Friday, October 28, 2005
Unlogged:
I heard the news, OH BOY! (Hotmail is for some reason inaccessible right now, so I've logged on elsewhere and resorted to this.) My ma told me, over the phone, and my dad had a cow, which must have been difficult at the least, and I thank you so much. I screamed, pounded on my thighs, acted as though I had scored a much-needed touchdown on Monday Night Football--punching the air, you know. I don't think I've ever had such a positive thrust of emotion, or at least not one I can remember right now.
My dad has set it up, played with it a bit, and seems satisfied via phone.
So I must find work, to pay an ISP. I need guidance, in both areas. My dad the former computer scientist insists that the cheaper ISPs let you pay their low rates for about 3 months, then jack them up to a point commensurate with the big guys. This fraction of my need will take some phone research, and oh boy do I hate that. The work part is even harder: the nice-lady caseworker is back, tsunami'd with work, and cannot take me right now to apply for a McJob, where she knows ppl. She'd explain that I'm not suited for running the register, and not that I'm a thief either--just too nervous, too shy, regardless of what droogs I have in me. The job would probably allow me to wander around the area where the customers eat, and pick up their trash, wipe the tables, clean the bathrooms and supply those with the toilet paper that has always been absent those times that I could afford to eat there. And the McTrays: don't know about your neck of the woods, but around here, nobody picks them up, let alone washes them. I'd have to sacrifice some much-prized confidentiality, and allow myself to be treated like the Down's syndrome baggers at Kroger's--but I'd have enough in hand to swing an ISP. That is, I think I would. Dunno about the cable, though: if I could afford 100 channels, I'd start feeling like a big shot, and maybe get really lazy.
If I can access Hotmail, I'm going to try out their personal calendar option. I can't seem to keep important stuff straight, not that I ever could; this tendency is more of a problem these days, as I've a fire beneath my butt to be working on my medical transcriptionist certification, in my own apartment, a year or so from this date. Just need to get through the winter gas prices. Use these bastids, if it comes to that. (When I try to 'get', let alone 'keep' things 'straight', I usually reach for the nearest scrap of paper, borrow, or burrow for, a pen, and scribble. Jam the paper someplace I think I'll recall. Don't recall, and hence you get the picture. When I try to make lists, I brainstorm first, and then try--try so hard my brain cells ache in concert, as though they have tried to bench something heavy, and failed miserably--to assign each item some kind of value. Sometimes simply finding clothes that fit--last night, put away summer clothing and other clothes that I can no longer wear due to rapid weight gain--is an item in and of itself; so I tried to thin out my options.
Lemme tell you, this activity was not satisfying. Took me a week to locate the number of an acquaintence's boss, a lawyer who might be able to make some free phone calls and erase, by basically threatening each individual he'd reach, two or three awful nursing home references. Getting this information was a wonderful thing; finding it was something else. Why should I be afraid of having two possibly libelous (or slanderous; forget the difference) references erased? That's just silly, and I am too old for silly.
I'm going to throw around some names here, real names of businesses and people. I interviewed at the medium-high-end store Kohl's, for a night-stock position, this Monday. The portly young fellow who interviewed me was called 'Randy', and didn't seem terribly enthusiastic,especially when I drew a blank on the deceased great-aunt, who I said I'd cared for until the bitter, metastatic end--all of my great-aunts are long-dead, and I cared for not a one, although I'm sure each had her good points. I recovered, I suppose, but gracelessly and out of time. (My 'survey', which was actually a personality test, should have indicated that I am both thoughtful and honest. Even though I do lie when Ego says it's necessary. Ego ought to shut up, but hardly ever does, even when I am in dire need of a job.)
He said he'd get with me in a 'couple' of days, either way. Nice of him, but I take 'couple' to mean 'two', and 'several' to mean a threesome, or four, but never five. Randy said a 'couple'. I called him yesterday, which equalled 'several'. He was cranky, and even though I indicated that I was still interested in the position--an understatement--his truculence made it across the wire with little effort. Dude doesn't want me, but must interview a few more cretins, I suppose, before he decides if I will 'do', or not.
Dude, I'm 'doing' NOTHING, and it's frickin killing me. Making me fatter, at any rate: all that cortisol, you know, and the binges, with their invisible calories hanging around. (The weather in da Lex is not can-collecting weather. Who wants to slop around Litterville picking up slimy cans full of Gaaa knows what? Plus, it's cold out there, out here, whatever. I don't care for extremes of weather.)
Today, I must turn in an application at a somewhat local Rite-Aid (I think the company's HQ is in Philadelphia, or nearby, which makes the idea of being in the joint for more than an hour tolerable.). A skinny little assistant manager indicated that the place--large for a Rite-Aid, even roomy--needed some help. To talk to someone called 'Tom', a big shot, I guess. And I still do not want to TOUCH that register, handle other ppl's money (bad memories there: at 15, 16, I worked summers at a local amusement park called Great Adventure. I ran a register, and cleaned hotdog grills with Seven-Up when I had the time. At the end of my shift, I took my money to a room full of low light and long tables, to count it. Regardless of how diligent I'd thought I'd been, I was either egregiously short, or over. When I was 17, though, I took to stealing a little, in order to finance weed and speed. When I was 17, I didn't care if I was short, over, or even occasionally even). The notion of facing customers, swiping their credit cards, carding them when presented with requests for cigarettes or liquor, bouncing the occasional drunk--none of that appeals to me. I'm sure it would suck the private parts of recently deceased farm animals. Smile at them? Say, 'Have a nice day'? I think I am better suited to fly the next space shuttle, or sit on the Supreme Court, or some damn thing that doesn't automatically demand sappy and fake behavior.
If they'd let me STOCK, or price things, or something that didn't involve much contact with live people, yeah, I think I could manage a smile. Anything to pay for an ISP, and, eventually, Botox.
I'm off now, to set up a new blog, I hope. I accept that my references to the resurgence of a truly nasty habit are off-putting. Vomit like dreadlocks, hah? I guess I didn't get out of the way quick enough.
c h, amanitadaturabrown recluse.
Thanks so much again, Unlogged. You are cool, blessed, a blessing. Hope to get the gift to the dingeon this weekend.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Hey, Unlogged--
Good to hear it. With some luck, which has lately been in short supply, I'll soon be able to afford an ISP.
No-work blues causing me much trouble. I've applied for bullshit jobs--if I wasn't referring to them as "bullshit", maybe the stars would see fit for me to get one or two, keep the second a big fat secret from my minders, whom I hope to escape this coming spring, if the oil prices are down and I can afford to do so.
And if I had a second job, what would I do with my profits? Why store them away, of course. Get a van: that's been popping up on the old screen lately--I was thumbing on a busy road into town, bus service here being what it is, and this old fat guy in such a vehicle picked me up and told me that the thing sleeps four. And so I have developed this low-grade obsession--with a van, and plenty of blankets, I'll never be assessed rent, can again take advantage of social services agencies like God's Pantry, and perhaps evade the taxes that underwrite sports such as war.
But oh yeah--the puter. Where would I put it in a van?
For the sake and safety of the reader, I'm going to put my adventures in self-induced vomitng someplace else. Some ppl can't hack that kind of thing. (Actually I'm hoping that that blog, to be entitled 'vomitorium', will attract the attention of those professionals who deal with treating eating disorders. Mine has taken a flying leap from an occasional, even planful indulgence to something I just can't stop myself from doing, even though the ghost calories (Happy Hallowe'en, ya wiccans and others if you're out there) manage to make it into my fat cells by way of some occult mechanism I can't come close to understanding. Just don't do it, I guess is the answr. i don't want to have to fool with any more 12-step groups. No 'Anonymous' no more.
