Thursday, May 26, 2005
Dispatch from the Land of the Loud: Teenagers in the house. Just had to sic the librarian on them, but it doesn't look good. And it sounds worse.
Too bad I just can't take their empty little heads and smash them together and watch the pieces roll.
Self-help is for shite. Or some of us are beyond helping. Yesterday being Wednesday and the middle of the week, I drank a few beers and gave up the pretense of looking for any kind of work until Monday. Thinking about that--work--drains me. An hour or two to get there, the same to return, and endless volumes of fresh hell while I am there. Now, I know I'm not worth much these days. I worry about brain damage. Really. But since I can't seem to DO anything, let alone for a reasonable amount of money, it would appear to be useless to even try any more.
These library people really ought to take that 'Teen Chat' icon, and whatever idiocy it represents, down.
Major trouble concentrating here. These kids might as well be full-frontal miscegenating in the Land of the Loud, that's how distracting they are. (That trouble with the concentrating is a significant part of me not being able to do that annoying activity called 'work'. Nobody's willing to help me establish that for the record, though. I have tried.)
Don't have much to say. The relative peace that goes with being alone, even if the remainer of the apartment resembles a low-rent model condo, is about to be shattered. I'd like to know if I should act forbiddingly crazy when Gramma Outreach brings the potential roommate around. It would be great if this was another Sally's salvage job--somebody who already knows me by sight and is aware what a bountifully complex individual I am, what a rare vintage. Biodad says that I should continue to milk the situation for what it might yield, but I'm tired of having to answer to these people as I've been doing. School is looking like the only thing that might promise salvation. Salvacion'. I'm surrounded, now--these two little 'hos up front, and boys, two to a puter, on either side, and I'M NOT ALLOWED TO DO SHIT ABOUT IT.
Fuck these raised-in-caves little savage bastards. fatherfucking ho-bags. where are the iraqis when you need them?
Greetings from the Loud Room, in all of its concrete greenness. There are but four of us here now; it's the dinner hour. The usual suspects are probably eating.
I was at the folks' farm recently, got back to the Lex yesterday. The whole time, and despite my father's snappish mien, I was on task--training two foals, yearlings really, to lead, first at a walk and then a trot, without being pushed or dragged along. Initially, I'd balked at my mother's invitation to do this, sure I'd do something wrong and traumatise the creatures. They are about as loveable as loveable gets, gentle as your average Golden Retriever, and thoroughly green. And small--small enough to envelop with my big body, hold close, and whisper until the neck and chest musculature relaxes. I got this idea from a man who bred draft horses. When his mares started dropping foals, he'd pick them up like dogs (these are some heavy foals) and enfold them in his arms and carry them about his barn. His starting philosophy was based on getting the babies to trust him, and although I was working with yearlings, I could do the same thing. Enfold them. That's how small they are.
I didn't want to drink, either. I've said this before: horses are holy. A whole horde of illegal grooms would disagree--I saw them this winter as I was getting off work, in any one of the convenience stores at the corner of Vur-Sales and Alexandria. They'd be thoroughly drunk, and happy; I could pick out the words "cervesa" and "tequila" in their conversations. And I didn't get, as in "understand", this: horses training to race are usually pretty high-strung and can be dangerous to the careless handler. It would have taken about ten illegals to subdue a colt that didn't care to get with the program that day, or any other. Though I recognise some animals as incorrigible, I recognise also that calm, a certain decorum, and a firm hand if needed have their places. Trying to manhandle two-thousand pound animals is a useless undertaking.
I slept well. Dangerously well, on the high clean bed in the basement bedroom. There was one element of their set-up that I found disconcerting, and that was the wealth of insect legs, most probably crickets, strewn about the carpeting. There was a spider or several, crumpled up on their backs, and pillbugs in their defensive stances. I'd train the foals in the mornings and early evenings, so I had enough down time to watch television. (Somehow, the first day, I'd pulled something in my lower back: I'd been trying to arrange manure tubs in a circular fashion so that the public bathroom inside would be allowed to dry out and stop stinking. I knew who the culprits were, and just said to myself that they would have to find somewhere else in the dirt-flooree barn to do their business. My mother didn't care for my thinking there, and single-handedly put them as they had been before.) I had about 800 mgs of ibuprofen in me, and a heating pad on my back. I watched 'Millionaire' and some truly stupid soaps, and then Judge Judy. I took note of the cricket legs, and one whole bug, its antennae still waving and twitching, and that was when I decided that I needed to vacuum the rug, live bug and all.
