Saturday, December 31, 2005
I must be getting pretty boring lately. No one has anything to say--no pity, no retort, nuthin--about my posts. Call me stupid, as one unlogged respondent did in another blog; call me anything. It's a response, and that's good enough for me.
My heart is still in my throat, or butterflies: I had difficulty getting logged onto motime--my user name kept getting denied. I wonder if that has anything to do with me being anti-war and proud of it. But I kept trying. And here I am, seeking refuge from the clangor in the living room. Four kids, even though at least one of them is profoundly gifted, can make a lot of noise. They are really cool kids. The little girl, eight, I was giving her a piano lesson? For unknown reasons, she seems to love me. I was awash in it as I sat next to her on the piano bench, vamping on that old (and, admittedly, boring) old saw 'Heart and Soul', and trying to get her to learn it in F and D, both of which involve black keys. Tried to explain the difference between half and whole steps. Don't know if it took; I'll venture to guess she was using her prodigious little memory to play the song with her too-small hands. Like me on guitar, she won't use her fifth digit: "It's not comfortable," she said. This, at the age of eight.
The fourteen-year-old, who speaks like a tiny, bubble-cheeked professor, tutors gifted children in chess in the mornings.
The twelve-year-old--special place in the interstices of mind and heart: he was born minus a left ventricle, and underwent three operations his first year of life--is a pretty good artist, gets perspective and all that stuff my own brain never seemed to process correctly. He has severe allergies, which now stand in the way of becoming a veterinarian. That's too bad, hope he outgrows them; he'd be a wonderful animal doc.
The ten-year-old is very small for his age. He is also a good little gymnast, has eidetic memory, has not yet whupped me at Sudoku, but that's b/c we're out of puzzles. (The game is growing on me. I think I'll get one soon. Never mind that the eldest child, the fourteen-year-old, has done eight of them, six in one night alone.)
And my niece, she's the music mind. She used to have hair she could sit on, but donated about six inches of it to an outfit that makes wigs for kids with chemo-related hair loss. That's pretty darn admirable. And speaking of charities, I'd better get on it; learned this morning that colleges, even good old generic state schools, are asking for resume's (that's not a possessive, says GrammarDog) now. Mine might say something like, "Career substance abuser," or, "Lost four jobs in one year--easily disposed of." My talents--"Relieved self of 50,000 kCalories in one night and did not die of electrolyte imbalace"--are not particularly marketable. Puts me in the position of thinking about lying, for the admission ppl cannot possibly check all that incoming.
Ah, tomorrow they're leaving. It's sad--I cry at leavings, regardless of who is departing. I know that relationships are not forged over a matter of days. These ppl are in GA. My options are limited and much too late. I'll probably intentionally oversleep. Like I did last time.
(But at least I'll be spared more tales of my mother's Uncle Jim. My brother, their dad, asked them today to write a poem each about their visit to this long-dead guy's homestead. What rhymes with 'Jim' that cannot be made offensive?
I don't rhyme much, so I don't know.
over,
c h
Friday, December 30, 2005
I'm sure stranger things have happened, but my brother and family are here. Didn't experience the antipathy I'd been expecting toward his wife. She still smacks her lips when eating and chewing gum, but I cannot dig up any way to ask her not to do those things without coming off as both offensive and psychotic. So I guess I'll have to disappear when the smacking starts. It stinks that I didn't think to bring more books. Regular TV bores me to a head-scratching frenzy.
The 14-year-old is whupping me good in Soduku--a logic game employing numbers as symbols, to be arranged in columns and grids, never using the same symbols 1 through 9 more than once in each column and grid. Never heard of it and find it hard to picture? I'm sorry--firing on about 2 of 13 cylinders this noon hour. Complete humiliation at the hands of a child, even if he is a certrified genius: if that weren't so weirdly funny, I think I'd be in tears right now.
