Friday, December 31, 2004
Yesterday evening, I was moved to post something rasty-nasty, and then went to bed. I was bowled over by a serious guilty conscience, and in the dark, rose from my knees to stumble towards the place in the blackness where the lightswitch and door should be, so that I could get upstairs and beg to the ancestors to let me back on the computer so that I could delete the offensive entry. God was with me on this, and my parents didn't ask too many questions. So there I was. I'd scrabbled hard like a dog at the door in a storm to get out and up, and there I was, minutes later, trying to undo the damage. That was a no-go, and I'm back today, trying to do the same thing.
An outfit in de Lex called 'Servicemaster' is advertising for disaster relief/cleaning techs, at a modest but liveable wage. Last time they advertised was after the Furies took Florida. The ad stayed up for a week, and was gone. I wonder if this is overseas disaster relief. If it is, I wonder if they take medically-trained but unlicensed people to give vaccinations and the like. I wonder if I can get Klonopin in Indonesia. If I can, I need to get away from here.
Having pretty much decided on completing my human nursing coursework, I'm confronting several hurdles: my record, for one. If I can get either the first or last of four public intoxes expunged, I'll be pleased, but I wonder if the court would allow me to work one more off. Doing anything. I hear it's fairly difficult to get an expungement, even if one has never before been in trouble with the law governing one's precinct. I am worried about this, that I'll be laughed out of the admissions office. An applicant who hasn't, to date, handled disappointment well, who has numbly retreated into positions she can't get out of until big trouble intervenes. I am getting worked up about this: I can feel the machinery of the worry-go-round warming up, stinking hotly of old oil, teeth heedlessly starting to gnash at others in the apparatus--a few kinks to work out, but after another spat with the Mother, I guess the thing will be on-line and I laid out at its merciless regard.
I know I can sleep through the coursework, though I have no intentions of doing so. I plan--if I get in, that is--of making A++s, of rehearsing skills until I am simply exhausted at the thought, and of attending to the irksome details--care plans, formulas, that sort of thing--until I can no longer write. I plan to get to know what each teacher wants, and to wear cheery colors and stay after class to ask questions. Actually purchase an APA manual--there has to be a cheaper way--to put the proper shine on my papers. When I need help, I will ask for it. I may need none, a little, a lot. This is all halfway down the line, and I shouldn't worry, but the machine is running now, in ruthless loops. I hope it wears me out.
Tonight, the parents are going to her brother's home for yet another celebratory dinner. My cousin's wife B. will doubtlessly be there. She is curious about me, she feels sorry for me, things along these lines that I can't abide. Me, I've done my share of judging, on entirely superficial grounds, so I'm no innocent party. But I don't want to wander off my turf and be regarded like a brightly colored, yet sinister-seeming insect. Should I stay or should I go (sorry, Joe)? Already the seams are fraying: not able to get my bangs trimmed, not willing to ask if I could be fitted for contacts today, face of many colors, fabric of quality poor, and the flab that gives no sign of receding from below my waist. I used to be able to put myself together and leave whatever apartment I was occupying, confident that if I didn't feel good, at least I looked good. If not exactly normally trendy, then striking. Always that--pos or neg, doesn't matter.
Joy to the world. Celebrate destruction. Spend money you don't exactly have, and don't drink and drive. Calling a cab--better yet, tattooing the number of the cab company to your inner wrist, if you have space there, and sticking the cab fare in your drawers or brassiere (presuming you wear either, if any at all)--is worth the price and a half of another drink. Innit? I'm going to be here, basically safe, although my mother hates me today.
Maybe she'll offer to take me back. I'll have the house to myself and several merchants at the ready.
See ya. From Indonesia.
ServicemasterHoss
HELP STAT! Howard or anyone--please delete (or tell me how to) the last ENTRY of this blog. It is rank/ Two days ago I was talking about hhow I wanted to go over there as a paramedical support person. The nasty narcissist at work. I am hideously embarrassed. Couldn't find any other option. I am so sorry.
hoss
(Thanks. And, H, you aren't posting my numbers. Didja lose them, or what?)
There is this drug, cocaine. I used to do a lot of it a long time ago. And when there were hillocks of the stuff just lying around, I could work up an unmitigated enthusiasm for almost anyone, or anything: Gum-cracking. Noisy libraries. Sex--in theory. Housecleaning. Children.
And so here we are, five days past tsunami, muttering and clucking about and spending money over The Children. Turns out they can't swim? Hey, who knew? Poor little Karl-Heinz, ja ja, such a charmer. But he is two years old. "They were killed in a giant flood," is an acceptable answer ten years down the road.. To World-Traveling Parents, it's been what, five days now? She's sleeping with the FISHES, can't you SEE THAT? She's STARTING TO STINK REALLY BAD. And still you're going to STAY OVER HERE (or THERE), SPEND THE REST OF YOUR considerable fortune trying to hunt her down and blow her back up again. What is it, man, I have to ask? This thing with children.