So I did. Those antennae reached at something from childhood, perhaps discovering that a grasshopper had gotten itself hung up in my windbreaker when I was seven. My father sneered this off--he was mowing our little lawn--and said something about me being afraid of a 'little' bug. Today, I wonder if ppl's fear of and revulsion at basically harmless insects is hard-wired: some of them bite, others sting. Roaches are just plain furtive and dirty (though it was always funny when one wound up in some poor kid's ear). I don't know. I don't really dig insects, and have taken oddballs like walking sticks and praying mantii outside and away from the nursing homes where they inevitably, for some reason, showed up in the strangest places. I didn't like the sensation of them sitting on the palm of my hand. I didn't like the idea of killing them either. There was a time when I tolerated fruit flies--they hovered about my wastebasket on hot summer not so long ago. But bugs as a whole--they serve some preordained function of which I am not aware. I don't wish to be around them.
Some big rains came through when I was in Mt. Sterling, and now Garbage Creek looks to be much cleaner. Gramma Outreach was over today; she'd told me a little while ago that some of her "clients" collected pop and beer cans to recycle, for a few bucks. If I went after the west side of Garbage Creek and divested it of the metal in the overhanging trees, I might eventually become independently wealthy.
Gramma Outreach also got the ball rolling vis a vis me returning to school. She called the person with the right skills, and that person told her to tell me to get my transcripts together, and we'd go from there. (G.O. also wants me to push harder for disability. I'm ambivalent about this. Have to get a physical and a lengthy writeup from the lithe and pretty little shrink; some of this might helf. And I could do it for a while, I think, until the labeling associated with receiving guvm't services got to be too much of a cross to bear. My own cross is heavy, bites into my back. It has poisonous thorns, and my blood reels from the puncture. I'm told to pick it up, to greet it like a long-lost friend, and hoist it with grim pride, and keep humping on. Sometimes, I have to wonder about the wisdom of this.)
BTW, this is just an update. I'm not on fire today. Unlogged, if you're still out there, please gimme an e-mail. Right now, getting computer time is kind of hard, and if I don't reply in a timely fashion, it most probably means that I haven't found a computer to post from.
thank you, everyone that reads this. I recall getting an address for a critique group that I did not write down. maybe we writers should start one of our own.
glad to know you're out there,
czyhs
Monday, May 16, 2005
Just lost about fifteen minutes of my second and final session here by soliciting help on how to bring up an article I'd been viewing at the end of my first hour. No help there. Screaming Man--the name just came to me--was of no assistance whatsoever. I don't think he like me.
Downstairs, before I got started on the puters, I found some almost-new additions to the library. The first is entitled "The Clutter-Busting Handbok". Over my time @ motime, I'm sure I've talked, or tried to talk, about my problems with attention, sloth, messes and so on, particularly in the context of a very small bedroom. Before inspections, there has always been a huge rush on my part--something that causes me to envision myself as a giant, and very irritated, goose, flapping around and knocking dusty objects over--to create the appearance of neat and clean. Sometimes this involves hiding or otherwised getting rid of empty bottles, and sometimes not.
I've always been a bit of a mess. My mother rode me ceaselessly until I was about fourteen, then sort of ran out of the energy she needed to continue. Roommate situations--more often than not, disasters, because in addition to eating other people's food, I wouldn't clean. I'd take dirty dishes to the kitchen; that's about as far as my cleaning efforts went. I think I've been kicked out about three times because of this.
Sometimes I thought I enjoyed cleaning. This state of mind was almost always associated with amphetamine consumption, and most recently with the intake of a whole pot of Navy-strong coffee, plus some Prozac and a couple of Mini-Thinz. Cleaning was akin to ceaseless, sometimes sweaty activity, cleaning and recleaning, leaving footprints on some surface or other that had to be recleaned. I'd read that cleaning an entire home could work off 500 kCals, and that was always an incentive to keep moving, polishing, impulsively discarding, disinfecting, and so on.
But I don't really like it, I've never been good at it, nor at organising papers and clothing and the like, I've been berated for not being able to make a bed (this, at age twelve, by a snobby, distant relative by marriage, and downhill for me ever since--I mean, why make a bed when you're only going to get in it and mess it up again?), and for generally being "gross" (this meant living like a 26-year-old creatively-inclined, drug-addled man). These appreciations stay with you, meaning with me, and have in fact formed another sniping introject for me to hide from.
