Saturday, November 27, 2004
Damn, this job is hard. All the bufus are little kids (under 25) and total masters of their domains, which include these wretched hand-held scanner guns. They show/tell us once, and we are supposed to, in the middle of the night and the belly of theAmazon machine, GET IT. Right then and there.
IT probably goes without much explication that I DIDN'T get it, and that my trainer was becoming mightily annoyed. I lost my gun, put it on the conveyor belt, and when she, exasperated, after asking me if I recalled where the scanner cage was (hint: I said "no".), accompanied me to that spot and after Ihad received gun and battery for it, told me to get out of the way when I tried to put the battery in the gun!
Later, I told this creature that I had done alright in the book section, and asked if I could be assigned there in order to pick properly and learn that damned and further damnable scanner gun. She said that the assignments were random, and looked happy as she said it.
I just don't want to get fired. Guess there is at least one head to go over.
That, and I'm beat numb tired. Gonna have to do something about those car stereos--the car costs $500, the stereo 5k, and I got an eyeful of the little white eggbeater that emanates the same 2/4 country song again and again very loudly, shaking my windows and soul. Now, I can get the address and license plate of car and driver. Rock and roll. One annoyance--and I know, I know, I know, it's not just I who am murderously annoyed--almost down.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
My mother is popcorn and industrial machines.
There is not one place in my universe where I can use a computer to write at length and in peace. My friend from church implied that I might not be computerless for long, although an Internet provider seems not to be part of my possible Christmas present. There is at least one problem with this, if I can believe it: the roommate, who has been unpleasant for a week (might have something to do with my eating the store-bought birthday cake I got her and she herself barely touched), has assumed ladyship of the whole bloody apartment, save my little stinking room. No way is she gonna tell me that I cannot keep it in the living room--she better not, or I'll have to rat her out. (And if any of this comes to that, I'll win--in theory, for she will start making hellish noise with her country music and blaring TV. And at this point, the white noise machine and industrial earplugs will have to be employed.)
This imaginary situation hinges on one thing--if I can stay there. Eviction is plausibly one thing I have to worry about--I'm a skimpy, erratic payer. Despite my lifelong history of poor money management, there is something else that factors in here: the only job I can get is something under the table, for taxable labor will simply stop my efforts to get SSI in their tracks. I'm getting it from all sides, the therapist is not returning my calls about how to handle the incoming, and this all is too much for me. How am I supposed to write? I've spent twenty-some years destroying my brain with chemicals, and come to this point-- I haven't killed the thing that keeps me going, although there have doubtless been hits to the parts of my brain that handle logic and expression of emotion, and I'm ticked off that I am under orders to continue damaging what remains in an altogether different manner. If I labor 40 hours a week, you bet I'm going to be more ticked and further beat down in spirit and in dire need of nothing but sleep.
Although some therapists will tell a body different.
Yet another BPD book for the laypatient asserts that borderlines who are steadily employed do better overall than those who get goverment aid. (I'm using the b-word here as a qualifier rather than primary identifier of my mental/emotional state.) I didn't find any statistics on that, and haven't really looked, but what I read didn't include any information on the educational level of those ppl, comorbidity (if any) with other PDs, or substance abuse history variables. So I'm not convinced, although I understand on the surface that for many, self-reliance trumps guvmnt aid, even if the guvmnt pays much more.
I also don't like to work. Boatloads of negative, demeaning, somewhat demoralising personal history there. No, I'm not saying that because I don't like work, I should not have to do it. There's simply something in me that wishes to manipulate my personal/psychiatric history to my benefit: send me to school, so I can learn something I might actually enjoy. Don't overload a fragile and aging mind with something that detracts from my ability to do well at the 'something' in question. I guess that's too much to ask of those in charge--to remarshall what funds that are to, in part, assist ppl who screw up for so long, and awaken to find out that all there is left is the kind of labor that will literally take them further down. (I had an okay interview at a horse hospital I can get to by bus/foot on Tuesday, and although the position--ICU tech--doesn't pay well, despite the fact that techs are working on animals worth millions of dollars, I would like to think that I could do that because my heart is unimpeded, actually there. So I don't hate all work--only the stupid variety.)
Space moment: I think there was something else going on here before I decided to return to the paragraph above. If it shows up at the end, I won't like the way this comes out. Anyway, I nursed for awhile the idea that if I actually enjoyed what I was doing, if heart and brain were equally engaged, and if I were regarded by coworkers/bosses with some degree of goodwill, I would be able to write, productively and well. (To date, all I've been able to do while working is productively sleep and/or get sleepy.) Reams of anecdote say that this is true more often than not.
