There's stuff I can't do. Can't. Don't know how. Can't learn. Like I took Set Building in college. I can't build stuff. It falls apart, breaks, is all crooked, has things sticking out of it. Its pretty embarrassing. I tried to learn a programming language once. I don't remember which one. Probably Perl or something stupid like that. Failed. Didn't get it. Couldn't make anything work. Didn't understand what half of it was supposed to do in the first place.
I can't stop feeling things.
I can't become a person who doesn't need antidepressants (tried, failed)
I can't touch my elbow to my ear.
Can't do it. I'm pretty okay with all this. Most of the time. I wish I didn't have to take a tiny little pill everyday so that I don't end up stuck in my room crying and pulling out my hair and scratching my face. But it's kind of like wishing I didn't have to sleep. It isn't really here nor there.
I got a postcard from flamingbanjo today. Who I like to call Ricktastic, because it's funny. BUT! I am SO TIRED OF MISSING HIM AND STEEN. I hate it. I feel like screaming all the time. You guys HAVE to come back soon. I hate missing people. It's unpleasant and makes my heart hurt. I want you all back where I can hug you and kiss you whenever I want. Because you guys are cute and nice and funny and I like talking to you all the time. Come home come home come home. Come home and hug me!
"Shit!"
"What's up Sarge?"
"Nothing. I just say that whenever I wake up."
Okay somehow certain people around me got it into their heads that they needed to put me in touch with reality in terms of the pain I'm still experiencing in my ankle, which is still healing from a very very very bad break. I say, "I'm looking forward to when it doesn't hurt all the time." RC (reality checker) say, "Oh that actually never happens. Thats something they don't tell you. It's going to hurt for the rest of your life. I broke my ankle almost exactly like you did about ten years ago. It still hurts." I say, "I'm looking forward to walking like a regular person again." RC says, " I was too, and then of course I got arthritis in it, so I'm limping again. With a bad break like that you definitely get arthritis." I say, "Wow, my ankle is kinda cranky today." RC says, "Get used to it. There are days when the weather changes like this where you're hardly going to be able to move, much less walk."
You know what. Fuck You. I don't know what all this is about, and you know some of these RCs are old cranky dudes with arthritis, and some are young women, and some of them are random people on the bus. By the way, if you ever have surgery or break anything, everyone around you becomes a fucking authority on the subject. PT, Bone Density, Surgery, Osteopathology. How they did too much PT. How they didn't go to PT enough. Whatever. I don't fucking care anymore. I'm sick of hearing about it. And about how I'm doomed to a life of pain. And how I'll never walk, run, dance, jump again.
Because as much as I try to eschew denial I have to say, I AM going to walk normally again. I AM going to be free of pain. I AM going to fucking play fucking badminton and fucking frisbee and fucking go dancing and fucking go running again. Fuck all you RCs. Right. Up. Your. Asses. Sho. Nuf.
A brief survey of the worst thing that has ever happened ever as listed by random people I asked, in no particular order except the first:
The Holocaust (duh)
Slavery (no one even mentioned it until I asked a black dude)
The Khmer Rouge coup
September 11
The Rwanda Genocide
Assassinations of JFK, RFK, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, the Israeli Olympic Team 1972
Bombing of Hiroshima/Nagasaki
The Rape of Nangking
Columbine
The Gulags/The Stalin regime
The Vietnam War
The Inquisition 13th and 15th Centuries CE
The Rule of the Khans
The Trail of Tears/The Native American Genocide
The Bubonic Plague
The Alabama Four
Lynchings
WWI and WWII
Oklahoma City Bombing
The Palestinian/Israeli Conflict
Exxon Valdez disaster
The Titanic
The Edmond Fitzgerald
The Decimation of the Rainforest
The Catholic Scandal
The Middle Passage
The Ethiopian Drought
Bosnia
The Aztec Nahuatl Massacres
The Branch Dividian Massacre
Little Big Horn/Wounded Knee
The Reagan Era
The Cultural Revolution
Your Last Relationship
Last Friday
It hasn't happened yet. The thing. The one big thing. It hasn't happened yet.
Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.
So I have to start swimming. Have To. My blood pressure is not good. Very bad in fact. This makes no sense to me. My brain says that only fat people have high blood pressure. I know better. Seriously. I do. I mean all the women in my family regardless of weight have high blood pressure. But you know. Denial is one of the strongest forces in the universe.
