July 2007

I don’t like my cats anymore.  I used to love my cats but now I can’t stand having them near me.  And they’re not really mine.  When I left California, they were among my many treasures I had to leave with my brother, because my then soon-to-be husband was allergic.  In New Hampshire I missed them so badly I used to dream they could talk.  Jack, the EVIL cat, was my favorite, and in my dreams we’d travel the railroad tracks together, always headed to someplace green with a big blue sky.  I don’t recall what he said but doubt it was anything profound.  It is, after all, my subconscious mind, and not the cat’s.

I’m sure Jack the EVIL cat, were he able, would have much to say.  Lately, he’d probably bitch about me, and tell everyone within purring distance that I’m no longer his affectionate pal.  I’m grateful he can’t tattle on me for my recent chill, and that I don’t have to explain it (to him or anyone else), because the truth isn’t something I like to admit to myself between the hours of awake and dreamland.  When sleep gets the better of me, and Jack the EVIL cat and I hit the road again, one of these days he’s going to ask and I’m going to have to tell him the truth.

“I’ve already left you once and I know I’m going to be leaving you again, soon.  I don’t want to grow attached because I remember what it was like the last time.  Getting over you sucked, fur ball.”

To this he would respond with a sound similar to a harrumph.  (Give one to the governor!)

I’ve unpacked but I’ve never moved in.  I exist here but I wouldn’t call it living.  The other day a man offered to pay me for sex.  He assumed, because I’m poor and he’s rich, that I’d take his money and fuck him with a smile on my face and dollar signs in my eyes.  He assumed, because I’m a woman and he’s a man, because I have a cunt and he has a cock, that I’d understand the logic of his reasonable proposition.  He probably thought he was doing me a favor, his offer altruistic.  Helping someone onto the slippery side that spirals down into the hell of their own making doesn’t look as bad if you shove a few bucks into their pocket.  I’m rolling pennies and nickels, quarters and dimes, and I have everything I’ll ever need.  And the fucker who offered money to fuck me can jackoff to his bank statement.

This isn’t my home.  What I don’t understand about the people here, I don’t need or want to learn.  I came back to help my brother purge this house of all the shit left by everyone who’s lived here over the last 13 years.  I never imagined it would be this difficult.  I don’t want to do anything that might tie me here, anything to prevent or cause me to hesitate when I get an opportunity to escape.  I don’t belong here.  Everyone is insane.

If this were my garden, my home, my city, if I were free to love my pets, and not worry about leaving them again, knowing I’d hear stories about how they slept under the covers for months after I’d gone, maybe I wouldn’t feel so cold inside.  Maybe I wouldn’t be as angry as I am at this moment.  But this is not my garden.  Right now the only safe place I’m free to love anyone is in my dreams.

It’s 4:30am and, once again, I can’t sleep.  My mind is busy processing today’s intake; forgetting phone numbers and names, remembering completely useless, random things I’ll later quote in a conversation I kill by doing so, repressing, compartmentalizing, whipping up reasonable denial, more efficient ways to entertain myself, making reminder lists which include primarily reminders about needing to make lists, remembering what I forgot to do today that I’ll forget to do tomorrow, and wondering if everyone has as much fun thinking their thoughts as I do.

I can’t sleep but I don’t need to be fixed.  Everyone I know is an insomniac yet none report psychotic breaks brought on by sleep deprivation.  Being an insomniac isn’t as bad as the pharmaceutical companies would like us to believe.