So, what do I do? I have a bad knee, so getting down and scrubbing anything is out of the question. I've been told that I'm about to get a new roommate (reaction: bad thoughts and worse words), so I have to scrub out the tub. Its condition doesn't bother me, but I'm about certain that it would bother most other females that are not strung out on crack, or shouldering six kids, or strung out and shouldering, and making huge messes everywhere. Yes, I've been outgrossed, and always by males. Anything to do with cigarettes and their residue is also gross to me, particularly when found in toilets and sinks. These images cause the bile to start rising.
I guess my dilemma is both how to stop others' bile from coming up, and making my room and other surrounds simple to negotiate, easy to dig through, and no longer such a compelling visual distraction that I can't get out of the house two hours after my morning bath.
I have piles. Have a hemorrhoid or two as well, but that's another rant. Piles, piles of clean clothes straight from the dryer, and dirty ones, clothes that don't fit and others that come close. There are no doors on my closet--potential rant in the wings--and there I see long-sleeved shirts of every description hanging like bodies in an an anatomists's lab. Shoes? The deaf little old fellow that is ostensibly the maintenance man for my building seems to believe that shoes don't belong in closets, and won't try to put my doors back on before I remove them. Don't normals leave shoes in their closets? In pairs, and some polished and shining, sure, but I've always been under the impression that closets were where shoes belong. Everything in its place, right? This is a bafflement of increasingly annoying proportions.
The old house is a dust machine. I don't know where the stuff comes from, and although I'm sure I could find out, I don't have the time to do so today. A feather duster won't cut it. I have a lot of coinage on both of my bureaus, lots. The Kroger machine would stroke out if I took them to it. I have keys, tweezers, sometimes thumbtacks (for holding up my black curtains), burnt-down incense, waxy earplugs, and other things there too. It's hard to dust around all that. Looking at it gives me a headache, and the introjects chime in behind it: deFECtive, deFECtive, doesn't even know how to make a bed.
The bottle/can problem is now laying low--in part, because my bellicose neighbor Frank 0 collects underage fast-food workers and gives them alcohol, and has thus brought about a few unsolicited inspections. But sometimes it is a problem, near-empties spilling their last onto my filthy rug, where they live under the bed, so whenever this particular problem develops, I'm quick to take them out at night and put them in someone else's Rosie Recycler.
I've just been warned. Coercion works with me. This is not to say that I enjoy it, but I have to get off this computer or lose this post. Something like that happened yesterday. It's that simple.
From where nothing is simple at all,
crzyhss
Cold here. Could be autumn coughed up from the southern hemisphere, grey and almost windy, garbage running like water. I have an interesting aside on this little topic, and unless I forget to, will tack it in here later on.
Some days there is just about nothing. I'm starting to hurt for money, although I'm starting to get that a person who has historically been bad with money is not likely to win the lottery, or otherwise be gifted with that kind of green that would, properly spent, make the remainder of their life a lot less aggravating and sloppy. There are times when I almost understand the reasoning of people with too much money: they might be pretty miserable at three o'clock in the morning, but the other 23 hours can be spent actively forgetting just how terrible they feel at the core.
Things. They can be entertaining, even though numerous sages have, across the years as we know them, have said that if people can't entertain themselves, by themselves, they must themselves be kind of boring. There are occasions when I would like to have things, such as homes and perhaps a car to be garaged in each one; horses, of course, though not so many that I could not give each a lot of 1:1 love; cosmetic surgery--if I ever complete my RN, I think I'd go directly to cosmetic surgical consulting and as a perk there, get free "work" done whenever I so desired; big dogs; a personal trainer, a top-of-the-line riding instructor; comfort things like fireplaces and walk-in closets, and maybe a maid or three to cure my ADD.
Lots of silver. Never-ending Antabuse (or a free liver waiting just for me, so I could go on in the madness). Fresh flowers and koi fish and dreadlock extensions. No more debt, no more bills, minor bling in silver forever and a forest of expensive guitars.
Someone to fix my brain. Friends as installations, draped and slurred over furniture I can't yet imagine, furniture being one of those subschemata that I never really tried to fill out. (I mean, how can I produce a novel that doesn't contain one room description or brand name?). Stupid, hazy weeks at a time with these friends in a shapeless palace where the heavy black drapes are always closed. I'm thinking Keith Richard's Moroccan years, with a Dead vibe and a punk undertow, and a Christian guru at the ready, there to absolve us all.
