Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Is now the time to resort to formula fiction?
And what are formula fans reading?
I don't know if I have either the time or stomach to read romance right now--nasty stuff, yes, I think I could pull that off, but I'd like to think around that box, if not exactly outside it.
Wonder if there's a service listing the publishers of both traditional and drrty formulae. I could query and find out what they tend to want. I'm not so hot on the idea of work, if you know what I mean; work with other ppl, more to the point.
Yesterday, This.Little.Bitch accused me of failing to have completed a certain duty that she would not touch if she had a cattle prod up her ass. She's the boss's unwed pregnant daughter, and has some input on my job eval. I don't care for inhaling bleach either, but get a little bent if someone accuses me of not having done something that I have indeed completed. Also, it's most always NOT the criticism, but how it is levelled: sarcasm, public humiliation (there were three ppl there, but still, I think many ppl would get the idea), treating the criticised individual as stupid (i.e., reitering past the nexus at which point I know I would stop caring very simple concepts, concepts that a sharp pre-schooler could grasp AND elaborate on. I am not exaggerating here), and speaking in a contemptuous tone. Very strangely, I DID have a comeback or two right at the fore, but kept them there. Figured that was part of the deal I'd gotten myself into. (Usually when someone puts me down in this or any other fashion, particularly in public, I am too hurt/pissed to say shit, and when I come up with something really cutting, about three seconds too late, the moment is lost on the critic and I am left to stew. I did the little prayer wherein you ask your God to give the person you are put out with all s/he wants and deserves, in God's opinion, not yours. Perhaps it is because I wanted someone--a medical professional, maybe--to cut her down--about smoking throughout her pregnancy, for one--as she had done to me. I don't know. I'm not big on physical harm. But some emotional mayhem sounded pretty good.
That prayer is for the pray-er's benefit. I had hoped I would awaken free of grudge. But I did not. Once I got downtown, I found that I had to deal with some shit I hadn't expected--no check this morning, ergo no prescription. And me poor old mum wants to treat me to Chinese, over here, forty miles from her home tomorrow. Maybe she wants to take advantage of the lower gas prices, but I don't think so. Not really.
The experts say that if some ppl go on and on and on about something that has ticked them off, they will be unable to turn the anger down until it is tepid and manageable. Right now, I am neither tepid NOR manageable.
Time to walk, maybe rid myself of some of this steam.
bronc, today
Monday, August 30, 2004
Howard, help: I need to delete 'The Roommate' and start 'The Universe's Guide to Hitchhikers', the last being a log of the ppl who have given me rides in these transitless days.
I guess I never told you flat-out that I am working on public computers, which have time limits (1 hour). I suppose, given the right conditions--more time, and less noise--that I could figure out myself how to do this. But I can't rightnw.,
Hehehe. Me made a fool out of me. Going on about getting a bad reference is all. Found out today that I've actually gotten 'good' reports from my supervisors. Wow. How the heck about that.
Small things have jammed me up today--having to call the woman who had relayed the flattering evaluation and discovering that she cannot type up a simple statement saying that I am a client of her employer, this in order to get my food stamps renewed. I must come in tomorrow to speak with her own boss, who will, I hope, then write the necessary document, as the impatient little social worker sits outside and smokes in her Volvo. The Little Social Worker almost never waits, though: but she must, if she wants the hard copy of the letter not yet composed.
Purchased one stamp at the Rite-Aid; apparently, it had rested in a warm place, the glue that would affix it to an envelope had melted it to the paper one must peel away in order to use it, and there I was, outside the downtown police station, trying madly with my blunt-tipped fingers to separate the stamp from its backing in order to mail a request for deferment (my increasingly ancient student loans; this in order to return to school, etc.), and the damnable thing would not peel off. I was practically riding the public drop box, and felt like kicking it a time or two, or three. Once I would have done just that, police station or no police station, and Wheely-Cops (will explain) all over. Today I did not lift a foot. But the cortisol rush through my rage circuitry was right there.