Nature calls.
c h
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Speechwriter for Bush: what an MFA programme. All that laughable fiction.
crazier hoss
How does a person step into her life at the age of 40? Granted, I feel much younger--the eternal seventeen, maybe, or an immature 24. Now and then I realise that I have no desire for responsibility--have been so deeply wounded by criticisms of my ability to execute same--and that I continue to feel deep shame regarding myself and my circumstances, and this addled dialectic will commence to chase its tail until I find myself finally diverted.
That is what medication is for, I guess. Been thinking about going off Klonopin again. The urge to travel--even if myself goes with me, stowed away in old old luggage--is on me. It's like an 'Anywhere but Here' thing: hard to articulate at times, but the main theme seems to be that thKY-- is the place where I went down in sullen little flames. I need to capture an identity. Have new experiences. Get out of myself, stowaway or not, and lose the drug that ties me down.
Big gratitude to my parents, despite all of our prominent buttons, for a place to be for ten days, in which I can lose weight, begin to accumulate time away from the alcohol, experiment with surfing noisome situations: my brother, cute kids, and annoying wife are coming tomorrow. Part of me wants to let her have it, another to hide in the basement, and yet another to lay back and watch, lurking in their lives, for when my parents are around, they often forget about me.
Which is acceptable.
I wish to declare here that I have always opposed the war in Iraq. I believe it was initiated on the basis of one man's deceptions, that many of the soldiers there have been royally screwed--cardboard boxes to insulate them from RPGs and improvised explosive devices--and that even though most of the reading, thinking public has been inoculated against wholly believing much of what is set forth by media orginisation, we have on some level allowed our intellects and emotions to be hijacked by the earnest-seeming rhetoric of the little man with big ears.
The words of his speechwriters are window-dressing. He is not to be believed.
I get ticked off more often than is practical, but am not a violent individual. I fear guns and bombs and things of that nature; when violence among ppl threatens, I walk.
When money buys power, I am somewhat upset. I know this happens all the time, but usually, I can't see it, and therefore disregard it. Never before have I been much of an activist about anything. But I oppose this war. It is time to save our own skins and get out. When I finally get a tree, I'll tie a yellow ribbon around it.
All of yiz, have a grand year.
c h
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Hanging on by a thread of spit. No bad behaviors, but an undertow of antipathy that sometimes threatens to suck me further out there. My folks don't decorate for Christmas anymore, nor have they for years. That used to be, and probably still is, my favorite part of this time of year--setting up the tree-farm evergreen, trimming it at the base, stringing twinkly, low-tech lights, blue my favorite color. When I was relatively flush at home--Philadelphia--I'd buy them what I though were eclectic ornaments, faeries ensconced in flowers, tiny horses made of cookie dough, other things I forget now, but would like to find in the attic, confiscate, and try to sell on eBay. I'm wondering now about the value of '70's Breyer model horses, all in great condition.
My mother keeps them upstairs as a collective momento of how it was before it got wild and crazy. I just read her journal (hope I put everything back right), and she says that I'm 'piling on weight', that I 'eat much and exercise little'. Comparatively, that is true; I've mentioned before that both parents practise restrictive eating habits. And yeah, I have larded up, and I hate it but don't talk about it here--good little horsie, knows that that line of chatter ticks them off--and am trying to take my therapist's suggestion to accept where I am at this point, and to worry about other matters, such as employability, going down off Klonopin, not drinking at all, regaining a sense of hope about this life I've mangled so.
Can't tell you how hard it is not to live in the past. Can't tell my parents that they do the same thing, albeit in different, more subtle ways. (I know all the standard arguments about letting the past occupy the present; my own is simply so oppressive that I lie in the bed and cry, actively mourning all of the possibilities I put the screws to.) Last night at dinner, the three of us--John, Rose and myself--were discussing a local man by the name of Henry Earl. Jimmy Kimmel wanted him on his show b/c he spends more time in jail for public intoxication a year than he does not. 300+ stays in this year alone; over 900 since the jail opened up its records for public consumption. He was indentified in the paper as 'the town drunk': not nice, 'Lexington Herald'.