First, they--the ones that have died, are dying, and will die--will never have to know want, war, or suffering. The ones who make it through this won't remember it well enough to walk away with anything more consequential than, say, borderline personality disorder, as a result of some huge, whooshing, ultimately faceless and blameless trauma. Let it be said that child ABUSE as we now know it will be, for them, a less virulent and entirely different entity than the vile character it is today. No more laboring in outsourceries making ill-fitting trendy garments for the Philistines across the pond.
Now that I have someone's attention, this: there are entirely too many children in the world today, and living for what? Is it not absurd that parents who genuinely desire children of their own but can produce none in the Biblical sense have to drop large sums of money and jump through guvment--and/or criminally-erected--hoops to save an infant girl from dying in Kenya or China? (If those ppl are willing to spend all that, might as well see that they acquire a quality product.)
Innocence? It was a wonderful idea while it lasted. Here, in the most muscular, prideful, and damn-proud-of-it nation on the flipping (no pun intended) face of the planet, children...have more children. Beat up other children. Beat up, for that matter, parents, grandparents, teachers and bus drivers and police officers. Getting some ASS means getting props, then a major pain IN the ass, i.e., the kid, crack alcohol and fetal babies and all of this damn unpleasantness. Get your shots on time and save for college, it's a beautiful thing and wonderful world and can't you just feel the love?
--well, no. Stephen King, American institution, knew this much: childhood is terrifying, children are vicious, and it doesn't get much better. If people are so vainglorious that they think having not just any kid, but having THEIR kid, with half of THEIR genes, is how it must be, end of story, well kill yourself already, baby. You ain't all that. Your hypothetical own KID won't be all that. This world is beyond saving, and even if it were not, Imaginary Brat ain't the one to do it (unless, maybe, you were breeding for IQ and extreme social giftedness in the same squalling package).
There is something real to this rant, and that would be the relative lack of attention given to (equally-real) adults with real difficulties. Ditto their kids. Having some foresight, I never took pains to have any, because I knew at an early age that I might have some trouble taking care of my own self. I don't hate the buggers--well, except when they make noise--but I have no jihad against kids in general. Tracking down the troubled adult life of the affected region is gonna be some rough sailing, as is cleaning up the gutted shore towns, burying the dead, and attempting--and is this necessary--to stem the natural consequences of bad weather. As might be applied to those who have lived long, and one hopes, well, those who haven't yet considered the idea of living in this world might be best served by never having to test it.
My mother knows of some people who took revenge on the old bus driver who told authorities their kids were behaving badly on his bus. You know what the people--the parents of these kids--did? Chased down and killed his horse. My mother also believes that an earthquake of sufficient magnitude could turn the world upside down. That said, my point is this last, sad shiver: don't draw all of this out to save face of something--decency--that's been down the road a long while. What's done is done; Nature has spoken. Humans in the remaining 92% of the world can and will produce uncountable hordes of children in as little as 360 days. Some will--and some will not--contribute to the future of this planet. Make bombs that stop tectonic activity, unpollute the ocean with a magic net, and create that elusive thing the time factory, even though Time might have done better to have stopped a long time ago.
--hoss, at my narcissistic worst
Monday, December 27, 2004
(Thanks, H.)
I am failing as a chemist. Last night, took 300 mgs. of trazadone and an Ultram for my right hip; thought I'd fall right out, but began to trip instead. Black and white hallucinations and a muttering fan. Air of a Hallowe'en house, trapped in that strange state, unable to sleep, wake fully, or resume usual function. Around dawn, took a Klonopin, something I'd been hoping to avoid--one of my hallucinations told me to quit the Klonopin. I'd agreed that that was a fine idea.
Then, a knock at the door, too soon: my parents, heading out to church, wanted me to watch the dogs upstairs while they were gone. The preacher is coming for lunch, dinner, whatever you want to call your noon meal. (I call it "lunch"; the locals call it "dinner".) They are bothered that I don't want to attend church with them. They don't understand my kind of shy. Since I was a child and visiting for the summer, I have never been comfortable there. Oh how you've grown, they used to say. They can't say that any more. How I've aged--badly--is more like it.
Their church, Sugar Grove Christian, overlooks a highway. To one side is a dug pond with bought fish in the summer. The guy who owns the place charges people to fish there, and makes them pay for worms. The other side slopes down toward the interstate, I think, though I've never followed it to its endpoint; I simply look in that direction and appreciate the dust-colored hum.
The parking lot there has always been gravel. Hot summers when I was a kid, I'd cut out right after services ended and stand in the shadows of parked cars--the sun could pin me like a bug on the briny white siding, awash in misery and sweat. The local kids formed their own groups; the adults did the same, and there was I, plump and dolorous, in a dress my mother made me. In poor Kentucky as well as at home, I could tell that the girls wore store-bought clothes
Men would cut from their groups to smoke cigarettes. The smell went poorly with the heat and sun, and I would have to move away to where I couldn't smell it, the smoke, I mean. In front of the church, the adults talked and talked: who had cancer, who was getting married, who was dead. They--as I do now--could mute the presence of any child nearby, especially the uncomfortable one who wanted only to go home, or to a cool place, to nap and eat lunch, drink cold cola, wade in the creek later.