Oh, I know…  To live the “good life” you need to drink lots of water (but if you live in San Francisco, don’t drink it out of a plastic bottle!), get plenty of exercise, eat whatever they’re saying is healthy this week, sleep 8 hours a day, be nice to children, puppies, dolphins, recycle, and don’t question your government.  Oh, and hate yourself.  Hate everything about your life.  Feel inadequate, less than whole.  Buy into the obsessive need to “improve” the mass of imperfection that is you.  Get stronger, smarter, thinner, fatter, taller, shorter, buy a bigger house, buy a smaller house, consume more, don’t consume as much, fix your nose, get bigger breasts, buy a better car, get better looking children (’cause apparently this new crop of kids are just too damn fat), run more, be good to your knees, pray, kill your television, get a brighter smile, get a bigger cock, beware of the Internet!, be afraid, don’t trust your neighbors, research on line to see if you have the disorder mentioned in the drug commercial because you too suffer from thinking, dreaming, and believing in yourself, and Goddamn it, that shit just ain’t right.  Hate yourself.  You’re not good enough.  Get a life coach, get a pet psychiatrist, go to AA meetings even if you don’t drink - you could be an “emotional” alcoholic - find something wrong with yourself, and if you can’t then go buy a magazine, turn on your TV, talk to a friend…they’ll help you!  Everyone has an opinion about who you are and what you should be.  AND YOU AREN’T IT.  FIX YOURSELF.  BECAUSE YOU SUCK.  And if you think you don’t, you’re deluding yourself, which is okay, because we have books about that too.  And things to buy.  And drugs to fix it.

Medical research discloses
that everyone is going to die
of something.

                ~Franz Wright from the poem TO JOHN WIENERS: ELEGY & RESPONSE
                    from WALKING TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD

If we got over the absurd notion that it’s possible for everyone to like everyone, stopped this endless obsession with “self-improvement”, we could work on finding a way to co-exist without killing each other.  We talk about tolerance and acceptance, yet spend an enormous amount of money trying to find ways to cure that which we “tolerate” and “accept”.  “You’re okay just as you are, or until I find a way to fix you.”

I think I’ll file these thoughts under “shit that irritates me”.

I can’t sleep.  But I don’t need advice on how to improve my sleep habits.  I don’t need to stop drinking coffee or start taking drugs.  We don’t share a fence.  How you fix you is your business.  What goes on in my yard is mine.

“How you play the game isn’t as important as winning the game, or sometimes just beating other players. The joy of infuriating others, stealing their victories, dashing their hopes, spoiling their plans, ah, you can’t put a price on such things. Friends are people who love you in spite of your constant desire to win and crush your competitors’ spirits, but Gods, they love you because of it.”

                                                                                       ~John Cottonwood

“305 The love of absurdity and the paradox is the animal happiness of the sad. As the normal man might talk nonsense or slap others on the back out of vitality and good humour, those incapable of enthusiasm and happiness do somersaults in their minds and, in their own (cold) way, perform the (warm) gestures of life.”

Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquietude

I love my life. I’m grateful for every miserable second of it. And the good parts are okay too. I’ve never lived “traditionally”, never taken the easy path (not that I wouldn’t have had I known where it was), asked for help when I needed it, or looked to my friends for solace and comfort. I don’t want to bug them. They’ve got their own lives, and anyway, I hate that cross-eyed stare I get every time I talk about what’s bothering me. I’m okay with this, too. I’m only lonely when I have someone to miss.

I’m a little lonely today.

For the most part, I keep to myself. I don’t talk to hear myself speak or contribute to a conversation when I have nothing of value to add. A handful of people know me as I am. That’s true for most people, I think, even though we were invited to “come as [we] are.” I accept that my lack of active participation leaves the field open for “radical interpretation of the text”. I don’t confirm or deny what people assume. Don’t chase them down to force revisions of or addendums to unauthorized biographies whispered by gossips and contemplated by fools. I don’t think people put that much thought into who I am. I like it that way. It’s why I keep to myself.

But I really fucking hate it when I feel like I should play dumb for someone who wants me to pretend I didn’t notice and accept their gross underestimation of who I am without comment. Normally I don’t care. I used to but I couldn’t break myself into enough parts to fit into the mold. This is different. I reached my hand out in friendship and got patted on the head like a puppy. I’m pissed off and confused. Nothing comes easy, especially worthwhile friendship, and it’s true there were things left unsaid (for a reason), although God-Unit #2 wins the grand prize for audacity. If I didn’t think he actually believed his assumptions, the whole thing would’ve made me laugh, because I really like arrogant megalomaniacs with god-complexes. Not everyone wants to play chess with God - but I do. I’m not a god groupie, I’m a god collector, and he’d fit nicely in my pantheon.