Re: the situation with the lapsed AA friend: she lost her job, the one she had held for a month, which can be deleted from her resume or job applications. Her own daddy was surprisingly understanding about this, though; custody of her daughter is not lost, if she can find a job, and pay for a smaller, less expensive apartment. She located her car keys in time to make it to her lost job--her honesty didn't work, I guess, if what she told the other friend is true. But I'm tired of writing about these people right now.
The mutual friend, D, had a time of it yesterday, though: at a meet in the Dungeon, he was attacked by this Irani brain-dead who refused to stop cursing at his video game so loudly that he disrupted the meeting from the back room. I came up on the tail end of all of this, noticing four cops and two cop cars first, and a body face-down on the grass, in plastic cuffs and leg-irons. The visuals at first did not add up--I immediately thought that someone had croaked right there outside the Dungeon; the lone female officer seemed to be prodding the dark-clad form with one boot as the others stood by, laughing softly.
I watch too much TV. D and a few other regulars stood back from the police; I asked him what had happened. He gave me the blow-by-blow, adding imitations of the prone man's anger as he went. (Let me say this at this juncture: D has gone out of his way to be respectful of the video guy, whose slow-boil seems to have been escalating these last few weeks. The kid, bipolar and depressed, had tried to hang himself a few years back, and did not succeed. Cerebral anoxia can have ugly results, not unlike those sometimes seen with closed-head injuries--both exhibit a lot of anger, this kid's appearing to be fueled by ineptitude and feelings of impotence in this world. I understand those feelings. I do not understand the experience of both brain damage and bipolar disorder. The guy told me a few months ago that he had gone off all of his medications, against medical advice.
I used the term "brain dead" in reference to this individual. It's too late to take that back; the term is a certain slur, and the person's brain is surely not dead at all. It boils and bubbles with uncensored rage. It has killed its own censor, if ever it had one.) The guy, T, was hauled off in a wagon, something rarely seen in the Lex outside of a roundup of morning drunks. Someone joked that he was going to look for T's picture on the local jail website. Against my better intentions, I may do the same later on.
It was funny, how the scene was replayed by those who saw it. Funny-ODD, I mean. Grown men, parked for now at fourteen or sixteen or twenty years of age, imitating, laughing at this person who has been ostracised by a group of drunks, snickered at, in fact, by the Hopeless Center Hoes, while he was within hearing distance. I imagine that this happens to him often, and that he is aware of both its effects on his sense of self, and his global inability to stop such experiences.
I've had a laugh at his expense, behind his back, of course. I too find his displays amusing. I don't dislike the little fellow, although he often stinks, and has come to the dungeon half-drunk. I'd be afraid to deal with him full-bore wasted. D said that he was 'strong as a bull'--D, fifty, wound up putting T on the ground when T struck D's cell phone, breaking it. That qualified as assault IV to the police. D had been trying to call them with his phone, and wound up yelling for help.
Oh well. They're all running on cortisol this chilly wet day. You wonder when spring is kicked into summer, and summer into fall. These times, I don't much care. I can do without the pretty storms and the daunting winters, though. Thass all. Not a lot of time today, except to start a new blog at the expense of an old one.
c h, tying up today
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Out until after eleven last night, riding sober to the jail out Old Frankford Pike through a district of water treatment plants. No businesses or apartment complexes thrived there.
We had business at the jail: a mutual friend, C., had experienced a heavy relapse, and had been jailed for public intoxication (familiar territory there, coming to on your feet in a cold bright tiny cell, taking in the sterile white of the walls, and saying to yourself, aw *&^%, not again). Earlier, she'd called the mutual friend D. to come to her workplace--the University of KY--and collect her; she'd gone into work drunk, and reasoned that she'd be better off leaving before the boss got there. D. finds her in her washerwoman's scrubs--all employees wear them--and wandering the dormitory complex. She is quite drunk, and he takes her to her two-bedroom apartment: she expects custody of a young daughter.
He leaves her there, and much later, he is summoned again, this time to the jail. There was, apparently, some kind of brouhaha at C.'s complex--a sometimey lover, a drunk also, seems to have called the cops because she was in his front yard, reeling and yelling, raising all kinds of hell. When the cops arrived, she tells them that the dear friend she called to remove her from the dormitory complex was the same person who 'made' her drink to intoxication, and who had also given her drugs, crack and Lortab, to wit.