I was that child. I have been to that church, Sugar Grove, several times over the last few years. The inside has changed, grown brighter, every pew and pulpit and keyboard instrument buffed to the midranges of gold. I see poorly without my glasses, and never wear them in social situations, like the ostrich with its head in the sand. All I can apprehend is amber around me, held breath, a sense of swimming. Then, fracture: the congregation starts to come in, their heels jangling on the hardwood floor.
The pianist, who has been there since I was a child, opens up a volley of southern gospel-style hymns. She was a teenager when I was nine, ten, and I envied her, though I no longer do: I am the better instrumentalist. She is simply familiar and loud. As she plays, the congregants settle in, then turn to one another; their conversation rises over the thunderous hymns. They mean no disrespect to the pianist, she is one of them. It has always been this way.
Early June, I was fascinated by the stained glass and its depictions of Jesus. I can't tell if any of it has been replaced across the years, but the stained glass windows were always up, always a soft breeze blowing, and always the branches of some flowering trees, petals falling fragrantly away from the bough. My memories of the windows are better than their descriptions. I will have to work on that, or let the memories work on themselves when, if ever, I get some sleep. I feel to be on the fringes of crazy today, the kind of crazy I've read about, seen in others, but have myself never actually been. Not in a natural state.
These last couple of years, I've gone to that church in a foxhole mindset--God save me from this, I'll never do that again.But I always did do that again, that bad thing, whatever it was, and continued in my foxhole, at war, constantly hiding. Then the storm would hit. I'd seen it coming, stood in its eye. That meant it was time to dry out and go to the folk's house. Respite. Put myself on a prayer chain list, save myself softly from my ills, go to a Sunday service and cry without sound as well-known and well-remembered hymns are played.
God get me out of this mess. My handlers are thinking that I am up to the demands of getting into, and completing, nursing school. My friend M. thinks that God feels that way too, as I've been asking for signs as to what course of study I should follow, and having been shot down by the local equine hospital--hence, a return to human nursing. I think that getting in will be the double oxer to a water jump: I have to package my past as more of a help than an impediment. They conduct background checks now. I can see how a couple of public intoxes and four years worth of wallowing in a quicksand of self-pity and misdirected hatred might put the committees off. So I am big scared. Anxiety is on red. There is a theme in here and I cannot find it--churches and preachers and nursing school, and a fear of being on some edge that I can't access, let alone escape? If the answer is to, Nike-like, just do it, take the flying leap and start pounding sand when I land, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how to persevere. Getting as far as I've gone has sort of just happened. I'm not in this place by any design. I don't know how to plan. I must find someone to show me how to begin.
--sorry for typos and thought-splatter,
cold sleepless horse
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Frigid Christmas, at the folks' house. I have no clock downstairs where I sleep; it is trazadone pitch black, and at three-something in the morning, I put on my jeans and wandered upstairs with my plastic bag of goodies in hand, thinking that it was around five-something, and that soon the folks would be up and about, gifts would be exchanged, and myself back to bed in short order.
I remembered that I had neglacted to prepare the baked potato my mother had left for me. Noticed that I was hungry, and stuck the thing in the microwave. Then: there is this sound, a thumping of the Pergo (sp?) floor in the living area. Then there is my mother, eyes slitted with sleep, hands on hops--akimbo--and looking so old in her sleep cap and baggy pajamas, so small and diminished.
I try to explain: I am disoriented. No clock down there. I am all slept out, having put myself down at six p.m., 400 mgs of trazadone down the hatch and out she went; and I am hungry. Hence the potato.
I am also shocked at how---gruesome, I think--my mother appeared. What I saw of her eyes was red and blind. Pajamas--trailer park daywear from your nearest Dollar Store more like it--that hung from her, stopped short at the ankle, suggesting emaciation. Either one of my parents is old enough to die on the other (and me) with no warning. That right there is close enough to the root of how I look upon my mother, and although I know I will beat myself about the head for having posted that here when she is gone, I will be able to absolve that show of grief with an admission of fear of the same.
(I THINK I can I THINK I can.)
Tonight, Saturday 25 December, she and my father are going to a gathering at the home, newly acquired, of my first cousin, who lives about thirty miles away. All that remains of her side of the B. family will be there, save my butch cowboy cousin F. in Colorado, Utah, one of those places where people ski. And my own brother, of course, in Georgia and set to move to Indiana. Gatherings like those make me acutely nervous, self-conscious (as in, I fail a lot ergo I am a failure), and prone to eat entirely too much and want fiercely to vomit. Failure-type behavior and thought process? Yes? Oh well, never mind that, I am at a physical location where bingeing is not possible. No one can criticise me for doing so, then.