This has been a bad week. I'll go in reverse here, and try not to digress, although not digression is hard for me when I'm like this. Today is Sunday. So far, nothing awful has happened; I've been taking Seroquel, samples given to me by my psych to get me through the periods when I have no trazadone. Seroquel has a talent for damping down the thorns to turn everything an uneventful grey, even though there have been numerous events, couch-biting while screaming 'F----------------ck' outstanding. I have a ways to go here, for an 'event' just might rear its ugly little head. So, it's Sunday. Nothing going on, except that my minders, whom I'll out here as this not-for-profit MH organisation called 'New Beginnings of the Bluegrass' has blocked my phone so that I cannot call my parents. I called the office last night, and left the answering maching there an icy, acid message, for my relationship with my parents, for all its variations, is my closest here, and to have it slashed just b/c no one will hire me (please believe that I am trying hard here) is just plain wrong.
(This New Beginnings outfit provides cheap housing for the 'chronically mentally ill', btw. I don't see myself that way, but existing under its auspices has increased my investment in the so-called 'sick role' by fathoms and miles. I'm a lot sicker now, I think, then when I agreed to enter the program. I'd do better in a halfway house, a sober house, whatever you want to call such a place, if certain conditions were in place, i.e. no gum-cracking roommate. I'd probably, despite my talent for getting fired, do better on my own. Despite the roof and pillow and access to Section 8, the outfit angers me hugely at times. Now is one of those occasions.)
Yesterday was Saturday, cold, brisk, not made for walking. I wound up walking anyway, as I had no food left (guess why) and had to stand in da Lex's equvalent of a cheese line to get some food. Most of the ppl I waited with were homeless, by choice. One, a man of about fifty, started talking to me b/c as he said, he noticed that I 'wasn't from around [here]' (get that a lot) and that I 'sounded' intelligent. Lately I tend to revise that observation to 'overeducated'. Anyway, we talked, and after I had collected my bag of stale breads, I began back toward the library; he flagged me down and asked me if I wanted to drink a forty. I waffled on this, said yes, and after the man had purchased two of the same, we went back to his dwelling.
which was a car, didn't run, was stuck between semi trailers that had been left there to rot. The guy had to throw out a couple of blankets, a lot of trash, and after he'd done that, we took our seats up front. i was stuck behind the driver's wheel; the car didn't run. some irony there. We unscrewed the caps of the beer and started talking--it was clear to me that the guy's brain had once worked pretty well, and might be salvageable if he sought treatment at the local clinic for poor people, got some medication. I'd formed my diagnosis--bipolar, with periods of psychosis. He caught on to what I was doing. I was impressed. He went on to state, three times, that he was fine, that he wanted no medication. I didn't exactly agree, but wanted a drinking partner, and so shut up about that.
Friday I'd tried to sell some CDS. More on the subject as I go backward. I had those in hand yesterday, was thinking about travelling out Versailles Rd. to a pawnshop there. I had my driver's license on me, which is yet another piece of irony to revisit. Lots of irony coming down like acid rain. The dude, called Paul, said he knew of a place that might take some, so we walked, over two bridges, to meadowthorpe, a nasty little neighborhood where I'd lived for a couple months prior to an amicable eviction. We walked, we walked; we got to Pop's, and the propietor, apparently Pop himself, agreed to take three for a dollar apiece; though the others worked, Pop explained that his customers didn't like 'em scratched, which the others admittedly were.
With my newly-acquired three bucks, and Paul's one remaining, we bought another pair of forties and walked further, to a place where we could drink in peace. (Be reminded that I don't want any further contact with our friendly local police.) We gabbled; he had this strange habit of repeating things three or four times apiece. This was irksome, so I finished mine, fully intent on writing about this experience later.
I don't have time. I reached a bus stop, a bus came, I got on it, and then I went back to the nabe. That was when I found out about my phne, for Mama Rose had called me--I'd emailed her about my not being able to reach her some time eariler. I guess that little bit of beer had made me tipsy, for I was more than curt toward her--she was in agreement with New F. Beginnings, Bluegrass, Inc. Said I should be grateful. Sounded like she'd been going to AA, even though she has never drunk much. I agree that I was being wretched, but last night, was not capable of feeling the same.
Borrowed four bucks and a Klonopin from my neighbor. I needed to knock myself out, and so I did, after she took a look at my rear view--in clothes, of course--and said that yeah, I did look like a size 16. Whew--not what I needed then.
so I bought, drank the beer, on top of a Seroquel and a few other things, I forget what.
I wish I could forget Friday, the events of which might someday be rendered in a comical manner, but still sting right now. I had the CDs, and it was rainig, so I put on my only raincoat and Harley boots, and ventured out into the soup to catch the focking--no typo there--bus. Missed my stop. Had to cross Lex's beltway, a simmering mess of vehicles whose drivers sometimes had unkind things to say. One, some black guy in an old truck, yelled, 'Hey Philly, get it together!'. I figured that the driver was someone from AA who knew I was from Philadelphia. There were so many cars in the way that throwing a nasty gesture would be useless; he'd never see it. I stomped on, and reached the pawnshop, wet and more than a little ticked off. Got an employee's attention; eventually she told me that unless I had a driver's license, she couldn't help me. I had my disability bus pass on me, comeplete with my dreaded birthdate, and still she wouldn't buy the things. I said loudly, 'I'm selling these CDs for a little drinking money. Do I LOOK like someone who drives?' Like someone who could pay for, and take care of, and put gas in, a car?
I saw I was fucked. thought about trashing the CDs, jumping on them, something. Guy in business dress and a van noticed my upset, asked me if I needed a ride 'home'. I accepted. Told him what had gone down. Went through the driver's license story again. When he let me out, I made the statement that if I could find four Mexicans to blow, I'd be okay. suppose I didn't need to say that, but I did.
In the apartment. Time for the couch-biting thing. I did so, then howled the F-word as loudly as I could. (By this time, I'd built up a lot of madness. Like papers in a junk drawer, like bunnies, it was busy replicating itself in my head.) I could have explained as much if anyone wanted to know. But no one did. So I took my sedatives and finally fell to sleep.
Wednesday: I had a bad hangover from Tuesday, the day that kicked this all off. After the Motrin set in, I figured I'd complete the binge, and so consumed five tall-boys--about ten beers--over the course of the day, and went to sleep. Nothing significant happened.
Tuesday: really truly awful. I'd completed my personality test for seasonal work at a local department store, doing night stalking (I loved the original), and immediately a bunch of free-floating anxiety tied itself up in a knot and began to fester. so I went to AA, a women's only meeting, feeling a lot of crap to disgorge. That's waht they tell ya, right? Anyway, I "shared" twice. This knobby little woman who called herself 'Selene' had the GALL to interrupt me the second time, which was near the end of the hour. I got up. I left. slammed nothing, said nothing, just left,and headed to a bar where the beers were steep, and got this fat guy with a Ph. D. to cover me. I hit on him. No go, but that's no problem today. He paid my cab fare, and I used the leftover to drink the next day, even though I needed trazadone badly.
there you have it, then. Also, the attorneys that were to handle my disablilty case got rid of me, b/c they didn't feel that they could win. Money moneymoneymoneymoney, that's the ticket. I fell headfirst into a funk the likes of I haven 't seen for a long time.
