Why I Drink Coffee (and other elementals)

Hello, all 0.1 of my readers. I am sure somewhere, someone has actually put an actual THUMB on my blog and, scanning it quickly, realized I am, as they say, "el loco" and went on to better, bigger, sweeter blogs. Of course my blog is very sweet indeed, but in a world this cruel who could ever care for the likes of little ol'me, saturated in syntax and with a backhand dying to be exercised? Yes, POUND away on that goddamned piano, Imelda, and don't come back until you've mastered at least a few runs on that thrillingly black and white keyboard! And tennis, yes sir - that was really the analogy I was going for.

Anyway, I don't like that last sentence much, but good thing it doesn't matter because NOBODY READS MY FUCKING BLOG. Oh well, cry me a river, don't be a cry baby, I'll give you something to cry about! It's amazing that human beings are still so very primitive, more animal than human, unable to dive out of their evil dark side and somehow embrace compassion in a lovely liquid sea for their fellow human beings. Instead, they seek, in no particular order, STATUS, POWER, AND MONEY and yes, I AM shouting. Good thing nobody is reading this, heh heh! Oh, I do need to write, yes sirree, I really, really do. Move that thumb, baby, it's about to get REAL in here.

And, sylph like, I am currently residing in the town where I grew up only to realize that the only thing THIS town gives a fuck about is all of the above. Disgusting, really, Western civilization's propensity for destroying itself because Rome can't let go of that nagging feeling that somewhere, SOMEBODY needs to be oppressed. Civilizations are bought and borrowed upon the backs of the poor by the rich; ever was, and ever shall be, and everybody knows it, and somebody somewhere has gotta feel superior so you can remain inferior. As a poor woman on disability believe me, I know this, although I do a ludicrously ingenius job of pretending to be normal.

But lately, I don't want to blend in, but stick out. Lately I don't want to play it safe, but make some fucking waves. Lately, I want to seek Jesus Christ for His own sake and NOT for what He can do for me (although God knows, with my potty mouth and multiple wounds, I need all the fucking help I can get, isn't that right, man who hung out with foul mouthed fishermen with a few issues of their own)?

Come, and I will make you fishers of men, He said. In a world always poised on the brink of disaster, succumbing to its own insanity, held together with the glue of the righteous by which I mean those who have forsaken self to serve others, I want to find a new way. Out of this hell, out of this interior suffering, into new light, new hope, and a new sense of my own weakness mired in His competency. I do have gifts and talents, and they are valuable to someone, somewhere. I believe this to be true, even for the likes of sinful me. Incest will not win. Jesus in ME will.

Jesus liked sinners. He liked the suffering. He embraced the weak and despised the sins of the arrogant. He wanted to lead people OUT of their suffering.

Now, I pray this for me. For you. For all of us.

May it be so, Lord Jesus, and thank you.

Amen.

Oh, and coffee? I drink it to wake up in the morning. But of course! ;)

My Nervous Breakdown

Hello! I'm back again...and again...like that mysterious sock in the drier that won't stop popping up ad nausem, forcing you to conclude that there is, indeed, a mysterious, cult-like world where socks are being forced to down THE KOOL-AID en masse, or in this case, one pitiful sock at a time until you have NO SOCKS LEFT. Fuck, man! No socks left. What a world we could conjure up in our tiny wee little minds...a world where people had bare feet...a world where people were forced to all move to the beach because not only were their socks gone, but their shoes too. But that's a different story and shall be told another time, my friends (and I think I unconsciously stole that before it just became frantically obvious to my conscious self, like a whale emerging from the depths of the sea, from The Princess Bride. Or something).

Yes, I'm having my 19th nervous breakdown, and it's rather interesting, from an ontological point of view, to watch myself disintegrate. I have let my chain be jerked my whole life, going this way and that, hither and yonder, hoping that someone, somewhere, would finally approve of me and VALIDATE MY EXISTENCE. This will never happen, as human beings are, famously, not so much into the validation business. So I have let it all go. All of it! My church, the support group I attended last night where our militant resident skinny feminist proclaimed, YOU WERE RAPED in technicolor letters that had me screaming for a time out and a bout of Vivaldi therapy whilst lying on the fucking couch, and I don't even like Vivaldi. I gave away my Four Seasons CD, didn't you know, and why is that music almost always played at little country restaurants for the city set? Vivaldi and grilled chicken and white wine go together like splenda in your fake latte. I'm just saying.