When searched prior to booking, no drugs are found on her person. She is placed in a cell--bright lights, small toilet--for the duration of the evening and presumably into night. There is no drunk tank in Fayette County Jail. On the way out to this comely expenditure of taxpayer's money, D. is on the phone with some male acquaintence of this woman--he is getting tense, for the cords of his neck stick out and he is chewing, smacking, gum at a furious pace. He keeps calling the guy 'Sir'. I have no idea, and sit there, quiet.
It is odd, being at the jail sober, having come to collect a drunk, when in the past, I was the drunk to be collected. Red tape is negotiated, and the prisoner released, nauseous and hangdog, going on about killing herself. She believes herself at this point to have lost not only her job but her only chance to get full custody of her young daughter; her family, especially her father, wants a fight. And when Dad finds out that she has gotten toxic drunk three weeks out of a treatment center, he will push hard for grandcustody of the little girl.
The two of us try to calm her: if she really wants to hurt herself, perhaps she might want to check herself into one of several behavioral health facilities for a three-week hold, say sober up and speak with a trained counselor and get some idea of how she might proceed, first with respect to her job, and then, to the custody matter. She is balled up in the back seat, periodically popping up to assert the need to vomit, and each time D pulls over. This means that I must get out, out and into a violent lightning storm, the sky and the earth throwing down in all possible directions. The show of lights is intensely lovely, lovely and terrible at once. C. buckles a few times, but never vomits, just dry-heaves a bit and crawls back into the car. I am glad to get in as well--ducking isn't going to protect me from God's pyrotechnics.
We at her apartment complex: one thing she had worried about, her car, is still there, although she does not have the keys. The living room is frigid, thermostat registering 55. Poor C. lies down on her couch, shivering. We look first to empty the place of any liquor she might have hidden there, and we come up with a pint of whiskey and one Bud Light beer. All of this is poured down the drain, the first time I have done such a thing, for myself or anyone else. Of course, I want to drink the beer--it is icy in my hand and would taste good after such an adventure--but recognise the absurdity of trying to do so. It's only one little beer, but I would want another. Or would I?
As C. vibrates with the cold on her couch, D. and I go upstairs to search the rest of the place. We find no booze or pills; instead, we walk into something like preemptive loss, a negative space of misery waiting to unfold. There are two bedrooms, yes, hers--unmade queen-size bed, pillows without slips, a comforter to take downstairs--and the one designated for her daughter. A child's room, a child's possessions, still boxed. C. says she has 1,100 dollars in the bank, and if she can save her job, she won't have to break her lease and leave. If she can't save it, she will have to break the lease anyway, leaving perhaps in the middle of the night, belongings boxed and loaded in the back of some male friend's pickup truck. I have done this, on several occasions. One was quite funny, and I will have to tell you about it sometime.
We don't want to lie, but we do. Cutting and running like that would be dishonest, but what can a person do, if they have deprived themselves of work (I have done this, too), feel too depressed, too 'beat down', to locate a tiny efficiency someplace yucky--she has a car, though--and immediately start searching for another job. After all, she doesn't have to list one she has held for about a month. There are several things she could say that would cover that issue nicely, but those would be dishonesties too. This woman C. appeared to be doing well--apart from her aggressiveness with men, she seemed to be 'working the program', as the AAs say. I cannot quite picture this, though I won't admit as much now--it's all semantics, but when I think of 'working' something, I think of horses.
I cover C. with her comforter; the living room is still cold against the heavy stormy air directly outside. Neither D. nor I find her car keys. The poor guy sets her alarm clock, and helps her to her feet to lock the front door. He has agreed to pick her up for work at sixish today, that is if she decides to go in, lay herself on the altar of her employers, and just spill it. I wait for the tumbler to turn, but there is no sound. D. says to check the door, and I do, and cannot turn the knob.