I need to write faster here, for I am on the mother's computer, and any moment now, she will pop in to announce that it's time to get off. Today I heartily disagree, for any phone calls from far-away family will surely come at night, after mother and dad have eaten food and watched more televison at my ultra-competent 34-Y/O cousin's apartment. (No, I am not going: I will be massively uncomfortable, pig out even though my mother is scowling, and then freak when I can't find a place to puke. Once, about 15 years ago, I was here, In KY, for a no-thanks-giving, and ate enough that I had to escape over the hill to puke. And my father found it! The vomit, I mean. And told my mother as I sat there! I find that cruel, for his disgust was all that registered, his armor of "should"s. I guess his bank of feelings is so deeply buried that all he can get to are anger and disgust. Which make matters worse for anybody on the business end of those.)
The mother, who just popped--quite literally, she does this, bangs, thuds, pops--in to tell me that it's time to give it up. (She might try bank robbery as a third career--doesn't get that the impulse to write can't be switched off like a lightbulb. So I'm giving it up--whatever miserable thread I was running, whatever pukesome dialogue with myself and its sideways watcher I've been producing, never mind that the content of this post to this minute might well have morphed into something good. Mental masturbation? Maybe. The trance state that ends when you realise, Man this is good!
--Or not, and I won't ever know differently, unless I get really brave when they leave to go to my cousin's apartment and I go on-line without asking first.
smoke football, watch cigarettes, and drink as much as you can without driving.
c h, lamed again
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Oh yeah--he farted at me.
Fat John went AWOL this past summer, meaning that he stopped coming out of his apartment except for one thing. His evening duckwalks into the heavy heat abruptly stopped, and the light from his downtown apartment, a rosy yellow spliced with that from the TV, began to cut off just as the sun was finally down. Dogs--a Harlequin Dane bitch as big as a pony, a pair of bug-eyed mops, a Golden, many mutts, and the ubiquitous dogs of the region, nervous little Jack Russells--galloped their owners through the park about that hour, and everybody gathered nearby the little grey-blue building there smiled at once. John was not among them.
Before he started staying inside, sometimes never leaving the bed to turn his apartment lighting on, let alone stopper it when sleep seemed near, he went over to the little park, a rectangle of green and dog shit. There, he'd sit on a concrete bench outside the building, lisping in that wet way he had to the young boys from the Hopeless Center from some podium of his mind. No idea what it was he found so impelling--stinking cigarettes and a mucoid cough, one fat girlish hand in the air, stopping in mid-discourse to greet almost everyone who descended the broken stone stairs into the basement of the little building: I am someone, said the hand, listen and you shall hear, if not quite know--
--Before he disappeared, he wore the same clothing daily. A burqa of a black t-shirt, belly swinging free underneath, and cheap dungarees. He toed out when he walked, unimaginable thighs chafing one another. He smelled bad. If he didn't like someone, he would turn his back to that person, literal and broad, and begin to fart, small plosive messages of distaste.
Word was, he was rich and bought boys after dark, like pizzas. Some who knew these things said that the young men had begun to exhibit a curious pattern--they would arrive around nine, and bolt back out again, only to return ten, twenty, sometimes half an hour later with bottle-shaped brown bags. There was a package store nearby, maybe three blocks west from his apartment, and the boys, the contents of their deliveries increasing, would remain with Fat John for another ten minutes, having a nasty drink of expensive gin and pocketing the change.
Though the activity in the green park continued, dogs and rich people, drunks and dog shit, the boi parade started slowing down. It was about this time, September coming, when a few folks begain to voice concern. "...You know John? Older gentleman, heavy-set?" one such person said to me, and no, at that time, he remained a curved slab of negative space: lots of men were named "John". The most common name on Earth, of several bad dates that stayed too long, of dogs, and horses as well. No such animal, this John, and the person went on--
"Yeah, he's a pretty cool guy, but when he goes on binges, he really loses it. I'm worried about him. Haven't seen him for two months now, maybe.
"The last time was bad, real bad. Pip and Logan and I, we went over to his house, he hadn't been around for a few, and found him sitting on the floor, naked, I mean there was piss and shit everywhere. Bottles? Bottles? I don't remember asking him if he could tell me where he was, but I'm damn sure he didn't know his own name.
"We drag him into the bathroom, get him cleaned up. There's garbage everywhere, food, shitty clothes, I mean this was gross. And it was really sad, because when he's sober, he's real intelligent, educated, you know? Real nice guy."