Yes, it's all good folks, depending on your point of view. I am at a point of rather low screaming fragility and, although cross-eyed strangers looking at me cross-eyed do not make me cry, it's rather splendidly obvious that LIFE IS NOT WORKING OUT. I am currently living with a strange and strangely kind eccentric rich woman who goes to the church I have given the big ol'finger to, and in the meantime a rich pastiche of life wanders past my window as I sit here, chained to the desk, hoping to find a way out of the hopelessness. Nothing works, nothing, and if I could get a job, fix my life, learn to relax, and have great hair all at the same time (which, actually, rather, really, I do), than I'm sure that...what? It would all finally be PERFECT?

My perfectionism has been slowly killing me for years, and the people I let rent space in my head. And I don't want them to. No. Not anymore. NOPE! The screaming demons, the need for their approval, the lack of any real employment, all must be fixed. What has been working works no longer, and I have no idea why other than that years of trauma have somehow submerged me to the point that, like the whale singing happy whale songs to the other whales, I no longer can do much more than float. But the songs have not been quite so happy, I am afraid.

I am me. I am on disability for PTSD. I am a person. A lovely gifted person who has gone through much pain. It doesn't make me bad, or evil, these rampant fears sexual abuse bequeathed to me. It makes me starkly human, and to cover up all those awful feelings I learned to be a perfectionist. I have feared, all my goddamned life, WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK OF ME. I have needed their approval like a baby needs a pacifier.

I don't need it anymore. I have weathered heavy storms for years, have survived and, at times, even miraculously thrived in a killing culture with little love for women and little love for people like me. And, I am surrounded by kindness even though Jesus Christ has gone the way of the dodo and I am still in great pain and need to go through a compulsive checklist in my head every day to be OK.

But maybe not. Maybe there is hope. Maybe I can get to where I want to be, wherever that is, maybe I am not a failure at all, but someone forced to swim upstream against a killing tide of disease in a world that is hard enough. I have not complained much, although there are certainly things I could complain about, like feeling half my life is gone and most of it has been devoted to suffering.

Could there be a life after this? Where creativity could be unleashed and a fear of failure submerged, could there be people who see those good things in me (for, in fact, once upon a time there were?). Could there be...hope? For? Me?

19th nervous breakdown, maybe you're here for a reason, and I don't even need Mick Jagger to function.

God bless you all for reading. Love.

Medication, Aryan Madness, Your Spying Lying WWW

I love klonopin. At least, once again I do, because lately my anxiety has meant taking the pill. I worry of course about the side effects, but say a little prayer of protection because frankly I feel like if I don't something heinous will happen. What we could not say, precisely, but someone told me that antidepressants have been linked to blood disorders down the road. Ah, how scary, how very scary! So, I take this little agent of relaxation with a judicious prudence only rarely glimpsed in the chambers of Parliament when people there aren't screaming at one another at the top of their wee little British lungs. Or something like that; I haven't a clue how the British judicial system really conducts itself, or the workings of Parliament in general, except apparently I am related to someone named Sir Matthew Hail. I may have the spelling wrong; let's hope it's not heil lest I be accused of indiscriminate, horrific activities devoted to the propogation and upward mobility of white people. Ergh, yuck, bluck! How I got from klonopin to the dubious workings of neo-nazi groups is beyond me, but the brain, it doth work in strange ways.
I continue to live, like a good little masochist (ye olde Freud, bugger ye off) in the horrific Chamber of Horrors with the landlady and her Creepy Ye Olde Boyfriend, a man so weird I have dubbed him the Pedophiliac Santa Claus. He looks like one, he smells like one, he probably IS one, and there is little to do except to leave the house when he appears and when he insists on telecasting his activities to me at the top of his voice. "HEY! I'm going to pick up Madame X now at the airport!" Wonderful, sir, and perhaps I was trying to sleep. Yes, that's OK, women are, for some, not human beings in their own rights but simply people to f---, and I think that this dubious gentlemen (and not of the old, proper, gentlemanly school, methinks) sees women as basically being his caretakers, sex partners, and, in general, people who are supposed to ward off his Inner Demons. His Inner Demons also seem to come about in various icky poems that I devoutly hope are never published, and in general this home is so rife with disgusting pathology one really needs some anti-bacterial agent to rub all over one's self after being in said home. Yes, a lovely image, but I have battled in this GodAwfulState (and it is, quite literally, awful) for almost five years as a poor person on disability attempting to secure HOUSING. Yes, remember back in the day when you had a decent place to live? The mind shudders, the heart aches, the body rejoices, and yet those days are gone, gone, and very gone SOME MORE. And so here I am, and it ain't been fun but, as Layne Staley once famously sang, they ain't found a way to kill me yet.
Yavoile, my dear departed heroin addict; how we loved that voice of yours. Ah, back in the day, the 90's, pining for glory, the good old days, days of youth, days of Bill and Hillary, days that shall never come again. Those were, indeed, the days.
In other news the internet apparently is making us SHALLOW (big surprise) and the counterattack/attack/insurgency of pop-ups and inflammatory content being constantly thrown at us (assaulting visual moments that cause, if not outright blindness, certainly some difficult cognitive activity according to this article I read) stinks. Stinks, sucks, blows, whatever you'd like to call it. We can only process so much information, and in fact are somehow changing our PLASTIC brains by becoming passive absorbers of shallow data. We consume, but do not actually analyze, we passively sit and, via technological osmosis, read but do not THINK. We are being overtaken by the government, folks, or so some AGING codger would have you think, the kind who also believes the FBI is speaking to him through his fillings. I wouldn't doubt it; everyone needs one good vast conspiracy. Klonopin is mine, honey; what's yours?
Peace, love, and downloads a-plenty, folks.