I've gotten my warning. Look forward to when that problem will no longer exist, hint hint. My flab encircles me like loving arms. I'm sure that has something to do with my childhood.
muy bad, and all those crazy names.
at lleast I won't be able to self-harm (drink; binge) this week.
but I probably won't see any results at all.
chdajulie
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Just read something that made me fear for my future. My poetic voice is lost, and I rely on my sense of humor, admittedly warped, to drive the stuff I write today. Pretty much, it sucks in comparison. I feel sorry for myself, which is not unusual.
That said, this is not the vomitorium, although I have many corrections to apply to the last post here. I prayed to God to help me find some peaceable solution to my problem with conversational noise, gum-popping, popular radio, and the like (I still suspect that my aversion to these things was both premeditated and hard-wired.). Prayed that my anger at these phenomena be somehow reframed. Well, I'll tell you about reframed: with the twenty dollars I'd reserved for more trazadone, I spent five of that on two sets of earplugs. God works through poverty. I don't like that, but I can't see myself working within this noise machine either.
Don't have friends to write about like the above-mentioned, scary-gifted writer does. Of the remaining two--I basically killed off the two others, snarking about a mutual acquaintence, an old-money sort of young man whose arch and condescending attitude does nothing for me. Apparently, I said some pretty disturbing things, one of which involved a soldering iron. A month later, I had a chance to apologise to one, Gum Dave of AA. The other, Reetha, is elsewhere, prehaps with her Pet Tim and his foody biker beard. I would like to have a couple of women friends. Because I used to be able to drink like a horse, I long thought of myself as a man's woman. That one observation there carried me for years, but is dissolving post-haste--
--I had something to say there, and it got away from me. Like the mini-foals do when they see me coming with their halters. They won't fetch much money if they haven't been trained to lead. Catching the little boogers is, in a twisted way, fun, for they enjoy the chase far more than I do, and when caught, stand still for the full-body hugging.
Last night, the 'meteorologist' (read: weatherperson) said that the leaves won't change color this year. Something about draught. Draught has been a problem, has hardened the ground to fractured stone. I've always loved that flameout, and the transition to slaty cold November. The sky on your shoulder, clouds towering with imaginary snow, fallen leaves now dry as papyrus, scuttling about your feet as you pull the straitjacket of your arms about your torse, tighter. I have memories. They sustain me, or perhaps they do not--simple suggestions of what might have been had this, or that, taken place.
I continue to dream about the here-pseudonymous Will, the lifeguard-turned-special agent. I wake, often without compass, and wonder where I am (Kentucky: not by choice, a place to get away from) and how old I am (40) this time. Cannot tell the reader what these dreams mean. Sometimes I come to with tears in my eyes. It is summer, SE Pennsylvania. Outdoor swimming pool, each occasion the same shade of blue. Tanning is not yet forbidden, so girls oil themselves and watch the boys, their musculature, eyes, imagined intentions. Coconut smell hot on the bright warm air. I lie face-down on my beach towel, this day reduced to rags; my mother keeps everything; every rag, every empty orange medicine vial, is useful.
Face-down, I spy on Will, looking up from beneath my hair. He's far away, but may come closer, when the lifeguards change positions. I don't see well; I can't determine which patch of oily girls he looks at. In dream I know what he told me at that party--I was with one of his classmates, a Navy recruit and pothead, and I was drinking hard. Practising to be a man's woman, I guess. He'd come over to where Jeff--real name--and I were sitting. I had a tumbler full of whiskey, Jeff, a beer. (Jeff and I would later fight over the alcohol business, and I'd awaken in his van with a scar above my right eye, which I still have today. Some ugly goings-on.) Will confessed to me that he'd liked me in those swimming-pool days. I think I told him I'd liked him too, but he never asked me out. That might have had to do with the drinking, or that, plus I was with his pothead classmate. I'll never know, though I sometimes half-plan how I might get back to Pennsylvania. I hope that this is not simple wish-fulfillment. I hope that I will bump into Will at a class reunion, something I'd never attend unless I was doing, and looking, well, because his wife Kaye (another pseudonym) is my classmate. Will and Kaye. I'd manage to step to him alone, and he'd tell me he'd been pining for me, or worrying about my mental health, for near forever. He probably forgot all about me the day he entered Annapolis, earlier, maybe. I can overlook this. Except for the tenacity with which I screwed up, I'm hardly memorable. Just clinically insane, the same crap again and again, learning nothing.
Sound and fury: I spent over an hour looking for local (two, if you count Louisville) and on-line medical transcription programs. Some of the hits I got included pornographic passages. Just had the thought now: write porn, if I can't locate a program that I can afford. I am not a well woman right now. Since the state guvm't is intent on stuffing me down a hole that will bring in $800/monthly (I simply must join the committee for a living wage) and drive me through the endplace of despair. I have some words re: that scenario, but will not post them here.
Wish someone would hook me up with whoever collects KY blogs. What it's like being poor and partially dependent on the charity of others. Riding the bus. Enhancing learned helplessness. GAAAAAD. I'm moving now, all parts in motion, but going nowhere once again. Somebody hook me up. I'm inept. Sick to death of all of this and not dead yet. The yohimbine I take now in the absence of Prozac has quit working.
ahh, the words I am thinking
datura amanita crazy horse
Thought about it last night, after eating all eight of the blueberry snack bars I'd bought with what remains of my food stamps. Didn't; the trazadone was taking some effect, and I had to be up early today for something or other. Oh yeah--a "survey" to complement the application for the night stocking position I was almost sure I'd get by virtue of my simply feeling good (or better than average) about it when I left the store yesterday. The thing turned out to be one of those personality assessment tools--"tool" is about right--to allow the recruiter to determine whether or not I'd fit in with the rest of the drones. The thing asked the same questions about four different times apiece--tricky, huh? And then, the little girl who turned out to be the person who would read and score the personality tests said that she'd probably get to mine on Friday. This blew my hopeful attitude to shreds of shit. I imagine I'm going to want to drink, or binge, or both tonight, even though I have an appointment with Lisa, shrink, at ten a.m..
Then: today, I called the office of the attorney whom I'd attempted to enlist to help me get SSDI last year. I got the paralegal--no surprise there--and when she pulled up my records (I hadn't followed through last time; when I got shot down, again, I simply tripped into one of those lightless sinkholes and did not emerge for about three weeks, except to drink and binge and purge, and piss and shit when the need fell upon me. To continue, or try to, she asked me if I was "drug/alcohol dependent", which was what my records from the clinic where I see Lisa indicated at that time. I don't consider myself dependent on anything except Klonopin, which the docs back home never should have given me.
And this: the clinic records, all seven years' worth, indicated that I was doing "well". That was '97 to '04. This year I had about four months during which I thought about suicide, or more correctly, terminal illness, something that would take me out fast, and I told the paralegal of those. Her response was encouraging. To that sound byte, anyway: when I told her that I thought I would be capable of working alone, from home, or in a cubicle with headphones clamped to my head for eight hours every day, she sort of shrunk. I could hear it over the wire. She said that opinion would be a hindrance in obtaining disability. I said something about wishing to go to school. She replied that if I took more than 9 hours, I'd be considered able to work; I replied in turn that I'd just take eight. Which would be cool. because I think I've lost some IQ points across this miserable journey of mine.I'm not as smart as people once thought I was, although I can wield my vocabulary in a scarily efficient way. At times. Dumbing it down is pretty hard for a person who has a history of reading dictionaries on public conveyances.
So, the woman set me up for an appointment to meet with the guy again. Asked me if I could get the clinic records to the office by Thursday; I didn't think that would be possible,so I called Lisa's office and left her a detailed message about all of this mess. Asked for a hard-hitting, descriptive letter, about my lifelong inability to play well with others, and my tendency to fall into serious clinical depression (and substance abuse, when staying in bed all day, eating prescription sleepers, is not enough). Actually, I think I could take a full courseload and rock my GPA--but that is something that the judge, who is, I hope, kind and well-informed about the matters that s/he is entitled to consider, does not need to know.