So I promise this is not going to turn into my dream log, but I had another crazy dream. This one had Ida and John Galt in it. John Galt fired a bottle rocket and it hit me in the eye. When I pulled it out, it left a hole right next to my eyeball about the diameter of my pinky. So Ida says, "Hey I'll take you to the doctor, " and we jump in her car. But instead of going to a clinic or something she takes me to this big house, that sort of reminds me of the wood buildings on the Army base I lived on in Germany. There's this guy there who is putting in the really cool stone floor, and as he was redoing the floor found the remains of an ancient stone road that he was considering making a part of the floor. It looked really cool. But I had a hole in my face next to my eye, so I turned to Ida and said "Um is this guy a doctor or something?" And she thought for a moment and said "You know, I don't think so."
I had a wierd dream last night. I was in a kitchen with two people, one of whom was really out of control and angry and crazy. She looked very much like a street person version of a friend of mine in high school. Anyway, we were trying to accomplish something the three of us (the third person is much more vague and white blonde) and I'm standing at the sink and the out of control angry lady is holding a kitchen knife. A big one, one that you would use to cut a head of lettuce. I say something that makes her angry and I see her raise the knife as if she's going to throw it. I turn my back on her, in a gesture of trust and humor. "Yeah right, whatever." But she throws it. Hard. I hear/feel it punch through my skull. It enters in my occipital lobe, right at the knit of the joint between the temporal and occipital plates on the right hand side. I immediately am plunged into darkness and I think, "I'm dead." I realize I'm not dead because, well, I'm still thinking and I additionally realize that she's blinded me, permanently, and that I might still die. I actually hear the whooshing, roaring sound of blood entering into my cranium, my legs buckle and my forehead is on the counter of the sink. I feel this whooshing for another moment and then my legs buckle all the way and I'm in darkness. And I wake myself up.
The two major sensations are the punch through of the knife into my skull (sounds like "krchshnk") and the whooshing sound of arterial blood pumping into my head.
As I was headed out to rehearsal today I realized that the back of my head had a burning spot that I'd been pushing on and touching all day. The spot, still a bit tender and tingly, is where the dream knife entered my head.
Several things have happened over the past couple of days that make me uneasy. Which is exactly the right emotionlette. Unease. Dis-ease. Mal-ease. I hardly know how to begin. I'm pretty sure that I'm in a really bad position. It's that feeling that I think paranoid people must have regularly. That someone somewhere is totally fucking them over. I generally suffer from the opposite of paranoia. I generally think that no one anywhere is generally working in anyway against me. In fact, I live under the suffocating blanket of indifference. I'm relatively poor. I have nothing to steal. I have no clout among any group except maybe my lovely friends. And my lovely friends are not trying to take me over or screw me up or relieve me of my duties. So I think no one is DOING anything to me or even trying to DO something to me.
But I have a problem. The place I work at is trying to kill me. I think. They have through dissembling and trickery managed to create a situation in which one of the best people I've ever worked with has to resign. And to her credit, as a kind good natured person, she really has to go. And I understand that she has to go. And I don't know what to do. Do I quit as well? Do I pitch a huge fit and get a bunch of meaningless attention? Do I make demands? Do I throw up my hands and say, well life is unpredictable? Does my head explode? I'm really angry about this, and about the lies that both she and I were told that made this all come to pass. Does being part of a large organisation make it inevitable that even the best of the best will be lied to and screwed over and basically have their minds and emotions messed with ... in a serious way? Not in that, we're big and slow and we don't take individuals into account kind of way, but in a you will pay for mistakes that you didn't even make and aren't responsible for kind of way.
I'm completely freaked out.
So I have something here I think no one, absolutely no one, will comment on. (Do you sense the challenge?) I have not menstruated for over a month. I have also not had sex with anyone for much much much longer than that. Why? (I hear you query) Would I do something as reprehensible as publish this simple fact? Well it's because I have this thing that my cycle is actually a measure of my health. I don't dread it. It doesn't like make me crazy or make me sick or cause me pain. It's like every month I have this check in. I'm okay. everything is in working order, this is just as it should be. But not this month. Hmmmm. Stress? My mother became perimenopausal when she was in her thirties. Just lucky? I don't think it's lucky to miss my monthly check-in. Concern furrows my brow. More than usual. Just say something. Anything. I dare you.