Exorcising Old Demons in an Indifferent World

Ever been so tired you wanted to throw up on somebody? Yeah, that's me, too. I feel my life winding down and it's been a sad life...a hard life...a lonely life. Boohoo, you say, cry me a river, cry me another, play me a violin. Maybe I shall, because I have lived for just a little too long with this feeling of helplessness, monstrous shyness, an inability to trust, to reach out, all the by-products of sexual abuse in a society that doesn't seem to care much about anyone. At all. Selfishness, one could say, the modern hallmark of a society that seems to run faster and faster and trample on more and more people. I wish I could feel better about things. I wish I could feel that God really loves me, or that I have people to talk to, or that my entire life is not a bomb waiting to explode, wired to a totally horrific family in which I was the scapegoat and, kaboom, one false move would lead to their entire demise. Somehow, they did to me, and there you have it - it wired my brain to feel as if I am responsible for everything and everyone.
And now, somehow, I don't care anymore. I can't find a place to hang my hat in this state. I can't find a decent life. I have been unable to work. Well-meaning people tell me it will get better. It doesn't get better, and the world gets much worse. Who cares about anyone? Who cares, period? Certainly no one in my family has ever cared for me. And the bad days are so very bad, the sense of aloneness, the indifference of the people around me, the sense that I am alone, rejected, unwanted, unloved, ignored. All of it. That's how I feel, most of the time, and to reach out to another is hard, too, although I've done that mostly with anonymous strangers on crisis lines.
So, today, I set myself free from my perpetrator, whom I have written to to renounce the curse of his cruelty. A car may come next and then, who knows? A job? A move to another state? Something better despite how damned hard it's been even living where I'm living which has triggered my symptoms so badly? I can't take another second of it and yet here I am, writing about it, sure the world will now blow up in my face. I can't walk anymore, take the bus, worry that my perpetrator will die if I tell him the truth and again, as it always was, that it will be ALL MY FAULT. I need a quiet place to write, and to live, and to live without being reminded daily, constantly, hourly it seems, of what happened to me as a child. I need to feel confident and able to support myself once more in a world that, without money, is full of very horrific horrors indeed. I sometimes feel that all of my options are no options at all. That's how I feel. Sometimes my life seems like a sick and brutal joke indeed. Yes, it surely does.
And that's the end of my therapy for today. Forgive me for how self-seeking it has been, but it was a necessary exorcism for my soul.
The end.