Would I lie under oath? I do not know. I haven't had the chance to do so since the age of eighteen, when a couple of drug buddies and I stole a car and drove all the way to State College, PA. I blamed the whole thing on one guy, a known burglar; and I got off because I was attending college at the time. So, yeah, I am capable of this, but I'd rather rephrase a few things, seem dopey and unfocused and all that, than outright fib.
Back to the Vomitorium, then. Since I could not recall it, my first (of three) gang rapes did not happen to me. Rather, others knew about it and singled me out for further disparagement. 'Pulling a train', it was called then, and still may be. I got fat on all the booze and munchies, and so returned to the speed doc, the groper Dr. Kenneth Chalal (names in this discourse have not been changed). I moved to West Philadelphia, convinced a few guys that I went to Penn--the vocab thing again, and surface knowledge of almost everything--and lost sixteen pounds in two weeks. I could fit back into my leathers, a grand thing. There are many things nastier than tight leather pants on a plump woman, but I could not see those at that time.
Speed cured blackouts. Facetious observation, I know, I know. And it beat puking, the sound and smell and feel of the stuff in your hands. (Later, in KY, I would encounter a girl from New Jersey who kind of resembled me--tall and slim--and bitched about weighing 146. One four six. What I would not give to see those numbers. She confided in me that she was vomiting, and seemed to think it a novel solution to an intolerable situation. Hah. I, kindly enough, responded that I 'used to' do it too, and what got me out of it was this CBT-ish trick I'd happened upon on my own: whenever I wanted to puke, which at this juncture was after consuming what my thin parents thought a 'normal' meal, I conjured in my mind's eye everyone that had ever given me shit through middle and high school. Boys I'd had mean but quiet crushes on--rode bikes, and then drove, past houses; called their homes on the off chance that I would get to hear them say 'hello' and then giddily hang up--were there too, to witness the spectacle that Weird Girl had become. At this time, off speed and on exercise and a severely restrictive diet, I thought that I had the thing beat. Later, while living with my parents for about a year after I'd taken what I thought (again) my last bad bounce, I relapsed in a sort of comical way--I ate too much at 'Thanks'giving, and since the whole holler had shown up to gorge and then watch football, I drank a lot of water, donned a heavy coat, stuffed my pockets with toilet paper and took a walk up and over the hill. There, I vomited until I was sure enough that my stomach was empty. I cleaned up as best I could, and returned to the house about a half hour later.
My father was doing some kind of pseudo-farmer thing about three days post-holiday. When he came back, he looked pretty angry. With his characteristic lack of tact, he jumped my ass as I watched TV, or read, or something. He wanted to know if I'd puked over the mountain. At this I feigned outrage, taken aback and unable to actually think. I forgot that cows and horses cannot vomit, and blamed it on some animal or other. He replied that cows did not eat meat. I realised then that I was busted, that there was nowhere on that damn farm that I could go to unburden myself of that bitch bastard, cruel-lovin' 'ho food.
When I had roommates, I wouldn't do it. (At thirty-three or so, I was living with three college girls, between 18 and 20. One was a blimp, and got much bigger afterward. We hated each other--that borderline projection thing, I guess. But she's succesful now, the way I hear it, even at three hundred pounds.) When I was alone, doing relatively well, i sometimes slipped. But after the fall, when my next bad bounce took place, I resumed. First, just occasionally, a sort of treat with its own set of reasons that then made sense of some sort to me. But like some sort of obsession--and the Experts seem to agree that binge eating is an obsessive/compulsive sort of thing--it got worse. Witness this month: just about half over and i have 8 bucks left on my food card. (If I got disability, my food card wuld be history; likewise if I was forced to work forty hours at some soul-enriching job that did not pay me close to a living wage. See, there is this one job that continues to give me heinous reviews--Satan's little sister, or something along those lines--and I am going to have to get a Legal Aid attorney to shut their asses up. Acording to law the way I understand it, former employers are supposed to provide to prospective employers only the dates that the applicant worked at that company. I need to stop the cunt that is saying all these nasty things. And when I do--ther's a chance that I might be wrong about my understanding of employment law--and when I do, yes, I expect to feel great satisfaction. I'm on it now. For years, too much of a wuss to even think of trying to do something about this.)
I have my ten minute warning. And despite the fear/anxiety I feel about the way things went today, I know I have to stay in some semblance of right miind in order to weave and wade through what I still think of as 'bullshit'. If I could, I'd hire someone else to do it for me. (That's irony, y'all.) I know--in a Spockian sort of way--that this is not 'bullshit', but rather a form of training a fucked-up, entirely self-centered person to step out of the sick role and step up to the plate. ('Plate"? I should not have used that word. Brings on scary images of food. And BTW, those commercials that feature ppl eating? Chewing? Chewing is fucking DISGUSTING. Me no gusto, or something along those lines. Must refresh my Spanglish.)\
And why have I not gone off about the noise here? B/C I am wearing two--that's TWO--sets of earplugs in each ear. I have been praying on this. To find solutions to my aversion to noise. This might be one answer. Or not. Time, if I live through it, will tell.
datura aminita crazy horse.
I have fifteen minutes on this puter. Land of the Loud. It echoes in here, and the typoesare intent on making me look like a bloody fool.
Anyhow, this is the Vomitorium (don't know if I want caps or not, but I do want to present this as a third blog, something I do not yet know how to do), and I promised last post that I'd describe, as best a person who blacked out and pissed herself in a mens' dorm can, something rather terrible that happened to me when I was nineteen.
Because of the drinking and bingeing associated with weed, my weight fluctuated pretty wildly. When I had speed, I was cool. Losing weight was more of a rush than actually being thin. I was off-campus by this point, living with other derelicts in training. I sold weed to augment my paltry student loan's so-called "living expenses". Sold it to jocks, in fact, once of whom I had a quiet crush on b/c he played guitar, and therefore, as my drugged mind was concerned, this jock--Rodney--had to be a secret sensitive guy. Turned out to be a user, and probably has a monk 'do by now. His hairline was receding at 23, but he styled it well.
Rodney was in the other quad, studying. He did that; it annoyed me some. I was in the other, drinking kamikazes, smoking weed, and eventually passing out, although I was told something else entirely happened along the way: I started shouting, 'Let's fuck!' and removing my shirt and bra. I have no idea at what point the blackout turned to 'pass-out', but I gather that I was fucked, by three guys, all of whom turned my stomach on an individual basis, and as a group, repulsed me even further. There was Chris, from NYC. Looked like Fred Flintstone and hated being told as much. There was Lee Fucking Rosenthal, tall and lean, resembled the actor Robby Something, with coiffed black hair and an abiding love for the green stuff. There was a Victor involved, whom I understood to be short and a groupie of jocks. There may have been a Dan-Dan, Dan the Pyro man/Starting fires in garbage cans, who was a groupie as well. I cannot say who wielded the video camera, but a video emerged from this scenario. My friend Gay George, who would later become an architecht, marry a girl named Pam, and father several children, well, Gigi got hold of the tape, which I did not wish to see once I'd sobered up, but he could not guarantee that copies had not been made.