The guy is running--running himself ragged on missions to save drunk women, multi-tasking 'service work', like making coffee, setting out the rather dull 'inspirational' literature of the AA program, mopping up the lake that forms in the Dungeon every time there is a heavy rain. What purpose does this serve him? Hell if I know--another lonely middle-aged guy, tired of television and all of the other paillid pleasures available to the sober drunk. Hey, service work might even be kind of fun, if I could just get on with Step Four. The spill-your-guts-and bad-deeds part, which I have been doing iin dribs and drabs here on the Web, and in other places.
Last night before the eight o-clock meet, I found some cardboard and laid it down in the little pond, allowing it to soak up the dirty rainwater there. Not bad for a chick. Again, my intelligence is evaluated by someone practically a stranger. And today, will there be news of C., or of another sad woman, mourning the defection of a deranged sort of young man in days of vodka, no roses? What do these gestures do for me? Lst week, I called the other woman, and as I suspected, she was deep into a binge. She was coherent. Admitted to drinking, because of the young man, she said. That was the first time I have ever reached out like that to ANYONE, for any reason. It felt so odd, this thing others call empathy.
I have been warned that I hae two minutes to post, publish, log out. So I wil do that, and maybe return to this topic when I can get to a free computer.
Hey, Howard, thanks is good stuff coming from you.
I don't know how I've managed to block things like the post previous--they are perhaps some of the most interesting memories I possess, and I am not one to shrink from morbid or painful recollections (well, most of the time; sometimes I practise 'thought-blocking'--analogous to snapping the rubber band, but what is blocked usually comes back in recognisable form in dreams). Other day, I saw a downtown Philadelphia I didn't quite know on sight: food shop(pe)s had circled the base of City Hall, a concatenation of enemy presence, enticing the entitled and hustling away the physically hungry. Just now, I experienced this particular metastatic growth as yet another device to keep the have-nots at far bay. No you canNOT have any spanakopita! Leave now or I'm calling the police!
I'm only about a quarter serious about the above observation; I'm sure the elite coffeehouses and whole wheateries are part of the Burgeoning Economy (yes, I am registered to vote). The burgeoning economy must, after all, burgeon, or out itself as the pack of lies it is.
No, I am not, nor have I, been drinking. I'm distracted, even though I have had my dose of progesterone cream, which seems to have truly calmed my prodigal nervous system. More likely, it's the three cups of oily and fragrant coffee ('Gourmet'--cost a buck at the Dollar Store, and is a probable mix of Arabica and Robusto, which I understand is used to cut almost every coffee there is) I drank before setting out for the library, and the relative lack of trazadone and benzos I've been taking in--anxiety in extremis. 'I hate X.W.Y.' is about all I can say about politics, and I say this to but a select few apoloticals, for when questioned on why I 'hate'--'strongly dislike', is what I meant--XWY, I have to pin it on his ears.
He.He. Tacky humor and evasive action.
My emotions have been running circles around my logical faculties, and all the cute little slogans out there can't do much to slow them down. I've had this little job--paid volunteership, actually--for the last five weeks. It's due to end in a week and a half. Aside from developing a completely irrational crush--or all crushes both irrational and exercises in projective identification?--on the veterinarian that sort of runs the place, I've fixated on two transactions I've had with one of the two vet techs who actually run the clinic. The first suggested that I could come back and volunteer after the gig was over; the other, held several weeks later, indicated that I would have to speak with someone in the agency that farmed me out in the first place. The disparity between the two responses has convinced me that some kind of information, the content of which is ritually withheld from persons like myself, has gone down that would disqualify me from returning in any capacity. And THAT would be:
--Although I don't stop running, I never get anything done. (The main tech thinks I am distractable. Yeah, no kidding there.)
--My insecurity is grating, and I shirk from challenge. (Yes, I am insecure, especially when it comes to work evaluations. These translate easily, for me, into evaluations of person, and personal capacities into human worth. I've had a rough time, I've been as honest as I've been allowed to be. Yes, when nervous, I do reveal too much info. This was a learning experience, in which I had to, among other tasks, modify my behavior. Guess I failed there. And yes, I am slow to learn the few activities that relate directly to the patients. The clinic is rushrushrush; the man I have a crush on, sometimes terse or otherwise dismissive of a tech's failure to do what is demanded of her perfectly, and on time. Yes, I don't do well--yet--under that kind of pressure. Having a schoolgirl crush on someone that would get along with my dad and probably goes fishing on the weekends to boot--makes me even jumpier, but I am not obligated to tell you any of that mess. PACERs don't go to their assignments on a winning streak. You know?)