(For the record, that is not this writer's experience with John. When 'the person' asked me if I knew him, I replied that John X. was a character on E.R. Shows ya how much I know. I find him overbearing, and most likely covered with warts and sores in unseemly places. He hits on the young, hip-hop ones. As the flip if. Now, I can't prove a thing, and sip vinegar as I write this, and realise that the unformed, unfinished, and altogether done have, much as I do, nothing but their fictions to sustain them.)
Got the boot again. Add this to my character collection.
'Boyfriend'? I meant 'borderline'. This person is a woman.
What's the use of not expressing deeply felt anger and betrayal when a) both remain intact and b) you get props for not expressing those and c) they come out in your dreams anyway?
I am hugely ticked off at my therapist, Lisa. I don't recall if she was on vacation last week--think she might have mentioned someting about that--but I left her a couple of voice-mails regarding needing Antabuse, trazadone, and a call on my behalf to my primary Vocational Rehabilitation counselor. Counselor seems to think she needs to bring Lisa in on whatever she considers problematic vis a vis my participation in that program. I'm not sure why--a couple of possibilities loom large; and Lisa knows how I deal with these well-scripted ambiguities: if I don't act out in historically credible ways, I find other ways to suffer. If--big 'if'--she thinks silence is appropriate here, that it might 'foster growth', I daresay she's way off base.
In this DBT, a client is thought to have succeeded if s/he is in a lousy situation and does nothing to make it worse. So here I sit on my anger toadstool, physically and communicatively immobile, waiting for the sexy spider to drop down and offer me a fifth of Southern Comfort. Yesterday, I had two bags of old clothes to donate to my church's mountain mission. I tore one open to check if its contents were as I thought; they were not. As my ride pulled up, I placed the trash bag and its load back inside the living room we, in theory, share. I go inside last night, and the thing was on the floor of my room, where she had thrown it. That wasn't necessary. The nasty-letter monkey was on my back, not at all stingy with the whip, but I did nothing to appease it. Spiders and monkeys and fudge, oh moi. I've been bearing up rather admirably, I think, when I consider the past, the history of my reactions. And my reward: a shitsicle.
Good: an interview at one of the local horse hospitals today. The place--sprawling--is about 1/2 a mile out from the end of one of the bus lines. Therapist Lisa has indicated that I'm coming up on getting ready to finish nursing school, and the stress level at this facility would be similar, and I'm minus a lot of mind muck and questionable influences, and might do swimmingly there.
Good: an opportunity to get out of my angry self yesterday afternoon, when my church friend M.--a former supervisor and angry boyfriend--got me into some volunteering, assisting with the food and clothing ministries. All I know about ministry is that it was a band--but I enjoyed myself a bit, throwing cut-rate canned vegetables into flimsy plastic bags, scoping out the donated clothing. I remain a clotheshorse in the closet, for now. Was looking for cowboy boots, and found none. And size-fourteen khakis as well, all the better to pass myself off as an earthbound horseperson. I didn't see a single person in tight pants out there, at the horse hospital, today.
Good: haven't sought drink or drugs. I promised my church friend I would not. She believes that if I choose an act of obedience to God and flog the life out of it, I will be blessed. Because I've screwed up in this arena, shrugged off certain behaviors as 'oh, well, this is trivial compared to back when'. Guess not so trivial now. Which brings me to this uncomfortable feeling that I might be playing checkers (chess is too complicated) with God: I do good, You do good; I do bad (drink beer) and You loose the flood of decomposing kittens on my head, losing sight of the fact that I badly need a hair cut.
I don't get it. I have been too lazy to study it. I don't know what I need to study. I do know that I am tired of trying to live under duress, that struggling to mold myself against mighty and inchoate urges is becoming a bore. At times, I think there is some great, grave internal shift afoot, and at others, I hope and fear that whatever has moved me to any kind of action in the past has guttered out.
Went to AA last night after volunteering. I should have gone straight to the apartment. One individual I've never gotten on with was there in his glory of fat and intellectual pretension. Years ago, he says, he worked as a family therapist. Years ago, the training for that kind of thing was tightly defined and set off a bit from more regular psychology. So, he takes everything he knows about diagnosing deviance and stuffs it in his snug back pockets and proceeds to drop a label or five on anyone with whom he has conflict.