As for the possibility of me being selfish for continuing to avoid these scripts and plays, I can't say, other than I know I am looking out for myself first amd foremost; that there is a wispy but real chance that my isolation can be viewed as almost hostile; that the expectation for Failure to make small-talk with Relative Success is probably too much for me to take on with any degree of comfort or hope of correct completion right now; and that something something something something SOMETHING. I can't say. Too many thoughts trying to merge at the moment, and the semi ain't giving.
Excuse there? HELL yes. My brother sent me a couple of Christian-themed books for Christmas (there is no other way to say this, and if there were, I would not use it). One of those is a critical take on the self-help movement. It reads fast, and I got into it quickly earlier today; one topic the author and I considered is the nature of love, specifically in terms of "right" actions toward persons for whom you have no lovely feeling. (Envy and fear of being judged aren't lovely feelings.). I envy my cousins. Although both women have "failed" at marriage, one of them twice, they have still succeeded in having had relationships that seemed to lean in the direction of whatever marriage is supposed to promise--socially, in a worldly way, a good thing. I have no such good things. I am too crazy, always was. I think they know that. It shows today, more than around the edges. They have a rough idea how old I am.
Neither side of my family discusses things. Issues. Matters of some vague mainstream heart. Those are embalmed in euphemism and thus rendered safe secrets. I don't know to what degree this practise has affected family unity--on either side, in any one grouping. I do know that I was surprised to learn (more correctly, "hear") that my cousin's second husband was a drunk and that her sister's former husband a self-drunk boor, and that the child of that marriage has big-B behavior problems.These are large factoids, not a whole lot to support them, and nothing in the way of other points of view. I guess that's how my failures have been presented by my mother to the rest of her family--drinking problems, work problems, school problems, drug and man problems. How childlike I seem in this context, especially given my concrete age.
--Oh, bugger me, I'm doing it again. Gerbil-mind, tearing up the Habitrail, even though I've had no mini-thinz and little caffiene. Soon I'll be microwaving my glasses instead of potatoes. Soon I'll be trying to open medicine vials with keys.
She'll be in here soon, telling me it's x-o'clock and time to get off the computer.
It's funny how much better she looks in daylight.
Got to talk to my brother. We had an okay Christmas. I saw my dad smile, twice. Works for me. They'd better stay safe on the way to Richmond.
cold little horse
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
For some reason I can't get to right now, I confused the last name of the guy I last posted about with that of one of his peers, and leapt on to assume that the two were married. They are not. Last night he stopped by and seemed to try to ascertain if I was a breeder. I breed nothing, actually, but wound up having entertaining conversation. Later, one of my female co-workers was trying to figure out if he were gay himself--all of the men he works with seem to be.
He revealed he lived in Danville. I don't know where that is, but it is not close to Lexington. The woman who was wondering if he was gay said that he was making some unflattering comments about a girlfriend. This is where Wise Mind comes in and says nothing. Just filters. Lets embryonic defenses swirl the miasmic brain; I think there were a bunch of those in place when I managed to convince myself that he was married to his co-worker. Since these ppl are, after all, my bosses within the temporary company, it follows that they don't overtly hit on the employees. Hence, I conclude--nothing.
Last night at the plant was effortless good. I made numbers on top of numbers. Funny: their training-sic-methods over there go awry, I get defensive, they make a fuss. Let me learn the shit on my own, and I wind up chuting out the stars. So I can work in factory an do gud. Many minds greater than my own have done the same.
I have a cut on my wrist from a cardboard box that won't heal, and a cough deep in my lungs that won't go away. Now someone's computer is making these awful tinny sounds in Spanish. Good farking Creator: not everyone in this universe is inured to noise. Which is what that was, now that it has gone away. The cough bugs me more than the cut does: I can slather the latter with triple antibiotic cream, and it will probably clear up in a matter of days. The cough, on the other hand, is a real pain; it keeps urging me to dispel whatever's in there--I have seen the unmentionable and will speak no more--and I end up with a dry itchy throat as a result. I've been drinking non-drowsy cough syrup to keep from hacking on my coworkers, and now what is deep in there wants to come out and play. There is probably no chance that, when I go in to see my therapist tomorrow, the little shrink she works with will write for me a script for an antibiotic. That'd stop the rattling in its progress, and let me fall asleep on time.
I'm finally understanding where my parents must have been when I was eight, nine, ten, around Christmas. Greed greed greed greed greed. It is inculcated as an American value from the gut of the formative years. Make lists from Spiegel, the Sharper Image, Victoria's Secret. Want want want. Give SantaSatan a chance. Perhaps I thought that if I got all this shit, I could show it off for my peers and then they would like me, I dunno. Maybe I thought that a wealth of presents with tags for me would solve the mystery of whether They--the adults in my family--really wanted me or not. The evidence suggests that they did, in a grim, spartan way. I just couldn't get with that. Something else overrode what they were trying to teach me.
