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.