Today, I was reading something in a weekly rag by a local dilletante, something about an after-party party, struggling to walk there although guitars and beer were waiting. I'm taking this out of context because I truly enjoyed the same thing myself. Staggering toward a dawn that always be blacked out by thrift-store sheets strung in layers across basement windows. Doing some more lines, passing jugs and jugs of cheap wine, and letting the music, however one wishes to describe it, continue until all of us, whoever we were, or are, fall down.
I guess I want to buy my youth back. Drop some bucks on me, I'd have the work done, pay off all my debts, and go back to school, do it right, for some edification of my own. The future is galloping along, or is maybe blinking apace between satellites and over cables and wires. Blurbs and encapsulations amaze me. They give me hope, thoughts that if I can slug on through the bloodclot miseries of the days I inhabit now, I might get my hands on some peace of mind.
In the first paragraph, I mentioned something about garbage and wind.
Almost twenty years ago, I was walking east on Fairmount Ave., Philadephia, on the sidewalk in front of the abandoned prison. A skeletal girl in thrift shop drag and stenciled army boots, my elaborate hairdo shattering with every gust of springtime wind. This was a real wind, warm, sudden, strong enough to push both me and the garbage that moved about my legs and torso with me. And there happened to be a guy with a couple of cameras nearby. He ran to where he directly face me, and started shooting, and the next day, my picture was in the Inquirer--girl chased by garbage.
And it's been that way ever since.
ch
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Muy bad, this place. GOD THESE MOTHERFUCKERS ARE LOUD. AND FOR NO REASON. WERE THEY RAISED IN CAVES? What ever happened to "Shhhh"? I cannot wait until I have my own computer. Then, I presume, I would not have to resort to weak expletives. Then, I presume, I could get some thought and writing done. Then, I would not have to blow chances for a post of the day my first or second sentence out of the gate.
I wanted to talk about back fat. This is an aberration in the female physique most often seen in "before" shots of some well-paid cosmetic surgeon's expertise with my friend the giant suction cannula. Oh, for some lipo. But I won't get started on that topic, there is nothing I can do about it save in my dreams: win "Millionaire"--I've done that a few times. Take up meth manufacture. Forget prostitution--no market for fat aging women.
Buy underwear. Wear it for a couple of days and sell it on e-Bay later. I go commando and have about since about age fifteen. I have my reasons. But I could be persuaded to don some tacky lace things, from the local Dollar Store, size nine the last time I wore any, which was to church. There was something just WRONG about commando in church. But I'd do it. If I had a computer.
Back to underwear: I now have breasts, a size C. Too bad it's a 38 C--that's offensive lineman territory. (The old roommate Vanessa, last seen on her perpetually drunken toyboy's lawn. She was mowing it, and in short shorts, thereby saving the drunk from a bad arterial bleed. This Vanessa wears a size 38 D, and is five foot four inches tall. I'm not there yet. I mean, I'm a lot taller.) There is no joy in these breasts. They are, for the most part the kind of fat a person gains from sloth and drinking, with the possible addition of estrogen in high circulation. This, too, can be traced to drinking: the liver isn't doing what it is supposed to. It isn't able to clear the estrogen from the blood, and as a result, I am growing breasts. I used to want breasts more than I wanted drugs, beer, or the ogle-eyed admirations of various club kids, and later, lawyers.
I went to TJ Maxx this weekend, for the express purpose of buying a bra or two that fit. And I found some, two, maybe more if they had them in black. (Which is a kind of stupid idea, given that women interested in appearing "sexy", even if they are not, wear black brassieres. I am not a sexy person. I probably never was.) These garments fit me in a way that no bra approached when I was thin, or even "normal" in terms of the way some of look at our bodies. When I was five nine, a long-muscled 140 and a stone size eight in jeans, my size As hung like rotten fruit from my torso. There was no bra on the face of the planet that was designed to accommodate my little uglies, permanently droopy from sleeping my stomach and set wide apart. (There is a bit of veritas in the sleep-stomach theory--I saw in a National Geographic an African tribe whose men make women wear boards on their chests during puberty; apparently the droop/slope/slide toward the navel is considered attractive.) Once--I think I was about twenty--some absolute boob, if one will pardon the obvious bastardisation of a useful metaphor, grilled me on the subject of whether or not I had had kids. He was sure I had some stashed away in the attic, a few more in the basement, and maybe another finally noticed and snatched up by Social Services. I was skinny. Looking GOOD. Long, lean, absolutely titless except for these little bumps on the middle of my bony torso. And pale as skim milk. And here was this punklet, accusing me of spewing them out en masse. Or maybe he thought I started early. Who knows.