I don’t like conflict. In the past, anytime I felt things weren’t going well, or I couldn’t be the friend I thought my friend deserved, I walked away. (Fucked up, I know.) I’m not like that anymore, and I have the Amnesiac God to thank for it, because no other deity could test a woman’s patience like him. He exists in a world that makes sense. He doesn’t pretend to know the answers or the way. He’s the kind of God that empowers you to figure it out for yourself and helps you believe it’s worth once you get it. His friendship is precious to me.

So I no longer walk away. I wait and see what happens.

Like I did with my friend “The Prick”.

I’ll let you all in on a little secret. I’m a geek. Shocking, stunning revelation, I know…but it gets worse. Off and on for the last 6 or 7 years I’ve played numerous on line video games with my brother. I usually play a gnome or an ogre. Trolls are good too. If you play a female character, especially one with a “pretty” avatar, “boys” (typically men ages 25 to 40) like to flirt. They never flirt with me when I play a male troll or ogre. I’ve always wondered how many women gamers play ugly male characters to avoid the “pick up”; I can’t imagine many women willing to run around as a goddamn wood elf in a g-strong with Band-Aids over her nipples. But, I digress…

Back to my friend, “The Prick”. The other day I logged on to my on line video game of choice (not telling, don’t ask) to discover a creature I needed to kill for a quest standing in front of me. Yeah, me! So I kill said creature just as a group of “people” show up. As I’m looting the corpse (yes, a corpse) for the item I need, I notice the members of the group are giving me the finger, and shouting out not-so-nice things about me to the entire “zone”. This confuses me. I contact the shouter in a private channel to ask him what his problem is. Apparently, they’d been telling everyone in the “zone” they needed this creature for the same quest, and asked anyone who saw it to please not kill it. Oops. After 10 minutes of volleying creative insults at one another in which we suggested various things the other could do to improve themselves as a human being, I realized I didn’t want the conversation to end, because I kind of liked the guy. He was articulate, funny, could type fast and spell, and kept up with me jab-for-jab, which isn’t easy to do when I’m on a roll. I said, “You know, if you weren’t such a prick, I’d actually like you.” This must be the gaming equivalent of calling a truce because after one or two weak jabs, he told me he’d had a bad day at work, and “need[ed] someone to take it out on and [I was] convenient.” Up to this point, I hadn’t apologized or even bothered explaining why I killed the creature because he we wanted to fight and I knew whatever I said wouldn’t penetrate. I said, “Please tell the members of your group I apologize. Had I been on when you said you needed [insert creature's name here], I wouldn’t have killed it. Not my style.” We talked for an hour, mostly joking about the nature of our “relationship”, and how it would consist mainly of creatively insulting each other. In the end, we thanked one another for the “pleasant conversation”, and went our separate ways. But we say “hello” from time-to-time. Had I not told him the truth, “You suck, but I still like you,” the outcome would have been very different. I’d have an enemy instead of friend.

I’ve learned the hard way how to choose my words carefully; something for which I will forever be grateful to Bill. The most important aspect of this lesson, of course, is knowing when not to say anything at all. Unfortunately, it’s become my default response, and I’ve been told my silences…are difficult to endure. My Amnesiac God went silent once. If I knew their numbers, I would call everyone I’ve ever known, and apologize.

I don’t often leave my cave. This is as close as most people will ever get, because I know my strengths (and weaknesses), and slapping others on the back with enthusiasm is not one of them. I’m better at performing, in my “own (cold) way, the (warm) gestures of life”. I may not get it right the first time, or be happy with the results, but I live my life deliberately. When I seek out friendship, I’m not asking for a mirror, I’m looking for a window.

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• fuck (3x)
• piss (2x)
• bastard (1x)

A rating I’m not ashamed to tell my parents about.  I can’t tell you how disturbing it was to learn I’d been rated G.  And this is AFTER writing about nipple torturing winters and the benefits of fluctuating gravity for those suffering from erectile dysfunction.  What the hell does a girl have to do to get rated PG 13 around here?