--The vet is uncomfortable having me around, and is going to water that piece down into something more conventially disparaging. (Yeah. I've seen the man blush--he is a very very white fellow. One time, he wanted me to brace a large dog's head so that it would not bite him, and we were flank to flank, and it was wierd; another time, last week in fact, he was preparing for a surgery and instructed me to 'tie (him) up', meaning his gown. I actually started to laugh, jokes in mind already, then caught myself, in time, I think. But he almost bolted from an AA meeting I walked into a few weeks back, then caught hold of himself, I was told, and stayed; last week, at a different meeting, I was sitting on the perimeter, writing furiously in my copybook, when I noticed a friend who had relapsed. I got up, hugged her, and she sat down with me. Asked me about the job, at which point she asked me if I knew the vet in charge, because he was present at that meet. I had already scanned the groups of men there, and saw a few guys that resembled him--very conservative men in their fifties. But I didn't actually see the man. I figured he saw me first, when I was scribbling, head down, and took his exit.)
I'm usually correct when I sense that someone is attracted to me. But he's heard me go off at meetings when I didn't know him from Adam, didn't give a rat's behind what the geezer contingent thought about me, and couldn't have picked him from a police line-up regardless of what I was to be paid for so doing. It is possible that he hasn't a clue that I would like to sit down and talk outside of the job and AA; I can't quite picture doing what so many ppl do on the third date, but then again, this is a godly person who loves animals, and might include twisted and negative ex-punks in the latter category.
I just don't want to get rejected. Between what the techs said, and my imaginings, I can't get a hold of my own self. Brain won't stop its gerbile travels. One day at a time; no guarantees of any tomorrow. Yesterday is go-oone and so on. See you in a few.
hungry horse
Saturday, August 28, 2004
The usual suspects are behaving as they usually do in Phoenix Park. An interesting newcomer--head shaved with black and green tats visible--eyes closed and dozing in the noisy heat. There were children swimming in the fountain, which is about two feet deep, with cosmetically-placed boulders and little fountains erected at seeming random. They were fully-clothed, their mother watched, approving, but probably not yet aware that she would have to drive the boys home in their wet clothes.
A year ago, there had been a sign there: No Swimming, perhaps because there was no lifeguard, and more likely because the homeless men that refused to stay at the Hope(less) Center just north of downtown liked to bathe there now and then. Memories of home--summer, walking home from the clubs at seven a.m., often with gorgeous strangers on speed just like I was, and relaxing in a large, chlorinated fountain, gibbering away as working folks headed downtown began to form a small and disapproving herd, briefcases in hand.
Once, I had done just that, and my roommate and I were headed back to my two-bedroom apartment on the seam of an Irish-Catholic neighborhood that disdained gentrification, blacks and Hispanics, and the occasional punk rocker. We came across two drunk guys, about 22, our age, who had opened a fire hydrant and seemed to be playing in it, just as black and Hispanic kids often did. It was seven a.m.. They made some forgettable slurs against us; we continued home, to lie in front of the fan until the convenience store on the other side of the seam--a black neighborhood--opened. That hot, that early. neither of us could fall asleep, so we drank a six each and eventually nodded into a hypnogogic state, in which thought interacted with snippets of dream, and from which we could be easily awakened.