So, tomorrow I am supposed to get up early, do all the Christmas shopping I can, and then head down to the tore-down park on the Northside to catch the bus to the plant. Make myself a little something to hang onto in the New Year. I never thought I'd be here as long as I have been. Had I chosen to come here, that would be another matter--that there was no choice involved, that I was a specially-tagged unit from the Garbage Barge headed down to further sully the Landfill Capital of the You Nited States, is exactly the problem. I was turned down for the foal-nurse job at one of the horse hospitals at which I'd interviewed. The rejection slip said that there were other, stronger candidates for the position, and I have no doubt that that is true. I'd been looking for a sign as to which career choice to pursue--human or animal nursing--and it seems as though human is the right answer. I'm just a little bit mad right now. Fucked that I don't have another job lined up after this one is over. I had my doubts, oh yes I did, about whether or not I could do what would be asked of me. Now I don't have to worry about that. Libraries are places for quiet, you arsewipes. Oh God, I can't adapt to this. Never could, and until my brain is rewired, I never will. Fuck unnecessary noise to the ends of the galaxy and beyond.
Peace on earth, good will towards human and animal kind.
hoss
Friday, December 17, 2004
What to do with the cooling carcass of a day you've just basically killed, you know, sort of pissed away?
One bus an hour runs here. I narrowly missed the last one leaving from the nearby transit center. Got out of group at three, collected my Klonopin, came to the library. That transit center--or bus station--is physically disgusting. A couple of jailhouse trustees are supposed to keep the place clean, which would consist of sweeping up cigarette butts, throwing out half-eaten food, and supplying toilet paper to the bathroom, and tigers, and bears, and oh my, have I never! All those boys do over there is try to hook up with girls who like to have sex with convicts. They wear hunter green jumpsuits with the letters 'FCDC' on the back. Fayette County Detention Center, a place I am passingly familiar with but not to the extent that I stay there at night. Not recently, anyway.
Guess the trustees don't earn a whole lot of money, which probably explains why they don't do a whole lot of work. I have this thing about cigarette butts, especially wet ones: looking at them makes me nauseous. (Word to anyone who likes to get around, or justify, a stiff cover charge by making off with the done-paid-for, half-drunk alcoholic drinks of others: be very very careful, for if your town doesn't have a smoking ordenance, you will eventually try to consume something in a green or brown bottle that contains at least one cigarette butt, in addition to backwash beer. I know this because...yep, yep, yep. Ripped pages out of library art history books too, when I was too poor to photocopy material for exams. And this was long before I began to disgust myself on a predictable basis.
I respect books today.This is not new. There is overlap with predictable disgust of self, and beyond, further back toward adolescence, but I will never respect cigarette butts, nor cigarettes, nor the act of smoking same. It's just unnatural, and this is just my opinion. That's all on that subject. On another, tomorrow night kicks off the last pay period of the amazon.com gig. Self thinks self has embarrassed self mightily there, as in the staffing company that provides the Greyhounds provides as well these people called 'job coaches'. I came in contact with one such person, whose function was more like go-between between local full-time staff and temporary workers unaccustomed to being yelled at by (marginal) supervisors in public places. (Even when I went to work drunk and geeked, nobody actually yelled at me; rather they told stories to influential people there about me. Seems that debasement is going to be a part of my life, one way or another, until I'm eighty, the age at which I will, for one of two reasons, stop working--either I'll be wracked unto death, or actually dead.)
I spoke with this man after I had been yelled at by one of his colleagues, a woman. When I mentioned to him that this colleague had gone off on me in public in a way not unlike that of a full-time "ambassador" employee, who had sicced staffing personnel on me in the first place, he seemed taken aback. As though he knew this woman, and knew that she wasn't the sort of person to do that.
Well, it's not like he didn't wind up hanging out with me later, discussing Beat writers and offering to lend me a book by another writer I'd been wanting to read. It's not like he was wearing a wedding band. He didn't have a regional accent, and suggested that he'd been pretty wild in a previous incarnation, so I did the math and started to wonder if maybe he might ask me out, and were that to happen, if I'd be up to a date without drinking, and so on. Entirely rational? Probably not, but entirely usual for someone with my psych and substance use history: I can geek on my own dire imaginings very easily, thank you, which is what I went on to do until--
The blond woman who had jumped my ass apologised (I replied that I'd been kind of snarky as well).
The guy came around, asking the cockroaches (workers) if they were all right, a question that has rankled me for a long damn time. This cockroach had a serious backache, and the guy told it--me--to have my boyfriend or husband or whatever, and he did say that, massage it, and my face must have done some talking then, for he repeated his question: Was (I) all right, in the spiritual sense? I told him dunno, and to ask God. From that point, I figured I'd been judged and found lacking, and could easily find ppl to talk books with, no great loss there.
In other words, I was pretty embarrassed, having watched myself get busted and not done a thing except turn really red.
Next time I saw the woman, who does have a regional accent, I noticed that the surname on her name tag was the same as that book-readin' man's. I'm laughing as I read this, remember that I was coming out of a convenience store and into a wet, vicious pre-dawn chill as the math did math of its own, and I didn't think much further about the matter, for that day, last Tuesday, was to be a day into night of serious sleep. Yesterday, I'd break into a grin--I mean the dude's pretty good-looking for a suit, and not the youngster I'd first taken him to be, and the woman is plump and no youngster in any sense of the term. I'd never figured them for an old married couple. And today, I've had moments of laughing at scenes visible to no one but me. But tomorrow? I gotta go in there again? I'm going to do what I've always done after it's dawned on me that I've been rejected: duck my rejector, and when cornered, mutter civilities, and finally, go on.