Because again feels so like yesterday
déjà vu, synchronicity, and providence
take to the stage like weary veterans
fearful of forgetting who they are
pretending to be; their lines
written in pencil
on props without names.

I can say anything and never know
if I’ve affected the right motivation,
or if I’m stepping on someone’s cue,
living a life meant for another,
an unwitting usurper
encouraged by kin and country
to do all I can
to be what I can be;
scrap the script when necessary.

I keep moving the X on my map
putting distance between
myself and the past,
with each rising and setting of the sun
every phase of the temperamental moon,
knowing I am no one
of consequence on this stage; that the stars
I wished upon as a child
wouldn’t miss me.

I wonder as I watch you from behind the curtain;
is the audience as vulnerable as the actor?
Are those polished smiles that wax and wane,
on the pretty faces of the costumed and cultured
good enough to impress or fool the neighbors?

Or are they as naked and contrary as I feel?
Unwilling to read their lines as written.
Always trying to find another way
to say the same thing.

“Find me.”

The stars wouldn’t miss me
but I would miss you.

Or not.

Occasionally (every 10 minutes) I ask myself, “What the fuck?”  “What were you thinking?”  “Are you insane?”

Wisely, I stopped answering years ago.

And kept doing and being what I do and who I am - because who really cares?  Who’s keeping score?  Who but me gets to dream my dreams, or has live my nightmares?  Who remembers what I remember or forgets what I forget?  Who is going to fall, laugh, jump, wave, drive, and sing in the shower for me?  No one.

In every 80’s teen movie somebody asked the question, “What are you waiting for?”

Nothing.  Not a damn thing.

Life is happening now.  Every stupid thing I do and say is my life, how I’m living it, what I do with my time on this rock.  Sometimes I do and say some pretty weird shit.  And it’s fucking fabulous.  I mean every word and believe none of it.   I’ll always be wrong.  I’m always going to select the door with the duck behind it.  Or pick the empty hand.  And then one day I’ll win the grand prize, a “major award“, and it’ll fuck up my bad luck theory, which will reinforce my “I’m always wrong” theory, which, in a way, means I’m always right.  Fabulous.

But really…what the fuck was I thinking?

“Oh, shut up,” I say to myself, as I look at the clock, and wonder why I’m not sleeping.

You know why.

I feel distracted, upside down, wired, exhausted.

Around 4:30am I fell asleep and dreamt of you.  Stranger than fiction.  No more than 15 minutes into the dream, a siren woke me, followed by a cop directing someone to park in an empty space across the street.

Could you double the fine for waking me and fucking up my dream?

Didn’t think so.

Today a power line fell down on the playground at the corner.  (Nobody was in the park at the time.)  They cordoned off the area, and for a few hours it was almost peaceful; minus the police cars, firetruck, electric company truck, various miscellaneous city personnel, and your standard throng of hangers-on and gawkers.  If I could nap I betcha I would’ve slept like an old person.  (I don’t have children but the expression “slept like a baby”, when applied to my nephews and niece, is something I never want to do.)  Now old people…folks in their mid-70s, early 80s…they know how to nap.

Speaking of working toward old age.  In exactly 2 weeks I’ll be 32.  I don’t know what 32 is supposed to feel like but this is definitely not what I expected.  Maybe I don’t own enough stuff to feel like a grownup.  I also thought I’d be taller.

See what I mean about being distracted?  Zoot is skipping multiple grooves tonight.

Completely pointless.  And exactly what I needed.

I suppose I have good reasons for being distracted.  Rat Bastard’s in Florida eating all my shrimp and tattooing someone else’s name on his forearm, I get idiot-happy anytime my amnesiac God burns a bush or sends me an email, then sad because I realize how little it takes to make me happy, and wish he’d pass along the secret.  The Swedish Fish is livin’ large with the dog who’s afraid of the furniture, and I if I go back I’m not sure my presence will be any less haunting.  And then there’s the calls I’m not making and the letters I’m not writing.  The Gambler just popped into my head.  Perhaps Fiery Bra Lover, The Itching Gnome of the Sea will take pity on me and convince his government to let me stay for a while.