Rose kept on arguing that his behavior was a "choice"; John smirked, sighed and said something about why do I keep defending 'these people'. I am not allowed to know anything about anything in this house, so my own experience with the bottle and what I have learned formally about alcohol abuse were roundly discounted. (This is kind of pathological: she won't hear my personal take on the affliction, let alone anything I may have picked up in my adventures in psychology and nursing studies, yet has taken measures to warn me away from her brother's New Year's celebration, which involves four ounces of box wine after the cornbread dinner. She's spoken with his wife, her closest confidant, as well. Good thing she's not in the helping professions--I could sue her skinny self for breach of confidentiality. She doesn't get that I'm not the kind of drunk who likes to cop a buzz in the presence of sober ppl.
And they are sober, all of them, save for this one occasion when they drink four ounces of cheap rose'. That's enough to render my mother a pile of giggling bones. It's enough for me to be the ne'er-do-well and suspect lesbian; I don't know why she had to open my book of malign shadows. I don't know how her mind works, save to say that it's closed much of the time.)
She'll be in here any moment now to tell me to get off the computer. My brother, his wife and four kids are due to get here tomorrow, and she is constantly awaiting his call. I don't know if I want to be here for their visit, which Rose might extend to include New Year's Eve. It's possible that I have resented his wife since he married her, which would be a jealousy that has lasted almost fifteen years. And she ticked me off this summer, with her snippy comments and that gum she insists on chewing after dinner. I'd probably be upset about his marrying anyone, for I continue to go on about how his marriage has truncated any hope of forming a 'realtionship'--vague, vague--with him.
Making fun of her to myself and on line doesn't do a lot to reduce the present level of inflammation that I have with regard to their upcoming visit. All I can do, I think, is lie low. Ask Adam--my brother, an electronics engineer and computer bufu--about downloading the contents of my blogs to disc. Don't want my Chinese menu of pathologies out there for just anyone to scan. My father thinks the Devil resides on the Internet and insists that potential employers have their ways.
New Year's resolution, my only one: trust God to help me heal my mind.
cool runnins,
c h
Monday, December 12, 2005
It's supposed to snow tonight. Even though I have an appointment with Lisa Shrink, I don't want to go back there. Neither parent has asked me if I need money--in truth, only to pay down my library fine and pay back the pharmacist who let me slide on a trazadone special, which would come to about ten bucks. My greys need dying--add on another eight; I need vitamins--on the cheap, about six; and there are the commodities, toilet paper, a feminine hygiene product, and trash bags, this last coming to six or seven. I'm hoping there are no hoops through which I have to jump, although there are those always, and then the guilt that follows.
My brother and his wife, whom my parents love and I dislike still, are coming to Mt. Sterling for Christmas. With them are coming the four kids and her mother, whom I like. She is much kinder than her daughter. And when I am in my parents' house, I have to play by their rules, and they like my brother's wife a lot. Hell, they love the hairy creature. Playing by my parents' rules means no antagonistic words, no vigorous debate, even. Because they know I've had drug and emotional problems, both my brother and his wife look down upon me. That particular emotion there--condescension--gets my goat almost as intensely as does the one underlying ridicule. Contempt, I think it is called. It can make me cry, whereas condescension causes mere unfocused anger. You'd think that it would have focus, but when I'm that mad, focus is a blurry thing.
Time to get off. My timing has been off all weekend.
I don't want to go back there and try to deal with the joblessness and the stigma.
I do want to do a couple of bad things though, things I'd never dream of doing here.
(Well, seeing as 'dream' means 'think' in that context, yes, I've thought about those things, and here they are repulsive.)
King Lemuel said that losers should drink--Proverbs 30-31, I believe. And I agree to some extent, which makes me thirsty for that singular mode of escape.
To those ppl who are my friends here, pick your holiday and enjoy it. To those who are not, the same. My bile and spleen shall remain my own--until the anatomist gets them.