Still, the prick should have worn a ring. If he had been wearing the thing, and oh no you don't trot out that old bull about rings being unsafe in the workplace: he's not exactly a worker, for one, and workers there have been observed wearing at least ten such items, for another.
Maybe self is not doing so well with regard to how self sees self attempt to interact with others.
If perception isn't reality, I've been chatted up, responded, and then dumped by someone who may have simply been doing his job. All kinds of screaming evil out there. Maybe i should fall upon the sword, forget about the pen, try to pick my battles with an eye for what's easiest to win, and call it a day, even though I have wasted it to death.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Whafuck?
I can't make heads or tails or ridges out of an unlogged person's comment to me, so I'll have to assume that that individual isn't willing to identify him/herself. About all I could get from that transmit was that the person was not logged on. Oh, well. I went to my med group, got my brown bag of free Wellbutrin and Prozac, and my Klonopin script. Pretty much what I was expecting. There was this annoying guy in the room, liked seventies music, kept smacking his lips. I wasn't surprised that his meds included antipsychotics--he was probably having some extrapyramidal symptoms there, but I was ticked off nonetheless.
Have been marinating in the library, with DBT at one--fifteen minutes out. That over, I'll fill the Klonopin, catch a bus to the apartment, and try to be good and asleep by eight p.m. at the latest. I shopped last night, and found some Fendi cologne at a serious markdown. This doesn't excuse the fact that I spent seventy-five bucks--there's that rotating compulsion thing again, as if I ever thought that it might go away on its own. My mother doesn't get that this is something that only the absence of money can control, just as living alone cures me of nonstop destructive eating. Although the roommate, who has pretty much been living with this 29-year-old drunk guy, doesn't keep much in the way of food where I can reach it, I can't stop myself from eating my own.
Damn, my right shoulder blade and hip sure are sore.
Later. There are children, many of them, in the building.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
I'm back. Guess I'm a computer addict, in addition to the rest of the snakes in my bag. Thta wouldn't be a problem, but since the buses here stop running at eight-thirty, I'd better be on one soon, start doing the xmas deathmarch. When I was a child, the notion of shopping among the hordes in the suburban malls was almost as exciting as that of Christmas Eve. These days, I've noticed a big change there: though I have none of their expected obligations, imagining myself in a long line of pretend-cheery people, arms overextended with items that will lose half their market value on 26 December 04, with my own small load of presents for the maybe four people in my life, two of those parents instead of children, isn't a pretty process. Before my old-skool Tetris was stolen from a laundromat five or so years ago, I used to whip it out when I found myself in a line. When I was really annoyed, I'd play the little song, the Russian march that I haven't yet figured out on the piano. How wierd is that--not the Tetris play, but the inability to get that tiny shard of music.
I am going to email my brother and tell him that I still haven't located an old-timey Tetris cartridge. I have a yard-sale GameBoy, but no cartridge. I was an excellent Tetroid. Those were some glory days.
For a while, I've had no truly informative dreams. I believe the scientists who contend that dreaming rehashs what's on, in, and under your consciousness, sometimes arranging the levels thereof in compelling, if not exactly meaningful, ways. Recently, though, a dream with a theme has begun to recur: the settings and talent are different, but the meat of the thing remains the same. They have to do with finishing nursing school, something that was in reach and something that I pretty much shot to shit my own damn self. There is always some final test involved. I must perform a procedure before critical eyes. I've practised the procedure (some of them don't exist in real-time, but that's okay) until I can, well, do it in my sleep. The examiner is not necessarily hostile, but always extremely critical. I never figure out exactly what she, and it's always a faceless woman with advanced degrees, wants from me. I go blank. Or sometimes, I am a basically unlicensed nurse running around a dimly-lit green place with glaring tiles, beeping machines, and a giddy sci-fi air about it that overtakes me; I do doctorly things to people I cannot see. My hands are never visible. It is implicit that these skills are highly evolved procedures, and that if I can do them well--that is, if no one dies in my process--I can do also what is required of me for licensure. I have taken more than several NCLEX-RN exams, and always kicked ass in theory and pathophysiology. Also, pharm. I got the pharm gene, the drug lust, whatever you wanna call it. But in these dreams, the final test, the one that will free me to graduate and take the real thing, never gets started. I'm there and ready and the examiner is present, but the test itself never gets going. I run through all the anxiety drills--the confusion about what is sterile and what is not, the exact order of component parts, the explanations, called rationales, that go with them, and the blackout on all of the preceding--and the person who would elevate, or further condemn, me, cannot set up that crucial test of skills.