Yes, definitely time to try sleeping again.

Writing about nothing feels good though.

(In case you’re curious…a pirate.)

From the journal I kept during my trip to Europe with a friend.  I was 18.

September 22, 1993 - London

THOUGHT:
    I once said I love the city.  I take it back.  I love being lost in the moments of big cities.  I love the burst of energy you get from all the rushing cars you have to dodge.  I DO NOT, HOWEVER, enjoy the panic and constant fear I feel when I walk anywhere in the city.  I do not like the rude shoving and casual snarling.  I WANT TO BE THE SPECTATOR.  Participating means I must get sick with these people, eat, sleep, and bathe with these people.  I HAVE TO PARTICIPATE TO BE A SPECTATOR.  That isn’t fun at all.  For the first time in my life I long to see familiar faces.  To engage in familiar conversation.  I want to be home in my bed, getting over this cold, not in some stuffy café I can’t breathe in.  I want a lover.  A confidant.  A close and familiar friend.  One I know…  Someone who knows me.

My video card is toast, it’s temporary replacement made around the time Kurt Cobain was still alive, but everything else in my computer survived yesterday’s crash landing.  Including Jack the cat, whose odds of continuing to exist on this planet fluctuated throughout the day.

Thanks for the prayers and kind words.  Maybe your Gods talked to the ones that I piss off and got them to back down.  Whatever works…

…with the Gods, make sure you can afford to lose, and back up anything worth keeping.

The fucking cosmic prankster’s been at me again. I beat him at chess (sore loser), so he decided to possess my cat, hop on my rolling computer chair, and surfer-cat it into a head on collision with my computer. The end result?

Cosmic Prankster: 1
Broken computer on the floor: 0
Possessed cat: current whereabouts unknown

All week long I’ve been thinking, “It’s back up time again.”  I don’t believe I’m psychic or because I’m a woman, writer, or I like shell fish. (All of these sound like reasonable explanations for ability.) However, I try to trust my instincts in the same way I trust my senses. If something smells bad, I don’t eat it. If something is too hot, I don’t put my hand on it. If something wrong, an alley way, an interview, the way a man keeps watching me as I walk through a parking lot, I trust that my body or subconscious mind senses something about the person and/or situation that I might not be able to immediately identify. Like a certain spice I don’t like in a flavorful dish; the other flavors might overwhelm my mind’s ability to pick it out and name it, but my taste buds know it’s there. For whatever reason, I sensed it was time to up my shit and I didn’t.

I started to. I copied all my music, photographs, word documents, etcetera to my second hard drive, but for lack of funding, failed to burn them to disc. I was going to this weekend after I sold a few things. I’ve started selling my stuff again (oh, so reminiscent of the days I used to spend my paychecks on books, read them, then sell them to pay for utilities, rent, and food). I put the nagging back up your novel feeling in the same compartment where I house other irritating thoughts such as:

”Don’t bother with caller ID. You know it’s him. Your blood pressure’s gone up for no reason. Of course it’s him. You can hear the bad news later. (Someone I love dearly only calls if someone is dead, dying, or I’ve done something wrong.)”

”Write. You’re not writing. You’ve already read this book. Twice. You didn’t like it the first time. Write.”

”Why haven’t you written your friends yet? You promised them you’d write when you got to California. HELLO. Welcome to California. The Terminator is your governor. Your healthcare system is ranked 2nd to last in the nation. According to the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children, there are currently 317 missing or abducted children in/from the state of California. The state you left to come here? New Hampshire lists 5 - 3 of whom have been missing since the early 1980s. It’s not like you don’t have a lot to write about!”

Until I find a computer I can use to test the hard drives, the question if whether or not the novel I’ve been working on for 5 years still exists, is making me a wee bit tense. Everything the numerous outlines, character biographies, notes, research, ramblings, discarded plots, the original screenplay version I abandoned, and accompanying screenplay crap is on those hard drives. I know there are ways to recover data even when it appears a hard drive has been. Hell, I’ve done it. But that’s when I didn’t give a shit about what I was looking for. If I found anything at all, I’d be happy because it was the process of finding the unfindable, retrieving the irretrievable that excited me. Fuck the data.