He left when I told him that the bumps were a highly unusual form of melanoma. And after a few shots of whatever was lying around, I was okay.
I was twenty-six, still slender, when I became convinced one night that I had breast cancer. No family history, but lumpy enough, and me on the ass end of a five-day run. In Philadelphia, where it is acceptable enough for some people to have shrinks that double as babysitters, I took my very own doctoral student with me the day I had a mammogram, which hurts enough to put off another for like fifteen years, and she came with me the day my physician, a kindly Italian woman, delivered the results. Fibrocystic syndrome; no biggie. I have since learned a lot about fibrocystic syndrome, and it can develop into a biggie, particularly when fed by drugs, alcohol and immense self-loathing--plus coffee. The lumps are there; I know it. They are racing with my fibrotic liver to suck like crackheads on what's left of my soul.
And now let's forget tits: throughout this piece, there has been an undertow of alcoholism. Though I was earlier thinking I would be just peachy, maybe even close to fine, if someone would give me the money to buy first Antabuse, then Hoodia--an appetite suppressant that actually works. Alcohol has not been my friend. Basically, it has twisted my mind and brain, wringing and warping both into this messy gelationous thing that just dont ack right. If ever I had a useful potential or two or so, alcohol, and to a lesser extent, benzos and meth, have been on a long slash and burn. Search and destroy, and defoliate, leaving my brain as the metaphorical equivalent of that coneheaded, bug-eyed Baby Agent Orange.
You saw him, didn't you? He ain't fat, but he is, well, me.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Tried twice and failed to get up and out a reasoned essay on My Worst Boss. Both times, I got into giving background, both my own and that of the nursing home culture, and both times, unintentional leg movements--I tend to shift and squirm a lot, particularly if there are disruptions, like loud conversation and even worse paint jobs, in effect--knocked me off the screen. I had to reboot, and thus have a good excuse to fail, at least here, to get out a set of lucid reasons why this woman, one Carolyn Maggard of Lexington, Ky--is a bad boss.
These have nothing to do with her persona--old biker chick-slash-whore going to seed, dressed in black where white has been the more usual color for aeons. Flat black dye job on top of a half-grown-out perm. An old rose tattoo on an old teat hanging (I noticed this while she was giving me a Hep B vaccine) and heavy drugstore perfume. Mouth a red gash, yellow teeth stained with lipstick. And a physique that suggests a predilection for corsets.
I'm all for self-expression in terms of body modification and clothing, although I cannot, to this date, look swirling gum in the face; I must run, hide, figure out how to remove myself from that particular situation. But on the day the old 'ho in ankle boots decided, on the basis of a conniving patient's accusations, to fire me, there was no gum. The woman had, that day, called me herself, at about noon, telling me that we needed to "discuss" something before I could work again. This was on a Tuesday; I had worked last Sunday. The patient, lucid and vicious and conniving when she found it necessary to be, had accused me of drinking one of her sodas in front of her. I'm lucid; she's lucid. Theft has never been my thing. And yet she apparently saw fit to inform three ranking administrators that I had drunk her soda in front of her. And I don't even like Seven-Up.
This is someone who got an aide fired after claiming that the woman, working with a nurse, had fondled her while applying diaper rash balm to the groin area. (The nurse kept her job. This is, BTW, SOP in most of these places.) Carolyn Maggard, of course, believes in understaffing, old girls' networks, the power of the clique, and the value of an employee being honest about her history of depression and polyaddiction. When she called me to ask me to come in to discuss the patient's claims, she identified herself as "Carolyn Maggard, from Hieronymus Bosch Place"--as if I were in some condition or other that would cause me to forget where I worked. Let me note here that my attendance was never a problem, nor was coming to the workplace under the influence of alcohol or illegal drugs. I knew who she was, though she almost never said hello in the hallway, and she knew I was the employee, one of two, with a history of flagrant substance abuse. I knew, though she might not have been aware that I did, that an official inspection was coming up, and that part of such an inspection involved going through the charts of persons employed by "Bosch". Bosch itself had a stinky rep, and perhaps in order to clean that stink up a bit, she used a baseless (and stupid) allegation to get rid of one problem. (The other known substance abuser, Saddam Cocaine, a woman, had once been a CMA, but lost her certification some years ago because of drugs. That's it; all I know is that it had to do with drugs, and this woman was abrasive, contemptuous, as we had worked elsewhere when I was actively usuing.
