Tag: Sunday thoughts

In Which I Fear Nurses With Needles

sunny december

I’m a little panicky today because time to the new year is running out.  It’s going by too fast!  Am I using it well?  Am I wasting it?  I’ll probably die tomorrow anyway so who cares, right?  GAH!  Stop spinning, brain!  Yo!

What’s my problem, anyway?  Yesterday was a great writing day.  I didn’t actually do any writing but I mapped out 8 chapters of book 2 and will finish mapping the plot out chapter by chapter before I do any more writing.  Free-writing wasn’t working for me.  I can’t meander with my novel writing.  It doesn’t work for me to just see where the writing takes me.  I have to know where I’m taking it.  I’M THE DRIVER.  I also built a new character that is important to the whole story arc.  This has made a lot of other things clearer too.  So it was a very productive day working on the book.  I planned to work on it more today but instead I have to deal with my damn scooter again which is at my friend’s house – not working.  There are also errands to do and a visit to a pub with our friend Dennis.  So I think this won’t be a writing day at all.

I need to get my transportation issues sorted out.  My bicycle tire keeps going flat (probably  because I’m so damn fat) and the scooter is just – FALLING APART APPARENTLY.  I can’t afford to keep having work done on the scooter.  The back tire needs replacing, the carburetor most likely needs replacing, it’s possible there are a million other things about to collapse and need replacing.  So it’s looking like the best thing is to get the bicycle tire fixed and do all my errands on it.  Which will likely kill me before it gets me in shape.  My mom depends on me to run errands for her so I have got to have a set of wheels.  A car for me is just as out of reach as completely fixing the scooter is.

Vehicles suck.

I’m supposed to have my blood drawn to test my liver function.  I haven’t done it because I am too scared.  Firstly, I’m scared that it will take 30 tries to get enough blood out of me to test in the first place (last time I had blood drawn the nurses accused me of having “rolling” veins, as though I was thwarting them on purpose and it took three of them to poke at me before they were successful which very nearly made me pass out) and secondly, I’m just afraid of getting bad news like I’ve already got cirrhosis of the liver and it’s too late and I have to go on a transplant list.

I never do anything by halves.  So obviously my fears are well founded.

I think that January should be a really witchy month for me.  I should make that salve (the one I’ve been meaning to make for months).  I should make some shampoo (I have soapwort for crying out loud!).  I should work on my lotion project again.  I should drink dandelion root tea for my liver and to prove what a tough-ass I am (that shit is BITTER).

I should also work on cooking new things and getting new recipes up on Stitch.  I haven’t done that in a long time.

And WRITEWRITEWRITE.

And not drink.  I have emailed my psychiatrist to request a different substance abuse counselor.  I hope she gets my email before my birthday.  If I don’t get a new counselor by then I may have to take my friend Sid up on going sober with me.  Can you believe how awesome it is of her to offer such a thing?  I seriously have the best group of friends (online and off) a woman could hope for!

You what’s a bummer?  The lack of rain here.  It has been so dry here for so long.  I think we had two rainy days in November.  The weather forecast continues to show mostly sunsunsun with a little bit of cloud here or there for five minutes followed by sunsunsunsun.  This is NOT good for Northern California.  We desperately need the rain.  Plus, I miss the rain.

Alright – it’s time for me to skedaddle.  I hope you are all having a fabulous Sunday and are enjoying your last days of 2013.  We all get to kick it in the pants very soon.

Stockholm Syndrome for Dreamers

I think it’s uncool for meat-eaters to get chirpy and self satisfied when a vegetarian eats a piece of meat.  I can promise that this vegetarian will not be secretly loving meat nibbles ever.  But some vegetarians do slip up or indulge or fall off the wagon because most of them weren’t always vegetarians and meat tastes good to them.  There should be no war between meat-eaters and vegetarians.  There is no need.  It’s stupid.

Still, I have to admit that I’m prone to my own juvenile moments.  I’m sure if you’ve been hanging around this blog for long you’ll already be able to count many proofs of this on your hands, so I’m not going to give you more right now.  Let’s just say that it has been confirmed this week that a local person I knew didn’t like me doesn’t like me.  It doesn’t bother me because I don’t like this person either.  We were never friends and it’s pretty much a non-tragedy that we never will be.  I think we’re both pretty happy with this arrangement.  However, this person has actually snubbed me pretty sincerely and after quite a few snubs I finally gave up doing the polite, cause there’s only so many times you can bother acknowledging a person who pretends not to know you.  So I engage in some small wicked fantasies about a future in which things are different and I have the opportunity to very politely make this person feel like total shit for being a total shit.*

The point is: a very small number of meat-eaters are total shits who are waging a juvenile war against people choosing not to eat meat and I can point my finger all I want but I know I play my own juvenile games and so I think I’ll fold my finger right back up and redirect my attention.