I don’t want to fuck the data now. But I will be truly fucked if I can’t get it back.

I’m writing this on a friend’s computer. There may be salvageable parts of my computer but who knows.

Round Two is going to be interesting. If this pansy ass prankster God thinks I’m backing down he can suck my…[edited for television/grandma].

His girlfriend beat him. I knew this before he told me his name. You’d have to look at his shoes to avoid seeing the bruises, broken nose, and stitched cuts. High, crazy, or just a bitch - who cares why? - her unpredictable temper sent him to the ER more than once. He could’ve overpowered her or fought back, but to my knowledge he never touched her. His physical strength was no match for her financial power, and she wielded it like a bat. He’d hit a bump on life’s highway; unemployed, chronic illness. She was all he had. So she beat him and he let her because she paid the rent, utilities, bought the groceries, and kept him off the street.

After one particularly nasty fight, he left (she was arrested for domestic violence and the police locked him out of the apartment). He lived in a shelter until they kicked to the curb when he failed to get a job. He watched New England’s foliage change from forest green to brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows through the mesh door of his tent pitched in a wooded area close enough to the city so he could walk to the food pantry and eat. I didn’t see him again until late December. He was living with the girlfriend again. When I gave him a look that conveyed my not-so-high opinion of his significant other he shrugged and said, “She’s warmer than the New England woods in winter.” I said, “Tell her to keep her boxing gloves in the closet.”

The perception is this situation is the exclusive domain of women. Equality between the sexes! Here at last! We’re damn good at abusing each other. Poverty has no respect for popularized gender roles. Money is power everywhere. And no one wants to freeze to death. So his woman beats him… At least he has a roof over his head, right?

And wouldn’t all my pragmatism go straight to hell if the bitch kills him the next time she’s in “one of her moods”?

Well I live here with a woman and a child,
The situation makes me kind of nervous.
Yes, I rise up from her arms, she says, “I guess you call this love;
I call it service.”

~Leonard Cohen from There is A War

I was 18, he was 23.  We’d had sex before but this was the first night we “slept” together, actually spent the entire night in the same bed.  We rented a room in a cheap motel near the ocean, picnicked on the twisted bed linens with provisions purchased at 7/11 - cheap wine, French bread and kiwi.  The sex was terrible, something I blamed on the alcohol and marijuana, but later realized was just the man’s lack of interest in his partner’s pleasure.  He really was a selfish prick.  In the middle of the night, in my sleep, I (apparently) began rubbing his back, my subconscious self reaching out to affectionately pet my lover.  He has a deep, dominating voice - excellent for theatre - and if his abrupt movements hadn’t woken me, the tone of that deep voice would have.  He said, “If you touch me one more fucking time I’m going to cut your hand off.”  Startled awake, not fully aware of what I’d done to make him so angry, I said nothing.  I lie there naked, barely older than a child, too terrified to move or take too deep a breath lest I disturb him again, until the sun came came up.

We didn’t talk about what he said or why he said it.  I wasn’t going to leave him because he was my ticket out of that shitty little town.  I needed someone to run away with and he didn’t mind that I was I little “mad, north-northwest”.  However, until that night, I was “in love”.  Afterward, I knew whatever I did with him was an exchange for services rendered.  I used to refer to our sex life as “performance art”.  In a poem about him I wrote, “I will not walk barefoot on the coals of your black heart”.  He read it and in the margin wrote, “What will you do for what?”  Essentially asked, “How much to suck my cock?”

Oh, not much mister.  Just help me get out here…

In her piece whore, paisley at ……why paisley???? answers the question “What will you do for what?” with eloquent honesty.  She also tells us why.

because,, i still have the mind and soul of a whore.. hes got what i want,, this house,, and if i have to “dance between the rain drops” to get it, as my one time pimp, so aptly put it.. then that is what i gotta do.

I wonder how many people go to work each day feeling like a whore?