Last night, I averred that I was angry and confused, about things I've written of here. AA doesn't encourage what it calls "crosstalk"--members speaking to one another, as opposed to discrete speechifying about whatever ails them or floats their boat. Well, Fat John proceeded to diagnose my need for a sponsor--a female who would be a sort of mentor in the process of becoming tolerably sober. A female with whom I would be brawling in the streets in no short order, beating her about the head with AA's vaunted Big Book (of crap) and trying to stick little statues of the idols Bill and Bob up her nose. That's the idolatry, the cultdom, so many anti-12-step people write about. Book. Bill. Bob. I hate 'em, as well as the wont of the pro-step camp to use the pronoun "we" when speaking of anyone who has ever had a substance abuse problem. About all we have in common is that our drinking eventually caused serious problems in certain vital domains--relationships, finances/vocation, and run-ins with the law. Some are depressed; some not. Some are comfortable in social situations, before, during, and after the drinking; some never have been, never will be. Some, like Fat John, have a need to flaunt what they think they know, and like children at recess, can home in on a target for their narcissistic performance events.
He ticks me off. Twice, I've asked him to leave his DSM at home, to set it down beside his Big Book and calcified braids of feces that, I've been advised, were found on his floor after a particularly nasty binge. I'm getting into writing about this guy as a character, a figure in the distance, but cannot--I've gotten my damnable warning, and the headbanging is about to begin.
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Fear, anger, the sense of being violated once again, of having to do shit that I don't think/feel I need to do, of being recycled about as my systems can stand only to be thrown on the scrap heap, no further chances for education, for getting out of debt, I mean it's like how the flapping fuck am I ever going to get my debts chopped into manageability, get my ass into a car and then to school, am I ever going to have long enough periods of relative calm------
big sad demented sigh. Those fudgepacking fatherfuckers who make decisions on a person's ability to make a functional living (a misnomer if ever there was one, yet consistent with my life to date) or not, have again seen fit to tell me that I can do "some" kind of work. That's not amusing. Land of freedom and prosperity my fat pimply ass. Get me off Klonopin and I'll leave this godless place. No such thing as equal and "freedom" is a concept immutably linked with "money."
Yeah yeah yeah--Frankl and Job and all those. You're most free when you're least attached to the things of the world. And maybe if there were no Klonopin, I could move like a tumbleweed around the warmer regions, availing myself of hospicharity, day labor, ravines and gullies. Now how the hell is somebody who might actually have a chance at being good at something actualise that chance with daemonic hordes of state examiners howling for heart and its blood right outside the bedroom door?
That's the big pisser.
I'm not done for yet, but that's exactly what I was seeing and feeling earlier today, having considered the ominous tones of the Voc Rehab people--what's the worst they can do to me, save take away the bus pass and maybe give me some more ammo to use to get some disability. No, I don't care to be disabled forever, or for what is left of mine. A few days back, I was riffing in my head about how sick I was getting of my living circumstances, and how I wanted to be a REAL person, with a real means of supporting myself, even if said reality really sucked bad. Now, i see a bit of error there. And I've somehow construed both what the counselor wants to discuss with the therapist, and several statements I've made involving a) a dislike of AA and b) wanting/needing Antabuse, as evidence that I'm about to be thrown out of this little house I'm in--and then what? I could lose a lot of weight on the street. Maybe 160-something pounds.
I'd hoped I could work this out before going on to do this amazon.com in another town thing tonight. don't need any further confusion, do need to turn it over and ask not for what I want, but what I need, because I don't really know. I do know that I have a few large, if unformed (sort of like my arse?), gifts that aren't being so heartily abused these days. I'm better than what I used to be. Calmer? PRobably. Faster? Nope. High buildings? Love 'em. Oughta be a lot more of 'em around here.
thank you motime for finally letting me through today. i needed the help understanding the monsters before me. who put them there--me, by misbehaving, or misunderstanding?--isn't that important.
anger's burned down to ash, but I still feel lost as hell.
Finally, able to log on. Took me thirty minutes of slow computer hijinks, what I thought were clever roundabouts to accessing this blog, b/c today is one of those on which I really need to blog. When it rains, it rains dead things in varying stages of composition. This all started Thursday evening when I checked my email, and hasn't exactly stopped yet.
#1--Got a request from the original Vocational Rehabilitation counselor, who wants to see me, her toadboy and my therapist--yeah--as soon as she can.
#2--Where I realise that I could have handled the cleaning-lady thing better, I could have also done so worse. Much worse. This is what the lead counselor wants to discuss, although in what capacity I can't say (save that it is not a good one.)