And it is critical that I log off now, or I wont be able to get this much off and out. Later
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
I need some heavy guidance, as in stepwise, graded assignments with feedback upon completeion. Got Prozac, which doesn't do much for my depression except present for the enjoyment of all involved a series of false bottoms when removed for a week or two. I do not know what to do about work. That much is its own rock formation. I can't get a decent helping job (such as live-in residential counselor, night shift) because of my little record. My bad, or is that 'muy bad'? I don't think the television writers know either. Can't work with horses because of my inability to get to them. I've burned all of my nursing home bridges (but must still ask this: I'm not abusive, and so many workers at the entry levels of those facilities are.) I can't "make rate"(s), and do not function well under the guillotine of pressure at all. So, what else? I could incorporate myself, say as a form-filler, or, say, a mole photographer (you're supposed to have this done every month to check for changes in moles and freckles, and I recognised a need while inspecting a funny spot on the sole of my foot today--I have no one to take pictures of MY spots. So I imaging others may not either. Oh, the legalities.)
I'd like to do what is absolutely necessary and nothing further to get started in non-fiction. A child of the red pen generation, I'm sure I'd have to do a semester or two just to catch up to the computer people. Truth is I don't know. Every day, something else about as intelligible as this little Spanish girl's muttering to herself directly to my left comes along. (Today, I caught a Geico commercial featuring my first love, Speed Racer. Wonder where they got the rights to that. It brightened my day, until I caved into some quixotic yet powerful need to gorge. Nessie is no longer in the house, and I'm still buying and bingeing. It's a lot harder than I'd been thinking it would be. Go, Speed Racer.)
Yesterday afternoon I was buying beer. Buying beer is not fun these days, nothing a lady with nothing but time on her hands would joyously cop to. Anyway, I noted a child, a tan little girl, down and to my right. I smiled at her and she smiled back (note: this doesn't happen often). Then I got a peripheral look at her mother, who had been a direct supervisor of mine at the last circle of hell where I worked for two weeks early this year. I liked the mother. The mother was kind enough to me. But as is so often true in encounters where someone encounters someone who they had once worked with, discomfort took over. And I gave her some ammo, in the form of the sixpack in my hand. (Well, missy, you've been a nurse for fifteen years. you've always been a good little employee, you have a big bold heart, but nevertheless will take your sighting of that old drunk J. back to that snakepit where you get paid less on the hour than any other nurse in town.)
Say: what's a good site to post a sketch of your worst boss ever? The usual searches didn't help me a bit. I don't have time, and so, want some site names, and promise to post no fiction while there.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
With the money I had left over, I hit the Spanish thrift store, the one where the old mamacita has to write out how much things cost for prospective buyers. I have conceced that I must buy clothes that fit me now, and not off the rack, for I don't want to be a shapeless and lumbering size 15/16 any longer than I must. Being long and lean and bony in places bought for me only transitory attention--when the drugs and drink washed out of our systems, we were left, for that indefinite moment, with who we were: scared kids. My lower lip, pale without its overdrawn black laquer, trembled more often than it should have. Boys (and the occasional slumming lawyer) saw this, and edged away.
Now I'm just fat. The little shrink that I see for medication modulation made reference to my age in group today, and although I hope I never see this particular cluster of mouth-breathing, lip-smacking persons again--I sat there, cupping my ears, for I had one on each side--I was greatly offended. The narcissist inside took the opportunity to bring to light the fact that I was often taken for being in my mid-twenties as recently as three years ago. Then, collapse across all vectors. My god I must do something about this visible aging that stares me back in the mornings, all full of new creases, old ones that now threaten to match up and grid, and the coarse hairs so juicy and fulfilling to pluck out, yet so disgusting to finger and regard.
So I look my age now. That would be fine if I were a ground-breaking neuroscientist, equine vet, the Pope, or even a working journalist. The kind of journalism that sells today seems easy enough to write--like a medical procedure, watch one, do one, see one. I might to try to address my gonzo slant to issues peripheral to vanity, its anchor to dark, unnatural and otherworldy thought systems. I might write about the healing properties of raw foodism, about antioxydants, each more powerful than the one before it, sluicing through the juicer to wage a war in defense of my pink insides.