I think that this is an informative dream. It may have arisen in conjunction with the factory work I am presently doing, my desire, and possibly my ability, to redo my final year (I must, as I've been out five years) and work those skills into my unconscious, and my therapist's suggestion that I am approaching a place in my life where all that is doable. (I don't know if I've really flaked out this last month, or if I'm so worried about flaking that I've come to believe that I've done just that.)
Used to be, I'd tell folks that I wanted to combine the specialties of psych and AIDS care. Psych is low-impact nursing, light on skills, and not much in the way of relevant patient contact; AIDS is edgy, skills necessarily razored to compact perfection, and high on establishing rapport with possibly dying, possibly crazy, people. I thought that this made me sound heroic. I'd trot out allusions to my own experience with behavioral health issues, and exploit my dead Buddies in Philadelphia. Talk about taking their cats to the vet, getting takeout on the way back, watching movies, and wiping their shit bare-handed.
Give me a break. Like many people who have gotten a handle on their chemical problems, I think I'd do well in a combined psych and addictions unit. For some reason, rehab graduates gravitate toward social work and/or CADC certification (here, a master's in some helping field is necessary in order to obtain that certification, and although I don't doubt my ability to do all but orally defend a thesis, the money's just not there). I've not been in rehab as of long late. It's rather that I have this great ocean of knowledge, formal and otherwise and easily combined, on psych and addictions issues, and with all the freely-lended guvmnt money I've spent on that education, I ought to be allowed to finish it up and go on, make the salary, and pay the guvmnt back). I don't need to be able to give an injection while starting an IV on someone who's blown their veins and acquired a scary disease in the process. Some persons young in the field of nursing, and effectually weaned on Doctor TV, cream their jeans at the thought of wielding sharp objects with aplomb. I was one. I now recognise my limitations, that I woud/will be at best adequate. My most useful attribute would be my assessment/diagnostic capacity--and what else? The field evolves so fast that I have a hard time keeping up with what I may well have to know pretty soon.
Which brigs me to the horsies. I haven't heard from the girl at the hospital, nor my church contact Laura. I don't know the interviewer's last name. I would like to send her a card expressing my ongoing interest in the ICU tech position. Eight bucks an hour sounds like dirt pay, but it'd be dirt with a heart, and I'm a section eight motherf--STOP IT, DAMMIT--recipient, and what I'd expend on rent would still allow me to save a bunch of money should I ever be called on to spend it on school.
And before I go, this question: certified vet assistant or equine specialist at a bachelor's level, or nurse to ill humans? The latter is where the money lies, the money to be paid the guvmt and my folks, set up for my ancient years; the former is what I'd do for love. I've said it before, and with my ten-minute warning, I'll say it again: there is nothing like a foal. There are no ugly horses. Sick to the point of death, the elegant structure remains. Then, there is the face, the eyes of a horse. Humans may be more cunning in their expressions, but never more lovely. Never a human with those great lovely brown, or occasionally pale blue, eyes.
I'm about to get the boot. Remember the boot, the orange thing cops would clamp on your tires if you were a persistent parking offender? This is a different boot, electronic in nature, but almost as annoying.
Peace. Later. Hoss.
Aah. Sweet black sleep. Slept all day Tuesday and on through the night. Pity I must work so hard to earn it--read a medical article that confirms my suspicions that stress really does accelerate physical aging, hence the perma-frown and rapidly greying hair--but when I get it, it feels so good.
(A long aside to Unlogged, who I am going to assume is one person: First, please identify yourself. Also, I have a couple of e-mail addresses. Perhaps we could communicate one/one there. Finally, I am unwilling to give out any real-time locations to which anything could be mailed, although a cold fifth of Stoli Pepper would be nice, or money, which always works. I don't want to disrespect your intentions, but you must realise that I am marginally nuts. I have my moments. You never know what might set me off, nor what I might do once I arrived there. So: unless you can be more forthcoming, I will read your comments until I manage to unlearn to read. I won't respond, though, for I feel myself to be a bit disrespected by your persistent anonymity. Dass all, Unlogged. Peace out.)
That said and done, my last weekend at amazon.com is coming up Friday. No roses. The two women who seemed intent on running me off their turf have pretty much ceased and desisted; however, the fat one keeps shooting me the mal ojo, which I occasionally return. I've been told, mostly by my old mother, that I can look pretty feral when unguarded and feeling the piss rising. That hasn't stopped the fat one, though.
It's funny. I'm a slow "chuter"--a lot of the younger temporaries there are obsessed with "numbers", the stats posted hourly that tell you flat-out how many items you have scanned with that abominable hand-held device--but when four-thirty rolls around, the hour at which the temps are slacking off like the admitted slackers they are, yakking fuck this I wanna go home, I'm just getting started. No one is there, the chutes are full, the rows lit up like a Freddy Krueger Christmas, and I want to shift from a grinding second into sixth, chute myself three hundred items in the hour I don't have that would prove that yes, I can chute, well.