Yeah. Right. Send me crates of razors and Nair and duct tape, so that I may subdue my brother's wife and shave her.
c h
Saturday, December 10, 2005
I must still wonder why other bloggers' visit counts are posted and mine are perpetually *loading*: a dangerous word for a drunk, 'loading'. Just the thing I'm not supposed to be doing. Maybe it's a perspective thing--the other bloggers can't see their head counts either. But I have no way of knowing this. And as much as I might want to *load* myself, that's never a good idea, and these days makes me a hurtin' liar: there is actually pain there.
I never thought much or hard about whether not writers are necessarily liars, feigning knowledge of all kinds of unsavory things to make their points. Some writers don't have any points to make--I know that often I do not--so that jangles the argument that I haven't had yet a little.
The following is not at contest: I need a job. I want to escape my housing situation, regardless, I'm thinking now, of the situation I might have to accept by default. I'm just not as crazy as I was a year ago, a year before that. Though I have the sometimes-disputable pleasure of getting to watch my emotions vacillate wildly at times, I rarely exhibit the lively reactions to the sight that were almost given two years back.
Simply: I cannot be this age, and doing what I am doing.
Courtesy of some drug-influenced (and some not) bad choices, a lengthy pile-up of these stretching years and years of potholes and gravel, I got where I was, and am now ready to proceed in another direction, this one to be aided in its development by Ppl Who Can Do Such Things. More reason to let my favorite abuses alone. (Read in today's paper that a drunken man, who'd been living in a car from which 'rancid venison' had been removed by peace officers, caused an accident nearby when the seven-year-old whom he'd enlisted to steer the vehicle from his lap made a miscalculation. Also confiscated--two empty bottles of Mad Dog and a third, apparently awaiting consumption. And knives, big ones. The man said that he was 'going to Florida', and that since he'd driven a tractor at the age of seven, he was justified in letting his son steer the car. I've never been that much of a mess. I've never been a parent either, which might drive me to it.)
Just told my mother I'd get off her computer.
Maybe later.
c h
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Okay. I'm guessing that your average interviewer, for a wage-per-hour job in this burg, is not going to Google me, knowing nothing about me except, perhaps, if I am asked, that I have basic-to-middlin' computer skills. It may come up that I write. Don't know if mentioning my so-called 'hobby' would cause some nosy body to Google me, then look closely at the hits to see if my name were attached to this blog in any fashion.
In other words, I'm safe. Even in this world with rifles and crackheads and buses whose seats are spaced so closely that tall riders such as myself are condemned to bump their knees on the seat ahead. Truth: I have bruises, bruises on top of old scars. My knees are unlovely, starting to turn to fat, but still, I have not had bruisy knees since I made a habit of going outside and falling down.
Were I to title this entry--I've tried that, titling, but never could justify my title to center and the rest of the post to left--I'd have to call it 'Wintry Mix'. That phrase, a favorite of local weathercasters, clamps down on my last nerve, and pinches. Hard. They're an unimaginative lot. Whatever they do on camera, it involves a lot of jumping around, looks calisthentic. Maybe I should think about becoming one. They're not fat people, although I concede that they might be burning all those calories with their strenuous smiling.
The sky is the color of concrete. Earlier, it was sleeting. My weak left ankle is becoming an issue: again, it almost gave out on me on a street downtown, where I definitely do not want to look like a stumblebum and take up ten minutes of one of Lex's peace officer's time getting breathalyzed.
Re: the housing director, I did my therapeutic activity for the day and got the bitch signed. Went to AA, I mean. So I now owe him nothing, assuming my Section 8 went through for this month. I got my Klonopin, and trazadone--thank God; I won't have to torture my metabolism this month with Seroquel, and the doc agreed to up my Prozac to 60 migs/24 hours--and I believe I'm headed to the country for a couple of days, a therapeutic activity in itself. (The most funny thing: I had a special script for the trazadone, could get it for five dollars, and the pharmacist agreed to spot me, seeing as I was completely broke. I thought today that I must not come to regard myself as lucky, skating along as I am on the goodness of ancestors and strangers and govnm't largesse. This housing director could yank it all out from under me in a nanosecond and think nothing of it.)