We prepared for our nights about six p.m. We had to get lubed with a few beers and a few lines of crystal. This is so long ago and 800 hundred miles away right now. I went out to get the beer, and noticed a sound I couldn't identify. Coming back, crossing Girard into the Irish-Catholic sector of Fairmount, the sound had swollen up and taken on an edge to it, isolated curses and sirens in the distance. I was curious. I didn't want to get cursed at such a holy hour--dinner--so I went back to the apartment, did my roommate's makeup and my own, and we began to dress ourselves. We were seeking attention, we desired to spark outrage. By the time we left the apartment and began our walk down the parkway into town, we had forgotten the (fill in blank; will find the words later). We danced, drank, drugged; my roommate had some kind of sex in the men's bathroom, and when we left--six or seven a.m., we took the same way back home. The fire hydrant was still; but when I took a look at the headlines visable from a paper box at 24th and Poplar, we saw the faces of the two boys playing in the furious bath. Each face was badly bruised, an eye swollen shut, a laceration sutured and running black like a vein of coal breaking skin. I recognised the names--good Irish Catholics, so I bought a paper, read the headlines, the articles, and took a good punch to the gut. The two guys who had called my roommate and I a few dully obscene names had not been amusing themselves in the harsh spray of the hydrant. They had been cleansing themselves of the blood that would identify them as baby-rapists--they did a B and E, and drunk, on downs, failing to locate anything worth stealing, wandered into a year-old baby's bedroom and raped her, basically destroying her internal organs.
The child lived. All kinds of donations came in to cover medical expenses. I think I donated a buck or two myself-- I was making student-job money, and spending much of it at that. And the boys, the young men: the darkly riotous noise I heard a few streets down was the sound of two families being run out of the neighborhood, if not town.
I have walked past these sort of events, walked beside them, at times aware that unimaginably terrible things had just occurred, or was going to. A cop shot as he wrote up a report in his vehicle, a girl raped a block away, this presence in my gut suggesting that I take another route. No voices or visions, just random route changes, bad vibes of something bad about to step off. Years, many of years, have passed since the rape of the infant. I have not thought about that since, nor the violence of the neighbors practically rocking the brick rowhouses, ready to tear them to the foundation brick by brick as they would have liked to do to the drugged-up baby-rapists, who, as the neighbors averred, would get what they gave and so much better in the state penitentiary on the lip of the great Northeast.
I have about worn out my time here. I can't speculate on how I might have flashed on this event, on anything described or suggested in the little piece I might entitle "How I Spent my Summer Vacation". And my right shoulder is locking up, and the jeans I thought would be a little loose on me were hard to pull up today. Diet--what's the use? I know what is missing--exercise--yet I just don't do it, as I don't do a lot of things that would ease my worried mind.
horse in quicksand
publish and post
Friday, August 27, 2004
Enough already about the squirrels: squirrely as I can be, I just discussed myself in third-person-animal, which says a lot about how I consider my brain and the manner in which it has learned to function. I refer to something deeper than habit--that my mindbrain just goes ahead and configures situations and discussions and ways to show itself off, that is, if anybody is listening; and as it emerges, or seems to, nobody does.
There are times when I move my lips while doing this, and smile into my coyly-tucked chin as I go on to imagine the satisfying response to my inner chatter. Almost always, nothing of the sort happens. I've done this with telephone references, letters of recommendation, opinions of other 12-step members who have watched me evolve and grow. Grow what, I'm asking: a third head? A gnarled ancient arm out my arse? It is but minimally possible that ppl who pass for that unknown Normal could get together and say anything except, 'That J.. She ain't sober 'cause she's in so much pain.'
Oh well--can't control them, but I can't join them either. That said, I was at a meeting, a large one which horseppl tend to favor. Didn't see any horseppl, didn't see my boss either, but this woman I know and like told me that she'd noticed him a little earlier. This was after the meet, in which I hadn't seen him at all, and in which I'd announced that there was a certain task for which I cared little, and had felt the urge to cheat on that day, but went ahead and did anyway b/c I cared about the animals, felt some responsibility for helping keep them safe from transmissable disease. Perhaps he'd seen me earlier, writing earnestly at a table which I had to myself, and left. At any rate, he wasn't there (although he could pass, from some distance, for any one of several conservative country gents of a certain age, short-sleeved shirts and khakis and utility shoes, wire-framed specs and a quiet way about them). I haven't seen him on Yahoo either, btw.