What good are mirrors? I think they should be placed in storage. Yes, I am fat. I will be this way for some time, as it didn't take me a week to put it on, and so will remain, more insidious, longer with each cycle of up and down. So why do I need to challenge what I know will look hoodedly back at me, bad haircut like so much chop on an alginate sea, and these ridiculous glasses. I dyed my hair today oh boy. Warm brown appears closer to black. I doubt if I have the funds to try to fix it again. I must get my hands on some money.
For now I have a thunderous body--from the distance that only bad vision can provide, it seems as though a thick, wet and thoroughly unwieldly apron has been grafted me during sleep. Went to bed with ribs showing, and woke again with this thing of putty cocooning my torso. I could take a stab, literally, at cutting if off--have a look at the anatomy, see what can be cut and what cannot, and start cutting. That would put me in the hospital pretty quick; someone would fix it with lumpy roadmaps of keloid and bad jugdement by proxy, and then I'd be sent packing to the bin, and my non-existence would be reinitiated once they saw fit to release me.
I should not look at myself too closely. I fear that much of the problem is beer, trazadone munchies, and a wack thyroid. The sleek little ocelot of a shrink once again failed to write me a script to have a thyroid panel drawn. About the ADD that slings my thoughts and their fragments about like a mad chef tossing a salad, all she can say is that ppl with long histories of substance abuse will experience unsettling phenomena that cry for a one-pill resolution. Some of these are as follows: placing one's eyeglasses in the refrigerator while sober; the inability to arrange one's dresser drawers in meaningful fashion--socks here, psychotropic drugs there, unopened mail in a special place, and enough cosmetics to fill a Texas drug store all clamoring for space in what used to be a computer desk. I look at them, their smeary cases and two-dollar price tags, know my eyes to be unsuitable for lining any more what with their billowing droopage of upper lid, goofy glasses to make them seem smaller, and wary, possibly hostile slant. I wish I'd never been beautiful for a second. Never having trumps having and losing almost anything. There there is that awful business of compare/contrast. I have always suffered badly beneath its hand.
J, J & M, I am depressed. To the point of wanting to contract a swift and murderous disease. To wanting to incur an injury that would put me in an insensate realm, to grow stink and bedsores and never know a thing. I can't work. In fact, I have learned to hate the idea of working, because working means being fired, or being asked to withdraw, asked to resign, nothing personal, just business, you didn't make your quota.
I am in the Land of the Loud, and there are these two barrel-chested ladies in the reading section just behind the puter lab. They are bellowing at one another, and if I asked them to tone it down, they'd pull the race card and I'd be told nicely to leave by one of the workers.
The idea of work is like the idea of a boyfriend: nice to think about when you're lonelier than usual, or have just been terminated and have grown tired of the taste of your wounds. Being employed by someone else involves repetition, evaluation, heavy boredom, a lot of prayers, and the spectre of that big old guillotine primed to fall on your neck. Having a boyfriend involves either a lot of drink or none, constraints on your time not unlike those you find with most ordinary jobs. You will most likely not be asked to have sex on your job, but you will overhear a lot about the subject, and where the cute boys used to look at you sideways and smile, toothless old men now do the same. Should you find a boyfriend, he will very shortly be after you for sex. He will do this in any number of ways, ways on which I would elaborate given silence and time here. Should you refuse, he will be gone, and though you will be secretly glad on many levels, the strongest and most stealthy element remains: you were just there, next to useless anyway, you'll die that way and so forGET you.
I'm tired of this professional mental patient horse excrement.
I want another chance about as much as I don't want to be here. I can't kill myself, and will accept cancer, even stigmatic AIDS, perhaps an embarrasment of cirrhosis. That shrink, she sat there in her slenderness and money and basically denied me the chance to work with her 1:1 and demonstrably improve my brain function. I used to like her. I still respect her. And I caught myself today moving toward childish confrontation, outright argument, over improving sleep and blah blah and so on. That was an out-of-body moment. (Recently, I have been having dreams in which the opportunity for confrontation with others arises, and what I want to say is, like a familiar bus or train, there, right on time.)
I have been warned. If the allergens lay low, I might go downtown. Once again, I may be able to say, Almost cut my hair, happened today.