Anybody watch the news lately? A woman by the name of Mary Gard(i)ner, a passenger on the jet on which a deranged man claimed he had a bomb and got killed for that misstatement, has been kneading and pummeling, working the shit out of her fifteen minutes of fame. I mean, she should shut up already. IMO, that was a sick situation and an unwarranted response by the air police, or whatever the ppl who shot him are calling themselves. He reaches for his backpack. It would take about the same amount of time to tackle him as to sight and drop him as they did. Geez. His wife's screaming that he's bipolar, that he didn't take his medication. Granted, that factoid probably has little bearing on whether or not he was going to detonate the bomb that was not in his backpack. (But doesn't detonating a bomb take a bit more effort than trying to reach inside a piece of zipped-up luggage?)
Yes, he was olive-skinned. A lot of people are.
Mary Gard(i)ner should be quiet, go home to her handsome hubby and loving 2.5 children, buy a fifth of nasty vodka, and take it into her walk-in closet and drink it in the dark . After she's peed on her shoes, she should forget it. There's no book deal there, and if there is, I'm a monkey's uncle, complete with an artificial dick. (If she really wants some excitement, she should find herself some shoe-bomber shoes. They're out there, folks. The news says so. Five pairs.)
I guess NAMI will have something to say about this. Authorities have been shooting crazy people for awhile now, and we know that this is nothing unusual. But the airplane angle is a fresh new twist, hah? A rime of lime on a martini glass. Shaken. Not stirred.
c h
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Well, okay, then. I can't find myself, my blog, that is, on Google. And that's all right by me. So none of the charming interviewers who have to date dismissed me have read my self-serving drivel, occasional rough diamonds, and nonstop descriptions of bodily functions, some with their own internal logic loops. I just wanted to say that: "logic loops".
Now, I don't know what to say. Or I do know what I want to say, but there's this fear, now, that I'm accessible to hiring manager types like that oily slug Randy--dang, I wanted that job. I suppose I should pray for him or something, as I should for Rob Lobster, the so-called clinical director of my housing program, who is riding my big old behind hard--ouch!--to get a job, pay him some money money money.
(Dude really does look like a lobster. The cooked kind, with eyes a-buggin'. Takes out his inability to get any on women. Crazy women. That's really not too nice of him. But I doubt that 'nice' is in his job description.)
Sunday night. Having dined on Mexican with wartime buddies Gum Dave and Rhonda, I went to AA, and sat there an hour fighting the expected compunction to rid myself of the food. When it came time to leave, I manipulated my way into getting dropped off first with a bald-faced lie, for I could not sit through forty more minutes of that gunk--'chyme', in the nursing texts--leaking out of my stomach, onward and downward and into fat cells.
I did what I had to do. Took a hot bath, counted my Klonopin money, decided that there was enough there to allow me to slink--it's hard to slink in a puffy coat, with a puffy face--over to a neighborhood bar/grille and try my luck at mooching drinks.
Someone had other plans.
The place was almost all black--I'm Caucasian, Irish with some Cherokee in there, drinkin' genes. Bar's set up in a horseshoe, rondure facing the door. Twinkly Christmas lights strung up to give the place class: NY fern bar, ca: 1984. Failing, with vim and honor.
The best, the only, seat in the house is with my back to the door. I slid up onto the stool, fumbled in my puffy big pockets for a ten-dollar bill; and I had it in hand, was going to place it on the bar: and to my left, there is commotion. In that false intimacy of dusk, Xmas lights twinkling, two big dark men begin to struggle with something hoisted between them. The barmaid screams softly, "Jesse."