Allegedly, I cried out for farmboy Rodney, who was studying some business thing or other across the way. Said I loved him, and would he come and rescue me. He did not. Instead, a big, steroid-bald lug named Tore--short for Salvatore, I presumed--pulled me out of the mess, and deposited me in the common lavatory, where I pissed all over the pretty little skirt my mother had made me. (I was wearing it with a shredded sweatshirt and Docs at the time, and it is good, good, that she did not see me.) Later on that evening, I made it, apparently, to Gigi's room, where he let me sleep on the floor. When I came to, he was getting dressed for class, and he was stark raving angry. But he wouldn't tell me what I did. That night--I was still drying out, sick, and wishing for nothing but sleep--the big lug offensive lineman Tore came to my apartment (which took some effort). He told me what had occurred. I was shocked, and then I allowed him to hold me, and guess what: that creep from Long Island--lots of them at Temple at the time--put the moves on me. Wanted to have sex with badly damaged goods. I worked up the nuts to say no. Got a roommate involved. Lost grip on everything that had ever given me comfort: booze, drugs, and that bitch beast food. I can live without the first two easily enough, but food, that's a stone bitch and I hate the stuff, and K-Rations would do me good today.
My weight went up. I stayed away from the croakers. The fat was like a girdle, like body armor for me, insurance that what had happened to me would not happen again--because in addition to the damaged goods thing, I was just plain fat and ugly. Sweathog walking. I failed that semester and had to go through hoops of bullshit to get back in.
In retrospect. I should have committed myself. Rose agrees, although she doesn't know but a shard of it, and never will--would hurt her too bad.
datura, feeling it, even though I wasn't actually there.
About the bulimia. Perhaps confronting it, in all of its disguises, might help me figure out what I am dealing with here.
So, enter the vomitorium, if you will. There is no trough, no merriment here.
I was eleven. Hormones were asserting themselves, though I did not know as much. I had breast bumps. Sometimes the popular girls would let me see-saw with them if they were missing one of their own. The summer before middle school, seventh grade, I even got to sit with a couple of them at the swimming pool. One, Tawnee, a gymnast even if she was a little tall, told me she was going to invite me to her slumber party as soon as I returned from KY. (I was leaving with the folks and the bro the next day, and the whole drive down, I fantasized about Tawnee's party: it would make or break me.
I got back a week later, and made a run for the mailbox. My invitation was not there; the party went on without me.
For some reason I had been pretty excited about middle school, even though I was awkward (like an awk? big and clumsy?) and terribly shy. At times I tried to play the clown, failed miserably. My first day, I saw that our "home rooms" were going to be organised alphabetically. I got to sit next to this beautiful girl named Kim. She was fast; she had big breast; I was in love. I couldn't speak, so she spoke first. Then she started talking to a couple of friends who had come from the same elementary school as she: Jerry, a handsome Matt Dillon type, asked her if she'd stopped smoking. I hadn't considered starting, so I knew I was in way over my head.
Within a week, cliques had formed, and I was in none of them. Or maybe I was--those shunted to the side on the bases of physical and temperamental attributes. I was gaining weight, cooking at home while my mother was still at work, and infuriating her when I failed to clean up, a task I found entirely unappetising and thoroughly beneath me; I had greasy hair, and never spoke save to say something the others found odd. Whatever I said was borne of anxiety, its ephemeral meat occupying mind and gesture at once. This--all of this--gave me the title of "sweathog", several years before 'Welcome Back, etc etc' came out. What. A. Name. This name was truncated to "sweat". There were a few others, girls ugly and fat and not too bright, so I wasn't interested in any of them. Shit rolls downhill, I guess.
So I ate. In secret, while my mother was working at a fabric store. She wouldn't get home until five, which gave me enough time to follow certain directions, such as how to make various chocolate desserts. Sometimes I'd eat them all, and try as hard as I could to clean up. I always failed; she--Rose--always caught me by virtue of finding something I didn't exactly clean right. More evidence of my insanity: I beat my brother up; he told; I got in trouble. I didn't quite get a pan-spatula-sink clean, and she chewed me one of many new assholes, and while the chewing hurt for awhile, the assholes always closed over and I was at it again. I could forget her comments, on a surface level, for after she chewed me out, there was dinner, and the books I hoarded--no other word for this--from both school and the public library.
This was the year of the hairbrush. I hated school so intensely, the nonstop bullying and ostracision, that when a minor snowstorm blew through, I went limping into the house, indicating that I had had some kind of sledding accident at a local school parking lot. I continued to limp upstairs, and went into the bedroom, saw the hairbrush sitting on my bureau, and began to whack my right knee as hard as I could for about half an hour. It became red and swollen; I liked that. I made sure to complain a bit about the pain I was in, which Rose naturally blew off; the next morning, after brushing my teeth, I turned the water on as high as it would go, and dipped a cotton ball in the stream. Placed it in my mouth, hobbled downstairs, announced that I felt really bad, would you please look at my knee (which I had continued to beat on until about midnight) and also, my throat hurts. My temperature please.
That trick usually yielded a sturdy 100 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes a fraction less, and sometimes more. She sighed, let me stay home, and when she left, I began to eat, and whacked my knee some more. This would go on for thirty days. Somehow I managed to lose about thirty pounds, and when I finally had to return to that hellish middle school, the first thing I noticed was that my weight loss had no affect on my peers' feelings about me at all. I was screwed, in a big way.
I tried to vomit a few times; didn't work. I started in with weed at fourteen, fifteen, and so I ate more, the "munchies" always at the ready. One of my few friends, K., stole her father's beer often. Though I didn't like it then, I drank it anyway. More calories to settle about my waist. I finally discovered how to pull it off--puking, that is--when I stumbled across a letter in some young womens' magazine, written by a girl in the orthodontist's far suburb. Irony, although I didn't know that such occurrances had a name at that time. The writer indicated that she, and her sister, drank large quantities of warm water, and then puked up everything they had binged on, plus some. I tried this, somewhat guilty about the fact that the girl who wrote the letter was trying to help her readers. And it worked. I had something there. Between grades seven and eight, I ran blocks and blocks and blocks. I had a crush on a neighbor boy two years older, who played hockey. I decided I liked hockey, which I really did not, unless Bobby Clarke and his missing front teeth were in the picture.
Weight loss didn't confer upon me any kind of popularity. The few teachers who didn't side with the popular kids, greasers, and other bullies, took me aside, told me I was pretty, that I should smile more. (I thought, but did not say, I don't think so. I don't have a lot to smile about right now.) One of the very popular girls, Laurel, would talk to me when no one was around. We shared music and not much more, but we were in the bathroom one day and she told me that she thought I should model. In "Seventeen". Regardless of what "the others" said. As if we were secretly related or something. (Recently I googled her. She lives in one of the states contiguous with KY, and sings in a bluegrass band. Not being shy, as far as I could tell, she had a big old voice, really good, sounded like Streisand from outside the auditorium, and played the guitar. I would take up that instrument a few years down the road.)
Now I was in middle school, and though I would binge and puke whenever I could (Rose was onto me by that point; her mission was to search out evidence of vomit, even if it was in the leaves piled up in our tiny back yard), I decided that it was time to see the speed doctor down the street. They were called "croakers" then, and every Monday, this doc, Doctor Chalal, a perv who felt up bellies, moved onto breasts, and eventually lost his medical license in the late eighties. In addition, glam, mod, and bits and peices of punk were showing up on South Street, the 'hippest street in town'. I was on speed, losing weight, combining the black beauties and pink footballs and robins' eggs with beer, and glomming onto what would become a beloved religion for the next ten or so years--a movement that encouraged rebellion against the bathwater norm, completely forgetting about the baby.