I’ve been having lots of bad dreams lately.  I have spent a lifetime learning the subtle differences between bad dreams, disturbing dreams, and nightmares.  It really doesn’t matter what you call them unless you spend a lot of time in them because when you do you need a rating system to describe (even just to yourself) what level of fear or depression or horror you spend all your sleeping hours experiencing.  I wonder if I have a version of Stockholm  Syndrome with regards to my life of bad dreams and nightmares?  They have held me and my subconscious captive my whole life and at this point I think I might freak out more if they stopped than if I continue to have them the rest of my life.  More than that, I think I’ve come to think of them as part of the fabric of my being.  Who would I be without the haunting?  Who would I be if I had mostly good dreams or no dreams at all?  How would I take my own psychological temperature?  They keep me in a constant state of unrest and they chain me to themes I have thought I’d like to be free of.  But it has come to a point where this macabre landscape of desperate sleep is like a spiritual imprint.  A tattoo on the psyche that glows in the dark.

There’s a part of me that believes that all dreams are real in an alternate universe and if the nature of my dreams completely changed it would be like dying.  I don’t like the bleak borderlands of crows I walk in my sleep but I’m used to it in a way so that when I’m still walking them in daylight I know it’s my two lives crossing each other and nothing has been undone.

I’m trying to slow down the gears of preservation.

It’s been a phenomenally long day.  I’ve worked all day so I don’t have to work so much tomorrow.  I took a three hour “break” to make a double batch of corn chowder and slow roasted tomatoes.  It’s late and I must now commence “wind down time” which takes about two hours.  I can’t go from focused activity to sleep without a very long period of numbing my brain into enough stupefaction that it will accept sleep without demur so that I can launch myself into the road again to save an infinitesimal kitten and a stupid puppy both bent on dying and an old boyfriend who wants to play tennis while an old friend accuses me of stealing everything from furniture to cheese.

You have no idea how much anxiety those things caused me last night in my parallel reality.

Good night.  I hope you go to bright calm places in your dreams.  I hope you don’t see me in mine!

 

 

*Yes, it’s all cloak and dagger here.  Remember what a small town I live in.  A few of you actually live here too and I’m terrified that in spite of my careful vagueness you have already figured it all out.  But you can’t.  There are only two people who know the details and we’re very SPY.**

**Remember that many people in this town don’t like me and more than one person has snubbed me.  You are not SPY enough to dig my secrets out of my subconsciousness.***

***That is not an invitation to try.

Laundry List

Remember the other night when I was all hateful towards my country and denounced it which would have been very difficult for me and my family if this was 1952?

Yeah, nothing’s changed since then because that was last night at roughly 2:30 am.

I am a woman of no country and I pledge no allegiance except to non-violence and to the education of the mind to seek an ever greater understanding of just why humans suck so much.

One of the important things to do when recalibrating oneself to a place of greater balance is to answer dark with light.   When I heard about the attacks on Libya yesterday and looked up as many news reports as I dared to read and was blowing angry steam out my ears and shouting the walls down, I stopped and asked myself how productive it was for me to sit around blowing smoke out my ass and pounding the walls.  It’s not very productive as it turns out but it proves I’m alive and thinking and have a conscience.

After Max said:

“You know that Germany and Japan are just waiting for us to use up all of our money and weapons and when we have nothing left they’re going to get revenge on us.”

I decided to take a fierce walk.  This was slightly hampered by my old lady fat calves that are still trying not to eject themselves from my legs after I pulled them well over a month ago.  I didn’t allow this to stop me.  I stopped to stretch my calves about every ten feet and may have been walking with a slight limp but I was out there breathing the fresh crisp air and I’m not going to lie, it didn’t save the world.

While I was walking I was feeling impotent.  Yes, even people without penises may feel limp and useless.  I noticed so much trash strewn around and was reminded that I missed my Kung Fu school’s trash pick-up event.  I’m not sorry.  I don’t need to be around lots of people right now.  That’s kind of the whole point of my direction at this moment in time.  Still, it made me look sharp at those soggy dirty flattened Kool-aid boxes, candy wrappers, plastic bottles slightly crushed (which always makes me feel a little weepy right after feeling angry at the eejits who dropped them) and suddenly I was picking them up.  With my bare hands.  I’m not going to tell you I enjoyed touching such disgusting trash.  I will say that picking trash up on my fierce angry walk was therapeutic.

It might not bring peace to the world but it reaffirms that I give a shit and I can get my hands dirty to make this world a better place.

I took another walk today and the calves felt a little less jumpy and twingy.  It felt so good.  I really love walking.  I love jogging too but walking is my favorite form of exercise of all time.  It takes me outside myself and exorcises demons.  When I got home I practiced double sticks and hubud with Philip.