#3--I have told my therapist about one slip, the DBT group about another, and there is yet another, maybe my biggest one yet, and this happened two weeks ago last night. No one knows but who reads this. Then I tried to go to "work", and felt sickly and slow, and I have this suspicion that this is going to come up--me being hungover. I was hungover. On the bus into town, I had ridden past an interesting crime scene--one of the oilier of Lex's homeless community had set himself on fire. When I later heard the name, I realised I'd known of the guy. A library/bus station regular. What this has to do with what is only now shadily apparent: I got depressed! But have I told anyone yet? No, not really.
#3--As early as two weeks ago, I'd begun to make noises about needing Antabuse. Asking a buddy sort of guy if he thought he could get a few solvent associates to contribute to the considerable cost of the prescription. I need my mind to clear to its utmost, and keeping it gunk-free is paramount. Also, my Creator wouldn't put that stuff in His body, so why should I? (Because I am in a lot of pain for a little organism?)
#4--Yesterday, Friday, I left two messages for my own shrink, a really nice girl whom I'd hate to disappoint by admitting I'd drunk more than one time, both of these about the Antabuse, and also for paperwork for Trazadone. I gave her the rehab counselor's number, asked her to touch base, all of that. She didn't return either call, so I have no clue what happened there. Maybe she, or her toddler daughter, was sick. That happens, but I don't feel it today.
#5--Today, I got my second SSI denial. It came in a thick white envelope, so I knew it wasn't a skinny manila check sort of deal.
-----------This is when it began raining dead things. And if I hadn't been given my ten-minute-warning here, I'd go into a convoluted spiel about what this might mean because of this or that, and what might happen as a result of this AND that, how the two--or four, or more--could be related, the worst that could happen and all of the surprises I should have seen coming. That's pure narcissism there--the narcissist is often incredulous when events she thinks might have transpired because of her brilliance (or at the least-----dangit--gotta log out right now
Thursday, November 18, 2004
About fifteen feet away, there is a he/she somewhere in transition, legs crossed at the knee and a bitchin wig about to take flight from her long, worried head. She is reading. I know how that can be, sitting in a loud place, focus in a vice grip applied to a fierce and daring frown. She wants to be left alone, like Garbo. And who can blame her? But I really want to know about that wig, was about to ask her where she got it, so that I could imply that I wanted one like it too.
But I didn't. Not because I knew how I thought she was feeling, and not because I liked the idiotic wig, synthetic rust on the verge of matting. It's because I knew that that wig was her own hair, and that furthermore, s/he was not s/he at all, but a real woman, of some leisure, intrigued and maybe perturbed by what she was reading. The hair was arranged in struts of tacky spray from her head. Her head was long and the skin was falling off it. Wandering off into the stacks, allowing some minutes to pass before I re-upped at the computer bank, I understood that she scared me, commandeered my powers of reason--as so many things do--that she had in fact placed my fingers in that musty scarf of skin and made me feel it. Made me feel something.
But I still wanted to ask her about the wig. That worries me.
These last three weeks, I have been bingeing aggressively, without much thought, and probably, because I can. I "do good" during the daylight hours ("do good" is the kind of phrase that E/D therapists rail against), only to come home to the familiar loneliness cut with two-tone fear, for now, and for the future, and maybe forever. I've been stuffing down 2-3 thousand calories a night, with no purging. Minus the sum of the usual metabolic expenditures of a 160-pound sedentary female, this leaves me a good five pounds up. What's odd this time, or even odder, is that I can see what I've put on, like a suit of fat, the next day. Whatever boyishness I may have had is really gone--there is this place where my waist should be, then two symmetrical rondures of flab, these framing an increasingly outpooching gut.
Consider this thought: "I binged because I wanted to get rid of all the tempting food in the house." I said this to a DBT therp today, and I wasn't kidding. Of course, it sounded absurd and I laughed right along with myself, but it's true. It's also gonna run me outta money. I have accepted a 4-week night gig with an amazon.com warehouse an hour away--trans is provided, but the lack of real sleep is going to be killer--and since this is something called "employment", and that the authorities will have to know, I'm gonna have to use the 30-something dollars remaining on my food card to buy a lot of moveable food--lunch, I mean--before anyone knows that I am working, for a month, and that the money is gone.
AFter that, I'll have to go through those bloody loops to get it back--the food card, I mean. That's some serious torture. Hurts to think of tryng to describe it.
Just wandering I guess. Have to try to email my brother.
peace out and happy trails
|
rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
|