Fuck the baby, and fuck the monkey, and fuck fuck fuck every idiot who uttered the word "sweat" in my presence. I began to thrive on weird, me and all the other weirdoes, kids of all colours and persuasions. Meek and mild as I'd been (although my Inner Truman Capote was alive and very well, making rude comments about the PK's all the time), the changes in my appearance did prompt further ridicule by some, concern on the part of PK Laurel ("Why do you DO that to yourself? You're so pretty!), and enough scrutiny and reportage on the part of the teachers who never did a thing to stifle the bullies. I went to school, when I bothered, stoned and rocketing, smelling of weed. It was great. The speed put an end to my bingeing. It did other things too, which I'll approach here later on, my next hourly session, maybe.
I was drinking pretty heavily then, me and the rest of the weirdos, in cars, under railroad bridges, in the clubs we could get into downtown. (I should mention here that I'd had a few ugly blackouts before I got heavy into the ups: I'd barfed in the bathtub, and apparently gone to bed, to awaken to my father John trying to pull me up and out, to clean up the mess I was certain that I had not made.) I discovered then that speed cured blackouts.
But the speed and the booze didn't always come together as I wished them to. Real vile stuff would take place a few years later, in the Temple University dorms, where I sold weed to jocks. If I'd had speed, or taken fewer downs with the booze, none of that shit would have gone down. Please imagine. Although I will tell you about it in some detail later on.
Datura
my little horse, Charger, is in bad shape. pray for him if that is your inclination.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Haven't binged/puked for two days now. It's something you don't practise in this house. That means I'm not in the Lex, and that any second mama Rose will blow through the bedroom door like a twig in a tornado and make me get off her puter.
I can tell anyone who wishes to continue a few things about how this person became a ranting bulimic who still cannot cook, even though I will lie about the not-cooking part to nosy strangers. First of all, the memories: I was about 7, and BioBro, 4 or 5. When the dinner plates got passed around, I was chastised non-stop for taking the largest piece of whatever was up, unless BioBro happened to be choosing the evening's entree, which for him was liver. (He later, much later, confessed that he did so not because he liked liver, but b/c he wanted his two birds with one bush, or whatever: he could both piss me off and please my mother in one small, Machiavellian swoop. And he just wouldn't quit, regardless--fat kids hit hard.)
No, BioBro was little. Nobody made HIM go on a damn diet. We had this Family Tradition on Sjnday nights--there was Lassie, and popcorn, rattled on the stove and touched with butter, and real Pepsi. I didn't care about that stupid kid on the TV, nor much for that neurotic shemale of a collie either; it was the snacks. We never got them otherwise. And when this old family doc who is probably dead now--he used to smoke in his office, or maybe that was the dentist--said I needed to lose a few pounds, the proposed caloric deficit was exacted every Sunday night. Since we didn't have horses, and since I dog-paddled instead of really swam, and this in the summers only, I didn't exercise much, aside from whaling on (or at: never was real coordinated) BioBro whenever I thought I might get away with it.
Even then I was insane: he always told.
I got some other exercise nobody ever found out about--this kid, name of Billy Nace, this huge (for a 7-year-old) and stupid and vicious thing that caused me to start thinking about how to lose him on the way home before school actually started. Later on, Robert and Tim: with them it was acorns.
Anyway, I was sold on the premise that I was not only fat, but naggable and chasable, these for all the wrong reasons. I never forgot it either. I was eight, and had my first visit to the orthodontist, a Dr. Brady in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He was a specialist, so we got to drive to see him. Oh, that bastard devil used to goad me in his I"m-not-making-fun-of-you-you-little-kid way about my undeveloped calf muscles. He was probably in his late 30's to my, say, eight, nine, I don't know if I made it until ten. He'd developed that dreadful monk's-head hairdo--they actually shave theirs on top, I believe, until it finally disappears one day. (Nothing against a nice smooth bald head, though--these have NO hair, and a baby face can pull this off until he's a good-looking sixty.)
The thorn is in the flank, so I gotta go.
datura
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Typoes be dmned, I want to start a third blog, to be entitled 'vomitoruim'. It will cover what its name suggests it might, and possibly go into issues regarding being heavy in America, body image dysmorphia and the roots thereof, and if I had access to such a thing today, it would address how medications and age and unending tedium occasionally spliced with a garnish of red tape--endless phone calls to ppl who don't return yours, arranging transportation with someone who refuses to carry a company cell phone (for exactly the same reason I would refuse to do so as well: who wants to be bothered with whiny, possibly delusional clients, even if (you) are getting paid, and gassed up, to do so? Certainly not you, G. G..
You, meaning I, need health care. Even though G. G. was convincingly pleasant on the drive across the Lex, where I would drop off my third and, I hope, final packet of SSDI paperwork (it asked for, at one point, a listing of all the jobs I've held during the last 15 years; that number came to about 47). The receptionist hit her puter, told me that I was up to see an administrative judge, which meant that I was to find my arse an attorney, and fast. Yet more red tape: every time I try to reach out and touch someone, they recoil. I could possibly receive what would, for me, be more money than I've ever seen in one place at any time in my life to date. Then again, Bush and his reforms could have made this so: I would be eligible for retroactive monies for one year instead of the three that I've been applying.
I had long been on the fence about disability. Saw myself as otherwise abled, the kind of person who could work for some unseen corporation in the privacy of her own surrounds, or report to a hospital setting at some arbitrary time, to hole up with headphones and transcribe the janglings of Indian medical residents and Asians who have been in this country maybe one year tops. The Hindi who get to practise medicine in the USA usually have excellent command of the King's; only problem is that their musical accents get lost in a brain used to Philadelphia accents, and more recently, the intonations of the locals here in central KY.
I'm starting to get moving on the medical transcription thing. In order to repay my student loans, and hire an attorney to discharge the bulk of my idiot excesses via Chapter 7: I have no assets, basically. Just broke my own heart today having to sell this luscious pair of purple and orange oblong sunglases from the sixties for five dollars, to probably be sold for at least ten, at the one place here in town that buys such things. I used to have three, count 'em, three fine leopardskin coats, any of which would outrank those on sale in that place. I gave those away at some point when I was trying to buy friends say half my age. And I will, no doubt, see some little hipster slouching down the street in my sunglasses, black band t-shirt, either ratty blue or neat black jeans, and Docs or beat-up and stinking sneakers. (I was thinking that if I had projected endless sunshine instead of the usual, eternal bile, I might have gotten a better deal, even if I am fat and old.)
This morning, I had a truly scary moment, or series thereof: last night, I had my butt-ugly, Vision Project glasses. I'd taken them off in order to complete my long and tedious job history, with its 47 items in 15 years (but a slight exaggeration, including the temporary assignments). i see better up-close with nothing except a squinty right eye. This morning, when I'd thought I'd taken them back to the bedroom so that I could, like, find them in order to make my appointment today, I looked around as best a blind person could, and found nothing several times over. I tore that lilypad UP. Made circuits of the place, which sems to grow smaller by the day, threw open, and then shut, drawers, went through pockets of clothes I hadnt (tried to wear) for days, hung those up, went up, over, if not exactly IN the bed, and found, still, not a thing. Then I got the bright idea to ask my neighbor, even if she does try to manipulate me for Klonopin sometimes. (She usually succeeds, despite the severity of my own habit.)
She was trying to conduct two phone conversations at once when I knocked on the door. I don't know why she asked me in, for listening (or pretending not to) to two separate and private conversations is almost as bad as several things I can think of, but fvorget right now. Eventually, she did come over, and pronto, found the things under the kitchen where I'd been sitting last night. I don't know why that didn't occur to me. Nevertheless, I was the better for it, having left a hysteroid message with the parent company that basically demanded that I get new specs--to go to work with--even if they were KY Vision Project rejects, like the ones perched crooked on my nose right now.