I suppose it's the nonspecific attention deficit in me. Lisa--therapist--left me a message that she'd tried to call me several times, and suspected that I hadn't received the messages from roommate Vanessa. She left that information for the person who would access it. I hope Vanessa heard it as well as I have. Today, I tried to return her call--couldn't, the receptionist's lines were backed up to God knows where. Lots of distress and desperation around this time, and crisis (which, to me, means having the cops punch your flimsy door in to ascertain that yes, you are alive and bitter, and just wanted someone to talk to; that lead to a bill with my name on it for the damage done, and a refusal by the police department to spring for it). Somewhat like a balloon filled with ether and bile, my anger with Lisa promptly dissipated when I learned that she had, on several occasions, tried to contact me. The paranoid in me (Gunderson, a prominent writer in the field, said that some borderline people experience brief, historically valid, periods of what one might call pseudo-paranoia, an canopy of bad feelings that qualifies as a body of acquired knowledge: I do this, I am fucked over, or close to it) was thinking that Lisa wished to test, without my consent, my ability to tolerate distress (we tend not to do that well, either) without going into crisis mode. Now, it's like this: she may have, a little or a lot, been considering this when she initially didn't return my somewhat distraught calls about Antabuse and unmanageable obligations. I let those fall where they did, and nothing that I know of happened that would qualify as crisis. Perhaps that's the kind of improvement the handlers over at Comp Care were hoping for. I just wrote a couple of miserable sentences. So chute me. I know if I try to think any further about this situation, the circuits will overload and fry like ticks on a griddle.
I have money in my wallet, trazadone in my backpack, and a medication management meeting in the vile cold early morning. I get my Klonopin script then, and my brown bag of legal drugs. I hope that Wellbutrin's in it. I'm feeling dislocated and low, and could use a mild ass-kick. The ubershrinks usually don't write Butrin for ppl with a history of either eating disorders (can cause the heart to short out, and I won't discuss that any further, though I could) or amphetamine abuse (both cause a rise in dopamine activity, though Butrin's activity is much milder). My sleek shrink won't write for more than 300 extended-release tabs a day. Once I was on six hundred, which went well with beer. But that's not currently a problem. Beer, that is: it's too chilly out, especially at night, to carry around.
So, there is money in my wallet and it's consumer-breath madness out there. I've been talking up the Blind Boys of Alabama to my dad, who is a gospel fanatic. He has a little collection of white Southern gospel, which can pretty much make me leave whatever room I'm in at the time, that he plays on his little CD player, when he retreats to his room to lie on the floor and ease his back, and whatever else that ails him. We've been together when the Boys have been televised, and I can tell that Dad's into them. I'm wondering if WallyWorld is selling their box set cheaper than the music stores on campus. I'd like to give him somthing that would make him happy. They're saying on CNN that CD's--certificates of deposit, that is--will get you a pitiful return in terms of interest, so although I concede the purchase of such an item would signify to him my intent to repay him and Ma for all they've done for me, the Blind Boys might be a more vital source of pleasure. The man has a bunch of unhappy genes. He gave some to me; I can't begrudge him that. What bugs me is his absolute abhorrence of behavioral medicine, that it's alright for his kid to be crazy, but not John D. Trying to ride out a foul genetic load has to deplete a person. It's happening to me. I can see it in my face, in my hair.
Dad can sing. He's the source of my musical inclinations, as was his own father before him. Grandpa was a drunk, but he played the organ. Music made that sour fellow smile. (I have a story about his funeral that's both amusing and wierd: the meat of that tale is me and my cousin Stacy sitting side by side, trying to will the old man in the casket before us breath. Us looking for the rise and fall of his stuffed cotton chest. And the dream I had later, at age ten, is with me today.) When I was very young, say nine or ten, I'd beg him to let me accompany him while he sang in church. He wouldn't do it--that sly old shy gene, or a childhood of psychic abuse made manifest--and I was seeking one of the few forms of glory that I could access. Even then.
I guess I'm gonna have to face the music. Literally. There is a guitar in my closet. My fingerpads are tender. Dad sometimes asks me to play the piano at his house. It's unplayably out of tune, but for some reason he wants to hear it. A few years back, I practised a lot. New Orleans-style funk and boogie, pretty much. Dr. John w/o the jazz inflections, Marcia Ball, Lee Ammons. I was good enough that music majors would sometimes pop into my practice cubby at the university and ask what venues I played. None, of course, but that soundstage in my mind, me jamming with myself and in time. I've never been adept at keeping time, with myself or anyone else--like an impatient horse, I was always champing at the beat. No pun intended there.
I've been given my ten-minute warning. God, I cannot wait for that Christmas present I suspect that the church folk are going to give me. Finding and paying an ISP will be on me, so I hope and pray that some form of work continues. I'll be up all freaking night. I know nothing about ISPs, but need, of course, to find the cheapest one.I know that BellSouth is out of the question--that's the one my parents use. It's slow as protein shit (proteins, meat or otherwise, tend to sit there and make you all kinds of sluggish for a week), so any advice the gentle reader can proffer--I'm presently in central KY--will be carefully considered.
Now it's two minutes and I'm dead. P and P, de Hoss
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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