer it in a way that my mind can handle right now. And it's raining, threatening snow. Sorry, Elmore Leonard. Sorry aboaut the many typos.
c h
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