Which highlights something heavy on the mind I believe I still have: I am losing marbles, and acorns, and starfish carcii and found objects such as little gilt leaves by the branch bundle. To return to the got-on-the-bus thread, I took a seat on the rocking reeling farting and belching thing, and began to write about my thorough lack of any kind of organisation at all. Bemoaned all of the awful things I have done to my grey matter, this internal rantalogue intercut with certain rememberances: what a vague child I had been, always daydreaming, and sometimes about seriously strange stuff; upon reaching middle school and finding myself the punch line to jokes I didn't know existed, and seeking then to bury myself in books, and food, and TV and the right warped fiction I'd begun to produce (one such item I deliberately left where my mother could find it; at the time, she had an ugly wealth of raised moles that resembled raisins, and in the 'story', my male protag was dreaming about slicing and dicing the raisins before they got a chance to sing on TV; in keeping with my fear/fascination re:maiming, I would lie in bed at night, thinking that by staying awake, I could somehow prevent the attack of the moles, keep them from springing up unannounced and ugly as dicks with hair while I was sleeping; none of this had found its way into my 'story' when my mother confronted me with the three or four pages I'd managed to crank out, waving the pages--or, more likely, leaving them on my breakfast plate, where FOOD supposed to be, and making an appointment for me to see the cheapest child shrink she could find).
That digression is not unlike the hundreds I am capable of making in a day. Can't keep my glasses, or my FREE bus pass, with the FOOD CARD behind it, or even my damnable keys, halfway straight. I've insisted for awhile now that I have some kind of ADD problem (according to this one site I looked at, and tested on, there are at least five that correspond to different areas of the brain and are characterised by sets of signs and symptoms that sometimes overlap, and these at times with psychiatric disorders, making the whole mess kind of hard for the eggsperts to untangle, let alone the lowly layman.
Only half jokingly, I said to the neighbor/'Pinhead who found my glasses this morning that I'd be a jabillionaire if I could design products for the attentionally-challenged. The first, I told her, would be a purse. Oh, yeah. I vibrate with goodness on this one. The other day, I was carryihng about this thriftshop-acquired Fossil (a name brand popular with the chic abd/or young) number--it wasn't particularly big, not like those unadorned hobo bags of the finest leather that I covet every now and then, but the bastid had at least seven pockets, and its own inner monster, a creature capable of grabbing items like glases and keys and finding a way to bury them under the lining of the thing, where its carrier could not get at them unless scissors or knives were involved. Oh yeah, I'd be good--if I knew something about organisation, and fabric, and bag construction, all that stuff you learn at Parsons, a place it never crossed my mind to ty to go until just now.
Better stick with the simple stuff for now.
datura--my new name, even if it won't 'go through'
jld
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
I'd been on the first, screaming floor of the Public Library for about five minutes when I looked up and outside and noticed this guy without a nose walk on by. Seriously: his profile was entirely flat, save for a pair of lips that seemed to jut in an unnatural manner, and a white bandage where his nose should have protruded.
This was a young guy, someone of indeterminate ethnic makeup, wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt, shorts in rapidly cooling weather. He loped rather than walked, as many of the loose-jointed young seem to do, and carried a set of papers dangling from one fist. The sight of this adolescent was a comeuppance for me; I'd had a rough day that verged on pure awful, as I'd had to ride the bus into town, this young guy with one of those weird haircuts where the hair is scraped down onto the forehead in a vague simulacrum of bangs, and he held forth the whole time on Shaquille O'Neal and other 'big men', as he called them. I said a wee praisesong when he got off.
Because all I had to do at the Social Security Office was show my driver's license to get a voucher for the SS card I seem to have lost within the last four months, I walked into the low-set red building to find the menagerie, I mean office, completely crowded, and a long-ass line, for Social Security Card-related stuff, that I had no other choice but to stand in. In front of me was this teenage boy, maybe a college student, and his geek friend. The teenage boy, six-seven easy, was listening to some tinny overflow that I recognised as the BeeGees. The fucking BeeGees. In that setting. I needed help, and I think you would, too.
The 'Big Man' was lugging this ancient CD carrier looped over one shoulder, like some kind of arcane medical device that provided oxygen, or monitored his heart functions, instead of serving its owner as a repository of BeeGees. Though the both of them had, as I do, been using disabled-rider identification to ride that horrid bus, only the shorter one, this dreamy, thoroughly disconnected kid with some wildly strange hair--short and wiry in extremis, it looked as though he, or someone, had tried to curl it under in the back. Plus, he was developing a yarmulke, that kind of bald spot that will deflower itself into that freakish monk 'do that should've been shaved entirely before it got half that far.
Who knows? I got out JUST quickly enough to catch the bus, something I had been worrying about since I was about halfway through that line. After the second bus, the one going toward town, returned, I wound up seated next to this man with serious musculoskeletal problems, in addition to a bilateral hip replacement. He would have been six-six--a 'Big Man'--easy, had degenerative spinal disease and hemisiderosis--a deviant pattern of iron accumulation--that put him in severe pain. We talked about methods of pain control, beyond that old stiff drink or six. When the bus pulled into the precinct of the damned--the stationette, I mean--he indicated he'd enjoyed talking to me. Which was a kind thing to say, considering that I'd confessed that I had an inner Kevorkian dwelling in a cell down the block from that of my inner child. We'd been discussing wartime injuries to America's soldiers, all of whom, IMNSHO, should be here in New Orleans, or fighting fires out West, or on their way to Pakistan, where in addition to assisting in all phases of rescue and recovery from the earthquake there, Osama bin Laden might possibly be found.
I'm not really joking there. However, I did confide to this stranger that it was almost cruel to take a double or triple (Johnny Got His Gun, anyone?) amputee, whose limbs had just been blown into blood soup by whatever those roadside bombs contain, their heads feelin' fine on morphine in the field, and then bring all that field surgery has to bear on his or her desecrated body. Take away some of that morphine and let those younguns appreciate the fine, Bush-driven mess they're in. Give them a chance to contemplate what their lives might be like after discharge. Hold the heroics until these ppl can voice how they feel about going on into a world of piddly disability checks, unusable, due to their injuries, grants that send other and able-bodied soldiers on to school, and an unimaginable life in a squalid apartment punctuated only by visits to the VA to have their pain medication refilled.
Rant over, at least for now, I return to the noseless young man. I don't think I could look him in the face today, although there is always room for improvement. I wondered if his condition was the result of some wartime injury. Though medical science is indeed amazing, and sometimes appalling, I'm pretty sure that the prosthesis such a patient would receive today would, in five years, be upgraded to a fully-functioning, aesthetically-acceptable nose.
Which has what to do with what? I was feeling as fat as I actually am, plus some, in a thrift shop pyjama top of leopard-print satin and velveteen cuffs and these black, woven-hemp pants that used to fall off me as recently as three years ago. i wasn't wearing a bra, as the 38's I'd bought early this year are now too tight. As far as I can tell, all of my appendages and organs are in place, though, and working almost correctly (every now and then, an arrythmia of unknown causation climbs to flutter in my throat like one of those huge moths you catch as a child batting against your grip for its freedom; and as quickly as it arises, it dies, stops, won't show up on an ECG that evening). These run in my family: my brother, fatter than I am and abused until midnight at his well-paying computer-exec job, has at the least PVCs, and my father, a 'fibrillation', as my mother let loose in one of her medium-security moments. (By that, I mean she is a well-guarded, and hence, defended woman.) Fibrillations either indicate the heart is beating in a manner without any sort of electrochemical coordination, and has been described by one who's seen these things as resembling a 'bag of worms'; or that by reason of a brief electrochemical hiccough, the left atrium--the top part of the left side of the heart--is quiverng like a web of bagworms, and not pumping enough blood into the ventricle, which should then distribute it to the rest of the body. Grossly simplified, I know (enough to pass nursing tests, though), but both arrythmias are capable of shaking loose and dislodging clots into circulation--one of those bastids continues to the lungs, and its owner is one fucked puppy. I think I may have atrial fib. Drinking and puking can cause it.