At least my humour is hanging on. That's one gift that I haven't destroyed. Yet. When this larval period is done--next week--and I must find some kind of work to do while my disability claim ferments, I may well crash and shatter, although spontaneous combustion would be a more elegant way to take my exit. I think I'll get through it, if I can get done those things that pile up on themselves like offensive linemen tend to do, burying me in the end. I can't separate out. I need someone, some agency to handle this shite. Would I feel like more of a stand-up hominid if I ate some minithinz and went at it? My student loan could default if x and y are not met by z date. That's a big one--lose that and I can study my own shite every time I take one, like the quirky old lady I am coming to be.
I think I need more serotonin, because I am certainly quirky, and at this point, easily set off.
hoss in the datura patch
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Laser "wit", is what I meant.
Other stuff very very wrong
I know the dream theory stuff, but it's almost fun, sort of like being tickled, to feel as though the other party has borrowed your brainpan for the evening and jumped right on in.
Last night, someone I haven't thought of at all in double-digits invaded the space between my ears as well as that good old mother/daughter bond, and taken my mother shopping in this fantastic dream-lit mall. We met going different ways on the same escalator, and this girl told me that my boyish new haircut, which I didn't know I had gotten, showed off the scabs on my head.
That said, nothing encouraging happened with regard to this teenage retard crush I have started to discuss here yesterday. I can't seriously think that it would, yet thinking seriously about highly improbable happenings--endowments for yet more education; cosmetic surgery; two years of hard time that would deliver me both respectable and intact into the arms of the meritocracy that is in me like cancer--is part of my psychological makeup. I do not doubt that research scientists will someday be able to visualise and vaporise the areas responsible in large part for such painfully aberrant thinking. It can cause a lot of hurt, even as you realise that it is not to be taken as seriously as it would seem to demand at that moment; that it is, at this level, not that harmful and actually sort of funny; that you can, as meditators do, sit back and watch it play out as the more reasonable-acting brainparts attend to something else. You can, if this is the case, even blame it all on psychdrugs: my Prozac was abruptly stopped in favor of Wellbutrin, the very medication given to patients on SSRI antidepressants who would like to have sex but cannot. Now, that's big irony, seeing as I'm a born-again virgin and all.
Made a joke right here, right now--but will it hold?
Would be nice. If I hadn't thumbed down here as a downpour was kicking off, I'd still be back at that tacky sadsack of an apartment (that I cannot bring myself to clean the last couple of weeks, sort of like me not being able to call X to arrange Y; like I cannot get together the collection of phone number scraps I've collected over the past few months, and the e-mail addresses, and simply centralise those in some kind of black book; like I cannot get my ass to the Health Department or manage to flag down the local mobile health clinic or the dental service--peridontal ailments--even though I believe myself to be in need). I'd have to call both the PACE people and the clinic itself and tell them that I cannot make it in to "work" because I am a prisoner of rain. That would be both gratifying and residually embarrassing: someone would want a reason, and I'd have to tell them that I am not only afraid of thunderstorms, but that I must take the bleeping bus, the stop for which is a quarter of a mile away, and could someone please come and get me over here in yet another little Mexicali, and the answer to THAT would be, sorry hon, but that's your responsibility.
Yeah, I know. Not a lot I don't about my condition, narcissist I've been accused of being, that I don't; always up for something novel, like the splinter hemmorhage--something associated with IV drug use--that has come up in my right thumb. Glass ground into my gums would work just as well, I suppose.
Squirrels chatter. The main squirrel holds court, commenting drily on what has happened over the last couple of jots of squirrel-time, and what might happen very soon, or not, because the squirrel did this thing, or that one, and some ways of telling this are funnier than others. The squirrel reads squirrel minds well, or at least it thinks it does, which is why it is conditioned to think of amusing things to say so that the other rodents will locate its laser with under all that fur and say good, good, highly complementary things about that squirrel, even as it gibbers down the squirrel-path, ahead of itself, thinking of more demonstrative things to say.
Actually, most of the others find it a weird squirrel. Its comments seem prefabricated, as though in place of a squirrelself there is a soundtrack, one that has cost the weird squirrel its life. It would star in its own show but fears the footlights. It has never been asked to get out of its tree and play, and that is quite enough about that squirrel right now, except to say that it thinks of ways to cause cars to crash when it is not considering amusing and alluring things on which to jabber on.