Sometimes I weep for the old music, for the chance to enjoy it again
FTS,
ch
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
By the standards that bear most weight in legal and medical practice, I am alive. My body is, I mean, and why couldn't I have just said that? Because the brain is doped with the wrong medication and absent of any other compound that might make it ack right, or at least better, as they say in these parts. Vague and vaguer. This is taking an unbearable shape already.
I just fired myself from amazon.com: wasn't gonna make a perfectly reasonable rate, one that barely-legal (and often short) Hispanics address with ease. Had blisters and eyestrain and the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome from holding and shooting a scanner all night. Got no sleep. Ironically, did get on well enough with just enough ppl so that the job wasn't entirely loathesome. Order-picking, that is. Some day I'm gonna have to apply myself to the task of telling all the vigorous consumers out there what their books and CDs and DVDs and (DDs and VDs and all that alphabet soup) go through at the hands of those who pick them before they are actually consumed. Doesn't quite equal the tricks restaurant workers pull on their public, but can be made undeadly boring nonetheless.
I'd shell out ten bucks for a cab to the plant, and four to some stranger eight, nine, ten hours later to take me to my residence. Once I ditched the Seroquel habit, if not the pills themselves, I'd find the trazadone inadequate to tackle a sensorium vibrating on legal stimulants, and so took to augmenting those with a deuce of horse piss, nicely chilled, and if my allergies didn't get me, sleep hard and dead until at least two p.m. Sometimes I would manage to catch a bus. (The buses here run once an hour, BTW, and taking one cuts into my sleep. Nobody ever accused me of having common sense.)
To the chase, then: couldn't bear to be fired, even though that eventuality registered as purely business, no hard feelings, we'll just recruit a bunch more students and/or Mexicans and cut about a fourth of them loose--I just bet that that last is called 'purging'. Which I haven't done for a good stretch, and which, in the context of hire/fire might just as well be designated the cleansing of unfit worker bees. I NCNS'd twice in a row, and insodoing terminated that job, and most likely, any other with the amazon outfit.
And I caught Vanessa moving out on the sly. According to Vanessa, she just couldn't take "it" any longer. This was on Saturday. I'd been waiting on a cab at a Rite-Aid, when I saw this beat-down, chlorinated, low-riding little truck quiver to a halt outside the store. Nessie was at the wheel. The truck disgorged--purged itself?--of one drunken woman-beater truck owner, who, according to Nessie, never drove when he was drunk, so by that definition he was already wasted at four in the afternoon. He entered the store and picked up a fifth of something, got carded. Being "almost thirty", as he rudely told the clerk, wasn't buying any booze, so he dug for, and produced, identification. I'd thought at the time that it'd be funny if he approached me to buy the stuff for him, for him and Nessie to guzzle before bumping ugly bellies later on. But that didn't happen. Too bad that was.
They hied it to Nessie's and my apartment some minutes before my cab pulled up. I was giving the driver directions to the duplex, and noticed that my ususl choice of landmarks, flag and wreath, were missing. Inside, I found Nessie, totalled, and her assault weapon, who was trying to lift something heavy and failed something awful. (Drunks shouldn't be trying to lift shit--trust me on this issue, for I am well-acquainted with it.)
So, yesterday--two whole days, to embarrass myself in this context of public--it occurred to me that the new phone system that was provided me when Nessie kidnapped her own had gone blinky about three days after she took hers to her room. My message was to be the only one. Hah! The devious Nessie was finally apprehended early last week, when she came in early in the morning to listen to her messages. Sure, she said, overly gracious, she'd place the phone in the shared living space. Meaning:
She deprived me of my messages for next to a month, to prevent me from hearing any that might have been left by a potential landlord. For a month. I am lucky that this didn't compute until she was gone, because with my work/no work situation, and because I have old parents, and because sometimes friends from home call, I had reason to be as pissed off on Saturday, at least, as I am now. Pissed because all this time I'd let myself believe that maybe we were moving toward a more easy co-existence. Oh what a fool am I.
Well, fuck--I was having a hard time enduring mass contempt in the shape and form in which her family could be counted to deliver it to me. Dag, my brain is soft. I'm at that point referenced in many, many songs: to believe in this living/is such a hard way to go.
My folky blues roots are showing. And I have to dye my hair. Not so much optimism these pollen-riddled days.
c h
will try to be more consistent here
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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