So here we are.  Into the morning hours again.  I am sad about the world and don’t revoke anything I said yesterday.  Still, I think I have shifted the anger a little and come right back to this place where I understand that this is just a part of being alive.


I’m going to make a very long list:

  • I’m not Theda Bara which may surprise a few dimwitted people.
  • Chapter 18 is a pox on my soul.
  • I will never understand what induced rational human beings to explore civet glands as a source of delight for odorizing themselves.
  • I miss my friend Lisa E very much and wish she’d move back to Oregon.
  • My mother tried to kill me today with a curry full of giant chunks of fresh ginger.
  • I miss Chelsea and Sid and Sharon too.  They’ll all be asking why the hell I don’t call them if this is true.  I’ll just pull a blanket over my head instead.
  • I love Craig Ferguson except for his obsession with puppets.  I have to wonder if it’s his unholy love for puppetry that is responsible for his many marriages.
  • Max got into the charter school we were hoping to get him into and I’m so excited about it.  He’s excited.  Well, he’s excited to leave his current school.  He’s mostly excited that it’s spring break.
  • I read that the highest temperature ever reached in Vancouver BC was 93 point something-or-other.  Why was I not born and raised there?  I would never get a heat rash there or kill an innocent bystander just because the unbearable heat made me do it.
  • I still don’t believe in Armageddon or the Apocalypse.  But I’m starting to worry about the fact that I don’t believe in these things.
  • I watched the Golden Compass with Max last night and Philip told me it is an atheist fable and while I don’t quite see the atheism in the movie plot I have to admit that it thrilled me to finally have the atheists represented in fables.
  • Charlie Sheen has been developing creepy hair and I’m very sorry to see it.
  • I think the country I formerly belonged to is a lot like Charlie Sheen.  WINNER.  (aka: asshole)  (aka: unhinged) (aka: always a john, never a man) (aka: snorting the big delusion)
  • I have been wondering lately how come I have heard so many people speak of the missionary position as being boring.  Why is it that with sex you’re either boring or you’re exciting?  I like to think of the missionary position as being classic.  It never goes out of style.
  • Speaking of sex, I wrote something in Cricket and Grey that I can never say out loud without my skin crawling off my bones and I marvel at how I’ve left it in because it’s a phrase others use liberally and happily: “making love”.  One of my characters uses this expression and it caused me a lot of pain but for the sake of authenticity I left it in because I know it’s what this character would say.  Unlike me.
  • When you read my books you must remember that while I may have writ them in my own blood, they are not me.
  • The word “unguent” is repulsive and attractive at the same time.  It’s greasy and healing.  It reminds me of incense and also anointing.  Which reminds me of devils I don’t believe in.
  • I have actually literally written in my own blood.  It’s a queer thing.  It’s distressing.  When people talk of signing their name in blood I always remember what it feels like to actually do this.
  • I still have some very disturbing evidence of my open armed youth.  I have a playing card covered with blood and ripped to pieces, a page in an old sketchbook splattered with it, and somewhere (because I know I haven’t gotten rid of it) is a picture I drew with my own blood.  Do I destroy these so that my son never sees them?  I have not been able to let them go because I think my soul is trapped in these bits of blood saturated paper.
  • I grapple with revealing the truth.  I grapple with my desire to protect my son from painful truths and my belief that hiding truths is more damaging than revealing them.  I couldn’t bare it if my son looked at me with fear the way so many others have.
  • Or looked at me with horror, which is even worse.
  • What kind of horse am I?
  • I found a piece of paper with a grocery list, the times of Max’s last therapy session, and a drop of blood splattered and dried darkly on it.  I have no idea where the blood came from but seeing it felt portentous.
  • Max has only gotten a couple of mild bloody noses in the last six months.  We don’t talk about it out loud for fear of the evil eye.
  • Yes, we don’t  believe in God yet we’re superstitious as hell and are forever knocking on wood and not saying things that might then become untrue for having been noticed.
  • My cat Pippa has a slightly crooked chin that is so adorable I can never take her seriously.
  • I miss my chickens but I’m glad not to have that one extra responsibility right now.
  • Sweet salad dressing offends me deeply.
  • I have known my whole life that I would be responsible for my mother one day if she didn’t die young.  She’s here now.  I want her with us.  We love her here.  She’s scared for her health and her future.  I’m scared too but it isn’t for any dreary sense of obligation that I will care for her no matter what happens.  It’s just because I’ve always loved her so much it hurts and she’s always been so much more vulnerable and vibrant than me.
  • Pippa loves beer.
  • I love uniforms even when I don’t love what they represent.
  • If I get cancer I will have to simply let it do it’s thing because I can’t afford to be treated.
  • I have a beautiful signature.  I don’t say that because I’m an insufferable proud bitch.  It apparently gives lots of pleasure to clerks everywhere.  They tell me so.
  • Please be kind to yourself tonight.  Tomorrow.  Now.