So I was a very anxious child and I realized just how axious recently when I was telling someone the stuff that used to freak me out when I was a kid. It was a long long list. Here are some highlights:
1) HR PuffnStuff
2) Sleestacks
3) Fireworks and firecrackers
4) Henrietta Hippo and Freddy the Frog from The New Zoo Review
5) Morgan Freeman as Dracula on Electric Company
6) The deaf lady who would be on Sesame Street sometimes
7) Anything that could be described as "sticky" except Elmer's Glue and paste
8) Needles
9) Dogs
My mother once asked me if I thought when people snapped they heard a noise. She thought they did. Snap. Like a dry twig breaking underfoot. And I say she's not all wrong. When I'm feeling particularly crazy, or when my medication is wearing off, I hear a sound. A very particular sound. Vreevren. Or Vrivreen. The context for it is this: when I used to clentch my teeth when I was a little kid this high pitched vreeeen would sound in my head. Not at all like the ear ringing Iiiiiiiiii sound. More like biting on tin foil or having an electric current run through your fingers. Vreeven. Vriveeeeeeeen. Vreeven. Vren Vren Vreeeven...
I'm feeling much much better today. I think I just needed to get all those Ishmael's off my chest. (Actually, what was I THINKING? Come back Ishmael come BACK!) I think some people are into pining. Those long distance relationships absence makes the heart grow fonder kind of people. I more of an out of sight out of mind type of person. So I think romanticism is sort of like a stomach virus. It hits really fast and is gone in about 48 hours. That's a very valuable thing to know. Perhaps next time I'll stay home and eat jello and saltines.
And I DO have Cooties Joshua. And I DO want a Kryptonite Cockring for my birthday dammmit. You have a whole eleven months to come up with one. Your reign of terror will come to an end Norton! This is my solemn oath...
So I've been thinking about my experience of unrequitedness and here's a nice little list. Just because I want to put it all in perspective (from about age 11 to present):
Ishmael (my dear friend)
Ishmael (my dear coworker from a while ago who showed me a glacier once while we were on the prow of a ferry. There was a dog who looked like he was entirely made of felt. Ishmael asked if he could call me JP. If he was enough of a friend of mine to call me that.)
Ishmael (the Jazz guitarist who actually helped me understand what I was hearing)
Ishmael (a person I knew once a long long time ago. A long long time ago. A long long time before we were permitted to meet again. A long long time before...)
Ishmael (Nice karate ghi dude)
Ishmael (You, yeah you and your Irish good looks, attitude and accent. You who used to whisper in my ear in Irish, not gaelic, cause before you I didn't know that Irish was a language all it's own and that the word colleen meant girl or woman)
Ishmael (Where did you go? I used to dream about you, but you grew up in my dreams. Not like dreaming about the people I used to know who didn't change. Where oh where are you?)
Ishmael (You're gay. I know that. I love you anyway. Didn't you know that?)
I call each of you Ishmael. Yes I do.
xoxoxooooohhhhhhh
I am absolutely without question the most pathetic romantic on the planet. I say this because I actually made myself heartsick yesterday. I felt as though I had a fever and my stomach was in knots. And it was all just that I had worked myself up into a repressed frenzy over something that does not even exist. Sad.
I'll call him Ishmael. Because it amuses me. For some reason recently (meaning about a year ago) I realized that I was desperately in love with this poor fellow. Now, because I'm not blind and stupid, I know that he does not now nor ever has felt anything similar for me. So there's this dillema. What do I do? It's much much harder to get over something that is not happening or has not happened than something that has. So I have this intense desire to make something happen. Like confess my deepest feelings or something really really entertaining like that. See but again I realize that this has nothing to do with Ishmael really and for me to do this would be simply selfish. I would get this thing off of my chest and he would feel terrible. At least that's my projection. He would feel awkward around me and, knowing him, guilty, like somehow it's his fault that I'm so...I dunno... INSANE.
I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of thing. I'm honestly usually fairly uncomplicated in my feelings for others. My complicatedness gets taken care of in other ways. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to deal with this whole rediculous unrequited thing Dear God let me know.
Is there like a tea I can drink? If I walk three times around my house widdershins? Anything? Anything at all?