Huddled in the buzz of my pre-drink nerves, I hadn't seen him come in. Maybe he'd been in there already, waiting in his long black overcoat. I don't know. But he was loaded with a passion for something, I don't think it was money. He was going to shoot somebody. That thing hoisted between Jesse and the other man was a rifle. People around the horseshoe were starting to respond, to fumble, duck or back away. One word jams itself into my head--gun--but I do not yell it out, as a cop would, maybe. Then there is the outline of my parents doing something parental, and secure in their beliefs, their prayers, that I would never find myself in a situation such as this one. It takes me about four steps to exit the place, sole white person in a big orange coat and clunky clogs. I I barely see him, Jesse, really. Jesse doesn't see me.
And I am out in the cold. Three men, older middle aged, stand around grinning. They saw him enter the bar, are waiting to see what will happen. I tell them, there's a man with a gun, a rifle. All three shrug, to me a strange response, one I have forgotten since living in the big city. I take off running in the clogs--dangerous, with my weak left ankle. Round a corner, and the Arabs have come out of their store, vaguely amused. Call 9-1-1, I say, almost breathless. There's a man with a rifle in the bar.
I have no choice but to go on. The apartment is about 20 yards away, nobody's gonna do anything, and yeah, maybe nothing's gonna happen, maybe jesse was subdued, disarmed, left to slink on back to his own apartment, with the gun.
And maybe the other man cannot disarm him. He was a big guy, on the Ving Rhames side. Probably mad over some woman. So I snitch. I must first plug the phone back in--ring tones started to bug me around the time I had my first apartment, and so the thing remains unplugged at night--and I am again breathless. Don't know the address of the place, spit out street names, a restaurant, a bar. A man named Jesse with a rifle. And I stand back and watch the cops start to come, silent, lights twirling.
I'm a target, standing there in the space of my front window, nicely back-lit for a drive-by, a no-brainer. I'm waiting for a cop. Any cop will do, a cop with a pad poised to take my account of the would-be shooting. I don't know how long it takes me to remove the billowing orange coat and draw the blinds. To collapse on my overstuffed couch, chanting Jesusjesusjesusjesusjesus.
This really happened, and I would like to think on it some more. I wanted to drink because I was depressed about not having work, and these events happened, just as I have described them, editorialized a bit, here. Depression. Drinking. The cycle. This big silent hand, turning me stunned to vapor.
c h
and if you don't hire me, it's on you, baby
This Sunday's edition of Career Builder ran an article that suggested blogging can be hazardous for job-seekers. If my blogs have been scoped by potential employers--Googled, the article said, simple as that--I can, well, see why I might still be unemployed.
So I ask the hypothetical you this: is it possible to 'hide' a blog or three, somehow disguise or encrypt the thing so that it will escape the notice of Googlers? I can't review all of them today, given my time restraints, and I do mean 'restraints', but I know that there is writing I want to keep for further tweaking or other conceits, and that there is writing that sends me straight to the loony bin, or jail, of the minds of hiring-manager types.
What to do? I used to be proud of my 'writer's bump' on the index finger of my right hand. I imagine that many readers of a certain age have them, or have had them, and like I have, watched them wane as the pen--mightier than the sword, and now the keyboard--was used less and less, and the keyboard, more and more. Others, of another age, probably have no such prominence. My point is, writing with one's hands hurts now, comparatively, a physical pain, 'writer'scramp', some call it. I never thought I'd say this, but it has become so much easier for me to write at the keyboard, to 'journal' (a bastardisation that makes my skin crawl, reminds me of annoying TJ on "Starting Over") as it were. And to have to remove my journals from this setting--I'm not sure how to capture them, to download them to disc form (yes I am that backward, also poor), and thus keep them alive for my use only.
I've over-used Google in some cases. I probably should not admit this, but as a lonely person, I like to check up on others, see what and how they are doing. Some of them I've known, spoken with; some are giants in my mind; some are dead. I don't know if this qualifies me as a stalker, but it is now upon me to Google myself, which I've done before, and found a lot of doctors in other states. Smart women with my name. And me--well, that pronoun speaks volumes.
Off to Google-land. Pray for me, pilgrims.
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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