Having touched upon my hypochondria, back to the bloody stumps of our soldaten and the guy without a nose. What are they supposed to say to me? Be grateful, grateful, grateful that my body is intact, and pretty much works okay, save for that issue of a creeply slow metabolism and that body-image thing. For if I'm gonna hang around this earth for any extended period of time, the thing had better fucking work. I have always had this queer fascination with being maimed, also with other bodily oddities. When I worked as a security guard at Temple University, I had the keys to the anatomy closet. Cadavers hung there. Though the dude I worked with was almost unnaturally fascinated with the cadavers that hung inside like those things some ppl use to carry suits and such, I preferred to inspect the anatomist emeritus's collection of strange abortions (those that happened both naturally and in the mid-thirties or forties, I mean. One had this huge skull, like a squash with a hole for its one eye, and two skeletons, mirror images of one another, complete with malformed ribcages and jangly skeletal limbs.
If i gave birth now, at my advanced age, what with my almost surely damaged DNA (hallucinogens, some of those rather strong) and eggs on their way out--though they are very much in evidence today--I shudder to think what would happen. I donated them when I was 28, for $2K; I was attractive, then, and had done well enough on the IQ test I'd been given, to appeal to a certain brand of designer-baby-buyers.
I bet those folks had bad thoughts when their bright, attractive spawn turned out half-crazy.
ah...eugenics
Monday, October 10, 2005
I'm feeling the urge to tell those Oak Factilly (not a typo, btw) ppl that one well-done commercial might assist their operation more than the ones they're using now, e.g. the one with the attractive little girl and her brother, who is markedly less so, and in addition, can't talk right, which the parents seem to think calls for celebration.
These ppl have opened a store--an outlet, to be more precise--in Georgetown, which is not near Washington, DC, but which abuts da Lex, smacks right up against it. In order to advertise this, the propietors have once again called their children into service. This time, the children are not wearing cartoon Joe Cool shades. Their faces, as well as the boy-child's spit, are in full view. Since my once-eidetic memory seems to have lost a lot of steam over the years, I can't recall how the commercial is set up, except for the final shot, which apparently must involve the children, the lovely girl who speaks beatiful, non-accented English, and the boy, who is not lovely, and whose huge tongue hurls spit through the big mother mess God made of his teeth when he tries to speak. He always does--try, I mean.
Once I told my mother--and a local fellow who is very much against the misappropriation of the disabled in commercials and such--that I believed the Oak Factilly family was using the boy to both boost his 'self-esteem' (whatever, I've come to wonder after all these years of reading, that is) and to convince TV viewers of their big-heartedness by employing the kid, showing him off to Central KY and maybe elsewhere, in a manner that speaks to advocates for the disabled, and others. 'See how broad-minded we are?' those commercials seem to say.
Having been bullied and ostracised at that child's age, I can tell anybody who wants to know, and others who do not, that his parents' use of him in those damnably self-serving commercials is only going to egg the bullies on. Being 'special' is not a gift when you're ten, twelve, thirteen--the demonic stage, I think. Those parents ought to take that child off TV and spend some money to get his teeth fixed. I guess they've never thought about seeing an orthodontic surgeon. Too much money, too much time? A wretched and cosmetically motivated gesture? A move that might permit this kid to exercise what appear to be normal executive functions of the mind, and allow him to be special where, say, academics are concerned?
Though he doesn't appear at all unhappy, I think this child is being abused.
So there he sits, with his sister, on the edge of the bed. Though I swear I've seen him walk in earlier commericals, he, as well as the sister, sit with their legs straight out. She says something perky. And then he's on, his pale arm pinwheeling to point toward the camera, in rhythm with his spitty voiceover: something about 'Oak Factilly Outlet'. Slitted eyes bug open, and there are the teeth, the inescapable teeth, the teeth that frighten some viewers, according to this other guy, who has written me in accord with my feelings about exploiting scary-looking children. (I'm truly surprised that there isn't a band or three around here that calls themselves, all thirty, thirty-five, some older, the 'Oak Factilly Kids'.)
Ah, I dunno. I used to lie about not having a TV, when I actually did, this ancient black and white thing that wound up getting smashed by this drunk named Lee. His real name, and he was a good guy. We liked each other, but the proportions were off. The guy I'd been running with had rudely dumped me, this while I was living in this little pigsty above the bar he owned. As I bounced not entirely merrily into the throes of depression and heavy drink, I failed that semester of nursing prep classes by simply not showing up. Didn't feel like looking for work. Just wanted to sleep.
This was in the spring of Iowa City. The streets smelled wet, the buses were up and running at 4:30 a.m. Somewhere around there my cousin died in a motorcycle accident, and I would almost die a few weeks on down the road. It was so weird; I'd been moved to a private room and was heavily doped up with all kinds of benzos. This was good at the time. I'd turned off and unplugged my IV, which also carried a heavy yellow Rally Pack, full of thiamine and other stuff I forget right now, and taken it with me to the bathroom. On my way back to bed, I plugged it in again and reset it--I'd seen the nurses do this, so it was no big deal. I was thinking about real clothes instead of the butt-bearing hospital johnnies (no one called them 'johnnies' in Philadelphia. I dont know where I got the term, but I know that they were called what they were--gowns--and that the only way to cover butt was to wear two of them at a time, the top one backwards). I sat down on my hospital bed. Since the nurses never came around except to administer shots of Ativan in the butt, I figured I was a low priority sort of patient.
I looked through the Venetians out into the pink-lit hall and saw this skinny little figure, clutching itself about the waist and gut, making its way toward my room. My mohter. Someone I really did not wish to see, at least not until my head cleared up and out a bit, and I felt that I could explain this latest predicament.
I stood; we embraced; she wept, thinking that I might have been in a coma--meaning 'dead'--or irreparibly brain-damaged, something she now blames on the drugs I may or may not be taking. I fool her often, or tell her what she wants to hear. But holding her then, in May of 94 or 5, I felt as though I had hurt her ina way neither of us was going to understand then. I'd only wanted to sleep, I told her, or I think I did. I took some Klonopin. Don't know how much. Apparently I was on my way to the State Store when I was found by Lee and this guy named Paul. They said I wasn't breathing, was going blue, and so called 011.
Lee, in turn, found my folks' number here, he must have rummaged through my ruins of shit to locate it, and called them. I stil think I might have figured out a way.....as much as I hate ellipses, that is.
Due to time and outside obligations--I almost threw a clot or several when this new outreach guy, Gary, started asking me duh-type questions about having a puter of my own. It was like, hey dude, I'm this fucking age (fill in the fucking). Of course I've had a computer (I haven't, but still...). How am I gonna pay for it? Well, once my SS card is found, get a job, like other ppl do, and wait for the disability to come sailing in. He doesn't get that someone in my position can actually be a writer, to look toward a career that involves writing, what I do best, and medicine, which I learn well. I'm applying for a psych tech position, and won't that be a blast if I get it.
As I was saying, scrambling after that long-lost train of thought, I gotta go. To AA, to possibly extract some bucks for female supplies.
Later on. All I can say is, I tried.
c h
(unlogged: I've sent you my folks' address. Twice. Whazzup?)
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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