Forsooth, I See a Tiger and Lo, It is Laughing

Remember those perfume commercials from years ago when women walked through smoky European streets after using some kind of product made by a Frenchman who likes to talk about "notes" and presumably drives a really nice car? Invariably there would be some black jaguar or spotted cheetah or SOME kind of wild cat lurking in the midst, presumably because if you use really expensive perfume it turns you into a wild, sexual creature as implied by the presence of the wild cat. I think this came to me, as all things inevitably must, as I lay on my bed clutching my teddy bear and staring at the sad remnants of my remaining Chanel No. 5 - ah, Chanel, we hardly knew ye! This perfume is really truly my favorite - and I haved loved perfume ever since my grandmother first taught me how to dab it on my wrists, one of many priceless gifts a grandmother might impart. It's a love affair that started young. The other gifts she imparted were her abhorrence of Vanna White and her love of classy TV dinners - once, in an attempt to buy something cheap, I was assaulted by my grandmother's caustic tongue. I, of course, thought that I was doing her and her limited income a favor, but my grandmother was not shy about drubbing any and all humans in her midst with her various opinions. My father, who was abused by this wonderful misguided woman, would later turn his wrath on me, and hence my many years spent rearranging knicknacks on therapist's couches mentally as they attempted (yet, not very hard, she thinks) to determine what makes me tick. I find therapy useless and the world frightening, particularly in the relentless gentrification slowly bleeding through the land. But what, you ask, in a confused and righteous tone of voice, does this have to do with perfume?
Well, now that I'm poor, I long for nice things, and this bottle is a very nice thing indeed. And I think a lot lately about things like status and power and money and racism and oppression and how it seems to me we are creating a world in which the rich will one day literally walk over the backs of the poor. In fact, it calls to mind something I saw on my telly - a picture of a naked woman covered with fruit at a party for a very wealthy celebrity. The fruit was being eaten by various guests as she lay there, supine, presumably being paid well for her time and trouble but what, I ask you, is the point of this? Other than to show off how rich the owner is and what he might do in the way of humiliating people in this manner? Truly sad, sick, and bizarre, my friends, but the world has come to this, I think, and it will only get worse. Much, much worse.
And yet I still like things - my perfume - and wild cats. And I even loved my grandmother, horrible and kind though she was, all at once (although not horrible to me - but certainly she was to my father, and so the sad cycle of abuse began). I wish for nice things. I wish for a world that is a level playing field all might enjoy nice things in - starting with a liveable wage for all. No racism, no oppression, no have and have nots, no inequality, but a place of opportunity, the place our Founding Fathers, subjugated though they were to the mores of their day, did wish to see flourish.
It's a little bit of contemplation, I guess, to garner from a bottle of perfume. But for some reason it did call to mind this last thought: how can the rich possibly enjoy their luxury unless all can enjoy it with them?
Wild cats in the jungle, roaring, demanding to be heard.
May we all be heard in this world, my friends.

You Thought I Ran Away But I Was Hiding

Ah, to be or not to be, that is the question teeming inside my subconscious mind...or is it unconscious? Evidently and apparently there is some kind of war between these two words! At least, so I read on that oh so helpful website, wikipedia. Wikipedia, coming soon to an Internet near you! I think that wikipedia has written many a shyly sly high school freshman's first term paper, but I could be overreaching with this kind of speculation. At any rate, evidently the weird subconscious is really not a very academic word at all and the word "unconscious" is the preferred word because it has a specific Freudian interpretation. Should be, 'cause that coke-snorting fiend invented it! Ah, me and Sigmund, Daddy issues galore. Perhaps it could have been a match made in heaven, or at least one stretched out on his couch while he took notes and I free-associated while he interrupted me periodically to snort lines off a cracked mirror. Oh, is that your fantasy, too?
Anywho, once I was young, now I am not, and the old mind well, it is still depressed. I have been living (and you thought that this particular blog came streaking in from that fabled afterlife! Admit it, you thought I've been hanging out with that John Edwards guy!) in a house run by a very strange woman whose life is as chaotic as Imelda Marcos' former sock drawer. Admit it, Imelda, you had the shoe thing down, but dropped the ball on the socks!
Anywho, I like living here in the way that some people enjoy root canals or Tom Cruise enjoys being alone. You get my meaning, folks. For awhile renting a room in a complete stranger's house seemed a fun time, but gradually the eerie facade she wore dropped away and I was left with the hallmark of the twenty-first century. e.g., dsyfunction! Lots and lots of it, plus sinks that don't drain, leaking pipes that never get fixed, suicidal boyfriends, snotty sons who never speak to me, dogs that barked so much I finally blew up at her, and of course the little niggling, nasty feeling that I was only loved for my money. Sacrebleu! Could it be? And here I thought, like Kermit the Frog, they loved me just for me. Sigh.
To make a long story short, in this hell state the theme of my life has been this: no fucking housing. The other theme: lots of fucking depression. The third theme: what in hell am I doing with my life? There are little sub themes, themes that only spend the night, and occasionally themes that wake me up early demanding to be exorcised only no exorcist ever seems available, alas and alack! Alack is prettier than alas, but alas is so much more demanding!
So there you have it. I'm really a nut, but in a nice way, the way that a man can't keep his hand out of that little jar of salted peanuts at a bar...what do I mean, exactly? Well, does everything need an explanation, do our rational western minds need to be curried to and fawned over incessantly, people? I thought not! Ah, God bless you.
So, my life's been ticking along. I have no car so walk frequently, and attend an Episcopal church overrun by a lot of elitist types who like to exercise their need for friendly condescension. It's mildly irritating, but human hemmrhoids do exist, folks! Alas and alack (alack, stop scratching that! we'll be there soon!). Just going on with the hemmrhoid theme, really! I write a lot, never date, have a few friends, and continue to struggle with MDD, PTSD, and that one lone space alien who just won't leave me alone. Sigh. It's so hard people, really! Tired of being superwoman. Tired of being a woman. Tired.
That's my story and yes, I am sticking to it! Later, gators.