That's me. Always imagining conversations that never happen, doing this at really inopportune times, all this trivial rumba and inane carnival up there in my head, a bloated expostion of want and fear and undergirding all, self-pity.
I don't want to go there today, knowing everything I think I do, and not yet being able to feel much outside the same old rat crap.
None of the streetfolk are outside. If they were, even one, I might have something to describe.
hoss on moss
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Holy Cow, it's Dwarf Month in the Lex. Saw yet another about and out this morning. There is a retarded child beside me, and his scrawny old ma, and he's a loud one.
Understand that I am just playing. Nothing against anyone. Brought but one earplug today, silly mimimi; planned on being downtown until 1:20 p.m., then catching the wheezebox out to the two to six clinic gig. In terms of hours logged, I'm nearly done with that, but would like to continue to volunteer until something part-time emerges, perhaps a position at another clinic. (I have a crush on my boss. The one that has heard more than quite a few bizarre assertions in the basement of Gratz Park, and who has apparently decided that I'm okay. He seems like a really sweet man. This is what got me--the animal cage floors are covered in old newspaper, and one day I saw him reading something there. I have done the same thing. Gave me shivers. And a woman I know told me that the other day, when I arrived late to a six p.m. meeting and went straight for the coffee in the other room, he stood up as if to leave, but sat down again. Embarrassment? The man, for all his academic accomplishment, seems shy. Wears short-sleeved plaid shirts like my dad.
And I just know that I will go in there today having written this, and a sheetstorm will break loose, and I will cry or get mad or something counterproductive. That is my luck. Plus, the authority-figure thing: fear and loathing and the knowledge that I could never assume such a role, even if I had paid the necessary dues and earned it.)
I have never fancied any of the men I have met in these meetings. There was the charismatic horse trainer with gender issues--he is still charismatic, but an unknown quantity. There is a cute young black guy--I'm Irish/German with a touch of Cherokee--who lifts weights pretty seriously, but he is young. Ten years younger than I am. He's one of those reasons God invented shame and clothes. There was a writer named Walker at the noon get-together (Yups, aging boomers, several lawyers, professors), who spoke of New York in a controlled and luscious way, but he disappeared. And he was married. And he was so handsome he scared me.
So this is a first. The damaged-goods (my typo: "damaged gods": I like that better) factor bears consideration, for I am just that. I drank two beers last night, to augment one trazadone, two Neurontins, and one Klonopin; this guy hasn't drunk anything vaguely alcoholic for years. I'm getting the be grateful and do no harm and keep your criticisms ("inventories") of others to yourself mindset. I pray. I am a born-again virgin, trying to learn to value something about or in me, but since the doc yanked me off my Prozac and substituted Wellbutrin, certain thoughts and impulses come at me like dragonflies. And I pray about that.
I'm damaged goods. Some of the long-timers are stone pricks, and some not. I'll still have a beer or two if I need to sleep, or if I feel the urge to get one over on my psychotic neighbor Trouble Rat, who is simply disgusting. I picture his side of the yard, his generic-brand coffee can he uses as an ashtray, I see the endless butts he has ground into the grass, see him smoking hard, as if what may well kill him before his ass turns forty is the very thing that will save him. Heard him masturbating through the duplex wall. The pale pelt that covers his shoulders and upper chest. Fatty little tits. Earnest groans and grunts, as though he's climaxing, or at the very very least, taking a massive poop over there.
Can't stand the guy. I used to flush the toilet when I heard him get in the shower. I don't do this any more: gratuitous nastiness can and will breed more of the same.
Still can't stand him, and I'm still damaged goods, and the kindness shown to me by my boss is probably of the same variety he'd show to anybody struggling to stay away from drink.
You know how it is when you have one of those dreams about someone you never considered as an, um, romantic partner, and you're sure in your deepest of heart that that person had the same dream too? And you have to see them again the next day?
That's how it is. Could also be the progesterone cream working. Dude looks like a lady feels like a little kid again, just for today.
squatting mare
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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